authority

Rational Man VS the Warrior Society

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

I bought in completely, swallowed the whole story of Man’s rational world, of the long progress of mankind, maybe even with the idea that we were leaving our animal selves behind us.

 

Circumstances being what they were and what they are, I didn’t really see through it until just these last few years, in my mid-fifties, and the process by which I did cost me wife and daughters, and my house – and just to make it a clean sweep I’m throwing my job on the fire too – so, with nothing left to lose, I’m doubling down. This rationality thing isn’t really catching on, but that is the world I require to be happy, so I am going to spend the remaining days of my throwaway life trying to create it. Maybe if I get a glimpse, I can have a little happiness – there’s plenty a slip ‘twixt a cup and a lip, right? I may have been killed, but I ain’t dead yet.

 

It’s not a social pursuit, and it’s not good for you, but you know, I’m already done for. With my dying dream, I’m going to try to market my asocial condition, use this disinterested perspective to describe humanity from a more omniscient place. Here’s the not so cheerful upshot: not that I think we are anything specific at any given moment, but because that’s the way we talk: we are that war machine, the ape that rules the world by violence. Insofar as we aspire to inhabit the rational, civilized world we like to talk about, human societies are warrior societies, and that is by far the best way to understand our behaviour (a sure to be controversial example – https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/02/23/ast-and-child-sexual-abuse/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true ).

 

A shorter version of the same idea came to me on Twitter this morning. I spend a lot of time with Christian original sin. I even bought and read the book of the same name, by one Alan Jacobs. I don’t think the canonized version is why, but it seems like a good way to refer to what maybe in another context is our nurture assumption: some reason why we all think we owe our kids the consequences, the discipline. What I hadn’t considered until today’s lesson was which exact sin was supposed be the one we’re all born with, and sure enough, it’s sex, the sex that spawned us: we are all sinners because we are all conceived in sin – conception is a sin, sex is a sin. * This is the attitude professed to me, I think, by an American Christian, so a citizen of a globe-spanning military empire: sex is the number one sin, the first. This is how a warrior-citizen feels, in a world of war and violence. Makes sense, right? I mean, sure, it’s a world of sex and breeding too – but if sex is your number one sin, your society is not a sex cult, is it?

 

In the very same way, Freud also erred hugely, by the Dark Matter ratio of one in ten, by his focus on sexual matters, by imagining the very basis of our biological life to be the problem and declaring our warrior life to be an extension of it. His vision mirrors genetics, relationship and conflict theory, sure, but it’s all within the visible ten percent. He knew about the Dark Matter, but the meme still worked on him, the behaviour’s protection remained in place: he too thought the sex was the Dark stuff. He too spoke about our nasty natures and didn’t see how the true human nastiness is in that our nature is not nasty enough for our needs and we have found a way to change it. Freud had a scientific mind to some degree, and so, as biology does today, viewed humanity as passive, as subject to drives and circumstances and not so much as a self-actualized creature. It’s the scientific version of the idea that we are all born sinners, the legacy of the brute we were, the unconscious beast within, but still with the warrior society bias: the ‘beast’ within us wants to destroy the world with rampant and ofttimes incestuous sex! It’s an afterthought that sometimes a club is just a bludgeon.

 

In a very real and military way, Ignorance really is Strength, and Yellowbeard was right, you really “can’t get any killin’ done if you go around thinking all the time.” This is another way to state game theory, perhaps, but the reasons we are the war ape, this ‘deep roots of war’ creature, the things we do as such, these are things we all do, things humans do. We do not live in the state of war so much of the time because of the way some humans are or the way some people behave. War is the logical outcome of what most, if not all humans are, of what most, if not all people do. I’m not happy about it, I’m not trying to sell us the “fact” of the ‘deep roots of war’ to minimize it and promote war, as I so often assume of other authors myself when I read the phrase: I’m exposing that version of us as something it is in our power to change, mostly because we have created it ourselves in the first place. The point there was that it’s things we all do, in fact most of what we all do. For illustration, try doing things that might hurt the war effort, see what happens. Get on Facebook, tell the world that you refuse to beat your children and watch your comments. Suggest we stop giving terrorists things to avenge and watch the comments. ** Sorry to tell you.

 

If the warrior society notices you pulling in the wrong direction, you are in some kind of trouble, be it “only social” or literally anything else. This includes not bringing the discipline to your kids, it includes fighting bigotry and it includes eschewing religion. Some largish portion of your society is not going to like it, and upon analysis, it will come back to security, to the warrior society. This is utterly pervasive, we all need to understand this, or we will always be doing it, always subject to the whims of warlords and never understanding why the bad guys always win.

 

OK, that sounded like an introduction to my usual rap, the stock ending of one of my usual beginnings, but that’s not it. This beginning is just getting started.

 

I am alone, which as every scientist, doctor and Facebook user will tell you isn’t good for you. I’m at risk. I’ve got a few good friends and two sisters, but they’re all in other places, other towns. Basically, I don’t fit in. I had a family, a wife and two daughters and I wanted to raise them differently, so I sort of checked out of the “normal” world of parents and my family were sort of my only friends . . . I had all my social eggs in one basket, guess what happened – wait, beginnings. The first thing that happened, I guess, was that I found myself in a role I could no longer play: quiet, compliant, never complaining, never angry husband and father. Next, I had a drug reaction, a manic and then depressive breakdown from a new biologic medication I tried for my psoriasis. Sad and compromising to say, but I have seen something about humanity, something I wasn’t maybe supposed to see, I’ve seen the man behind the curtain and I can’t ever be the same.

 

It’s part and parcel of my increased asociality: “social” things for me have gone from being some combination of pleasant, uncomfortable and largely irrelevant to being the problem in the world. We need social connections – I need social connections – but I now see us as a warrior society that will not see itself and I am faced with a choice, my social connections or my morals. I don’t know how to un-see it, or more to the point, I have no path to wanting to un-see it. I can’t help but dramatize my struggle: find some social connections, strengthen the ones I still have, try to join the social world that gives what comfort it can to folks in the in-group – or follow my truth. Again, I’ve already lost pretty much everything to my truth, so I’m going with that – with, of course, the hope that someone out there will still want some connection with me as I follow my own path. Having said that, my own path is at very real odds with the interests of the in-group: I don’t expect to find my social connections among social people, in fact those are hurting me more than helping me these days. I want to connect with asocials like myself.

 

“Asocial” is not only a Nazi term, but I’m afraid I hear that in it myself. I think I first saw it in “Fatherland,” the novel by Robert Harris, spoken by a Nazi indoctrinated character, so that is one of my main associations with the word – but we can’t start deleting words and their concepts just because some swine used it to bad ends, can we? The Nazi connection I will leverage here also: being an “asocial” was a crime in that novel, and now I think that Nazism is hugely “social:” we’re all pulling in the same direction, right? Nazism is fascism and no kind of “socialism” in the cooperative sense, meaning conformity may be an aspect of the goal, but in Nazism it’s forced upon the people, in a top-down authoritarian way, with the inequality built in, integral to authority. Socialism, in it’s dream form, is a community of asocials, all working together from a more self-motivated stance. Perhaps all political ideologies’ labels are necessarily backwards. More likely it’s me that has flipped: it just all looks backwards to me now. But “social” and “smart” appear to be opposites.

