Comment on Generational Trauma by saarnok

saarnok · 5/12/2025, 11:51:34 AM · permalink

Generational trauma is EXCLUSIVELY the perpetuation of victimization narratives, typically through systematic reinforcement and enlargement of those narratives via public policies.  
  
In short, they only exist to the extent a program of victimization exists to pass on the trauma from generation to generation.  
  
Those who perpetuate this trauma use the excuse of teaching "history", supposedly eliminating "racism" or other such claptrap.  
  
The victims of these programs internalize as personal experiences events whether fictional or accurate as their own experiences and use it to nurture resentment of those who they come to view as their oppressors and demanding those "oppressors" admit to their culpability for events that either never happened or at least did not happen to anyone alive today.  
  
I'm familiar with someone I've known as long as they have been alive who converted to Judaism and took on the Jewish narrative of slavery in Egypt, the supposed antisemitism of modern day America, holocaust stories and so on.  
  
Even though he was in his twenties when he adopted Judaism it makes very little difference to how he sees the world, though recently he found himself being denied attendance at a Passover Seder because, you know, he's not really a Jew. I've also seen this with a man I knew fairly briefly who'd decided he was Lakota and took on that group's "generational trauma" after some sixty years or so of being "white".  
  
If not for the insistence that everyone else must play along with these narratives it would be simply a curiosity, but since people who have determined that they are Black or Jewish or whatever and internalized their group's narratives it is critically important for them to force you into your assigned place in their narrative of victimization, their mythos, which you will be quite reluctant to do.  
  
A further continuation of this is the "We Wuz Kangz" narrative adopted by every single group claiming "generational trauma". Not most of them. ALL of them.  
  
In every such group, whether Black, Jew, or any other, the group is historically without flaw, the originators of all progress and philosophy, the doers of great deeds somehow overthrown by their intellectual and moral inferiors.  
  
Thus we see the of necessity abject contradictions of people who both created Egyptian culture while being it's slaves. Blacks actually developed mathematics and basically all technology, building the Western world even while the almost entirely black populated Africa never developed any technology whatsoever and as soon as European powers stopped supplying technology they immediately reverted to tribal savagery.  
  
As the pinnacle of examples of how absurd this becomes we can look at the story of Mansa Musa, who is reputed the richest man who ever lived to point out how incredibly great ALL Black people are. Accepting the story at face value we can quite reasonably deduce he was a slave trader of some note, having traveled to Arabia to visit his Muslim customers. Understanding that his vast wealth was almost certainly the result of slave trading we can then move on to noting that with his vast wealth he accomplished nothing whatsoever. He didn't build libraries, cities, educate the people or apparently anything else.  
  
The difference between modern "white trash" neo-Nazis and their Black or Jewish counterparts is the societal acceptance of their absurd claims. Blacks and Jews are politely allowed to rave about their mythology while the "white" people are not. If all these groups were granted the same social status they would all seem equally pathetic.  
  
The great risk in pushing back against these narratives is that one might inadvertently accept the designation of your own special group as a defensive gesture. Once your individual identity is subsumed into the group identity you will quite naturally begin to identify, not as Tom, Dick or Harry, but as "white guy X". Once that happens you'll be caught in your own identity trap, subject to it's ever growing mythos just as they are.

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crimsonmvestro · 5/12/2025, 2:17:09 PM · permalink

Generational trauma isn’t just a narrative people are clinging to for attention or power. It’s something you can see in families who’ve lived through war, slavery, genocide, or systemic racism. You don’t have to be a scholar to notice how pain and fear get passed down — it shows up in how people raise their kids, how they trust (or don’t trust) institutions, or how they carry themselves in the world. That’s real. And pretending it all vanishes just because the people directly affected are dead doesn’t make it go away.

You mention people adopting Jewish or Indigenous identities later in life — and yeah, sure, some people might do that awkwardly or for the wrong reasons. But most are just trying to find a piece of themselves that was missing. We don’t mock someone for learning about their ancestry or wanting to belong to something deeper than the individualistic rat race we’re all stuck in. Why mock it when it’s someone reconnecting with a marginalized culture?

And the way you talk about Black and Jewish history — it honestly comes off less like criticism and more like contempt. Yeah, not every story is perfect, and people do sometimes overreach in trying to reclaim pride. But you don’t fight myths with mockery, you fight them with real history. Mansa Musa wasn’t just some slave trader with a pile of gold — he ruled one of the most literate and stable regions of his time. Is that the whole story? Of course not. But dismissing it as nonsense is just as dishonest as exaggerating it.

