I think she is worth noticing as a terribly bad example. Remember the episode of Seinfeld where George succeeds by doing the opposite of what he normally does? Well, Lena is sort of George for everyone. You could do well in life by simply doing the opposite of what she would do.
I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, "That's a marshmallow. That's a child. That's a dog." It wasn't mean — he just seemed confused.
The vibe was very much like, "Do I want to [have sex with] it? Is it wearing a … yep, it's wearing a tuxedo. I'm going to go back to my cell phone." It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, "This should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes.”
All sorts of people rained abuse on Lena for this.
The gist of the criticism was that she had presumed to read this guy's mind. That's wrong. Our minds are not closed spaces. Very often, most of the time, you can tell what people are thinking (including what they are thinking of you) by observing them. Most people don't bother developing the skill but it's easy enough. All you have to do is stop talking and pay attention to others. (Bonus point: doing this will make me a better person too.)
Let's begin by reminding ourselves that the experience she describes is a very common one. You walk into a room, a coffeshop, a bar and someone looks up, sizes you up, and returns to whatever they were previously doing having determined that you aren't worth their paying any more attention to. That has happened to you thousands of times. And you have done it to others thousands of times. It's a normal human interaction and the thoughts of the person who rejects the other in such circumstances are relatively transparent.
And feelings of shame go with this experience. It feels shameful to get summarily rejected. It can also feel shameful to do it. Sometimes. We might think we should be putting more effort into this other human being. We glance up furtively, hoping not to get caught making this summary judgment. But it keeps happening so we all keep doing it and experiencing it.
The moral lesson here is, "Get over yourself and learn to deal with it because this sort of thing is going to be unavoidable for people who live in cities."
If there is one thing we can count on from Lena though, it is that she will never get over herself. The shame she feels comes pouring out. You can see it it in the way she wallows in her rejection. "... I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, 'That's a marshmallow. That's a child. That's a dog.'" She calls herself "it". He might have thought those things but she couldn't possibly know based on her own description of his reaction. Their interaction was too short for her to have figured out that much in the (unlikely) case that it were true. He looked at her and then he turned back to Instagram.
What Lena felt in response was a narcissistic injury. It was her sheer unimportance in his eyes that she can't stand. And she'd rather imagine that he judged her negatively in degrading terms than face the fact that he barely even noticed her. He probably has never heard of Lena Dunham. That shame is too horrible to face so she substitutes another kind of shame, quite literally body-shaming herself, because it's easier to deal with that thought than with the possibility that there are people out there for whom Lena Dunham doesn't matter at all.
In rewatching Mad Men episodes on a random basis, I had hoped to force myself to rethink the whole series and not simply rewatch the shows I liked the most. My favourite episodes, after all, are the ones most likely to confirm rather than challenge my views. As a consequence, I felt a slight twinge of regret when the random number generator gave me one of my favourite episodes of the entire series for the second show to watch. It's not only great television, it's Don Draper at his best. What we see here is the stuff of heroism. But there's more! We also see the show making a deeply important point about politics and morality.
Because there are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. And something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves ... is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.
The heart of conservatism is an understanding of loss. Conservatives understand that loss is inevitable and that it changes us and not just the circumstances of our lives. From the outside, conservatism can be seen as trying to retain all of the past but it's never that. That's simple traditionalism. Conservatives recognize that we will suffer loss and we will be changed by it and that understanding that is the key to moving forward. And you see that in the rather cryptic statement that Don makes to Peggy when recruiting her to move to the new agency with him.
It happens during an oddly quiet moment of an otherwise fast-paced episode.
The change of self that goes with loss helps explain Don's comment to Betty that "Mourning is just extended self pity," back in season 1. That sticks in a lot of people's craws. It is an overstatement. A more accurate version would be, "Mourning is often only extended self pity." That's certainly what we saw in the way many characters responded to the Kennedy assassination and to the death of Marylin Monroe. Nowadays, we see horrible displays of narcissism in response to every mass shooting.
It's certainly what's in the air today following the shooting of Dallas police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest. We wake up and see that our world has changed and it has changed in ugly ways such that we ourselves have lost something even though we don't know any of the people involved. And the way we saw ourselves ... is gone.
But how do we avoid mere narcissism?
The biggest danger is to feel we are entitled to get back what we lost. That is what drives men in the best neo-noir films. One of the things that makes Don Draper such a good role model (although he is rarely recognized as such) is his willingness to cut his losses. When something is gone, he lets it go. He doesn't come to these recognitions easily. That Betty is a bad wife takes him a long time to face and he can never fully shake the emotions that go with her, although his initial reaction is anger, an anger driven by the feeling that he should be able to control his life, he comes to recognize that he cannot control what happens to him and that she needs to be let go and, much more importantly, he acts on it.
