Why people hate children
Vulnerability and holding babies
I disagree with this image.
The “imp of the perverse” impulse that people report experiencing, when holding a child, about imagining throwing it, is not random. It is specific to holding a baby, people don’t report feeling a sudden urge fantasizing about throwing, for example, a wallet or a fork. I disagree that this is a “normal stream of consciousness” and “its the thoughts you act on that matter”. Having thoughts themselves means something, and it’s worthwhile to understand what.
Holding a baby triggers some of the most primordial psychological and chemical effects in a human its possible to have, it’s deeper than animal level instincts. It’s primordial soup level instincts. A baby is the ultimate vulnerability. It is the concept of vulnerability made manifest. A baby is inherently in danger, by it’s being, a baby, and you recognize this on a primordial level. If it is the case that: “Baby”, then, danger. Mirror-neurons blasting alert.
I think what is happening to people who experience this, is, on a psychological level, is that they are uncomfortable with the concept of vulnerability, they are not comfortable with their own vulnerability. So that when confronted, physically, with Vulnerability Made Manifest, their wires get crossed and they can’t compute it, and mistakenly misinterpret it as an attack, which in turn results in an aggressive self defence response. Fantasy.
It’s a computational error trying to process an automatic empathic experience. I don’t necessarily mean to say its a big deal and trying to guilt people who experience this. But I’m also not not doing that. Luckily however there is a cure.
If you are so afraid of vulnerability that being forced to face the conceptual reality of it makes you afraid and overwhelmed, then you simply need to think seriously about death some more. As we’ve discussed here many times, sentience is death-awareness, and in this context, I think it’s fitting to say that awareness of your own mortality is accepting a kind of vulnerability.
Ways you can go about achieving this include: Tell people something you are deeply ashamed about, without making excuses for it. If you have the baby throwing fantasy, admitting it is good, but writing it off as random and “choosing not to identify with it” is a bunch of modernist mindfulness gobbledygook, that only exasperates the problem, and is a way to avoid feeling vulnerable. Best case scenario, it’s symptomatic treatment, which prevents a deeper cure. “normalizing” a “taboo thought” like this, is not good, and “letting parents who are scared and confused about parenthood fell less guilty for their bad thoughts” is not good in itself - unless you subscribe to a worldview where all thoughts are essentially just a random number generator. The ultimate contradiction in the modernist worldview is that everything has a materialistic cause-effect relationship, except your own thoughts, which are just pure Chaos drawn from a hat.
What is needed is an integration of “sentience” and instinct, which is something that is frustrated today because we do not live in a natural environment (the world we have built for ourselves since 1789).
It is a microcosm for the ultimate social problem of today, the much discussed atomization and individualization of the world. The way you establish a social connection with another mind, the way you establish a friendship, or even basic animal “play” requires, mechanically, making yourself vulnerable to the Other, and blindly trusting it to not Crush You.
Dogs do this: you show your belly and throat in mock submission, because those are your softest, weakest spots. It’s literally called “a soft underbelly”. The way humans go about it usually is, you show a little bit of vulnerability, then the other party shows a little, and you go back and forth getting progressively more vulnerable with each other, as you slowly expand the realm of “he is not going to Crush Me even if I Show My Big Red Glowing Spots”. Also called trust. And just instead of body parts it’s usually stories about our lives with stuff we are upset and ashamed about. But depending on the kind of relationship, body parts also come into play.
I think this idea can be extrapolated to a lot of things and has a lot of potential explanatory power for the general shift in attitude to towards children over the past 100 years, from an unconscious expectation and a natural part of life, to, an opt-in fashion statement of identity-building, to, whatever horrors the future has in store for us.
If you have Dasein, holding a baby is purely a majestic experience beyond scope, a “falling to your knees and seeing the face of god” type deal. If you have integrated your Anima, the child’s vulnerability only makes it precious, awe inspiring, majestic. And the way you get Dasein is confession.
Here's a confession. When my children were first born I would cope by spending way to much time on my cellphone (Twitter). It was some Peter Pan Syndrome type sh**. My wife would complain all the time "spend time with your children!" but I was so addicted and absorbed in my little fantasy cope world. Finally to break the spell, one day I took my smart phone and smashed it with a hammer in front of her. I left Twitter and spent more time with my kids after that.
The poisonous part of modernity: Not Knowing How to Hear a Confession. Your friends IRL say a Good Honest Thing and you go "Aha, nice try guy, looking to pull my strings." Or you think "Ah, I've seen this before, he cannot be redeemed" because nobody on the tl is really looking for redemption/confession. You think, "Doesn't he know that HR won't tolerate this?" "Isn't that a Bad Thought?"
And all the while you make no confessions - per yourself, who would listen? (lots of people) - and you get crusty and mad and bleak. So no one lets you hold baby, but you see all these babies and you're like "What the fuck look at all these sinners holding babies, don't worry stick to the plan."