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.
Their dominating behaviour has not faded as I have grown 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 agonizing 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 (as my parents demanded of me in childhood and all through life, largely blocking me from being able to relax with them). I can do all that modelling and anticipation of others’ needs, 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 progression from parental treatment in childhood to adult psychology.
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