Child-rearing

The Common Denominator, Part #2

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Again, psychology tells us that abuse and trauma are damaging to the psyche, and to a person’s development. In simple language, we often say that an abused person “has problems.” It is often considered that an abuser was him or herself, abused. Alice Miller thought so:

“It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person. “

Alice Miller
Alice Miller (20th century), German psychoanalyst and author. For Your Own Good, “Unintentional Cruelty Hurts, Too,” (trans. 1983).

Considering the above, often in cases of clear abuse or even heinous crimes, the perpetrator’s own experience of received abuse is not in evidence. We can be baffled when some person commits acts of violence, and the public record shows that no abuse or violence was committed against the offender. This can become fodder for ‘Law and Order’ crusaders, it can appear to give the psychology of abuse a black eye, it can be pointed to as debunking any correlation between the receiving and the committing of abuse. Then there is talk of sin, Original Sin, video-game and TV and film violence, as well as talk of genetic predisposition. Again, though, the existence of a precursor, or common denominator can reconcile this apparent conflict.

If we thought differently about it, if we saw our world in perhaps a darker light, if we had a reason to think that most people were in fact abused, if our view assumed few people escaped abuse, that view would certainly change the puzzle. When someone committed crimes or abuses that shock and horrify us, we would see that they probably were offended against, as per Miller’s statement; there would be some chance to understand it in some way. The conflicts would clear away, and our confusion would be lessened. That is the key. That is my premise.

– here’s part #1:

The Common Denominator

The Common Denominator

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There are many ways in which child-rearing can be mishandled, many sorts of trauma and many corresponding types of damage that we suffer. As I said earlier, raising children is not what we call a ‘mature science,’ and although we may think it is, in actuality, the scientific method has really never been applied to it. In a sense, I think the old one about the elephant being examined and described by a group of blind men is appropriate –

One man at the elephant’s backside feels the tail and says “an elephant is very like a rope.”

One at the side says “an elephant is very like a wall.”

One at the trunk says “an elephant is very like a snake.”

One feels a leg and declares “an elephant is very like a tree.”

The story has many versions and there is more to it, but the aspect I’m going for here are the several different views from various limited perceptions of one unimaginable thing. I think it’s most likely that the varying forms of childhood trauma may all be aspects of a single, larger thing, and that thing is our belief in punishing, our faith that a process of ‘bringing the pain’ produces good things in us and in the world. It is this belief that helps to make all the forms of childhood trauma either more justifiable, or at least easier to hide.

Psychology has put forth the idea that abuse and trauma are damaging to people, particularly developing people, meaning children. I think this broad idea is largely accepted among the majority. There is a lot of material about it, and types of abuse and its effects are many and well documented. There is no end to the number of the types of childhood damage that can be named, among them, issues of

– Physical abuse
– Sexual abuse
– Abandonment
– Alcoholism and drug addiction
– Verbal abuse
– Emotional abuse

This is not a complete list, and of course some of these categories overlap, and include one another to some degree or other, but it serves to make a point. Again, there are many ways in which child-rearing can go wrong, many types of trauma that can affect us, and many sorts of damage that former children can and do live with, with varying degrees of success.

Much of psychology and personal counselling deals in the details of these particular sorts of problems. There are substance abuse counsellors, rape or incest counsellors and support groups. Often there are very specific things that can be pointed out to people, very specific errors left in the victims’ minds due to the type of abusive environment, or more to the point, many specific kinds of emotional support for the type of feelings that result from it. Of course, these kinds of support and therapies are well informed and well intentioned, and provide a great deal of help for a lot of people. It’s all good. Having said that however, it does sometimes seem that everybody can find one or more of these specific errors in their own childhoods, it can become unavoidable to think that everyone has problems, and if so, that maybe we are getting bogged down in the details, and that all the various forms of abuse might be masking a bigger problem. At some point, it starts to appear that rather than all these kinds of trauma being distinct things in themselves, that they may in fact be various aspects of a larger, almost universal cause, the common denominator in the equation, or perhaps a common facilitator that makes them all possible.

– here’s part #2

The Common Denominator, Part #2

Video-games Do Not Cause Violence.

