Thread by @CZEdwards

#TailorSnarkWars
MetaBattle: Self-perception & Cognition

I. Our own brains are out to get us
II. Dementia comes for us all
III. Narcissism is an underlying feature/bug of consciousness
***IV. Try not look like a 40 year old vampire even if you are***
V: Defense Against Dark Arts

This is gonna be a continuing series, because it’s complex. How we think about fashion is just one aspect of how we think and perceive. I’ve been working on this for a while. It’s foundational. Per usual, I’m just articulating what you already know.

Prior 3 threads in this series:

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1029094521798242304?s=21

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1029449327377174528?s=21

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1029804899792347136?s=21

End of repetitive content

Battle IV: Outdated Vampires

In S1E1 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Giles chews out Buffy at the Bronze for inattention. In response, she clocks a vampire on the dance floor in ~1 second, by reading his rolled up jacket sleeves, oversized shirt & haircut as hopelessly out of date.

Buffy is Fashion Fluent, btw. As the series progressed, we learned that vampires don’t emotionally evolve (with 1 textual, 1 part subtextual, & 1 writers-didn’t-intend-it-but-it-happened-anyway exception) because emotional evolution requires a soul vampires no longer have.

Since fashion, & memory, are at least partially emotional, vampires suck at growing up. This is why it’s silly to dress like a 40 year old vampire: the slayer will see you coming a mile off. Update with the times so you don’t become stake-bait.

We have no vampires in the real world (except Peter Thiel) but we well document the behavior pattern of failing to evolve, in cases of developmental and acquired personality disorders. I described the developmental one in Battle III; acquired ones are a bit more complex.

Can people, in adulthood, become narcissists or sociopaths? Well...I’m a behaviorist, so I posit people can display behavior consistent with a personality disorder if incentives & conditions favor it. Did they show a predisposition for it before that environment? Maybe.

Can you give a kid a personality disorder? That’s the developmental model.

Can a kid develop one despite best efforts? Yes. Sorry.
It’s not just behavior & cognition; there are genetic & epigenetic & social factors, too.
Does early therapy help? YES!!! Also, you. You’ll need it.

Since I’m a behaviorist, I do draw lines between mental health, mental injury & mental illness. Someone can have a mental injury -say PTSD- yet practice mentally healthy COGNITON & BEHAVIOR. It’s like lifting a weight: if you’ve got a busted knee, you adapt HOW you pick stuff up.

HERE BE METAPHORS

...or be on spectrum or experience dysphoria. An injury isn’t an illness; divergent cognition IS NOT a broken brain or subroutine.

Having to learn to cope with asshats who say divergence is mental illness, IS NOT MENTAL ILLNESS.

It’s... tool acquisition, like school or lessons or tutoring or paying to go to dance class. Medical billing requires us to code for payment because we’ve decided mental health is part of health, but we don’t have good preventative health billing, either.

...Sorry. We like to eat, too, and our landlords insist we pay rent, but nobody wants to just give us money; they want their insurance to pay us. Complain to insurance & our kludge of a medical-social-psych resource distribution system.

I miss the phrase differently abled. An autistic brain runs a different OS; it’s not broken. ADD?Overclocked processor & needs a chemical assist plus behavioral help. Not broken. A dysphoria is a BIOS setting, not broken. We just have an open parens somewhere in the software.

Are some mental illnesses & injuries *disabilities*? Yes. But seriously: evaluate your therapy. If you’re mostly concocting means to make it easier to deal with clueless OTHERS, your therapy is tool acquisition & only a disability because our society is stupid. You’re not broken.

You have a right to exist with the brain you have.
You have a right to make your cognition work for you, as long as it doesn’t require harming others.
You have a right to your body, as it works best for you & your cognition. You have the absolute right to figure that out for you.

But isn’t pathologizing Two Scoops giving him benefit of doubt?
No. I describe aspects of how his epic asshattery probably came to be. He is NOT consistently helpless to change, NOT unable to observe the effects of his behavior & NOT granted absolution. He WILL be held culpable.

As a mental health pro & someone with my own diagnoses, I find the argument that pointing out “consistent behavior” infinitely belittles people with mental injury & illness. It excludes us from mental health because we’re different. (& we often make this argument ourselves.)

That attitude says
IF we grant that people we don’t like have [disordered behavior, mental injury or personality disorders]
THEN we have to let them continue their bad behavior *because* of their disorder.