Also, this idea that you’ll be “forced” into some white identity just by acknowledging others’ pain? That sounds like fear talking. None of us are just a race or a tribe — but pretending that race and tribe haven’t shaped our lives is just denial dressed up as individualism.

You don’t have to agree with everything people say about history or identity. But if your reaction is to mock everyone who’s trying to understand their past, maybe pause and ask why it bothers you so much.

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saarnok · 5/12/2025, 8:36:41 PM · permalink

Crim: I grew up with the most hardcore, deep-faith cult narrative around. What I see in people is what I lived through. In fact, unless you can see it in yourself, you can't really understand it in others.  
  
I disagree, at least for the most part, not only with your assessment of the race larpers suffering through "their trauma", but also with your critique of the caution to avoid becoming subsumed into your own competing group identity.  
  
My "tribe" considers your "tribe", which is literally everyone who is not "us", and trust me, you're not, to be pitiable grist for the mill of Hell. Not your fault. Just the way the cookie crumbles. Still want me to identify with "my group"? Or would you rather I think of myself as JUST myself?  
  
I want you to understand this, whether you believe it or not: I have WATCHED people actually die, held their bodies as the last breath left them while they clung to their group identity rather than accept help from "them". I know what I'm talking about. YOU DO NOT.  
  
I held my mother's hand as she died. I cradled my father's body as he died. I watched helplessly as my brother died. In every case they died to confirm their identity as part of their group. My group. My people.  
  
Do NOT presume to tell me why people who identify as their group do the things they do. If I didn't understand it, I'd still be exactly like them.  
  
Yes. Black People (Kangz) are larping as "BLACK people". They dress black, talk black, walk black, etc., etc., because their personal identities have been subsumed into a fantasy black consciousness. Same with "Jews", "Mormons", or a hundred other group identities.  
  
It is not I or people who share at least some of my opinions who are in denial. It is you.  
  
Generational trauma is, and I don't want you to take this the wrong way, absolutely nothing more than a story of how your group (including you) have been screwed over and how upset you are about it. That's it. Nothing more. Not one tiny little bit more.  
  
All that's necessary to utterly end "generational trauma" is to stop promoting it. That's it. Nothing more.

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crimsonmvestro · 5/12/2025, 8:46:01 PM · permalink

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saarnok · 5/13/2025, 2:40:30 AM · permalink

I'm not going to lie to people just to spare their feelings anymore than I'm going to tell the truth just to hurt them.  
  
The world we think we live in is a story we adopt and invest into. It genuinely doesn't matter if it's "real" or not.  
  
I once "rescued" a girl from a burning car where she'd been left to fend for herself by her "friends", miles and miles from any potential help other than someone who just happened to be nearby and willing to stick their neck out for someone who needed help.  
  
She'd been in and out of prison, daughter of a Filipino Hells Angel father and an actual Russian mail order bride, she'd grown up HARD and had been busted smuggling heroin, served her time and was trying (Really badly) to get straight.  
  
I stuck around long enough to help keep the cops from setting her up for possession after I learned that they "couldn't" give her a ride to anywhere and insisted the cop claiming he smelled 'weed' search all her possessions to give her an all clear so there'd be no excuse to pull us over as my wife and I drove her to her mom's house.  
  
I told her exactly the same thing I'm telling you: Everything you remember is just that: It's a memory, a story, and the only thing that story can possibly do for you is to keep you from taking stock of where you are right now, what advantages you have right now and setting a course from where you are right now to where you want to be.  
  
As I was driving her home she broke down crying: "I never knew there were such good people!"  
  
Fact is, the world is full of "good people" willing to help anyone who isn't trying to screw them over or saddle others with guilt in order to maintain their story.  
  
You want to talk about it? For what purpose? What's it get you? What's it do for me?  
  
My old friend, Robert was a vietnam vet who told me how he shot a twelve year old girl through the knees because she might be bringing a bomb to blow up more of his friends. Believe me when I tell you Robert would have twisted your head off, after smashing every bone in your body if he thought you harmed a child unnecessarily.  
  
He carried that trauma with him along with whatever else he'd done, and if you knew your legendary government conspiracy theories the way I do it'd raise your eyebrows to learn he was in The Dirty Dozen.  
  
