An Unsocial Conditioning

I started thinking about this perhaps over a week ago. I thought it was going to lead to a nice, easily digestible and profound insight - you know, the kind I usually deliver¹ - but the more I picked apart the various threads the more tangled everything seemed to become.

The article that prompted this, on Substack, I can no longer find. I thought I had saved it. It was written by a mathematician and discussed the methodological flaws with twin studies and the issues of heritability. It was very long but fascinating. Yet another cut and thrust in the eternal swordfight between nature and nurture.

I immediately engaged in a deep analysis and study with a sample size of one. Perfect methodology ensued, of course, as I attempted to understand my own drives and motivations.

The image above is intended to be humorous (obviously) but also a reflection of my youthful passion with a certain kind of mythology. Essentially it’s a mythology of kings and kingdoms. The Arthurian legends, the Lord of the Rings, The Narnia series, and so on; why did I seem to respond at some deep emotional level to the idea of kings and kingdoms, even whilst being rather dismissive of the UK’s own ridiculous monarchy?

Was it, perhaps, my early Christian (Catholic) upbringing which very much emphasized notions like Christ as King and the Kingdom of Heaven?

Somehow I had internalized this mythos, probably from an early age. Was this just part of ‘state programming’ to view the nation state with fondness, if not reverence?

I’ll never know. I can speculate until Arthur emerges from his slumber on the Isle of Avalon, but I will never be able to pick apart the detailed causative elements in an upbringing I cannot properly remember with sufficient depth or clarity. Was it Bill and Ben, the flowerpot men, who are responsible? Or the Clangers?

But it wasn’t as simple as just a love of kings and kingdoms; there was also a strong understanding that there could also be the wrong kind of kings and kingdoms. I cheered on Lin Chung and the heroes of Liang Shan Po as they battled the wicked emperor in The Water Margin, the 1973 Japanese TV adaptation of the classic Chinese tale.

When Aragorn triumphs in The Lord of the Rings and returns as the king of Gondor, there is a feeling of ‘rightness’, that all has returned to where it should be - despite me utterly rejecting, now, the very idea of monarchy and inherited rule. To mix movie milieus; Sauron definitely wasn’t the king you were looking for, Harry.

Is it all a Christian-inspired longing for a ‘saviour figure’ - some great hero that will emerge to sort it all out?

There are ideas that will resonate with us - and presumably these might be a little different for each individual and across generations - but where do they come from? How do they begin and take hold?

We could ask similar questions about lots of other things. A more adult line of questioning might be to examine and speculate upon where our various sexual attractions stem from? Why did something like Fifty Shades of Grey take such a hold, for example? I haven’t read it, but the kind of relationship I understand to be described there is anathema to me and would make me somewhat nauseous. The idea of there being any coercive or dominating element to the act of sex is something of a turn-off for me, and yet I know that it is quite the opposite for many, who see it as exciting².

And then there’s the even weirder stuff - like the various fetishes some people have. Presumably it feels ‘natural’ or even ‘innate’ to the people with those desires, but it’s somewhat unlikely that these (directly) stem from an evolutionary process and history that didn’t include gimp suits, whips, and dungeons (to name just one fetish).

The original motivation for this piece was to accept the role of social conditioning in the formation of the overall ‘mythos’ that drives us, to wonder about how this process seems to have become somewhat fucked up of late, and to think about how to unfuck it. Culture huff 'n' stuff. But as I tried to disentangle my own cultural ideas and where they came from I realised the impossibility of this task.

The Jesuits have, over the years, come in for a lot of stick, not least for the supposedly chilling phrase “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man”, indicating the willingness for a judicial spot of brainwashing by today’s standards, but basically that’s the entire basis upon which many, if not all, civilisations have been built. All our kids are ‘brainwashed’ - or as we say in the modern vernacular, socially conditioned.