But that’s not how we treat ourselves. Or want to be treated.

We, as clients & therapists, don’t give OURSELVES that good a pass.

We’re harder on ourselves & insist we do our own goddam work so we can function. Of course we’re scornful of those who clearly need the work & won’t do it. We’re the best critics.

And yes, that’s why having him shoved into our categories offends us - it puts us in the same basket with awful humans who are lazy slackers who hurt people, and because humans subtextually expect collective responsibility from any group, we get blamed for their shit. DAMMIT.

When I say Donnie is a lifelong narcissist & showing documentable signs of cognitive decline, I’m saying he’s a f’n loser who never did any psych work, that he’s exploitable & his behaviors make him deeply unreliable. That’s the OPPOSITE of claiming him for Team Mental Health.

(And seriously, we have 45 YEARS of documentation of his behavior. Narcissism is not a one & done event. It’s a long process to get to the N word. It’s behavioral pattern recognition, not a blood test....

... We have lots of history on this guy: on camera, when he doesn’t know he’s on camera, people who want his approval, people who don’t. He behaves *better* when on camera, and his *best* behavior gets most kids put in time out. No, this guy does act like this all the time.)

Using the N word with him mostly warns others, provides frames for coping with him, b/c narcissism takes different skill sets than dealing with random unpleasant asshole.
It’s not legal absolution; he’s responsible for his actions, he knows right from wrong. He just doesn’t care.

& No, racism isn’t mental illness, but it is a *symptom* of either broken cognition (if recent & sudden) or broken socialization (if lifelong). Both are choices. Mental health is how we make the choices we makem which ones are voluntary & which are subroutines. & how to fix it.

In short: those of us with mental illness or injury would prefer The Psych Sorting Hat not put us in any house that would have people like DJT. We ask it very hard and we want to believe the Hat hears us.

Unfortunately, that’s not how this works. Their behavioral asshattery is symptomatic of THEIR specific conditions. Not ours, but we don’t have a house for GIANT FUCKING ASSHOLES.

What we’re saying is “I may be bipolar/borderline/in cognitive decline, but at least I’m not a REAL ASSHOLE like him.”

You’re not an asshole, probably. Except asshat behavior *is* a sign of cognitive decline/failed socialization/deteriorating emotional regulation/decompensation.
It’s just not a DEFINITIVE sign.
It says person is unable to play by the communal rules, so we have to figure out why.

(It’s also culture bound. We deplore racism/sexism/homophobia because our culture makes equality for all a virtue. If we were born into a strict caste society & never experienced our version of equality, we wouldn’t have our definition of virtue. This is SOFTWARE, not hardware.)

Recall: Percy is Gryffindor. He’s an asshat with a stick up his butt. James Potter is Gryffindor. He’s a fucking bully. But our HP perspective is of teenagers stuck in artificial categories designed to divide, so we don’t get to see the pro-social Slytherins. (Who must exist.)

Clem is a demon; he’s a pretty good guy. Some of Giles’ & Angel’s “I know a Guy” NPCs are demons on the side of good. Some humans are really fucking bad in the Buffyverse.

And this is fictional metaphor, but you are not your diagnosis/species/house. Your behavior is only influenced by it. You can change it.

No condition gives ANY OF US a pass. We’re members of a social species, living on 1 planet, w/ finite resources. We ALL have to get along. We must install software that allows us to cooperate to the full extent of our ability, whether we have a DX or not. We don’t get to be lazy.

(This especially applies to people who insist they are in good mental health. Probably not. Find a therapist. Who is not me. You likely need 101, and to discuss the unreliable nature of perception and memory. Start there, with optical illusions.)

Off my soapbox...

I think anyone can be pushed into antisocial behavior, either long or short term. Put a person in an environment where empathy is punished & selfishness rewarded (hedge fund, toxic frat, Objectivist summer camp) they will either adapt or die/leave.

I’m not being dramatic. People in untenable situations mostly adapt by normalizing the horrible behavior, currying favor to get above the worst treatment (& keeping those at the bottom down, so they absorb the worst)

...or they abandon everything or kill themselves to get out.

(You don’t walk from Guatemala to Arizona in June, carrying 25 pounds of toddler, because you were bored. Just sayin’.)

We learn behavior patterns that are adaptive in the moment, but can become maladaptive when we leave that time/place/situation.

It’s the premise of The Good Place in reverse: if you put a fairly good person in Hell and give them no exit, what happens?

