Author: admin

Making Them Do Tricks

Imagine a worker in a small business who wants to ask her employer for a day off.

WORKER: Hey, can I have Friday off?

BOSS: *exaggerated shocked expression* I don’t know! Can you?!

WORKER: Uh … may I have Friday off?

BOSS: What’s the magic word?

The boss has the power. He can probably get her to utter, “Mr. Smith, may I please have next Friday off?” or whatever happens to stroke his particular ego. However, any onlooker would correctly identify him as a manipulative, power-tripping jerkwad.

In fact, we’d probably say that he’s treating her “like a child.”

Why is this behavior acceptable when directed towards the young? We rationalize it by saying that the kids need to learn manners, but why is this so, when the manners in question only apply to children? No adult would freely say something as artificial as “Mr. Smith, may I please …” in normal conversation. That being the case, why do kids need to learn this?

We’re making them do pointless tricks for us. We want them to learn it because it pleases the adults. It’s not about respect or manners; it’s about submission. The adult is demanding deference, not politeness, which is why we can easily identify the real culprit when both parties are at least 30 years old.

Do the young have immature brains?

One of the most pernicious myths of the modern era is the idea that the human brain isn’t fully mature until age 25 or 26. The people promoting this idea point to brain scans showing that the frontal lobe is smaller in teenagers and young adults than in older adults. However, I’ve never heard any of them propound a good theory on why the young adults of the past were able to make sound, future-oriented choices.

It’s gotten to the point where I’ve heard some speak seriously of “children” in college. Not the more general “kids,” and not in reference to the speaker’s own offspring … some have begun to take seriously the absurd idea that a group of people who are largely ages 18-22 are “children.” In the past, people younger than 23 have led armies.

It seems intuitively obvious to me that the frontal lobes are not undeveloped; they’re atrophied. We’ve infantilized our young to such an extent that they no longer can develop these skills. Notice how the official age when we’re finally mature keeps going upward? The age of so-called maturity keeps being raised, but it’s always several years after the rest of us have finally started to allow them a little autonomy.

Imagine some eager person observing that one-year-olds often fall down, and that three-year-olds fall much less often. This person decides that the toddlers are bad at walking because they’re not developmentally ready yet. Somehow others are talked into this, and the culture begins keeping one-year-olds and two-year-olds in strollers full-time, until they’re declared chronologically qualified on their third birthdays.

Now imagine those three-year-olds trying to walk.

Their legs were exercised in preparation, but their brains have no idea how to manage the task of swinging from one foot to the other. They fall down a lot.

At this point, the culture has forgotten that one-year-olds used to walk. They decide that three-year-olds must still not be old enough, and the next generation isn’t allowed to try until they’re six. They fall down a lot.

Give it a while longer, and now nobody’s allowed to walk until age twelve. Meanwhile, our entire culture has become clumsier, less graceful, less athletic, because our formative years were spent sitting and waiting.

We think this is normal. We don’t believe the old tales of how ten-year-olds used to play baseball ― why, that’s a hard task for adults! The idea of children doing it must be a myth.

Ridiculous? Sure, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. In some European countries, for example, people think that children “can’t” learn to read until they’re nine or ten years old. They’re aware of children reading earlier in other parts of the world, but they seem to think that the children are being forced and possibly even damaged somehow. What they see around them is that eight-year-olds can’t read well, and most people just don’t have enough separation from their own culture to realize that something which seems normal right here is actually rather weird overall.

People who read well usually started reading earlier than age ten.

People who walk well usually started walking earlier than age twelve.

People who solve problems and make decisions well usually started solving problems and making decisions earlier than age twenty-six.

Genuine brain development appears to finish up around age 12-14. Absent other factors, that’s also when we reach reproductive puberty. This is not a coincidence. That’s when we become fully developed human organisms.

We will continue to learn and change, and that will lead to small brain changes, but this process continues throughout our lives. It’s called “neuroplasticity.” If a person’s brain must be beyond change for that person to count as mature, then the only mature people are corpses.

“You should get a sense of humor”

Bullies ― including in-family bullies ― called on their behavior will often complain that their targets “need a sense of humor” or “should learn to take a joke.” In fact, it’s usually the bully, not the target, who lacks a good sense of humor.

The next time you observe bullying, glance away from the bully and the bullied to look at the bystanders. Notice how they’re not laughing? There may or may not be a few co-bullies giggling along with the primary bully, but if so, it’s always the same crew. Bystanders who aren’t participating are never amused … and if the bully were doing something genuinely funny, they would be.

The bystanders don’t care enough to stand up and help the target, but they don’t laugh. That’s because nothing humorous is happening.

The bully thinks the bullying is “funny” because the bully is having fun, but the bully’s enjoyment is coming from malice, not humor.