 

When we’re fighting City Hall, we all like to say that “a committee is a creature with six or more legs and no brain,” but everything is contextual: four extra legs makes brains disappear, but thousands or millions of extra legs doesn’t? I mean, three people have no brain but the entire society is supposed to be smart?

 

What about this? What about Rich Harris’ children’s group? Are we smarter as a society than a fifth grader?

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/04/28/its-a-childs-world/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true&calypso_token=fd42246c-6bc8-41bc-bdce-58b483f0f9f0

 

Sorry, friends and family, you have plenty of social support, I have nothing for you on that personal level, I don’t agree with you about anything . . . I mean if I manage to rise above our differences and love you despite our differences, despite living on opposite sides of the curtain, or you do and find a way to love me, that is still only in the realm of rational things and the social benefits aren’t forthcoming anyways. I’m still sorry, because the good folks are, but I’ve gotten a do-over and I work for humanity now; our social priorities, our biological needs are the problem, not the answer. Follow me to this empty, unsatisfying world of rational things or have a nice life. On a very personal level, I feel this is exactly where my family and I have parted, they’re social. I mean, my girls are young adults, one still technically a teen – talk about pressure, of course they have to try to conform. I’m ready to admit that trying to make a huge change with them wasn’t fair to them, but I didn’t have as much choice as you might imagine. Once I began to look at punishing, once I started to see it as optional, I couldn’t un-see it, so there was no passive choice for me, it was “beat them or don’t” for me, I’d lost the ability to be unconscious about it. I don’t think of all the people out there who have wound up “spanking” their kids, anybody made a conscious decision to “beat” them, the choice is never presented nakedly like that, but for reasons of my mutation or something, it was for me. I have regrets, but it doesn’t mean I could make the opposite choice if I had it to do again.

 

How many readers, I wonder, saw the messiah complex before the “follow me” bit? No matter – that really is it, I’m not trying to hide it. When I can manage to turn this antisocialization theory business into a readable book, then the idea is to create a new paradigm that takes over the world, that’s a messianic dream. And the religious parallels don’t end there, either, because ‘a new paradigm’ isn’t exactly right, although it’s something like equal and opposite. I want to reveal a current paradigm – that’s revelation, in religious terms or discovery in scientific ones, I suppose –  but I’m not sure what the replacement will be. The existing paradigm to which I refer is a bad habit: if we try to stop, and stop a little, every time we don’t engage in it, that’s good for us. What we will do with the time we are accustomed to spending at it, I don’t know, but we can make healthier choices.

 

Carrying on with the Dark Matter analogy, if we measure social modes – prosocial, antisocial – against society, then we can clarify many confusing ‘social issues’ by considering human ‘society’ as ninety percent ‘warrior society.’ With this find/replace function, we can say that it is prosocial to support the troops (pro-warrior-social to socially support our society’s warriors) or say that it is antisocial to be an active member of a small minority that protests the war the troops are engaged in (anti-warrior-social, denying support to our society’s warriors). It seems that the size of our moral inclusion circles can be viewed as our definition of ‘society’ when we ponder moral issues. If ‘society’ means our nation, our culture, then anti-war is antisocial, against everyone in ‘society.’ If ‘society’ means something closer to humankind, then it is the warriors who are positioned against it, the warriors and their supporters who are antisocial – and my own moral circle has certainly grown beyond my borders, because ‘supporting the troops’ is clearly and obviously antisocial to me, war is antisocial, that is a no-brainer, self evident, and there is surely some Latin way to say it as well, that the conclusion is included in the premise or some crap, when the association is in the definition of the word.

 

It’s not open for discussion, though. Warrior society, I mean.

 

I want it to be, and this is step one, certainly not the first time or one of the first thousand times, but it’s not a debatable topic, not yet. It’s what I am calling in my ignorance, believing I must coin the term myself, a protected behaviour. We don’t know what we’re doing, we don’t know how it works, so we’re in no danger of stopping it. I’ve been writing my evolution on this topic (I can’t think unless I’m talking) and I’ve coined another one, the consequences ‘mimic meme’ to describe the two-sided aspect of our child-rearing behaviour, the discipline.

 

Carrying on further with this Dark Matter analogy, the consequences meme being the visible ten percent of the social practice of child-rearing, has us regrettably employing punishments to teach our children how to treat people right, how to be a normal member of the society. This is our conscious effort at understanding this behaviour, and all the parenting discussions I’ve ever been involved in happen in this arena. The Dark Matter part, the ninety percent of this behaviour that is protected – this is where we do not so regrettably abuse our children to ensure that they treat those other people “right.”  I’ve spent pages on the mimic meme elsewhere, suffice it to say here that we all too often wind up “spanking” to conclude what started as a “moral” lesson, and we hope that our intended lesson is what the child remembers, and we hope that the unintended violence will be forgotten. This is the power of the meme, of the protection in place, that we hope this against all the evidence.

 

It looks like it works; the child is ‘socialized,’ warrior-socialized. If we can be at war perpetually and still tell ourselves we are a peaceful society, well then if our children can too, then we have socialized them as ourselves, just as we hoped – except, mimic meme, protected behaviour, we forgot what it was we hoped for. What we hope for, warrior society, is that we be strong and fierce and that our enemies fear us. What I’m getting at is, that is exactly the sort of man that starts a war if he’s powerful or winds up in prison or at least in anger management counselling if he’s not. We spend ninety percent of our time and energy creating soldiers and jailing the ones that we don’t send into an official war.

 

This is a chestnut, but it’s one of those problems we will never solve if we can’t even see it. We need to be strong, I mean unless every society on Earth makes a move towards pacifism all at once, but if we’re ever going to solve things for the folks at home, the ones not on the battlefield, we need to understand that we have set them up for their “antisocial” diagnosis.

 

Hey – you know the way we’re stuck in our aboriginal mindset, smallish troops, 100, 160 members tops and the rest are the out-group and how that affects us today in bigger ways, apparently driving us to war? Well, it’s never occurred to me before to wonder whether the actual wars we drive ourselves to never “work out” for the same reason, that the wars themselves are maladapted behaviours that only ever worked out in our aboriginal situation. Like we go to war thinking, “yeah, we’ll kill those guys, and live on their land, happily ever after,” or “we’ll kill those guys and there won’t be that threat on our border anymore,” and maybe that was actually a possible result back in that day. Maybe genocide was a doable thing at that smaller scale and today we foolishly go to war thinking we’ve got to kill a village and we’re done! One thing to say we have that tendency, and one more to suggest somebody knows it and sells their wars that way, as simple, straightforward, and doable, of but of course that’s the worry. Someone with a better grasp of human nature than we ourselves have is sure to be a director of, rather than only a player in this little production called human life.

