Do you believe there's such a thing as a "bad seed"?

[Sal Ammoniac]

Let's begin with a definition: "bad seed," for the purposes of this thread, is a child raised by normal parents who turns out to be pure evil. In other words, let's leave out abnormal bad experiences (wars, molestation, cranial injury, etc.) obvious mental illness (schizophrenia, psychosis), or the effects of drugs. It would help if said bad seed has siblings that are good seed, or at least okay seed.

Know anybody like that? I don't, myself, and I'm glad I don't.

(Special bonus points if you're a bad seed yourself!)

[Sampiro]

I think that by definition a "bad seed" is a sociopath, which as the word implies is a pathology. While sociopaths most definitely exist, no question about it, it is a mental abnormality and they really don't choose to be that way. A diagnosed sociopath I once worked with when I was a case manager in mental health probably summed it up nicely when he said "It's not that I don't want to care about the feelings and pain of others, it's just that I don't" (and he wasn't being glib or trying to be funny). The ones I have known all had at least relatively normal parents.

So, bad seeds exist but it's I think ultimately physiological/pathological in origin. That's not to say they shouldn't be held accountable for their actions- they should, for they at least intellectually know what they are doing is wrong and self-serving, and they should be punished accordingly and I would argue they should be punished to an even greater degree than others since they have no emotional negative reinforcement and thus only a selfish fear of reprisal is going to "correct" their behavior. But I do think it's essentially a birth defect when someone's an "all the way" bad seed.

I make a distinction between the sociopath and people who are assholes due to drugs or circumstance. The main difference is that there is hope for the latter.

[Shagnasty]

I have a cousin that is one. My aunt and uncle are two great and pure people that would do anything for their three kids. The first two turned out great. They went to good colleges even though my aunt and uncle never did and they shot right out and figured out what they wanted to and did it. Then there was the youngest, Brian. You wanted to kknow about drugs and he admitted he has had a meth problem since high school. That seemed to be enough. I can't count how many times he has been in jail and he once cursed out a judge in the middle of giving him public service and dared the judge to so something better. He went to jail again for two months. Two weeks ago he assualted someone with a broken beer bottle and may go to prison over it. He seems hellbent on destruction for himself and everyone around him. Nobody seems to be able to help him either. We all assume that he will be dead soon enough. He just cruises the streets on his motorcycle seeking out bad things.

[Annie-Xmas]

Yes I do think that some people are just born to be bad. Nancy Spungen was born into a nice middle class family and her younger brother and sister turned out fine. Yet Nancy was a bad child from the start.

Since we know some people are born with good personalities, and some people grown up in hideous environments and turn out very well, it's only reasonable to assume that some people will turn out bad no matter what the circumstances.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Yes I do think that some people are just born to be bad. Nancy Spungen was born into a nice middle class family and her younger brother and sister turned out fine. Yet Nancy was a bad child from the start.
I had to go and read up on Nancy Spungen in Wikipedia. It seems she was born a month and a half prematurely, and suffered from blue-baby syndrome. Her mother apparently claims she was also a paranoid schizophrenic. Maybe a damaged seed more than a bad seed.

[Wee Bairn]

I may be wrong, but I don't recall Jeffrey Dahmer as having anything grossly out of the ordinary in his childhood, but I'm not sure he can be considered evil, anyway.

[Alias]

I had to go and read up on Nancy Spungen in Wikipedia. It seems she was born a month and a half prematurely, and suffered from blue-baby syndrome. Her mother apparently claims she was also a paranoid schizophrenic. Maybe a damaged seed more than a bad seed.

You should read Deborah Spungen's autobiography/biography of Nancy called "And I don't want to live this life." It's a fascinating read, and it sheds a lot of light on Nancy's problems. I think she was definitely mentally ill- not a bad seed.

[Quiddity Glomfuster]

I don't believe in 'evil' people. If you do awful things to other humans, then there's something wrong with your brain. I think that eventually, all such ailments will be preventable or treatable.

[Harmonious Discord]

Yes

[WhyNot]

I had to go and read up on Nancy Spungen in Wikipedia. It seems she was born a month and a half prematurely, and suffered from blue-baby syndrome. Her mother apparently claims she was also a paranoid schizophrenic. Maybe a damaged seed more than a bad seed.
While I don't recall if she was premature or not, I do remember that it was jaundice, and an extremely high bilirubin count, which eventually led to a near-total blood transfusion, that Deborah often wondered about causing irreparable damage to the infant Nancy.

[Least Original User Name Ever]

*drools acid*

You rang?

[fisha]

Yes, I do. I've met a couple.

[Auntbeast]

On our road to pathologize everything, it's hard to declare someone a "bad seed" any more.

That and when we see someone like that, we just KNOW their a few flavors short of the 31. I'm certain that one day we will know what biological triggers there are for such people.

I have been constantly amazed by my daughter. Her default setting is happy. She can't even throw a tantrum yet and maintain it for more than a few minutes. Then I go to work and deal with people who always seem to be pissed off.

