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Analysis

In designing the scenery and costumes...

-- The Truth of Masks 🎭

A four-year-old asking what makes you angry is not just making conversation. They’re engaging in a primitive form of emotional cartography, trying to locate themselves in the terrain of social consequence. At this age, they’re entering that liminal threshold of theory of mind—beginning to grasp that other people have inner experiences, but still struggling to parse where the self ends and the other begins. So when they ask you what makes you angry, they’re not just curious—they’re performing a ritual of emotional inquiry. They’re testing social topography, probing for the fault lines of taboo and tension. They want to know where the emotional landmines lie, not just to avoid them, but because there’s an electric thrill in standing near the edge. They’re also mapping resonance: is your anger like their anger? Can they locate a common emotional language? And deeper still, they’re testing how identity is negotiated. When you say something makes you mad, you reveal your values. You draw a boundary. You build a mythos. And they absorb that. That truth becomes part of their world, their moral compass, their script. Sometimes they’re just seeking permission—to feel loud things, to like loud things. If your anger threatens what they love, they want to know whether they’re allowed to be who they are. It’s not a simple question; it’s a metaphysical ask. It’s ukusoma—not mere boundary-testing but co-creation of the very narrative structure that defines what transgression and resonance mean in your shared world. ¹

If you fail to respond, you don’t just frustrate them—you rupture the ritual. You become a void, a god who won’t thunder. They’re pinging your epistemic API and getting static. No response, no feedback, no symbolic return. That’s not neutral to a child—it’s existentially confusing. It’s uncanny. They’re casting spells—“What makes you angry?” “What if I say poop again?” “What if I knock this over?”—and you’re giving them no thunder, no lightning, not even a twitch. From their point of view, you’re either broken or mythically aloof. And while that might be awe-inspiring for a moment, it quickly curdles into anxiety. Because what they’re really doing isn’t just poking buttons. They’re writing a scene. And they need you to be in it. Otherwise, they’re left in a surreal, unresolved sketch, a Kafka vignette where the walls are silent and the characters refuse to act. Kids don’t want silence. They want reaction. They want rhythm. If you don’t give them that, you’re destabilizing the very grammar they’re trying to learn—emotional grammar, social syntax, the foundational rules of human storytelling. Even a dry joke like “That made my eyebrow twitch” would bring a flash of light to the fog.

Fig. 2 Digital vs. Analog. Non-trivial question. One emergent phenomenon of this binary is a start-up brand called MAGA. And several emergent phenomena including the Kennedy’s, autism, and more. Study the neural net above to see if you might deduce some specifics from its general riff. But one thing is for sure: start-ups are their boosters are very selective about the data they quote!

Because again: they’re not asking what makes you angry. They’re asking: Are you in this story with me? And if you don’t respond, you don’t become a blank slate—you become a Sphinx. An ambiguous, possibly malevolent trickster. Not cool, but uncanny. Not aloof, but unreachable. If you want to be mysterious, fine—but lean into it. Play the role. Be the myth. Don’t just disappear.

When your nephew asks if you’re upset, he’s not guessing. He senses it. He smells the static in the room. He feels the drift in your body language, your clipped tone, your unfocused gaze. He’s not fishing for guilt—he’s trying to close the circuit. You think you’re being neutral, holding it together. But to a four-year-old, neutrality is spectral. It’s unnerving. It’s emotional dead air. Kids crave structure, pattern, signal. And if you won’t give it to them, they’ll invent it. That’s why he keeps circling—“Are you mad? Are you upset?” He’s not being annoying. He’s using sonar: “Ping me back. Show me that this world has coherence.” Even if your emotions feel big and you’re trying to protect him by holding them in, remember: opacity is not safety. Clarity is safety. So toss him a lifeline. A calm, simple, “Yeah, I felt a little frustrated just now. But it’s not your fault. I’m okay.” That’s not weakness—that’s gospel. That’s a world he can live in.