 

Personally, I’m tired of listening to people fumbling about, trying to understand why the violence, to a few good-hearted folks trying to fix it, paddling against the current of everyone else putting their weight into the warrior society. Personally, I would peel the protection off this thing, we own it after all, I would have us all understand the warrior social nature of the human being and how it works and let’s all decide, is this really where we want to be, playing out this ‘sins of the father’ crap for the rest of eternity. I want to know that the United Nation Rights of the Child Committee understands all of this, they should probably be the organization that might oversee that we all learn this about ourselves. The point there being – the generals already know it, it’s the good folks that don’t. We’re grownups – I mean, not as a group, but one at a time we are – and we can handle this knowledge, this knowledge, which, by the way, is probably the knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil that got us tossed out of the garden in the first place. That’s my pet version, it’s not just ‘the knowledge of,’ it means ‘the technology of’ good and evil, meaning, how to make the stuff, or how to make one of them from the other, an alchemical recipe. Here’s the kicker, though. It’s not the original sin because it’s knowing how to convert evil to good, how is that a sin? Isn’t that religion’s mission statement, double literally?

 

No, it’s this. It’s how to convert a live and let live sort of ape into the ‘deep roots of war’ ape that we at least think we need to be.

 

Wow, full circle, solved the entire mystery. It’s a grand unifying theory, and not only does it reconcile social and biological science, but even Genesis! And we were alive when this singularity came together, you and I, this Canada Day weekend, year of our Lord, two thousand and seventeen! Hmmm . . .

. . . maybe a little grandiose, maybe a little manic. I’d better medicate, I mean celebrate.

 

 

Jeff

July 1st., 2017

Happy Thank God, We’re Not Quite America Day.

 

abusewithanexcuse.com

 

* There is a kernel of generic, or biological truth in this, perhaps where the flavour of universal truth comes from. To live is to eat, and we can’t eat inorganic things, life lives by consuming life, mostly, and so to live is to harm, our selfish genes and bellies grinding on, preferring our own lives continue than others’ lives, whom we would advise to keep their gloves up and protect themselves at all times. This is the biological core of original sin, the self-evident part; the rest is a value judgment – not a small thing either though, and an important clue.

 

** I’m referring to actual comments from human beings who may or may not know they are supporting the warrior society’s values, although the disingenuous comments from the trolling section are probably an even more rabid and bloodthirsty version of the same. I think it’s safe to say, the current trolling attacks on America aren’t aiming for peace and understanding.

Dark Social Matter

Jeff/neighsayer6 Comments

This will be a sort of a spitballing session. I’m just working through this false social meme thing still. So, Dark social matter.

It’s ninety percent of the social matter in the human universe, the invisible majority of what is going on in our lives, and the reason our equations don’t add up.

Knowing I’m holding back some clarity on this point, I will say that statutory abuse, the abuse we mostly all agree is abuse, meaning abuse over a legal line, is only ten percent of all abuse. The rest is either abuse we don’t see or abuse we don’t mind, like parental or criminal punishments, or wars we condone. This is the dark abuse that we are socialized to, this is the stuff of our antisocialization.

To draw a line between the two, this is not science, and this is the failure of social science, to imagine that only those with documented statutory abuse have been abused and that this premise has any basis. For a science, negative experience must be the measure, not some socially determined list of experiences that are accepted as such. If a stimulus is ubiquitous, then it matters, ubiquitously, we don’t simply reset our base! This sort of relativism is self-imposed, a self-fulfilling meme. If everyone is abused, everyone is abused, it shouldn’t matter to an actual science that we like it this way, it’s a fact, dislike it or not. Every human is ninety-seven percent water; we don’t ignore water in our science.

What I want to do here is a list of examples, how this blindness to dark social matter causes so many of our biggest misunderstandings, how it makes things seem impossible to understand at all. I’ll mine my Twitter feed:

 

maura quint‏Verified account @behindyourback  39m39 minutes ago

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love to live in a world where men complain female ghostbusters ruined their childhood memories but finding out Cosby’s a rapist didn’t

 

Rape, like all abuse is antisocializing, meaning it produces bad feelings and generally feeds the antisocial forces in society, gearing us all for war. As long as our society feels a threat and is geared for war, abuse generally and rape in particular aren’t going anywhere.

 

John Harwood‏Verified account @JohnJHarwood  1h1 hour ago

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Cosby mistrial

Cop who shot Castile walks

young woman convicted for boyfriend’s suicide

 

Rape, as above.

Police killing of unarmed blacks being apparently legal shows the prioritization of antisocializing (terrorizing) the citizenry over the appearance of fairness or justice. This follows the basic ratio of dark matter generally: we get ten percent apology (words) and ninety percent intimidation, who kills who. That they never prosecute a cop shows that good will is meaningless against the dark reality. This scenario terrorizes, angers, and drives people mad, exactly what is desired for a wartime population.

Antisocialization Theory has it that if we are a straight-up warrior society, this young woman has strengthened the tribe by taking out a weak link – but women winning these fights, women being in control, perhaps that is more dangerous to the war effort in the long run. I don’t feel that overly, though, I admit. Maybe this scenario runs counter to the general trend, she did what warrior society boys do maybe, but because she’s a woman she just doesn’t get a pass from the law.

 

Vice President Pence‏Verified account @VP

Follow

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It is the greatest privilege of my life to serve as Vice President to @POTUS Donald Trump – a man devoted to American ideals.

 

 ❄️ 🌈ProvaxShill 🗽 ✌🏾‏ @ProvaxShill  24h24 hours ago

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Replying to @VP @POTUS

You’re the VP for the people, not the POTUS. This servile obsequiousness to the president is a mockery of the Constitution.

 

Here’s an example of people not simply not understanding antisocialization or abuse, but power generally. When a man prostrates himself like this in public, suffers this sort of humiliation, it is not indicative of his free will, and for us to spend our energy criticizing the victim in this bullying incident shows a deep misread of things. This goes a step bigger still: this is how we talk about corrupt politicians generally, as though corruption is rare and voluntary. * This is victim shaming – a staple of antisocialization, of warrior societies. Have we ever broken it down, analyzed it? Or is it another false meme? Here’s what is perhaps this meme:

“Bad powerful people use their money to influence the world and our lawmakers, and some politicians are corrupt, just in it for the money.”

What is missing: bad, powerful people have always engaged in war and conflict. They do not simply offer money, they also make threats, irresistible threats. What does the meme suggest – that if no politico takes the money, they just shrug their shoulders and wait for the next election, maybe we’ll get a scumbag next time? I simply feel that this is not a thing we could misunderstand about politics unless we misunderstand power generally. The salient point is that victim blaming is extremely stressful and antisocializing.

 

Hmmm.

Maybe that’s enough for this Saturday morning. I imagine I’ll be appending this, as my Twitter feed demands.

 

Cheers,

Jeff

June 17th., 2017

 

* This is the signature of dark social matter at the macro level: corruption is rare, paedophilia is rare, physical abuse is rare, suicide is rare. Of course, in reality, societies that are free of corruption, and families that are free of serious abuse and suicide, these things are in the minority.

Critique of “Do Parents Really Matter”

Jeff/neighsayer3 Comments

Here’s Brian’s article.

https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/take-two-babies/

 

And here’s my response, Q & A style:

 

Do parents really matter?