When I was a teenager, my brother was a problem kid. My mother, in desperation signed up for the Tough Love system. We ended up with this rotten kid in our house who was just, useless. He stands out as one of the few people I've ever really gone off on. Of course, he was a teenager, so it might have been that. But I have no idea if he grew out of it. God he was a piece of shit, even for a teenager. (When my brother was arrested, the warrant on him described him as "quiet disposition, calm demeanor, no violent tendencies.")

[toadbriar]

Every time I think about this, I get hung up on the fact that families who look completely normal from the outside can be really whacked in private. And by the time a person's grown up, lots of the determining factors of their mental make-up are decades in the past. I know that in my own family, various members can have vastly differing memories of the same event or even a general recollection of 'how things were'.

All 'bad seeds' would presumably be sociopaths, but would all sociopaths be to some degree bad - amoral? My reading on the topic skews towards the lurid, so I wonder about the not-wrecking-people's-lives sort of sociopath, if there is such a thing. Is there such a thing?

[Scissorjack]

Yes I do think that some people are just born to be bad. Nancy Spungen was born into a nice middle class family and her younger brother and sister turned out fine. Yet Nancy was a bad child from the start.

Wait - what? Sid stabbed her: how does that make her a bad seed - dirtying his knife? So she was a bleach blonde junkie slut with a thing for destructive rock musicians - thirty years on, she would have had her own TV show and a cosmetics line.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Every time I think about this, I get hung up on the fact that families who look completely normal from the outside can be really whacked in private.
Or alternatively, there's some secret trauma -- molestation by a neighbor, say -- or an unsuspected medical problem that no one ever learns about. So from the outside, everything looks normal -- parents are normal, siblings are normal -- but the putative bad seed in fact has hidden damage.

[Scumpup]

My second wife's son. He's never had anyone around him but loving, caring people...and yet he's always been a total shit. I remember being amazed and disgusted at seeing him, age 3 1/2, make a deliberate and systematic effort to hurt his grandmother's feelings. From the moment he was enrolled in school, a constant stream of disciplinary referals have followed him home. He's about 12 now and has only grown worse with age. As he enters his teens, I foresee bad things.

[WhyNot]

Wait - what? Sid stabbed her: how does that make her a bad seed - dirtying his knife? So she was a bleach blonde junkie slut with a thing for destructive rock musicians - thirty years on, she would have had her own TV show and a cosmetics line.
Having read the book mentioned above, I can only go by it. The "bad seed" parts were long before she even met Sid - uncontrollable violent rages, self-mutilation as a toddler, attacking her siblings and parents, drug abuse (of course), theft, etc. One doesn't become a bleach blonde junkie slut overnight.

Deborah also suspects that Nancy goaded Sid into stabbing her - that it became a game of "if you really loved me, you'd end my pain." That was the sort of mindfuck she played on her family for years. Nancy was certainly smart enough and Sid pussywhipped enough that she could have easily manipulated him into the deed, especially if he was drunk or drugged.

[Annie-Xmas]

Whynot, I read Deborah Spungen's book too. Nancy decided what she wanted to do, and rules be damned. She didn't live by her parent's rules, her schools' rules, or by society's rules. Her two siblings turned out fine (Well, Susan did work for Martha Stewart). Nancy was uncontrollable from the start, and nothing seem to be able to stop her. She was sent to a boarding school for problem children, went to college at age 16 and still couldn't straight herself out.

I know that Nancy was murdered, but I don't consider her an "innocent victim." If she had been walking down the street and was attacked and killed, she would have been. But she wanted to die, and in all likelihood she set herself up to be killed by Sid. She bought the knife and mentioned to her mother that she was going to die before she was 21.

[Rilchiam]

Wait - what? Sid stabbed her: how does that make her a bad seed - dirtying his knife? So she was a bleach blonde junkie slut with a thing for destructive rock musicians - thirty years on, she would have had her own TV show and a cosmetics line.

Thirty years on, doctors would have taken her parents seriously, instead of saying "She's just acting out; you have to take a hard line with her." More effective meds would have been prescribed. Insurance would have covered the treatments she needed. Or a sliding-scale fee would have been applied.

Really, Nancy's parents tried every way they could. It was most unfortunate for them that Nancy was born in the spare-the-rod 1950s, and came of age in the kids-are-free-spirits 1960s. The way Deborah describes it, it was like a non-funny version of "One Froggy Evening." Nancy was exhibiting all kinds of truly disturbing behavior, and all the doctors heard was "Ribbit."

[Auntbeast]

I often wonder about the facade people have. Our family was pretty big on appearances, so much so that once when we went to family therapy, the therapist asked if everything was so great, why were we there. I also remember catching hell for talking about things to the therapist. That being said, I am far different from my other family members. Everyone else looks healthy, and I'm the one that is sick.

