Common Sequelae Of Shit Parenting

Modern psychological science has revealed that the vast majority of mental illness is the result of bad parenting. Unbeknown to many, the human infant has a number of developmental psychological needs, particularly in the first few years. If those needs are not met – usually because the parents are abusive or neglectful – there are several predictable outcomes.

Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development consists of eight stages, each with a specific conflict or challenge that shapes personality. The first stage is trust vs. mistrust, which occurs from birth to 18 months and involves the infant’s relationship with their primary caregiver. A lot of permanent psychological damage can happen during this stage.

According to Erikson, if the caregiver is reliable, consistent and nurturing, the infant will develop a sense of trust, believing that the world is safe and that people are dependable and affectionate. This sense of trust allows the infant to feel secure and confident. They become willing to explore their environment and form other relationships.

However, if the caregiver fails to provide adequate care and affection, the infant may develop a sense of mistrust and insecurity. This could lead to a belief in an inconsistent and unpredictable world, fostering a sense of mistrust, suspicion and anxiety. The infant may also lack confidence in their ability to influence events, and may come to view the world with apprehension and fear.

The psychodevelopmental consequences of failing the first stage of trust vs. mistrust can be severe and long-lasting. Four of the worst effects stand out above the others.

Difficulty forming attachments: A person who failed to develop trust in infancy may have trouble forming and maintaining healthy and satisfying relationships with others. They may feel isolated, lonely or mistrustful, or they may have difficulties with intimacy, attachment or communication. They may also have problems with boundaries, assertiveness or conflict resolution.

Those with attachment-forming problems often don’t reciprocate their friends’ goodwill. They can be very quick to cut ties. They are typically the sort who neglect to return calls or to answer emails. It’s very common for people like this to end up viewing their friendships in a very transactional manner. It’s also common for them to drift out of touch.

Impaired emotional regulation: A person who failed to develop trust in infancy may have trouble regulating their emotions, such as anger, sadness, fear or shame. They may experience intense or disproportionate emotional reactions that are hard to control, or they may feel numb or detached from their emotions. They may also have difficulties expressing, understanding or coping with their emotions.

Most adults are now aware that hitting children leads to explosive violence from those same children later on. Many are still not aware. There are hordes of adults out there who abuse and neglect their children and then look on, mystified, when those children end up with learning or behavioural difficulties, or getting in trouble with the law because they learned that violence solves problems.

Abused children usually end up with an increased propensity to limbic hijack, otherwise known as amygdala hijack. This is when the body’s threat detection mechanisms launch into high alert and empower the emotional system for immediate action, bypassing the rational system. A tendency to chimp out is very common for those who suffered early childhood abuse.

Low self-esteem: A person who failed to develop trust in infancy may have a distorted or damaged sense of self, and may feel worthless, hopeless or guilty. They may have low self-esteem, and may struggle with self-care. They may also have a negative self-image, and may be prone to self-criticism, self-doubt or self-blame. Such people often suffer Impostor Syndrome if they become successful.

This is especially true for those who were made to feel worthless by abusive or neglectful parenting. After all, if your own parents don’t even care about you, then why should anyone else? It’s common for people who suffered childhood neglect to value themselves very lowly, and to behave accordingly when it comes to negotiations or conflicts.

Increased vulnerability to stress and trauma: A person who failed to develop trust in infancy may have a lower threshold for stress and trauma, and may be more susceptible to developing mental health problems, such as anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They may also have a weaker coping mechanism, and may resort to unhealthy or maladaptive behaviors, such as substance abuse, self-harm or isolation.

Complex PTSD is another common condition among those who were abused or neglected in early years. People with this condition often suffer stress-related physical conditions for life. Migraines, insomnia, nausea and chronic fatigue can all be triggered more easily in a person whose nervous system has been primed for hyperarousal through constant stress during important developmental windows.

These four signs will easily reveal a person who had a shitty upbringing. If a person hates themselves, hates others, has a hair-trigger temper or is constantly bombing out of every challenge placed in front of them, chances are high they were damaged in early childhood. If this sounds like you, have compassion for yourself!