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It’s May, 2013 as I write this, and the USA is deep into a national debate regarding the ownership of guns and gun violence which has come about in the wake of some very famous rampages where many innocent people have been killed by one, sometimes two, young men with guns. Some people have brought up violence in video-games, film, and television as a part of the problem, that is to say, as one of the causes of what seems to be a disturbing trend towards violence. I can agree with the first part of that statement, it certainly is part of the problem, but video-violence is not causative.

Both of these phenomena, the high-profile shootings and the amazing popularity of the violent video-games, are effects, and neither is a cause. Both these trends can be viewed as the result of violent fantasies, which fantasies can be played out both ways, virtually and literally. Although I do not wish to weigh in on the American gun control conversation or divert this book towards that debate, I must say that America’s unique view of the gun issue would seem also to suggest the presence of violent fantasies in American society. I would note that America is among the last of the former First World nations to ratify the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child legislation; America is a great supporter of the practice of the punishment of children, and also the American lawmakers will not seem to support any sort of limitation of the sale of guns. Again, this suggests the existence of a strong undercurrent of violent fantasies, as well as the reason for them.

Punishment is a form of violence, certainly physical punishment is, and really, there is no other kind. Punishment is unpleasantness imposed, and imposition means force; forced unpleasantness is a pretty good definition for violence. So, if we can grant that (which, maybe not just yet, but we will, someday), then we can view the video-game theory this way:

There is real violence in our society, crime including some rather random mass killings, and there is real violence practiced upon children in the form of abuse and punishment, both corporal and “non-physical,” all of which has been shown, in study after reputable study to be harmful and to increase crime, violence, and poverty. There is also much virtual violence in the form of movies, TV and video-games. Do we really think that virtual violence is a cause and actual violence is not? The real violence is not a problem, but it is the virtual violence on the videoscreen that causes the shocking mass killings?

It is fantasies of violence that makes a child love the virtual violence he or she finds in videogames, a disposition that must exist beforehand, because simple exposure to a stimulus doesn’t cause a need, it only fills it (or not). It is the actual experience of violence during childhood punishments that produce the need, the experience of helplessness that Alice Miller speaks about that creates fantasies of power and violence, and the fantasies predate the experience of virtual violence. If the need wasn’t there before, there would be a much smaller market for violent video-games and movies. If we were unable to identify punishment as violence before, this reasoning would be enough, the size of the market for anything that plays upon our violent fantasies. The other side, the argument against that conclusion would be the same ones about ‘human nature’ and Original Sin:’ it’s nothing we do, we’re just born evil and full of longing for violence, naturally.’ That is counter to evidence, and counterintuitive, to phrase it in the most dispassionate way I can muster.

I must add that the mental illness issue that arises as an alternative conversation to gun control is very largely due to the culture of punishment also; mental illness is one of abuse and corporal punishment’s well documented negative outcomes. If shooting your parents and a bunch of teachers isn’t some kind of reaction to punishment, I don’t know what would describe it better.

Nature VS Nurture – the Full Version

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It is my contention that the nature VS nurture debate is often framed in a bad way. I wish to make it clear that it is not an inverse relationship, not an either/or kind of thing; we have natures and we have a lot of nurturing to do, it’s not one or the other.

When discussions of behaviour take place, when crime is studied, it very naturally leads to talk of the ‘nature VS nurture’ debate, and understandably so. Both principles play huge parts in our lives, and determining what is in our natures and what we are actively creating in our lives would seem to be an endeavour the importance of which really can’t be overestimated. Many believe that we really might benefit greatly if we knew which aspects of humanity, which aspects of ourselves are “hard-wired” and which are or can be learned. Why that is, why so many of us find this dichotomy important may be an interesting query, but not just yet. First, let’s look at the present state of this old debate.

Genetics is a fast maturing science, and is taking many other branches of science to new levels of complexity and understanding. I believe the present state of the ‘nature VS nurture’ debate is that some things may be all one or the other, but that in many behaviours, many instances of predisposition as well as many illnesses are brought about or not, as the result of some interaction between the two. Genes have been identified to correlate with many of these things in people, but many cases show that environmental factors can act as switches for these genetic occurrences, that is, have the effect of turning genes on or off. This is not remotely my area of knowledge, but as an example, there are genes that have been identified as making certain cancers more likely, but of course, everyone with the particular cancer gene doesn’t get the cancer. I’ve even heard of a “psychopath” or “warrior” gene (the MAOA-L allele) that requires abuse or neglect in childhood to activate it; again, not everyone with the gene actually displays violent behaviour and not every abused person with the gene does either. (Again, the disclaimer: this is not my area, but it shows the interaction of genes and environment.)

