Dysfunctional Governments and Dysfunctional Families

The majority of world governments are dysfunctional. They promote lies, mass delusions, propaganda, to their people. They do not respect human dignity and human rights. They do not practice social justice—that is, merit is not reliably rewarded. 

In my youth, there was the Soviet sphere, and the Third Word, and only a rough third of the world was “free.” and free of corruption to a dysfunctional level. It might seem that things have improved since the fall of the Soviet bloc; but it seems to me that things have been getting worse quickly in some of the supposedly “freest” countries: Canada, the UK, France, Australia, Germany. And until the modern era, there were no or almost no “free” countries. All governments were dysfunctional.

The Gospel warns of this: the Devil is the prince of “this world.” Government is better than no government, but government is given over to Satan.

The great value of studying history is that there you see the human truths writ large. The state is a proxy for the family; which is why we speak of “patriotism”—from the word “pater,” “father.”

So the lesson of history and politics is that most families, similarly, are dysfunctional. They promote shared delusions; they are not nurturing; they do not reward merit.

By my reading of the Old Testament, the inevitable failure of the family is the conduit for original sin: “the sins of the father are visited on the sons unto the fourth generation.” All the families of the patriarchs are obviously dysfunctional. Abraham abandons his son Ishmael, and is ready to slaughter his son Isaac. Isaac plays favourites between Jacob and Esau. Jacob plays favourites between Joseph and his brothers. Lot sleeps with his daughters. Noah curses his son Ham. Eve tempts her husband Adam into sin. The Bible is making a point, if subtly. Let those who have eyes to see, see.

Richard Mackenzie, who grew up in an orphanage, thought his own childhood without a family had been pleasant enough. And he became a successful economist. So he decided to investigate, using the economist’s toolset. What did he find out?

“Alumni [of orphanages] reported that they had done better than the general population on almost all measures, including education, income, attitude toward life, criminal records, psychological problems, unemployment, dependence on welfare, and happiness…. The alumni reported that they had an overall college graduation rate 39 percent higher than the general population in their age group … They also reported 10 to 60 percent higher median incomes than those in their age cohort. ”

Twice as many said they were satisfied with their own lives, and twice as many felt they had achieved “the American Dream.” 

Shocking? But that was the data. 

Accordingly, associating Christian values with “family values” seems diabolical. Just as we should not idolize the state, we should not idolize the family.

Francis and Mark Carney as Abusive Fathers

 

Two unaccountable and unpredicted things have happened recently. I think they are connected.

First, everyone thought the successor to Pope Francis would be a progressive “Francis 2.0.” After all, Francis had appointed 80% of the voting cardinals. Yet Leo XIV is so far signalling traditionalism. How did that happen? 

Second, having just won an election, Mark Carney’s cabinet and caucus seems rife with dissent. This shouldn’t happen right after an election win. Liberal MPs live in fear of their leader: he gets to veto their nominations if they alienate him. And Carney just saved the party’s bacon. Until he stepped in, they were headed for a historic defeat. Why the dissatisfaction?

In the case of Rome, I think we all missed the dynamic in thinking the divide in the hierarchy was between “progressives” and “traditionalists.”

The first sign was a report that, as they gathered for Francis’s funeral, the cardinals demanded the opening of a repository of traditional vestments kept under lock and key by Francis. Were they all secretly traditionalist?

Then reports of an elevated mood in the Vatican—shocking at the death of a pope. Now someone is quoted as saying, for the years of Francis’s pontificate, they were all living in fear. “It is like we are escaping an abusive father.”

And that, I think, is the key. Not left or right, progressive or traditionalist, but abusive.

Francis gave no moral direction. He seemed annoyed by those who followed the traditions of the church; yet offered no clear alternative either. This left everything up to the will of Francis. 

Take, for the most obvious example, the Latin mass. Francis suppressed it, on the grounds that wanting the Latin mass was an expression of opposition to his authority. That was a tautology: if he did not suppress the Latin mass, wanting it would not be an expression of opposition to his authority.

I(t was all about the exercise of power. Francis was a narcissist. Narcissists worship their own will.

When a parent, or a superior, acts in this way, one lives in constant fear. You can never know whether you are doing right or wrong, you can never relax or feel good about yourself; you never know when the hammer will fall. Francis’s position on any given matter was unpredictable: he blew hot and cold; it seemed to depend on how he was feeling that day. He had arbitrary favourites, and punished others arbitrarily.

This is the essence of abuse. The sense of disorientation this causes is the font and source of virtually all spiritual distress, which we commonly and improperly call “mental illness.”

Francis was driving everyone mad.

And Carney seems to be in the same mold. What is his true stand on any issue? He campaigned on imposing tariffs on the US, and standing up to Trump. Now he has quietly suspended the tariffs. He endorsed the carbon tax, then set it to zero. 

In personnel matters, word leaked out that Chrystia Freeland was being dropped from cabinet; then she wasn’t. I suspect this was not a false rumour; Carney changed his mind. A more public example is Nate Erskine-Smith. In Carney’s first, stripped-down cabinet, he kept Erskine-Smith. Only a month later, in his greatly expanded cabinet, he dropped Erskine-Smith. This seems inconsistent, arbitrary. This is clearly the way Erskine-Smith experienced it; he got blindsided. Carney kept Stephen Guilbault in Cabinet, and promoted Anita Anand, seeming to signal a turn to the left; then publicly adopted much of the Conservative platform. This seems like a mismatch; he seems to have blindsided them too. It is as though Carney is just enjoying imposing his will. Another narcissist. L’etat, c’est toi.

A dysfunctional caucus, a dysfunctional church, or a dysfunctional family, is the result. “Mental illness” is the result.

Fairy Tale Princesses are a Fairy Tale

 

When the average person thinks of fairy tales, they think of “Disney princesses.” And until the recent woke remakes, the basic plot was always to find true love, to link up with Prince Charming. Isn’t this what “fairy tale” is supposed to mean?

However, real fairy tales, as collected by the Grimms or Charles Perrault, rarely feature either princes or princesses.

They do usually have a king’s daughter as their protagonist, and probably feature a king’s son. But that is invariably how they are referred to, “king’s daughter” and “king’s son.” Never “princess.”

The point being made is that royal identity is a metaphor. It refers to narcissism: people who think of themselves as better than others, as kings.

In “Little Thumbkin,” all the tiny ogres sleep in crowns.

The clearest example is Hans Cristian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea.” The entire point of the tale is to define “real princess.” Those who were literal royalty were commonly not. Instead, an obviously poor homeless girl appears at the palace gate during a thunderstorm, water pouring out of her heels. “Down at heel.”

What made her a princess is her ability to be irritated and complain about a night spent on twenty soft mattresses.

A king’s daughter is the child of a narcissist. Suffering a narcissistic parent, who cares only for themselves, the children are anything but princesses. They struggle just to survive, like Cinderella, Snow White, Belle, or Rapunzel. The wealth or status of the parent is no help to them.

