Lola said:
Not necessarily. After you turned on the water hose and the water gushed through the streets of your perfect creation wreaking havoc, didn't you rush to re-enforce your sand dykes, redirect the flood with a block of wood, or dig a trench to allow the water to destroy some things and leave others intact? Wasn't it thrilling to watch the destruction be minimalized by your efforts? After you turned off the hose didn't you sometimes lose interest and wander off and sometimes, with great delight, take on the challenge of restoring your demolished world to it's previous perfection?
I have observed this activity in children.
It can be interpreted as destructive behaviour, or as practice in damage limitation. It depends on the child's thought process.
The truly destructive child does not build. He (or she - destructive behaviour is not a male-only preserve) simply destroys the work of others.
The builder, as you note, might visit catastrophe on his creation, then try to prevent that catastrophe from completely destroying his 'world'. As there are no actual people in the model, he harms nobody, and he is most likely testing the robustness of his creation. If it fails, he will build another.
It's called 'learning by trial and error', and such children are likely to become expert problem solvers, if not actually builders and engineers, in later life.
The child does not always react with glee when his construction fails under pressure. On the other hand, the child who recognises that his city of sand is ephemeral, and will not last the night anyway, might obliterate it rather than leave it to fall into ruin. In many cases, they will do this to prevent the local bully from doing it for them.
This behaviour might, at first glance, seem at odds with the grown man who religiously polishes his car, or paints his house, only to react with anguish at the slightest dent or blemish. It is not. Those things are permanent, and had to be worked for. Sandcastles are temporary and cost nothing but a little time. They are a test-bed, rather like the car manufacturer's crash tests for new vehicles. See how it breaks, then re-make it so it won't break next time.
Watch children on the beach, building sandcastles near the sea. They dig a moat around it, hoping to protect it from the rising tide. It doesn't work, so they move back, and rebuild, and dig a deeper moat. I have seen sandcastles reinforced with pebbles at the base. These are not destructive children, they are children in the process of learning.
The destructive ones are those who deliberately kick down the sandcastles built by others.
2 comments:
I did not mean to imply the creators (children) were maliciously destructive. I was observing that they created and then recognizing that a static creation is a bit boring, introduced change. What some believe is the human destruction of perfection may simply be creator-sanctioned change intended to keep the original perfection from getting boring.
Just as the child building the sandcastle doesn't worry overmuch about its destruction because he knows he can easily build another even better one a few feet away, so perhaps a creator of planets wouldn't worry overmuch about the destruction of one planet because he knows he can make another as good or better at will.
Interesting point.
Perhaps Mars is an 'old' construction, now defunct, and Venus is brewing as the next one. Or maybe it's the other way around.
Could be that the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus is where this planet is heading, whereas Mars is a 'blank' waiting to be built on.
And what could have happened to produce the asteroid belt, I wonder? Perhaps all those stories about 'doomsday weapons' are some kind of race memory?
Interesting thoughts, but unfortunately idle speculation since there's no way I can see to test any of it. Unless, of course, someone really does discover a rock on Mars with "Kilroy woz 'ere" chalked on it.
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