The existence of such a gene is certainly a useful piece of information, an important type of contribution from the ‘nature’ side of the conversation, perhaps a couple who possess the gene could be counselled to either adopt children, or at the very least, to be educated in a gentler method of child-rearing. This would be a practical thing resulting from this scientific discovery, the first, a ‘nature + nurture’ problem with a ‘nature’ solution, the second option being a ‘nurture’ solution for the same problem. I think I’ve made no secret of which side of this debate I feel to be the more important. Suffice to say, a major improvement in human nurturing would render the scientific discovery of the ‘warrior gene’ moot. If no-one abused, no ‘warrior genes’ would be activated.

I thought this topic needed mentioning, but honestly, I only bring it up to pass over it. For the record again, I am a ‘nurture’ guy, and that may be genetic: the apparent determinism of the ‘nature’ argument doesn’t sit well with me. I’ve read some stuff about the ‘twin studies’ – twins separated and adopted out at birth have been studied specifically for the unique value the resulting information would bring to the ‘nature VS nurture’ debate, and apparently some of these twins have lived amazingly parallel lives, giving support for the ‘nature’ side. Strong as that and some other things are on the ‘nature’ side of the conversation, I can’t seem to accept it; to me it seems hopelessly counter-intuitive. And so, I have developed a philosophy that simply ignores it, but consciously. I have made great efforts not to base my musings upon on the idea that my side has won the debate, which is certainly not the case. An argument for the ‘nurture’ side would be the many studies, some of which I have included here in this project that show the negative consequences of childhood abuse and corporal punishment. Those are very strong, well vetted arguments for the ‘nurture’ side, at least in terms of ‘negative’ nurturing. That may be an important thing in the ‘nature VS nurture’ conversation.

Positive nurturing seems not to be in evidence, at least not as clearly and obviously as it is in the case of negative nurturing, or abuse. It would appear that the power of nurturing is seen and felt most strongly when it’s all gone wrong. Partly, influences on us have their greatest power when we are younger; every year we age things get less influential on us, so the damage of early abuse is rarely completely resolved later, even with many years of positive nurturing stimulus. This usual arrangement of things makes it difficult to separate it, but it doesn’t prove that abuse isn’t just plain more powerful than positive nurturing. It may be. If so, that is very important in the discussion. Positive nurturing may be losing the debate, but negative nurturing can win it – again, if it were a debate, if information from one side negated the knowledge gained from the other.

That, however, is not the case.

I cannot imagine in what way a complete understanding of our natures could ever negate the importance of nurturing. How can a full map of the human genome, all labelled with predispositions for behaviours, even for brain disorders or psychoses ever mean that we don’t need to be careful and nurturing with one another, with our kids? Conversely, how could improvements in the nurturing of human beings invalidate scientific inquiry? This is an apples and oranges sort of thing. The only way there is a ‘debate’ here is in the most negative extrapolations. ‘Nurture’ folks may legitimately worry that the ‘nature’ people wish to institute some program of eugenics, mandatory sterilizations and such. As a member of the ‘nurture’ crowd, my worst fantasy is that the ‘nature’ folks are looking for a way out of any responsibility that is implied by the importance of nurturing, that they want to believe their parental roughness isn’t hurting their kids. Obviously, science should march onward, I don’t caution against any learning, but I am having a hard time imagining a good, moral reason for any argument from the nature side if it is intended to detract from the importance of nurturing.

Having chosen sides in this false argument, I simply choose to exempt my arguments about punishment from the ‘nature VS nurture’ issue in this way:

In terms of behaviour, nature is what it is. The time may have come when we have difficult policy decisions to make regarding exercising control over our genetics, but to date, eugenics has spoiled the enthusiasm about it, morally. The spectre of total control over our lives that way, total control over our breeding habits is not a pretty one, and we know that the efforts made throughout our history, and our long pre-history to fit our actual breeding into a scheme anyone thinks it should follow have failed spectacularly. Even in societies that exercise extreme control over their females, still the behaviour of the males ensures that breeding remains nearly as random as that of our primate cousins. This may be a sort of genetic imperative, providing randomness in the gene pool.

