Like many people living in today’s fucked up world, I have read The Fourth Turning and am looking to the Millennials to “save” us. If they do, they have quite a task on their hands. My experiences with Millennials are limited. I was active in the Occupy movement where I guess most of the people were Millennials. I thought they were beautiful and idealistic. All that. They stood up to police repression as long as they could. I’m sure many are still in the movement doing other things.
I heard about TH1RTEEN R3ASONS WHY quite recently. People were all in a tither because two teenage girls committed suicide after watching this Netflix series. It sounded interesting so I got the book and joined Netflix to get the full experience. I read the book and saw the episodes. I’m presently going through the episodes a second time. It made me realize that this was a very different generation. The focus is on kids going to Liberty High School. The main character, Hannah, who killed herself and left tapes for thirteen people to listen to and find out how they had failed her and were therefore responsible for her death. How weird is that?
For starters, she doesn’t seem like someone who would kill herself. She seemed to have too much going for her to give up on life. In the beginning, she sets up an elaborate, cute and clever way of getting a date with a boy she liked at a new school. He offers her a ride in a car full of his buddies and she says “Thanks but my chariot awaits” as she jumps on a city bus. He follows her on the bus and she puts her number on his phone and then jumps off the bus. He calls and she makes up a math problem about two buses leaving from different places and what time do they meet to set up a date to meet him at a park. All this doesn’t look like a girl without resources. They kiss and everything should have been wonder except he does this very guy thing. He lets his mates think they did more than kiss, hence her reputation takes a turn south. That’s a common experience for girls and women, not only in high school. Shitty thing to do but is it reason enough to hold him partially responsible for her suicide?
That experience is followed by other experiences, many of which are even more obscure. I got the impression that anything that isn’t perfect in her interpersonal relationships is ground for indictment of the other person. I’m aware of the term highly sensitive personality but come on! From a sassy, resourceful girl, Hannah turns into a fragile, yet bitter injustice collector who blames everyone she knows for disappointing her.
We share her tapes with Clay Jensen who is also sensitive and vulnerable. Clay is all-too-willing to feel guilty for Hannah’s death before he even hears the tape relating to his own failings be what she wanted him to be when she needed him to be it. He is guided through the maze of guilt-inducing tapes by his friend, Tony, a boy who seems a lot more mature and detached than the others. Tony provides a cassette player and keeps Clay on track when he is too overwhelmed to keep listening.
At the time Clay gets the tapes, most of the other kids have already heard them. They seem very defensive about their role and the blame they could incur. It doesn’t help that Hannah’s mother is suing the school. She is looking for evidence of bullying. The school is also defensive. They are trying really hard to show how sensitive and caring they are. They have posters all over telling kids “Suicide isn’t an option.” The kids set up an altar to Hannah, first on her locker and then on a table in a hallway. Are schools really held culpable if they don’t 
manage to protect a student from unkindness if it leads to suicide? I do know some schools go to ridiculous extremes such as charging a First Grader with sexual harassment for kissing another First Grader. Can a school really be blamed for bullying? Most bullying happens outside the sight and sound of teachers. Few bullied kids disclose their problem to adults. They are too ashamed. I know some schools have programs to boost self-esteem. The kids I know who had such classes didn’t seem very keen on them. Just saying. Hannah’s case doesn’t really seem like a typical case of bullying. She wasn’t taunted, called names, beaten up or any of the usual things. I don’t think her experiences 
in school really deserve the name of bullying. A boy lies about how far he got with her sexually. A girl and boy she was friends with drop her and become a couple. A boy turns stalker and takes pictures of her from outside her window. Yes. This is more serious than the other problems she had previously had. But it’s just one boy, not a group of mean kids. She plans to trap the boy with the help of another girl. They succeed and find 
out his identity but not before he gets a picture of the girls kissing each other. Hannah isn’t a lesbian but the other girl is and she dirties up Hannah’s reputation a little more to protect herself from being outed. Sorry. I don’t call any of that bullying. Maybe Millennials do. The law suit doesn’t seem to be doing anyone much good. The mother is perplexed. Her daughter hadn’t given her any information about why she was ending her life. That was reserved only for her peers. In fact, none of the parents really have a clue what is happening with their kids.
