People love to say abuse is a product of trauma. We still live with the utterly archaic wisdom, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” This has been translated by pop psychology to “Hurt people hurt.” You need to understand that the religious took over most science fields and much modern science is thus garbage.
Abuse is not a product of trauma. It’s a product of entitlement. And they absolutely know what they are doing.
Lundy Bancroft is an abuse counselor to men who provides penetrating insight. He says abuse isn’t because of how a person feels. It is in how a person thinks. It has little to do with internal emotional damage that needs healing, which just keeps it on the abuser’s health and needs, which is what he likes. Instead, Bancroft offers,
A critical insight seeped into me from working with my first few dozen clients: An abuser almost never does anything that he himself considers morally unacceptable. He may hide what he does because he thinks other people would disagree with it, but he feels justified inside. I can’t remember a client ever having said to me: “There’s no way I can defend what I did. It was just totally wrong.” He invariably has a reason that he considers good enough. In short, an abuser’s core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong. (35, emphasis original)
Abuse is in a person’s moral paradigm. They think they are doing something good and beneficial. They think they are dishing out rightfully earned punishment. They feel highly entitled to whatever it is they want. Bancroft says to imagine a child promised a piece of land but gets to be an adult and realizes they have no such land. That is the mindset of an abuser and why they rape, steal, and hit to get what they want. Please read Lundy’s Why Does He Do That. See also Don Hennessey’s work. From Men who abuse women ‘use same tactics as a pedophiles’ and I’ve never met one who wanted to change:
Mr Hennessy believes that for men who abuse it is a “lifestyle choice”.
“It’s founded on a sense of entitlement and a lack of what I call conscience. He thinks he is entitled to do certain things. He will not have a sense of the impact that those things will have on anybody else. He will just go through life taking what he can get from people and primarily that’s in his family life,” he said.
If this is so, then a reprogramming of a person’s moral paradigm would do tremendous good in the world. If we saw punishment–inflicting physical harm on someone for the sake of behavioral compliance–as ethically wrong, a tremendous amount of abuse in the world would be cleaned up.
Objectivism is known to have toxic adherents. They are caustic, abrasive, and insulting. They deny tooth and nail that the adherent’s behavior has anything to do with the philosophy. And yet Objectivism is a moral philosophy. It has an ethics. It is one that encourages its members to judge and harshly. To clean up the world of irrationality, Rand advises to “never fail to pronounce moral judgment.” Its a highly moralizing philosophy, which claims reason and rationality for itself, as well as the moral high ground. Intuition and authentic feelings are damned as possibly hedonism or mysticism. Certain men are “the better sort of man.” Only a few get into Galt’s Gulch. Not to mention some of its fictional heroes have “the slow smile of an executioner” or have eyes “dark with ecstasy” when watching slaves be whipped.
But, no. It makes no sense whatsoever that it in any way produces abusive, caustic individuals.
Ok. Yes it does.
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