So, to repeat, nature is what it is, and not to sound anti-science, but it probably should be. So even if we develop a workable plan to start breeding in a far more conscious and scientific manner, I think we should direct a large portion of our effort to nurturing issues.

When approaching any problem, Occam’s razor – the simplest explanation is probably the truth – is probably the first tool to apply. One interpretation of this idea can be to first test the things we do know, before searching for more information. In the case of the problem of human misbehaviour and crime, we should look first at what we do regarding these problems now, and wonder what effects the things we know that we do are having – of course I am referring to punishment. Punishing is certainly a part of the phenomena we are investigating, so considering that abuse is known to damage people, causing defiance and misbehaviour, and corporal punishment does the same, perhaps Occam’s idea should be applied to punishment in general. Although difficult to consider for most of us, for a variety of reasons, purely logically, this is a simple question: is it possible that the very thing we do – the only thing we do – to cure crime and misbehaviour is actually the cause? Again, emotionally challenging, but logically simple: is it possible that the only thing we do is the thing we’re doing wrong? I think Occam’s razor demands that we at least test it somehow. Otherwise we are probably doing the equivalent of running around town searching for our spectacles while they’re right there on our face.

In summary, then, advances in the understanding of our natures, brought about by genetics and other disciplines are not in any opposition to the human need for nurturing. The present state of the science of the debate is that there is an interaction between genetics and environment. Nurturing can affect our natures. The power of nurturing is most visible in its negative form, the damages of abuse, where we know that nurturing can affect our natures. We have natures, yes, and to learn about them is a good, useful pursuit, but we have nurturing to do. There is plenty of room for improvement in the human administration of nurturing. Nurturing is what we do, what we can do, and where we should be concentrating our efforts to solve the social problems of crime and misbehaviour. It may be exactly the things we do in the area of nurturing, and not our natures, that cause these sorts of problems.

It’s Not Your Fault.

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It’s not your fault.

It’s the system, the system of child-rearing. It’s no-one’s fault. As much as we feel as though we are free individuals thinking for ourselves, there is ‘nothing new under the sun’ and a great deal of what we do is determined by our culture, our birthplace and time, and the cumulative knowledge and traditions of thousands of years. Child-rearing is the product of millennia of human history and pre-history, at the very least. We learn the process by being raised ourselves, starting at our birth, much of the process occurring before we have any ability to talk about it or even think about it. Everyone learns it that way, so it’s clearly no-one’s fault; no-one should be accountable for something passed on that way. It’s simply hereditary. I don’t mean to blame anyone, I’m not angry at anyone; I just think we’ve been doing it wrong.

It’s not your fault, it’s not anyone’s fault; don’t hate the player, hate the game. It’s the system. We are doing it wrong, and it is systemic. It’s not some small thing, not something peripheral, what we’re doing wrong is the main thing, the big part. It’s the system, the human system. It’s part of the original human technology, our ability to do the unnatural; it’s the human madness and the human genius. It may have made us human, that is, different from the rest of the animals, but truth to tell, not everything that makes us different makes us better. Truth to tell, there is still some room for improvement.

I’m not selling a system. I don’t claim to know exactly how child-rearing should be done. I don’t claim to have all the answers for all the situations that can arise during the long, maximally complex process of raising our children; this is not intended as a parenting manual. As I said, we’re doing it wrong, and long and short, that’s all I’m really saying here. I think I know what we should not do, and I think I can prove it. It’s important. Often what we don’t do is the most important thing, isn’t it? Certainly for things like abuse – a central topic in this document – not doing it is the important thing.

There is no “Right Measure” of Punishment.

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A great deal of this judging and this talk between parents and about parents naturally centres on these different rules and the discipline we use. We say “Oh, she’s too easy on him, that boy is going to be impossible,” or we say “Oh, that poor kid, did you hear the way his dad talks to him?” In the tragic event of a son or daughter going very bad and winding up on the streets, we hear,

“Well, they beat the Hell out of him, no wonder he wanted to get away, to anywhere!”

Or maybe the opposite hypothesis,

“Well, that’s what you get when you let them just do whatever they want. It was obvious things weren’t going to go well for that kid.”

