"Love you, Hate you." The cybernetic anti human splitting of being raised by hippies
Does it or does it not take a village
Cybernetics is the study of control. It is the study of binary. On/Off goes the transistor. Two types of inputs communicating a wide area of possibilities.
Perhaps hippies is too specific here. We’re really talking about a type of typically upper middle class intellectual class that harbors deep contempt for how children cognitively develop. A subculture which treats the children raised in it similar to have deeply abusive men treat their wives. A progressive eroding and denial of healthy human skill building, leading up to a boiling point of explosive rage. There isn’t much difference between the man who praises “The Goddess” and then beats his wife, and a subculture that praises children’s intellect while neglecting them. Destroying the physical reality of what one idolizes.
Rowe culture involves teaching the young anti life skills in order to attempt to see a mythical innate wisdom reveal itself. When one idolizes “innate wisdom”, it provides incentive not to teach. Teaching would be seen as ruining magic as opposed to giving proper healthy structure for a human being. I wouldn’t be surprised if I learned that unschooling culture was very similar to Rowe culture. A new term might need to be coined to identify exactly what we are dealing with here.
“Love you, hate you” is what was directed towards me during my major developmental years. I remember being praised by various adults for being considerate of the environment, yet there was this palpable undercurrent of contempt of me for needing resources to exist. This idea that it rested upon the children to fix the earth and that if I at 13 didn’t have a handle on things, then some new messianic baby should just take my place on this planet.
Being told we were disgusting planet murderers for not having perfect “carbon footprints” during the time when we needed to learn driving and basic career moves. We were evil if we seen as “part of the system” and evil if we were using money. We were either idealized or condemned. Parentifying minors was the norm. The boomers say themselves as breaking away from their parents and expected us to follow suit. A strange “I know I must be wrong in someway and am excited for you to overthrow me.”
Adults indulging their odd theories and curiosities cut into our time for healthy development. Inappropriate remarks hidden in anthology references abounded. In many ways, the entire thing mirrored the Christian purity culture of the time. This sense that we were deeply evil and had failed at a savior. The Christian evangelicals had Jesus and we had this expectation that we were supposed to be the chosen ones.
We were told having most jobs were evil but expected to buy expensive food. Coffee was evil unless it was very expensive, chocolate as well. Abstaining entirely made you seem strange or laughable in the eyes of wealthier community members. You could also never abstain enough. There was always a major class tension and guilt intersection at every corner. They’d say the love the working class but really they hated us. They only loved the ones they didn’t know. They only loved the stories of people in foreign countries who could say they owed everything to them buying chocolate!
You couldn’t just be a person. You had to some expectational redeeming quality and that quality had better shine like a diamond. It better be innate to your soul. Reminding these people that you are a flesh and blood human could enrage them. To show that you benefit from stability and that you aren’t a human toy could enrage them.
The adults loved when we acted as mini versions of them. They loved teaching us an overabundance of questionable sex ed. They loved teaching us to express wild viewpoints. It wasn’t about what was good for us in the long term, it was about having as many “luxury beliefs” as possible. We were to be indulgent in our beliefs and self effacing in our consumption. Sitting down on a rock and pretending to learn to drive being more preferable to actually driving.
Until reality sets in. Until you realize that in order to haul your neglected child to the remote woods for an aura reading retreat YOU HAVE TO DRIVE THEM. Until you realize that despite hours teaching the children who to dunk on evangelicals, you never taught them how to pick a good vehicle.
The failed child messiahs are seen as having betrayed these idealistic communities. These communities often have a pervasive feeling of “x cannot fail, it can only be failed.” Even in cases where the former messiah child grows up relatively okay, it is often in spite of the adults around them. All of us would have been vastly better off without this storm of “Love you, hate you.” “Love you, hate you” persists in pseudo woke culture. The same dynamics are often at play, but without the messiah child element. Instead there is this pervasive feeling of guilt and dread. The “Love you” is removed, leaving nothing but hate you. “Love you” is seen as distant futurity and not at all promised. The hurt of the neglectful idealizing “Love you” replaced with a distant evasive one. Sometimes the former child messiahs will get to play the role of the withholder of this new “Love you.”
They may feel their parents didn’t properly love them for their REAL specialness or some other psychodrama. The crushing blow of watching the first paradigm fail causing a Reaction into cruelty. The overarching demand remains the same. “Be more than human to earn being treated as a human.” Similar to a child with OSDD crafting narratives about really being a non human to make sense of life, this subculture fabricates fancy narratives to justify the mundane. The appeal to dramatic narratives in order to make basic social functions work is rather pathological. By demanding the sublime, we have exhausted the real. By demanding child academics, we have undercut basic functioning.
The antidote to this, is to see the promotion of dissociation from being human as a type of moral poison.