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I sort of went into the lion’s den earlier today on the subject of spanking, so I’m sort of retreating back to my blog to give some air to the subject as well as to expand on my thoughts.

There have been numerous psychologists weighing in on both sides of the “spanking” issue, some saying that it’s essential for discipline, others recoiling at the horror of it. I only know a bit about the psychology, but I know enough to say that the vast majority of people will bend over backwards, sideways, and into pretzel knots in order to justify how their parents treated them.

The question of spanking is pretty simple for me: in its most simple and direct form, it involves the parent hitting the child with the open hand on the buttocks. The key word is “hitting.” No matter what anybody says, you cannot get around the fact that the adult is causing their hand to move towards the child in such a way so as to startle or cause pain.

The fact that spanking necessarily involves hitting is inarguable. Obviously, if we can’t even agree on a simple definition (and it’s amazing how many people try to contort the argument at this stage), then we can’t go any further.

The question for me, then, is: is hitting a child ever appropriate?

My history may or may not be of relevance, but it may be of interest: I was hit as a child, and far more than simple spanking took place. Not only were implements other than the hand used, but I can remember seeing… feeling their rage as they did no less than beat me.

So, you might say that this is a bit of a sore subject for me.

In any case, my personal feelings aside, I have to wonder, what drives an adult to hit a child? Adults will almost always tell a child that has hit another child that hitting is wrong. That same adult, however, may turn around and hit that child for any number of reasons.

Not only is this incredibly hypocritical, but consider what else is going on in this moment: the adult is many times the size and has many times the strength of the child. Children–small ones, especially–are entirely unable to resist and must eventually endure the hitting. If we have been hit as children, we may lose that sense of perspective. It is quite instructive to imagine yourself as you are now, being approached by somebody four or five times your height and having many times more your strength, and that person immobilizing you and hitting you for whatever reason they may have.

As an adult, we can clearly see that such a person is a horrible monster who is taking gross advantage of their size and power over another human being in order to inflict physical punishment upon them. As adults, we have the ability to reason in this way. However, when a child is thus accosted by his parents, he has the innate ability to reason this out, but the conclusion is too terrifying to behold. His parents? Bad people? Evil people? Horrible people? Monsters? No, that cannot be the case… it must be the child, therefore, that is bad, evil, horrible, and monstrous. Otherwise, why would the child suffer to endure such punishment from his parents, the very people who are supposed to nurture and protect him?

The reasons given for hitting children are manifold; one person even put forward that the intent was to humiliate the child. Humiliation! Parents say that they love their children, and then they turn around and begin hitting the child with the intent to humiliate them? Such people should never have children!

Children come into this world totally defenseless and dependent upon their parents. They do not choose to be born. They do not choose to be kept by their parents. It is the responsibility of the parents to raise the child, to nurture the child, to ensure that the child grow up to be a healthy, functioning adult.

You don’t get healthy, functioning adults when children are humiliated, when children are frightened, when children are hit by their parents.

So why would an adult hit a child? The child has no way of fighting back–he is oftentimes entirely under the adult’s power. There is no greater power disparity than that between adults and children–none. Thus, it is a most egregious abuse of power for an adult to hit a child, for the adult holds all of the power and the child holds none. The adult has the ability to refrain from hitting the child, to seek another avenue for their aggression, but they choose to hit the child.

This is the central problem: the adult who is a parent has said “yes” to having that child born, has said “yes” to taking care of the child, has said “yes” to raising that child to be a healthy adult… and then turns around and uses that power–that responsibility–to inflict lasting psychological trauma onto the child.

If you listen to the justifications put forward by people for the reasons they were hit as children, you’ll get stuff like, “I was spanked, but I deserved it,” “My mother spanked me, but I learned my lesson,” “My parents did more than spanking, but the times they spanked me, it was appropriate.” Those justifications are the justifications of the parents that the children believe for themselves. They believe that they deserved it, they believe they had a lesson to learn (what lesson could that possibly be, incidentally–don’t cross your parents?), they believe that, even though worse physical abuse took place, somehow less severe abuse was appropriate.

All of these beliefs, they do not speak to the child’s experience of being hit. They short-circuit any memories they might have in order to stop the conversation. The fact that people say this while becoming increasingly upset is telling, though it doesn’t prove anything by itself. It does indicate that the conversation is cutting very closely. It is as if they are shouting at a doctor that points out that a limb that they broke long ago did not heal correctly and, thus, their limb is deformed, causing them to contort themselves and possibly causing pain. Not only do they tell the doctor that there is no problem, that their arm is normal, but they may even go so far as to imply that the doctor, with straight and undeformed limbs, is crippled and deformed himself!

Now, I’m no doctor… I’m more like the guy who’s walking along the street, watching all of these people hobble along, and decides to say something.

The reaction isn’t exactly unexpected, of course, though I will admit that the ferocity I faced earlier today did hurt. But they were mere slings; I will continue along unabated. In any case, the way to fix the problem is to break the limb again–to re-experience the pain and fear and anger at their parents for mistreating them so egregiously! I don’t necessarily blame people for not wanting to go through that, but I would only ask that if they do not want to do it for themselves, that they stop telling me that I am crippled and that they do not go forward and cripple their own children.

Not likely, not unless they actually go through the process of uncrippling themselves first.