When a kid goes bad, it’s natural to look at the parents and the parenting. It seems we all see the huge effect parents can have, it’s always probably been obvious or maybe psychology has also had its effect on our minds, but it’s a sure thing that those ruined kids weren’t raised in the exact manner that our successful kids were, so it’s judgement: too hard, too soft, too something.

If our own kid goes bad or if we lose one, it’s regret. Half of us will say,

“If only I’d been stricter, if only I had stopped her from . . . “

Half of us will say,

“I was so mean! If only I could have been nicer, more supportive . . . “

It seems with discipline, with punishment, Murphy’s Law applies; it’s somehow never the right amount. At least that is our natural assumption when things go wrong. It’s too much, it’s not enough, it’s too soon, or it’s too late. They shouldn’t be punished for that, or that should never go un-punished. Any of these opposites could be said about the very same situations by someone, and this state of affairs begs the question: if there is no good version of a thing, is it a good thing? If a thing can fail in every sort of instance, is the abstract of the thing to be relied upon?

That is the question I am posing here, and the subject is punishment; yes, all punishment.

Modern Parents are in a Terrible Bind.

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Old School parents still feel the lessons are the important thing, and that ‘the rod’ is the most effective and therefore the right way to discipline, the way to keep their kids on the right path. New school families do everything they can to raise their kids in a more loving fashion and are attempting to separate discipline from punishment by various ways, using non-violent methods. Modern parents are all in a bind of some sort. The Old School parents are often operating outside of majority public opinion (and sometimes the law), and the New School ones are trying not to use the most reliable tool parents ever had, the one that always works, physical superiority.

Between the two extremes are the regular folk, neither part of an orthodox old school community nor part of the psychology or social work scenes, and they are in a tough bind indeed. Most of us were raised somewhat in between the two paradigms, but the previous generations, our parents and grandparents were closer to old school than new, and the latest few generations have heard the news from modern psychology. They want to be nicer. They don’t want to be like their parents, they remember their punishments, and not fondly; they suspect that it wasn’t good for them, and when they strike out to start a family, they want to do it differently. They just aren’t sure how. This is when many encounter what I call the ‘bait and switch game’ of non-physical or non-violent punishment, what we may call the New Parenting, in a generic sense. When that fails, these people – us, let’s not mince words about it – when that fails, we see two choices: work with it and fail (but fail in a gentler fashion than our parents did), or turn back and do it their way. This sentiment breaks my heart:

“Oh my God. My parents were right!”

If this is you, or someone you know, know this: they weren’t right, they were just winning. They were winning, but child-rearing is not a game, and it’s not supposed to be a fight. They were winning, yes – and we were losing. If that idea bothers you, if you won’t be happy doing the same thing, if you don’t want your children to lose that way, please, don’t go back. And don’t stay stuck either. There’s an answer.

Just don’t ever punish. At all.

It’s not about gun control, it’s about punishment.

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Several points:

– penalties for using banned guns and magazines mean nothing to a lunatic who plans to kill himself anyway.

– there are enough guns of all sorts loose in America now for the carnage to continue for centuries if no-one ever built or sold another gun starting today.

– America may be number one in gun ownership, but that’s an effect, not a cause. America is also number one (in the former ‘First World’) in punishment. America is a holdout against the UN’s Rights of the Child’s efforts to outlaw coprporal punishment of children. (Honestly, Canada is moving pretty slow on it too. We’re not so different, you and I.) Apparently, whooping your kids is an important “freedom” too.

– the mental illness issue that we’re talking about as an alternative conversation to gun control, is itself very largely due to the culture of punishment. If shooting your parents and a bunch of teachers isn’t some kind of reaction to over-punishment, I don’t know what would describe it better.

Good Violence / Bad Violence

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We hear a lot of talk these days about abuse, therapy, your inner child, life as a grown child of alcoholics, and the like . . . while on the other hand, at that point in my life when I’m having kids and everyone around me already has them, all these parents tell me the same story of how “Oh Yes, You Have to Discipline Them.”

Am I the only one who’s hearing both these things?

Am I the only one who has seen through to the first cause, the elusive but finally simple and obvious heart of our troubles? Hear me out, people, because I think I know what’s wrong with things. With, in fact, practically everything.

