I think I’ve finally, finally understood the basis of my father’s parenting style. Which is also why I can finally articulate its fatal flaw.
My dad recognised that there are certain virtues you need to know, feel, and reflexively practice. Things like thrift, honesty, reliability, hard work, perseverance, attention to detail, and not complaining instead of acting. So, he did the obviously logical thing and tried to instill them in me through explicit instruction.
The thing is, virtues generally can’t be taught. Knowing about them is only part of the problem. You have to be able to feel that they are true. And that can only happen when they’re harnessed in the service of doing what you actually value. Of bringing about the satisfaction of your own purpose, rather than anyone else’s. Of creating the world you want to live in.
Which meant I didn’t immediately get them. I would have to act in the world until noticing the patterns in my own actions made them click. The problem is, he was terrified of the ways I might hurt myself if I didn’t know these things. So he didn’t see giving me the opportunities to make mistakes until they stuck as being the most important things he could be doing if he wanted me to Get this.
And, well, I just didn’t live in a world in which this was true. My time wasn’t my own, so I couldn’t use it to pursue projects that might fulfill me. Instead I had to use it going to school or doing homework or working in the garden or on otherwise externally imposed tasks.
But the problem is, not a single one of those tasks inculcated a sense of meaning in me, because none of them affected my goals. They didn’t contribute toward anything. It was clear from primary school that I would do as well in school whether I showed up every day and did all the homework, as if I showed up once a week and never took notes. I was once bumped from grade 5 into grade 6 for two weeks and followed all the lessons perfectly, despite showing up in media res.
And yet so many hours of my day were directed toward this. I had to take notes in class. Would whether I took notes affect anything about my education? Empirically, no. Would doing homework affect anything? Empirically, no. Would studying for tests affect anything? Empirically, no. Would going to class affect anything? Empirically, no. I’d even do just as well on exams, despite all of this.
Every single time I tested whether something adults were forcing me to spend time on affected my education in any way, the answer was always no. Literally the only things in school which affected the progress of my learning were having conversations with teachers and getting new books. Everything else was a distraction, and I knew it was a distraction. And once you know that, it’s impossible to value the thing anymore.
So I always hated being in school, and in addition to this had to deal with the fact that all my peers had it out for me. But this combination of experiences - meaningless dead time loosely related to learning, and constant bullying - was allotted a huge amount of my time by forces external to me. And when it wasn’t that, it was something else my parents had decided I should be doing.
Furthermore, at the time, I didn’t have a very secure sense of property. Most of my things weren’t really “owned” by me, so much as they were treated as being on loan from my parents. My school treated it as axiomatic that any student’s belongings could be taken by teachers, and the other students took it that my belongings could be taken because I didn’t fight back at the time. (That’s another essay.)
I also didn’t have much persistence for anything I owned. We moved a lot, based on my parents’ plans, so pretty much at random (from my subjective perspective) I’d have to choose which things I’d have to abandon to move to a new place. And, of the things I carried, some of them were on loan from my parents, so who knew when I might stop having them? In my early years, I cried a lot any time the things I thought of as my possessions were taken from me. Over time, I just realised I had to stop caring about my things, because they weren’t really mine anyway.
My father is quite familiar with classical economics. He knew that in societies where people have an insecure sense of property, they also don’t value labour. He also knew that I wouldn’t have had a secure sense of property and I didn’t value labour. In retrospect, I’m kicking myself wondering how he didn’t put these two together. Or, if he did, why he didn’t make the obvious adjustment.
(Things started improving in this vein when I started getting a weekly allowance, but definitely the best thing they could have done would have been to give me more opportunities to earn more money, plus a belief that I’d get to keep things I paid for.)
So, I lived in a world where most of my time was taken by others, and nothing I made or acquired persisted. So I just gave up on the outside world. Turned off and dropped out as far as external circumstances were concerned. Why should I care about anything going on outside of me? It wasn’t like any choice I made would affect it.
So, instead, I exclusively paid attention to the inside world. I thought and studied and theorised. I followed whatever was interesting until I could find cool surprises. I solved problems only when the rewards of the action existed solely in my head. After all, if I solved a problem in the outside world, there was no reason to think that I would get to keep anything valuable that was produced.
But I could always keep knowledge and carry it around inside me. Knowledge was the only thing no one else could take away, so it was the only thing I cared about. My father always thought I was a wuss because I couldn’t take even minor pain. But the problem was, I couldn’t take minor pain for no reason. What, you want me to do this slightly painful work that will have exactly zero benefit to me? Of course I’m going to complain!