Finally, I get a lot of people throwing stuff at me like, “Oh, so you want to try to reason with a child?? Good luck!!” I suspect that these people never had an adult try to reason with them when they were kids. I would further suspect that people do not try to reason with them now… there was certainly no reasoning going on in the “discussion” I had earlier today. I mean… nobody even bothered to address the blatant hypocrisy behind: “adults hitting adults is wrong, children hitting children is wrong, but adults hitting children is OK?”

[Edit] – Here are some external references so it doesn’t look like I’m totally talking out of my ass:
www.alice-miller.com
Traumatized Children: How Childhood Trauma Influences Brain Development

But the way he says it… I don’t think he really believes it. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable truth, and he’s got to attempt to numb nimself to the truth somehow, to try to forget it. He started to talk about some martial art, at which point I just took my leave of the conversation. What have I to say to this person anymore?

It’s sad, because I’ll occasionally think, hey, I’d like to talk to him, but… there’s that old chestnut of him signing up to be a state thug. We have this long history… but I can’t say that I ever saw this in him. He used to be interested in weather and was looking to go for a meteorology degree. Perhaps it was a long shot, but he just gave up along the way… and he kept giving up. All of the jobs he’s held… he’s almost 30 and he’s still living with his insane mother and impotent father. His application to the state police sounds like he’s continuing to just give up on life.

I don’t know how many more conversations we’ll have left. I really don’t want to discuss martial arts disciplines. I don’t want to hear about the guy he pulled over who cussed him out. I don’t want to hear about the politics, the mindgames, the… thuggery.

I can’t stop him. I know I can’t. But what I can do is withhold sanction regarding a relationship with him.

I guess that the bottom line is, keeping in touch with him will not make me happy.

There is a gun in the room, and it is pointed at you.

All threats are threats of murder.

I heard this story on the radio, and I immediately rushed to the telephone to let all of my friends know, because it was such an important event that I felt that everybody needed to hear it.

Actually, no, I didn’t do that. I would have probably lost friends, as I heard about the story at around 6AM. Also, I was less than impressed by the headline: “Former US Senator blah blah blah.”

The first thought to my mind was, who the fuck cares? This was, of course, even before I heard the name of this very important person that has warranted news articles and radio air time (and probably television air time to boot): Carol Moseley Braun.

ZOMG! I remember her! She was the woman who courageously submitted the bill to impeach Bush–as a lame duck with about a month to go. Yeah, that’s courage and bravery.

I’m not going to downplay mugging and crime. Being victimized by somebody who wants nothing more than to rob you of your possessions is pretty frightening. But I’m not about to feel much sympathy for Braun, because that was her job as a US Senator! Only, she was doing it–along with her fellow senators and representatives–in the name of “the people,” “the greater good,” “the common good,” and so on.

Those phrases are bandied about, but they aren’t very meaningful, usually. Often, “the greater good” isn’t necessarily what’s best for the greatest number of people, but part of the thug’s–I mean, “elected representative’s”–vision for “society.” But most of the time, it isn’t even that–it’s about scratching your friends’ backs so they’ll scratch yours.

Of course, Braun will get a few more minutes in the spotlight but she doesn’t deserve them. Muggings happen all of the time. This one really isn’t special except for the delicious irony surrounding it.

People like Ed Brown make it difficult to articulate my position with credibility. It’s not that he and I believe the same things–we don’t.

I suppose that it’s not so much of a problem, really. I don’t know why Ed Brown takes the position he does… I do have a sense that if he believed in a fully voluntary society, he would not take the position he currently holds. He might say, “molon labe,” after a fashion, but he would not necessarily be issuing writs to the court, ordering the case to be closed… he would not make pronouncements like, “I speak for her. You speak to the head. You don’t speak to the woman. That’s the way it was until the last decade or so.”

I know Ed’s been under a lot of stress lately, but the things he says are getting progressively nuttier. Not only that, but that last statement of his reflects a willingness to clobber his wife’s right to voluntary association… not to mention that wives of men have been “allowed” to speak to men that aren’t their husbands for a little longer than “about a decade” now.

My stance is that a society is based upon voluntary interaction. The society is primal. Anything that involves coercion is an aberration.

Due in large part to these thoughts, I’ve been considering rescinding my signature from the Free State Project’s Statement of Intent. Since I hold that, to paraphrase Gandhi, there is no wall of separation between the means and the end, I have significant problems with the modus operandi of the majority of the members of the FSP. They believe that one ought to use the system (a system of coercive power) against the system. But the means, in this case, is coercion! Coercion cannot induce voluntary action–it never has, and it never will. Coercion will actually depress voluntary action!

There are members of the FSP who do not kowtow to what is effectively the party line. But these, who are few in number, what do they accomplish? They throw themselves as a wrench into the gears. Have you ever seen a wrench that’s been tossed to the gears? It gets mangled. It quickly loses its effectiveness as a wrench.

Aside from all of this, the geographical limitations of the Free State Project are something of an absurdity. What about all of the individuals elsewhere that believe strongly in voluntaryism? Must they tear themselves away from their lives where they live, reducing their potential effectiveness as voluntary individuals in their communities, families, and social circles? Not only that, but the FSP is horribly limited in scope… and I’ll admit it: New Hampshire is cold. I like cold, moreso than hot, but it’s still cold.