Yeah. He talked about it, just a tiny little bit, just enough to let you understand that he'd gone from a terrible criminal, a murderer who didn't even care if he lived or died to the jolly man who became part of my family and cried like a baby at my brother's funeral.  
  
Yeah. He was a victim. He was a victim of deliberate psychological and physical torture which was scientifically designed to turn him into what he'd been, then turned away from him after he stopped being useful.  
  
That didn't define him though. What defined him was who he wanted to be, what effect he wanted to have on the world TODAY. He wasn't a killer when he died. He wasn't the soldier who shot kids "just in case", he wasn't a meth addict, drug dealer, robber and god knows what all that he'd been. By then, he was my brother who attended my mothers funeral and said: "I think of her as my momma too."  
  
When you become the group, whatever it is, you'll find yourself in what to outsiders are absurd situations, making absurd claims that can only be interpreted as delusional or lies. Take for instance, Walter White who headed the NAACP from 1931 to 1955. He took on all the narrative of his "black" heritage and even wrote the most commonly referenced article regarding the Tulsa Greenwood Riot.  
  
Here's his picture:  
![image](https://us-lax-1.linodeobjects.com/sojooo/comments/3231/1747104030266-62c99ec2600bf097.jpg)
  
Yep. He's got his stories of how 'whitey' oppressed him for being black.  
  
And, I'm not pulling your leg. I'm not trying to put one over on you. That's his real story and his real picture. This isn't some modern 'woke' crap. It's the way I guess it's always been.  
  
Look at that picture and tell me how he was racially oppressed as a black man, or perhaps recognize that *it's just a story!!*  
  
So, what purpose does this "trauma" serve? It justifies criminal activity as 'payback', refusal to uphold the most basic levels of decent behavior, blaming everyone outside your group for your problems and so on.  
  
And, it's not like it needs to be a racial group or anything to have that effect. I know people who believe their personal family is a reviled and hated group, though most of the members of that family are well known as salt-of-the-Earth, wonderful people.  
  
It's *just a story!!* And I'm sorry you don't get that.

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crimsonmvestro · 5/13/2025, 2:54:34 AM · permalink

Oh wow, man — thank you for blessing us all with your totally unbiased wisdom gathered from decades of heroic savior missions, war buddies, and random girls in burning cars. I almost forgot that if you experience trauma and talk about it, it’s called “life lessons,” but if anyone else does — especially if they’re Black, Jewish, or Indigenous — it’s “larping” and “criminal justification.” So consistent. So rational. Really inspiring stuff.

You act like you’re the final boss of enlightenment because you’ve suffered and “moved on” — but the only thing you’ve moved into is a delusional god complex wrapped in a hypothetical ass rant. You talk about how trauma is “just a story,” while simultaneously dumping your own trauma saga like it’s a TED Talk with a twist of Alex Jones.

Let’s not pretend your issue is with “victimhood culture.” Your issue is with the wrong kind of people having trauma. The wrong kind of people having history. Because when you bring up your war criminal buddy crying at funerals, it’s powerful. When a Black person talks about systemic inequality, it’s “absurd lies” and “excuses.” Got it. Real subtle.

And this whole “Walter White looked white so he couldn’t possibly experience racism” thing? That’s not even a hot take — it’s just kindergarten-level ignorance. Racial identity isn’t based on your ability to spot melanin like some racist bouncer at the door of history. But thanks for confirming that your entire worldview is built on skin-deep assumptions. Literally.

So maybe before you go off on your next trauma-is-a-myth monologue, take a breath, sit with the fact that your entire personality is just rugged individualism cosplay mixed with a superiority complex and a dash of Reddit-racist philosophy. You’re not above the people you mock — you’re just another bitter dude screaming “it’s just a story!” while desperately clinging to your own.

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saarnok · 5/13/2025, 4:28:01 PM · permalink

I provided you with example after example of people who either did or did not write their own story, either early in life or later on, and talked about what effect it has on your psyche.  
  
What's killing you is that you want to not just believe, you want to KNOW that the world is turned against you if you're black in particular, because they'll ONLY see you as black regardless of anything you say or do.  
  
I gave you examples from my own life because those are what's available to me and your actual criticism of those examples are, to summarize: "But that's just a story!"  
  
Yeah, Crim. That's the point.  
  
But, what really upsets you is to find out that more than a hundred years ago there were not only white people pretending to be black for whatever advantages that carried, but managed to carry that LARP quite successfully through their lives.  
  