Everything we thought we knew about how personality is formed is wrong

CULTURE

Brian Boutwell

14 Jun 2017

Jeff in blue, in italics.

Here’s an experiment. I wanted to read this article through, and maybe critique it if it really was something in my crosshairs, but I had that first answer below immediately, so then it occurred that that was the way to tackle it, point by point, logical step by step, in real time, during my first read, see where Brian takes me.

Brian in black, in Georgia.

Parenting does not have a large impact on how children turn out.

I’m sorry, I’m gonna stop you right there. How is that possibly true when some parents have killed their children, beaten them to death? Is “bad stuff” exempt from your science? May I guess? The dead ones are deemed not to have turned out at all and therefore don’t meet study criteria?

An incendiary claim, to be sure, but if you can bear with me until the close of this article I think I might be able to persuade you — or at the very least chip away at your certainty about parental influence.

 . . . this I imagine, for the right and lofty goal of convincing parents that their abuse doesn’t work anyway, that they can give it up? That is a takeaway worth trying to create. Kudos.

First, what if later today the phone were to ring and the voice at the other end informed you that you have an identical twin. You would have lived your entire life up to that point not realising that you had a clone. The bearer of this news says arrangements have been made to reunite you with your long-lost sibling. In something of a daze, you assent, realising as you hang up that you’ve just agreed to meet a perfect stranger.

 

There was a time when separating identical twins at birth, while infrequent, did happen thanks to the harsh nature of adoption systems. One of the people who helped reunite many of them was the great psychologist Thomas Bouchard. I first read about Professor Bouchard’s work, wonderfully described by the psychologist Nancy Segal, when I was a graduate student. I still think about it often. What would it be like to live a large chunk of my life not knowing that I had a twin, and then meet him as an adult? Would our conversations ever go beyond polite small talk about the weather, sport or current events?

 

I’m sure similar thoughts went through the minds of the people in Bouchard’s study, and yet person after person realised — happily, I suspect — that they had a lot in common with the image of themselves sitting across the table. Their characters were often remarkably in step, as were their intellects, their behaviours, even their hobbies and eccentricities. The similarities often ran deep, cutting to the bone of their beliefs and their morality.

 

Our intuition sometimes seems to testify against the work of Bouchard and his team.

There’s a world of dialogue available here: are we sure that voice is our intuition? Have brain scans shown the intuition lobe to light up when people fixate on the power of nurture? (I have a new idea about where that voice comes from, please ask.) And ‘against the work?’ You mean against the conclusions they’re hearing from the work, right?

The emphasis on nurture dictates that identical twins, reared apart and reunited later in life, should not be all that similar.

I’ve heard it that way many times, but “the emphasis” doesn’t require that we think nurture has the lion’s share of the power – only that we know that it’s the only power we have for influence, however small it is. IRL, once you have your children, the genetics of the matter have been settled, and nurture is all we have left. So, sure, we exaggerate our influence, but the “importance” of our ability to nurture is irrelevant. If we think we have a single percent of influence, we are obliged to attempt it. With that reality check, you sound a little like you’re suggesting we abdicate all responsibility for teaching our children: we already know how little power we have, we are using all our energy to leverage any small chance we have to influence – and you’re here telling us, no, don’t bother doing what we can, it’s not enough anyway . . . again, that’s what it can sound like if it’s not this: you can’t influence them, so stop beating them.

Because if I am beating my children, and you tell me what I do doesn’t matter, then I want to agree, don’t I? And guess what else? Ninety-five percent of Americans are. Corporal punishment hasn’t dried up and blown away, so one step more brutal: are you telling parents who “spank” that what they do doesn’t matter? This is your mission in life? I tell you, if you do not clarify this, you are tacitly supporting the existing system, corporal punishment. This is why I’ve felt obliged to fight you.

 

And yet they are. Contrastingly, adopted children who share no distinguishing DNA with one another but are raised together should be quite similar.

It bears repeating, if yours did, I guess: parents don’t think nurture is where the most power is, they only know that it’s the only little power they have. If the families of these separated twins raised the twins to be normal, reasonably happy people, they wouldn’t be hurt to know they turned out identical, they, like all parents would just be happy their kids didn’t wind up in prison or mental institutions.

 

Yet they are not, and this poses some problems for traditional ideas about how parents shape children.

Mostly for the authors of parenting books, I imagine.

It’s not just Bouchard’s work that suggests parents have less influence than we think. Decades of research into behavioural genetics — twin studies, family studies and the adoption and identical-twin stories I have already mentioned — all point in the same direction. The shared environment, the experiences that create similarities between siblings raised together — the part of the environment that most often captures parenting influences — are all secondary when it comes to personality, behaviour or intelligence. What’s more, my own work as a criminologist, and that of my colleagues, has revealed the same pattern of findings when applied to violence, antisocial behaviour and crime.

OK, up to this point I’ve kept my answers in the old world, within your conversation, to some degree, but to answer this, we may have to leave your world and enter mine. In my world, nurture has more power, but in my world, parenting is not a purely positive influence: beatings have power. Abuse is where the power of “nurturing” is, and where the evidence is that parenting damned well does matter. Unfortunately, as per your main point, parents all seem to think they have this power and the obligation to use it, so there is no control group for parental abuse. Who wasn’t punished, who wasn’t spanked, whose parents didn’t believe this?

A note regarding corporal punishment: it’s a dodge. If a child misbehaves and we decide to spank him, that’s corporal punishment, the pain is the penalty. If, however, a child misbehaves and we decide he must do the dishes for his error, and he refuses, and an argument ensues and a fight results to impose the dishes penalty, and the child gets hit (not for the original offense, but for this new insubordination, I guess), then that is technically not “corporal punishment” (at least of the first offense). I respectfully suggest to all concerned that the child’s biology doesn’t appreciate the difference.

The upshot here, is of course, is abuse not a part of “ . . . the shared environment, the experiences that create similarities between siblings raised together — the part of the environment that most often captures parenting influences”?

It is my contention that it is indeed abuse that proves the power of “nurturing,” and that this is the reason for our “nurture assumption,” because when we beat a child, especially regularly, we see changes. Again, for a perfectly normal, moral and intelligent person to say, “parenting doesn’t matter” can only mean that parenting is defined as abuse free, which – epic fail, I’m sorry. This mistake on the part of a century’s socialization researchers is a classic. We think it’s here, so we’re looking here. A century later, parental influence doesn’t exist because we didn’t find it here, the only place we ever looked. And biology, in the form of one Brian Boutwell among others, has apparently accepted this mistake.

No blame, there is a strong, perhaps species wide self deception in place. We made this difficult for ourselves on purpose: nurture/child abuse is a protected behaviour. We aren’t supposed to see it.

 

This apparent puzzle (which is something of a scientific heresy) becomes clearer if we accept that genetic factors play an important role in making us who we are. Yes, the environment matters, but not just the environment that the child experiences in the home. The environment in this sense is far more nebulous and hard to nail down — behavioural geneticists call it the ‘non-shared’ environment and it includes anything that causes two siblings to be different from each other.

