Controlling parents

I learned when I was very young — so young that I don’t even remember what age — that I needed to tightly control anything my parents knew about my life because, as soon as they became aware of something, they would decide what the right thing to do was, steamroll me, and insist that things be done in their way. I would explain my position, preferences, rationale. I would beg them not to take actions that would have predictable adverse consequences. Their implicit position was: “We know best, we have the power, and we get the final say”.

If I wanted to maintain any control over how a problem was solved, I had to solve it myself in secret. (Cue lifelong obsession with secrets, how they are kept and stolen.) Looking back, that did lead to a lot of cases where a bit of information could have helped me get through something tough far more easily. There were health issues where feeling ashamed of myself and unable to share anything sensitive with my parents led to me not finding effective treatments until late in adulthood. At the same time, my whole point is that such information was not available a la carte to be used or not based on my judgment. As soon as they were consulted, my parents took on final jurisdiction and authority. They would do what they thought was right, and often completely lie about it afterward when I brought up how I had understood the problem and what I had asked or begged them to do. If criticized, they would pout about it for a bit, and then assume they could go back to the normality of treating me however they wanted and expecting to be praised for it. To this day, they think most of my reactions are wrong and too strong and assume that normality is not just them getting to determine what should happen, but what I should think and feel as well.

This behaviour has not faded as I grew up, and has had a massive effect on my psychology and relationships with others. I have a profound need for autonomy and control over my own life. It’s such a profound need that it eclipses the need to have relationships. It might be agonozing and sap my sense of self-worth, but I can endure with effectively no active relationships at all. I cannot function in situations where I never get space and autonomy to myself. Time with others is tiring, because I always need to be using a lot of my thinking power to run mental models of them and guess how they will react to words and actions. I can do it, but it drains me instead of recharging me. (Also unacceptable, since people who need praise always find it insulting if you experience their presence as a burden.)

These dynamics also shaped my view of authority as arbitrary and not grounded in practicality or ethics. People will exercise power to show people around them that they have power, or simply because of how it makes the person with authority feel, not necessarily for any good purpose or to achieve any good effect. Most leaders are substantially incompetent in many ways, and often use most of their time and effort to conceal this and mislead people about it. Most hierarchies operate to protect the higher-ups from the just consequences of their own actions, and to redistribute praise and blame so the heirarchy remains intact. With that perspective, I do not admire the institutions that dominate our society. Nor do I expect them to be able to resolve the crisis which our species is collapsing into more rapidly with each passing day.

There is a deeply engrained societal expectation that status equals goodness: if someone is a president or a king or a chief executive officer it means they act legitimately and with concern for the welfare of others. My experiences with governments and other institutions have created much the opposite expectation: leaders will put on a show of apparent nobility, but their moral commitments are always superficial and systematically de-emphasized in favour of ‘practicality’ or ‘efficiency’ or (behind the scenes) to preserve relationships with other powerful people. Our leaders are neither wise nor noble, but more like action movie stars who the public assumes are super tough because of what stunt men, editing, and computer graphics did.

I don’t understand why young people today are not in open revolt against our leaders, who are unambiguously destroying their prospects for the future. Part of that may come from the psychologically active remnants of the idea that status and nobility are the same thing. Part is a semi-apathetic assertion of the very opposite — that the system is so entrenched and exploitative that nothing can dislodge it or change things. Part is surely just that living through the catastrophe of our collapsing civilization has left young people less well equipped to understand their situation and take action about it.

Constant fear that anyone who you rely on will control and dominate you has many complex psychological effects. Most paradoxically, it creates profound fear about my own real self and its vulnerability to corrosion — the fear that complying with compulsion will erase me. It exhausts and infuriates me to have to mis-represent myself for social or pragmatic reasons, because it feels like giving in to the erasure of people who will me to be a certain way, whether I want it or not, and whether it is honest or not. This goes over really badly in an employment landscape where cheerful flattering deception of one’s bosses is the sine qua non of career progression. I can’t just ‘go along to get along’ or ‘tell them what they want to hear’ because that positions whoever I am placating as a kind of pseudo-parent with the same assumed right to control what I think and feel.

One weird historical echo is that my parents moved cross-continent from the east to the west coast to escape their controlling and disapproving parents. One advantage of my commitment to never having children is not having to worry about the next iteration of this process from parental treatment in childhood to adult psychology.

Related:

Strong will

They had one too many divers. They had selected eight men and one woman, and the woman was unable to dive with a rebreather. This made her the weak link, the General and the Priest agreed. She needed to go. The Colonel wasn’t so sure. Yes, her participation would add a layer of technical complexity. She would be slower and burdened with more equipment. She would need more bottles for each dive […]

She had leadership qualities. He wasn’t sure if a sudden crisis would sap the motivation of the rest of the crew but something told him she would carry on in the face of any adversity. She was in her late 30s: feisty, funny, good-humored. On her resume she described herself as kind and happy. These were not the qualities of a person the Colonel would typically work with […]

Most of all he noted a trait in her that was rare in any of the operatives or proxies he’d worked with. He drilled his agents until they had a mechanical routine, because routine helps suppress fear when things go wrong during a clandestine operation. But the female diver didn’t suppress her fear. She was unafraid […]

The General re-watched her interview videos. He noticed one particularly intriguing exchange. In the footage, the Colonel was taking notes and occasionally reading out questions to her. After a while she became impatient: “Who is writing these questions for you?”, she asked. The Colonel looked up from his notes, surprised by the question. “Who is your superior officer? Is he the one writing you the questions? I want to speak to him”, she demanded.

