One of the costs of being a philosopher is having to acknowledge your parents were flatly not good enough.
"My parents weren't that bad!"
If that's true, you didn't become a philosopher. If you're really a philosopher, not faking it, it's because your parents screwed up their parenting so badly you were better off doing it yourself. Being a philosopher means you can't lie to yourself, which means admitting you were raised almost completely wrong, which is exactly why you had to re-derive how to think and how to act, etc etc. Naturally you can't start out as a philosopher, so having such incompetent parents inevitably has side effects, beyond merely being a philosopher.
More precisely, being a logiomancer, of course. You can be an academic philosopher if you want, without having to go through the trial by fire, but you can't be an innovation-class intellect and an academic philosopher at the same time. You'll get fired almost on the spot, or suffer some other extreme negative result. In general you can't make it through a bachelor's in philosophy, let alone the Ph.D, unless you're wildly deluded and happy that way.
This reminds me of a time I wrote an article about how unwed mothers damage boys and a guy contradicted me the comments. The reason he was right and his unwed mother was fine and his life was superb: he had a PhD in Philosophy. You couldn’t be fucked up and do that, so he thought.
ReplyDeleteOof.
ReplyDeleteThe literature shows that if you have to have only one parent, have only a father. Especially now you don't even need wet nurses and so on, you can't even make the argument that they'll die without a mother.