Conversation and Growth

If we want to continue to widen discourse, raising and educating children is a key aspect of a Grower’s society, especially today. We see modern government and society breaking down, The US election of a known sexual predator to its highest office, and escalating numbers falling victim to the manipulations of the marketplace, an economic system which has led to our need for constant vigilance against scams and which sexualizes every aspect of our lives. Meanwhile, religions, especially of the “fundamentalist” stripe hostile to modern science, position themselves as the alternative to the instability of capitalism. In this environment, therefore, raising and educating children is especially challenging. Those who want to participate in a Grower’s society must therefore understand the need to protect them from the dangers of this breakdown - or at least help them cope with the resulting trauma. Administration and mature parents are vital to raise strong children who respect other people as well as science. Such work would involve development of those abilities, such as empathy, emotional management, and critical thinking, which enable them to take part in this type of society. Such a task will require enough mature guardians per child to encourage them to develop these traits. This need would require a system of oversight as well as an acceptance of guardians based solely on their Grower’s orientation and commitment and ability to raise the child. Prejudices based on the gender/sexuality, “race,” country of origin, or number of the partners in this endeavor must be abandoned. In fact, considering the many dangers in the world, including abuse from elder siblings, I believe it is necessary to increase the number of mature “partners,” in proportion to the number of children in a family – enough to keep caregivers from being overwhelmed. Whether the child is biologically related to any of them is also irrelevant. Of course, there should be some vetting of would-be guardians for the necessary empathy and other abilities listed above. I understand there are psychological tests for these extant, although some signs of immaturity are not difficult to detect. Unwillingness to express uncertainty (especially when the answers are unknowable, such as the existence of deities or the supremacy of “the market” over any other possible system,) is perhaps the best sign. It is also a good idea to watch how candidates react to dissent.

Growers must also see how newcomers, especially possible guardians, interact with different people – Are they nice to those from whom they can gain a favor (or even to most others) but harsh to people in subordinate positions, or to those who are self-effacing? This behavior undermines credibility even on anonymous message boards.

One the other hand, if they show gentleness to “subordinates” and growers but seem harsh to others, they may know more about these others than you do. Try to find out why they are reacting this way – Some people are better than others at detecting and opposing stranglers (many of whom can appear innocent, reasonable, and even compassionate, for strategic purposes.) There may be “stranglers” who have, or could have, a change of heart. Especially in a world where other societies are becoming more hostile to everyone, they must be treated with extreme caution. A common fault among growers is naivety. This is where those in such detectors would be invaluable.

Lastly, a Growers society would recognize that people make mistakes. If a member becomes pregnant before being able to manage parenthood, that person should be able to ether end the pregnancy or arrange for qualified adoption or foster care.

The above is, of course, only a brief description of how I imagine an optimal society would work – there are people much more qualified than I am who should be able to fill in more detail, so I will stop here for now.

EDIT 4/16/18: Since I called attention to this thread, I think I should put my more current thoughts on this subject here, along with a recording of an artist whose eloquence on our era might have been lost if thoughts such as these earlier ones had held sway:




As expressed in my last post to the Intersubjective Morality thread:

Islandmur’s “me too” post led me to record an experience - and its aftermath - which I had never discussed with anyone, except in the most vague generalities; I had seen a therapist when memories had begun to resurface, but only mentioned “suspicions” these raised, and we focused on more current, practical issues. I think it’s appropriate to record it here, since this thread has other such experiences/ideas. Like the Weinstein and similar revelations of the past several years, I believe such experiences are more well-known than people acknowledge, and violence (as well as its causes) is a key aspect of both the OP and the "me too" topic.