The original point of fairy tales is to give children an education in morals and life. This is what they had in preliterate times and places, when children did not read nor go to school; this, and the Sunday sermon. They are told by fairy godmothers—a godmother being a person deputed at baptism to raise a child in morals and truth, in the faith, and to protect them should the parents fail to do so.

Accordingly, many are about bad parenting, and seek to rescue the heroine from it. Usually bowdlerized delicately by making the villains step-parents.

According to Ursula Le Guin, who is wise in the ways of story, fairy tales must always be in the past tense—as they are—because present tense in narrative evokes discontinuity: nobody can know what happens next. Fairy tales are meant to restore a sense of security and the ultimate rightness of things in a child torn by the everyday madness of a dysfunctional family. They are written in “third person omniscient”: from God’s point of view.

Not the Disney versions, woke or pre-woke, which miss the point entirely. The Grimm or Perrault versions, as collected from the wild.

They are healing at any age.

I Was Still a Child

 

“I was still a child.”

The black girl in the red dress was singing for coins in front of the Dollarama. Beside her was a hand-drawn whiteboard giving her name, Keira, and an explanation. “I am suffering from depression and anxiety. All I have left is my voice.” 

And I knew it was true. I could hear it in her voice. She sang so sweet, so high and yet so deep. 

You need to suffer for a voice like that.

She deserved those coins more than any banker or store manager or dentist in the mall.

“I was still a child.”

That is the original tragedy of life: we are raised by humans. Every parent fails us, some maliciously, some with good intentions. As children, we cannot understand this. We believe, and we trust. We accept as right and normal whatever upbringing we are given. 

If we are told we are vermin, we believe it forever. If we are told we have no right to live, we believe it. If we are told we live only to give pleasure to the parent, we believe it. If we are not loved, we conclude we are unlovable.

The tragedy of black America is not the aftereffects of slavery 160 years ago. That’s absurd. Neither is it the aftereffects of Jim Crow three generations ago. It is the failure of the black family. It is kids raised with no father, heedless parents, or some predatory male boyfriend in place of a father; or kids given no moral guidance.

The tragedy of Canadian Indians is not residential schools two generations ago. It is not the loss of some imaginary culture in which you could talk to animals and trees. It is the failure, aided and abetted by welfare dependency, of the indigenous family. It is teenage girls desperate to escape their home situation, who too often die in the attempt; it is bands of kids on isolated reserves planning to commit suicide because they see no escape from “adult bullying.”

These subcultures have failed in parenting. 

But not they alone; it also happens in the best of families.

I used to know a couple of schizophrenics who mostly lived on the street and were in and out of psychiatric hospitals. I cannot tell you their last names, because almost anyone in Canada would recognize them. 

I knew a family up the hill in Westmount, then the poshest address in Canada, one of whose adolescent sons locked himself in a closet and set himself on fire.

Another kid I knew, from one of the best families in town, broke into a doctor’s office, and swallowed every pill he could find.

The “great families” are often as abusive to children as the poorest ones. The problem is not caused by poverty, but by parental sin. Great families regularly devour at least one child a generation, as if a ritual sacrifice. Think of Rosemary Kennedy. Think of the Emperor Claudius and the family of Caesar Augustus. 

Worse are the children raised not to be abused, to become scapegoats, but raised to abuse. Every dysfunctional family, unless there is only one child, seems to have both. It is these latter who pass on the original sin unto the next generation; the little Cains. They are groomed to believe that they are special, and deserve to get whatever they want. They will go on to abuse the next generation. And so the tragedy is repeated, generation to generation.

“Whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5And whoever welcomes a little child like this in My name welcomes Me.

6But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

7Woe to the world for the causes of sin. These stumbling blocks must come, but woe to the man through whom they come!”

There has been a black girl singing in front of Dollarama for all of human history. No doubt there will be, until the Second Coming.

Philomela's Metamorphosis

 

King Pandion of Athens had two lovely daughters. King Tereus of Thebes asked for the hand of the elder daughter, Procne, and after suitable celebrations, brought her home to his kingdom.

After some time, and the birth of their first son, Itys, Procne grew homesick. She begged her husband to invite her sister Philomela for a visit. So Tereus travelled to Athens and asked King Pandion if Philomela could return with him for a short visit. Pandion was concerned about his unmarried daughter travelling abroad. Especially since she was so lovely. He made Tereus swear he would watch over her as if she were his own daughter, and bring her back soon.

So Tereus gave his oath, and Pandion agreed. But his lust had already been awakened. He had other plans for Philomela.

Once he got the lovely girl back to Thebes, he did not go directly to his castle. Instead he led her deep into the woods, to an abandoned cabin. There he violently raped her. When she protested loudly and warned him she would not be silent about this, he bound her, cut out her tongue, and raped her again. Then he abandoned her in the cabin, posting guards so she could not escape.

He returned to his castle and told Procne that her sister Philomela had died.

In her enforced silence and isolation, unable to tell anyone what had happened, Philomela took to weaving, like the Lady of Shallot. She began a beautiful tapestry. Into it, she wove images of everything that had happened. When it was done, she bound it up and somehow managed to convey to a guard that this was meant as a gift for the Queen.

Procne unwrapped the tapestry, not knowing who had sent it. She immediately understood. She found out where this girl was living.

Then in the evening, she dressed in leaves to perform the rites of Dionysus. The female devotees of Dionysus, the maenads, would dance in the woods in a frenzy, supposedly possessed by the god or feigning possession. So this gave her cover. Feigning a temporary madness inspired by the god, she danced and stumbled her way to the isolated cabin in the woods. She broke down the door as if manic, and found her sister. She dressed Philomela as another maenad, carefully concealing her face with vegetation, and together they danced and stumbled their way back to the castle and slipped inside.

Little Itys ran to greet his mother. In a fit of rage at her husband, Procne suddenly started hacking her son to death. He reminded her too much now of her husband. As she was stabbing wildly, Philomela slit his throat. Perhaps as an act of mercy. Then they cooked him in a stew.

While Philomela remained hidden, Procne called her husband to supper.

Once he had finished, he asked for his son. Procne told him he had just eaten the boy. At that moment, Philomela emerged from the curtains and threw Itys’s head onto his lap.

Tereus grabbed an axe and came after the two sisters.  But just as he was about to catch them, the gods transformed Procne into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale.

And so, when you hear the nightingale singing in the night, a song famous for its sad beauty, that is Philomela, mourning her fate.

Later writers have regularly understood Philomela and the nightingale as images of the artist. The story explains where art and the artistic temperament comes from.