At the same time, he looks to his past for ideals to uphold. Although we call the scenes where Don remembers "flashbacks" they aren't that. They are stories he tells himself, as we all do. The historical accuracy of such stories is less important than the fact that we tell them and keep telling them. It is the retelling of the story that confers value.
The particular story Don tells himself here is important not just for him but for all of us who grew up with distant fathers or with no father at all. Nostalgia is often a feeling for what we never had or only had brief glimpses of rather than for something we had fully and then lost. For many in my generation, that is the relationship we have with our fathers. As boys, we'd watch television shows in which fathers played catch with their sons and wondered what we did wrong because nothing like that ever happened to us. But we loved this distant man anyway and when he was gone we needed some continuity. We couldn't hold on to what we never really had but we needed to find something in him to carry on. Don does that this episode and its beautiful and good.
Okay, now for some disillusionment for those who think the series is historically accurate. Conrad Hilton did not hold the kinds of beliefs that the character with his name does in the series. But that's okay because he acts like a father figure for Don. There is a symmetry between Don finding Conrad and Betty finding Henry. Both are like magical father figures. As typically happens in the series, Don reveals himself to be an adult and Betty reveals herself to be a child. And it is through that interaction that Don evaluates his real father and decides where the continuity and disjunction should be.
You can't live your life reacting to your father. You have to become your own man and you'll nevr do that so long as you are angry at him. Don finds a value in his father that he can treasure. He doesn't become him or even try to.
Shame is a good thing. It's not an unmitigated good thing but it is good. That's worth noting at the start for there is a school of psychology that translates emotions into good and bad and tells us that we should never feel emotions such as shame, resentment, jealousy, envy or hate. These emotions can, the theory goes, only do us harm.
There is some evidence for this view—there is some evidence for most bad theory. Negative emotions really do subject your body to stress and that stress can have negative health effects. But, as evolutionary psychologists remind us, if these emotions didn't also have positive benefits they wouldn't have survived thousands of years of evolution.
Without shame none of us would be able to learn moral behaviour. It is shame in reaction to your parents' disapproval that first taught you that there even is a distinction between right and wrong. Later, it was shame that helped you start developing the ability to make such distinctions and to talk about them with others. Even as adults, fear of shame plays an important role in keeping our behaviour in check.
But it's not all good. We can feel shame when we know we've done nothing wrong. And there are people who try to use shame to control us. Worse, you can internalize shame. Anyone who has ever had their mother say to them, "If you look deep inside yourself you'll realize that what you've done is wrong," will know how powerful internalized shame is.
That motherly argument, by the way, is pure bullshit and it's purely manipulative. Anyone who has a real moral argument to make will make it with factual claims and not by trying to make you feel shame and think that shame is guilt. There is an emotion that goes with guilt but it arises in response to moral claims and not some "looking deep inside". Here, as always, to "look inside" yourself is just a metaphor meaning to think hard about something. You can't actually look inside. You can only look outside at factual claims.
Which brings me to the most important lesson we need to learn if we are going to become mature moral beings: to develop a sense of guilt you have to be a moral realist. You have to believe there are verifiable moral truths that can be checked the same way you can check to see if the plums in the fridge are gone as William Carlos Williams has confessed.
The standards to determine guilt are the same for yourself as they are for anyone else. We can easily imagine that Williams feels no guilt and that his apology is bogus. What would establish his guilt, whether he is willing to feel it or not, is whether he was entitled to eat all the plums or if he should have saved some for his wife. Likewise, we can easily imagine a situation in which he feels guilty even though there is no reason he should not have eaten the plums. Why else would food be in the fridge except to be eaten?
We can't make shame go away. What we can do is train ourselves to feel according to verifiable standards if right and wrong.
Of course, if we live in a culture that increasingly says there are no such standards except in the very limited case where others are hurt, we will not be able to become morally mature. Eventually, there will be some in such a culture who will so deeply resent the feelings of shame that they do have that they will narcissistically insist that others treat their feelings as sacrosanct.
And that is hell we are currently living.
Incidentally, and this is relevant to the Irish experience in North America, there is a kind of pseudo-pride that is really just shame projected outward. Robert Glover describes this strategy that leads to this false pride well in his book No More Mr. Nice Guy,
I call this shame dumping. This unconscious strategy is based on the belief that if the Nice Guy can shift the focus to the other person’s badness, he can slip out of the spotlight. Typical shame dumping techniques include blame, bringing up the past, deflection, and pointing out the other person’s flaws.
