We live in cultures that circumcise children. This means that the adults believe it is a good idea to ‘edit’ our most intimate physical organ of connectivity. Think carefully about what this means.

In America, it is largely only males who undergo this, and it is not as severe as the female circumcisions that happen in distant places. But what’s important here is this: these processes comprise culturally sanctioned rape.

And their implications are staggering.

If they will edit our bodies, visibly and openly, what will they do to our minds? Our inner organs of intimacy and relation… our intellect, our imaginations, our souls?

They will do more to what is hidden than what is visible. These faculties will suffer the most egregious of assaults… and we will call it ‘education’. This matter is complex, because the processes that result in our acquisition of language and our skills with knowledge are deeply involved and cannot reasonably be separated. We do not yet realize that these are only gifts when their pitfalls are revealed and addressed. We do not believe that language has pitfalls. But it does, and so too, our habitual relationships with knowledge. The habits that surround language and knowledge become functionally self-interested within human cultures and children, and their interest is in survival and dominance… at any cost.

And this is invisible to almost everyone. Children often begin to notice it in school, but cannot explain the processes they are undergoing to adults. If they do manage to convey their experience, the adults almost invariably re-define and belittle their concerns, citing the necessity of ‘education’ — and the children generally succumb.

Nearly all of us are cognitively circumcised in this fashion, and the damage is deep, invisible and cruel. Since we have neither language nor tradition that might reveal or remedy this, we are not yet empowered to discuss, address or amend it. As our culture proceeds, each generation suffers a more ramified and egregious version of these assaults. Our children are dying inside. And so are we. And no one is paying any attention to this.

You did not ‘grow out of’ the astonishingly effulgent imagination that was your constant experience during childhood! It was attacked, purposefully, and efficiently — by cognitive and ideological traditions whose function and character act as a kind of contraceptive. Their primary weapon is the enforced formalization of the experience of identity – ‘what’ things, beings, and relationships are and mean. These formalizations attack and replace the faculties of liquid identity which comprise the vital foundations of children’s imaginative capacities. And they cripple our intelligence in the process. Once this process is sufficiently advanced, the ‘conceptive’ capacities of our minds and imaginations are cruelly limited, usually permanently. These processes proceed throughout our lives, deep into our adulthood and old age, driving the damage to ever-more severe expressions.

Meanwhile, we are led to believe this is the natural result of ‘maturation’ — a festering lie that protects the traditions responsible. Your imagination doesn’t disappear when you mature -=unless it was assaulted=- and replaced with something else.

Armed with these understandings, we may at last intervene, here and now, together, with and for each other and our children. The open attack on our most intimate relational assets — our minds, our intellect and relational senses, and our imagination — must cease with this generation.

Someday soon there will be adults who are not bereft of the astonishingly transformative imagination that was our common experience during childhood. And their children will be immune to the loss of the capacity to invoke and experience liquid identity. Mark my words: these beings will remake our understandings of what it means to be human, and the actual nature and power of our relational and intellectual intelligence.