Clay’s parents get quite frantic when Clay disappears for long periods of time while he processes Hannah’s tapes. He is seen to be part of a serious drama while the parents are completely excluded. Hannah’s parents cope with their grief and puzzlement by filing a law suit against the school. As sensitive as the kids are to each other, they seem strangely uncaring 
about their parents. Clay’s mysterious disappearances and his intensity (the reasons for which he keeps to himself) and Hannah’s suicide with not even a suicide note for her parents, just the gory sight of her dead body in the tub full of bloody water. It’s only important to her that her peers know why she did it. One of the boys, Justin, the kid who kissed and told more than there was to tell, had a mother who hooked up with 
abusive men who beat Justin savagely and threw him out of the house. He depended on his peers for a place to stay. One of the most supportive of his peers is Bryce, the rapist. Obviously, Bryce is more than a monster. Most of the parents seems reasonably good parents but they were all excluded from the truth until the end. The adults at the school were also left out of the loop. A man who was an unofficial counselor had no psychological training but seems to do his job well. But the story seemed to blame him for not being omniscient.
The kids seemed to fear they would be blamed and lose their acceptance in colleges for their roles. Most of them banded together to keep the contents of the tapes strictly secret. They feared Clay would prove the weak link. In order to keep him quiet, one night, some of the boys way-laid him, grabbed his bike which they put 
in the trunk of their car and forced him to ride with them. The driver, Alex, drove really fast, got stopped by a cop who turned out to his father. Alex’s dad lets him get away with anything as long as Alex is obsequious to him, always addressing him as “Sir.” Clay doesn’t cry out when the car is stopped telling the officer he’s there against his will. He apologizes for the fast driving as if he were guilty. After the ride, the boys keep Clay’s bike. I would have told them I would tell everything if I didn’t get the bike back immediately. I would have reported it stolen. Clay did none of those things. It’s hard for me to imagine how anyone can be so passive. Justin goes so far as to suggest murdering Clay and making it look like a suicide.
One of the boys is a rapist. He is also a top jock so he is protected by the others although they don’t seem to really like him. Justin, however, is a close friend to the rapist, Bryce. Bryce takes him in whenever he has to leave his abusive home. He is grateful and feels he owes Bryce a great deal. So one night, at a party, when Justin’s girlfriend is passed out drunk, he lets Bryce have his way with her. When she sobers up, Justin tells her she had sex with him. She “believes” him but has memories that belie the story which she represses. Hannah knows the truth 
and is upset that Justin won’t tell the truth. Another “trauma” Hannah experienced was riding in a car with another girl driving. The girl accidentally knocks down a stop sign and refuses to report the accident. Later that night, another two cars have an accident due to the stop sign being down. Hannah is deeply disturbed by her friend’s failure to take responsibility and somehow this also contributes to her suicide.
Yes, a long, sad story about imperfect people acting imperfectly. What’s a snowflake like Hannah to do? One experience stands out as really nasty. She has a first date with a boy named Marcus. He keeps her waiting for an hour and shows up finally with a bunch of his mates who sit at another table. One of them explains that he keeps girls waiting for an hour because he knows if they are still waiting, they will put out. But Hannah doesn’t agree to his mauling and knocks him off the seat of the restaurant booth. He says, “I only asked you out because I thought you were easy.” That’s rank.
Hannah stays in the booth, feeling sad. Another boy, one of Marcus’ friends, sits down at the booth and is really nice to her. He calls Marcus an “asshole” and is trying to make her feel better. But she remains hostile and seems to blame him for being more socially successful than she is. Clay, upon hearing the tape, keys Zach’s car. I find Clay incomprehensible. He is so guilt-ridden! We finally find out what his “crime” was. He and Hannah finally make out but she suddenly starts crying and says she’s not worthy of him and runs away. Clay’s crime was not stopping her and telling her he loved her.
She is eventually “raped” by Bryce. There is a discrepancy between the story in the book and in the TV series. The former has her getting into a hot tub with him and passively allowing him to have his way. She thought he should have seen by her facial expression that she didn’t want it. The latter shows him actually raping her, that is, forcing her against her will despite attempts to get out of the tub.
After all her trials and tribulations, Hannah decides to give life one last chance. She sees the counselor. But she rejects the chance to report Bryce. The counselor suggests that, the only option left is to get on with her life. That was his “crime.” I don’t know what he could have said or done other than that. Maybe a Millennial can explain it to me.