Now back to Buffy, specifically S6. (Spoilers.) The premise we get is Buffy was truly a good person. She went to a heaven. And then her friends brought her back to a literal hellscape full of demons, pain, and being trapped in a grave.

Go them.

Is it surprising Buffy’s behavior (as textually written) becomes incredibly maladaptive in the next few months?

And while that’s metaphysical (and fictional!), it also describes both monocyclic Depression & chronic illness that comes with a flare & remission cycle.

Seriously, her supportive people are baby sis (also grieving their mother & coping w/ being made flesh & TWEEN), her new friend who has extricated herself from toxic fam (& prob has no $$ as out-of-state unmarried student under FAFSA magic 23) & spent months in mind-control...

And Spike, who spent a century as primary therapist & caretaker of a *vampire* w/ severe mental illness & injury & no coping (Dru is multi-dx, fight me), but at this point in the narrative, Spike has no soul* & is riverdancing on the line between stalker, boyfriend & exploiter.

(*I can make a solid, textual argument that Spike/William never lost his soul, but survival with Darla, Dru & Liam forced it to HIDE. Spike is 1 of 2 vampires who evolve emotionally without a textual soul. [Harmony is 2.]

I’d say Angel evolves a lot LESS, despite having one. Spike is COGNITIVE BEHAVIORISM!

Yes, I’ve thought about this a LOT. Spike-Buffy isn’t healthy, but it’s a relatively egalitarian relationship with significant mutual respect that had potential to evolve...

... until the writers fucked it up. Buffy-Angel was never egalitarian, grew very little, was proto Bella-Edward Chastity Porn. Okay, yes, I’m fangirling... sorry.)

The fact that Buffy pulls herself about halfway out of severe depression, complicated grief & acute traumatic stress in about 6 months says she’s got great resilience & coping. (I also posit she’s still depressed in S7 & into the comics, which I stopped reading early on.)

Imagine how much *worse* she’d be without supportive tween sister, new friend in the midst of her own trauma & safety crisis, & Mr Sexual Healing Makes the Peroxide Go Round.

That’s most people living in a cult, or bad marriages, or toxic workplaces.

This is *how* we create acquired dysfunctional behavior that is functionally identical to a personality disorder.

Buffy just mostly mirrors the shitty behavior her mentor, friends & lovers display, and they don’t have the excuse of being formerly dead & ripped from heaven.

Now, apply this to ... our favorite (and by favorite I mean do I have to think this through?) deplorables, the Tiki Torch Incel Brigade. This specific group of young men has been talking amongst themselves, reinforcing a whole suite of generally maladaptive behaviors.

Were these guys shitty before they started encouraging each other? Meh.

In old skool shrink talk, we used a divide between neurosis (problematic but realistic behaviors/thoughts that lead to distress) and psychosis (a lack of connection with reality at all).

We don’t use that anymore, but a 14 YO boy, overwhelmed & out of his depth in social interaction is... normal.

Insecure? Sure. Socially naïve? Absolutely. Risk averse? YES.

That’s childhood & inexperience.

It’s FINE: Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, Emotional.
And totally OK.

This is how everyone feels when learning a new skill: uncertain, afraid to fail & lacking access to skills & resources to improve.

Part of me definitely side-eyes gaming, save-reload & CTRL-Z for encouraging this, but we do have a cultural problem with how we teach *failure*.

That gets them into trouble: they fear failure so deeply they can’t manage their insecurities. They won’t even try.
Their experience of failure has likely been negative. Parents tend to react to failure with more lessons & loss of privilege. That feels punitive. So why try?

Adults toss out the 10,000 hours to expertise canard at each other all the time...

but the moment someone tries to apply it to a kid, everyone sets their hair on fire & runs around bemoaning how the kid won’t get into HAAAAVAAAD.

(You know what? Getting an on-campus (not online!) community college AA benefits many young men far more than going to a big Uni or online. Many 18 year old boys aren’t ready for 40K college campuses. If your kid must move out, consider western state, rural Community Colleges...

...that still have dorms.
The AZ & CO systems are both VERY good for reasonable cost + major student support.

Or invest in a backyard tiny house & accept the Cheeto bag layer. Don’t let them do most of their work online. Insecure & risk adverse + physical isolation? BAD mix.)

