Underlore

@GiveMeThePush

You bring up an interesting point. Trust has many meanings. Is it universally trusting as in devoid of skepticism? Like can I make up a religion and have her instantly buy it? Or is it just that she’s devoid of fear? Is fear a form of skepticism? I think she should be kept safe of course, but I don’t think she should be put in a box or “cured” any more than I think kids who like Nascar should be cured.

I understand the fear, people think as you say she’d be prey instantly. But isn’t she already? Aren’t all children? Suffering is adaptive, it makes you weary and afraid and safer, I get that. But it’s a high price to pay. Society is full of nice people being taken advantage of.

I don’t think she’s special in that regard. I think everyone is just pissed and jealous.

We routinely drop 18 year olds on the world and they routinely get cannibalized by society. Look at our teen pregnancy rate. What the difference here? Since when do we care?

Because she’s unpunishable. She’s going to be devoid of shame. In short she’s going to be uncontrollable.

I say we hire a chaperon to hold her money or offer her a service like say setting up a trust fund for herself so she can’t ruin herself in a single day.

It’s like unipolar hypomania, the clinical term for happy as an affliction. We cure them for other’s sake. It’s an invasion. Let her self destruct, let her be trusting and happy. For me it’s a civil rights issue. For the parents and everyone else it’s a property rights issue and fitting in with the Joneses and it makes me sick.

We’d apparently cure the happy monk.

It’s like people say, if jesus showed up, we’d give him a cell. (actually I think we’d gas him and then burn him, but whatever, you get the point.)

It isn’t that she is trying to force Isabelle to conform to what she feels is acceptable to society; it is for her own protection.

To an extent, obviously. But it’s not so cut and dry as all that. Indeed I’d say it’s only about 5% that, though of course I’m sure she feels it’s 100%.

In my experience people with disabled family members tend to concentrate on approximating a “normal” life. As if it’s a simple gauge with degeneracy at the bottom and utopia at the top and disability put yous somewhere below the middle, normal.

Setting aside the fact that its not so simple, certainly not a single gauge, there is also the irony of the obsession with mere normalcy itself which is a symptom of our broken minds.

So trained by the environment and each other that when we find someone well beyond normal in some way especially in a way not readily testable or usable, our first reaction is to drag them down to our level if we even think to try anything at all.

Most especially when that transcendence balks at social norms, which are after all there for society directly, and the individual only indirectly.

Isabelle, on the other hand, lacks the capacity to learn that lesson.

Are you sure? It says she lacks social phobia, not all phobia. Are you saying she would also plunge her hands into fire because she trusts it? I suspect not. I suspect she would not react the same way to dogs, they are after all a potential predator of an entirely different species. Indeed I suspect people have to learn to not fear dogs by default. But of course I’m not sure, and I see what you’re saying. Like those children that don’t feel physical pain and bite their lips off. That’s a real problem.

Not everyone is nice and a child, any child, should proceed with a certain level of caution until the child sees fit to grant that person trust.

Why? I question the wisdom entirely of living in fear based on the off chance of harm. And I do mean off. Child abductions by stranger are thoroughly down. And they would vanish if we’d stop being prohibitionist about synthetic indulgence, but that’s another debate.

The vast majority of the time it’s a family member that’s the biggest threat to a child and don’t get me started on church and school.. I think our entire approach to children and safety is broken.

I think children like this have a lot to teach us about how to build and live in a society that isn’t populated with callow monsters. I think our efforts to prevent and defend against them in part create them.

Like drug law causing drug wars. Or like fire prevention teaching you how to burn something down, or how safety tips teach us to blow things up, “Remember kids never ever mix bleach and ammonia!”

or to fear just for the sake of being afraid,

But that’s exactly what’s happening in large part. Her courage is being labeled a symptom. And while we know that fearing black people for being black is absurd we should also know that fearing every guy in a van is absurd as well. (or every guy who’s overweight white short and has glasses, if TV’s depiction of child rapists is accurate)

Indeed, a randomly selected black man has more of a chance of being a drug criminal in general than a randomly selected guy with a van has a chance of being a child abductor. So using your own logic the fear she’s being taught is absolutely irrational for exactly the same reasons.

The difference is complicated because as I explained its tied up with sex, which as I explained in other posts, is near and dear to the heart of conformity, the heart of The Company. Society demands that women and men behave a certain way about sex and children to ensure that the next round of people behave in a way conducive to society’s existence in its current form.

NPR chose a little girl for a reason. They’re no fools. I’m sure there are little boys with this syndrome. But little girls have a special place in the American mind.

