Comment by shadowoflight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowoflight | Hacker News Reader

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> This used to be nigh unto a human universal: your parents raise you up from a helpless infant to adulthood, and this obliges you to love and care for them for the rest of their lives.

Alternate take on that human universal: your parents had unprotected sex and fulfilled their obligation to raise the offspring produced to adulthood, this obliges you to nothing.

I'm not saying this means everyone should estrange their parents, but the idea that a child has any obligation to their parents for raising them seems misguided at best and damaging at worst, imo. Any attachment between children and parents should be due to mutual feelings of love and respect, like any other relationship - if those are absent on one side, why should the other suffer a relationship with people who they would otherwise remove from their friend group?

(Note that I have a good relationship with my parents, so this isn't coming from a place of personal pain, but rather a dislike for the idea that two humans procreating and fulfilling their obligation to the offspring that comes of it should impose any obligation whatsoever upon that offspring.)

EDIT: I should clarify that I do believe that parents who went above and beyond that obligation to show their children love and respect and receive nothing in return have a right to be upset - however, what about situations where a parent thought they were doing the right thing (based on how they were raised, religious briefs, parenting advice from a friend or magazine, etc.) but the thing they were doing was actually harmful? There's a lot of nuance in this, but I think that a blanket "honor thy father and thy mother [out of obligation]" is a bad idea.

In reality, no one owes anyone anything. That doesn’t make it ideal or justified.

Turns out that’s a bad way to structure a society and being hyper individualistic just ends up in your society collapsing.

If society collapses it will be because we ignored existential threats like climate change, nuclear war, biological warfare etc.

Wrong. Societies have dealt with far worse situations and managed to survive. Societal cohesion is what prevents anarchy in the long run, not avoiding natural disasters.

Precisely none of “climate change, nuclear war, biological warfare” constitute a natural disaster, nor has this quasi-neo-confucian conception of societal cohesion via filial piety historically triumphed over anything worse than any of these modern extinction scenarios.

None of those things would result in the complete extinction of human beings.

The Black Death was pretty horrible and yet European society still exists.

I’m not going to bother arguing about it, but suffice to say I don’t share your sunny optimism vis-a-vis nuclear holocaust.

Many scholars have posited that a global thermonuclear war with Cold War-era stockpiles, or even with the current smaller stockpiles, may lead to human extinction. This position was bolstered when nuclear winter was first conceptualized and modelled in 1983. However, models from the past decade consider total extinction very unlikely, and suggest parts of the world would remain habitable.[25] Technically the risk may not be zero, as the climatic effects of nuclear war are uncertain and could theoretically be larger than current models suggest, just as they could theoretically be smaller than current models suggest. There could also be indirect risks, such as a societal collapse following nuclear war that can make humanity much more vulnerable to other existential threats

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust

We might live but we wouldn't live well and our long term prospects would be dim.

The claim was “extinction event.”

The phrase I used was actually “extinction scenario” rather than a singular event, and “most people die immediately, an unlucky few eke out lives of unspeakable horror and pestilence for a handful of generations before the species collapses entirely” was basically what I had in mind.

Really though I can’t imagine what you think this pedantic obsession with whether or not everyone gets blown up immediately is adding to the conversation.

It’s not pedantic, it’s referencing actual studies on the topic. No expert thinks that humans would go extinct.

We're incredibly resilient. We can eat anything and we have technology that can be used in some of the worst environments on the planet and that allow us to get shelter and food.

We'd be 10 thousand not 10 billion and life would suck but we would survive. And the fallout would clear within a few decades or centuries.

No, we wouldn't. The fallout could feasibly kill everyone without WMD protection within a few years.

10 000 people is not nearly enough for a modern division of labour - we'd be reverted back to prehistoric technology levels within a generation, with a bonus of fallout and absolute climate dysfunction. Given a sufficiently destructive nuclear exchange literally every single human could die.

Why did you just shift the goalposts from societal collapse to complete human extinction?

Because the comment used the word extinction?

European society exists today, but experienced societal collapse at the time, which extended for hundreds of years. Y'know, the Dark Ages?

The Dark Ages were before the Black Death...

Nuclear war could definitely kill literally every human. Even more if you get bio weapons and omnicidal nuclear strikes at once.

The Black Plague is not even a cold compared to what we can engineer.

Can you please list some of this "far worse situations" than nuclear war and climate change as we are currently facing?

"Societal cohesion" doesn't do too much to help us survive crop failures and wet bulb temperatures over 35C.

Aside from that, I think you might misunderstand your causal arrows a bit. It is fair more likely that massive industrialization and late state capitalism led to a society that valued the individual over the social unit, rather than that a sudden desire to be individuals sprung up in people's hearts and made a mess of the world.

Black Death and Mongol Invasions were probably worse on a per-person basis for those affected than even a realistic nuclear war would be.

Absolutely not, not even close. 99.9% of the population dying within a few years is not comparable to a disease that killed ~10% of the population and a series of invasions that killed at most a single percent.

> If society collapses it will be because we ignored existential threats like climate change, nuclear war, biological warfare etc.

All that where created by an individualistic approach. Party now and let future generations deal with the dirt.

> All that where created by an individualistic approach.

How so? TFA attributes this modern alienation to changes in the American family structure that took place in the last half of the 20th century. All three of the threats the person you’re responding to listed, nuclear war, (modern) biological warfare, and climate change, were developed or essentially locked in in our society prior to the last half of the 20th century – largely by people born before or right around the end of the 19th century, who were presumably much more attuned to this “dutiful family obligation” mindset, since those are the very people TFA is contrasting these post-1950 changes against.

The plain history of these developments would seem to argue that post-1950 societal changes had nothing whatsoever to do with these threats, unless you’re arguing that the effect preceded the cause.

Change ‘will’ to ‘might’ and this statement is likely more true.

What makes you think society is more important than individual?

Without society, the best you can do as an individual is forage for food while naked and homeless. A little hyperbolic, but not far off.

Having grown up in an environment exactly like your edit describes, I really appreciate you voicing this perspective.

> the idea that a child has any obligation to their parents for raising them seems misguided at best and damaging at worst, imo

Let me guess: you are not a parent

This is the individualistic take.

The person you're responding to is referring to how societies worked since time immemorial, prior to the advent of such strong individualism.

You'll have to go back a very long way to find stable families that didn't have children leaving because they were bored, ambitious, abused, angry, or - in royal families - literally wanted to kill either or both of their parents and perhaps also their siblings so they could take over.

One difference now is freely available contraception and a much lower birthrate, combined with more economic stability. (At least for the boomer gen.)

When parents have two children and both are estranged, it's a tragedy. When parents had ten children, five of them made it to adulthood, and two decided to leave, it was acceptable attrition.

The other difference is the absence of extended family and friends who can step in with childcare help. So parents + kids going through adolescence under the same roof becomes a pressure cooker. No one gets much of a break for 4-8 years.

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