The Things We Hide

People have a fascination with the unknown. That should be relatively obvious to anyone who is alive, but in case it isn't I could bring up such evidence as the fanciful stories written in the 16th century about far away lands.

To get to the actual point of this post, what a culture hides from its people is inevitably what that people become fascinated with. One could easily point out how countries that banned religion upon opening up experienced massive religious revivals that slowly died out a few years later as religion became something permissible.

What do North Americans hide? We censor sex and violence from our young people. Is it any wonder then how sex-crazed this society is? Is it any wonder how popular violent video games are? Death is something we hide in a corner, that same corner we hide our dying old people in. Is it any wonder then how much music focuses on the subject?

Which brings us to the question, is censorship the right approach? If you're trying to raise a good, Christian kid, is hiding sex and violence going to work?

The body of evidence would suggest no. But what then do you do? Surely deliberately exposing them to sex and violence isn't the right approach?

Well, I can't speak to the latter, because my parents didn't raise me that way. You could take the train of thought that no person has a sense of the true value of innocence and the cross until they've sinned, so you might as well go all in. But on the other hand people speak about the memory of that home they remember, and wanting to get back to that, and they wouldn't have that if home was where they met the world.

There's also the problem that when a society makes something hard to get, people have a hard time telling if something is real or fake. Note how when I described a sex-crazed and violent crazed society, you didn't understand me as saying there are prostitutes on every street corner and street gangs having shootouts in the street every night (though both of those things are probably true in places).

No, you understood "sex-crazed" to refer to all the sex in movies, all the internet porn, and heck, even all the advertising. And video games aren't anything like real violence--there's no trauma involved, and the gore magically cleans itself up.

So to sum up the questions. Does a society become fascinated with/defined by what it tries to hide? Does censorship have an effect opposite to what is intended, or is it better than the alternative? And by making something hard to get do you make it easier for people to fall for fakes?