It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them. Kids in a playground aren’t trying to be safe - they’re trying to become competent. Competence makes people as safe as they can truly be. We prefer to live on the edge, hardwired to enjoy risk (though some more than others). The goal is not to minimize risk, but to optimize it.
→ Much more of our sanity than we commonly realize is a consequence of our fortunate immersion in a social community. We must be continually reminded to think and act properly.
Good Parenting
As humans, children can’t be left to their own devices and be expected to bloom into perfection.
Some parents want their children’s friendship above all, but a child will have many friends, and only two parents - if that - and parents are more, not less, than friends.
→ The fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.
General principles of discipline:
- Limit the rules, and enforce them with the least force necessary
- Parents should come in pairs. Single mothers struggle impossibly and courageously, don’t be mean to them - but don’t pretend that all family forms are equally viable. They’re not.
- Parents should realize their own capacity to be vengeful, arrogant, resentful, deceitful.
- Parents have a duty to act as merciful, caring proxies for the real world. This supersedes any obligation to ensure happiness, foster creativity, or boost self-esteem. The primal duty of parents is to make their children socially desirable, which will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security.
A working crew’s behavior
Working men will sometimes engage in humorous but caustic, almost insulting verbiage with each other. It’s partly for amusement, partly for the eternal dominance battle, and partly to evaluate character through response to social stress. It allows men to tolerate or even enjoy their work, by enforcing a code of behavior: Pull your weight. Don’t whine or be touchy. Stand up for your friends. Don’t suck up and don’t snitch. Don’t be a slave to stupid rules. Harassment in a working crew is a test: are you tough, entertaining, competent, and reliable? If not, go away. We don’t want to put up with your narcissism, and we don’t don’t to do your work.
People choose bad friends
→ Why? Sometimes it’s to rescue someone - “it’s only right to see the best in people.” But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wants to rise.
→ How do you know the person crying out to be saved hasn’t decided to accept their suffering, simply because it is easier than shouldering any true responsibility? Are you enabling a delusion? Is it possible that your contempt would be more salutary than your pity?
→ “Even Jesus befriended tax-collectors and prostitutes.” But Christ was the archetypal perfect man. Are you certain that your attempt to pull them up won’t instead bring them (or you) further down? When a delinquent teen is among civilized peers, it is the delinquency that spreads.
→ If you wouldn’t recommend a friendship to your sister, father, son, why would you have such a friend yourself? Loyalty is not enough, since friendship is a reciprocal arrangement. You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place.
The solution
→ Before you help someone, find out why they are in trouble - don’t assume that they are noble victims of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It is more likely that the person rejected the path upward, because it’s hard. If you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future).
→ Carl Rogers, famed psychologist, believed that you can’t convince someone to change for the better. The desire to improve is, instead, the precondition for progress.
→ Maybe, instead of continuing a friendship, it would be more helpful to just go off somewhere, get your act together, and lead by example. (And none of this is a justification for abandoning those in real need to pursue your narrow blind ambition, by the way).
→ It is appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improved.
The caveats
When you desire to aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future. Then you disturb others, in the depths of their souls, where they understand that their cynicism and immobility are unjustifiable.
Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not.