It’s not even new, really. All the information is available, all the data necessary for anyone to make sense of it all – but, unfortunately, this being a large, integral part of our problems, we can’t make sense of anything. That’s a function of repression. A modern, psychobabble concept, and for those rare among us that can and do read but haven’t heard it yet, I’ll explain it briefly.

Repression is the function whereby one or more of a person’s desires and/or needs are not met (or not even allowed to be expressed) and are therefore buried by the person, along with the pain, buried beyond consciousness. It’s a survival tactic, particularly for children, and it works. However, the main side effect is that the person’s unconsciousness of the pain and need remains, extending into the future and onto other people. For instance, if a person is obliged to repress feelings of say, helplessness, then that person will be unable to see or appreciate any feelings of helplessness in others. If the person can see it, likely they will despise it.

Did I say ‘brief?’ Anyhow, that’s the basic theory.

Now, I don’t really hold with what appears to be the lay version of childhood trauma at work. In the most unflattering, simplistic terms this theory has it that, in an otherwise normal early life, incidents of trauma can cause harm, causing repression to occur, therefore causing symptoms later, blind spots that leave us and those around us at risk and in trouble. Actually, put that way, I don’t disagree. It’s possible; I’ll give you that. But it’s hardly worth worrying about, really. Compared to the truth.

Anyhow, the theory boils out something like this: mostly everything’s OK, but you get some people who have problems and there’s a name for the great cause, and that’s abuse. Now abuse is, I think, having any kind of sex with children or with anyone who, for whatever reason cannot give full, conscious, free consent; and something I will diplomatically call Overdoing it in the old Discipline Department. Violence, in short, or better yet: use of Force. You ask me, this theory falls a little short of reality.

We, as a society, seem to believe in a two-sided kind of violence, what I will call Good Violence/Bad Violence. The idea of GVBV goes like this: if some private citizen takes a person and locks them up in his basement for weeks or years, then that’s illegal, immoral, traumatic, psychically and emotionally devastating. I think most people, and certainly most experts would agree. But, according to GVBV, when an old man in black robes in a legal position to do it sends someone to the giant cellar called prison, that’s supposed to do something positive for society (read people). Then we use different words; it’s not abduction and torture, it’s a deterrent. It’s not abuse, it’s punishment. The point here is we are talking about the same act. Unless you have the appropriate license, it’s a crime, and a wicked one; with the credentials, it’s a good day’s work serving humanity.

Morally, the problem is obvious. Wrong for you, wrong for me. Now, I know it would be turning the world upside-down to just adopt that moral stand, but that’s not my thrust, not really. The real point is in how we think about violence, or the broader concept, force. If we thought about it, no-one would really believe in GVBV like it’s portrayed on television, where the good guys shoot the bad guys, for, guess what, shooting people. Good murderers and bad murderers. Individually, I hope half of us can’t believe that kind of stuff, but as a society, we appear to.

When the awesome non-logic of GVBV is brought into the light, one can’t help but question it. If violence from an unlicensed, freelance source is bad, then so too is it bad from a sanctioned one. Now, so far, I’ve confined my argument to the justice system, but that is only a side effect. The other licensed source of violence is the real problem: child rearing. The rest, the justice system, the corporate world, etc., these are only fractal offspring: child rearing is the model, the base unit. What if GVBV is false? What if it is, and every act of discipline, punishment, and control ever practiced on us all, all of our pre-adult lives, had no good effect? What if it’s a simple law of nature that violence and force are harmful to their objects? That it’s . . . bad? And that our well-meaning parents and educators did it to us and we in our turn will do it to our children, believing in this mythical good violence?

What I’m saying is, there is no good violence. It’s all just violence, and it’s what’d I say, immoral, traumatic, etc. GVBV is a myth; it’s all bad violence, however well meant. This seems clear: we are never going to win our war on violence if we believe in the good violence we practice on our kids (and our criminals), and expect it to produce good things in them, and in the world. We sanction violence when we sanction good violence. We are continually supporting the very violence we hope to minimize by our good violence, for example:

We punish a child somehow, by hitting it, or by some more creative way of making it’s life less pleasant perhaps, not necessarily hitting, for, guess what? For, oftentimes, hitting, or finding a more creative way to make the child’s sibling’s life less pleasant. When really, we know the child’s violence toward it’s siblings to be bad violence, our identical, or at least analogous act qualifies for good violence status in our minds, because we are teaching them how to behave. This, ironically, is true. We are teaching them how to behave, but not the way we think. We are teaching them our behavior, not our ideals. According to GVBV, though, if there’s a lesson involved and the punisher is licensed, then the violence isn’t what’d I say, immoral, traumatic, psychically and emotionally devastating. No no no, not that kind of violence! This was good violence!

