Some people don't break
I don’t particularly like to categorise people or “put people in a box” by reducing them to a certain classification such as ‘introvert’ or ‘extrovert’, or one of the four personality types (Type A, Type B, Type C, Type D). All of these terms and categories are really just approximations, although they’re probably helpful to apply to people if you’re the manager of human resources in a company of 840 employees.
I learned a few years ago from my own life experience – and I still think that my thoughts on this are accurate – that people can be separated into two distinct groups. There are people who break, and there are people who don’t break.
Everyone has a limit, and if you put more and more pressure on a person then you will eventually reach their limit, and then something will happen. But this is where the two types of person differ: What exactly will happen when the limit is reached? What will the person do when they’ve had enough?
Some people, if you put pressure on them, and then more pressure and then more pressure, if they can’t keep up with you, then they’ll break and they’ll submit. This is what I’m talking about when I say ‘break’. A person who breaks is a person who reaches their limit, has no more motivation to struggle, and is only left in a state of submission.
And then there are the people who don’t break. I’m not saying that people who don’t break cannot be defeated, but what I am saying is that when you push them too far, even if you push them to the point where they know they simply can’t win, they will do something crazy. These are the kind of people who will go down swinging just for the sake of going down swinging. These are the kind of people who don’t mind losing so long as they can do maximum damage on their way out. These people don’t mind destroying themselves if they can do a little destruction around them in the process.
Some people have made a career out of breaking people. Back in the 1800’s there was a slaver named Edwin Epps who was renowned as a ‘nigger breaker’, he had an aptitude for breaking the spirit of enslaved men to the point of their submission. Nowadays in the 2020’s, there are managers and directors in big multinational companies who spend their day dominating people and keeping their subordinates in line, sometimes getting people to work unpaid overtime, which I think we’re calling ‘modern-day slavery’ now. Thankfully it at least seems that some countries are bringing in laws against ‘coercive control’. Back in 2016, it became illegal in France for an employer to contact an employee outside of their normal work hours to talk about work. But anyway, back to the idea of ‘breaking’ a person.
There are mixed opinions around the world on whether or not it is moral to break people. Sometimes there can be a positive final outcome to breaking a person, but even in those cases that do turn out well, you have achieved your goal by abusing a person.
If you use these kinds of tactics against a person who doesn’t break, well hopefully you won’t draw it out to the bitter end. Because what you’ll get at the end is an explosion. It won’t necessarily be an aggressive or violent outburst – it could be much more subtle than that, so long as the antagonised person is content in the thought that they died swinging.
Up on YouTube there’s a channel called “World’s Stricted Parents”. Teenagers are sent abroad to go live with a different family in the hope that it will set them straight. I watched a few episodes of this show, and there were things I agreed with and things I disagreed with. The worse episode I’ve seen so far though is definitely this one:
As I watched that hour-long episode from start to finish, in which the parents aim to break the children, I was more than once gazing wide-eyed at the screen at what was just clear-cut child abuse. Emotional and psychological abuse directed at a child with the hope that they’ll be overwhelmed and just stop struggling. Some disciplinarians of children think that it’s fine to break children like this.
I have a friend of mine who’s a tiny little bit strict with his kids. Me and another friend of mine were over having dinner at his house recently, and once or twice the father was in my opinion a little too strict with the kid, but I’m not going to interject and broadcast my own parenting tactics at every opportunity (in particular when I myself don’t have any kids). I will continue to go over to my friend’s house in the future and just let him get on with raising his kids the way he’s raising them. But of course there would be a limit to what I would abide. If my friend was treating his kids in any way like the video I linked above, I’d stop going over to his house. I’d probably be considering discontinuing my friendship with him.
There are different kinds of parenting styles, and then there’s child abuse. Emotional and psychological abuse. Good old fashioned bullying. Some parents bully their children. They’ll have a big problem on their hands though when they take that approach to a child who doesn’t break.
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Originally Posted by Obs