This is a pretty common strategy and hardly unique to Irish Catholics descended from famine exiles. But it can, as I say, manifest itself as something that only looks like pride. Pride is often condemned but it is an essential and usually good emotion, however, for it has a tendency to elevate the person feeling it. It is a way of fighting off other people's attempts to shame us. (Those who would have you believe that pride is always bad cover their asses by coming up with different terms, such as "self respect" as if that were something completely different from pride.)
To really understand what is going on here, we need to contrast pseudo-pride with excessive pride. Excessive pride, which can also be called "hubris" or "vanity" tends to lure us into taking chances we should not. We learn that it is unwarranted when we discover we cannot actually perform at the level we convinced ourselves we could. The pseudo-pride that is just shame dumping, however, is the work of someone who does not take chances; it's a defensive strategy driven by shame and fear rather than excessive pride. They believe they will fail and cannot stomach that thought so they bluster. That bluster, however, will crumble at a challenge so they avoid such challenges.
They tend to do this not just to themselves but to others. Some parents, terrified at the thought of failure will undermine their children privately so that they will not try things they might fail at publicly.
the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.
The theory, first developed in 1966 by Jack W. Brehm in “A Theory of Psychological Reactance,” is directly relevant to the 2016 election, according to Haidt. Here is Brehm’s original language:
Psychological reactance is an aversive affective reaction in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom and autonomy. This reaction is especially common when individuals feel obliged to adopt a particular opinion or engage in a specific behavior. Specifically, a perceived diminution in freedom ignites an emotional state, called psychological reactance, that elicits behaviors intended to restore this autonomy.
If your life experience is anything like mine, one of the things you've had to face is sudden aggression from other people and yourself about things that make no sense. A conversation about subjects that it seems like no one should have any personal investment suddenly becomes very heated. Without knowing how you got there, you find yourself arguing about things that shouldn't matter. Part of you thinks you could just give in, as this is something that shouldn't matter, and part of you thinks you shouldn't give in as this is something that shouldn't matter so you are rightfully suspicious of this other person pushing so hard to make you give in on an issue that shouldn't matter.
Family does that to you.
I've been rereading Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur Melzer. He lists a number of reasons why someone might engage in esoteric writing. All these are either to avoid evil or to attain some good. On the avoidance end:
We might write esoterically to protect ourselves from condemnation by the larger society.
We might write esoterically to protect the larger society from truths it cannot bear.
We might also write esoterically:
As a form of propaganda aimed at similarly minded people.
As a way of teaching for the reader will be obliged to figure things out for themselves.
I think psychological reactance raises another possibility: that we might write, indeed live, esoterically in order to gain a private sphere for ourselves. We could get this, of course, simply by locking ourselves in our rooms alone for long periods of time. Indeed, just about every teen does this when puberty comes along and they are suddenly subject to needs and desires that would cause extreme shame if they were not kept private. Ultimately, however, this privacy will be empty. We need a private sphere that includes other people, a world we can share with others, that also excludes people who "try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you".
The word "perceive" carries a lot of weight here. You might simply be wrong in your perception and you can never completely shake the feeling of doubt that comes with that. Combine that with a family member who has authority because they are a parent, or who is self righteous in their anger and is threatening you with exclusion, or, and this is gruelling, is both of those things, and you will crack. Thus the need to carve out a sphere where you can express thoughts esoterically that others might suppress.
The good news is that everyone feels this need and you will find others playing the same game and it, like most games, is more fun to play with others. And, because all games have an implied teleology, that teleology will become the basis of your personal mythology. You will have a notion not of who you are, which is what your family bombards you with, but of who you should be trying to become.
That creates tensions within the family. Seeing you develop independence as a consequence of having this teleology, some family members will try and reign you in. Mothers are particularly prone to this, which is why I advocate that every man and woman intentionally blow up their relationship with their mother at some point. There is another danger, however, and that is enablers: these are family members who set themselves up as the unofficial police for the family mythology. They do this largely because of fears and insecurities of their own but that doesn't mean they won't make you hurt.
Another subject about which there will be more to say.
I would think you shouldn't need to know what's going to happen next to understand this ending. Others feel differently. A Google search for "Good Wife Ending" and "ambiguous" gets 215,000 hits. But if you watch this carefully, I think you'll see that there is no ambiguity at all.
