"When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone."
- John Steinbeck
When I read this in East of Eden, two possible explanations for the sentiment occurred to me. The first was what a lame, incessant cliché it is ("bromide" as Ayn Rand used to say) that there are actually children somewhere who see adults as gods. The second possibility was that some people actually believe this garbage.
Under which rock or in what kind psycho-Christian prison do you need to live in order to believe this nonsense? I can't remember a single moment in my childhood when I thought adults knew what the fuck they were talking about. I still don't think they know what the fuck they're talking about. If any "gods are fallen" for me, they fall whenever I meet an adult who does know what the fuck he's talking about.
Steinbeck wrote East of Eden in 1952. Maybe there really were children back then who thought adults were gods. But the amazing thing about the quote is that it's written as if it applies to all children. ("When a child...") I think the only legitimate explanation for the universality of the statement is that Steinbeck was either completely full of shit, or very, very stupid.
If Steinbeck was very, very stupid, then it's possible he over-generalized about the human race based on his own see-no-evil, hear-no-evil childhood psychology. He clearly must have heard a few people make similar comments throughout his life, so maybe he just thought everyone felt the same.
Evidence for the "full of shit" explanation includes the following: the over-the-top, poetic language Steinbeck uses to convey an idea which everyone on the planet has already heard before reading it from Steinbeck's hand. The technique is a slight variation of the "muddy the waters to make them appear deep" technique. Rather than muddying the maters, though, Steinbeck throws a few handfuls of rose pedals on them. Perhaps the natural reaction of the unthinking is to point and say, "Isn't that pretty?" rather than actually to identify the originality of the idea conveyed. The bromide they've heard throughout their lives becomes reified because it's said so goddamn nice.
And if you think that I'm a hypocrite for criticizing John Steinbeck while misusing the word "nice", there's only one possible explanation for it. Your gods are fallen and they can't get up.
