Families

Question for Zig Forums: what was your family situation like growing up, in terms of your parents' (or guardians') relationship with you or each other?

You would think most radical leftists come from broken or abusive families, where the parents/caregivers barely raise them or have trouble doing so. But, I've found the opposite to be paradoxically true: nearly all the best comrades I know come from families which are quite close-knit (even if it's not an "intact" nuclear family); some of them even have parents who are radical lefties themselves. On the flip side, the comrades who came from shitty family situations always seemed to hold their leftist views based on emotion alone, rather than principle.

My understanding of this is, if you grew up in a family where there's love and compassion, you learn how to love and feel compassion and are thus more likely to empathize with the oppressed. If your family situation is shitty OTOH you will probably base your political views on anger and resentment. Any psychfags want to weigh in on this? Also, if we assume this is true, what would it mean in terms of how a future socialist state should understand and threat the family as an institution?

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Anyone?

Family is divorced and my father was abusive. I guess I fit the stereotype. My Mom is a pretty empathetic and compassionate person, though. I really don't know if it matters much, since I know some far right people whose parents are divorced. Also, you can have some twisted af ideas about what compassion actually means. I've talked to Nazis that actually think their ideology is about love, for instance.

I grew up in a decently intact and loving household could always be better and I make an effort not to exhibit the bad qualities of my parents but I was also relentlessly bullies from about 4 years old until 17 years old at school. So analyse what you wish.

I want to fight for a world where oppression and pain does not exist anymore, and also capitalism is fucking unsustainable read marx, even if you are a fucking rich ass bourg you should be pro-communism given that its the only way to tackle our impending climate holocaust.

It is relative, not true/false. You can have less or more oppression/pain (however you define those terms), but you cannot have absence of it, short of wiping out all life that have nervous systems in the universe.

When I was small and about to cry, parents asked me:
And my grandparents reminded me about wise words of comrade Lenin ,,to learn" when I was at school, so I guess I might have been hearing true class memes since I was small. We do not talk about politics with family, except for my indoctrination of youngest brother by anarchist theory, but my parents are great people.

What made me leftist was not a family, but a job and Zig Forums. Only person who works can hear Marxist propaganda and look past his ideology. NEETs for example often hold reactionary wives because their entire world consists of spending time with edgy 13y/o children without facing the fact they have to work in order to live.

Just like how I cannot write perfect code, I can keep working to ever closer approach perfection, like a curve and its asymptote.

i know its an error but still

fuck families, everyone should be raised by the state.

I grew up with a single dad. My parents broke apart sometime when I was like one or two years old.

My dad had alcohol and amphetamine problems (not meth, just normal amphetamine). He went in and out of various delusions and could be in a psychosis for weeks at an end. Like, believing that we were spied upon by the government and so on. One time he came home and was cut up, bleeding like a pig, presumably because he had crossed some gangster. He said it was nazis that had done it to him.

He slept a lot and Never had a job. We never had clean clothes or anything. Sometimes there was no food in the refrigurator.

When I was 8 I contemplated committing suicide, because my life was hell. I was a member at a shooting club and I had noticed that I could steal bullets from the shooting practice. So I had quite far gone plans for that. But I decided that if I just lived through this shit I would grow up and gain control over my own life, and that maybe I could move away from home in not that many years from now.

When I was 12 the police came to my home and took me away. They never told me WHY they did that. As in, what was the official bureaucratic reason? They never told me that. I actually asked them, and they were perplexed and asked me if I didn't understand that. Of course I did, I told them, but I wanted to see the actual document, the decision making process that led up to that. They told me they would show it to me, and then they just never came back to me with that. I still do not know.

I was placed in a childcare home. Locked windows and stuff, but I instantly got like 6 new crazy friends that I absolutely loved. This was in Sweden, and not retarded USA, so we were actually treated with a great deal of respect and loving care at the childcare home. Every weekend something had to happen, like we HAD to go to an amusement park or a zoo or a museum or whatever. After a few months that actually got a bit tedious (!).