Pay particular attention to how she pulls herself together and goes on. That's exactly how she responded to the virtual slap life gave her in the first episode. In a sense, what we see here is an incredible kind of strength to keep going. But the something about this strength feels empty. And that's a problem because a lot of people wanted a happy ending for Alicia. Now in denial, all they see ambiguity where they should see emptiness.
The question we are naturally inclined to ask is whether she "deserved" that slap. That's a ridiculous question however. Of course she deserved it! What matters is whether it will have any effect on her. It won't. Alicia's life is exactly what always happens to people like her. That's a plain and simple, and utterly unambiguous, fact. Which makes it rather difficult to accept if you identify with Alicia and, if online comments are anything to go by, a lot of women identify with Alicia.
"The moment she realized her life was not what she thought it was."
For Walter White and Alicia Florrick the moment comes when, even though they both had tried very hard to be a good decent person, they discover that the most important people in their lives don't really respect them. They make a show of respecting them but this show, which was convincing until now, is suddenly shown to be the sham it is. That's the believable part. The unbelievable part is that Walt then goes into the business of making and selling meth. People who've been respectable middle class citizens all their lives don't do that. And they don't do that because it's terribly important to them that they are able to continue to see themselves as good and decent people. "Meth dealer" doesn't go with that.
Getting on with life does. Most of the evil most of us will be responsible in our lives goes under the heading of "getting along with life". And that is what Alicia does. We jump forward six months and we see her going back to work at a law firm. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Where there is potential for evil is the trap of moral narcissism and that's the trap that Alicia Florrick walks into. She, like all of us, is already part way there for we all want to think of ourselves as good. When your moral life comes to be primarily about preserving that sense of yourself as good, you're a moral narcissist. You stop doing things in order to bring about good for yourself and others and start doing them to avoid shame.
The crucial moment to borrow a line from Wittgenstein, is when "the decisive move in the conjuring trick is made, and it was the very one that seemed to us quite innocent." The decisive move is to think, "I'm a good person, I didn't deserve that." As if it would be okay to brutally betray a bad person! We make that move because it guarantees us our victim status. Thereafter, we have to remain a good person in order to maintain our moral authority. And that's why it's a conjuring trick: because we assume we know what moral authority looks and feels like. We don't for the simple reason that we don't have any moral authority simply by virtue of being a victim. Truth is not a feeling! We are convinced we need that moral authority, however, because, otherwise, how would we know that we are innocent?
From there, we slowly evolve into morally callous human beings, which is precisely what Alicia does over the next seven seasons. Whether you see it or not will depend on how susceptible you are to moral narcissists. For most of us, the answer to that question is, pretty damn susceptible!
There are early hints of trouble. In the fifth episode of the first season, Alicia is about to put another woman through hell by exposing her affair. There is a good case to be made for doing this. The problem is that Alicia is not concerned about the pros and cons for other people. What concerns her is what this says about her. She needs to know if this makes her a bad person. As if that wasn't bad enough, she goes to her daughter to get this reassurance. A morally serious adult does not go to children when looking for a moral assessment and they especially don't go to children who are completely dependent on them.
Darkness at Noon
Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view.
The most pathetically obvious hint ever dropped in a TV series is the name of the series, "Darkness at Noon" that Alicia watches over the last few seasons. Setting matters and it matters a whole lot that The Good Wife is set in Cook County. Cook County is not only the most corrupt jurisdiction in the USA, it's been or been in the running for most-corrupt-jurisdiction every year sine 1921. If you can make it there, you're probably evil. It ought to bother Alicia's fans a lot more than it does that she succeeds so well in this environment.
The second thing that ought to trouble us is that Alicia, right from episode #1, she is clearly good at manipulating people. She starts with people she barely knows and slowly builds up to her closest friends. Her epitaph might well read, "She could always use a friend." Once she convinces herself that the end is justified, that it will not hurt her status as the good person wronged, Alicia goes to work with a lack of remorse that is chilling. If you notice it.
If we don't, we're on her side because we've all had a moment when we realized that our life was not what we thought it was. And the story, this is where it gets brilliant, is told from her perspective. Alicia struggles but succeeds and we root for her the same way you root for a jewel thief or an assassin when the story is told from their perspective.
"No one is what they seem to be." Alicia says that in the first season. And she's right. Funny thing is, that should be obvious. We don't see it because we're so busy hiding our own secrets. If you think you're the only one improvising and that everyone else has a script and is sticking to it, you don't notice anything unusual. Alicia has the advantage, if you can call it that, of having been rudely awakened to all this lying. Remember the old song by The Who? "I can see for miles and miles and miles ..." Well, Alicia can.