Again, I keep missing the point, which is the confusion that GVBV causes. Sanctioned violence, unsanctioned, with a huge gray area between . . . it’s anarchy calling itself civilization. Rules for me, rules for you, rules for the police, different rules for the very rich, and again for the very poor. In the preceding parent/child/sibling exchange, likely as not, the real issue was played out: the explanation. This is where the parent gives the lesson, “Don’t Hit your Brother. ‘Here’s the deal: you hit him; I hurt you (or more creatively make your life less pleasant), until you learn not to. This is me, proud of myself, teaching you not to hit.’” This is where it’s passed on, the belief in good violence. That was bad; this (identical act) is good. No wonder the world is full of people who continue to break the rules, no matter how much legal violence we use on them. It’s hopelessly confusing.

I’ll try another tack. We seem to think there’s a ‘safe’ amount of force and/or violence to use on children, you know, like ‘safe’ levels of pollution, or radiation, heavy metals in our food. Knowing full well the damaging effect of illicit violence – to the point where victims are awarded lottery-size compensatory payments – knowing that, we still think a little bit of it is actually good for you! A person needs discipline. Well.

Who are the most disciplined people in the world – soldiers, elite soldiers, say, the Marines? And what are they good for, what is their function, their job? That should tell us what discipline does for us. And if that doesn’t tell us, what about our children, in the cities, in the gangs? What is that but kids hardened by abuse and Good Violence, doing basically what the Marines do, that is, shooting one another over economic and territorial issues?

We have to really look at whether or not it really is that simple, that violence, force, is simply bad in any quantity, regardless of who is dishing it out. Like gravity, you know, it counts for everything and everyone; it’s a natural law. It’s an unlikable notion, but here it is.

We cause all the bad violence in the world by dealing out good violence to our children, that is, everyone, at the beginning of all our lives. In the name of education and socialization, we induct our young into a life where ‘Might is Right’ is the only truism, all the while selling them our concept of child rearing which is GVBV. Now, if the test of a theory is whether or not it explains more than the old theory, try this one on. Take it into your heart for a week or two; try to look at things this way. If the theory is good, you should understand more through it, it should explain phenomena that was previously not understood, or misunderstood. If it describes a pervasive, almost universal force, revealing its effects everywhere you look, then it’s a revolution in thought, enlightenment – but only history shows us those. Of course these things take time. Also, it would require that we face the awful truth that all those nice, struggling people who raised us – even if we don’t consider what we would all call abuse – unwittingly raised us up with all manner and degree of control, from withdrawal of love to force to violence to torture, and, and this is the killer, all to no good effect! I mean, if violence has bad effects, which it does, no matter who deals it out or why, which in all likelihood it does, then all that yelling and screaming and spanking and being locked in the playpen, and being sent to our rooms, forced meals and mealtimes, toilet training, all that did us no good whatsoever. In fact, guess what?

Remember? When we were the kids, and our parents pulled some of that parenting stuff on us (Boom! ‘Don’t hit!’), remember what we thought then about their ‘explanations?’ Well, we thought they were full of shit, didn’t we? And you know what? They were. We were right, then. Back then, at some point before we were completely broken, we knew ‘Boom! Don’t hit!’ made no sense. Maybe we even guessed that something had to be terribly wrong with our parents for them not to see it. And it did us no good whatsoever, did it? In fact . . .

In fact, it killed our spirits, separated us from our emotions, and the third crucial point, one often missed by bookstore psychological theory, it disabled us for rational thought. In the absence of any comparison and with enough force behind it, we were forced to accept, as our only working premise the logic of ‘Boom! Don’t hit!’, that is, of GVBV. The worst thing it did to us is that it made us into the kind of people who, believing in GVBV, will destroy our children the same way, conditioned, desensitized, brainwashed. Proud of ourselves for our use of good violence in raising our children. The kind of people who can do anything, even allow or support a state of war.