It comes from a child or young person who has been cruelly treated by someone with authority over them--a parent or perhaps someone in the place of a parent. When Hemingway was asked how to become a writer, he answered, “Have an unhappy childhood.” As often as not, this cruelty has to do with the adult fulfilling some illicit sexual desire. Freud saw this, but got it upside down. This being the usual motive, the dysfunctional childhood is most likely to happen to an especially attractive or impressive child—someone highly sexually desirable, or else someone who appears to the adult to be a potential sexual rival. Because the parent or guardian is in authority over them, and they are a minor, or perhaps in early adolescence, they are unable to say anything; they are wholly dependent on the adult. If they do say anything, they are not listened to. It is as though their tongue had been cut out.

Like Philomela’s tapestry, art is the sublimation of this urgent need to speak. As Emily Dickenson wrote, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies.” Art is the representation by other means of whatever needs to be screamed to the heavens, yet cannot be said outright. It exists in a folded state to get past the posted guards, and to the ears that can and need to hear it.

As Jesus said of his parables, “Let those who have ears to hear, hear.”

If Philomela the nightingale represents art and the artist, what does her sister Procne the swallow represent? A second strategy employed by an abused child: madness, or feigned madness. Madness or the mask of folly is another way to say what needs to be said, or do what needs to be done, without destruction; at the cost of being ignored. Strategic madness perhaps accounts for everything we call “mental illness.”

The prime symbolism of the swallow is of a frequent flier, a constant traveller, on long migrations. This is the fate, a “wandering mind,” or perhaps the prescription, for Procne, the mad sibling: for God’s sake, get away from the family.

What about Itys? Why is that part of the formula? 

The murder of Itys is especially morally disturbing. Tereus is the villain; Itys is an innocent victim just like Philomela and Procne.

Nevertheless, this is just how dysfunctional families work. Instead of confronting the adult authority figure responsible, even when the rest of the family really know who is responsible, children, spouses, siblings, generally turn on each other instead. This may be out of fear of the power of the true villain—he or she has done what he did because he was powerful enough to get away with it. Therefore it is risky to attack him or her directly. It is easier to take out your anger at someone else—a family scapegoat.

In the epilogue, Tereus, the selfish king, the narcissist, is transformed into a hoopoe, a notoriously preening bird with a crown on its head.

The Moral Imperative

 

Edvard Munch, Melancholy

Seiko, a 45-year-old man living with depression and chronic anxiety, insists his parent are stupid, not evil. And how can it be their fault if they are evil?

Od’s response:

You puzzle over how you could blame your parents for being stupid. “I doubt if stupid people can make themselves less stupid.”

Those raised in a dysfunctional family will go to almost any lengths not to blame their parents. Accepting that your parents are at fault is the essence of the cure.

It is possible for people to be deliberately stupid, and many people choose to be stupid.

Here’s how.

Have you ever watched a movie? You know that what you saw was not really happening. It was just light playing on a screen. Even the story was all made up. You even knew that nothing bad would happen to the hero, because most movies have a happy ending. Yet you got engrossed in the story and kept watching, forgetting where you were and your real life, for an hour or two. You imagined it was all really happening.

This is what narcissists do all the time. They decide what they want to be true, and then simply choose to believe it. They live in a movie they are writing, directing, and starring in.

It follows that a commitment to truth no matter where it leads is the antidote to being raised by narcissists. It is necessary to break through a series of delusions and denials with which you have been raised. Especially about your parents.

So narcissists are not born stupid. They usually choose to be stupid, to turn away from truth, in early adolescence.

Seiko thinks the modern world and all its technology is too complicated for him. He yearns to live in the jungle, or like Canada’s First Nations.

Od:

I understand your concern, but I don’t think you have the real problem pinpointed. It is not with technology, but with society. Our society has its values wrong; most people are to some degree delusional, in denial. Your instincts are right to want to get away from it.

This is also a projection of the fact that the society in which you grew up, your family, had its values wrong. You need to get away from all society to think things through, and you know this by instinct. You need, not nature, but solitude.

The antidote to being raised with false values is a commitment to true values—to the good--wherever it leads.

I think it is unwise to jump quickly into some new “community,” even if one is available. You are vulnerable to being exploited by some new dysfunctional community or individual narcissist who spins you a comfortable new delusion. Without a grounding in reality, you are unable to detect this. This is how cults develop. You need first to establish a solid sense of what is true and false, right and wrong.

In the old Christian monasteries, when you joined, you were required to observe a period of enforced isolation and silence.

Cults do the opposite: they never want you to be alone. They fear independent thought.

Edvard Munch, Anxiety

Seiko persists in denying the existence of God, and, like all atheists, inconsistently also blaming him for all evil. 

Od:

There is no need here to discuss the existence of God. I think this has become a distraction. What is important is to accept the existence of right and wrong. Whether or not God exists, surely you agree that it would be wrong to rape the next woman you meet? That it would be wrong to kill the next person who annoys you?

No?

Then would it be wrong for the next person you meet to kill you? Or to rape you? Perhaps if he is homosexual?

No objections?

Can you agree that the world should be better than it is?

Immediately, then, you are accepting the reality of right and wrong. That is all that matters: right is right and wrong is wrong, and people are capable of doing either.

I think you want to introduce God as a scapegoat. Then perhaps you can blame him, and avoid blaming your parents.

Forget God, then: your parents are fully responsible for their own actions.

But supposing, on the other hand, that God does exist. It does not follow that he is responsible for the actions of your parents, any more than a parent is responsible if he lets his son drive the car, and the son gets into an accident. Nor is the car manufacturer responsible. Humans have moral agency. We know this, because we know we do. We know we make conscious choices. Why that is so is irrelevant. We cannot blame God for our own choices; or those of our parents.

Why did God allow us to make choices? Because he does not see us as objects, mere toys to play with. Martin Buber speaks of an “I-thou” relationship, far more meaningful than an “I-it” relationship. No doubt you can understand that I love my wife in a different and more important sense than I might love a good meal, or a soft couch, or a gadget.

To suppose your parents themselves had no choice in how they raised you, that it was all God’s fault, or the fault of some genetic flaw they were born with, or the fault of their own upbringing, is to reduce them to robots, without moral agency. Is that respectful?

You ask, what purpose does hell serve? The answer is one word: justice.

Deja Vu All Over Again

 

One of the biggest lies in world literature is Tolstoy’s opening line for Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." 

This is the opposite of the truth. Dysfunctional families all follow roughly the same template. 

You can also predict with great reliability that any truly outstanding artist, in whichever art, comes from one.

Johnny Depp rings the changes for us. Some of us will find much of what he says familiar.

It also explains his troubles with Amber Heard. Once you have been victimized by a narcissistic parent, you are primed perfectly to be victimized by a narcissistic lover.

The Loves and the Wilsons: A Family Case Study

 

Left to right: Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Brian Wilson

Mike Love, of the notoriously dysfunctional Wilson clan, is a puzzle. Everyone hates Mike Love, because he is an obvious egotist. Yet usually narcissists, true egotists, escape such condemnation; because they are skillful manipulators of their image. 