If Hannah really believed her death were the fault of all these other people, why did she kill herself? You would think not thinking it was her own fault would allow her the courage to go on.
Throughout this story, the kids are in their own world. They live their high drama while adults are left wondering what is happening with them. Strauss and Howe (The Fourth Turning) depict Millennials as very polite and respectful. They are here too. Only they keep their problems to themselves and their peers.
There has been a lot of kerfuffle over the fact that two teens have committed suicide since watching the series. Teenagers have been suicide-prone for centuries and media has always been blamed. When Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, there were a flurry of suicides for which Goethe was blamed. He responded,
“I had saved myself from a tempestuous element with this composition, from a situation into which I had been driven through my own fault and the fault of others, through a chance and a chosen way of life, through intent and haste, through stubbornness and compliancy. I felt like a man after absolute confession — happy and free again, with the right to a new life. This time an old household remedy had done me a lot of good. But just as I felt relieved and lighthearted because I had succeeded in transforming reality into poetry, my friends were confusing themselves by believing that they had to turn poetry into reality, enact the novel and shoot themselves! What actually took place now among a few, happened later en masse, and this little book that had done me so much good acquired the reputation of being extremely harmful!”
Ozzy Osbourne was also blamed for driving his fans to suicide. His song, Suicide Solution, was actually about the destructiveness of alcoholism. A blues song, Gloomy Sunday, has also been blamed. Fortunately, Netflix hasn’t bowed to the pressure to make creative story telling as bland and harmless as Velveeta Cheese.
Links
- Bullying in Schools: Who Gets the Blame?
- Bad Culture to blame for bullying in schools.
- Bullying is a fact of life in many schools…
- First-Grader Labeled a Sexual Harasser.
- Did “13 Reasons Why” Spark a Suicide Contagion Effect?
- “13 Reasons Why” drove more Google searches for suicide methods.
- Official Website of the book.
- 13 Reasons Why (TV Series 2017) IMDb.
- 13 Reasons Why Netflix.
- A Second Season.
- Talking ‘Bout My G-Generation.
Judging Judgement?
psychopaths, being human, are capable of judging others’ people’s behavior. I can judge my own behavior, too, knowing something I did was objectively wrong. But my judgement is just a detached intellectual acknowledgement, not even a mild self-flagellation. Of course, I can regret a stupid decision if it caused painful consequences. But that isn’t guilt. I also have a certain code of behavior. If I violate it, am I letting myself down? Perhaps.
I believe that it is wrong to judge the behavior of others. After all, I can do anything I want. Why judge others when they make choices? That doesn’t mean I’m always consistent in living up to the ideal of being non-judgemental. I do judge other people sometimes, especially when their behavior has an impact on me. For example, I judge conservatives for supporting political policies that would cause me material harm. At the same time, I admit to myself that, were I in different economic circumstances, my politics could easily be different and I could be one of those people I currently judge.
I have always identified with the underdog. I, therefore, adhere to the outlaw’s code that snitching to the authorities is wrong. Of course, I would seek remedy from the authorities if I were being harmed and were unable to remedy the situation myself. But I tend to judge people who snitch on someone who is violating the law in some way that doesn’t harm the snitch directly. I do realize that judging a snitch is inconsistent with my philosophy so I try to be tolerant.
I think there is a difference between judging the morality of behavior and the worth of belief systems. I do judge ideas that are irrational and I judge them harshly. Religion is high on my list of irrational belief systems. Since most religion judges people’s behavior, I have an extra reason to judge it. Not only is it irrational, it is judgemental. Christianity 
features high in that area. Most Christians believe God will punish anyone who doesn’t obey the Christian code of conduct. Some are not content to let God do the punishing. They support laws that force Christian rules on everyone. While openly despising the Muslims’ Sharia Law, they are actually advocating their own version of Sharia. Hypocrisy is a form of irrationality that I find particularly odious.
