Traditional parenting methodologies typically revolves around traditionally accepted positive values. Be nice, be polite, be honest, share, take personal responsibility, don’t talk back, listen to your teachers and other authority figures, abstain from behavior like illegal drugs, underage drinking or permiscuous sexual behavior and so on.
The thing is, many of these traits often seem to be counterproductive in terms of achieving actual financial success or even just professional survival. People always complain about nice guys finishing last and assholes getting ahead. Only in movies does the hyper-aggressive jerk get his ass kicked by a kid half his size who picked up Karate in 30 days from some old Japanese guy. So why not teach your kid to be one of those assholes who gets ahead?
For example:
-Take what you can while you can
-Playing sports not to improve health or learn teamwork but to learn how to be aggressive and physically dominate others
-Cheating without getting caught
-Superficial charm and attractiveness
-Using and manipulating others
-Steady diet of Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Sun Tzu and so on
-Avoiding and deferring blame and responsibility onto others
-Mercy is for the weak
So is it morally ok to provide a child with practical, if somewhat ethically questionable skills, that will ultimately help them dominate in a harsh and unforgiving world? Or am I just looking to become the father of history’s greatest monster?
I’d say that it depends. There’s a difference between teaching practicalities and realities, and teaching your kid how to act like an ass and ostracize himself from the rest of society.
Society is where it is because we work as teams. Those teams might be generally hierarchical, but it’s still a functioning body that relies on some amount of trust between its members. If each one acts independently or actively sabotages the others, you get much less accomplished and it just hurts everyone.
well, you cannot lose with teaching the charm part. It will also help you (the parent) in evolutionary terms. Think of the grandchildren, legitimate or otherwise
In terms of Nietzsche or Sun Tzu, I would think you will get more bang for the amount of time spent by beginning to teach a useful trade (whether vocational or intellectual/professional) early on. Come to think of it, Sun Tzu wrote for people already rich and in power. You have to get your kid get there first, probably.
Well, I’m from the camp that believes leaders (assholes) are born not made. Therefore, I think a parent will have little influence in those broad brush strokes. However, I do think parents can help shape a child’s innate leaderhip abilities toward certain productive goals: CEO vs military officer vs community volunteer organizer vs whatever.
I have no cites or proof. Just my gut feeling.
A few years ago, I remember a colleague was concerned about his 11 year old son. The child would cry very easily. If a softball scraped his arm, he’d break down in tears. The father was always asking us how to “toughen him up.” He bought boxing gloves, enrolled in karate, etc. It didn’t work. People are what they are. I secretly think the father was worried that his kid might be gay (NTTAWWT) but it turns out the child was fine. Just a little bit a softie.
He’s going to get you declared incompetent, make you the titular head of the businesses that front for his illegal activities, put you in a rat-infested shithole of a nursing home, then smother you with a pillow at the time that best suits his tax situation.
Kids are a wide range of things and each very different from the other. I agree that general tendencies may be set in stone such as: toughness, learning ability etc but specificity in other things tend to make kids special.
My own lessons have been hard to learn (for me). Let them be who they feel they want to be and go along for the ride. Be the tillerman of the ship, not the captain.
Even if the traits you propose did insure financial success and professional survival, there’s an awful lot more to life than just that. Lasting friendships, finding a trusting and loving partner, the way they’ll be treated in everyday life for the rest of their life etc. I would think the enjoyment of those would likely be compromised and frankly they seem more desirable if you want true happiness. So the benefits to be gained from raising your child to be more domineering and cutthroat will quite likely result in an overall net loss of happiness and quality of life.
How would we react to an amoral, cynical child? Disgust and revulsion on an visceral level. It seems quite clear that we want children to be innocent and helpless, and later grow up to adopt a different worldview, more worldly and practical. Parents are just steering kids along this bizarre, socially-approved course.
Seems to me that many people do instill those values in their kids. For all the talk about fairness, honesty, etc. lots of parents provide examples of the kind of bad behavoir you are talking about. Not that they are deliberately attempting to create the next James Bond style supervillian, but it,s a good bet that John and Jane Average don’t live according to the same highfalutin’ principals they (and the culture at large) try to drum into kids. “Do as I say and not as I do” and all that. Even people with saintly parents figure out most of this for themselves.
I don’t think you’d end up with an 18 year old kid who was not much different than his peers. Maybe he’d be a little happier than kids who become disappointed in themselves when they discover that they have not been able to live up to their parents espoused (if not acted) virtues, or kids who decide their parents are hypocrites and hate them for it.
But the positive values we strive to instil are not just there for shits and giggles. In my experience, there’s a very *practical *aspect to the Golden Rule, and to cooperation as opposed to a crab bucket-y free for all.
You might see a net short term gain by being a cutthroat jackass, that much is true. You might get ahead right now. In the long term, people who play ball get further ahead. And they have less to worry about tingling sensations between their shoulderblades.
The people who complain about nice guys finishing last are usually not as nice as they think they are and finished last because they’re inept.
I’ve never seen an ounce of evidence that being an asshole is necessary to be successful. It doesn’t necessarily stop you, but many successful people are not assholes. I HAVE seen people fail because they were assholes.
Possibly the they are also instilled from the absence of teaching your kids any values. It seems to me (in my admittedly annecdotal observations) that when kids grow up with absent parents, regardless if it is a poor family where the mom works and the dad is in jail, a wealthy family where the parents can just ship them off somewhere or simply the product of divorce, those kids can grow up very angry, selfish and entitled. Their lesssons essentially become self-taught from their observations from hanging out from other troubled kids.
Teach them that the world is full of dickheads, once they understand this then you need to teach them to work with them and use them to thier and socities advantage.
