Dysfunction For Dollars – NYTimes.com.
People love a good torture show. Especially if there are children and sex. We are creatures of extremes, it’s a survival trait, its extremes that let you live or make you die in unusual situations. Children are holy in this society, and powerless. And we like them that way. (This is the real reason why children’s suffrage will not happen pre-singularity. After all we let adult morons vote based on which looked better in a suit, why not let children vote? The vision of the informed voter is a myth anyway between government lies and secrets and Corporate censorship and exaggeration. And that assumes passionate interest in the truth and a brain made for research.
Voting exists to pacify the public and to enact near unanimous decisions not enacted by default through mass action. That’s why we elect people instead of laws, because if we elected laws, our ignorance and apathy and ease of manipulation would cause the country to disintegrate.
That’s why serial killer books crime novels and cop shows are so popular mainly. Some of us are so specific that it effected rating and the corporations noticed. Now we have cop shows full of nothing but sex crimes, or cop shows centered on specific cities marketed to the residents of those cities.
It like a real life horror show, we want to be scared, but then we want to be told its all going to be ok.
“The criminals would tear you apart, but don’t worry so long as you’re a good obedient citizen we’ll protect you.” Ever notice how cop shows are like the WORST for peddling normalcy no matter how obviously destructive it is the fakers in question? I highly doubt cop shows are realistic to any significant degree except in the worst possible ways. For example I have no doubt at all that cops routinely lie about the law in an attempt to manipulate suspects, but I suspect in real life everyone knows that and so never falls for it unless they are children or mentally ill or beaten into lying about themselves. Which I’d say explains about 90% of criminals now, at best.
We just love peering into our own abyss. We want to see the innocent stomped on and burnt, but only in such a way that assuages our insecurity and assures our control. That’s why we don’t want to see little blown up Iraqi babies, but we absolutely want to read about the child called it. We don’t want to see horror produced by the “good” guys, that would put us at risk. And we absolutely don’t want to see accidents, unless we were there and up close. Because there is no one to punish with an accident and if we are close then the feeling is the horror missed us, what are the odds of us having an accident right here right beside the first one?
We want to see poor innocent little children (insert back lit white toddler makeuped angel doll Ramsey clone here) strangled and crushed and burnt and stabbed. That way we can vent some truly righteous hatred at the people we just know are responsible, those people that we hate already, people different from us. We get to talk about all the yummy torture they’ve earned for themselves now, and we can guiltlessly indulge that urge to power which can only be expressed with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.
We imagine ourselves behind the executioner hood and the beatific haughty stare, smiled on by our gods for our obvious righteousness while our enemies scream and beg for mercy that is not given and a reprieve that isn’t coming.
And on the other side of that bloody little fantasy is the fact that these horrific abuses remind us that hopefully life is graded on a curve and the petty torments I inflict on my children, subordinates, and customers are nothing compared to the systematic torture I just saw on TV or just read about. I paddled little Sarah till she could hardly breath from crying because she wouldn’t do what I TOLD her to do or because she didn’t finish her homework, that’s not torture that’s “parenting”… at least I didn’t make her eat her own vomit and stab her, right?
It also lets us convince ourselves that we weren’t abused. “Well my parents treated me like a robot but at least they didn’t STAB me and make me eat dog shit.” And in this way we can justify the everyday torture the TV demands. Every child needs “discipline,” you can’t be a friend and a parent at the same time, they tell us. Bullshit.
Pelzer begins his talk, saying, ”Kids read my books and clean up their room because they’re afraid Mrs. Pelzer will baby-sit them.” The audience laughs.
That’s actually not too far from the truth. What kid is going to report spanking and slapping as the abuse it is when he’s aware of other kids being burnt on the stove? Count your blessings we tell them, and it keeps them in line. If they even get a chance to make that decision. We isolate them So much, and we censor their contact with an already censored media reporting on a secretive world and we act surprised when they make it clear that they just graduated high school and still don’t know SHIT.
What we do to children as a matter of course is JUST as bad as any abuse because it kills who they are and we repeat our tiny abuses across millions of children thousands of times to the point that they grow up thinking this shit is normal. They turn into adults who do the same shit and have the guts to DEFEND it. If you’ve EVER struck your child and felt it was the right thing to do and it wasn’t about knowing them out of the way of a car or something, I’m talking to you.
You people are as transparent to me as the stereotypical balding fat white guy with glasses and a camera at the girls soccer game, you think lurks in every parked van and in every hedge, just waiting to jump out and molest your little princess. I don’t think you care who’s winning no matter how much you can rattle off about the semi-finals, I think you care about the hotpants.
You’re a whole culture sweating and staring and squirming straightening your tie crowded around a centerfold telling me that its all about the articles.
Well I call bullshit.
You people would love to bring back public execution and the inquisition. You want MORE blood you want MORE righteous indignation you want CREATIVE LASTING pain.