Moral character and moral acts
The issue for those of us watching at home is, "When do we get off this merry-go-round?"
That's Jennifer Fulwiler explaining why she liked Breaking Bad. Of course, neither Eat, Pray and Love nor Sex and the City were meant to be portrayals of evil. Their creators thought they were creating a vision of the good life. The creators of The Good Wife, on the other hand, set out to create an account of a badly lived life in a beautifully alluring world where selfishness tends to pay off. That comes at a risk but it also has the advantage of being much closer to the world we live in that Breaking Bad was. Which brings me to this:
If you're a Catholic, you may recognize the logic here. Some acts are bad because of their effects. We call them extrinsically evil. There is nothing wrong with lighting a charcoal fire but if you light it in the house you will kill everyone inside with carbon monoxide poisoning and, if you do this knowingly, you are a murderer. That is very different from an intrinsically evil act which is an act that, by its very nature, is evil. There is no context—no equivalent of lighting the barbecue outside in a well-ventilated space—where it could be a good act. Some people don't believe in intrinsically evil acts. I'm not one of them and I have no trouble putting dealing meth on the list.
That said, I also suspect that the list of intrinsically evil acts is a relatively short one. Most of our moral lives will be lived without our having to avoid such acts. Our moral lives will, however, involve hundreds of acts that might be either good or evil depending on the context. Alicia Florrick (I love the Lil Abner feeling that comes with that name) is a woman who tries to choose good acts but does so for the wrong reason.
And that wrong reason really hits home for she, like me and probably like you, acts to maintain her sense of herself as a good and decent person. That may seem relatively anodyne but it isn't but it can be really hard to see why it's a problem. And that is the way it should be presented in fiction.
There will be much more to say about this in the future.
"Pietas" and its obvious English derivative "piety" is a challenging virtue for me.
Originally, virtue meant excellence and it was something worth pursuing as its own reward. For the Greeks and Romans moral law was relatively unimportant. Aristotle acknowledged that you had to have laws but they were of relatively minor importance.
That all had to change with Christianity for it was heir to a whole lot of scripture that said that moral law was very important. So what's the relationship between virtue and the law? For Aquinas, virtue seems to still be its own reward. Later, in the manualist period (17th to early 20th century) moral law became supreme. Virtue was worth pursuing because it made you better at obeying moral laws. Virtue by itself was nothing. And so a virtuous person became not someone who was good at doing something but a person who was good at not doing things. By the early 20th century, the expression "a virtuous woman" came to mean a woman who had not had sex if single and had had sex with only her husband if married. And it was generally taken that the when the married woman had sex she did so out of duty rather than enthusiasm on her part. (Men were held to the same standard in theory but not in practice.)
Sexual "virtue" in women was only the most extreme example. Morality came to mean our duty to follow the law both in Catholic and protestant teaching. Today, the reigning conception of ethics for most liberals remains deontology, that is, a morality of duty. To be sure, liberals have discarded many of the sexual duties as well as filial piety towards parents and state but duty remains the central concept and, as social justice warriors demonstrate daily, woe on the person who failed to recognize the reigning notions of duty and wore a sombrero on the Cinco de Mayo. Not surprisingly, some people rejected, and continue to reject, this sort of morality as duty as something cold and inhuman. Because it is cold and inhuman!
Pietas means many things but it definitely includes duties to other human beings and not just God. In a world where we define virtue not as a quality that a human being has, not as something they are, but as a matter of performance, we are going to tend to see the pious son as the one who always does what his parents want him to do. His virtue doesn't make him anything because he is only valued to the extent that he performs as desired.
Piety towards your parents is going to be a very different thing depending on which sort of environment you are operating in. Presumably, we will all travel between both. That is to say, our job will be a high performance orientation environment and our family and friends less so. It makes sense to fire someone because you think you can find someone who can perform better. It makes sense to value the high-performing employee above the low-performing one. It makes sense to value these people for what they do more than for what they are. In fact, we judge it a vice to hire friends and family over others. In this world, I and others will judge my piety as being indistinguishable from obediently conforming to the expectations my superiors have of me.
Someone might object that conforming seems not to match modern liberal society where rebellion and competition are valued. Yes they are valued but only to the degree that they serve a shared set of values. Our "rebels" all conform to a narrowly proscribed set of values. Try being a conservative rebel and nonconformist on a university campus and you will be sneered at and maybe even brutally suppressed. You may only rebel according to accepted models.
