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scaredyclassic
Participant[quote=spdrun]^^^ Positions such as?[/quote]
student loans should not be forgiven. Colleges should be forced to pay nonperforming loans out of their endowment.
there should be a mandatory 40 hour counseling session for students and parents with a state paid financial advisor prior to signing any loan documents.
wait, i changed my position. no federal student loans.
Participant[quote=svelte]Let me try an extreme example of how your childhood can affect who you are, but you should still be held accountable for your actions.
There are many examples of murderers from less than ideal backgrounds…charles manson and jeffrey dahmer come to mind… but they should absolutely be held accountable for their actions. No doubt about it.
And yes there are folks from great backgrounds who murder also. Menendez brothers come to mind. But a bad childhood increases the odds of extreme bad behavior.[/quote]
life is a series of risk factors. but we don’t like to think of ourselves as being subject to the laws of probability. So for instance, if your parents moved house a lot in your childhood, that would put a child at risk of a whole host of bad social and intellectual outcomes.
it is not a good thing for a kid to move around a lot. does that mean that every kid who moves around a lot will not finish hs will join a gang or murder someone? no. but it’s definitely a risk associated with being in a family that moves around a lot. and just because you grew up and moved around
a lot and turned out fine doesn’t mean that you weren’t exposed to a risk…or that your life context didn’t potentially have great impact on you in other smaller subtler ways.to say I am not part of the normal risk pool, that I cannot be affected by the various risks in my life through sheer force of will, is, well, probably just wrong.
or at least as foolishly proud as claiming ones self to be above the risk factors medical doctors agree on…, i understand I have a 35% increased risk of cancer due to my genetics or lifestyle, but through sheer determination, I know that i will not be part of that 35%. perhaps because i am so focussed, or I pray a lot, or I have a lot of people praying for me, the normal risk factors of life that i have inherited along the way do not matter.
i could not blame my parents for the social factors they laid upon me, anymore than I would blame the genetic factors (although frankly, when I look at myself, i’m not sure I shouldve been permitted to reproduce. but that’s another issue).
Participant[quote=The-Shoveler]Good lord you guys are right LOL,
We cannot be held accountable for anything we do or think.
OK I am done here, too much time on this thread already.[/quote]
huh.
financial psychotherapy. a burgeoning field…
from wikipedia…
In his 2000 book Creating the Modern Man, cultural historian Tom Pendergast traced the way in which the concept of the self-made man was referenced in men’s magazines from 1900 through 1950.[29]:10 Pendergast divided masculinity into only two periods: Victorian, which was “based on property-ownership and family”, and “post-Victorian”, which was “based on a cult of personality, self-improvement, and narcissism”.[30] He described the “ideal Victorian man” as a “property owning man of character who believed in honesty, integrity, self-restraint, and duty to God, country, and family”.[29]:10 The post-Victorian image of the self-made man was crucial to Pendergast’s study. He revealed how through magazines men “were encouraged to form their identities around an ideology of hard work.”[29]:10
In September 2011, Elizabeth Warren challenged the concept of the self-made man in a video that went viral,[31] garnering over one million views on YouTube:[32]
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody … You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. … Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
— Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Senate candidate (2011)
Participantlet’s say you’re in an argument with your spouse. You react in a way that you realize may have been similar to the way your dad reacted in arguments with your mom, or perhaps in your wife’s voice you see a direct repetition of things her mom said in the way she phrases her complaint.
this insight, which can hit with an almost blinding force at times, isn’t “blaming” the dad or saying it’s the mom’s “fault” that the argument is progressing the way it is.
Just a probable necessary step in understanding and perhaps changing why and how one reacts. And perhaps in some cases, a sanity or marriage saving inquiry.
thinking hard about why and what you’re feeling and how you are reacting might be seen as a pointless exercise for some (just suck it up and try harder, stop thinking too much or too deep, just do it, etc.), but some find it useful for getting along better with others in the world.
It feels like udner this type of thought process, no criticism is possible.
if i were to say capitalism is a brutal unsustainable system that makes life miserable for huge chunks of american society in an unjust society that eventually will consume all of the earth’s resources and kill us all, i would perhaps be simply blaming the system for the failure of soem people to be winners.
or maybe making a valid point about capitalism.
Sure I can and will necesarily still be responsible for my own financial affairs in our unjust capitalist society, and im still accountable, while also realizing I didn’t create the system , the incentives, and to some degree, my success within the system is not all mine, since it is in part genetic, part where and how I was raised, and which opportunities crossed my path.
blame. fault.
insight. understanding.
you choose.