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The Politics Of The 21st Century Have To Be Grounded In Known Psychological Science

Politics has been, since the beginning, a seat-of-the-pants enterprise. Although the West has produced Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli and others, the modern Western leader reads nothing of these men, preferring to just make everything up as they go along. But in the age of advanced science, it’s possible to have a political philosophy grounded in empirical observation.

More specifically, it has to be grounded in known psychological science. Modern psychological science gives us insights into human nature that were completely unavailable to philosophers in times past. Aristotle knew nothing of sociobiology. A sociobiologist standing on Aristotle’s shoulders could give us a vision of our own nature that was broader and deeper than ever before.

A failure to understand human nature is the common theme running through all failed political ideologies.

Communism failed because its architects failed to understand that people are always at least a little bit selfish, and cannot simply be conditioned to behave otherwise by propaganda. A system set up on the basis that people are perfectly altruistic will inevitably collapse into corruption and widespread distrust when rhetoric doesn’t match reality.

Capitalism is failing because its architects failed to understand that people would rather drop out of the system than get worked to death paying for rents and taxes. A system set up on the basis that workers can be employed for 50 hour weeks without the ability to own homes, yet will still have the motivation to work, also doesn’t match reality.

Historically, political philosophy has not been grounded on an accurate view of human nature, because there was no formalised science of understanding human nature. Machiavelli might have been correct when he said that human nature doesn’t change from time to place, but not enough people listen to Machiavelli.

Today’s psychological science, however, can predict human behaviour with frightening accuracy. The Amazon, Google and FaceBook algorithms can predict your next purchase before you even think about it. They can tell you who you’re going to vote for before you’ve even decided. It’s a thousand times more advanced than the knowledge Karl Marx would have had access to.

A modern political philosophy must be grounded in what we now know about human nature. This means: grounded in a psychological science that has a particular emphasis on man’s origin as a naked ape (hat tip to Desmond Morris).

Fundamentally, such an approach understands that the human animal evolved social structures as part of the battle for resources that all animals must engage in. It has to be made explicit that political questions are usually just questions of resource distribution, the same questions that man-ape chieftains would have wrestled with even before civilisation. Unfair resource distribution stirs up very deep, primal instincts that can rapidly become destructive. Therefore it’s important to get politics right.

It has to be taken seriously, and that means scientifically.

The curious thing is that a properly scientific approach appears to favour neither the left nor the right.

Developmental psychology tells us that hitting children, and most other forms of corporal punishment, have extremely bad outcomes for those children. There are strong correlations between getting hit as a child and ending up with antisocial personality disorders or suicidal depression. Hitting kids is right up there with fucking them as one of the worst things you can do. Therefore it ought not to be legal.

Developmental psychology also suggests that societies would benefit from making life less financially stressful for mothers of newborns. In America, where it’s sink or swim, mothers of newborns are often put under extreme financial stress. This leads to much higher rates of child abuse and neglect in comparison to, say, the Scandinavian countries, where mothers of newborns receive adequate financial aid. The end result is more mentally damaged people. So a slight tax increase, with the money invested into early child care, is likely to pay for itself many times over.

Such findings might favour leftist policies, but other findings don’t.

Psychometrics tell us that intelligence is about 80% genetic, and therefore education can only raise it to a limited degree. So importing people from countries where the average IQ is 85, and expecting their kids to turn out the same as ours just because we put them in the same schools, is a recipe for national suicide.

Western immigration politics since World War II has been based on the assumption that all human groups are genetically the same, therefore can be exchanged for each other like so many replaceable parts. Psychometrics has given us a blackpill that we need to swallow: many populations with average IQs under 100 are never going to adjust to modern Western life. We have to stop importing them.

Evolutionary psychology says that multiculturalism is bound to fail because people stop co-operating once they no longer have meaningful bonds of kinship with their surrounding population. So large, multicultural cities like New York, Los Angeles or London could have been predicted to have ended up soulless free-for-alls, as they did.

Evolutionary psychology also tells us that individuals within the same family can vary greatly in IQ thanks to genetic recombination. Even if a group of parents all had IQs of 100, some 2% of their offspring would have IQs above 130, and a similar number would have IQs below 70. Their children might have a mean IQ of 100, but individuals will vary a lot from this average.