The General leaned back in his chair. She does have leadership qualities, he thought. She’s very strong-willed. No one from the group thought to question the authority of the recruiter. No one, except her. And she not only challenged her superior, even before she was given a task, but she also wanted to go over his head. Her instinct was not to fit in, to become part of a team, but to test the limits of authority.

Pancevski, Bojan. The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World. Audiobook. Chapter 6.2. “The Divers: Cosmonauts of the Ocean” 15:50- 19:55

Proud Prophet and how nuclear wars end

The National War College is located inside the National Defense University, which is located just across the river from the Pentagon. Each day, to play the [1983 Proud Prophet war] game, the secretary of defense would pick up a red phone and call the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss various ideas in the different nuclear war scenarios put forth by [Thomas] Schelling. Schemes included everything from tactical nuclear strikes in a so-called limited nuclear war, to massive decapitation-event scenarios. There were exercises with NATO and without NATO nuclear forces getting involved. There were scenarios where the U.S. launched nuclear war preemptively, beginning with everyone at the Pentagon in a state of focused calm. There were exercises where nuclear war was launched in crisis mode. In full-on panic mode. With and without China entering the conflict. With and without the UK involved.

Paul Bracken, a professor of political science at Yale, was one of the civilian individuals invited to participate in playing the classified nuclear war game. The results were horrifying, Bracken says. Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario—and despite whatever particularly triggering event started the war game—nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.

According to Proud Prophet, regardless of how nuclear war begins, it ends with complete Armageddon-like destruction. With the U.S., Russia, and Europe totally destroyed. With the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable from fallout. With the death of, at minimum, a half billion people in the war’s opening salvo alone. Followed by the starvation and death of almost everyone who initially survived.

Jacobson, Annie. Nuclear War: A Scenario. Penguin, 2024. p. 174

Far and slow

I took my Dutch bike in for servicing today (to get my brake pads replaced) and calculated some usage statistics.

Indeed, on the ride from home to the bike store, I crossed 7,000 km of total distance on the bike.

One interesting element of that is how it has nearly all been done at a modest pace. 90% of all my travel is at less than 19.3 km/h and 50% was under 12.2 km/h.

It’s a hauler, not a racer, and I am often occupied with tasks more complex than just getting from Point A to Point B.

Libraries are the best

A couple of weeks ago I decided to read John Green’s book, Everything is Tuberculosis, in part as research for the novel I am writing about a tuberculosis outbreak. Initially I considered buying it, but remembered the weak state of my finances and checked the Toronto Public Library system. A library 150 metres away had it available immediately.

Yesterday was the due day, so I swung by to drop off the unfinished book. The librarian asked if I was done with it, and I explained that my effort to renew it was rejected for a short-loan book. She offered to check it out again for me immediately and — when I showed her a place the book was tearing — she offered to fix it immediately and then check it out for me.

While waiting I spotted Harriet Rix’s The Genius of Trees and leafed forward to the chapter on symbiosis with fungi. This is the passage that prompted me to take the second book home too:

Later, more mycelium networks can be seen in Devonian trees, in the first ectomycorrhizal interactions in pine from 156 million years ago, and today most trees form some sort of associative network with a fungus or two or even three or more. Like most of our own relationships with other species, these are not relationships of simple benevolence or mutual support. Although some fungi will kill trees and some not harm them at all, most sit at an awkward interface, a balancing point between support and harm, where the forest network can turn on a coin and the fungal support network quickly change into the digestion matrix. Trees use fungi for their own advantage, but they sometimes lose. (p. 118)

If anybody needs me, I will be in the digestion matrix.

Ellsberg on the Cuban Missile Crisis

If Khrushchev had not, surprisingly, initiated an abrupt, humiliating withdrawal of his missiles Sunday morning—without even waiting for an official American response to his proposal of Saturday morning, which Kennedy had argued to his advisors was “very reasonable”—there was every likelihood of the fuse to all-out war being lit by that afternoon.

How close did that come? As close as the unpredictable decision of one man to overrule two others on a Soviet submarine [preventing the use of a nuclear torpedo of which the Americans knew nothing], or the inaccuracy of Cuban antiaircraft gunners (improving every hour) on their first day of firing at live targets. Far greater than one in a hundred, greater that day than Nitze’s one in ten. And that was for reasons which I didn’t know, and no other Americans knew, for thirty and in some cases forty years. The world has yet to absorb the lessons of this history—the story of how the existence of humanity was placed in great, unjustifiable danger by men who had no intention of doing that, men who recoiled from ending human history, or from taking what they saw as a high or even significant risk of doing so.

A primary lesson I draw from this episode is that the existential danger to humanity of nuclear weapons does not rest solely or even mainly on the possibility of further proliferation of such weapons to “rogue” or “unstable” nations, who would handle and threaten them less “responsibly” than the permanent members of the Security Council, nor does it rest merely on the vagaries of the smaller and more recent nuclear weapon states of Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea (though these do enhance the dangers).

What a true history of the Cuban missile crisis reveals is that the existence of masses of nuclear weapons in the hands of leaders of the superpowers, the United States and Russia—even when those leaders are about as responsible, humane, and cautious as any we have seen—posed then, and still do, intolerable dangers to the survival of civilization.

Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Bloomsbury, 2017. p. 220–1