How exactly did 'whitey' know to oppress the blond haired, blue eyed Walter White for being "black"? It's all about skin color to the white man; right? How did they do it, Crim? Was everybody racially pyschic or something? Did they just do a double take, going: "What? I'll be damned! That's a blond haired, blue eyed, white skinned, nigger boy there!"  
  
Is that the way it was? Or maybe, just maybe, you know, on the outside chance, did he maybe just adopt a story of oppression that for some bizarre reason the people around him went along with?  
  
A superiority complex? My gosh. Where does that come from? "Reddit racism?" Do explain.  
  
What was it that ignited this "rugged individualism" observation? Was it when I said there was a world full of good people who want to help? Was that it? Is that what triggers you? Is that because you so desperately NEED to believe the whole world's against you and your kind that you can't accept anyone outside your group as a fellow human?  
  
Where is this undefined "racism" that you see everywhere, Crim? Was it in pointing out that people will take on this victim narrative under absolutely any criteria, up to and including their family name, even if their family name is actually quite well thought of? Was that it, Crim?  
  
Maybe you'd like a story of a black man who was actually black, actually born into slavery, actually escaped largely by his own efforts and in his own time became one of the best known men in the world?  
  
You probably won't like his story though. He's best known for his "Self made men." speech. We call him Frederick Douglass. Care to guess where a fair bit of my philosophy comes from?  
  
Douglass also had his share of oppression stories, but their point isn't how he was oppressed, but of how he chose not to be oppressed. What's the story of Booker T. Washington? Of how he was held back, held down and turned to a life of crime because of The Man? No. It was of how he made something of himself.  
  
Your story, anyone's story, has four character types. Heroes, villains, victims, and observers. The modern day black narrative group story is that YOU are the victim, the group are the heroes (not you), and the observers are everyone else who are really villains because they were supposed to be helping your group.  
  
Contrast the modern day "black narrative" carried and promoted by essentially our entire culture with the narrative of the people who wrote "Up from slavery" and "Self made men". Isn't the difference pretty stark?  
  
I'll give you this: I DO believe that it's better, "superior" if you will, that the story of your life be YOUR story, not the story of some mythical group. If you're black, do you say things like WE invented 'X', WE did 'Y', etc. etc.? Or do you say "I" did 'X', "I" accomplished 'Y'?  
  
Is the glory of your story what you did, or what someone else did? Did you learn something as an individual, overcome something as an individual, triumph as an individual, or are you just some bit of a "community"?  
  
When you see trash on the sidewalk; what do you do? Add to it? Or do you stop and pick it up? I stop and pick it up. I'm not doing it to impress you. I'm doing it to impress me. It's part of my story.  
  
Right now, I'm watching someone I've known for most of my life who's just begun to rewrite his story and it's fascinating to watch. He's spent twenty years or more being pretty much useless, but in the past year he's started to step up, trying to do something practical, and learn to take the responsibility of trying and failing so that he can eventually try and succeed.  
  
It's better. It's "superior". And if that's not what you're doing then it's what you *should* be doing, whatever that looks like in your particular case.  
  
But, if you think you should be credited with whatever supposed accomplishments were made by someone else did because you've decided you are part of their group, or you think you should be pitied because other people you've decided are part of your group went through hardship then you're just a LARPer.  
  
You went through some stuff. Cool. How did that make you a better person, instead of just a victim? You identify with a group. Okay. How does that improve your life? What am I supposed to emulate from you based on that?  
  
It really doesn't matter if the story you tell yourself is technically true or accurate. What matters is whether or not it's worth believing in.  
  
People who hate being fat tell themselves they can't change their condition. That's not worth believing in. It doesn't help. It doesn't help them and it doesn't help anyone else.  
  
People start to get a handle on their weight issues and then revert to gaining weight because if they get it under control it will demonstrate they always could have done so, which means they always WERE in control and aren't victims of anyone.  
  
Same things apply to everyone else who's excuse for not stepping up and making a better life for themselves is that they're someone's victim.  
  
If that's what you're doing I'm going to let you in on a little "secret". You're the victim of the people who convinced you you're a victim. You're a victim of the people who are writing your story instead of letting you write your own.

