Statism and Self-Projection

Read the following excerpt from this article and tell me what you see:

Age is just a number… except when it comes to marriage.

Let’s look at my stats:
Current age – 29
Divorced for – 8 months
Separated for – 1 year, 9 months
Age when I met my ex – 19
Age when I married – 24

Which brings me to my point: couples should not be allowed to get married before age 25.

While I know that this statement is going to make me very unpopular with readers, I do believe that it would be for the best — better both for the institution of marriage and the individuals getting married — if we could change the law to prevent couples from getting married before the age of 25.

OK, you can’t really tell me what you see so I’ll tell you what I see. I see a woman who is projection herself onto all other people and this projection is leading her to demand legislation. Statists seem to think because something happened to them it will happen to everybody. Gun control zealots sometime talk about what a situation would have been like if they had had a gun. Instead of ending peacefully the gun control zealot will talk about the death that would have occurred, and because they projection their violent tendencies onto everybody else they demand everybody be disarmed.

This is why I believe statism is synonymous with arrogance. When you say there ought to be a law because of an experience you had in life you’re making the arrogant statement that everybody else is just like you. Because the author of the above excerpt ended up divorced after marrying a man when she was 24 she believes everybody who marries before or at the age of 24 will end up getting divorced. This belief also requires her to believe that the cause of her divorce was the fact she was still “developing” as a person and such “development” completes at exactly 25 years of age, for everybody. This is incredibly arrogant. I know people who were fully “developed” much earlier than their 25^th birthday and I know people who are much older than 25 and still “developing.” Humans don’t conform to specific cutoffs. Some children hit puberty at an early age while others hit is later. Some adults are capable of living independently when they turn 18 while others aren’t capable of such feats at any point in their lives. There are 16 year-olds I trust implicitly with firearms while there are 30 year-olds I won’t go to the range with. Everybody is different.

Differences in individuals is what individualists recognize. If I were married at age 24 and got divorced at age 26 I wouldn’t assume everybody else who married at age 25 would experience the same outcome. Projection ourselves onto others is a basic human action, one that I try to avoid (although I’m not always successful). Every time somebody argues for a law based on their personal experience they’re projecting. We need to divorce ourselves from demanding laws based on personal experience. Just because you did something doesn’t mean everybody else will do it.