A post by Max Haiven.

As a child, I was slow to learn, not because of any specific diagnosable developmental delay but because of some deep, abiding and often angry skepticism towards anything that seems to me to be an arbitrary social convention that was presented as an unquestionable truth. For example, I remember being called before the class for some task in school at the age of 7 or 8, only to inadvertently reveal I could not tell my right from my left. Red-faced, I threw a tantrum before my shocked and bemused classmates, explaining that the distinction was purely conventional, calibrated solely by, so far as I could tell, the doctrines of our forebears. Such orientation was a form of guided narcissism, rather than a material point of reference: My left, I ranted from in front of the room, was my classmates’ right, after all. Why do we even use these words? Wasn’t it a matter of arbitrary perception being passed off as an iron law of nature. How many other things had we been taught as truth that were, in fact, habits of collective thought? What made North up and South down? Why did certain letters have to make the sounds we associated with them when they were all funny symbols that exist nowhere in nature?