Tips for Surviving the Suckfest Slog of Infidelity

There are definitely different theories about the roots of empathy impairment. I just find the genetic empathy deficit/born evil theory way too close to the old eugenic “crime gene” theory for my tastes. Plus every time some big genetic discovery is made supposedly supporting this idea, it turns out to be unreplicable and is typically founded on blatantly bigoted, debunked science.

For example, I once combed through the bibliography and every single one of the citations and even citations for citations for citations in Simon Baron-Cohen’s awful The Science of Evil for a group of disability lawyers who were trying to outlaw certain restraint and seclusion practices in schools and recognized that institutions were defending these practices and policies by using the kind of junk science that SBC was promoting. My task was to identify all the scary, antique junk science SBC’s eugenic arguments were based on so the advocacy attorneys could bring this to the attention of more legitimate scientists and hopefully get them hot under the collar about it.

Yikes, what a house of cards that book was. It’s hard to believe he’s the star of Cambridge. In the end we kind of concluded that The Science of Evil was really nothing more than The Bell Curve but in liberal drag and with the racialism concealed behind sciency cognitive theories. But all his citations added up to “Brown people are naturally violent and criminally inclined”
and “women who claim abuse are borderline.”

What a mess. Thankfully there are other theories on learned behavior to explain how people develop on/off switches for empathy that don’t veer off into master race/criminal race stuff and cognitive “castes.” One straightforward example of this is racism as a template for the development of narcissism because the belief system is clearly about how some people are inherently better and more worthy/entitled than others which is narcissism in a nutshell. It even has DARVO built right in because, in order to justify their fundamentally unjust views, unjust behavior and support for unjust policies, racist people have to continually collect evidence of the crimes and flaws of their designated scapegoats and, lacking that, just invent the evidence (eating pets anyone?).

So theoretically, someone raised by racist parents is probably at higher risk for developing narcissistic traits and the template for abusive behavior as an extension of an unjust and irrational ideological view. But, in my personal experience, I think being exposed to racist ideas alone doesn’t quite drive in the shitty belief system to the depths of someone’s soul unless that individual is also abused/traumatized in some way and develops psychic wounds and chronic rage.

In any case, I’ve never once encountered a racist clan that wasn’t dysfunctional af and traumatizing to children in some way or other. Live by the artificial hierarchy, die by it. From what I’ve seen, there was usually one or several patriarchal rage monkeys in the mix, then the flying monkey dynamic as everyone threw each other under the bus to avoid the loudest monkey’s wrath if not creepy sexual dynamics stemming from a fundamental imbalance of power.

Some current science seems to back this up by demonstrating that racism typically comes with other toxic patriarchal beliefs like “rape myth acceptance,” “might makes right” and “greater good” rationales to sacrifice some for the sake of others which all undergird the rationalizations for domestic abuse. And where you find rationalizations for abuse, you always find abuse.

All of this can apparently occur without fists or black eyes. Recent research on coercive control has found that it can be violentizing and cause permanent damage even if a small child is “merely” a witness to the abuse of others and/or experiences emotional neglect as a secondary effect of coercive control, either because the victim-parent is being robbed of energy and vitality and doesn’t have the bandwidth to attend to the child’s needs or because the victim-parent is frog-boiled into avoiding setting off the abuser’s envy over attention given to the child.

Regarding inadvertent neglect by a psychically traumatized victim parent, I think what makes videos on the “still face” experiments from the seventies barely watchable is because you can see how incredibly catastrophic a disruption in emotional connection can be to infants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTTSXc6sARg

In other words, babies being exposed to the secondary “fumes” of abuse can end up really fucked up. But one of the problems in proving the “nurture” theory for abusive narcissism is that, according to prison studies, domestic abusers, like other serial criminals, often cover up for the very former abusers whom they ended up emulating. Some will insist those relationships were just fine, even idyllic when other family members describe something quite different.

I guess it’s no big surprise that liars (and all abusers are liars) lie about everything and anything. It can also be that the abuse a child experienced or witnessed happened before they could speak (since women of small infants are at particularly high risk of dv and other forms of abuse) and so some simply may not remember the early influences that turned them into burned-out sociopaths.