Clarissa's Blog

I keep forgetting that not everybody is like me, writing three articles at once, reading 5 books, and doing public appearances every week. For many people, this is all very overwhelming.

A husband comes home early and discovers his wife in bed, having sex with a huge, bulky guy. The guy drags the husband to the kitchen, draws a circle around him on the floor, and says, “I forbid you to step out of the circle.” Then he returns to the bedroom, finishes his business, and leaves.

The wife goes to the kitchen and finds the husband giggling happily. “While the two of you were fucking, I stepped out of the circle 3 times!” the husband announces triumphantly.

Totally reminds me of the people in Australia and other places who are excited about being let out of the house for 15 minutes or to get a half-hour shopping privilege. Or a guy who gushed on Twitter about the fantastic quality of pillows in a detention facility.

At the entrance to the campus parking lot, there’s a large sign saying “THIS WAY to a world without Alzheimer’s” and an arrow pointing towards campus. I’m wondering if it’s a rude joke about how everybody on campus is too young to have Alzheimer’s or a promotional poster created by people who are completely devoid of a sense of humor.

An interesting exercise to conduct is this: To small children, everything you say means either “I love you” or “I don’t love you.” Try translating everything you say to a child during the day to this language. It’s very eye-opening.

“Did you wash your hands? They look dirty.” – I don’t love you.

“Why do you always drop your backpack by the door so it’s in everybody’s way?” – I don’t love you. And you are in my way.

“Are you done?” – I don’t love you. And you are a drain on my time.

“You grew out of these shoes already?” – I don’t love you. And you are a drain on my money.

This is an evolutionary survival mechanism for children. They completely depend on an adult’s goodwill for survival, so they try to gauge the probability of you taking care of them and not abandoning them to wild animals. You know that you love them no matter what but they don’t.

Another thing to remember is this: you can never give a child enough love and attention. They are little bottomless pits. That’s because they are trying to extract enough love from you to last them for the rest of their lives. So don’t beat yourself up if your kid looks starved for attention. It’s not about you. It’s a long-term strategy.

A little quote from Michael Burleigh’s book Third Reich:

Also, Burleigh tells of the brief existence of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. It started experiencing milk shortages immediately, and the progressive authorities needed to come up with a narrative to justify it. “The only people who drink milk are bourgeois children!” they proclaimed. “And if they die, that’s a good thing. They will only grow up to oppress the working classes, so what’s the problem with them dying off now?”

I love Burleigh’s writing style, and I’m thinking I might have to switch to the English original because the Spanish translation doesn’t do him justice.

Have you noticed how kids are particularly obnoxious in the morning? Dragging their feet, making faces, doing everything at 1/10 of their regular speed?

“What? You haven’t brushed teeth yet? What have you been doing these 15 minutes???”

“I dunno.”

“Where is your backpack?”

“I dunno.”

“What do you want for breakfast?”

“I dunno.”

It’s almost like they are doing it on purpose.

Because they are.

Kids are like cars. If there’s no fuel, they won’t run. Their fuel is love. During the night, you weren’t giving them any love because you were asleep. In the morning, their tank is empty, and they are trying to squeeze attention (which for them is love) out of you.

Klara is not an early riser at all, and having to get up at 7 for kindergarten puts her in a vile mood by itself. Plus, like all small kids, she needs the love fuel. So to wake her up, I come into her room and start buzzing gently in a loving way about how wonderful, beautiful, amazing, and precious she is. That gets her up and puts her in a great mood in no time.

Never say, “come on, hurry, we are in a rush, I have to get to work.” To a child, these words mean “I don’t love you, you aren’t important, you don’t matter to me.” So they start dragging their feet to prove they do matter.

A much more productive thing to say is, “it’s ok, take your time, there’s no rush.” I swear, this gets them to move a lot faster. I get my very late sleeper kid out of the house in 20 minutes, and that includes choosing an outfit, doing her hair, and breakfast.

Obviously, I’m talking about small children. With teenagers what works is that you have to be completely calm, cool, collected, and not chaotic inside. Teenagers are so chaotic inside that they react angrily and aggressively to you own inner chaos. And this is true for any type of engagement, not only the morning routine. Think wild animals. If you encounter a wild animal, the advice is to stay completely still, don’t confront them, don’t make any sudden movements, don’t stare them down. I’ve never tried this on actual wild animals, thank goodness, but with teenagers, complete internal stillness is the ticket.

Instead of “the unvaccinated,” say “the control group.” We are the control group in a planet-wide medical experiment.

My friend that I told you about gave birth to a baby girl today. She’s huge and sucks down milk like a happy little vacuum cleaner.

Burleigh mentions – and this is something I didn’t know – that for 30 years American academia tried to banish the word “totalitarianism.” The reason was that this term was a shortcut to saying that Nazi Germany and the USSR had a similar system of government. This idea was intolerable to many academics because they were apologists for the Soviets. After 1991 there was no longer a need to defend the USSR, and the word “totalitarianism” came back into use.

Still, however, putting up leaflets with a hammer and sickle on a US campus is considered completely normal, while drawing a swastika would get a student expelled. “I grew up in a totalitarian regime” is a phrase that evokes complete incomprehension from US academics when I say it. “But there were good things about it, right?” they sometimes ask, looking at me with pleading, desperate expressions.

The difference between totalitarianism and absolutist, authoritarian or dictatorial regimes, says Burleigh, is that a totalitarian regime wants to control not only all of the functions of the state state but also the family, personal morality, art, and science.

PS. I’m reading Burleigh in Spanish, so if you see some slight imprecision in the quotes, that’s the reason.

In Third Reich, Michael Burleigh echoes the great anti-Nazi philosopher Eric Voegelin who said that the redemptionist political projects on the right and the left imitate religion in their superficial manifestations but they lack the depth of religion and they also lack transcendence. They are very much “of this world.”

The lack of the transcendent aspect is what makes these religion-like political movements so virulent. They don’t address their hopes for redemption to God. For them, there is no God. The only hope of redemption can come from people. If redemption isn’t coming, if the kingdom of heaven isn’t happening on Earth fast enough, this can only mean that people are very imperfect. But once again, there is no God to punish the sinners. So the righteous human beings are completely justified in eliminating the unrighteous human beings. The result is the opposite of “love thy neighbor” and “forgive their trespasses.” The neighbor is eternally suspect because if the kingdom of heaven on Earth isn’t happening, it can only be that bastard’s fault.