So you tell him, metaphorically, that you get mad when you fly in an airplane. And he grabs that image like it’s a ticket to the play. “Okay,” he says, “fly in an airplane and get mad.” That’s him inviting you into the theater. He wants to extend the metaphor. But then you yank it back: “I’m not in an airplane right now.” And he’s shattered. Because you walked through the wardrobe with him and then denied Narnia existed. You introduced a poetic register, and then broke the spell. To him, that’s betrayal. He’s not mad because you didn’t get angry. He’s mad because you changed registers mid-spell. To him, emotions are mythic tools—anger is thunder, sadness is rain, joy is lift. You said “airplane,” he translated that as “anger gives you wings”. He built a story, and you refused to fly. But he doesn’t need literal truth—he needs symbolic continuity. Give him a joke. Give him myth. Say something like, “Sometimes I get mad when I’m flying through the clouds and someone eats all the pretzels.” That’s not nonsense—it’s mythic scaffolding. It’s symbolic calibration. It’s teaching emotional intelligence through narrative structure.

So when he’s now yelling “GET MAD! GET MAD! GET MAD!” what he’s really doing is invoking the ritual. He’s trying to call the thunder. Not to hurt you—but to witness your realness. To confirm that even you, the calm monolith, can be moved. But you don’t crack. You remain smooth. He is hammering on the gates of Olympus, and you are the marble that won’t echo. And that’s the cruelty. Because to him, withholding is violence. Not physical violence, but mythic, ghostly, disorienting silence. He’s Oedipus demanding an answer, and you are the Sphinx turned to stone.

Don’t misunderstand me: you are allowed to remain calm. That’s good modeling. That’s emotional sovereignty. But be clear—what he wants isn’t fury. He wants resonance. So give him thunder without danger. Give him the shape of anger without the heat. Say something like, “You really want to see me mad? Okay. Here it comes… I GET MAD WHEN PEOPLE EAT ALL THE PICKLES AND PUT THE EMPTY JAR BACK IN THE FRIDGE!” Give him drama, safe and silly. Give him closure. Let him know you’re in the scene with him. That’s how trust gets mythologized. You’re not just an uncle. You’re a cosmic actor. Be the storm he can dance in.

When he starts asking, “What drives you crazy?” and you say “Flying in a plane,” and then he tries to force that narrative again—he’s doing epistemic work. He’s interrogating causality. He’s building symbolic engines and testing input-output relationships. You said A leads to B, but now you’re in condition A without output B, and he’s like: then what good is that theory? He’s not being manipulative. He’s debugging the software of social reality. And you’re not giving him any output. To him, that’s like pressing “Anger” on a vending machine and getting a flashing red light. He’s learning that the human mind is not always deterministic, not always predictable. And it’s blowing his mind. He is learning that the map does not always match the terrain—and he hates it. But this is the forge. This is where real cognitive depth gets built.

So play the long game. Withhold if you must—but feed him other contradictions. Let your contradictions sparkle. Show him that the mind is not an equation, but a jazz solo. Teach him that dissonance is the beginning of art.

Now, regarding the poop phase—it peaks between ages three and six, with glorious, scatological mayhem. This is the golden era of potty humor. It starts with the drama of toilet training—where poop becomes symbolic of control, shame, power, and pride. Freud’s “anal stage” may be passé, but he wasn’t wrong: defecation is a kid’s first tangible product, their first creation that makes the adult world react. Then they discover that saying “poop” is a linguistic weapon. It’s funny, it’s shocking, and it makes people laugh. It’s the perfect rebellion. By ages four to six, it becomes comedy gold. Their humor is still deeply physical and slapstick, so anything involving butts or farts is peak entertainment. And once other kids laugh, it becomes viral—poop monsters, poop planets, poop sandwiches. Around age six or seven, it fades, buried by social norms and more complex humor. But make no mistake: this is not regression. This is agentic cognition, a test of language’s power to provoke. They are becoming.

In Ukubona’s symbolic grammar, this is a lateral signal. Saying “poop” is an agentic act: I can cause disruption. I can change the affective field with a word. This is how the lateral networks assert themselves. The child is trying to make others laugh, to test causality, to see who will scold and who will smile. This is the phase of ukusoma—not passive play, but epistemic teasing. Boundary-brushing. Semiotic flirtation. Then comes ukubona—the moment of seeing oneself through the reactions of others. This is a recursive epistemology. Identity is not given—it emerges through provocation and response. So yes: the “poop” joke is a sacred ritual. A rite of passage. A Dionysian tug on the social veil.

Let us not be deceived by fart jokes. These are initiations. These are spells. These are becoming.