I think the solution is simple. Mike Love is stupid. He is not smart enough to put on a good front. Most narcissists are better at it.

There is evidence enough that he tries. He wrote the lyrics to most of the early Beach Boys songs; he is responsible for their obvious simplemindedness. He was tailoring them to an intended audience as calculatingly as an ad copywriter.

“She’s gonna have fun fun fun ‘til her daddy takes her T-bird away.”

“I’m picking up good vibrations. She’s giving me those excitations.”

When Brian Wilson tried for more meaningful lyrics on “Pet Sounds,” Love was reportedly upset at him “messing with the formula.” Even though the formula no longer worked: the Beatles had ended the “surf music” craze. He had the intent to manipulate and create a false image, but lacked all imagination in doing so.

His ever-present hat to conceal his baldness is similar. He never appears without it. This suggests the personal vanity and concern for appearances that mark the narcissist. Yet it also suggests a surprising lack of imagination, or initiative. If it matters so much to him, why not get a follicle transplant; he surely has the money for it. Nobody remembers that Joe Biden was bald, or Frank Sinatra. But with the hat, everyone realizes Mike Love is bald.

Looks like stupidity.

His mother Emily was sister to the Wilsons’ father, Murry. Reports are that they both had similar, “dominant” personalities. In other words, they were dominant narcissists. It runs in families.

However, Love got a treatment different from that of the Wilson boys. The instinct of the narcissist is to either possess or destroy. Being of the opposite sex to the dominant narcissist, and good looking, Mike was marked for possession. That means he would have been spoiled, thus groomed for narcissism himself.

Love fell out with his mother when he got some girl pregnant. His mother threw all of his things onto the driveway, and he was forced to find new lodgings. 

This was entirely predictable; but the issue would not have been morality or getting the girl pregnant. It was sexual jealousy. He was two-timing his mother, to her way of thinking, and she was reacting just as a wife classically would if she found that her husband had been cheating on her. 

This is what happens to the golden child when they reach adolescence; especially if they are of the opposite sex. The narcissistic parent sees themself losing a possession, and accordingly their objective often shifts from possession to destruction. The syndrome is modelled in Shakespeare’s Cordelia and King Lear. The narcissistic parent will always resent the partner of the favoured child.

Now let’s turn to the Wilsons. 

The fact that Murry Wilson physically abused and terrorized all three of his sons is well-known. We even have audio recordings of him berating them in the studio. Murry too was a narcissist, and, like Mike Love, a stupid one, who made his abuse too obvious.

Murry would have particularly hated Mike Love, because he could not control him or take credit for what he did. And Love was good-looking, too; the narcissist runs on envy. This explains why Love’s contribution to many early Beach Boys songs was not acknowledged. 

Brian, showing obvious early musical talent, would have been his father’s trophy child. He was driven mercilessly to excel.  Dennis, second in line, was excess to requirements, and dangerously handsome, making him look like a sexual rival. So he was forced into the role of black sheep. Dennis would have been implicitly encouraged to engage in and rewarded for bad and irresponsible behavior; but then “Out of the three Wilson brothers, Dennis was the most likely to get beaten by their father.” 

My own brother was forced into the same family role. I immediately see the parallels. Brian once said of his brother Dennis, “Dennis had to keep moving all the time. If you wanted him to sit still for one second, he's yelling and screaming and ranting and raving.” My brother Gerry was the same way. You could get seasick from sitting next to him on a couch.

Dennis Wilson dissolved into sex addiction, alcohol, and drugs. He died age 39. My brother fairly narrowly managed to save himself from a similar fate.

Carl, as the youngest, short, and baby-faced, was probably the golden child. He looked most like a possession. His father bought him a guitar and music lessons at age 12; and a really good guitar, a Fender Stratocaster, at age 15. This in a poor, working-class family. Despite Brian’s obviously greater musical talent, Brian was not bought instruments. He learned what he learned on the family piano, which was primarily for his father. It is probably no accident that Carl ended up as lead guitar, and the original name of the family band was “Carl and the Passions.” Their father would have insisted as much.

To his credit, Carl Wilson does not seem to have become a narcissist. This is a tribute to him personally, and makes the vital point that nobody is simply made a narcissist by their upbringing. It is always a choice, and the individual should be held responsible for it.

Britney Spears' Dysfunctional Family

 

An interesting, if necessarily highly speculative, analysis.

Britney Spears may be doing many of the abused a great service by bringing the syndrome to public attention.

In other, perhaps related news, Britney revealed in a recept post, since deleted, that she has become Catholic. This reinforces my thesis that the first necessity to escape the effects of a dysfunctional family is to re-ground yourself in transcendent reality. 

Nathan Cohen

 

Nathan Cohen

Another lyrical clue that all was not well between Leonard Cohen and his father, from the song "Everybody Knows":

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

That always struck me as an inapt parallel--surely a father dying is a more significant event than a dog dying. But maybe that is the point; maybe Cohen is calling his father a dog, and no more. After all, given his own life experience, this cannot be a casual mistake. He knows exactly what it feels like to lose a father, for his father died when he was nine.

His father may also be meant by "the captain." 

More lyrics from the same song seem to criticize the fashion industry, Cohen pere's business:

Everybody knows the deal is rotten

Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton

For your ribbons and bows

And everybody knows.

Everybody's Wounded

 

 Well, it's Father's Day, and everybody's wounded

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

These are the final words of Leonard Cohen’s song/poem “First We Take Manhattan.” In it, he is clearly equating the fashion industry with Nazism. His father was in the fashion business. 

I don’t like your fashion business, mister

I don’t like those drugs that keep you thin

I don’t like what happened to my sister

First, we take Manhattan

Then we take Berlin.

These are the first words of Leonard Cohen’s song/poem “The Story of Isaac,” in which he speaks as Isaac, about to be ritually slaughtered by his father Abraham.

The door, it opened slowly

My father, he came in

I was nine years old.

His father died when Cohen was nine.

Something was going on between Cohen and his father, that he is not speaking openly about.

When it all comes down to dust

I will kill you if I must

I will help you if I can

When it all comes down to dust

I will help you if I must

I will kill you if I can

Perhaps something was also going on between Bob Dylan and his father. Dylan alludes to the same Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac in “Highway 61 Revisited.” The song is important enough in his mind that it also gives its name to the album.

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"

Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"

God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"

God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but

The next time you see me comin' you better run"

Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"

God says, "Out on Highway 61."

It might be significant that Dylan’s father’s name was Abraham. Highway 61 passed by his childhood home.

Happy Father’s Day. Everybody’s’ wounded.