That’s why Seven was popular. The whole movie was about torture. And if it was too complicated to understand, since much of the pain was mental, and we don’t like thinking about what other people feel because that makes them harder to destroy for profit and fun, there are always the raw physical torture movies. Hostel and Saw for example.
Should I even bring up the God of torture porn movies? The Passion Of The Christ. The WHOLE MOVIE is a torture scene. Setting aside the frothing psychotics that love this movie, do the rest of you not see it as BLATANT emotional pandering of the worst sort? Can you not draw some parallels between it and the cops shows and hostel and the child called it?
The bottom line is we are fearful violent chimps more apt to circle a fight than to break it up. And until we face up to that (or change it), the people that already have will be able to manipulate us with ease.
Great article, but basically all it is doing is setting the stage for the other shows to be accepted. Dave is pushing it, and now he’s being called. The next one will be more believable. Sadly there are no shortage of abused children with torture tales to hold up.
Basically the whole thing is an “It could be worse, shut up.” Yeah well it could be worse, but it could also be a whole lot better. So YOU shut up.
#1 by Kevin at June 17th, 2010
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I felt compelled to write a comment on this one, because I have experience dishing out some abuse to one of my nephews. We were outside at our old pool, and we were going to start playing, when one of my nephews said “Let’s all start playing, and the first one who cries is out.” When he said this, I was a little annoyed. But it was only when we started to play that what he said really got to me. I mean, who was he to say that? He’s lazy, does terrible in school, and is out of shape. So as we’re playing, things are going fine, until I decide to up the anty and pull him under water for a spell. I held him down for around 30 seconds, and when he clamored up gasping for air, on the verge of tears, I yelled “Game over!” At which point he actually did start crying.
In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t done it, since I really don’t like feeling like an asshole, and I know I’m a terrible person for doing it. But it just really bothered me that he seriously thought that he was “tough” or something, when he, by all accounts that I can manage to piece together, is lazier than I was when I was his age (of course, the difference here is that I actually regret my laziness at his age, whereas he is still oblivious to it).
I think some kids, they really know how to push limits. They may even be smart enough to realize how empty and meaningless words are. Like “Do your homework”. They know they’re supposed to do their homework, but they also know that their parents really aren’t going to do anything if they don’t do their homework. They’ll still get their requisite needs met, and even some fringe benefits like video games and television. What then? Take away their stuff is what I would do, but since I know my brother won’t do that, maybe a hard lesson on how fragile they really are will motivate them to “toughen up”. I really don’t know, but I can’t help but think that most of the kids in my family are in trouble. They all get F’s (I didn’t start getting F’s until college), and I doubt they will be even going to college with their grades. I’m starting to think that in my desperation, I turned to abuse (I call it this because I have no idea what else it should be called) to teach a lesson. Maybe I just wasn’t smart enough to teach a lesson without it. These days, realizing that I might be too stupid to interact, I just keep to myself.
We’re animals, and this thin veneer of society that keeps us from living in the jungle hunting and scavenging for food like animals is fragile as all fuck. I think our children should realize this, but how do we teach it? Maybe books depicting false instances of abuse is the answer. I don’t know.
#2 by Innomen at June 17th, 2010
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(I’m half way through your book btw, expect a full review.)
The problem here is that ethics universally apply and we as humans living in reality are aware of and like to make exceptions. The problem is a paradox in that we use universally applicable ethics to determine when to make exceptions. But what happens when those ethics demand an exception be made with regard to an ethic? Game theory has a lot to offer this set of ideas.
I dislike the implication that meaning is equal to coercion with the conspicuous absence of questions about the worth of the command. The Company wants is to train children to obey without question, and once you take than as a given then yes obviously coercion becomes a factor. The child being a child and therefor mindless property has no cause to ask is homework or school for that matter worthwhile, and no right to refuse the command. Taking that as a given the discuss devolves to how best to force them, with the comparatively humane side advocating sanctions and the ape side advocating abuse.
The real answer of course doesn’t spring to mind right away given our training and the answer is predictably caustic to the status quo, after all that’s why our training influenced us to fail to think of it in the first place. The answer is of course that children are people, not things and they have rights. And dealing with them is every bit as complicated and subject to context as dealing with other adults. The solution is to evade the issue and keep them thoughtless property until they conform with sufficient vigor that we can easily fit them in our society which as a result of age and trial an error has a ready answer for most of these questions.
This is the root of the sentiment expressed in seven. “It’s easier to beat a child than it is to raise it.” and the fact is that some people are not simply unwilling they are unable. To add to the urgency and tragedy of the problem these are the people that tend to breed fastest.
Your dilemma is common and your assessment is correct, there was a more correct answer, there always is, you just didn’t have the processing power to think of it in time. Like Einstein is said to have said “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” And yet with 99% of offers of help being in effect offers of control, no wonder people don’t want to hear any advice.