However, the bully doesn’t understand this. The bully thinks that there is some sort of humor in taunting and jeering at innocent targets ― which implies that the bully has no real sense of humor for comparison.

“Enrichment” is bullshit

When I was a high school sophomore, the geometry student teacher approached me and said she wanted to assign me some extra work. When I asked why, I learned that this was supposed to be one of those enrichment opportunities. She said that the extra work would be “more interesting” than the regular work. I would not be excused from the regular work; this was extra work piled on top, and I couldn’t see any Earthly point.

I asked her several times what the actual point of my doing this extra work was supposed to be, and there just wasn’t any. All she had was the claim that it would be “more interesting” than the regular work. Did she think I was desperate for something to do?

I might have fallen for this when I was eight. “Wait, there’s interesting stuff around here somewhere? Sure, show me!” At fifteen, though, I already knew better. I had no trouble finding interesting projects on my own; I didn’t need the school to assign me hobbies and tell me when to work on them.

She couldn’t tell me the point of the extra work because there wasn’t any point. I would not, for example, be paid for that work. I wouldn’t have the satisfaction of seeing my effort serve some purpose. I wouldn’t graduate and be free any faster, either.

Imagine a different sort of school system, one whose real goal was to teach instead of to babysit and train. In such a system, when a presumably-willing student demonstrated existing mastery of the proposed material, the student would be excused from the course. He or she could test out of the course and spend that class period in the library, on self-chosen activity. If the student could demonstrate mastery of all the degree’s required material, the school would simply grant the degree and release the inmate student.

In my 51 years of living in several different states, I have never encountered a high school which allowed students to do this. Instead, the kids are shoved into this “enrichment” stuff, still pointless and still controlled by others. What would be the great harm in letting a young person read a self-chosen book? Would it really be so bad if a young person learned something unauthorized?

“That Didn’t Happen,” Part 2

I’ve continued to think about the abusers saying the abuse didn’t happen. I’ve reached some tentative conclusions.

You see, the narcissist can’t do something wrong. None of us are exactly fond of learning that we were the bad guy in a situation, but for a narcissist, it literally cannot be true. She (or he) is and must be endlessly perfect, or else everything falls apart. So, when she sees “I did that” juxtaposed with “That was wrong,” it’s not just unwelcome news ― it’s a paradox. The entire world has stopped making sense, and she must resolve the paradox before she can proceed.

That’s when the mental gymnastics begin.

For the paradox to be resolved and the narcissist to remain perfect, one of the two premises (“I did that” and “That was wrong”) must be false. If there is no hard evidence, as is usually the case for most domestic abuse, then simply blotting her actions out of her mind ― “What are you talking about? I’d never do that!” ― suffices to remove the action from the space-time continuum and restore the state of her never having done anything wrong, ever.

We can call it denial or delusion or whatever we like, but I think that’s the gist. “I have never, ever done anything wrong” is such a fundamental axiom that it must be defended at any cost. There are several things pointing me to this conclusion.

One is that the other popular defenses for abusers fall into a general category I call “Oh, that was just.” They were joking, or everyone does that sometimes, or the victim didn’t understand the incident, or it was really the victim’s fault. There may be an entire conga line of such defenses, one after the other. Whatever might have happened, it certainly wasn’t wrong. What a silly thing to say!

The abusers can admit the actions happened as long as they don’t also have to admit that the actions were abuse. They can also admit that the actions are abusive as long as they don’t also have to admit that they performed the actions. Knocking down either pillar is enough to let the narcissistic abuser resolve the seeming paradox of having done wrong, so that the world makes sense again.

The other reason I reached this conclusion is that several victims have reported their abusers freezing up when confronted with hard evidence. Some people have been able to force their abusers to face the abuse. This is an elaborate procedure requiring hard evidence, objective witnesses, and situational control so that the victim is completely safe and the abuser doesn’t simply walk away when glimpses of the truth start to become uncomfortable. It’s a difficult undertaking, but some have managed it.

Some of these people have reported that the abusers go though the usual defenses of claiming it didn’t happen and then trying a dozen different rationalizations to make it not be wrong. As the defenses fall one by one, the masks slip, and we begin to see the naked narcissistic rage underneath. If the victims remain calmly confrontational, the abusers then display a new behavior: they lock up. They freeze in place, staring blankly. The paradox has shut their circuitry down.

One such man said that his mother appeared to be suffering from BSOD ― the Blue Screen of Death, an old term for a computer which had frozen and displayed a field of pure blue on the monitor. Another victim eventually left the abuser lying on the floor, supine and speechless.

Don’t worry. They’ll be fine once they’ve slept.

Don’t get excited, either. With a little time to process, they’ll overflow with creative new excuses to explain that the victim overreacted and the abuser was actually perfectly great all along.