Father's Day Podcast

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The Canaanite Woman

At that time, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.
And behold, a Canaanite woman of that district came and called out,
“Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David!
My daughter is tormented by a demon.”
But Jesus did not say a word in answer to her.
Jesus’ disciples came and asked him,
“Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us.”
He said in reply,
“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
But the woman came and did Jesus homage, saying, “Lord, help me.”
He said in reply,
“It is not right to take the food of the children
and throw it to the dogs.”
She said, “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps
that fall from the table of their masters.”
Then Jesus said to her in reply,
“O woman, great is your faith!
Let it be done for you as you wish.”
And the woman’s daughter was healed from that hour.

(Matthew 15: 21-28).

This, yesterday's gospel, is a difficult reading. It seems to contradict the clear message of the Gospel that Jesus came not just for the Jews, but for all mankind—or rather, for all good people. St. Paul says “there is no Jew nor Greek in Christ.” The parable of the Good Samaritan opposes considerations of ethnicity. Note that, elsewhere in the Gospel, Jesus has no problems with healing a Gadarene demoniac, or the physically ill daughter of a Roman Centurion, despite their not being Jews.

We must conclude that ethnicity is not the issue.

Consider that what the Bible calls being “tormented by a demon” is surely what we today call “mental illness.” And that the primary cause of mental illness is parental abuse, or emotional betrayal by a parent. This is the current conclusion of psychiatry, and it seems to be the traditional understanding.

So the natural assumption when a parent comes to ask for her child to be freed from a demon is that she herself is its cause. Accordingly, were Jesus to say “let it be done for you as you wish,” were he to answer her prayer, the ultimate effect would be to confirm her authority and to make the child’s situation worse.

Now consider too that the Canaanites were, according to the Bible, to contemporary Greek reports, and to archeological evidence, practitioners of child sacrifice. To those Jews observing at the time, even if the charges are not true, “Canaanite” automatically implied “bad parent.”

Jesus might have been omniscient, and might have known that the mother’s request was sincere. Nevertheless, the crowd would not know. To acknowledge her authority over her daughter in this way would have been to publicly endorse bad parenting and dysfunctional families. It would be publicly absolving her of guilt, and abetting the abuse.

Consider in this light his stated objection: ““It is not right to take the food of the children
and throw it to the dogs.” “The children” may not here refer to Jews, but, more simply and literally, mean children generally. Jesus is here for abused children, not for their parents, who are morally equivalent to dogs.

This is a worse insult, in the Middle East, than the reader may imagine.

Who then are “the lost sheep of the house of Israel”? He actually cannot be referring to the Jews. If they are good Jews, they are not lost. If they are not good Jews, they are not sheep, but goats. “Sheep,” as Jesus uses the term, means those obedient to God. To be a sheep yet to be lost implies someone who is obedient to God, but without proper guidance, the unchurched. John 10: 16: “I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.”

This might apply to the Canaanite woman. It is significant that the disciples ask Jesus to drive her away, and he does not. Instead, he says “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And lets her stay. Being Canaanite, then, does not disqualify her.

When he calls her a dog, she accepts the grievous insult. This is the critical act, that shows she is a sheep, that she is spiritually of the house of Israel, of Jacob. She thereby shows she is not a narcissist, not a goat. Moreover, she accepts this insult in hopes of helping her daughter, showing true paternal devotion.

It is this that allows Jesus to perform the miracle before the crowd.

Like much of the Bible, the passage is about dysfunctional families.

An Explanation for Denial

"It is easier for most people to accept a lie, than to accept having been lied to."

Denial

Denial is an essential concept to explain the dynamics of a dysfunctional family. A family becomes dysfunctional because it is denying some core problem. The classic case is the alcoholism of a parent. Adult Children of Alcoholics reports that fully 50% of those growing up in alcoholic families will deny there is any alcoholism present.

But do not be misled; alcoholism is not the only possibility. It is only the one most visible to our materialistic society. The real issue is a parental vice of any kind. See the Seven Deadly Sins for the traditional list.

The family exists to support a parent in a vice or vices; essential to this is denying that it is a vice, or that they have it.

But if denial is such a necessary concept, why has it not been known throughout history? Why do we hear it only in the last few decades; why does it sound so much like “pop psychology”?

This is a misconception. A Google engram shows that usage of the actual term, “denial,” is no more common today that it was in 1850, or 1800; frequency of usage has been mostly consistent, with perhaps a gentle valley stretching from the beginning into the middle years of the 20th century.

 

That has to mean that, if it is being used more frequently in some new sense in recent years, it must for some reason be used less in some prior meaning; an improbable idea, and something that surely could not simply happen by chance. A prior concept has been appropriated by psychology.

Denial, of just the sort seen in a dysfunctional family, is modelled prominently by St. Peter in the New Testament. It appears in all four gospels.

We’ll quote Mark’s version, as Mark’s is most succinct:

While Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the servant girls of the high priest came by. When she saw Peter warming himself, she looked closely at him.

“You also were with that Nazarene, Jesus,” she said.

But he denied it. “I don’t know or understand what you’re talking about,” he said, and went out into the entryway.

When the servant girl saw him there, she said again to those standing around, “This fellow is one of them.” Again he denied it.

After a little while, those standing near said to Peter, “Surely you are one of them, for you are a Galilean.”

He began to call down curses, and he swore to them, “I don’t know this man you’re talking about.” (Mark 14: 66-71). 

This is just the sort of adamant and repeated denial of the obvious seen in any dysfunctional family. 

Moreover, it is from the same source.

The government—as in the family the parent—has done something wrong. They are rejecting and executing an innocent man on a false charge. Rather than standing against this government action, Peter denies the slightest inference that he might. Nobody is more loyal to the government than he.

The gospel makes it clear enough why this happens, in either case: in the first place, out of fear. Every family, to preserve the family delusion, has a scapegoat, selected by the guilty parent. The surest way to become the scapegoat is to be caught telling the truth—about the secret vice, or about anything. In the gospel, this social scapegoat is Jesus: Jesus is the ultimate scapegoat for all mankind. The treatment dealt out to the scapegoat within a family, or within society, then serves to keep others in line: they fear that, if they point out the family dysfunction, or the resulting act of scapegoating, they may be given the same treatment, be scapegoated in their turn. This then fuels the family denial.

Some may remember how this worked with homosexuality back in high school—at least as late as the Sixties or Seventies. If you did not go along with the general derision towards some unlucky classmate who acted fey, you risked being declared a fag yourself.

And so the family is kept in line: denial.

There is a yet more fundamental example of denial in the Bible. It happens in the Garden of Eden.

“Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” (Genesis 3:8).

This is right after they have eaten the forbidden fruit; as obvious a denial of reality as we see in a dysfunctional family. God is omniscient; hiding in the bushes is not going to work. 

Here, the cause of denial is guilt; awareness of sin.

This too is a common cause in a dysfunctional family. Aware of their own settled vice, the problem parent will almost instinctively encourage or lure their children into immorality of some kind. Once they succeed, the child is doubly afraid to acknowledge the family truth, for they have their own secrets to conceal. The parent can, in effect, blackmail them; and truth itself, in any form, comes to seem a threat.