We imagine little boys as being potentially adult-like, from the lord of the flies, to the 10 year old in Somalia with an AK47, to the omen, to gage from pet semetary, to the good son, to home alone, little boys we seem to be taught can pretty well take care of themselves if they aren’t an active threat to us. After all they are little men and men get tossed in front of bullets. Remember toy solders? Cloak and dagger? War games? The Manhattan project?

But little girls, no they are different, they are symbols of innocence and vulnerability, and religion mixed all that up with sex by selling virgins off, and painting sexual restriction in the language of virtue and purity.

To this day there are a huge percentage of western female names that are either male derivative, jewels, or flowers, and the very first thing we always say about a little baby girl is “oh she’s so beautiful.” We literally can’t think of anything else to say.

We worship little girls in this society. And that worship is linked to sex. Fathers are obsessed with the idea of their “little girl” ever having sex and they are in effect instructed to act like jealous possessive boyfriends.

Which has the happy (for The Company) effect of teaching the girls to be sneaky. We isolate them. And when they finally are free, usually college they “go wild” if you’ll pardon the reference. And Bam, teen pregnancy.

This situation is absolutely not about safety. It’s about training people, in particular girls, to act a certain way, a way based on fear. Girls these days are trained to think of themselves as cavalier if they walk to their cars alone without clutching a can of mace. Sure that weariness might make them marginally safer but at what cost?

The system wants them constantly afraid constantly thinking about sex.

Being safe and miserable makes you not care so much about being safe. Maybe that’s why so many young women are relentlessly self destructive. And our whole culture is saturated with flowery cliches about living life to the fullest, to connect and open up. But when we finally find someone hard wired to do just that, its time to throw her in a box, drug the hell out of her do whatever we can to cure it.

People are completely full of shit and this is a great place to call them on it.

We never even ask the vital question how much authority do parents even have over their children? Obviously it’s not absolute. Else we wouldn’t need CPS. But we don’t mention that, we don’t talk about the fact that your children are not yours, you are renting them from the state and the price is curricular, behavioral, academic.

I take a progressive position. I say children need FAR more rights than they have now. not merely protection, but authority. I don’t see them as pets to be trained, as fill-ins, for the next batch of worker slots. And that’s the point here in my view. To the parents it might be about safety, but to the company it’s a chance to medicate the greatest threat to them since the telephone out of existence. Compassion, Trust, Kindness. If we Truly started caring about each other, The Company would be Fucked.

All I see here is a fresh round of “Oppositional Defiance Disorder” bullshit.

¯\(°_o)/¯

Considering the society we live in now, regardless of what it could be if we were all more like Isabelle, do you believe that one cannot be too trusting?

Obviously being overly trusting costs the trusting individual. Believe me I know that for a personal visceral fact. My inability to detect humor comes with an inability to detect insincerity. So I tend to make for an easy mark. But speaking from experience, I think I’m happier than I would have been otherwise. To answer in a straight forward way, I agree that in this context one can be too trusting yes, but I have a number of qualifiers. See below.

Do you feel that for a three year old child, unconditional trust without the ability to learn when she might be wronged is a safe situation?

No of course not. But I have to ask, what IS a safe situation for a three year old out side her room? I don’t see any extra hassle here. I don’t think a three year old should be left unsupervised around strangers, syndrome or not simply because parents should be there to answer questions and deflect threats etc. At what point is a three year old expected to judge character anyway?

To me this isn’t a situation where a child is being oppressed, but a child in a dangerous situation.

Agreed, but no more than normal. All I see is a big deal being made of an awesome personality trait (setting aside the other symptoms of the syndrome) and I can’t help but question the ulterior motives of that deal being made. I feel very strongly it’s damn sure not about helping children. If we wanted to help children hitting them would be illegal by now for the same reason hitting mental patients or hitting your boss is. For the record again, if a person is too stupid to trick a normal toddler, they shouldn’t be allowed to be in charge of one.

Man, talk about a child who is an easy target.

Again, agreed, but aren’t they all? Part of my objection to hitting kids is how easy it is to trick/bribe them. Children are by design the easiest of marks. Sure a William’s kid would take less effort, but again I smell intentional misdirection.

I said “caution” not “fear”. To teach someone to be cautious is not to teach them to fear. A child needs to recognize warning signs of a threat and act accordingly. Isabelle might not recognize she is in potential danger due to her unconditional trust issues.

Fair enough but the parent explicitly stated she was training her child to distrust. I’m still not sure if I accept that by definition an excess of trust is a deficiency of caution and granted I don’t know the full context of the quote, but still, that’s the quote NPR chose to highlight.

Obviously threat assessment is an essential skill, but we’re talking about emotions in a toddler, not conclusions from an adult. In a way she has a huge advantage. She gets to intellectually choose what scares her. (!!) She’ll be able to intellectually disregard pointless fears because she won’t even have them in the first place.