“That Didn’t Happen,” Part 1

When I was young, I had jaw surgery which went disastrously wrong. My mother openly mocked and ridiculed me. She had been indifferent to the precipitating problem and to the surgery itself, but flaunted how much she enjoyed the aftermath.

One night, she attacked me because my lower lip was numb and I literally couldn’t feel a piece of spinach stuck to my lip. She repeatedly pretend-asked, “Are you tellin’ me you can’t feel that?” while laughing her head off. I requested, in a civil and normal tone, that she tell me more nicely in the future. The next night, she re-attacked by making an over-the-top, theatrical production out of “telling me nicely” that food was on my lip, with more uproarious laughter at the malpractice victim’s expense.

Every time I timidly mentioned possible legal action or repair work, she smirked at me hugely and said, “You’re not mad at that nice Dr. Scheetz, are you?” She sometimes said that out of the clear blue sky, apparently just to remind me that she didn’t care. At one point she even made a public speech about how kind and thoughtful and skilled he was — and such a good-looking man, too!

She was indifferent to him before he hurt me, so I could only surmise that she idolized him because he hurt me. That was a painful realization. I already knew she didn’t really care about me and that she esteemed people who had hurt me, but going out of her way to exalt someone who hurt me was just plain malicious.

Because my jaw and mouth were no longer as they should have been, since then I have had to swallow hard. This was visible. Every single time I swallowed my own saliva, I had to gulp it in order for it to happen at all. My mother smirked and tittered, repeatedly giggling that I was “just doin’ that,” cracking herself up at the expense of someone freshly maimed by a surgeon.

Because no substantial repair work is possible, I still swallow hard. Every time. Many times a day.

It’s not a lot of fun to be reminded of what your mother is really like by the simple, human, and necessary act of swallowing. What does one do when one’s own bodily function is a trauma trigger?

I have looked into partial cosmetic repair (functional repair isn’t possible). When my mother learned of this, she actually had the nerve to ask if I wanted her to come out and “help” me during the recovery period. I said no, and reminded her of why — and, of course, she attacked. She instantly and viciously denied, then haughtily proclaimed, “I’d never do that!” She is a wonderful person, and wonderful people don’t ridicule the recently maimed, so therefore what happened didn’t happen.

Except it did. You did what you did, you lying bitch. Even if not a single other living soul ever learns of it, it still happened. The truth is true.

Why Do I Think I Should Have Fought Back?

I realized something a couple of years ago: I am bothered by memories of the abuse I have suffered, and part of what rankles is my own failure to stand up and punch the nasty person in the mouth.

If I were injured by something I genuinely could not have helped ― e.g., something heavy fell on me ― then that would not be an infuriating memory. I was injured by other people, though, and I believe I should have done something.

Targets who retaliate are usually blamed. Since nobody else cared about the abuse, the third parties will usually turn on the target ― from their own self-centered point of view, there would be no problem if the target continued to absorb the abuse passively, and so the target is the one causing problems for them.

I know that this is how my family would have reacted to any self-defense on my part, but I still think I should have punched one especially vicious aunt. She made a hobby of tormenting, insulting, ridiculing, and smearing me. She even shrieked ridicule at my father’s last services, to try to get the entire room to laugh at me with her ― at a memorial service. If I had administered some consequences in my teens, I would have had to deal with some fallout, but I probably wouldn’t have had to continue enduring the abuse. Accordingly, I’m pretty sure I should have just hit her. It would have been wiser in the long run.

So why didn’t I?

At the time, the lesson I’d learned was that standing up for myself generally caused more problems than it solved. No one else would ever help me, and helping myself always went badly because I was blamed. I was trained to complete passivity.

However, I feel responsible for not having overcome that. Not standing up for myself at age four is one thing, but not standing up for myself at age fourteen is harder to forgive.

In my daydreams, we’re all at my grandmother’s house for a family gathering, and I don’t hide in another room when she starts up. I take a hardback book, walk over to her, pull her down over my knee, and paddle her nasty behind good and hard. Then I dump her on the floor and step on her as I’m walking away (forever). I go to Minnesota, where emancipation is much easier than it was in Ohio, and live my own life. Once I’ve passed the magical-in-Ohio eighteenth birthday, I pop back up with lawsuits all around.

Since it’s a daydream, all of this goes swimmingly. In real life, everything would go wrong and I would be treated as the bad guy who “assaulted” the poor darling.

So why do I still wish I’d tried it?

All I can come up with is that I would respect myself more if I’d at least tried. Is that reasonable, though? If I’d continued trying even though it always went wrong, would I really look back on that more proudly? Or would I just be berating myself for not trying other things?

It’s absurd, really, to think that a child or young teen should simply stand up and end the experience of being the designated free target for an entire extended family. So why do I believe I should have?