The term “denial” may sound cheap to us now because modern psychology, in appropriating the term, has subverted it, by eliminating the essential moral issue. To put it plainly, psychology itself is in denial, and for the classic reason. The issue is sin, or vice.

Indeed, arguably, it is Adam’s and Eve’s denial of sin by hiding in the bushes that is the real original sin, the one that caused the Fall, and not the eating of the apple. Sin is inevitable, and was for them, given free will and a lifespan projected to be infinite. You sin, and you ask for forgiveness; a merciful God forgives. The problem is the denial, the refusal to acknowledge the sin, that commits one to the path of vice. This is just what original sin is understood to do.

The ur-sin of denial is then the reason anyone rejects Jesus and salvation:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. (John 3: 19-21).

Denial is, it seems, the sin of all sins; it is the turning at the crossroads onto the high road to Hell.

This is the most terrible consequence of growing up in a dysfunctional family.

He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. …

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. (Matthew 18:1-6)

Family Values and Original Sin

We often talk about maternal instinct. But there is a far more powerful instinct that we never talk about. Filial instinct. When have you ever even heard the term?

A mother, or a father, are naturally attached to their children. But the natural instinct of attachment is far stronger in a child to their parents.

We often marvel at some animal nursing young of another species. We never think to marvel at the young accepting succor from another species. That we rightly take as spontaneous.

We honour and make much of maternal instinct, therefore, precisely because it is sometimes absent. That makes it noticeable, and worthy of celebration when seen. By contrast, we can simply assume filial instinct in all cases. So it goes unnoticed and unremarked.

Think about it. In the early, vulnerable infancy of any higher species, the parent is everything. Evolution and the imperatives of survival will imprint a deep need for closeness to the parent. Closeness, trust, obedience.

So baby ducks line up spontaneously to follow their mother wherever she goes. If the mother is absent, they will line up to follow whatever else is available. So with the young of almost any species, up to and including the higher primates. A motherless baby chimpanzee can be consoled with a hot water bottle. A baby human is soothed by a plastic nipple.

This is instinct; it has no moral dimension. Yet it is so powerful we want to hold it sacred: we talk of “family values” and “filial piety” as though these were religious duties. Indeed, much of Chinese folk religion can be summed up in the phrase “ancestor worship.”

This simply makes us feel good about ourselves, because we are going to do it anyway. There is a moral debt owed to parents for their material and emotional support in our childhood; we have a duty to similarly support them in their age. But that is all.

In fact, the vital moral issue cuts the other way. To idolize a parent, a mere human, is just that: an idolatry. The average parent is necessarily only average, not better or worse. Some parents will be very good people; some parents will be very bad people.

To adhere too closely to “family values” is just like adhering too closely to tribal values: to believing that your nation, or your race, is inherently superior to all others. We know where that leads, and we call it racism. The worst evils in history, we commonly hold, are done because of racism. “Familyism” is in principle the same thing.

Morality, therefore, requires cutting through the instinctive tie to viewing our parents objectively. Doing so is almost the essential act of morality: not doing so is leaving yourself in the state of original sin—the sin one inherits from one’s ancestors. 

Abortion and Crime

From The Economist.

A famous study suggests that legalized abortion has been responsible for the otherwise mysterious drop in crime we have seen over the past few decades.

The study has been challenged; as with any science, and especially social science, that has obvious political implications, you cannot trust it.

But it seems plausible enough that it would be so.

This does not amount, however, to a justification of abortion.

If it were, it would also justify eliminating poverty by killing the poor.

What it should do it alert us to more compassion for those who fall afoul of the legal system. They are usually not the real criminals, but desperate young men.

The real criminals are rarely punished.

And the better way to reduce crime is to do something about dysfunctional parenting.

Why I Do Not Miss the Latin Mass

Many of my generation and the generation before felt betrayed by the loss of the Latin Mass. I have never felt this way.

Today, for the first time in many years, I attended a Latin mass; and realized for the first time why.

It was beautiful; there is no doubt. Although well attended, it seemed mad the place was not packed to the rafters if only for the musical performance. Some claim the attendance at mass dropped off a statistical cliff right when the liturgy switched to the vernacular.

And it satisfied to discover that after so many years I still remembered some of the Latin.

But I will not be back.

When as a kid attending a Catholic school, I went to mass with my class, I would often start to feel faint and nauseous. I would have to sit bent over in the back. I felt embarrassed and did not know why.

Some of that feeling came back to me this Sunday.

It did as well the last time I attended a Latin mass, years ago now, but as an adult.

The vernacular mass, banal as it may be by contrast, feels much more comfortable.

I grew up attending the Latin mass. I also grew up in what the self-help groups somewhat euphemistically call a "dysfunctional family." Aside from the constant stress and strife, my parents, inevitably, presented themselves as Christian examplars, and their own opinions as theologically authoritative. God was on their side, and against me.

I was aware enough to realize that what they did and said was not compatible with the gospel or the catechism  I learned in school. Yet there was the chilling possibility that the official catechism was really just a cover story to fool outsiders, and they really did represent the heart of the church. Why not? In every other horror movie, Satanists perform black masses that are superficially strikingly like a Latin mass, with smoke and intonations, ritual movements, organ music and oddly discordant chant. Perhaps this was the reality. The Catholic Church was, then, a secret cult along the lines of that portrayed in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Because of this, the lack of clarity with Latin was disturbing. What were they really saying? Why could they not say it outright so that all could understand? Surely the Latin suggested an urge to conceal; they had something to hide. The thought never fully formed, until last Sunday, but I believe this was the incoherent suspicion behind my nausea.

The vernacular mass, to me, if only symbolically, brought needed clarity.

I really wonder, had the switch to the vernacular not come about around when it did, whether I would have been able to remain a Catholic. Friends of mine from similar Catholic backgrounds have ended up Muslim, or Buddhist; others, raised in other traditions, have escaped their tainted upbringing by becoming Catholic. Others, and probably far more, less happily, have become secularized or atheist, losing all the comfort and support of religion, most desperately needed by those who never had a real family.

It is no doubt of such family backgrounds Jesus spoke when he said, "but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea."

The One and the Many

Moreau: The Lernean Hydra

It is characteristic of the hero that, sooner or later in his career, he must stand alone against all comers.

As Ovid describes Perseusʼs moment, at his wedding feast, “Phineus and a thousand followers of Phineus, surround the one man. Spears to the right of him, spears to the left of him, fly thicker than winter hail, past his eyes and ears. He sets his back and shoulders against a massive stone column, and protected behind, turns towards the opposing crowd of men, and withstands their threat.”i

Telephus holds off the assembled forces of the Greeks, the same armada that later conquers Troy; he “turned the valiant Danaoi to flight, and drove them into the sterns of their sea-ships,” says Pindar.ii And he rejects the calls of his countrymen to join them in that campaign, continuing to stand apart. Oedipus, if he can be taken as a hero, defeats a force of five mounted men, alone, at the Phokis crossroads.