Although I’m not as concerned as some over the nuclear aspect of this conversation, that is, that the desensitizing effect of good violence might just lead to global nuclear holocaust, because frankly, I’m more concerned about this little problem of GVBV in child-rearing here, thank you. What did the man say? ‘The disaster has already occurred!’

See, if things are so bad here now that global nuclear war is a real option, then some kind of disaster of near-equal magnitude has already happened! By analogy: when you’re young and healthy, death seems unthinkable, no alternative at all, right? But when you’re old, sick, alone, suffering terrible pain and not long for the world anyhow . . . well pulling the plug gets less ridiculous. Newlyweds think divorce a horror, but a married couple with thirty years of unfaithfulness and resentment between them might see it as a godsend. Well, what kind of state are we in already that a nuclear war is a real fear, that it doesn’t look so impossible? Brutalized, desensitized, cut off from our emotions, and addled with the logic of good violence. Believing any horrendous lie that we hear in the absence of any example of logic or truth by which to know the difference.

Now, I ask you. In this state of affairs, can we presume to ‘teach’ our children anything but the twisted logic that ruined us, and can we still justify the force required to teach a falsehood to a mind that has not yet quit functioning? Any adult using any force or control to ‘teach’ a child teaches only one thing, over and over again: Might is Right. It comes, not only free, but first and foremost, with every other lesson.

This is the problem of nearly all parents: they are oftentimes horrified by the behavior of their children once the little ones have gotten their legs and their words, the parents being unaware, through repression, of the child’s previous abusive experience. What with cribs, playpens, forced meals and toilet training, by the time our parents can talk to us, we’ve already been damaged, well on our way to becoming either deluded, dangerous, or both.

Violence, good or bad, propagates violence, good and bad. Part of the problem is that there is no way to tell good violence from bad, because, truly the distinction exists only in our addled minds. Depending on the dosage one receives, one will draw the line at a different point when it becomes one’s turn to dole it out, as to where the good ends and the bad begins. We still do the bad on occasion, helpless to stop it, but at least then we are repentant, when we cross the line that exists in our minds. The real problem is the evil we do believing it to be good.

Because good and bad violence can often appear identical (because they are), the legitimate status of the good variety allows bad violence to thrive unseen and unnoticed on our streets and in our homes. Having taken this idea on, viewing the world through it, I’m convinced that at least some of the too numerous abducted and murdered children we’re all aware of were hauled away, kicking and screaming, in broad daylight. Likely there were even witnesses assuming they were watching a normal parent/child interaction. With any honesty, one has to admit it’s possible.

Now I’m not saying, “Ban the Good Violence Now” for two reasons:

One: we have a whole world now, populated with people raised on the old system, that is GVBV, both of the deluded, law-abiding citizen type and the outright crazy and criminal type, and without restraint, these people will make things even worse, things being as they are. Frankly, I’m afraid of violent people, and any we lock up seems a relatively positive thing. Consider this: once a person has been abused, it’s a long road to bring them back to sanity and gentility. We have all suffered it, and crazy, violent people continue to suffer it into adulthood: confinement in prison or mental hospitals and torture by their keepers as well as fellow inmates. This, this being my whole point, does not make them nicer.

Two: we would have to invest some of us with the power to enforce this no violence thing with what, guns and prisons? Kind of defeats my whole idea.

No, not more rules and reprisals (read punishments, read violence). But we must begin to move away from this largely unspoken and unconscious belief in the great lie of GVBV. We must stop believing that force and violence will be the tools to put an end to our social problems. They, by definition, once removed either way, are the social problems. Aren’t they?

1.R.D.Laing, Sorry, I can’t recall which book!

There should be no punishment of children at all, period. Any questions?

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I see a few folks are liking my posts here enough to want ot follow me, and that is terrific, but I must warn you – I’m running out of things to say already!

The title here states my position, and there is some elaboration in the posts, but I don’t see any comments, no questions or arguments. That surprises me a little . . . OK, a lot. On other sites, I get a lot of outraged comments and arguments.

I would like to maybe hear from anyone who thinks my idea here needs some more explanation, perhaps there are aspects of child-rearing that need some clarification in terms of punishing or not. I’d love questions, objections, a chance to talk about my favourite topic, so feel free, please. Have at me.