I think it boils down to the programming that the abuse was my own fault. Everyone always said I deserved it, after all. The emotional message lingers long. Even though I always knew that the aunt sought me out specifically to insult and taunt me, and even though I now know it’s impossible for me to cause other people’s behavior, the message that “it’s all your own fault” makes me feel that it was still my fault because I didn’t stand up and end it.

“In my experience, the truth is usually in between the two stories.”

“In my experience, the truth is usually in between the two stories.”

How many times have you heard someone use this line? I’ve lost count. It’s an awfully convenient line, allowing the speaker to sound sophisticated and wise while also providing an excuse not to investigate the matter.

It’s nonsense.

“The truth” is simply a name for what really happened. It doesn’t move around as more people speak. It’s not a weighted moving average. It’s what actually went down in the real world, and the truth itself never alters no matter how many false statements are made. In my experience — and I suspect in that of most others, really — it’s extremely common for one version of events to be much, much closer to the truth than another is. Only investigation will let us determine where the truth lies.

If no real investigation is possible, it may make sense to assume the truth is somewhere vaguely in between the two versions. If there is genuinely no other evidence and no hope of acquiring any, what else can the evaluator do? The only options are to do nothing at all, to choose between them based on the evaluator’s own prejudices, or to assume approximately equal credibility. Someone might legitimately choose that last option when no better choices are available.

More often, though, it’s a statement born of laziness. The speaker just doesn’t want to be bothered determining the truth, so assumes it to be somewhere near a sort of compromise. Unless some other party is supervising, there’s no downside for the person taking this shortcut … but there sure is for the truthteller.

The Internet Is Great

I recently followed the tale of a young man, 14 years old, whose mother drugged him and tattooed her own name on his arm while he was unconscious. He asked Reddit for help, and Reddit came through with an outpouring of support and strong urgings to call the police. He did so, and he and his brother were rescued by CPS, while his mother is now jailed. It was a deeply satisfying ending to a story which should never have happened.

This story got me thinking about how important the Internet can be to young people in such families. This poor guy could have called the police right away … but he didn’t know that. People who grow up in these environments have no idea what is and isn’t actionable. No one has ever cared or helped before, so why would they now?

With several hundred adults telling him that this isn’t normal, that the police will help you, that maybe no one had ever listened or helped before but this one was genuinely different, the young man found enough hope to call.

If he had lived forty years ago, with no Internet access, he would have had no way of knowing that his crazy mother had finally crossed a line which would make others care. If he didn’t give up entirely, he would probably have continued timidly telling other people that his mother was crazy and possessive and controlling, and continued receiving big smirks and patronizing “explanations” that his mother loved him very much and only wanted him to be safe.

He would have ended up like me, wandering lost through his twenties, firmly repressing it, and occasionally falling apart from the unresolved trauma, utterly certain that no one would ever, ever care.

The Internet is a wonderful thing.

Ignorant, Cocky Whippersnappers

Younger workers are often ignored by older workers. It’s assumed, taken completely for granted, that the life experience of the older workers will easily trump any knowledge or skills the younger people might have. This might lead one to wonder why, if life experience is so much more valuable than education, we insist that young people sacrifice the former for the latter … but that’s not my point today.

Today, I’m iconoclastically suggesting that young people may in fact have more experience with some parts of the job.

When I was young, so was the Internet. The older people with whom I worked were not stupid, not inexperienced, but they sometimes didn’t quite get the whole thing with computers and email and confusing electronic stuff like that. Here are a few gems I recall:

  • “That page is too faded for OCR. You might want to retype it first.”
  • “Giving the computer more memory will slow it down. It’ll just have
    more memory to look through.”

And that all-time classic that more than a few of us heard …

  • “We should download the worldwide web, so we can still use it when the Internet connection is down.”

All of these statements were ridiculous to anyone who understood the concepts. All of them seemed sensible based on the existing experience of the speakers: retyping a page was a way to get a cleaner typewritten copy, looking through sixteen physical cupboards does take more time than searching eight, and a downloaded item is still available when the Internet connection is out. All seemed sensible, and all were utterly absurd nonetheless.

They genuinely thought they were giving good advice. They were mistaken.

Time has passed, and now I’m the fogey. Like most such, I sometimes offer life tips to those less experienced. Unlike most such, I haven’t forgotten the experiences of my youth. If someone ignores my well-meant suggestion, it’s possible that she’s a smug little know-it-all who doesn’t understand how much wiser I am. It’s possible.

It’s also possible that the younger person knows this particular task better than I do, or that she performs this task once a year and rightly doesn’t care, or that there are newer methods of which I’m unaware … or maybe, just maybe, I’ve lost the plot and am spouting absurdities without knowing it.

I’m not the best judge of that. The person hearing the suggestion is the best judge of whether or not to take it. The ages of the parties involved don’t affect that.