A little wider background might be appropriate here. My paternal grandfather had attained his wealth in the stock market, and he was also thrifty to a fault, once reproaching my father for over-tipping, after which he took for himself the change that he felt excessive. He passed on his mathematical interests to Dad, who used the skills he thus acquired to get a well-paying, highly technical job. He, in turn, took the responsibility to instill the importance of mathematics into his sons. A few reasons that, along with those outlined in my previous narrative, made the upcoming “horror story” practically inevitable: My brothers, like most boys of the period, were circumcised as infants; my eldest brother, Jack, also had tuberculosis, isolating him at this most vulnerable time, when bonding with a parent figure is of prime importance; and my mother had wanted a girl from the time she was carrying him. When she had one, at almost 28 years old, she made no secret of how glad she was about it. (Jack still remembers his then five-year-old self noticing a difference when she was changing my diaper, and asking what was wrong with me. Mom looked at him with wry annoyance: “It’s a girl, Jack.”) A possible reason for our brother Will’s central role in this drama: He may have been treated less well than the rest of us due to his appearance - I, like Jack, have light, fine wavy hair, cyan eyes and fair skin. Will had the most “foreign” characteristics of the family - dark, thick curly hair, brown eyes and olive skin. He was furthermore strange, more stoic when in pain even than his brothers (anyone not very stoic Jack would taunt with the word, “fem.”) – Will fell down the cellar stairs at about four years old, and when he was taken to the hospital, the doctor was ready to let him go without an ex-ray, since he wasn’t crying. My mother insisted that he get one, however, saying that he never cried. It turned out that he had broken his collarbone. He developed more solitary interests, such as literature, science, and other intellectual pursuits, than the others – I remember he had a chemistry set and a “visible man” model.

I was happy and assertive through early childhood, and I was perhaps unusually adventurous. My mother, among others, told me that, when I was a toddler and she had to lie down because of a bad sunburn, I wandered off across the street to a house where the cellar was being worked on, a cellar what still had only a skeleton of a ceiling. When they found me I was hanging upside-down “by my heels” from one of this skeleton’s beams. She also told me that, at my kindergarten graduation, my voice carried above all the other children’s when we sang.

Jack and my third eldest brother, Alex, were, unlike Will, fairly athletic and extroverted, and both were altar boys. Jack once told me that altar boys were “bad kids,” stealing change from the collection plates and drinking sacramental wine.

When I was about seven (and just starting ballet lessons,) Jack, who was twelve, and Alex, who was about ten, were fascinated by Harry Houdini, and would have others tie them up and try to escape. One day, Jack had us tie him up spread-eagled on the floor. He struggled, saying, “This is cool.” I wanted to try it myself, and the others “obliged.” They also gagged me, and Jack asked if I was comfy. I nodded. I tried not to be a “fem” when things they did hurt. I remember really struggling when this got intolerable, and my brothers laughing, “She’s mad now.” At some later point Jack got my clothes off and pushed my knees apart, saying, “I didn’t mean to pry,” then, “This is going to go in real easy, Babe.” I managed to close them, and Jack became red-faced with anger, roughly pushing them back apart. I know this kind of abuse happened at least twice, though my memories about it are disjointed. Jack made fun of the moles on either side of my neck, which reminded him of Frankenstein’s monster – afterwards I developed a tick of fidgeting with them, one of other such ticks which persist to this day. He said and did things to intensify my sense of helplessness, such as causing reflex actions and calling me a “puppet” (a word he also called Alex when they wrestled.) He further told me that I couldn’t do anything without his permission, including urinating and defecating.

As I said earlier, bullying doesn’t stop with parents and pastors (or altar boys.) When Jack encouraged eleven-year-old Will to get on top of me, he did so, kissing me. I also remember at another point a girl’s face laughing at me during one of these incidents. Jack and Will soon realized that, since they would get in trouble if caught, they had to discredit me. I remember their telling me, while I was tied up, that everyone hated me. They encouraged me to argue with them and answered my every counterexample that the person in question was only pretending to like me. At another time Jack said, while I had a gag on, that my smart mouth couldn’t help me now. One final memory of these nightmares is listening to Jack, Will, and possibly others chanting the way boys of the time did when imitating First Nations people - asking their god to take away my power.