Jason must defeat an autochthonic army that appears after he sows the dragonʼs teeth: “earthborn men were springing up over all the field; .... And as when abundant snow has fallen on the earth and the storm blasts have dispersed the wintry clouds under the murky night, and all the hosts of the stars appear shining through the gloom; so did those warriors shine springing up above the earth.”iii

Herakles achieves many similar feats. He defeats the Minyans “almost single-handedly.”iv He storms Troy at the head of “only six small craft and scanty forces.”v He holds off the Amazon army, killing each of their leaders. He defeats “hosts of four-legged centaurs.”vi The Lernean Hydraʼs multiple heads seem another image of multitude: “the hydra, that monster with a ring of heads with power to grow again.”vii “Of its fearful heads some severed lay on earth, but many more were budding from its necks,” writes Quintus Smyrnaeus.viii Some say the Hydra had nine heads; some say a hundred.

Being multiple in form seems a standard feature of Herakles’s opponents: “Typhons triple-bodied,” Cerberus, “the three-headed hound, hell’s porter.”ix Geryon has three heads; his watchdog Orthus has two heads. Ladon, guardian of the apples of the Hesperides, is “an immortal dragon with a hundred heads,... which spoke with many and divers sorts of voices.”x

Ravana.

So too, it seems, with Rama’s great adversary, Ravana: he has ten heads and many arms. Karna conquers a more literal multitude, the entire world, in the name of his friend Duryodhana. Alexander, of course, by tradition, does something rather similar. Moses, less dramatically, must repeatedly struggle against the popular consensus of the Hebrews, who continually turn on him as they wander in the desert. In the end, he does literal battle, and with a small minority of Levites, cuts the majority down (Exodus 32:27-30).

In Hamlet, our hero finds himself alone on a pirate ship, facing the entire crew: “in the grapple I boarded them: on the instant they got clear of our ship; so I alone became their prisoner” (Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 6). But he somehow, miraculously, achieves his freedom. In the more heroic original legend upon which Shakespeare based his play, Amleth holds off the assembled might of England almost alone with a bogus army of the dead.xi Even in King Lear, the abused heroine, Cordelia, is a solitary figure, even her husband absent for the action of the play, while the abusers, Regan and Goneril, are multiple. Lear is stripped of all his retainers but Kent and the fool. Dymphna must face the assembled army of Damon’s kingdom Oriel, with only old Father Gerberus at her side.

Churchill, a modern hero, and a depressive, stood famously against the consensus of his day in resisting Hitler, “a lone voice in the wilderness.”

Even Don Quixote, in his quest to be a proper hero, must engage alone against an army of giants:

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”xii

Don Quixote does battle: Dore

Many folk heroes are outlaws, who operate in defiance of the government, the social order, of their day: Robin Hood, the 108 Heroes of the Water Margin of Chinese legend, Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel.

This motif of one against many seems to reflect a characteristic we have seen in the depressed. Solitude is definitive, Robert Burton suggests, of the spiritual zone the melancholic inhabits. “Above all things they love solitariness.”xiii Diderot too cites “a firm penchant for solitude” as one of the chief features of melancholy.xiv The melancholic is a loner.

The hero type, it would seem, intensifies this characteristic. The merely depressed removes himself from the social whirl. The hero attacks it, rapier drawn.

According to Adult Children of Alcoholics, the second sign that you have been raised in a dysfunctional family is “We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.” Number seven is “We get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.” Number twelve is “We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment and will do anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to experience painful abandonment feelings.”xv

At first glance, this seems to contradict both conventional wisdom about the melancholic, and the hero legends. It paints the abused child as a compulsive crowd-pleaser.

But it may, instead, point out the reason why the depressed crave solitude, and why the hero stands alone in defiance.

The family is our first society; it is the introduction for each of us to social life, and all social life in microcosm. In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The family is the original cell of social life. ... Authority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society. The family is the community in which, from childhood, one can learn moral values, begin to honor God, and make good use of freedom. Family life is an initiation into life in society. (para. 2207).

In the case of an abused child, however, this original society is corrupt: his or her family is “dysfunctional.” It teaches all the wrong lessons. What then?

He must, then, fight against it if he (or she) is ever to grow out of his abused state; just as he must solve the riddle of the double-bind of filial duty. This will require heroic courage: the courage of High Noon. For, as the ACA “Laundry List” suggests, the more spontaneous response is to keep trying harder to seek an approval that will never come. Trapping you in another double-bind.

This illustrates the depth of the challenge faced by the abused depressive; and the degree to which he or she manages to overcome this perhaps marks the division between the ordinary depressed and the heroic. This is indeed what ACA advises in their “recovery” program. Seeking solitude or exile is the first sign of health. Rebelling against the corrupt social consensus is the ultimate victory.

However, this developed ability, if it is ever developed, to think for himself or herself, working only from first principles, would then serve the melancholic well for any enterprise requiring creativity or coming up with novel thoughts; for being a culture hero, an artist, or a leader of any sort; for becoming an explorer, a discoverer. See Burton’s armillary sphere and cross staff, used as personal emblems.

To become a hero, the abused must fight this great battle against the many-headed monster of social consensus, which is poisoning the landscape all about them.

And it is the abused child, specifically, who is called to this by circumstance.

iOvid, Metamorphoses, Book 5, ll.149-199. Mary Innis, trans.


iiPindar, Olympian Odes, 9. Myers trans.


iiiApollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, Book 2, ll. 1340-1407.


ivRobert Graves, The Greek Myths, vol. 2, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Pelican, 1955, “Erginus,” entry 121.


vGraves, op. cit., “Hesione,” entry 137.


viEuripides, Herakles.


viiEuripides, Herakles.


viiiFall of Troy 6. 212 ff. Way trans.


ixEuripides, Herakles, Coleridge trans.


xApollodorus, Library, 2.5.11 Frazer trans.


xiSaxo Grammaticus, “Amleth, Prince of Denmark,” Gesta Danorum, D.L. Ashliman, trans.


xii Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 1, Chapter VIII.


xiiiAnatomy of Melancholy, Part 1, Section 3, Memb. 1, Subsect. 2.


xivDiderot, Melancholie, Vol. 10, 1765, pp. 308–311.




xv“The Laundry List: 14 Traits of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic,” ACA.

Keeping up with the Wilsons

The Wilsons, who formed the core of the Beach Boys, are a good example of a dysfunctional, abusive, family. Because they are famous, a lot of unfiltered data is available to us.