But it was actually NICE AS FUCK living at that childcare home.

When I was 14 my mom, which was a total pscyho in the literal meaning, stole a car off a parking lot outside a shopping mall. She drove the car in the opposite *wrong* lane on the high way for a couple of kilometers, and then smashed it into a wall. She instantly broke her neck.

My first thought when my mom died was that, finally, that shit is over. She had only ever been trouble for me, and now I would finally never ever have to deal with her again.

Later that year I was adopted.

I spent the first few years after being adopted living in a little protected bubble that I made for myself in my boy-room. I learned programming and x86 assembler programming. I wrote a couple of viruses and learned to crack software.

When I was maybe 17, I opened up that bubble and got myself some new real friends.

At the university some of the courses, like operating system design and embedded real time systems, I had already learned everything, from back when I was in that bubble.

And now I work as a programmer. I have a quite fucking high salary and everything is just going smooth in my life :)

It's somewhat weird to have NO GUIDANCE whatsoever from my family. All my life choices have been totally my own, with no need to respect or possibility to consult with my dad or mom. In some ways that makes me more free, but also somewhat aimless.

Oh, forgot to say something political also.

I think I am quite LEFT in my political viewpoints. But, mostly I am just an anarchist, totally opposed to all forms of government and people telling me what to do. Maybe that is a somewhat predictable outcome of my childhood.

I think it is nice when small groups of people come together and create a caring society or group. But when that group grows too large, my trust to its often self-appointed leaders go away and I am just filled with disgust.

Solidarity is nice.

Bad family, although my material conditions were always alright.

My parents got divorced when I was about four, from which moment I lived with my mother. She was an art graduate with a severe personality disorder and would oscillate between pampering and verbally abusing me. Meanwhile I got bullied at the school she sent me to, to which teachers refused to pay any attention.
I had received outstanding results at some Autism Level test they did on me (152 at the time) and my mother thus decided that my struggles were due to me being mentally gifted, and thus belonging to a separate class of people from the rest of society. Other people would never be able to understand me and prosecute me without end. Eventually she took me off school and sent me weekly to a local initiative for gifted children. This initiative in many ways resembled a cult.
The stress of homeschooling me eventually became too much for her, and she decided to drop me off at my father's house and end her life. When she arrived and only found my grandmother waiting, since my father was at the other side of the country, she thought the better of this and planned to drive back home. My grandmother saw the state she was in and prevented her from doing so, fearful that she might kill us as well. Eventually my father and the police arrived, and I would live with him the rest of my childhood.
This was around the time I turned eight. At this point I had implicitly resolved to never engage in any sort of social interaction outside of my family again, and never to spend much attention to tasks imposed on me from school. It simply didn't work. It still doesn't. I'm still fucking trying to make it work, and it just doesn't. The problem is that I'm a weak asocial piece of shit. I can't imagine myself doing anything that isn't intellectually involved, and for such a career you need schooling.

My dad was a complacent unemployed lumpen who didn't get anything done. He distrusted authorities so never got me any help. Later on I would start seeing my mother again, and she'd again start to indoctrinate me with her paranoid fantasies, which I largely accepted until the age of 13. Then this turned into regular conflict with her, which ended when I turned 16 and decided I didn't want to see her anymore, as part of a general project to improve my mental health. It has up to this moment had mixed results. Around the same period I moved in with my grandmother, who is falling apart due to old age. (Something I have trouble dealing with emotionally. I normally just encourage her to overcome her insecurities about it, but the back pain she suffers from is an enormous burden on her mentally.)
When 18 I lived in a psychiatric community for two years. (With a guy who I suspect of being Zig Forums, though I never asked. If you think you're it, give me a sign.) Towards the end of it it started taking effect, but my allowed term (with extension) had finished, and I ended up somewhere else, seeking further treatment. This other place was a depressed shithole though and I decided it couldn't possibly do me any good. Now I've given up on the mental health system and am trying to finish high school through self-study.

