Dysfunctional Beliefs That Are Common in Estranged Parents’ Forums | Issendai.com

tanadrin:

argumate:

disexplications:

argumate:

this is probably the scariest page

I remember reading that series a while back.

It’s odd how there’s a network of forums that are effectively forums for abusive parents, even though they wouldn’t accept that label, although it probably comes down to bad driving out good more effectively than the reverse. She mentions in one of the posts that people who are estranged from their children through no fault of their own occasionally show up, but they don’t stick around.

twelve months on the parallels with incel culture are obvious.

Looking over this page again it’s interesting to note how many commonalities there are with societies build on traditional kinship networks (i.e., societies that don’t partake in atomized individualism, everything from feudalism to small-town 19c America). Especially the bits about how hierarchies between adults and children never go away, even when the children are grown, and refusing to acknowledge that an individual has a right to unilaterally end a toxic relationship (as opposed to being obligate to enforce a group shunning). Also, note from the next page:

The child can’t resist these demands without accusations of immaturity.
As far as their parents are concerned, wiser people are meant to guide
less wise people, and experienced people are meant to guide the
inexperienced. Teenagers rebel because they’re young and stupid, but
once they’ve learned the ways of the world, they’re supposed to settle
down and stop their juvenile bucking against their betters. True
maturity is found in graceful submission to powers greater than oneself.
Children who refuse to recognize this are bratty, immature, proud,
rebellious–even if they’re 48, a father of three, and head of the local
Rotary Club. 

Compare:

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a
woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All
homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views,
is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and
sacrilege are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by
destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a
bishop, or a father are only common homicide; and if the people are by
any chance or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most
pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny. […]
When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot
possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us;
nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly,
taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your
revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous state was owing to
the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as
such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume
that on the whole their operation was beneficial.

As in microcosm, so in macrocosm: even against outrageous abuse, toppling the order you were born into is to support anarchy. The same logic which places a parent forever at a rank above a child places an aristocrat forever at a rank above a commoner; things are the way they are for a reason; the metaphor runs “kings are fathers to their nation,” not the other way around, because fathers are, in this line of thinking, the original kings, the primeval tyrants.

This is a kind of conservatism so prehistoric it can hardly be called conservatism anymore, and I’m not even sure the neoreactionaries truly believe in it given how steeped we are in a modern understanding of psychology, i.e., we acknowledge there exists such a thing as abusive relationships between parents and children and that kings can be so bad they can expect, if not deserve, to be overthrown by popular rebellion.

I’m not saying it was universal, because universality is a hard claim to make in any context, but I am pretty sure a lot of the features of the past can be explained by the fact that many people were severely traumatized in one way or another. Between PTSD, the generational effects of famine, the constant threat of warfare, and social structures justified on incredibly abusive models of how human beings are supposed to relate to one another, it’s frankly a wonder we’ve managed to make it this far as a civilization.

Dysfunctional Beliefs That Are Common in Estranged Parents’ Forums | Issendai.com