I was often out of school with bronchitis that year, and Will tried to divert my anger onto outsiders. When I did go to school, people started act like they did, indeed, hate me. A smaller girl once grabbed my hair and pulled me around on the playground, telling the witnesses that I liked it. Others laughed at my under-reaction (I had been taught “if you ignore them, they will go away,” and one girl said, “If you don’t like it why don’t you hit her?” I don’t recall anyone at the time taking my side. I remember once when this questioner led a group of girls in taunting me and that someone stood up for me, but then the leader pulled her aside and whispered something to her. My former defender turned to me, sadly, and said she was sorry, but she couldn’t play with me that day.

The next year Will entered junior high. It was around this time that he developed an interest in chess and started to read the Dialogues of Plato. He became argumentative about even the most trivial matters that everyone I knew of considered “common sense.” This is also around the time when he began staging mock “trials” and “elections” to foster his debating skills. As I said in my previous narrative, I made friends with a Jehovah’s Witness. In addition to being from a different religion from the rest of us she was overweight and thus also an outsider. She and I were both interested in magic, and we soon befriended a girl who owned an Ouija board. Will greatly disapproved of this, even for fun, and some of the debates he had with me were about magic vs. science.

Meanwhile, Will, as stated, faced more trauma himself and was taking a greater interest in religion, especially as expressed in Dante’s works. The trauma as he was reaching adolescence combined with his new interest led to some kind of “religious experience,” which in turn led to his interest in William James. When the psychologist I mentioned in my OP told him that he was a “genius” it was easy to convince himself that he was, in Jamesian terms, a “saint.” Thus, he became immune to any evidence that he was wrong on any subject - He would perform incredible mental gymnastics to support his belief that he was superior to anyone we could encounter or read about. I remember his betting me he could confuse me. He seemed to find no pettiness in this challenge, despite that winning couldn’t have been that difficult for a teen four years older than the person he was betting. I think this was after he had read some book of paradoxes and wanted to use one on somebody.

By this time, Jack had friends who didn’t especially welcome his brother; he was also taking an interest in girls his age. In his loneliness, Will developed a fervor to establish his sainthood. Feeling he needed some kind of validation and to protect his desired status he monitored his younger siblings more closely, “debated” us more often, and controlled us and our sources of information in the ways my earlier narrative describes. Alex had used an inner drawer of his bureau to keep some private things. When Will found out he told us about “Alex’s secret drawer that everyone knows about.” He would pick on every spelling, pronunciation, grammatical, and stylistic error as well as the most common turns of phrase. Even when I drew a picture (despite that my family, including my illustrator Grandfather, often admired these drawings and that Will had no ability in this area,) he would find something to mock about it. As a result of his isolating tactics, after the slight respite of third grade, I was again a frequent object of ridicule in fourth.

My mother would scold me for being too quiet, but practically the only friendship she ever encouraged for me was one with her best friend’s daughter - a girl two years younger than I was. At about this time I watched, with my maternal grandfather, a PBS dramatization of Cousin Bette, and when playing with the girl I staged some of what I had seen with our Barbie dolls. My playmate shared the story with a younger friend of hers, and they then staged it for my mother’s friend, who immediately marched to my house, demanding, “What is your daughter telling my daughter?!” Meanwhile, this woman’s family had free run of our house and pool, and Will communicated that they were all obnoxious or “brats.” When the girl called him “queer” he replied, “If you’re normal, I’m glad to be queer.” This word, from the little girl, only meant “peculiar,” though by this time people his age used it as a synonym for “homosexual,” and at one point when she levied this insult he made his wrist go limp and flounced a bit, walking away. Experiences like these put me in a double-bind. (“They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool.”) – I almost always felt either too “above” or “below” whom I was talking to to have much dialogue with anyone.

