If ...

John Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Some years ago, Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” was voted the most popular poem in England. Muhammed Ali reputedly carried it with him wherever he went.

It is framed as a father’s advice to his son—as Kipling’s advice to his own son John.

It has always seemed to me, frankly, abusive. 

For example, right off, 

“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;”

Right—so you must trust yourself, yet doubt yourself.

“And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:”
Be good, but not too good; smart, but not too smart?

This kind of moral ambiguity seems to me to be the essence of abusive parenting: setting requirements the child cannot possibly achieve. It is not just that the bar is ridiculously high: it is that the child is here asked to do two contradictory things. This means they can never feel they have got it right, and they remain open to criticism by the parent whenever the mood strikes.

“If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much”

This is surely terrible life advice. In order to form a true and loving bond with anyone, you must be ready to be vulnerable. You must expose yourself to being hurt. You must give your heart fully. This is a recipe for a lonely, isolated life.

But this is the advice you would expect from an abusive parent or partner: don’t ever get too close to anyone but me. I want total control. I don’t want you to escape my clutches.

It is typical of a narcissistic parent to discourage deep relationships outside the family. It is typical of an abusive partner to object to your spending too much time with friends.

The penultimate promise with which the poem almost ends, “yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it” is also troubling. It implies that the objective of life is power, not to be a good person. This is the narcissist’s view. 

And by implication, the parent who is speaking is already a god, for presumably he already is a man. So this is his world and everything that’s in it—and, this being so, there is no room for some second ruler, at least until he dies. The poor kid has no chance.

John Kipling, to whom this poem was addressed, died early in the First World War. He was only sixteen; there was no conscription; and his poor eyesight made him ineligible for service. Nevertheless, his father Rudyard was determined that he must go to war, and pulled strings to make it happen. He died charging a German position in the Battle of Loos.

His father composed this epitaph for him: “If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

I take this as an admission of guilt—although slightly deflected by use of the plural.