That's my life story up to this point. Everything sucks and I struggle imagining it any better. Actually finishing high school and going to university seems Utopian from where I'm currently standing.

Shit son

Don't worry, cigar-user. If a shitposter like me can fumble his way through high-school, I think you're gonna manage just fine tbh. Also, if you're still sweating the social stuff, just remember that it's a learned ability and will improve with time and practice as long as you're not isolating yourself on purpose (don't do that).

Disregard sage

Is the childcare home that the child protection service put you in a free association or something?
My mother had been somewhat afraid of the child protection services taking me away when I was a child. It probably loomed over her like a oppressive institution. she didn't really raise me right since I turned out to be a neet.

This is such a fucking clusterfuck
Holy shit this childhood is even above the shit we get as examples in our mental health courses OR the fucking asylum we used to visit last year.
From your own subjective standpoint, how was your going up.
As far as you remember, age 4+ or whatever. Your mother sounds like a typical par excellence ambivalent parent with a dose of schizophrenia while the small part the father played in your telling just says enough.

Oh and I'm sorry if this sounds cold, but I am a bit excited I guess

Mom hit me. Dad hit me. Grew up and learned not to hurt anyone except for those with the intent to hurt. Always look out for the weak. Never back down to bullies and intellectual dishonesty.

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fucking based man, sending you love

Thank you user for the proof that better nothing than what I had.

Gr8 fam. Tight nit an full o love.
Taught me to care for all people and see mistakes as more than the person.

Great advice. See, if only Zig Forums worked half as hard as you, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, quit whining all the time, saved their money and gave firm handshakes in interviews, they could all be wealthy, hardworking programmers just like you and earn a great life.

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Almost got me with this boomer bait tbh

I've always felt like I'm not in a position to complain. Like I said, my material conditions were alright.
While my mother was abusive in her own way, her obsession with me kept her from going all out. Most of the time it was directed at my father, the school system, and non-gifted people. Sometimes she'd start ranting about shit I did wrong (things she was absolutely okay about previously), but this never got deeply personal. The worst I remember is her calling me autistic one time. (Which I was insecure about, although I'm convinced that if I am autistic it's nothing beyond mild Asperger's.) The point here is that she there focused in on an insecurity, which she wouldn't do otherwise.
There was never any physical abuse. No one ever hit me. The worst there was light neglect by my father. He would put off getting new clothes, going to the dentist, going to the hairdresser, getting in contact with my school… things like that. Food would be there every day and he'd be there for me if I asked him to.

These are three stark differences from many stories I've heard. There's not that much for me to complain about, which is what scares me into believing in radical change to society. Schools should have never let things get this far with me. If teachers were able to more closely engage with their students, all of this could have been prevented.

Other students with similar histories would end up failing at school and become poor, ignorant workers with unaddressed mental issues. You never take note of them.
This is pretty much formalized in my country. Here in Dutch-speaking Belgium, you can choose between ASO, TSO and BSO class groups in high-school. ASO is "general secondary education," meant for intelligent students with a relatively stable home who are able to focus on learning abstract subjects like mathematics, history, social sciences, learn complex foreign grammar and so on… They go on to college or university. TSO is "technical secondary education," for slightly less intelligent people with less stable homes who are able to solve concrete mathematical assignments, come up with designs, learn a new language, and so on… They generally go on to get technical college degrees, but can also immediately be employed. Then you have BSO or "trade secondary education." While trade school can help you get a very decent job later on, it remains primarily a method to direct you to manual labor immediately out of middle school which you stick to for the rest of your life. The competency expected of you in most of these classes is incredibly low, and the students enrolled in them have all kinds of personal problems that prevent them from achieving anything for themselves. Next to that, these students receive a worryingly small amount of general education on the world, making them incapable of critical thought. There was a poll recently that indicated that most of these students would prefer a strong authoritarian leader over a democratic system. (pic related)
I'm convinced that if most of these students came from a different background, or were given adequate psychological assistance, they would be just as capable of going through ASO education as anyone else, which I find a much more useful way to spend your teenage years than learning skills you could pick up on the job without problem.
It's only because I was too stubborn to go TSO that I stuck with ASO.

