Sorry To Return To This, But...

[poliphilo]

Why all this celebrity support for Polanski when nobody jumped to the defence of Gary Glitter?

What has Roman got that Gary hasn't?

No-one plays Gary's music anymore, but Polanski is still in work. At the time of his arrest he was preparing a movie about Tony Blair.
 
I don't get it, I really don't.

Comments

[oakmouse]

Exactly, and I don't think the sympathy card should be applied to anyone in that situation. People who have experienced tragedy, violence, and so forth can face it, deal with it, and choose how they respond. Also, I've met too many abuse victims who chose deliberately to become abusers for their own ends. My mother was violently abusive, and of her four children two have chosen to deal with their own issues and work consciously on not mimicking her patterns, and two have chosen to internalize her patterns and learn ways to behave abusively without looking overtly abusive so they can get away with things she did not.

[oakmouse]

Sorry, that was supposed to be "learn to choose how they respond". Bad edit.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I remember a woman who was abused by her mother saying on TV that she could have been an abuser too but chose not to be- and she didn't see why others couldn't make the same choice.

That's the mystery- why some go one way and some the other- why you rejected your mothers behaviour patterns and two of your siblings didn't. Is it about strength of character or what?

[oakmouse]

I've been thinking about this question, and have come to the conclusion that a lot of it is about how you respond to the world once your trust has been sufficiently violated. Do you decide that you don't want to fall to your abuser's level? Do you decide to strike out? Do you decide to manipulate and control other people? Do you decide to hurt yourself instead of lashing out? Do you decide that what happened to you doesn't justify paying forward the pain?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that you see it as a matter of conscious choice.

I like that. We're not the puppets of the unconscious, but at any given moment can choose whether we do right or wrong.

[oakmouse]

Ironically, I've been thinking a lot about this very issue because my husband's blog is being trolled by a graduate student in sociology who is convinced that laboratory experiments prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that human beings are indeed the pawns of their deep minds and that we're incapable of consciously choosing to alter our responses.

At this point, my opinion (based on experience and observation) is that every human being is capable of making such conscious choices. However, not all people know, or understand, or believe in that capability, and not all of the people who know about it are sufficiently practiced in exercising it to have gotten consistent or perhaps any results yet. (Like any skill, it needs work and practice to develop fully.) Some people will keep working at it in spite of failures because they have a strong desire to do right even if it's hard and painful work. And some people refuse to acknowledge its existence while using it for ill because they don't want to do right; they enjoy doing wrong.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I certainly believe I make conscious moral choices, but I don't suppose there's any way I could prove it.

[oakmouse]

When it comes to human behavior, I don't trust laboratory-based proof. Experiment after experiment has shown that the only thing laboratory experiments prove is how people and animals behave under laboratory conditions. There was a big story recently about the fact that the guy who developed the alpha wolf theory has now completely rejected it because it reflects a behavior that wolves do not show in the wild --- only in the lab, when forced to form a pack with a bunch of strange wolves who aren't their family. (In the wild, packs are basically a breeding pair and their offspring, or are otherwise family-based.) So, you know, I wouldn't worry unduly about proof. Lived experience and the fruit of your efforts in your own and other people's lives is a much more important gauge.