Abuse with an Excuse

The italicized 111 words below are an awful embarrassment, and I’d love to just delete the entire blog and pretend it never happened. I read it all wrong, I thought it was about the real Socrates and not Plato’s fictive one, and so everything I said is moronic and I look like an infantile git. Again, I’d love to pretend that isn’t the case but it’s too late for that.

I’m still confused, surely this argument is about something else than literal eternal souls, but I haven’t found out what that is yet, I’ll have to keep learning.

I read the Death of Socrates. The man made a reasonable etymological argument about eternal souls and declared it to be literally about eternal souls. I heard no irony or self awareness about it. It’s like what I do at my worst. Pathetic.

Is there no-one else?

LOL. Of course there is, but Socrates, hooey! Doesn’t speak well for his student either, does it? Well, the shadows on the cave wall, that’s more like it, I guess.

This is me about everything, it’s all like that, nothing is true unless it’s at least one step removed. It was probably a fine argument about our concept of eternal souls, Socrates’ final denial.

More likely only an example in an argument about arguments or something. I failed at exactly the point here, at looking that one level deeper! That’s funny even if it is me.

The same applies, the extra layer of complexity, hugely, to human nature. There is no one human nature, all agree on that, all serious people seem to agree on that – but there is one fairly universal opinion of human nature, and that is what seems worth discussing to me, so I do, bloody endlessly. It would have been a self-joke, me cussing Soak-rates out, if I had gotten the right Socrates anyway, because I am that guy, a walking talking off-putting question that is really a judgemental lecture. I might have looked a little better, but I’m working on that, and progress is inevitable.

I know, no-one cares, work harder.

Not endlessly enough yet. It’s not that we believe in Christian original sin, not even that we liked Hobbes or think that we’re still half-chimpanzee, in fact it’s not some positively held thought at all. It’s what we don’t seem to think.

Mainly, we don’t seem to think that hurting kids matters much as long as they learn the lesson. Some story like original sin may attempt to illustrate or explain this attitude, that the kid was wrong already or something, but it doesn’t matter, the myth came second and the upshot is we don’t seem to worry about it. Many young parents have big hopes of not spanking and otherwise hurting their own kids, they’re young, the memory is still fresh, but nearly all fail, somehow in the press of life the dream loses priority, things must happen, schedules must be met. This priority loss can go pretty far, all the way to where it seems a trivial matter to many folks, we all had it, we all survived it, relax, you’re not alone.

The trivial appearance of spanking is a camouflage, like carrying your expensive camera in a grocery bag so no-one thinks to steal it. The premise here belies the triviality, if it were, you would expect half of these young parents to escape it and for that to also be a trivial matter, of course the first part isn’t the case and the second part wouldn’t be, not in this world we’re in now.

I personally thought I had escaped and I thought it was difficult and I was one in a million, but it turned out it was all delusion and I was none in a million, non-existent, I had been faked out like a rat pressing a lever it learned when the researcher has it turned off. It was so non-trivial to my ex that she did it in secret and convinced the kids to keep the secret too. They were adults when I learned the truth. This blog was supposed to have real life answers for you about it, but the experiment was cynically destroyed like Bill Murray at the beginning of Ghostbusters not caring about the real psychic he’d found, and me and my kids along with it. Anyway. It’s that non-trivial. Non-negotiable with anyone so ridiculous as the father or I assume anybody else.

Just an example. I’m sure you have your own story about how not spanking isn’t as simple as it sounds, don’t you? OK, wait, I know some won’t.

Some folks never doubted, many folks grew up knowing it had to be done, and those folks may imagine that there is a world of folks out there not spanking, and who find it easy not to spank, in fact, it’s probably ascribed to laziness, this theoretical non-spanking crowd’s negligence – well, I’m here to tell them, no, there is no such population, that every human group says this about every other, that we all do it. They say the same about you.

Even the hippies, I think.

So it’s not about human nature, good, bad, or complicated; it’s about a behaviour that betrays some mute core belief about human nature. Again, all agree, your “nature” isn’t even a thing. But your unspoken attitude, your more than words attitude, now that’s a thing.

An addressable, knowable thing. So I expect we’ll keep shrugging and not thinking “human nature,” and never bringing the science to ourselves, as always. This virus knows us better than even COVID does.

Jeff

Sept. 2^nd., 2020

But never mind these little ones, go to abusewithanexcuse.com and read About So Don’t Spank and So Don’t Spank, but be warned that one’s awfully long. Worth the walk, though.