In the secular world, many want to enforce their form of morality on people who are not even harming others, hence the concept of victimless crimes. The use of mind-altering drugs is one of the most monitored forms of behavior that affects only the individual engaging in it. Society has made a distinction between drugs prescribed by a doctor for the treatment of illness, referred to as medication, and drugs taken by an individual for the sake of feeling good or otherwise altering consciousness, referred to as drugs. Both are controlled by the state. I despise all belief systems that support this kind of interference with individual liberty. Obviously, the state has the right and the duty to protect us from each other. Rape, robbery, murder, etc, are crimes that need to be prevented in order to protect our very liberty. But laws forbidding victimless crimes are themselves crimes.
Another belief system I judge is racism. The idea that everyone with a certain ancestry or ethnicity has particular qualities is irrational. The idea that these ethnic qualities are on a spectrum of superiority/inferiority is not only irrational but also judgmental. It is used as a way to divide people to make it easier for the ruling class to have power over us. Those who criticize the artificial high of drugs should look at the artificial high of the illusion of racial superiority.
How not to judge
My last short story got enough positive feedback that I’m trying my hand at another one. The TV show, Buffy, has an episode in which a character is split apart into two people. One has his weakest traits and the other his strongest ones. They each think the other is an imposter. The weaker one whined, “He’s living my life better than I am.” Their first impulse is to kill each other but they learn that if one dies, the other one does too. They resolve the issue by doing magic to bring the two selves together again. I thought of a much more wicked outcome as I let my imagination run wild and pictured a scenario in which I, as the stronger “self” decided to enslave and imprison my weaker “self” but keep her alive so I could just enjoy the power.
I always want to be the most optimal, the most perfect me possible. You know the guy in Limitless? Like that but in all areas of my life, not just intellectual. What if I could split myself in half with one half having all the weak, imperfect, undesirable traits and the other all the perfection I can muster.
Last week, I came across a recipe for a magick spell that would do exactly that. I think I’ll try it. What have I got to lose. Of course, I’ll have to prepare. I’ll have to find a way to keep the weak self alive but under my control. I am already identifying with the strong half. I will have to build a cage to keep her in. I’ll make it pretty comfortable. I will include a bed and a TV. I’ll let her have drugs, the kind that keep her calm and tranquil: Benzo-diazapams and opiates. That should do the trick.
I cleared the basement and built a cage, one large enough to hold the lessor or mini-me. I like that term. “Mini-me.” It has alliteration. Of course, it’s also the name of some toy for babies but so what. Zero night is here. I descend to the basement and draw a circle which I duly consecrate, calling the corners and invoking deities. I pour the magick sand I have purchased with great difficulty in a little mountain. Then I drizzled the potion over it while chanting. Never mind what was the chant. That’s my secret. Then I took the wet sand and drew a line down from my crown chakra to my second and first chakras and up over my back until the line met itself at the top of my head. I lit a candle and dropped an explosive onto the flame. A big bang.
I am on the floor, gradually taking inventory of my hands and feet. I am moving, discovering I can get up. I look across the room. There is a weak, pathetic girl my age and gender but very nondescript and lacking in energy. I tower over her. I’ve done it. I’ve accomplished the task of isolating the most excellent qualities and making them the whole of me. I lift Mini-Me who looks questioningly and fearfully at me. I carry her to the cage and lay her on her bed. I see she has all the necessities and I lock the cage and leave the basement.
What is it like to be rejected by one’s parents? Thankfully, I didn’t know it at the time. I only found out when I received records from my past, the two years I spend in the nuthouse from ages 13 through 15. My parents told a social worker what they never told me.
Yesterday, I found another statement by a mother about her ASPD child. This one has an ironic twist in that it is the psychopath who went “no contact” on the NT mom. But the rejection is the same. This is from Facebook, name repressed for the sake of privacy.
We are always being taught that it is noble to sacrifice oneself. When goods are unequally distributed, I can see the point of telling those who have the most to share with those who have the least. Of course, those being asked to share would protest that they have the most because they earned it or won it. That’s the way 
conservatives think and that’s why they favor policies that enable the rich to keep what they have. I can sympathize with that point of view. If I have something, I don’t want to give it up. Of course, that doesn’t preclude generosity. But one is generous to a point where he can spare something and still have most of what he wants to keep. And true generosity is in line with one’s desires. So acting on a generous impulse gives one pleasure so it’s not a sacrifice.
