Counter-Currents
Young Sailor Ripley lacked “parental guidance.”
73 words / 10:18
Greg Johnson has published a recording of himself reading his 2018 essay “Blaming Your Parents,” on the fallacy of blaming one’s parents for one’s misfortunes, and it is now available for download and online listening. The original essay is currently being featured in Counter-Currents’ new Classics Corner (see the right-hand sidebar).
To listen in a player, click here. To download, right-click the link and click “save as.”
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5 comments
I blame the jews.
Greg:
You didn’t mention the cases of severe parent-to-child maltreatment: what we are calling the trauma model of mental disorders. See pages 21 to 192 of my book (several years ago you yourself corrected me on the syntax of the essay on psychiatry starting on page 21).
I’ve been looking into this topic to try to deal with some of my own issues lately, and assuming I can trust the people I have been watching, there are patterns and reasons for how people react to different types of abuse and mistreatment that relate to the nature of the abuse, and if I am expected to overcome genetic factors that lead to bad thinking and bad behavior, why give my parents a free pass? The point of acknowledging and understanding childhood abuse and trauma one has experienced is not to find a reason to hate your parents or to get revenge on them, though depending on the severity of the abuse that might be understandable. Often, abusive parents have narcissistic traits, and don’t have a problem lying, making you question your memories, guilt tripping, crushing of individuality, forcing the child to act as an extension of the parent, forcing the child to act like an emotional tampon for adult issues in the physical or emotional absence of the spouse, making you believe you need them well into adulthood, etc. The power differential between parents and children is profound and unprepared for and must be dealt with responsibly if the parent wants the child to grow up to be healthy and independent. Genetic factors play a role as well, but what I’ve been looking into makes sense as well and rings true in my own life. I don’t know if there is a twin study where one twin was abused, but that would be, I think, the only useful kind of twin study to look at. Something like toothpaste preference is a matter of how a sense organ interacts with a stimulus and is not comparable to how an undeveloped mind interacts with inescapable abuse. The mind and relationships are a lot more complicated than the tongue tasting something. For me, learning about the ideas of CPTSD, enmeshment, parentification, helicopter parenting, narcissistic abuse, and covert emotional incest has been eye-opening. I think the “far right” has a problem of deifying parents and making a cult of the family because they really are like Gods in some sense, and racial nationalism seems to be rooted for many in a positive assessment of the family, and as the race as an extension of the family. Perhaps one reason that the justification and fetishization of “cruelty for the sake of love” is so common on the right is because rightists were told that parental cruelties were done out of love and were expected to be deferential or unquestioning. Maybe the desire to “save” the family, which is a common reaction, is being projected into a desire to “save” the race in some instances, and ends up with the race being related to in the childish manner of a child relating to a parent. In reality, we can not save our parents or our people from themselves against their will, and thinking we can can lead to feelings of futility for not living up to an impossible standard. Many children seem to grow up with Stockholm syndrome, or trauma bonding, instead of feeling love. Fear and supplication might become confused with love and impact how one tries to love later in life. It is said that a narcissist’s love towards his or her child is insincere and in reality is only about making him or her look good and feel good, which can involve seeking attention and validation from the child, not tolerating the child being different from the parent, etc. The right has a reactionary problem of only speaking in generalizations because the rest of society refuses to, and because they want to have this fantasy of their posse running society and doing what is best for the most people, but we do not have that power and one of the reasons why is because people are focusing on things outside of their control rather than sincerely trying to know themselves, perhaps even as a form of escapism and not wanting to look inward or to negatively judge their parents – which may be necessary in order to acknowledge that what was done was wrong, may have involved weird motivations, and wasn’t actually conducive to “your own good” or even necessarily intended to be for your own good. If society can be compared to a machine, damaged people are broken parts. The mental health model implies we can repair ourselves for our own sakes as opposed to the genetic model which implies that who we are is inherently bad and must be resisted out of idealism and conformity. This appeals to modern American masculinity and familial norms and the viewing the moral world through the lens of sin.
@Bob Rust – A very nuanced and thought-provoking comment, and it rings absolutely true to me. I will admit, unashamedly, that I am someone who suffers from mental illness and various psychological maladies. I deeply appreciate your above comments; you have real and rare insight into the subject.
Also, much appreciation for these audio essay downloads. Podcasts are my primary form of entertainment, and Counter-Current’s offerings are always top-quality content!
That is an interesting article, although I find myself disagreeing. For one thing, a question like “Is it wrong to blame one’s parents for one’s misfortune?” sounds quite generalized. It seems to me this would be like asking if it’s fallacious for men to blame their wives. I mean, it depends on what the wife did. Whether a wife is worthy of blame would probably depend on one’s individual circumstances. Certainly people can indulge in unhealthy resentment towards people close to them, sometimes relationships can be toxic because two people are incompatible (but neither side is clearly at fault), but in other cases an abusive or toxic spouse can wreck someone’s life.
I think today, parents wield a lot of power over their offspring and their values and support, or lack of it, as a parent, can have a significant impact on one’s life in adulthood. There’s a reason wealthy, upper class families invest a lot in their children. Today, many younger Americans were raised by baby boomers, possibly the worst generation in human history, and they increasingly realize that most boomers are toxic, abusive narcissists. But realizing one was raised by such a vile creature isn’t mutually exclusive with taking responsibility for one’s adult life.
There’s something awry about common American rhetoric around appeals to personal responsibility and individualism. Usually the question is loaded to suggest that resentment and blame are always dysfunctional, if not unmerited, a way of coping with being a loser. It reeks of similar leftist ways of pathologizing normal human behavior, such as suggesting “racism” is simply a result of jealousy. It’s usually simply gaslighting, it’s seem likely a modern American construct. As if everyone should be default be a happy, conformist consumer, mentally living in an eternal, deracinated present.
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