The limit for liberal deontology is Kant's principle that we never treat others solely as means. So, while you will treat the hired hand—for instance, the barista who makes your coffee this morning—as a means, you will not treat them solely as such. Assuming an opportunity ever comes up for you to think of them as anything else but the means to get a good cup of coffee but it probably won't. At the other end of the scale are the people who you see primarily as ends in themselves. But only primarily; there could be kinds of performance that would lead you to sever relations with them but there probably won't; most of the time, their performance will not affect your relationship for you value them for who they are (as ends in themselves) rather than what they do (as means).
Now, it may also seem that families will be low performance oriented environments where people are valued for what they are. Well, they should be but they tend not to be. My family certainly wasn't. A standard of performance according to expectations set down by management was very much the reigning morality. One of my mother's frequent admonishments to her children was "If you want to be part of this family." My mother wasn't a horrible person. She just didn't get what a family should be and she didn't because she grew up in a high-performance-orientation society that didn't (and still doesn't) get what a family is supposed to be. Her understanding, like that of many (perhaps most) mothers of her generation of filial piety was always that her children should do what she wanted and share her values. (See Betty Draper as the supreme example this.)
"Name don't blame," as therapists say. It's pointless to blame our parents for this. My mother was as much a victim of this as a perpetrator, which is to say she learned it all from a very ambitious Irish mother who had driven her children to success. (We blame WASPs for this mentality but there is nothing peculiarly white or protestant about the work ethic.)
So what can we do about all this now? The solution our liberal culture pretends to offer us is a rejection of piety but it does this by substituting one kind of piety for another. For example, we used to be puritanical hypocrites about sex and now we are puritanical hypocrites about food and the environment. Besides, I think piety, including filial piety, is a very important virtue that is essential for us to have a happy, healthy state and to pursue happy, healthy lives. "Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you." This is, St. Paul tells us, the first commandment with a promise. If all it means, however, is a requirement that we live up to our parents' expectations it is a cold and inhuman law and no virtue at all.
My first instinct is to dismiss the whole notion of privilege as just the latest manipulative trick of fascists social justice warriors. And that is partly correct.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)
That's Saul Alinsky's rule #12 and when SJWs accuse people of having privilege that is what they are doing. "Privilege" is just a stick to beat people with for them.
But that doesn't mean there isn't something to the concept.
If we get privilege wrong, it's because we start off thinking it's a boon for the person who has it. It isn't. Being a parent's favourite, about as clear an example of privilege as you're likely to find, is as likely to be a curse as a blessing.
Another reason we misunderstand privilege is that we imagine those who enjoy it have it good: that, because society judges them to be “good,” they are "loved, get their needs met, and have a problem-free life.” Robert Glover tells us this is the contract that "nice guys" seek to make with life. Much of our belief in "privilege" is based on the assumption that some people get this without earning; that they are just blessed.
Truth be told, people with privilege are just as lonely and frustrated as anyone else. Often, they are worse equipped than the rest of us precisely because their privilege leads them to fail to prepare for life and this will come back to haunt them for most privilege is temporary.
Which leads me to the issue of attractive young women. Although no one acknowledges it—it doesn't suit the purposes of SJWs to say so—attractive young women are the most privileged group in our society. They are valued for what they are and not for what they do. They have easier aspect to entry-level jobs than the rest of us (and those are the only kinds of jobs available to the young). They get little helps and boosts every day. And yet, if my experience is anything to go by, they are no happier than anyone else and often end up very unhappy in the long run.
Eleven years ago this month, Ayelet Waldman published an essay in which she said she loved her husband more than her children. She went on to suggest that it was the sexual intensity in her marriage that caused this to happen. It caused quite a sensation. The hatred flowed like Niagara Falls. Some people threatened to turn her in to social services for abusing her children.
A decade later, she stands by the essay and good for her. But she didn't go far enough. Loving your spouse more than your children not only doesn't do them any harm, it helps them. Loving your spouse gives you the strength to love your children better.
The love between a parent and child is not equal. As a parent, you have to to love your child. You have to forgive your child. You have to give your child more than they give you. You need a source of strength to do that. You need to love someone in a truly reciprocal relationship between adults to achieve that and the best way to do that is a loving sexual relationship.
When you don't have that, you will make unfair demands on your child. You will ask them to support you in matters they shouldn't have to worry about. You will share with them things they shouldn't have to think about. Neither of you will notice it happening but you will be denying her the chance to become a fully-developed, independent adult.