(I say this as a deep introvert who got really good at my research job *specifically* so I could turn my projects in to Remote Work Extravaganzas. I’m far more functional because online classes didn’t exist for me; I got a lot of practice managing insecurity & need for recharge.)

I hate to admit this, but sending your 19 year old on a 2 year mission to dig wells/harvest crops/build rural phone towers & solar? Possibly the best thing you can do for your kid. (NOT a typical Mormon mission.) Semi-independent + a strong structure that requires social cuing.

Insecurity, risk aversion, fear of failure?

These are not mental illnesses; they’re maladaptive behaviors. They’re mental HEALTH issues the same way that only consuming 6L of Mountain Dew & 10 bags of Cheetos every day is a physical HEALTH issue.

Hi, please separate your aluminum behavioral health from plastic psych for recycling!

Mental health & mental illness are not the same. A physical therapist can treat someone who broke an ACL & a professional runner. Similar techniques, even. Same for behavior/mental illness.

I’ve written about this before: what draws people into the deplorable basket is a double punch of insecurity & acceptance: they’re insecure about something (including parental approval, see narcissism☝️) & have been rejected by “Cool Kids” but taken in by “Other (K)Kool Kids.”

When we say “your X is bad,” (where X is racism, sexism, etc) they hear “you are bad”. The KKool Kids are Nazis, but they’re Nazis who feed acceptance & approval, while we liberal asshats keep challenging them & making them work when they already feel overwhelmed & frustrated.

(I’m NOT saying approve of deplorables or be nice to them. They’re not babies, they’re not stupid, they can distinguish between right/wrong, ethical/corrupt, moral/callous. They can obtain therapy & behave in civil society. People like me get paid to help them. You don’t.)

But that risk aversion... Behaviorally? Since they *refuse* to manage their insecurity, they build a mirror universe version of a support group, where they go complain about their risk aversion & instead of being encouraged to take chances & get praise for their victories...

... they reinforce their aversions & insecurities, their social skills atrophy further, and the most extreme voices get amplified until they elevate murderers to saints.

You can see how this might be a problem.

And Our Tiki Torch Toddlers are just one example. We have many examples of culturally acquired narcissistic behavior, where the subgroup approves of behavior that is broadly maladaptive.

Personal narrative time...

My early personal experience with this is growing up as a gentile (not Mormon) in a strict LDS community. I first got online as a young teenager, when 9600 modems were expensive, AOL didn’t yet exist & we used local BBS dialup. I couldn’t go online between 9PM Saturday night...

...when the BBS owner turned off his computer & 9AM Monday morning (which meant 4PM Monday afternoon because I was in school) when he powered it back up, because his faith didn’t permit him to work on the Sabbath. And he wrote creepy (& shitty) content filters, because why not?

All of his clients were LDS. They want their stuff filtered. There should never be a mention of menstruation. Or breasts, even cancer. Or the ability to look up the phone number & address for the Planned Parenthood near my grandparents’ house, because my local LDS doc said...

...the Pill might help my cramps, but he wouldn’t give it to anyone who wasn’t married with at least two kids already, and only if her husband approved. Live with it, he said. (No, I was not yet bitchy enough to kick him in the ‘nads for that. Should have, though.)

If I, a teenage girl, didn’t like his BBS rules, I could dial into another BBS. (Never mind that calls outside that small town was in-state long-distance, $0.25 a minute or $0.10 a minute for calls starting after 11 pm & ending before 5 am.) And my $20/mo was painfully earned.

(Fuck you, Qwest. The only reason you’re not the worst of the Baby Bells is because Verizon [NYNEX/Bell Atlantic] & BellSouth [Cingulair/AT&T mobile] existed.... Ah. I’ve waited 20 years to say that.)

(When I get wound up about Net Neutrality & try to convince you to make your guest networks into open mesh networks... this is why. I’ve lived without it. It SUCKS. Also, telephony used to be abusively expensive, which is why GenX either LOVE phones , or avoids them.)

Yes, that BBSAdmin was 1 in a town of 5K with ~300 geeks who thought BBS was worth their time & a pre-1990 $20/mo. Maybe just one asshole who thought God gave him the ability to control everyone around him & his Church approved?

Nah. There were also several bishops who thought it was OK to call me - a gentile, not part of their church! - into their offices to discuss my foregone conversion/my skirts/my boobs. (Having them was apparently the problem.) Because I was leading the boys to sin...

