Yeah, that’s not what Stockholm Syndrome is.
Correct. Also, fun fact: the actual origin of Stockholm Syndrome was due to the fact that the hostages were afraid of police incompetence and sided with the terrorists from fear of being killed by over aggressive poorly trained police. Source
They also successfully worked to negotiate with the hostage takers when the police didn’t.
After they negotiated their own release they criticised the police in the media, and the police realised that since the hostage leading all of this was a woman, they could just employ a standard abuser’s tactic and call her crazy. Apparently it worked.
I was thinking about a character in a TV show. He’s a Christian monk who is captured by Viking raiders and kept as a slave. He’s still quite young though. And while he has no freedom, he isn’t whipped or treated like an animal, he just lives as a very low status person. Eventually, after years, he starts wanting to improve his status with the tribe around him. Maybe he’s tired of being at the bottom. Maybe he’s just starving for some kind of human connection. When they come under threat, he asks to join the Viking fighting force. This seems like pretty clear Stockholm Syndrome to me - fighting for the people who enslaved you.
But is it really that different from waking up as a child in a certain culture and over time, absorbing its ways, and feeling the desire to grow your status in that society? How many people absorb their home culture’s ways because they think about them and deem them best? It’s a process of absorption.
So yes, while there’s always a little sass and irony in showerthoughts, I think there’s a connection here with pondering. You didn’t elaborate on your “yeah no” comment at all. Perhaps now you will?
Yes, siding with your captors is different from being raised in a culture.
This is one of the ways that I know none of the religions claiming to be the “truth” are true.
99.99% of the time, your religion is based on who your parents are and where you were born, not what is actually true.
I’ve always been stifled by people getting born into one of religions and suddenly thinking it is the true one.
Like, how likely it is for you to be born straight into the correct religion when the world is full or heresy?
How do you differ for all those believing, with same dedication, in something else?
Not in my case, I think. Very stereotypical conservative, religious parents. Have rejected many of their bigoted values, kept the work ethic, tried to carry empathy to it’s logical conclusion rather than stopping when they thought it was hard. I’ve changed religions. I think my country’s military policy is abhorrent.
Didn’t I just say that everyone thinks they are special? I’m quite aware that they do. That doesn’t make it true.
That it’s a wonderful thing and to let people suffer because of profit is evil.
I mean, yea. The whole idea is that you want to survive in whatever environment you were born into, whether that’s North Sentinel Island or the Siberian taiga or downtown Mexico City. So, the homo sapiens operating system is pretty flexible, you can put whatever you want on it. This food, that food, this music, that music, it’s all subjective. You just calibrated to your environment.
Started in the womb, your moms amniotic fluid can change flavors depending on what mom ate, which has some influence on a baby’s preferences.
The fact that our environments vary so much, and there’s a lot of rng in general, gives us a lot of the diversity we’re so fond of. None of it stays static either, it’s all flowing and changing over time, so, the flexible operating system really is necessary. No fucking clue what a baby is gonna be asked to do in 30 years, might be anything from a soldier to a doctor. Well, doctor might take a few more years…
Pssh, not me. I was born into a homophobic redneck culture and I hated it. I now consider myself an LGBTQ+ ally and computer nerd.
Same. I grew up in rural Ohio (USA) going to churches talking about the “synagogues of satan”, people at school saying “that’s Jewish” for something lame, lots of words I won’t repeat here about a number of ethnic and sexual minorities, etc.
It all basically never sat well with me. I moved out when my mom remarried which was a bit before my senior year of high school. Bigger city, bigger school, more diversity, etc. quickly proved what I had long felt: humans are humans and neither their religion nor ethnicity nor gender identity changed that. This would have been in the late '90s.
I now live on the other side of the world from that place (Japan, of course, having its own issues with things like gender and racism, but that’s (a) mostly the older generations and (b) a story for another time). Before I quit facebook years ago, I did catch up with a couple of people. Most of them did not change, but many of the bad ones got worse (this would have been around 2016) and emboldened by far-right groups growing in popularity. Living as a minority in another country also taught me a lot of about privilege and accidental racism.
So you agree with it but escaped it?
Then again maybe you are subject to some other form of Stockholm syndrome?
Was there a pivot point where you stopped just accepting what was around you and started resisting it?
One of the reasons this is such an insidious effect is that children just don’t have the critical capacity to step outside their home culture and even see it for what it is, let alone meaningful push back against their parents and other people in their lives. By the time this capacity develops, a lot of indoctrination has been done.