This natural variation in individual intelligence means that we cannot have, for instance, families in which every member was expected to become a doctor. Neither can we have racial exclusions such that members of certain races were banned from, or restricted to, certain professions. Such arrangements would be monstrously inefficient given natural variation in intelligence.

Ethology shows us that many different animals use drugs to get high, therefore a War on Drugs is unnatural. Altering the contents of consciousness through the use of psychoactives seems to be as natural as anything else is, perhaps reflecting the Elementalist belief that the world was dreamed up to entertain the gods in the first place. Banning the use of drugs, then, is as futile as banning sex. People will do it anyway.

Grounding a new vision of politics in psychological science could solve many problems. First and foremost it would solve the problems arising from basing a political philosophy on an inaccurate conception of human nature.

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For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

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If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon as a Kindle ebook or paperback. Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Racism Of The Gaps

The phrase “God of the gaps” is used to mock a particular kind of religious fundamentalist – the type who leaps on every gap in scientific explanation of natural phenomena, and declares it proof of God’s existence. Were the gap not proof of God’s existence, so the argument goes, then the materialist scientist ought to be able to explain it.

Thus, phenomena like the existence of the cosmos, the origin of life, the cause of diversity in animals and plants and the existence of consciousness are regularly attributed to the workings of God. If a scientist can’t explain them, then Goddidit.

The mockery is motivated by the fact that fanatics view the entire world through the lens of their obsession, and so they find that obsession everywhere, in every nook and cranny of reality. Hence, the religious fanatic sees their god hiding in every gap of the natural world, which seems ridiculous to others.

Today, in the Clown World of 2023, those who want to get a big dopamine hit from feeling morally superior to other people don’t use God. They use race. No-one cares about God any more. But race is everywhere and everything in the multicultural West. It’s rare now to find one street, one workplace or one television show without prominent virtue-signalling.

As such, there now exists a phenomenon that can be referred to as “the racism of the gaps”. This is when differences in outcome between any two human populations is ascribed to racism before any other explanation is considered, or when more plausible but non-race-based explanations are rejected. If a person from Race A has any kind of advantage over, or better outcome than, a person from Race B, then the gap is best explained by racism.

The most common example of the racism of the gaps fallacy relates to the so-called “wage gap”. The logic is that non-whites earn less money than whites because institutional racism discriminates against non-whites. This racism means that non-whites are passed over for promotions, or not hired in the first place, thereby giving them fewer opportunities to make money.

Blank slate logic only holds if a person believes that all human populations are precisely the same in all intellectual measures. The simple fact that most Asian groups in the West do as well, or better than, white people, despite suffering as much, or more, prejudice than much less successful immigrant groups, is sufficient evidence to disprove blank slate theory.

Moreover, the psychological literature clearly states that the most important factor determining the income of any individual or group is IQ, and the measured IQs of all the various races in the West correlate strongly with their economic outcomes. If the various races are as wealthy as the science predicts they should be, what’s the problem?

The term ‘racism of the gaps’ mocks the fact that no social justice warrior has ever been able to quantify the effect that all the supposed white supremacy has had on the beleaguered non-whites of the world. All the science explaining the differences between races is thrown out the window in preference of a Cultural Marxist narrative about racism – it’s right to mock such low-IQ thought processes.

Racism of the gaps also appears when people ask, for example, why there are so few Maoris or Pacific Islanders in the New Zealand cricket team. The implication is that some nefarious white conspiracy is preventing them from accessing opportunities. The reality, of course, is that Maoris and Pacific Islanders prefer to play other sports.

No-one makes the claim that the NRL is racist in favour of Maoris and Pacific Islanders because they are heavily over-represented in rugby league. The people pushing the racism of the gaps fallacy only care about something if there’s a racial angle that can be exploited, especially an anti-white one.

Much like the term ‘racism’ itself, ‘racism of the gaps’ refers to a deliberate strategy to undermine Western society by setting different racial groups against each other. It’s pushed by the ruling class, particularly the globalist ruling class, who want all the peoples they rule over divided and conquered along every possible fracture line. Thus they claim racism where it doesn’t exist, in order to stoke tensions and mistrust.