Social conditioning you like; great - let’s DEI, genderise, and critical theory the fuck out of their tender brains

Social conditioning you don’t like; brainwashing, child abuse, etc

But despite our best efforts to socially condition our kids in the way we would like to socially condition our kids (whatever that may be), unless we control their complete environment we’ll only partially be able to achieve our goals, in general. If you have free-range kids it’s going to be near impossible to control, or even know about, all the thousands of interactions and experiences that are shaping them. Kids, especially young ones, be like sponges and they pick up on all sorts of stuff that you don’t know about and largely have no control over. But some things you do have control over - like whether you think this is OK or not

How many stories have we read by now of perfectly normal kids, or seemingly normal kids, being seduced into the glittery delusion world of ‘trans’? Parents who had not, until the shit hits the gender fan, had any inclination that their kid was anything other than normal (insofar as any kid is ‘normal’) express their total surprise - and they’re left trying to pick up the broken pieces of a life that has, seemingly almost overnight, gone off the rails.

Kids, as they grow, tend to rebel. That’s their job. It’s part of growing up; testing the boundaries, learning to be independent. Usually this process is not too catastrophic³. In the past it has resulted in things like the overuse of black eyeliner, godawful tastes in music, and more than a few heated arguments. Parents got exasperated and hoped it was a ‘phase’. But what do they do when their kid says “Dad, for my birthday I want to get my dick chopped off”? And then get threatened with social services if they decide that, possibly, it’s not in the best interest of their child.

That’s rebellion on steroids, or perhaps the wrong sex hormones. We’ve moved, in some cases, a little bit beyond Twain’s wry observation

Parents in the awful and heart-wrenching situation of having a ‘trans’ child, like many of us, are left wondering “Where the hell did this shit come from?”

Indeed, I sometimes look inside the shallow depths of my own mind and wonder “Where the hell did this shit come from?”

We like to pretend we know ourselves, that we’re somehow ‘experts’ when it comes to self-understanding, but none of us have sufficient recall or clarity to properly understand where the influences that have shaped us have come from, or even what they were. The detail is lost in the mists of time and we can only construct a sketch that will, undoubtedly, contain some elements of truth, but will not have enough resolution to be 100% clear and accurate.

I suppose it would take years of study and some serious reading of thousands upon thousands of pages of scholarship to understand how we, as children, construct our understanding of our world, and even then it will probably only be a partial picture. Anyone who has been a parent, or interacted with little kids, will know there are plenty of times their thinking is genuinely surprising - not to mention often very cute. And you think, “Where did that come from?”

But you don’t have to be a child psychologist to know that kids love getting praise and attention from their parents and other adults. They’ll construct whatever ‘strategies’, probably unconsciously, that work best to achieve that. So an ill-behaved kid who’s always acting up is, quite possibly, just looking for attention in the only way they know how. With the ‘right kind’ of attention a lot of those behavioural problems will fade away. Not always (of course), but it’s a decent enough rule of thumb.

Throw a wobbly and mum/dad spends the next half hour or more doing amateur-hour psychoanalysis and exploring their child’s ‘feelings’. Fuck yeah - thinks the kid - this is bloody brilliant. You’re not helping when you do this, you’re just creating an addiction cycle. All you’re doing is rewarding them for their bad behaviour.

Then you tell them to be ‘kind’ and ‘inclusive’ and ‘compassionate’, but they watch you describe your political opponents in the cruellest and most hateful ways. What message is that sending to them? They pick up on all of these things. You’re actually teaching them that all that kindness and compassion and tolerance is reserved only for the ‘right kind’ of people and it’s OK to hate the other kind of people. Kids pick up on some very subtle things, even when you think you’re being careful. They’ll, subconsciously, note the tones you use for example, and see at an intuitive level how you really think about stuff.

They won’t have the language or understanding to process any of this, but they’ll definitely pick up on it at some subconscious level.

So, if they see you fawning and gushing over 5-year old Perseus down the road who now wants to be known as Sparkly Moon Fart and thinks he’s a girl, they’re going to get the message (subconsciously) that this is a really cool way to get lots of praise and attention. Their biology, for most, will be enough to make even this level of attention not ‘worth’ it, but for some that will not be true.