The second son, Dennis, despite all the money he had made, ended up alcoholic, homeless, and an apparent suicide at 39. The youngest, Carl, also had struggles with alcohol, and died at 52 of lung cancer. He had been a chain smoker since age 13. Brian, the surviving son, had a nervous breakdown in his early twenties, and became permanently schizo-affective, a severe form of “mental illness” that combines the worst features of depression, manic depression, and schizophrenia. All three were obviously suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress (PTSD) as a result of their upbringing.

You might say that rock stars often come to bad ends. True; it may also be true that they often come from such dysfunctional families. But here we have a control: the four early members of the group who were not Wilsons. Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston, and David Marks all seem to have avoided any of the same nervous problems.

How do you drive three sons mad? Papa Murry Wilson gives us a bit of a tutorial, thanks to a surviving tape from the recording session for “Help Me Rhonda.” Brian Wilson seems to have deliberately kept the recording tape running as his father showed up and tried to take over the session. One can easily imagine why. He wanted a record for posterity.

The common claim about Murry is that he had a terrible temper. When he got mad, in Brian's words, you felt the devil was there. He once hit Brian with a 2x4, causing him loss of almost all hearing in one ear. This certainly cannot have been good for their peace of mind, but I doubt it was sufficient to cause the range of their suffering as adults. The terrible temper was symptomatic of something deeper: Murry Wilson say himself as the centre of the universe, and his sons as existing, like everyone else, for the benefit of Murry Wilson. As a result, he could be merciless when he was angry, and he used them to vent his anger regardless of their own actions.

This is what drives you mad, because you cannot avoid the rage. A merely stern parent is easy to live with in peace, simply by following the rules. No cause for any free-floating stress in that case.

Murry demonstrates the true problem in the recording tape. He has been invited to come down, he says, “relax,” and listen to them record. But this he cannot stand to do, because it leaves them, not him, the centre of attention. So he tries to take over the recording session, until he is finally taken up on his threat to leave. He is not smart enough to cover up his envy: at one point, he says, “I'm a genius too,” and then “Brian, forget who you are.” The sons are fairly obviously made to feel guilty for their very success: “your damned Capital records.” “Made enough money, buddy?” “So you're big stars...”

Brian is producing the record, and there are about twenty people working under him. Murry begins by attacking Brian directly: “Brian, you’re coming in shrill.” Brian's voice is too strong. Implicitly, Brians should shut up. That presumably slaps him down, publicly humiliating him. To Murry's mind, it must be clear to everyone present that he is the greater man.

Then he makes the rounds, slapping down everyone else in turn. We can’t hear Al, Al is not syncopating, we can’t hear Mike, we can’t hear Carl. Dennis is flat, Mike is flat, Carl has been “loafing for two hours.” That’s everyone; everyone is doing it wrong.

More importantly, for driving someone mad, note that Murry sets things up as a double bind, so that nobody actually has the option to do it right. Having systematically set everyone on edge and made them self-conscious, he then harangues them for not being relaxed enough. “Loosen up. You’re so tight, I can’t believe it.” “Happy, happy, happy.” He does everything he can to shake their confidence, then demands that they “sing with confidence.” He tells Jardine to sing the phrase, and then, as soon as Al starts singing, shouts “no” -- three times in a row. Stop means go; go means stop. He tells Mike to get in closer to the microphone, then tells him he’s too close to the microphone. He warns the boys to never sing for the money, and then says they must fight for their success.

Another prominent technique is to say highly critical-sounding things, ominous things, then pause, then soften them. This seems to be a subtle form of “gaslighting”--in its severe form, maintaining things that are plainly false, or saying or doing something, then later adamantly denying you ever said or did it. It is a way to maintain absolute control over someone, because once you get them to accept the basic premise that your word and will supercede their sense perceptions, there is no remaining check on your control over them. They are forced to depend on you for everything. It is known to be a common technique among sociopaths.

An example: “For the first time in my life …” (pause) “… Brian said come down, relax, so I did.” That makes no sense as spoken. The first words, spoken with emotion, are calculated to jangle the nerves, and set in memory like cement. Then the follow-up allows Murry deniability if challenged.

More examples: “Fellas, I have three thousand words to say…” (pause to wait for shoe to drop) and he says a few. Non sequitor. “We need help...” (pause). “…we need the honest projection that we used to have…” “You can’t compete…” (pause) “… with the brains that are trying to hurt you.” “I’ve protected you for 22 years, but I can’t go on …” (pause) “… if you’re not going to listen to an intelligent man.”

Does Murry know what he is doing? Plainly he does, for when Brian tries something that sounds vaguely similar, he explodes. Brian says, “Let me ask you this...” And before the pause has a chance to register, let alone the question be asked, Murry takes extreme umbrage: “that is an absolute insult.”

And, at this, he storms out of the studio, saying he will “never help you guys mix another song.”

There was no insult. Murry is pre-emptively gaslighting.

Note that, the better to manipulate, and the better to gaslight, Murry encourages an “us against the world” family solidarity. Everything outside the home is dangerous. So, when Brian formed the group, Murry insisted that all three brothers had to be in it, even though Dennis was not really interested. The other three original members were a cousin (on Murry’s side, of course) and two neighbours. Murry became the manager.

“I am protecting you,” he says here, “from many people who are trying to hurt you.” This, of course, preserves his autocratic role as the father. His sons remain his appendages and minions. It would be intolerable for them to move out on their own.

Notice, too, that Murry commonly affects to speak for others was well as himself--a standard bullying technique. He speaks for his wife, their mother, repeatedly, and once claims unsolicited solidarity with the sound technician.

As M. Scott Peck observes, it takes two bad parents to make an abusive family. The second parent must be prepared to enable the first, to allow him or her to speak for both of them, to back him or her up in the bullying sessions. Clearly, this was the case in the Wilson home. Mrs. Wilson, Audree, was an alcoholic. Murry could have his way so long as he kept her supplied.

This enables Murry to threaten the boys at will with the withdrawal of all parental love. Everything must go through him. He uses the implied threat here, when he begins a statement, apparently again non sequitor, “your mother loves you...” and then leaves it incomplete. He is the one who decides whether she loves them or not. 

According to those who knew the family, Murry bullied and persecuted Brian the most, then Dennis, and Carl the least. Why? Because Brian was the gifted one, a prodigy, his musical talent apparent from a very young age. He was bound to provoke envy for it. Dennis was the best-looking brother, and no doubt provoked envy on this score. He then proceeded to justify the abuse by becoming the “black sheep” of the family: a standard survival mechanism for the second (sometimes third) son in a dysfunctional family.

The most heart-breaking thing about the clip is seeing how much the boys still love their father. Murry threatens early on to leave the recording session. This would probably be the best solution for everyone but Murry. Yet Brian's immediate reaction is to ask him to stay. It takes quite a bit before Brian finally loses his temper.

It's a wise child who knows his own father. It is hard-wired into all of us to love and to look up to our parents. And to believe that, deep down ,they love us.