Original convo in the Morrowind thread on Other Games, but I figured it was more relevantly posted here.
I hate how some children do those screams. It's because they don't realize that there are certain screams you save for when you are dying. If you do that scream and everyone looks at you and you are not dying, everyone will be very mad at you.
And you will definitely not get the candies. If you do the death-scream and your parent gives you the candies to shut you up, everyone will be very mad at the parent too.
We are very lucky to live in a civilized society where people will only be very mad and not do anything more.
Yeah, screaming kids makes me hates this whole "don't murder kids" taboo we have going on.
Right, so I realized I need to explain this better.
1: When someone does a death scream, as a human, my response is as follows, in this order:
A: Oh no! There is someone dying suddenly nearby!
B: They are dying because of some terrible threat! I need to make sure I know where this threat is so I will not also die!
C: I need to help anyone around me not die to this thing, especially the child who is currently dying!
This is a combination of two extremely powerful psychological/physiological reactions to the sound. A child in danger, and a life-threatening event. That shit puts a human being on 110% Fight Or Flight instantly.
Of course, what really happens is that you never get more of an outward physical reaction than a hunch of the shoulders and a grimace. This is because as soon as your body has flushed itself with adrenaline and you've momentarily gone bonkers, your civilized brain steps in and goes, "Look, it's just a shitty kid. There are no velociraptors or whatever. You can see him right there. You know there's nothing dangerous around here." So while internally your body is trying to recover from fight-or-flight stimulation, externally it's socially unacceptable for you to do anything more than glare at the kid. And if you glare too hard the mom gets bitchy.
So there's this intense emotion you feel, which is entirely pro-human, and then you instantly find that it's some brat punking everyone because he isn't able to assert his desires and get whatever he wants - and that, just as instinctively as you responded to it, the kid instinctively knows that this is the way he can get
Absolute Utmost Attention. And he thinks this is the way to assert himself and get what he wants.
In general, what a kid wants is not what's good for him, in decreasing correlation to his emotional maturity and in general to his age. He needs to learn how to behave in civilized society, how to take care of himself when he's older, how to speak well and intelligently to attract allies and a mate. He needs to learn all these things, and part of learning them is accepting direction from the parent. A hugely important part of success in life is moderating your desires, accepting that you cannot have everything that you want at all times. The parent generally needs to help the child understand that. For these reasons, it is inevitable that a kid will want X, the parent has decided that X is not what he should have, and denies the child. Denial of the child's desires is therefore not something that needs to happen constantly, it's not like we're in a boot camp or something, but it's going to happen eventually - and it is good and necessary that it happens.
If the kid does this stuff regularly, he's not being raised right. His parents, too permissive, aren't preparing him for the various disappointments of the real adult world. The adult form of his shitty larval stage is gonna be just as shitty. That adult represents a weak link, a possible free-rider, a possible criminal or outcast. Resources spent on him hope to be worthwhile despite his shittiness, to raise him up to the level of a normal person, to try our hardest to polish the common mudstone of his personality until it shines.
If you don't react this way to a death-scream, consider this: when you encounter danger, you personally, is your initial reaction to stand still or to escape to safety? I'm sure you've had a moment when a car stopped just short of you, or someone was about to run into you, whatever. Most people freeze. Most people halt and think about what's going on. Most people would get killed by that velociraptor (or injured cougar, or man-eating tiger, or hurtling trailer). I'm stuck actually feeling dem empathies for the person who lets out the death scream. To find that they're just manipulating me for their own petty power struggles over a pack of pretzels?
I'm not gonna kill that kid, but maybe I'm not gonna go out of my way to pull his ass out of a fire either.
Of course, the immediate problem when saving people is that you don't know if they're shitty or not. So even that would never come up.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3766774 times)