It is indeed hard to nail down, and it’s a point that they certainly hadn’t nailed it down during the twin studies, where it seems the different homes were supposed to be different environments, but along no particular vector, in some unknown, “families are all different” way that really had no detail, it was a black boxing exercise.

 

And I really mean anything. The psychologist Steven Pinker puts it this way: ‘A cosmic ray mutates a stretch of DNA, a neurotransmitter zigs instead of zags, the growth cone of an axon goes left instead of right, and one identical twin’s brain might gel into a slightly different configuration from the other’s.’ In other words, we should not presume that random chance plays a vanishingly small role in making us the people that we are today.

 

Beyond the randomness of life, we already have a window on to what parts of culture children are swayed by. Both Pinker and the psychologist Judith Rich Harris remind us that the children of immigrants adopt and speak with the accent and language of their peers. The movies people watch, the music we listen to, and much else that we’d put under the general heading of ‘culture’ are deeply affected by our peers. What else would you expect, really? Wanting and needing to fit in is not just a passing phase of childhood. To some extent, it’s essential for living.

 

So ‘the environment’ does play a role in shaping who we are, but it’s not ‘the environment’ in merely the conventional sense of how your folks parent you and your siblings.

The children’s peer group changes nothing regarding abuse. Allowing the children to abuse one another counts as parental abuse and/or neglect. The children’s stress is not smaller because it’s the older kids who will beat him into conformity rather than the parents. In fact, gene theory says the children have less reason not to finish him off, whereas the parents may think about their genes.

 

All of this is indicative of something deeper — an aspect which is less arcane and more relevant to daily life. A great many pundits, advice givers, and professional psychologists have spent decades being wrong about why people turn out the way they do.

 . . . and I have found it. Not “why they turn out the way they do” in terms of small differences, the twins who shared flushing the toilet before and after, these sorts of traits, but I’m pretty sure I’ve found your “something deeper,” the real mystery that these problematically powerless questions are trying to get at. Again, a protected behaviour, so within its logic, we can’t pose the right questions to crack the code; I came to it the long way around, very much by accident. Turns out it’s analogous to dark matter, invisible (that “nurture” means beatings and that “good people” means warriors, this, the core of what I call Antisocialization Theory, is sort of invisible), but comprising ninety percent of the matter in the universe. Ninety percent of our abuse is non-statutory and so invisible, and ninety percent of our social lives are lived in both halves of the causal realm around it, we abuse, and we are hurt, abused creatures, nine times more than we are happy, healthy ones. This is the ratio R. D. Laing was pointing us to when he said that “the disaster has already happened.”

When we start to see how the dark matter of generic, non-statutory abuse distorts and bends what we can see, the visible light in the universe, when we factor all that dark matter in, we will see our calculations making ten times more sense.

 

A child is not a blank canvas.

No, but the child is what it is, the point is what we paint and how we attempt to paint it, despite whether there was already a picture there or not. Not being “a blank canvass” hasn’t saved any kids their beatings, has it? The religious don’t think Blank Slate, doesn’t stop them. Biologists don’t think Blank Slate – has it stopped you? (I know your complaint. Blank Slaters are indeed guilty of child abuse, being one didn’t save kids either, and some of the abuse was in trying to eradicate some built-in natural thing because of the BS idea, but this is one of the ways the conversation needs to change to deal with the negative reality of what “nurture” really has been.)

How many books have been written about the way people should and should not parent their children? How many approaches have been suggested by experts who are not really in a position to know? Yes, they may hold advanced degrees, but the truth is that the advice they offer tends to ignore the genetic influences that we now know to be at work. The studies that identify those influences often find that parenting — unless it is actually malign — has very little impact on how children turn out. The huge ‘parenting advice’ industry is largely bunkum.

OK, so there it is, the exemption, “ . . . unless it is actually (malicious) . . . “

So, you do get that, it’s maybe you’re just a positive guy, you assume that malignancy is rare or something. It is getting more so, and that is terrific (also per Pinker), but that is putting the aboriginal truth of this situation further out of view: rare now is not meaningful as to why it never has been rare before, not useful in understanding just what this behaviour really is that we’re hoping to escape.

 

What does this mean for you if you’re a parent wanting to know how to raise a happy, well-adjusted child? I generally loathe parenting advice columns, so that is not what is on offer here. I can sympathise with the idea that having a child brings with it a host of responsibilities that are exciting but also terrifying.

 

At this point, I would turn again to the psychologist Judith Rich Harris, who authored the definitive book on this subject. Harris writes: ‘We may not hold their tomorrows in our hands but we surely hold their todays, and we have the power to make their todays very miserable.’

 

Pinker, meanwhile, makes the point that it should be enough for us to remember that our children are human beings, worthy of the same ethical treatment we give to our friends, other relatives, and even to strangers. So protect your children, provide for them, be good to them, and make memories with them. Apart from that, don’t expect to have very much say in how they turn out.

Hey, that’s getting better, Brian! You gave ‘em the hint. I can’t help but wonder if you’ve been reading me, or if for some other reason you felt you needed to do more than the Rockwell version after the first one of these that I saw. Whatever, you’re trending in a direction I can approve of, well done.

As for parenting advice, I agree, but I think I have a solid reason now. Parents should keep in mind that discipline makes warriors and out of work warriors are what we call criminals.

Jeff

June 15th., 2017

A Scientific Foundation (for the Gentle Parenting Movement)

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So that’s it then, I’m at the end of it.
The gentle parenting movement – a generic term, not sure anyone’s identifying this way – is largely an emotional response and it seems to restart in every generation. It needs a basis in science, and here’s a secret: if it gets one, it will reign sovereign over all parenting ideas to date because it will be the only parenting idea that ever did get one. OK, that’s not strictly true in a few senses, and even when it’s all laid out we’ll still have options, choices to make, but I’m jumping ahead. We need some science to back us up; I’m afraid a good heart and psychology hasn’t been enough.
When our stories our all told and the old view is unscratched, they are going to hit us with the gotcha question of why, why be so patient and gentle, what is the harm of a “pat on the bum?” This has been difficult to answer, and I’m sorry, our answers haven’t convinced them. Not only that, they don’t convince our kids to do it our way either: if the authoritatives of the world are keeping score, then they are winning a blowout, a no contest. Their story took over the world long before any of us were born. Another secret: science will back them up.
Surprised? Me too, let me clarify. Science will back them up, but it hasn’t yet, as I declared off the top. It will, but they don’t know about it yet, no-one does. My science will make sense of what they are doing, show the punishing parenting behaviour to be logical and biological – and it will show us the options we may have. Back to the question, why? My science, my answers:
Antisocialization is why, our false origin stories are why, and the write-protected status of this behaviour shows it to be terribly important by the near universal unconsciousness of it insured by an obfuscating social meme, the “consequences” rationale. Short version: our punishments do not “control” some default wildness or violence, quite the reverse. Antisocialization Theory shows humans to leverage abuse and our epigenetic options for it to enhance our own violent capabilities and impulses. So, here’s what we can say when they ask why: humans do that to create violence, and we do not wish violence for our children.
It’s what we’ve always said . . . but it’s been, I’m sorry, a belief system. Now, maybe for the first time, we’ve got a capital “T” Theory.
I am amazed, honestly. I never imagined I could build a story to support half of the namby pamby things the psychology and heaven on Earth types imagine, but that’s how it’s worked out. Original sin, even a biological, Darwinian version of it, is false, backwards. The logic of AST proves that we know ourselves to be born lacking aggression and we have found a way to solve that problem. That’s almost funny, that aspect, because today we have this low self image, we imagine our natures to be worse than our dreams because we are born violent, lustful, uncontrolled, when in fact, AST shows that we began this punishing behaviour in the past because we imagined our natures to be worse than our dreams because we were too passive, not violent enough to survive some competitive aboriginal situation.
But again, I’m at the end. It’s been nearly a two-year diversion where I was compelled to take a stab at answering the question, “why not spank our children” with more than blank slate, built-in naïve psychology, and again, surprised and amazed myself, success beyond my wildest dreams.
It remains to be seen whether I’m re-inventing the wheel with it, whether anyone’s doing this sort of work. I keep asking various luminaries if they have heard of this sort of work, and no-one’s suing me yet, so, I’ll carry on.