(Where where my parents? Spiraling through their own drama. The good thing about being raised by two narcissists whose primary source of attention was each other, is they orbited each other & mostly let the cats raise the kids. They were bored with parenting by the time I was 10

20 guys in my school told me to my face that they wanted to date, or dance, or talk on the phone, or be friends, but couldn’t because I was gentile. I was an LD debate champ & couldn’t get a POLICY partner because I wouldn’t convert. (Debate geeks will get how weird this is.)

But it was ok to sexually harass the gentile because who could she tell? Literally, I was not believed when I reported that a Good Mormon Boy trapped me in the sheet music library. His hands on my boobs was my fault for enticing him. (Please see my thread on Modesty Culture...)

Same with female friends: I could overnight at their houses but I had to participate in their LDS rituals, read their holy book & they couldn’t stay at my house. (I was ok with this last: nobody deserved my parents.) But I couldn’t share my faiths because mine are corruptions.

(For those in the back: it’s WRONG to force a guest to pray, or lay on hands, or participate in a scripture reading. Not a mission, Not bringing the Good News. It’s abusive. If you don’t know if your guest is ok with prayer, you ask. If they’re not, you have a moment of silence.)

My family was expected to contribute to the Bishop’s Storehouse (local community food bank) which distributed to LDS only. If we had needed it, we wouldn’t have gotten even a Thanksgiving basket. We couldn’t get the daily discount at the thrift store without a temple recommend.

Our property taxes paid for public schools, but 98% of my classmates got a free, weighted A for Seminary on their GPA. Which meant when the (LDS) principal figured GPA, there was no way I’d get into NHS or valedictorian unless I was taking & acing an extra AP class every semester

My peers had 6 classes a day, plus their hour to talk about their future planet & being eternally pregnant & reconciling the lack of horses & clocks in North America before 1493 with their story. I had 7 classes, usually an extra science or math.
This matters for scholarships.

(I happily took those classes, because grades for spite was fun &it kept me out of my parents’ house.)
Everyone got an A in Seminary. It was legally a Release class & shouldn’t have figured into GPA at all, much less as a weighted, but it did. The good guidance counselor told me.

Should I have sued? ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY. But this was before the real internet, I had no access to Freedom From Religion Foundation or ACLU or even an attorney who wasn’t LDS, and while I knew it was wrong, I just wanted out. If I’d sued, I would have had to go BACK.

Tell me this isn’t culturally transmitted narcissism. They believe they’re the only ones who are real/saved. We’re all NPCs in their war for souls. If we NPCs don’t behave as scripted, we disrupt the delicate scales of their belief. We belie their desperate search for approval.

Sorry, but Joseph Smith got killed mostly because LDS counterfeited banknotes. To be fair, many people with printing presses were counterfeiting, too, but they went further afield to spend their funny money. They didn’t scam the neighbors.
(Thanks, sib, who wrote MS on this.)

It had much, much less to do with side pieces & more with land scams & money scams & sketchy ass voting & not being good members of the community.

(Though I still think Emma Smith should have stuck to her revelation guns and demanded equal side piece action as her own prophecy. And to stop it with the scamming. Also she should have nutted Brigham, who was the true Dick Cheney of the piece.

I’m 100% ok with destroying counterfeiting presses. A.Ham set up a nat’l bank for DAMN GOOD REASONS. States/banks never should have printed their own money. Contributing factor to US Civil War: rapid boom-bust cycles caused by bank speculation kept slavery economically viable)

(Moral of the story: don’t shit where you eat. Also, when banks are unregulated & create the money supply through speculation, this fucks with the rights of workers and creates conditions for economic collapse & revolution. *cough* Dodd-Frank *cough* Glass-Steagal *cough*)

Evangelicals do this cultural narcissism, too. Vacation Bible School anyone? Birchers/SovCits/SageBrushers do it. Scientologists do it. Earth Firsters & radfems do this. Any group who defines themselves as superior has the potential to set up their own group as Ubermensch.

This becomes a social problem only when the group claiming superiority ALSO has entrenched social, economic & political power. (I’ll worry about radical hippies when they control a state house. THEY DON’T.)

That power need not be national or state, just locally unchallenged.

The Mormon Corridor (LDS AZ, UT, NV, ID) isn’t even majority LDS, except in UT. But they control most of the state & county & city governments.

When they control school boards, they’re ok with teaching Cliven Bundy’s vision for America. Science & climate change are optional.

How did Colorado City/Short Creek/Hildale become & stay an FLDS haven for 50 years? By controlling local government, including police.