Many of us have to deal with the negative effects of having a mother who is too focused on her children (and I may say something about some day but the subject has been thoroughly covered elsewhere). Though that is far and away the more common problem, some fathers deal with a cold and distant wife by bonding with their daughters. This bond typically starts as early as age five but becomes particularly intense when their daughters, as many children tend to do, switch allegiance from their mother to their father in their teens. That shift in allegiance is a powerful source of good if it is a shift from one role model to another. Not because there is something wrong with mothers as role models but because there is something wrong with only having one kind of primary role model and your mother is a giant influence on your early life. But something else, and decidedly not good, happens when a daughter switches from one love object to another instead of from one kind of example to another.
I dated two daddy's girls in my younger years. It has a lot to say for it in some ways.
A Daddy's girl gets really close to her father. They had little secrets, in-jokes and a private language that only they and their fathers shared. That's also a natural thing for any couple to do. When you date such a woman, she easily creates an intimate, private world with you because she's been practicing since she was a child.
She picks up on guy activities really quickly. You can go sailing, fishing, drinking with her just like one of the guys.
She and her father united against Mummy because he wasn't getting what he needed from Mummy and, his daughter will conclude, Mummy wasn't good enough for Daddy. Mummy was cold and unavailable and a Daddy's girl is determined never to be that.
Unlike Momma's boys who tend, as Robert Glover puts it, to remain monogamous to their mothers, Daddy's girls are very sexual. To become like her mother would be to betray Daddy. She thinks that Mummy let herself go. She thinks that because she judged her mother from the perspective of a woman in her teens looking at Mummy in her forties. She sees this cold and dowdy woman and vows to be forever hot.
And that all sounds pretty good. But there's a fatal flaw in it. For, no matter how good it seems, this woman will always relate to you as a child to an adult. She will never accept full responsibility for the relationship. Her only responsibility is to keep on being the woman she thinks is true to her father. She will not only not care about your emotional needs and vulnerabilities, she'll get angry at you for even having any. And she'll betray you and get angry at you for even daring to be hurt. Daddy always remembered his little princess, the reverse was not the case. And when she did do something for him, she did it on the expectation that his gratitude was automatic and extravagant. She didn't do it for him but for the reward it gave her. And that worked for them. It won't work for you.
Again, the sexual side sounds great except that she isn't doing it for you. She isn't even doing it for herself. She's doing it out of fear of failure and long before she actually reaches the age her mother was when she first judged her so harshly she will begin to see that she has set an impossible standard for herself. Only she won't see it as a standard she set for herself. She'll see it as something the world, and that includes you, is imposing on her. And you really don't want to be around when that happens; the massive cognitive dissonance and narcissistic rage will redefine personal cruelty for you. It may be directed at others (like you, for example) or it may be directed at herself; either way, it will be horrible.
For starters, we don't want to get into the business of diagnosing people. Or, to put it another way, there is psychological narcissism and there is moral narcissism. Psychological narcissism is more properly called Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Borderline Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Only a professional can properly determine whether someone has these problems. And only a professional can do anything about it; assuming something can be done and it may not be the case that anything can.
It might be moral narcissism. What's that? It's what happens to anybody who acquires mental habits that lead them to react in narcissistic ways. In our culture, that's most of us. Which brings the first of two problems into focus: Who am I to be pointing out the speck in someone else's eye? And the second problem is like unto it: It's not going to do any good at all to point a finger at someone else and accuse them of narcissism.
It might, might!, help to occasionally suggest that some behaviours that someone else does are unfair. On the other hand, the sort of person capable of accepting that sort of criticism should also be morally mature enough to figure it out for themselves.
But we don't see that as lay people just trying to get by. We only see someone who just keeps doing stupid, destructive things to others and themselves. If we care, and we should, our first temptation will be to try to get them to see the problem. That's tricky because "just trying to get someone to see something" is the way manipulative people describe their attempts at manipulation. It seems so obvious to us that the other person "just doesn't get it" and, therefore, it starts to feel justified that we should hold their views on the matter in low regard and to start using "whatever it takes" to get them "to see reason'.
And, somewhere along the line, this other person has been reduced to a thing that needs to be fixed and not a proper person anymore.
The most, it seems to me, that we can do is make the person aware of what we don't like and then leave it up to them to determine whether they should change.
From that there follows a second question: How many chances do you want to give them? What we need to do is draw a line. Don't tell anyone else about it but draw it for yourself. And if they cross it, you want to distance yourself from them. You probably don't need to cut them out of your life but you will need some distance for your own happiness.