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This post is chaotic as fuck. Two corrections…
should just be
and
should be
which is a significant difference in meaning.

my mom owns a book called "raising your child with an uncooperative ex"

Unfortunately there will never be a perfect world, where we're free from pedantry like this.

But on topic I'm kind of skeptical about this kind of topic, either it's someone trying to confirm some Freudian hypothesis or CIA.

Stephan Moleneux philosophy of irrational extremists come from an abusive family.

Freedom main radio was right.

This unironically. I hate literally everyone I'm related too. I've never coorelated me being a leftist with my upbringing. I've always just blamed it on being an American non-white that's not a total fucking moron.

I like most of the people I'm related to, love my parents and am dismissive of very few. We should not be basing our goals on our subjective experiences. There is however, a great flaw in the family structure in that a primary care giver's methods of child rearing are unseen and nigh unanswerable. I see the future as being an evolution of the extended family, in which a larger group of people with tight social bonds contribute to a child's development. It's absolute conjecture, and maybe a little utopian, but I think that in a developed socialist society, it would resemble this model, but lack the so called "head of the household" and also include close friends, as many people are closer to unrelated friends than their own family. I'm sorry that your family is incompatible with you.

Yeh. I didn't mean literally raised by the state no exceptions. But you get it the nuclear family structure isn't without flaws.

At least someone is.

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[x] doubt

There's been cases of child suicide. It's uncommon, but not unheard of. Pretty fucked up.

Some brutal stories here. Makes me feel lucky.

My childhood was remarkably normal and I grew up in a conventional nuclear family with a breadwinning, bourgeois father. This is in America. I read a lot of sci-fi novels and watched a lot of Star Trek with my irreligious father, who has a socially liberal outlook on life although constrained within the boundaries of – again – conventional suburban "normality." I'd say that put me on the normie-liberal side of things, which combined with this all-white and very conservative part of the country and school environment I was in, made me sympathetic to – but suspicious of – the actual left. Mainly, I really did not like the Religious Right, which was the dominant kind of political / cultural environment in my community.

I'd say what brought me into the left was (a) exposure to friends who were into radical left-wing politics at an early age (b) getting a job and becoming more interested in economics.

I dunno. Maybe there's some psychological stuff going on but I don't like to analyze myself. Marxist writers just make the most sense to me when it comes to explaining how the world actually works. I prefer to read the business papers and Marxist writers.

Eventually I told one of those friends "yeah I think you were right about a lot of this." He grew up in a shattered home and was abused by his father, who was a cop. He became a communist. He's one of the smartest people I know.

I'm also gay, which might have something to do with it. Maybe not, though. There are a lot of shithead right-wing gay guys.

I had a friend who became a neo-Nazi skinhead. I didn't find that out until a few years after losing contact with him. But he was a cross-dressing goth teen who wore makeup all the time, and later transformed himself into this beefsteak skinhead with swastika tattoos. Pretty wild.

Anyways he had a severely bad home environment. I read one study of white supremacist, neo-Nazi extremist types that found the two most common things they had in common were having racist parents who divorced. I don't think there is a single mono-causal explanation for why people join these movements, though, and you might just as well rebel against racist parents and go to the left.

What I can say is that the fundamental message that Nazi skinhead crews and so on make to recruits is "you're not alone because you're white." They recruit from vulnerable people who have fallen into a rut and are afraid and alone, and the Nazi movement provides them a family and a sense of purpose. So, it's no surprise many are capable of empathy and compassion, although in this narrowly-defined sense towards their own "kind."