Jack soon began smoking marijuana (Although not as close with Will by then, he later told me that he had shared his first “joint” with him.) Jack also started drinking heavily very young; the drinking age at the time was 18, but the law was not enforced very strictly, and he looked old for his age. In addition, he had friends who had elder brothers or easier access to alcohol. My parents urged him to get a job to get more of a sense of responsibility, but this only gave him older friends and more income to spend on these substances. (I suspect that when he did share with Will, it reinforced his fondness for the “Doctor Jekyll/Mr. Hyde” story.) My mother, who already nagged my father about his drinking, became even more irrational. I remember helping her with the dishes as she cried about her family – “I grew up in such a good home…”

Alex, although more rebellious than I was, had also been somewhat "broken in" by his elder brothers. (An early manifestation of his own trauma was that he had some “astral projection” experiences.) He provided me some comradery and humor but did little to counteract Will. In the usual pattern of abused children, he made friends with a bully as well.

I continued to read voraciously, at first folk and fairy tales from different cultures (My maternal family’s side had a tradition of writing and illustrating such books,) as well as biographies - One was a child’s biography of Queen Victoria which quoted her as having said, “I will be good.” Will said she sounded like a “brownnose,” and he used the quote decades later to mock her in a book he drafted.

When I started reading more mature literature, Will pushed me to read The Will to Believe, which included the passage about God and torture that I mentioned in my OP – a passage that would obviously offend me. I have come to realize that such stunted empathic ability, along with his other behaviors, qualify him as a malignant narcissist.

I remember his developing more bizarre ideas early on, such as that girls shouldn’t be educated and that the source of the horrors of the 20th century was the attempt, supposedly greater in that century than any other, to reform society. This latter idea eventually attracted him to the ideology (adapted by a party formed to run against Richard Nixon) known as Libertarianism. His ethics, derived from James’ “Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” urged him to invent some way to realize his ideas while meeting alien demands. It seems evident that a dialogue between such ideas has led him to his present endorsement of “anarcho”-capitalism.

As I wrote in my previous narrative, dialogues with my JW-turned-pagan friend and my participation in Alateen helped me re-connect with the world. I read many self-help books, including those of Nathaniel Branden. After I had graduated from junior college I met an aspiring writer who had had gotten an associate’s degree in film. He introduced me to numerous movies through the then-new medium of videotapes. We bonded due to similar backgrounds; he had been raised Catholic and was an atheist, he also had been bullied for being a “nerd,” and his father was in AA. We also had many shared likes and interests, such as the Cosmos series by Carl Sagan as well as dark fantasy and science fiction stories, and we both liked the comedy of Monty Python and SCTV. He had a large collection of records and books of all kinds, and when I told him I had read Branden he loaned me a copy of the novel Atlas Shrugged by the psychologist’s mentor, Ayn Rand. The author being widely liked by libertarians, I didn’t try to hide it, and I left it on the dresser in my room. Will saw it, and, to my surprise called Rand an “arrogant ass.” Days later, moreover, he gave me a 20-page paper which he had typed, the title and each subtitle of which all promised to show how each of her ideas “stunk.”

Of course, such reaction on Will’s part drew me further into the philosophy expressed in the novel. For all its faults, it does require its adherents aspire to some standards of interaction. (I’ve come to realize that it is just this requirement - not all the more technical reasons Will listed in his paper - that actually offended him.) However, after I married the man who introduced me to Objectivism, I found that my husband was a narcissist himself. During this period I focused more on aspects of “rationality” as I understood it. I read a number of books on logic, and studied techniques to help me remember its principles. These studies prompted me to read “Western Canon” literature more systematically as well as to develop a system of symbols to get me to think about how concepts relate to each other. I have updated this system several times over the years. If anyone is interested, you can find a fairly recent update at my blog. Here is the general link, although I recommend starting with Level One.

I think this project has helped me to grow - hope it spurs some conversation.