Jeff
June 7th., 2017

The Good, the Bad, and the Reality. A Better Metaphor, Part Eight.

Jeff/neighsayer9 Comments

I’ve been going on about this idea, the social meme or metaphor, what Benjamin David Steele (https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/ @MarmaladeSteele ) calls a social parasite, although that sounds like a person. It’s a solid point, though, so perhaps it should be ‘parasitic social metaphor’ or something. That’s going to have to be close enough, because it’s these parasites that have their way with labels and not the other way around. I haven’t yet gotten back and read Dawkins’ definition myself, because the concept of the parasitic meme fills an irregularly shaped hole in our knowledge perfectly and so its shape seems to reveal itself; if you get what it does, then you see what it is. I don’t see how it couldn’t be real, or at least how the parasitic metaphor isn’t one of the better metaphors we have.

So, I think I’ve beaten the consequences meme into the ground in this series, ‘A Better Metaphor’ and today I would like to concentrate on the moral kernel of it. I think the world has turned on this “good and bad” thing.

I’ve talked around it a little maybe, but I’ve tried to say that the sort of “good” an organism can have beaten into it will be a response to what a beating is and not to what the organism delivering the beating may hope he’s achieving, meaning stress and pain and a need to either avoid them or at least unload the stress after the fact. Further to that, I’m trying to paint a picture of a near-universal human adaptation, that violence at home helps to support warrior societies against their warrior neighbor societies, keeps them strong and fighting, and so, beating their children is a “good” thing, because what could be more “good” than surviving the bloodthirsty apes next door? It is my position that this was our original foray into sculpting our children, the one that worked, that this has always been our proof of the “nurture” principle. The reason the socialization researchers haven’t found their evidence is because they’re looking for something “good,” maybe prosocialization, something like that. Our theory seems to be that parents did something “good” that worked at some point in the past, so now we can’t help but believe in the positive power of “nurturing,” but that it just can’t be found anymore? No, this is the secret: we’ve switched what is generally “good” in our minds between when we started this behavioural adaptation and now.

Now this conversation can take a hard left turn.

Trouble is, it’s still what we believe, deep down: pain is good, stress is good, and a “good” person is an antisocial one.

That is the fascist manifesto.

I think it’s all our built-in manifesto, or perhaps it’s only built into our cultures, or the parasitic social meme, but that in peacetime we live in a sort of balance, and when war and/or fascism looms, the balance has been lost and a sort of a positive feedback loop results. When that violence-masking consequences meme takes over, when peaceful memes fade, then we become caught responding to all problems with a single answer, the consequences. I can’t say why it may ever not happen with this model, but it seems clear that when the problems you are trying to solve are antisociability, then bringing the consequences only makes it worse. People start to get angry, so they lash out, angering one another further, and we get the picture: it’s a race to the bottom. It’s Jacob’s Ladder, but the stuff’s in the water. But this is fascism, and this makes everything that the current administration does make sense. Antisocializing is the purpose behind all their trolling, both rhetorical and legislatively homicidal.

Pain is good, stress is good, and a “good” person is an antisocial one.

Again, true enough and important in our evolving and aboriginal situation, so we believe it, deep down. This is how the president has gotten a pass so far: the strongman, the disciplinarian, the authoritarian promises to make things “good” with exactly the meme’s meanings and he is delivering, daily. We are confused, we can’t glean his meanings, what is it we’re supposed to do differently so he stops with the threats and punitive bills? It doesn’t matter, they are using the abuse as evolution uses it, to drive us to madness, violence, and war. It is antisocialism as bare as it can be: no-one can make the sense in it. The only operative thing must be the subtext, the abuse, the fear, and the bad feelings. No matter where it comes from, if we receive stress, we must unload it somewhere, whether we want to or not, so this administration’s torments drive even the pacifists inexorably closer to madness and therefore to war.

It was indeed shocking when American evangelical Christians continued to support the now-president after the recordings of him bragging to the reporter about his casual sexual abuse came out, but there’s a lesson in it. Sure, on the face of it, sexism, plain and simple, but sexism serves antisocialization when that is the dominant social meme and not the other way about, this president clearly hates women, but there’s more – he only likes white people too. If the white folks like the evangelicals want their strongman, their white warrior king to fight the brown tide, then his accusers, the women who came forward to attest to his predatory behaviour must also be punished, shunned, shamed and so antisocialized. They were abused already (all we know about them, abused by the now-president), but not abused enough, because they were trying to hurt the white warrior king’s chances for election, they were positioned against the hoped-for race war, they were peaceniks, weak links that wartime cannot afford. Abuse solves everything. As Rich Harris described among the Yanomamo (and other warrior societies, I think), boys who do not fight are tormented until they do or they die; it’s antisocial or dead in warrior societies, and either result for Forty-five’s accusers would serve the war effort better than holding their strongman to the law.

It’s not a happy story, but happy stories, like our metaphor about consequences bringing civilization, make for unhappy realities. We can hate and revile, we can call the voters who invited fascism into the light names like evil and such – I mean, it’s hard not to, same as it is for them, social groups are almost all human beings have for morality – but we need to understand what’s at work too. This isn’t just politics, or the adversarial courtroom process, I mean it is, it’s metaphors in competition – but it’s also real life. Maybe if we get a little closer to it, the truth can settle the argument.

 

Jeff

Mar. 18th., 2016

Here’s the whole series:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/03/04/ast-a-better-metaphor-part-one/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/03/05/ast-a-better-metaphor-part-two/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/03/07/ast-a-better-metaphor-part-three/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/02/23/human-nature-or-let-me-tell-you-what-we-think-of-us/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/03/10/ast-a-better-metaphor-part-five/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/03/11/ast-a-better-metaphor-part-six-abuse/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/03/16/ast-a-better-metaphor-part-seven-the-abuse-truth/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/03/18/the-good-the-bad-and-the-reality-a-better-metaphor-part-eight/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

and a bonus nipple-twister:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/02/23/ast-and-child-sexual-abuse/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true

Punishment as Bullying

Jeff/neighsayer3 Comments

The world runs on authority, on force. The army, the police, schools, corporate hierarchies, parenting, parenting, parenting. Family structure. Punishment and discipline is a system by where we control unwanted behaviour by force, and punishment, which, punishment is defined as dishing out unpleasantness to the misbehavers in order to motivate them to change their ways.