The best way to stop this pernicious logic from becoming even more widespread is to mock it at every turn. Any time someone leaps to blame racism for some difference in outcome, on flimsy and unscientific evidence, laugh at them for committing the racism of the gaps fallacy. Make them feel stupid for pushing long-debunked blank slate nonsense.

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The Battle Of The Now: Nothing Is Anything vs. Some Things Are Something

The Western World seems on the brink of civil war. The factions appear to be two completely different conceptions of reality, or how to approach reality. One faction contends, essentially, that nothing is anything. Their opponents assert that some things, in fact, are something. As with many historical battles, it’s fundamentally a battle of masculine vs. feminine.

The feminine side states that nothing is anything. No truths can be known for certain. All is flux, therefore nothing is permanent for long enough to substantiate its existence. Because nothing is certain, there’s no point in being too strict about borders or boundaries. This side is what Alan Watts used to call “gooey” people.

The masculine side, by contrast, states that some things are something. There are such things as objective truths, and they can guide our lives. These truths are often fixed ideals. Such people often react with outrage to Nietzsche’s suggestions that there are no moral truths. This side is what Alan Watts used to call “prickly” people.

In the Clown World of 2023, these are the battle lines of the culture war.

The feminine side has no issue with the trans phenomenon. If nothing is anything, then women are not exclusively those with XX chromosomes. Therefore, femininity is a matter of what gender you “identify as”, or which gender you “represent”. Trans people are whatever they say they are, and the rest of us have to follow along.

The masculine side comes into opposition with this view. To the masculine, gender is fixed, and it’s more or less fixed to sex. Men are men and women are women. It doesn’t matter what you identify as, because there’s a determined and objective reality which itself reveals what you are. Thus, there is a particular bathroom to which you belong, and one to which you don’t.

A similar situation exists with nationality. To the ideologically feminine, nationality is like a mask, that can be put on, taken off, and replaced at will. It’s possible to become a member of a different nation simply by living there. Such a view sees no contradiction in having two or more passports and claiming to belong to more than one nation.

To the ideologically masculine, nationality is rooted in blood and soil, and therefore even people who have lived in a new country for 50 years aren’t members of the nation (although their children might be). Nationality, like gender, is fixed and not fluid. It’s comprised of kinship links that are as real as family ties.

In fact, this division is replicated in attitudes to biology. The feminine reject biological determinism, preferring to believe that anyone can become anything if given the right environment while growing up. Success is primarily a matter of will, and natural talents can be shaped in virtually any direction. This ties in with the modern globalist mindset.

The masculine, by contrast, reject Blank Slate Theory. They support hereditarianism. The masculine approach ties in with the modern nationalist mindset, because it’s concerned with the long-term effects of (e.g.) immigration on the nation’s genetic infrastructure. When some things are something, it tends to be permanently that way.

Complicating matters, sometimes one of the two sides is more correct than the other.

For instance, the masculine side is right when it says that intelligence is mostly genetic, but wrong when it says that mental illness is also mostly genetic. As such, it errs towards exclusion. The feminine side, for its part, is right when it says that mental illness is mostly environmental, but wrong when it says that intelligence is mostly environmental. As such, it errs towards inclusion.

Those who cannot overcome an inherent, entrenched masculine or feminine bias are why public discourse has now degraded to such a low level. Rather than talking to uncover the truth, people now talk to further the interests of their team. Those with the strongest biases are incapable of even perceiving their opponent’s position.

The correct course of action is to stop thinking in crude, black-and-white terms, and to try developing some intellectual nuance. Masculine thinking is useful when it’s necessary to delineate and discriminate, and feminine thinking is useful when it’s necessary to draw similarities. To have a bias towards either is a cognitive weakness.

In order to psychologically survive Clown World, it’s necessary to stand above forced, artificial battles that are designed to destroy your will and waste your mental energy. The simplest way to stand above is to not get sucked into inconsequential masculine vs. feminine debates that have been created by the mainstream media. Try to be, as the Confucianists say, the unwobbling pivot between yin and yang.

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