A reader emails to write of his reflections on the way in which the psychological approach is entirely unsuited to handle genuine evil.
On a serious note, the JBP discussion brought up something I wrote out and saved. You saved me the same few hours of reading, to reach similar conclusions. I’m disturbed by the dreams and unmoored personality, and disturbed similarly by the “Clean your room. Take your meds. Be Nice” set of commands.
Normally, suicide prevention is one of those mandatory training things that you nod through and then forget immediately. We had the unexpected benefit of having parents come in to “share their story” about how their son suicided at age 21, after years of drug issues. The emotional testimonial is one that I loathe, so I was busy tuning them out. It was crisis acting in action, complete with the special choreographed music for the slide show. But in the middle of mom’s opening speech about her dead son, she mentioned reading Gene Wolfe stories and going to conventions hosted by the local Science Fiction Society. Oh, now you got my focus.
The father was distant and not really involved with his family, and mom was associated with the SF scene in some way. I had read the Castalia House blog posts and The Last Closet, so at this point I tuned out the mom and soundtrack and paid attention to the boy’s pictures. What really got my attention were the activities the pictures came from: Scouts, swim team, boys’ choir, lead role in the school musical….
Oh, ye cats indeed.
The pictures were random and not in time sequence. Starting at about age 9-10 the boy’s stance, facial expressions, and attitude began changing in the pictures. It became overacting and getting outrageous in pictures shown to the public. The behavior changes did not look normal for the age. It was about age 15-16 where his drug use went into heavy opiate addiction, according to parents, and the pictures shown were of a ravaged young man with some serious ghosts in his eyes.
Short of adding peer counselor or gymnastics to the above list, it’s hard to consider a worse combination of potential exposure to pedophiles or homosexual groomers. After ten minutes, I wondered if drugs were used as part of the grooming, or if he turned to hard opiates to try forgetting. Moira Greyland’s words came back to haunt me for the next couple days.Were the parents blind to this possibility?
I thought I had this out of my system, but then came the issues concerning Jordan Peterson. I listened to about one and a half of his videos, and tuned out. Your analysis, including the diabolical influence, was on target. My thoughts came out of background. Peterson advocated therapeutic measures to mitigate the pain, and nothing to stop it, defend the youth, and counterattack. Then there were his writing about the cannibalistic and incestuous dreams. This does NOTHING to help young men. &*^{0f7560f409a8026d7b9d46efb18eca7d6fc1e8f4d90e8abec425fae450ca0aef} that, there are souls at risk.