“Passing on your values” to children to inoculate them from being corrupted by the wider world is one of those vaccines that basically doesn’t work 90% of the time even with significant coercion.
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Because most people are dumber than society in aggregate and kids figure that out even if they’re dumber than both you *and* society.
Very weird effect.
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You may have a half-dozen narrow contrarian ideas in your life where you’ll beat the wisdom of the crowd but can’t even begin to compete with the gazillion ideas the world throws at everybody, with anything short of a Chinese internet firewall.
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Kids do learn from their parents, but rarely what you want them to learn, and definitely not just what you consider your “good” traits. Both nature and nurture conspire to actually pass on a random sampling of what you are. A much less flattering but more robust outcome.
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This is actually a good thing. Your life and genes are wiser than you are. The more a child presents as a culturally determinate function of the consciously cultivated personas of parents, the less impressive both are.
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I resemble both my parents in a few ways, and am supposedly a lot like my maternal grandfather but in basically every way that counts I’m a product of the integration of shitposts I’ve consumed from broader global culture.
vgr = ∫(shitposts in environment 1974-2021) dt
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This is my retconned explanation for why I’ve invested in shitpost production over having kids
I’ll never be more than 0.001% the influence of a parent in a reader’s life, but… aggregate the memetic microparenting of 100,000 shitposters and culture > family-scale nurture
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I sometimes think about how Trump has actually succeeded in strongly shaping his adult kids in just own image and “passing on his values” such as they are. That’s actually the typical picture of such “success.” It’ll take a few generations to undo.
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Culture is like water erosion. A rock looks stronger in the short term, but given enough time, water always wins.
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A family that succeeds in “passing down values” for more than a generation is basically a micro North Korea. Good luck with that.
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Postscript thought occurred to me while on my run: it says a lot that so many people spend so much of their adulthood trying to *deprogram* their parenting. So even where you do succeed, your kid will likely experience it as trauma and explicitly try to undo the success.
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