Meanwhile, at seven years old I was coming in covered in ant bites every day, because I couldn’t stop performing experiments on ant colonies to figure out how they worked. The collective agency of ant colonies was fascinating, and anything I learned about them was truly mine. That information belonged to me; earned by my own investigation. And if I really was gaining something from it, I could endure however much pain being covered in fire ants brought me. Just not the stubbed toe I might get from doing externally-imposed work.
But it’s really obvious why my dad’s lifestyle contributed meaning and virtue to him, but his attempt to propagate it didn’t contribute meaning to me. His family was actually living at the edge of their productivity. Any work he did was really work that would contribute to all of them. If he built furniture, he’d sit on that furniture. If he planted crops, he’d eat those crops. His actions improved his world, so he identified with them.
My actions didn’t improve my world. The chores I was assigned weren’t actually at the edge of our productive potential. Important things weren’t left to me until late in my teens, so in the meantime any work I did was work whose value I’d never see. It would never provide anything to me. Even working in the garden was completely meaningless, because I didn’t consume any of the plants we grew (other than sorrel, the one thing I liked being involved with).
Nietzsche’s idea of master morality vs slave morality is really just about this. Master morality is identification with your actions, because their consequences belong to you. You act because it will bring you benefit, so you want to act. Slave morality is alienation from your actions, because their consequences don’t belong to you. You act to avoid punishment for inaction, but action itself doesn’t bring you anything but the absence of punishment.
And as a child I had a huge amount of slave morality because I had the circumstances that foster the subjective experience of slavery. I’ll call this experience of the world ‘slave condition’. I gradually shook off this slave morality in various areas of my life, but it actually only started coming off at home by complete accident.
In my mid-teens, my dad started assigning me work in the garden any time he saw me walking around unoccupied. This pretty much destroyed my subjective quality of life. Until then, the only place I’d gotten meaning in life was being able to pace and think, and now I wasn’t able to because any time I tried to use for that would be stolen. So I just became suicidally depressed because continued life no longer contributed to any feeling of gain. During this time, I eventually gave up on complaining when forced to work, and instead just started internally fantasising about death any time I was working.
However, I think he misinterpreted this as me somehow having acquired the relevant virtues that correlate with not complaining, when what had actually happened was that I no longer valued my life enough to argue for it. But after a few months of this, he started trusting me to have more control over my life. And then, the moment I was exchanging this otherwise meaningless labour for control over my own life, I suddenly became way more enthusiastic about working.
Which of course was the point at which I started acquiring virtue, and my father started trusting me more, and I started acquiring more virtue. A virtuous cycle, if you will. However, what this means is that basically the entire course of my learning to be a real person happened between 15 and now. I’ve had 5 years to become a person, because for the first 15 years I was in the stasis of slave condition.
And you know what’s the most horrifying thing about this? It was an accident! The ideal way of raising a child, it’s now apparent to me, is to give them as much power to control their lives as possible - within moderate safeguards - while letting them keep or lose what they earn or squander. Basically, putting them in the master condition so they develop master morality. And then they’ll have all the virtue they need to succeed in the world.
Meanwhile, I was in the slave condition for the first 15 years, and so had slave morality. It’s only because my father accidentally pushed me over the edge from “low meaning in life” to “no meaning in life” and then mistook depressed nihilism for virtue once that I ever got placed in the master condition in the first place. And then I’ve spent the past 5 years trying to develop increasing levels of master morality.
But it is utterly horrifying that I could have just never made it due to this one simple mistake. The mistake of thinking that one must be a master to be allowed to be in the master condition, instead of realising that the master condition creates masters. I could totally be like one of my uncles right now if I’d either failed to get depressed or my father had been better at accurately judging emotions. I was saved by a coin toss. *internal screaming*
I mean, luckily enough, now I’ve got it. Now I’ve fully internalised that I can make my own world. Now I value working hard, because I get to keep what I work for. I love earning money so much - not even because of how much money I’ll have, but because I made that dollar. My life is on a clear upward trajectory, and it only took insights my father already knew, plus one that apparently he didn’t:
To truly value action, actions must bring value.
I expect this is still an ongoing problem, even now that I’ve emigrated. When I left, the only notable conflict between my parents seemed to be over division of labour. My father wanted my mother to do work she didn’t value, and thought she was lazy for not wanting to do it. But he doesn’t seem to notice that the things that bring value to him aren’t the same ones that bring value to other people. No one else in the family wants to work on the garden because the garden is effectively his hobby.
If you want people to be active and motivated, you have to let them do things that will actually improve their lives. You have to let them take actions that improve the quality of things they actually care about - not things you think they should care about. I hope my parents realise this in time for my younger brother to become a master on something other than a coin toss.
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