4 bumps

crimsonmvestro · 5/13/2025, 5:01:02 PM · permalink

Ah yes, the timeless tradition of ignoring structural analysis in favor of motivational parables. Thank you for that TEDxRhetoric™ on ‘writing your own story.’ It was equal parts irrelevant and self-congratulatory. I especially liked the part where you unironically referenced Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington — two men who explicitly fought against the exact social and institutional barriers you now claim don’t exist. Beautiful irony. Almost literary.

Let’s be clear: anecdote is not analysis. Your personal Rolodex of ‘bootstrapped’ acquaintances does not negate centuries of systemic exclusion, redlining, wealth gaps, carceral disparities, education funding inequalities, medical discrimination, and generational psychological trauma. That you don’t understand the difference between individual agency and structural determinism is not an intellectual flex — it’s a foundational blind spot.

And your entire bit about ‘victimhood’ is textbook neoliberal reductionism. It frames complex, historically situated oppression as little more than a personal mindset issue — like racism is just low self-esteem with better PR. You’ve mistaken performative individualism for a cure-all and are now presenting it as philosophy. It’s not. It’s just a self-soothing narrative that lets you sleep better at night thinking inequality is a personality flaw instead of an institutional outcome.

Also: Douglass and Washington were not arguing against collective struggle. They were advocating for the uplift of a people, not pretending the past didn’t happen so individualists could feel superior on the internet. So if you’re going to invoke their names, maybe actually read their work instead of using them as props in a bootstraps fantasy that makes you feel good about ignoring real history.

Lastly, the obsession with ‘writing your own story’ rings hollow when your entire comment reads like a desperate attempt to rewrite someone else’s lived experience so you can feel morally superior. It’s not clever. It’s not profound. It’s just a long-winded way of saying, ‘I don’t believe racism is real unless it personally inconveniences me.’

But hey — I’m sure Walter White and the sidewalk trash are proud of you.

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saarnok · 5/14/2025, 3:40:47 AM · permalink

Gee, thanks, Crim. Thanks for entirely misrepresenting Washington and Douglass, demonstrating either that you have no idea what they wrote, or that you're confident no one else does.  
  
I'm past pretending that you're an honest actor with an earnest agenda.  
  
Here's what Douglass advocated doing for the freed slaves: Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. He wasn't advocating for affirmative action, DEI, or whatever euphemism you can come up with for differential and preferential treatment of select groups, he was advocating to let the freed slaves make or break all on their own. Or, in his own words: "Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us!"  
  
Here's a quote from Booker T. Washington that speaks directly to the grievance culture that you're advocating for: “There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”  
  
You either don't care about the truth or are outright lying, or more probably just so piss-bucket stupid you can't even imagine that anyone else knows anything about the subject or actually cares.  
  
The early "self made men" didn't see the world the way you so very desperately want everyone else to see it, and regardless of how you're trying to shift the goalpost from defending "I'm a victim!" 'generational trauma' to some asinine and absurd collective action narrative, I'm dragging you back, kicking a screaming to defend your original point: The promotion of collective guilt by people who had nothing to do with "generational trauma" or whatever BS name you want to give it in order to absolve misbehavior by those who cry about how someone they never knew suffered at the hands of someone I never knew.  
  
That bit about Walter White really shakes you, doesn't it?  
  
He wasn't just "white", he was about as white as any man ever was and he actually oversaw, nurtured, all but created the grievance culture you promote by pretending he was a black man and telling his stories, "anecdotes" of how oppressed he was a hundred years ago. He didn't even do like Dolezal or Shaun King and at least make a show of being black, he was just simply obviously white and calling himself black.  
  
I'd suspect you were a paid agent to invest so much effort in this cause, but, sadly, I'm all too aware that one doesn't have to be purchased in order to be owned.  
  
But, you are a liar. You represent yourself as knowing about a subject that you either do not know about; so you're lying about that. Or: You do know about the subject and are simply lying about the subject directly. Or, again, you're just so piss-bucket stupid that you don't even fucking care. All that matters at the end of the day is promoting the idea that black people shouldn't be held to any standards because they're suffering collectively from generational trauma inflicted by white people in the past, and we should all feel sorry for them and let them rape, murder, rob and destroy as penance for the supposed sins of people who bore some vague resemblance to us.  
  
Well, FUCK you, Crim. You're a worthless piece of shit who wants to make the world a worse place and are trying to exacerbate the problems of the very people you ever so much profess to care about.  
  
Go ahead and call us racists, white supremacists, whatever idiot labels your spongy little brain can dredge up. We don't fucking care.

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