They (and you to an extent) talk like it’s a huge handicap but it isn’t. (the fear/friendly portion anyway) I don’t know instinctively that electricity is dangerous, I had to be told, and I zapped myself but I still think she can learn from threats like that, her issue seems to be a tribal malfunction. She in effect treats everyone like close family. Ultimately no one knows really who to trust, all she lacks effectively is a false sense of security. As an adult she’ll come to intellectually determine trustworthiness totally independent of her emotional state. I envy her.

I suppose I wasn’t being very clear. I didn’t mean that Isabelle should be taught to fear. I meant that I didn’t see evidence of fear being used as a way to keep Isabelle safe.

The evidence is that the condition itself is about a lack of “appropriate” fear, and they imply strongly that the condition is a negative force. Obviously if the condition of lack-of-fear is bad then presence of fear or is good, and thus to add fear (distrust) of strangers is to offset the condition. We’re probably crossing terms. To be clear I am saying that the ulterior motive on the part of societyis to assure that she’s afraid because people who are afraid are clay minds.

Agreed. In this society…

We agree here.

Again, I see no evidence that Jessica is trying to oppress Isabelle by teaching her to be less trusting.

Except she specifically quoted the goal of teaching distrust but I completely see what you mean, my point was not the parents so much as society and the psychological community.

And by less trusting, I don’t mean to the levels clinical paranoia, but just enough so that she isn’t taken advantage of. To me the situation is no different than teaching a deaf kid to communicate via sign language.

Exactly, but teaching her to detect threats is not the same as trying to teach the emotional states we normally use to often incorrectly determine threats. In a way she has more of her day to day cognitive experience moved to the neo cortex. In my view she is literally more human than human in a very important way. We’re trying to cripple her like we’re crippled so she’ll fit in instead of helping her run now that she can stand. I’m talking about the goal relating to how she feels not the goal relating to keeping herself safe. I see them as separate. I don’t have to be afraid of a gun to know it can hurt me. Indeed, not being afraid of it is an advantage. You see what I mean? Was I clear at all?

Now is there opportunity for Isabelle’s parents to royally screw the poor kid up? Hell yes there is! However, I am as certain as I could possibly be with the extremely limited background on Isabelle’s parents that it won’t be done intentionally. Nobody is perfect.

Again, agreed. but were the one making the judgment that this is bad, almost for the parents. We’re the ignorant tosser in the van, not the enlightened parent. It’s that knee jerk cave man reaction “it different, KILL IT WITH DRUGS!” that has my blood boiling.

I do agree, however, that it is a terrible shame that in our society trust and kindness must be considered hazardous qualities in children.

And it always will be so long as we think positions of fear and distrust are normal. I hope this syndrome becomes airborne. I’d scrap a few IQ points of the average top of humanity if it meant we’d all stop wanting each other dead and could learn to share food. I mean seriously, is a William’s case EVER going to be a Hitler or a Stalin or a Kim Jong-il? Nearly Everything evil about humanity stems from fear and distrust and callousness.

Hell man it’s tempting to start churning out bracelets. “What Would a William’s Do?” I know I’ll in all seriousness ask myself that question from time to time from now on. It’s like asking yourself. “What would I do if petty fear and mistrust we not factors?”

I see a little Buddha, hell maybe Siddhartha Gautama Was a William’s.

Another point; I dispute the notion that fear and caution are inherently separate; they are quite related, as one is designed to induce the other… And I think by her own quotes, it’s clear that the mother is trying to instill fear in her daughter.

Related is a vague term, but then you go on to say one is designed to induce the other. I don’t know if I can agree on that front.

This might just be a petty semantics issue but in my mind caution is an action while fear is an emotion. Like social due diligence. Caution is prudence and thus can be codified and faked; A matter of protocol.

Fear on the other had has teeth, which is why I object to the idea that a lack of fear is bad.

To be perfectly clear: In my view, imprudence is bad, perhaps, but fearlessness categorically is not. Fear is there to tell animals what is a threat and what isn’t. We are thinking creatures now we no longer need fear. At All.

would you rather be happy and risk ending up dead sooner

If it’s merely a risk of course the answer is yes. Being miserable makes life worthless and being dead makes being happy worthless so they are of equal value.

I think 90% of the dangers to modern man are not detectable by instinct anyway. I think the animal notion of fear is by and large worthless in modern society. Indeed I say its counter productive, but again to my understanding she’s not absent fear she’s merely absent social fear. Huge difference.

Regardless the post focuses on that element and my reply as well.

They’re all worried because we have a girl here who isn’t a callow little waif when it comes to the big scary men around her and so everyone is concocting rape fantasies and rescue the princess fairy tales.

Thank you very much