How does Scientology maintain their work camps? A combination of corrupt local cops & exploitable loopholes in tax law.

I’m not saying Mormons or Scientologists have personality disorders. (Not Dxing. Not worth my time, above pay grade!)

I’m saying cultures can and do have power to promote a worldview that denies agency & equality to others, both inside their group and outside.

So how do we combat it?

There’s a flaw in culture-bound narcissism: if you raise a kid in it, their beliefs are fragile. Because they’re never challenged, they will believe whole-heartedly... until something disrupts their belief.

And then it breaks like a soap bubble.

Culture bound narcissism produces true believers who double-down & invent prophecies & justify & defend their beliefs... and apostates who watched their entire worldview crumble when a piece of their foundation failed.

It doesn’t produce a middling believer.

If you raise a kid in Evangelicalism without exposure to other thought, you raise the chance the kid will be an atheist when they have a crisis of conscience over omniscience/omnipotence/omnibenevolence.(Or infant vs adult baptism, or wine vs grape juice.Ya’ll get damn granular.)

Seriously, let’s do Pascal’s Wager backwards. Which is better: 99% chance of a believing Christian who is perhaps honestly mistaken about the age of the earth but is 100% behind Jesus,
or 25% chance they damn themselves to Hell by becoming atheist when science breaks their faith?

To maximize salvation, raise wishy-washy Christians, people. It’s all about faith the size of a mustard seed, and being generous & giving. (Unless of course you don’t actually care about saving souls & it’s all a cover for being mean & considering yourself superior?... )

The way we fight this is education, but not Democratic liberal go talk to Magats in Pennsyltucky & convince them of the superiority of kale — no.

Stop.

I’m talking Pre-K. Day care. Early childhood education. Free. Everywhere.

It’s gonna take a generation, maybe a century. (Socialism is finally coming into its own, as the later versions where it co-exists with regulated capitalism & laws that promote justice & it’s taken 125 years.) This is LONG TERM WORK. This is a big society problem.
No easy fix.

We know that children who grow up in daycare are more cooperative, more generous adults. They’re better at changing their minds when presented with new information. Their parents have far better economic outcomes at retirement age, because Mom didn’t take 10 years out of work.

If parents have more money & security when the kids are small, the kids do better in school, medically, socially. We can control for this down to well below the poverty line. The kid of a single mom getting 100% subsidies + Head Start does 100% better than the kid w/o Head Start.

A single adult can’t socialize a child. It takes a village. Children require age-peers for extended hours every day. Even having stair-step kids a year apart isn’t good enough to best socialize babies. (And their moms get fucking squirrelly after about the 3rd year of diapers.)

There’s a reason the Satanic Panic focused on daycare — it gave women freedom, and wow, that’s not allowed because damn, women get uppity when you give them 74% of a paycheck. They want the whole damn thing and to have their daycare paid for.

Ding-dong! Misogyny Calling!

Free college is a great idea, but it comes AFTER free daycare, available at 12 weeks old. Which comes after required, PAID parental leave for EVERYONE, regardless of hourly rate, 1099/W2, salary or gender. And universal health.

We start with giving all babies a good start.

Then we add critical thinking, from Pre-K on. It is more important for a child to know HOW to evaluate a source of information than almost anything else, except the ability to read the information for themselves.

Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Recess, Critical Thinking.

This one will make people REALLY mad. All children, whether homeschooled, in private school, or public/charter, are subject to the same evaluation & oversight. Everyone takes Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Evaluators see all kids 4x a year.

(This prevents child abuse, too.)

I didn’t say this was easy. But it’s doable, from the local level. If you’re in the US, you live in a school board district, you pay taxes for it, and you are entitled to be at the board meetings & run for the board.

Don’t have kids? Doesn’t matter.

The kids in your school district will be your doctors, nurses & caregivers when you’re old. You want them very, very smart.

You start by pushing for recess, 2x a day. (Little kids HAVE TO run around. They can’t just sit still.) If it extends the school day, be OK with paying.

Then you push for all day kindergarten, then Pre-K. Then critical thinking classes. You have to have the infrastructure in place, first.

We focus on early childhood development so we don’t have more Donnies who fingerpaint the WH with their shit.

Each battle is hard. Worth it.

Here endeth battle IV: Try not look like a 40 year old vampire even if you are. Next up: Defense Against the Dark Arts.