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No father or real siblings, but what damaged me the most was conduct disorder, which meant I almost lacked conscience during my childhood and I could not feel blame for breaking the rights of others (which I did constantly). So I was lonely and never figured out socializing. Worst part was that the psychfags diagnosed me with autism, so I never got proper treatment or understanding. I vividly emember my teacher asking "what is the REASON you are misbehaving?" and I was just blank.
A lot of people with conduct disorder become sociopaths, but I eventually developed a weak conscience (although I don't feel sad when people die). I used to be a fascist in my early teens, but later I got into leftism because I was edgy and wanted to destroy Zig Forumsyps in arguments on halfchan.

I agree with OP. Every single batshit emotional case on the left has some kind of family issues. No wonder these kinds of people end up abandoning leftism later on.

Interesting, yeah I agree that if teachers and professors or what ever word you use for school staff got more in touch with their students, both their cognitive, emotional and social development would bloom.
For example I used to go to one of the worst High Schools in my city (it was a mechanical-technical engineering trade school) and a lot of my fellow classmates were pretty intelligent but since they came from villages and the school was a neglecting shithole, none of them really did anything with themselves in that regard and returned to selling watermelons or similar family trades.

From the way you post, it's obvious that your cognitive development didn't really take any hits to it even with such a turbulent childhood.
What about your social and emotional state though, like, how much did the overbearing "You are gifted" talk of your mother influence you?

Do you have friends, do you have people that you are comfortable around emotionally or people you can confer to.

Not him, but being often told I was gifted in childhood partially led me to underperform throughout my school years (I think, that is. I've really got no knowledge of psychology at all - could very well be other reasons at play here).

Honestly it could be something as easy as the pressure to perform well that got you down.
Or as in some cases, the idea that because you were told you are gifted, you chose not to work harder.

It all depends really on a number of factors, first of, how's your self confidence, high or low, regarding both in social and academic (school w/e) life?

This, actually. I thought school was a chore and when I got the impression I could manage without putting effort into it, that's what I did. Only much later did I realize that self-discipline and work ethic is far more important than intelligence and that I basically sabotaged my own development for years.

Good, atm. Comes and goes, but I generally feel like I fit in fine with friends and coworkers and I feel like I have a healthy social life. Didn't always feel like that through puberty, but puberty is puberty I guess.
Worse, as I still underperform. It's not that I don't understand the material (because it's not very hard to understand, IMO), but more that I still lack the motivation to put my best effort into it, procrastinating at every opportunity. I'm the complete opposite at work though, working my ass off regardless of curcumstances, even if the work is shitty, tedious and dangerous.
Could be some undiagnosed depression at work or something. Have considered seeing a shrink, but I've been putting it off for about 2-3 years now, lol.

Honestly at times shrinks are just money grabs. And the thing is, that they're actually not even supposed to advice you on anything.

Well, I am not sure about your emotional state, as in, the same I asked freud poster, do you have people you can speak with about things that bother you on an emotional level.

The thing with depression is, that while it can be something you are born with, it's something that is usually found very early and quickly.
While you can BECOME depressed, it will never be on the same level as the former and is something you can usually go through.

Like for example I have been a terribly underperformer in the first University I tried myself at (Electronic engineering), but mostly it's because I am always overconfident that I can do everything and that really nothing can stop me (also that my work ethics sucked because, like I said I went to the absolute worst high school in my city.)

I know it's an autistic meme, but as long as you do have high confidence in yourself (not just the BE CONFIDENT MAAAN shit), you can bounce back from any shit thrown at you, either by trying harder, or moving to another subject that you excel at.

I grew up in a mostly functional nuclear family. Family on fathers side was estranged, on the mother's side we could depend on them. All proletarians on the mothers side, artisans and shopkeeps on the other - almost like the more you live through the market the less social you become.

Wasn't that originally Plato's idea? In a less gross sense.

Parents are still married after 30 years. Mom is a socdem, dad is a neoliberal. Mom's side of the family are all leftists and very, very close (mom has five siblings), dad's side are all old money reactionaries who are downright nasty people. My dad was very psychologically abusive to me as a kid; he was heavily emotionally/psychologically abused by his mother, so he took all the anger he had against his mother on to me (me being the oldest and a girl).