I know what happened behind the doors at my house, even though it isn't acceptable to talk about it. I often wonder if some of those folks out there aren't just more of what I was. A canary in a coal mine.

[Terrorcotta]

I've known one for several decades - my younger brother. He's smart, glib and has some sort of magnetism that women always fall for. He's also a pathological liar and has been since he could talk. I separated myself from him early even if I couldn't have told you why. Now I know it was simple self-preservation but it still upsets my mom that "...you just don't get along with your brother." Her dementia makes this a very long and circular discussion these days. I have almost no tolerance for whiney women so I tend to get all 'truthy' on her and that doesn't help.

He's never been in court for any crime, but there are a string of strange occurances that surround him and since no one ever gets the same story about anything from him we have no idea what he's done. Until now. Seems he's stolen over a quarter million dollars from my mom. I figured he was going to bleed her dry and put her in a county home so I went to court to get a guardian for her. It was a painful process for all of us but now I know she's safe and can live out her days in relative comfort.

As to the OP, I've been spending more time with the relatives and now I am hearing a lot of things about my brother from family. My mom always felt reponsible for my brother's dyslexia and has been an enabler. Most of them had an idea how bad he was going to be but my mom's enabling cancelled out their warnings. On the flip side I find out that they have all felt sorry for me the whole time. I had no idea I was the object of pity! At first I was horrifyed and embarassed, then I began to feel very good about myself for knowing it was a toxic situation and I was right to leave.

It's been a rough year....and anyone with one of these beings in their family has my deepest sympathies.

[cowgirl]

Every time I think about this, I get hung up on the fact that families who look completely normal from the outside can be really whacked in private. Honestly. I have these friends, 4 siblings, whose mother is a total nutjob. To all appearances they live a perfectly normal middle-class life, but that woman is completely insane.

The kids' adult activities run the gamut from settling down with the white picket fence, to backpacking around the world for years on end, but all of them are nice and normal folks, no drugs, they all finished school, etc.

Which is 100% due to the KIDS and not to their upbringing. By all rights that crazy woman should have raised at least one nutcase, and if one of them had turned out to be a junkie (or whatever) it would look (to everyone who doesn't know them as well as I do) like it was a "bad seed" as you describe - a bad kid raised by "normal" parents.

[Walloon]

I may be wrong, but I don't recall Jeffrey Dahmer as having anything grossly out of the ordinary in his childhood, but I'm not sure he can be considered evil, anyway.Murdering 17 men and boys over a thirteen year period doesn't qualify you as evil? Just ornery, bad tempered, unkind?

[Rigamarole]

Murdering 17 men and boys over a thirteen year period doesn't qualify you as evil? Just ornery, bad tempered, unkind?

He was just misunderstood, surely.

[Shirley Ujest]

I don't think there is something as a Bad Seed.


I think it is alot of terracotta's* situation: enabling parents, different parenting/time period, untreated/undiagnosed mental illness(es). Back then you did not discuss mental illness. It reflected horribly on the family.

My late brother #3 was a handful. Not a bad person ( except for the "Never trust a Jew or Nigger." Yeah, that was fun and he didn't mean it toward any individual, it was The Group, per se. He'd never say a thing inapprpriate to any person that wasn't whitebread. but if there was a bad luck to be had it was #3 that found it. He simply lacked common sense (all my brothers were Mensa, which means Nutty, too me.) and then was repeated bailed out of situations by my mother. Over and over and over and over and over again.

Brother #1, whom I only knew through phone calls home for him to constantly ask for money and having my mother write him another check ( and there went my college fun, thanks, Jimmy.) leeched on her too.


Alot of the problem besides the enabling was the fact that my mom refused to say, " Something isn't quite right with that boy." and take him in for help. Because, you see, mental illness in any form to her generation would be viewed as Something Terrible and Really, Really Bad and the Friends and Neighbors and FAmily would TALK!!!!!1111!!!! Oh NOES!

My, how attitudes and times change, no? Nearly everyone I know is on some kind of drugs and we talk about our issues and the breaking point that lead us to therapy/RX/the road to better mental health. (And those who I know who do not take any meds and think it is all a crock o'shit, are the ones that are the most fucked up and, IMHO, bad seeds because they cannot/refuse to change/evolve and pass on their ignorance to their children.)

Huh.

Just contradicted myself.









Terrorcotta It takes a very strong person to stand up for yourself, perserve your own sanity and happiness and move away from a toxic human being, while others mystifyingly continue to support/help/encourage really awful behavior. It isn't easy being a pariah of the family, but in the end, you saved your mom and proved them right. Unfortunately, there are no ceremonies or parades for such things, but, on the behalf of others who have walked in your shoes down that weary trail, I present to you: The Black Sheep Award. :D

[Terrorcotta]

Why, thank you Shirley! That's remarkably touching.

I'm just reeling from the idea I am the Good Kid now. As good as being proved right feels, I'm still sorry it had to come to this. We've all missed a lot of years.