If a kid is never introduced, at any stage, to the idea that a boy ‘can be’ a girl, then how many boys, we might wonder, would actually think they ‘are’ a girl (or vice versa)⁴? Activists who claim the trans delusion is ‘natural’ and ‘innate’ would, presumably, suggest the percentages are unaffected by society or social conditioning, but we know this not to be true.

It’s my view that, despite claims to the contrary, almost all of the current trans phenomena is a function of social conditioning. It’s perhaps the most extreme example of such - or rather the one with the most extreme consequences for the individual perhaps - which is why it’s worth focusing on it (along with its obviously important societal consequences).

But here’s the thing - like it or not, your kids are being socially conditioned. By you, by TV, by books, by their friends, by everyone they meet. It sounds awful because of the often negative association attached to ‘social conditioning’ - which probably first really took hold in the various Women’s Studies type courses. Women, you see, had been socially conditioned to be inferior to men⁵, and you had to fight this so that you could hear them roar.

Social conditioning, however, is (or should be) a good thing. It’s the glue that holds a society together. If we’re all operating from a different set of expectations and accepted behaviours we’re going to have chaos. It’s why ‘multiculturalism’ is mostly a huge excrescent pile of stupid. Importing people who (broadly) do not share your core values and worldview is going to lead to trouble - and we are seeing the effects of these idiotic policies of largely uncontrolled mass immigration on a daily basis.

Someone is benefiting from this - but it’s not your average man, woman, and weird freak on the street is it?

Many governments are pulling out all the stops to socially engineer things, to condition us, so that (they hope) enough of us ignore the evidence of our own eyes and come to view ‘multiculturalism’ as a great blessing. Sub-cultures, within a larger overarching cultural frame, have always existed - but they only work when that larger cultural frame is accepted as being pre-eminent.

Adults these days seem to be very susceptible, unfortunately, although we’ve become much less so after the deliberate social engineering that was (largely successfully) implemented during the covid farce. I know quite a few people who went full retard for all the ridiculous covid interventions who now are able to see how badly they were misled and just how ridiculous it all was. Will they fall for it again? Perhaps, but there now exists a higher bar for governments to attempt to jump over.

But when it comes to kids we have to do much better. What values do we want them to grow up with? What barriers and defences are we going to guide them to so that they’re able to properly fight off ridiculous ideas?

We can’t really ‘program’ our kids - although many seem to try - but we can give them a whole set of tools and foundations to give them their best shot at having a great life. One of the best things we can give them is our time - and that’s a very precious and very finite resource when it comes to kids. Once it’s gone it’s gone and you can’t unwind the clock. Think about what foundation they need to be able to develop as well-adjusted and happy adults and put in the necessary time to help them achieve that. Have fun (very important this one).

Don’t project too much of your own neuroses on to them if possible. You might have ‘anxiety’ or unresolved ‘trauma’ or whatever fashionable psycho-gloop is doing the rounds today, but you really want your kids to be saddled with all the shit you seem to enjoy wallowing in? You want them to be some kind of perpetual victim like yourself?

Don’t we all, as parents, want better for our kids?

Don’t we want them to be resilient, resourceful, self-confident, assured, loved and happy?

Or just a bundle of neuroses and medicated to the hilt in order to ‘function’ in the way much of society has deemed acceptable?

A childhood is not reversible - the profound words of one child psychologist. Think carefully about the kind of adulthood you’re guiding them towards.

1. Sarcasm, in case you didn’t notice

2. In an appropriate context (Snape voice) obviously

3. Although it can be. Sometimes as parents all you can do is to keep your fingers crossed and hope you’ve done enough to guide them to have enough ‘sense’ in the tank to weather the storm

4. Thinking you are a girl (if you’re a boy) and wishing that you’d rather have been born as a girl are two very different things. Many (most/all?) of the (supposed) historical examples of ‘trans’ seem to me to be more like wish fulfilment, people pretending/acting to be the opposite sex because that’s what they’d rather be, and not people who thought they really were the opposite sex

5. I totally accept that prior attitudes towards women were often more than a bit shit. Things did need to change. But we’ve kind of ended up in a situation where pretty much anything a man does is seen as shit if it doesn’t completely support and validate the aims and emotions of women