Okay, that's the person with narcissistic tendencies but what about the parent with such tendencies. That's not a problem I currently have to deal with but I think the first step is still the same. The next step is to subject yourself to serious scrutiny. Why? Because this parent has influenced you all your life. All the tendencies I described in the last post will be well internalized in you too. And you need to fix yourself, quite possibly with professional help. The way forward is going to require that you reject pretty much all the values this parent has taught you. That will be like amputating your own arm without anesthetic.
I've been doing some research for a writing project and decided to share what I have found here.
First and foremost, a narcissistic parent sees their children as markers for themselves. A child's success validates the parent and a child's failure shames them.
The narcissistic parent is relentlessly competitive. They keep a mental ledger of their status vis-a-vis others (especially their siblings) and are always ready to reward or punish their children for adding or subtracting from their perceived status.
They will value their children for what they do instead of who they are.
They will value physical appearance and effortless grace above real achievement and hard work.
They will manipulate their children to achieve desired results. A failure to persuade will rapidly be followed by shaming and mocking of activities and attitudes that the parent does not desire. Ultimately, rage and threats will be used. They will sometimes explode into rage when a child says or does something that embarrasses them even if the child could not possibly have known better. In such moods, they will think nothing of trashing their own children in the eyes of others, including other family members. That this might hurt the child will not occur to the parent.
Because the narcissist needs to deflect shame, the credit flows upward to the parent and blame flows down to the child. If a child succeeds it is proof of the parent is a good parent but if the child fails it is proof that the child has let the parent down. ("How could you do this to me?!")
They are incapable of self criticism. As above, credit (here in the form of moral authority) flows upwards to the parent and blame for any perceived moral failure flows downwards to the child.
As a consequence, they are phonies. This will seem so natural to them that they will not feel any need to hide or justify their double standards to their children. They are, for example, capable of saying things like, "I don't know where I went wrong" but they never actually believe they are to blame for anything. Their children quickly learn to read these questions as rhetorical; to make the mistake of taking the question literally will produce a scathing attack on the child that they will not soon forget.
Nowhere will this phoniness be displayed more clearly than in their morality which only directs outward. They use morals primarily to manipulate or to diminish others and the same parent who insists on seemingly "high moral standards" to get children to behave in desired ways will cheerfully overlook them in other cases. People within and outside the family who appear beautiful and/or successful in ways that are useful to the parent will not be held to account on moral matters the parent claims to hold dear. On the other hand, they will say spectacularly cruel and unfeeling things about people of whom they do not approve.
As children get older, they will discover that they have been praised to others outside the family in ways that bear little relation what they were told of themselves in private. Again, it will never occur to the narcissistic parent that there is anything wrong with this. If a child confronts them with lies and exaggerations that have told about them to others, the parent will only see this as proof of how much they love their child. Likewise, tearing them down in private will be taken as love since it was "only done to improve them".
They will not recognize reasonable boundaries as their children get older and will think nothing of spying on their children or intruding on their privacy. Likewise, they will think nothing of betraying their children's privacy in an attempt to recruit others into efforts to influence and manipulate their children.
The narcissistic parent will exclude the other parent as far as possible from the raising of their children. This will include discrediting and criticizing the other parent when speaking to their children. It will not occur to them that speaking at length to their children of the other parent's perceived weaknesses is an inappropriate thing to do.
This failure to grasp what is inappropriate when interacting with children coupled with an inability to build close ties with other adults (including their spouse) will lead the narcissistic parent to sometimes share things with their children that they really should only share with another adult.
Their first reaction upon learning of a child's struggles and setbacks will be to wonder how this reflects on them. (Often, "the family" will be used as a stand in. The child will be told to think about how this will reflect on "the family" but that will be indistinguishable for the narcissistic parent's own interests.)
They will have poor understanding of their own feelings and will not be very good at controlling their own feelings. (One manifestation of this will be the tendency to project their own feelings into the child: "I don't know why you are so unhappy.")
They will not recognize their children's feelings as valid unless they coincide with their own. (They will often use cheap "psychoanalysis" to justify this: "You're only saying this because you're insecure" or "you don't want me to be happy".)
Their feelings will always trump their children's needs. (The narcissistic parent can always say they love their children with perfect sincerity because "love" always means their own craving for validation.)
They will unhesitatingly tell their children that their status in the family is conditional on their behaving in certain ways.
They will play the martyr.
They will not encourage their children to become independent but will instead continue to control their children's choices as they grow older.
The answer to the question is "other people". They don't get mentioned because they aren't part of the consideration. You know, "other people" like your children. I don't think you could find a clearer example of moral narcissism than that.
We talk a lot about narcissism but seem curiously uninterested in our own narcissistic traits. And we all have some.