 

This is pretty much a definition of bullying. The bully punishes the victim. The bully justifies this punishment by listing the victims’ misbehaviours, or the victims’ families’, or race’s, or faith’s misbehaviours.

 

This is punishing behaviour, this is bullies doing what adults do, doing what the police do, I mean the bully’s behavior is very close to that, closer than any of us would like to think. I’m saying the bully feels he is doing what he sees around him, that in the parlance of some schools of psychology, the bully is getting his power back, after some authority figure has taken his power from him.

 

So, parents and schools going to the bully kids and telling them to stop is a joke to these kids. They see it as just more ‘do as I say, not as I do,’ which it is. I, for one, would love to see someone ask the kids if I’m right about that. Don’t take my word for it. Ask the kids. Better yet, we need a mole, someone who can infiltrate the kids’ group and get a real answer. They don’t trust us.

 

Parents don’t think they are bullying. We have a consensus about what is acceptable punishing behavior, and we really cannot seem to draw parallels with what we see as our legitimate punishments and other similar behaviours. If we can’t, if we won’t see how bullying is an extension, an extrapolation of our punishing ways, then there is very little hope that any of our conversation about bullying, any of our attempts to combat it will get any traction, very little hope of our ever solving a problem if we refuse to understand it in the first place. Surely, someone has noticed that speeches that don’t acknowledge this difficult truth have not had any dramatic effect on the bullying phenomenon? I think any approach that doesn’t include this idea would be considered empty and hopeless, at least to any group that lives under threat or reality of punishment – like our kids.

 

Long and short, if we adults don’t stop ‘bullying’ kids everywhere, we will never stop their bullying, that should be obvious. I don’t know why it isn’t.

 

Many nations have outlawed corporal punishment, in Canada, we are in the process of outlawing it, and I can see the next step, that we will someday realize that the damage caused by punishing behaviours generally outweigh any benefit, and when we all stop anything like bullying, so will our kids. Until then, we will fight this bullying thing in vain, fighting fire with fire, and modeling it and propagating it as we do.

 

So now, there will be programs, task forces, plans and research, all government money spent to figure out this embarrassing problem, and if we don’t try to stop people from the use of punishment – corporal and otherwise – on our kids at home and everywhere else, we are wasting all those resources. And that is a sad, cruel joke, one that the adults don’t understand, and only our kids are laughing about. Not in a good way.

 

Jeff

 

Jan. 22, 2016

Punishment and Respect

Jeff/neighsayer5 Comments

Punishment and Respect

 

I’m gonna change my approach a little here, start making these things short and sweet.

 

So this third one of those will be on this idea here: if you punish, it instills respect. Otherwise why would they respect you? So a couple of thoughts:

 

Punishment is a betrayal, of communication, of love, of respect; to be punished is to have our personhood rejected and denied. Punishments happen when a more powerful person or persons has given up talking to or reasoning with us and simply treats us like an object rather than any semblance of a peer, or even a person. To my mind, this is a worst case scenario in adult relationships. At its best, it’s Mandela’s incarceration, a classic walk underground and into legend (though, let’s not forget, not a good time for him still) resulting from a considered difference of political opinion. Rest assured most of the outcomes of this everyday betrayal, punishment, are not so good. One thing at a time, though. Respect.

 

To my mind, punishment is the end of respect. After one punishment, maybe, after some good apology, but after a regular application of it? Talk of ‘respect’ is empty chatter, mind-boggling hubris. A half-century of post-Skinner parenting crap literature never seems to acknowledge that you can’t have discipline from punishment and respect at the same time. I’ll tell you though: you’ve got a choice, and I repeat, you might not lose trust and respect the very first time – but don’t push it twice.

 

Have we really forgotten how it felt when we were the kids? Really? How many of us only come to respect our parents later in life, after we’ve spent a few decades dishing it out on our own kids? How many of us never do? We weren’t born disrespecting, they earned it – and we understand them after we earn it.

 

 

Jeff

 

Jan. 20, 2016

 

Rare Research Opportunity

Jeff/neighsayer19 Comments

Parenting styles don’t matter, that is what all the analyses of all the twin and adoption studies came up with. They postulated three sorts of parenting – permissive, authoritative, and authoritarian, and with that in mind and all the twin and adoption data, they found that the middle road was best.

I don’t see it that way, because for them, the middle was the middle and permissive was one direction and authority the opposite direction, when really, it’s a one directional scale. Really, the spectrum goes from no application of authority, through some (permissive), through more (authoritative), to much (authoritarian) application of authority. “Application of authority” means control and the tools for it, meaning punishment, meaning force. My point being the three “parenting styles” they postulated are increasing levels of force, and the data says a little is bad and a lot is bad, but in between is not as bad. To my mind there are other ways to interpret that pattern than that the middle amount of force simply strikes the right balance, I need to know if that’s true, balance between authority and what? Original Sin? If two out of three dosages of it are bad for you, why is the third not?

My interpretation is this: children of permissive parents fear punishment less, the deterrents fail because the child is not convinced he’ll have to pay the price, so some number more of those kids develop bad habits, find trouble. Conversely, children of authoritative parents can be any combination of damaged or bitter and angry from abuse they’ve suffered, and the rougher their parents are, the rougher some of the kids learn to be, and so perhaps more of those kids find trouble too. A multitude of abuse and corporal punishment studies will support that. But then, why the middle road? The other things don’t apply, the punishments are consistent, so the deterrents work, the child has a higher expectation of having to pay the price, and the child has a better chance of avoiding real abuse and damage, along with other things as well, probably. I think that small win for the authoritative parents represents more children trapped in impossible binds, more kids who aren’t hurting enough to really speak out, more kids we’ve fooled into taking it like a man. But the point is this.

The permissive parents’ kids still know they can and will be punished for some things, they know the adults reserve the right to do it, same as with the rougher parents, so they’re carrying the bitterness too, them, the middle-road parents’ kids, they all know that. To my mind, the force is the trouble – and the science also says individual parents don’t leave a trace, that children are raised as a group function, by other kids, with the adult rules and structures in place – the force itself is an issue, but maybe just that all kids know generally that the adults will use the authority, the force, on them is more to the point. That knowledge offends all children, irrespective of how strict or wishy washy their own caregivers are. (That will be a sticking point, of course, I imagine a lot of parents don’t acknowledge that sense of offense, and I would respectfully suggest that not understanding that feeling means there is a large blind spot in our empathy.)