Participantyou absolutely can be held accountable for things you do.
It is absolutely a good idea to own your actions and take responsibility for your decisions.
You absolutely have some agency and can control some things.
But it is probably an infantile response to believe you created the world, or for that matter, your self, in its totality.
Participant[quote=svelte][quote=The-Shoveler]Just a general comment not aimed at anyone,
Blaming your failures as an adult on your parents is really lame IMO.[/quote]
Agreed, and i hope you dont think that is what i said.
But the experiences one goes thru in life certainly help form the lens through which one sees the world in general and ones place in that world. Look at the first child second child syndrome.
My wife had a pretty darn rough childhood and she turned out wonderfully. The lens through which she sees the world is different than mine, and some or alot of that is due to the turbulence she went through. Not saying it is good or bad, it just is.
The nature vs nurture thing will never be sorted out completely, too many variables. But both contribute to who you are.[/quote]
it seems to me that the failure of the Trumps to get family therapy in Don’s formative years has changed the course of American history. it seems almost transparently obvious that don didn’t spring fully formed as the being he is, but is still working out some childhood/early adolescent issues.
Participant[quote=The-Shoveler]LOL too much deep thought for me.
I like my life, could it be better yes, but what ever it is I prefer to think of it as mine.
And I definitely do not blame my parents for any faults I may have (good lord I am over 50, think I could take some responsibility for my life at this point).[/quote]
the very idea of a “self-made man” is a very culturally specific, politically and socially charged modern concept. Even the notion that you conceive of yourself as self-created is a concept you did not create.
ParticipantI don’t understand why you equate learning about the roots of your emotional reactions with being a victim necessarily.
Would studying the history of a nation be (a) useful in learning about its current state of affairs and why it is doing the things it does, or (b) wallowing in the past and blaming our current problems on the historical actors of the past.
Is a nation reborn everyday with no tie to the people before us?
Is a man?
I kind of want to talk to your folks and get their perspective. can you put them on this thread?
Participantit’s kind of like accents. no one thinks they have one. everyone else is a bit odd. I, however, am neutral.
we swim in the water of our culture and our upbringing; we do not even see it.
it’s not even a particularly extreme example. just a clarifying example. once you are embedded in their lives, and see the love they have for each other, their children, for G-d, for country, they are no different than American families and their pride in their own G-d, country and armed forces.
jean paul Sartre was wrong; being does not precede essence. I suspect that your reticence to attribute any credit to your community or family unit to make you who you are is rooted in unresolved childhood issues of independence and separation from the parents. 😉
Participantexactly. and those little children of the syrian jihadist in the docuemntary OF FATHERS AND SONS, they chose 100% to be little child soldiers. It had nothing to do with their social surroundings or their parents viewpoints.
ParticipantOn the contrary, it is entirely your responsibility to better and understand yourself.
But how did I get here.
To understand all is to forgive all .
The past is alive.
Ghosts are real.
For instance, all of my anxiety and fear about money? That came from 1966 to 1979 in home training. It’s not blame. Its reality.
Yes, I could change, I try to become conscious, I try to work on it.
But some rooting runs deep.
Saw a haunting documentary last night. OF FATHERS AND SONS. A Syrian filmmaker went back home to live and film a jihadist dad and his 8 kids.
It’s pretty clear what blank canvases these children are, and how the world forms us.
And change is possible, but not entirely in our hands.
Except perhaps for the chosen few. perhaps lame is the right word, for the crippling effect the past may have on you. or the salutary effect.
who among us has not said, “I shall do things better than my parents did”?
“In retrospect, this obsessive desire to understand and know what had happened to her makes me think of what Jung said: “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” The word “burden” sounds so negative, but if I think about the calculated systemic oppression against women, the erasure and subjugation of women in my community, what the women have had to sacrifice to stay alive, I wonder if sometimes a parent’s unlived life could also be part of our responsibility. The trade of one generation’s sacrifice to another.”
Participantits THE CRANBERRIES
Participant[quote=The-Shoveler]Just a general comment not aimed at anyone,
Blaming your failures as an adult on your parents is really lame IMO.[/quote]
Blame is not the same as understanding.
Say for instance you have a disproportionately response to some perceived snub from your partner.
It’s likely that these panicky responses come from a deep place inside where patterns were set long ago.
ParticipantSexual imagery from childhood is incredibly potent
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