Many have-nots on the Left believe they have been unjustly shortchanged and they work politically to take their share from those who have too much (in their judgment). We live in a democracy (of sorts) and, since the have-nots and have-lesses outnumber the haves, the latter are in danger of the have-nots voting to confiscate their goods. To prevent that from happening, the rich have set up think tanks which have successfully spread ideas that stopped the have-nots from using their political power to equal the distribution of wealth. Russia had a Communist revolution which the opinion molders of the West lost no time in demonizing. “Communism” and even “socialism” have become dirty words, especially in the United States.
Economic inequality causes some very real suffering and hardship among the poor. During the Great Depression, Communism was looked at favorably by greater numbers of Americans. While there was a real possibility of revolution, President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt instituted his New Deal which softened many of the hard edges of Capitalism. It allowed people to retire when they got old and live a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. Unemployment Insurance gave workers a soft cushion to land on when tossed out of their jobs. The idea that government could make the lives of the struggling working class easier using tax money was accepted as reasonable by all except the rich and those ideologically committed to “free enterprise” capitalism.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a turning point in ideological trends. The US has been moving to the Right ever since the Reign of Ronald the Terrible. An article called 
Here’s the real subject of this post. Mainstream morality has a belief in the “virtue” of selflessness. What’s wrong with this value? While a small number of people achieve enlightenment, a state that transcends the ego, to most of us the self and the ego are one. A truly egoless person identifies with the entire universe. This removes the idea that we are limited to our selves. We are everything. So what happens to us as individuals isn’t important. To be in that state of consciousness feels blissful, sustaining it long-term can be difficult. Spiritual ego results when someone experiences that ego-
less state and then returns to normal but still thinks he is enlightened. The ego is cunning. It takes credit for the spiritual high one has achieved and claims to be that state. Everyone on a spiritual path is aware of spiritual ego as a snare to watch out for as one evolves. I wouldn’t know but I have a theory that as one reaches higher states of consciousness, spiritual pride becomes more subtle and harder to detect. I think the highest souls give up on trying to “be” spiritual and just carry on with their lives. As Baba Ram Dass said, “chopping wood and carrying water.”
For the vast majority of us who have not transcended the ego, at least not in any sustainable way, each one of us 
In the 
That is a state of consciousness akin to the eastern ego-less enlightenment. Most of us raised in a Christian society, even those whose parents aren’t Christian, are taught that selflessness is a superior way of being. That value is forced on us as children whether we like it or not. Most professing “Christians” are far from real selflessness while preaching it. That’s kind of like the spiritual ego of those who think they are in an “ideal” state of mind but are really just themselves. Not being a Christian, I’m not overly concerned with this apparent contradiction. As a psychopath, I have a gut-level antipathy to the very idea of selflessness. I am my own greatest advocate. If I’m not for myself, how can I expect anyone else to be for me? I have had to fight the pressure to bow to selflessness all my life.
a set of toy tracks, sharing is a natural. We can have a lot more fun putting our toys together for a better game. But parents often don’t wait until a child sees the advantage of sharing. The kid is just supposed to let other children put their hands all over his things whether he wants to or not. Joan Crawford took it to a ridiculous extreme. Her adopted daughter, Christine, was showered with birthday gifts. But she was forced to give away all but one present. Mommie Dearest was apparently unaware of how married she was to her own ego while trying to force her child to prostrate her own ego.
While we normally think of selflessness as an ideal of the Left, this depraved “ideal” is now being used by the Right as an excuse to take benefits people have won through political struggle. The latest is trying to guilt-trip Boomers into “sacrificing” for Millennials by giving up our Social Security. Ageism makes it easy to hate Boomers. Cartoons depict us as ugly and 
ungainly while young people whom we’re exploiting are beautiful. Before we had Social Security, the elderly who were not independently wealthy has wretched lives or were dependent on their adult children. The Right is trying to persuade us that we must return to those days as an act of virtue and as an economic necessity. The fact of the matter is that there is no real economic need to deprive any generation of a life with dignity. The 1% want us to battle among ourselves instead of stop the constant suction of all wealth from the 99%. Occupy Wall Street did a great thing by making the 1% more visible. Instead of seeing another generation (or race) as the group that threatens to take our resources (or to which we must give up our resources), we need to see who is really consuming the lion’s share of what we need to sustain life on earth. This isn’t supposed to be a political blog and the political-economic arguments about this are stated in other posts which I’ll link to below.
CLUSTER B 