Again, they say individual parents don’t leave a trace on their kids, so that must mean individual parents’ styles don’t matter either – again, by their data, and their analyses, because of the simplistic categorization of “parenting styles.” Life certainly, but their science particularly needs a control set of zero authority parents, because that is the fundamental difference, authority, punishments and force, yes or no, and then perhaps we can make sense of the floating scale of less, more and most too. They saw very little difference, again, the middle road was only a little better, their main point is none of it makes any difference at all, so really, what that means to me, because I postulate force and punishments as the operative force in these matters, is when force is present, the amount of it makes little difference. Perhaps it’s a binary condition, like the presence of some poison the smallest amount of which is enough and more makes little difference. What we need to see is if there is a difference if we remove it altogether. Now it just so happens, I know a family like that we could interview, put through some tests.

Of course, they’d have to be compensated for their time, and these people are rare, which may drive up the price . . . really, though, for a “science” that is a hundred and twenty-five years old, a chance to establish a null control, for perhaps the first time?

What price could be too high?

 

Jeff

 

Jan. 16, 2016

The Cruel Irony of Deterrents

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

This is my favourite series right here. It’s outside the box, it’s to the point, and entertaining.

 

😉

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/10/22/law-and-order-the-irony-of-deterrents-part-2/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/11/06/the-irony-of-deterrents-part-3/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/11/27/prisons-and-bad-neighborhoods-the-irony-of-deterrents-part-4/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2015/02/02/the-carrot-and-the-stick-the-irony-of-deterrents-part-5/

 

These ones are better coupled with the Irony series too, I think . . .

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/09/01/punishment-a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-and-the-roots-of-institutionalized-racism/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2015/07/12/shit-flows-downhill/

 

Thanks for reading, folks! Please, share and retweet, it’s all free. Trying to save the world here.

 

Jeff

Dec. 19, 2015

All Right you Mothers – Part #1

Jeff/neighsayer9 Comments

First of all, women are oppressed second-class citizens, no argument. I’m all about the equality. Having said that . . .

Ladies, get your shit together, and just like Pink Floyd told the teachers – Hey! Leave those kids alone.

I spend a lot of time criticizing parents, and I don’t mean to be sneaking it in under the radar: mothers are the main parents. In most of the world, most of the child-rearing, and therefore most of the child-rearing mistakes are made by mothers. I suppose in places where the men have proprietorship over their women (old world cultures, sub-cultures where the law doesn’t reach, among the very rich or the very poor), we can say that mothers have no choice, there certainly are places where a lot of misguided mothering is forced upon the mothers by a brutal regime of men – but not in my life! In middle-class suburban or city life in my corner of the former First World, the west coast of Canada, for the most part, it is mothers who have control, mothers who are the autonomous rulers of the family. Men here are still children to some degree, still living in the power-shadow of their own mother; the industrial revolution has removed men from the family structure. We’re like lions now, we will be called upon to fight if there’s a war or a threat, or when the children grow beyond the mother’s ability to control them herself. Other than that, we will defer to the mother, as we always have, from our earliest days.

On a personal level, I would have been one of those minimally involved men – I still am, half the time. Honestly, I still have the weak male core-belief that my contributions to running the household are optional. I cook and clean sometimes, but it’s still sort of voluntary, and sometimes I don’t. I’m sure I would have happily taken the suburban male’s back seat position regarding parenting too, except for this idea I had, my epiphany that children should not be punished. Un-punished children would not have happened if I had left things up to my wife. In my house, it was me, the man, who stood up against potential violence, against the betrayal and disregard that punishing brings to parenting. In my mind, it was about that, about saving my kids from a lot of unconscious brutality, but I have to admit – I wasn’t excited to be that uninvolved, un-consulted father. I was, as so many young men in this First World life are, staring down the barrel of familial irrelevance.

Having seen the effect of that in my own father, as well as in the patriarch of my in-laws’ family, and knowing my constitution wasn’t matched for the alcoholism that was their answer for it, I knew that wasn’t going to sit well with me.

This whole ‘no punishment’ thing, though, this started long before I was able to articulate that fear. I never recognized my dad’s situation that way as anything he didn’t deserve, and I only thought about it in a personal context. It was getting to know my in-laws that gave me to understand that it was a situation many men have to deal with.  Or not, I guess – and that I was facing that crisis/choice also. I think the chronology speaks to any conscious need to build a rationale I may have had – but I’m willing to grant the possible overlap of interests. Much as I’d rather look at it as a pleasant surprise, some collateral repair in my life from choosing to do the right thing, that I fought a careful and prolonged battle with my still-beloved wife to implement a form of child-rearing that very few people would understand or agree with.

I felt for many years, while the girls were young and vulnerable that I was walking a wire not to piss the wife off to the point of divorce while trying to bring her around to my idea, and to this day, I can see the pain that her lack of control over things gives her. The poor girl has done what I advise in my blog, she has lost at both ends, powerless with her own mother, and then cut off from the inheritance of power she needs so bad as an adult, never permitted to enjoy the topside of our eternal parent-child power struggle. I was trying to make the same sacrifice, but I had talked myself into it already, her parents were present in her life . . . for whatever reasons, it was me driving the change and was my wife losing her parental power simultaneously with starting to see the situation of her childhood powerlessness. It was very hard on her. She would never have it any other way now, but I think young motherhood was harder on my young wife than it is for some, thanks to me. Not to mention that I was intervening and insisting on changes because the girls were here now and needed to be spared a lot of “normal” stuff now – and a lot of the “now” was before my wife had understood or agreed with the whole ‘no punishment’ (so no force, so no bedtimes, no mealtimes, no toilet training) thing. If I ever succeeded in one of these interventions, it was often only that I had complained long and loud enough that she would just capitulate.

There wasn’t mostly a meeting of minds while the girls were little. It was a pretty stressful few years, bad for me, probably worse for her. It’s been a lot better since the younger one was maybe five or six, for all of us. Having said that –

My wife is the sweetest, most passive girl I could have found. I would say nine out of ten women I’ve met during the child-rearing years of my life would not have either allowed me to make this change, either would have whooped the kids’ asses while I wasn’t around or left me and had them all to themselves, something. I know what we did, what I made happen is what was in my dear wife’s heart, and she’s been very happy with it for many years now. We have always known we were loved, all through the teen years, always the communication and the honesty has been there.

Using your power early on takes that away from you; it’s a trade no-one in my house will ever again consider, I’m happy to say. Having said that, that, to a considerable degree, is motherhood, this power trap that my wife so painfully escaped, the stage of life where at last a young mother gets to feel her own power rather than her parents’ power, at the expense of her children’s power. I’m hopeful that we have lessened the power of that cycle for our girls and that the cycle will not simply resume with them, when they have children.

I’m hoping that my beautiful wife’s suffering won’t have helped save only our girls, but their kids, and theirs, won’t have been for a blip in history, but the start of something.

So I know how I’m framing this, and it’s horrible. It’s like male/master/rational – female/slave of unconscious needs – and I’m sorry. Any psychologist will remind me that I was getting my unconscious needs met too, of course. As I say, I powered my way into a strong parental position. Also, I acknowledge that most parents will grant that she too had a rational position to argue; I don’t agree, but if it makes me seem less authoritarian, I won’t try to convince you!

Hmmm . . . 1,300 words . . . better leave off for now . . .

Jeff

Oct. 8, 2015