Dumm is not wrong, and praise be to god on high for a feminist writer who has no apparent fear of evolutionary psychology.

In children the same psychological/physiological/behavioral need, distress, and somewhat different set of reactions gets constructed as “insecure attachment”, “overanxious disorder of childhood”, later “ADHD” and other disorders. The dependence on others for safety and psychological security is even more profound and its failure potentially more damaging in early childhood (it is a dependence for survival) and sets attachment-injured children up at greater vulnerability to anxiety-related disorders as adults.

The medical solution? – astonishingly, to chalk it up to biology, “disease” model, dose them with medicalized speed (er . . . stimulant medication) and not worry about lack of evidence for long-term benefits, potential side effects, or prevention. At least articles like Ms. Mieszkowski’s can help move us past medical models of distress and toward better understanding, prevention, and treatment.

Clinically distressing loneliness in adults is related to early experiences and the internal templates they generate. Learning to tolerate solitude and create relatedness paradoxically depends initially on secure attachment to, then its opposite - separation, independence, and differentiation from family. Retained need for connections with family of origin is a developmental failure, representing lack of capacity to independently choose and create new relationships with other adults, and as such will be experienced as a form of aloneness. Western cultural norms, medical models, and parenting advice have tended to work against these basic developmental needs.

What we know about human behavior is that lasting adaptive change (as opposed to short-term, fear-based, and situational) is simply not elicited by external motivators, especially not by punishers or threat of punishers. When the organism continues to experience unmet needs - however distorted those perceived needs are along with beliefs about how to get them met – what will be effectively elicited and learned from punishers and threats include: oppositionality; overreach for additional power and control; deception, guardedness, manipulation, in effect the full range of learned criminal or antisocial skills that more often than not effectively cope with and skirt rules and laws and are thereby rewarded. That is how Americans learn to work, live and achieve. The logical endpoint of this futile system is the normalization of criminality within the rule-making class (white-collar and political crime) and mass incarceration of threatening, rule-breaking classes by the empowered rule-making class (wait . . . we have those!) or street executions as punishers by warring classes with certain pretenses suspended, something being experimented with in other parts of the world.

With punishers, threats, and external controls, rather than growth that attunes behavior to principle, empathy, reflection, and internal moral development, growth in antisociality is promoted, a process that pretty much explains American culture, from academic systems to what we endearingly construct as “business”, “achievement” or “success” in all hierarchies. We reward, reinforce and celebrate pathology in all spheres, then wring our hands over “lawlessness”.

If only I had punished or threatened my kids more . . . .

are, in context, useful constructions that realize some congruence and internal logic within the larger constructed system of meaning characterized by utterances like “country”, “government”, “democracy”, “political ideology” etc. - in exactly the same sense that “my TV”, “special instructions”, “from space”, “leadership of the Universe”, “only late at night”, and “because they don’t have the same processor in their brains” may be elements that have congruence and internal logic within a stable system of belief, or for that matter, “absolution’, “hell”, “original sin”, forgiveness”, and “repent” may.

Problems in living invariably arise when delusional structures are taken as adaptive representations and hence useful cognitive structures for interpreting and navigating through the world. In the case of this thread, and of course much more broadly, movement is not possible as long as these constructions provided through domestication and whose function is to maintain hierarchies of power, control and resource differentials are taken at face value – i.e. “conservatism”, “Republicanism”, “the right”, “capitalism”, “religion”, etc. are swallowed whole as actually representing systems of thought, ideas, social movements, etc. as opposed to what they actually represent – macro level expressions of psychopathology incompletely but partially described e.g. as antisocial personality traits, social dominance orientation, or more simply, arrested moral and intellectual development.

That is to say, problems will naturally arise when maladaptive behavioral and institutional expressions of psychopathology are viewed not as something to understand and treat, but as something to legitimize, enable and find middle ground with.

virtualize an addicted, prevaricating, morally-arrested adolescent, cliqued-up with criminals and disordered demagogues, and intellectually engaged by War-On-Drugs and War-on-Terror, boyhood fantasies :

construct, image, and download as “assured”, “intellectual” “leader”, “president” of a “country” invested in “hope” and “change”

global download in progress

systems stable

minor perturbations

virtualize an addicted, prevaricating, morally-arrested adolescent, cliqued-up with criminals and disordered demagogues, and intellectually engaged by War-On-Drugs and War-on-Terror, boyhood fantasies :

construct, image, and download as “assured”, “intellectual” “leader”, “president” of a “country” invested in “hope” and “change”

global download in progress

systems stable

minor perturbations