Category: Autobiography

My evil parents

It’s me at fourteen,
when my parents
started the abuse…

I’ve been reproducing pretty tough selections quoting Alex Linder’s invectives not only about Judaism but of the nefarious role played by Christianity in the West’s darkest hour. That’s why one of my blogs in Spanish doesn’t link anymore to blogsites by Iberian Christians that focus on Islam: the speck in their neighbor’s eye and not the beam in their own. Even so I maintain friendships with Catholics and Protestants always provided they are, before all, white nationalists. Discussing with Pat Hannagan, one of these comrades, I pointed out recently:

Do you see how deeply miscegenated is Mexico, with overwhelming Indian blood over the European? Guess what: the mess started long before the Jews or the atheists took over. The perp was… a Pope.

Right after the Conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Pope Paul III in his Bull of 1537 recognized the personality of the Indians, and declared them fit to receive the sacraments, including marriage to the Spaniards. The implications of this provision were enormous, as it left the cross-breading between Amerindian women and the Spaniard conquerors legitimated.

In the best book ever written about the history of Mexico, Catholic José Vasconcelos wrote: “In the Hispanic world this policy prevented a separation system of castes, like the one that has divided the Anglo-Saxons of the north” (Breve Historia de México, Ediciones Botas, 1944, p. 205).

Pat replied. He said that, though he knew little of the history of this part of North America, he doubted that the Church had ruthlessly enforced herself upon both Spaniard and Indian. I answered:

New Spain was a sort of religious paradise for the Catholic Church: the triumph of Counter-Reformation in most of America if you want to see it that way (remember that New Spain covered important southern states that presently belong to the US). In fact, thanks to our Inquisition, for three-hundred years (1521-1821), before the movement of Independence, New Spain was Judenfrei: which means that we cannot blame the tribe for the incredible mestization that took place over a continent during that period. It is precisely the tragic history of how New Spain regressed back to “Mexico” (the name of the old Aztec capital) what refutes the single-cause hypothesis: that the Jews are behind every single ill of modern history.

Maybe it’s worth saying that in the 1860s my great-great-grandfather, mentioned by José Zorrilla in his autobiography, moved to the heart of Mexico City for labor and studies issues. The family chose to rent a catty-cornered room from the building which a few decades before had been the Palace of The Inquisition of New Spain.

Pat replied again: “OK, so the Church accepted inter-racial marriage but is that a cause for the current drug cartel [and the] related complete collapse of that nation and spread into the USA?” I answered:

To a certain extent, yes: I have not seen a single pure white among the drug lords. Hadn’t the continent become a giant experiment in miscegenation we wouldn’t have the present mess of today.

The explanation of my latest response appears in IQ studies about the color of crime.

New Spain lasted tree hundred years: about a century more than the current histories of both the independent US and independent Mexico. Spain’s viceroyalty was strictly ruled by Iberian whites and, as I said above, free of Jews before so-called “Mexico” became independent in 1821.

A map of the territories
of the Viceroyalty of New Spain
at its zenith in 1795

The story of the rise and fall of New Spain ought to be more than enough to convince nationalists that the problems we face today cannot be attributed only to the Jews. For instance, above I used quotation marks around the word “Mexico” to convey the paradox that the independent movement was led by traitorous whites (when Jews still had zero power in the whole region). It’s all too obvious that with the gigantic miscegenation that the New Spaniards practiced throughout three centuries in the Judenfrei viceroyalty, universal Christian values screwed the American continent big time. When I leave my suburban home to go downtown and see the swarm of brown faces, I cannot imagine that a couple of centuries ago in those same streets white people wearing white wigs crossed the avenues with elegant horse-drawn carriages, like in the movies about eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe. The curious country where I was born beautifully demonstrates that besides a Jewish Problem we have indeed a Christian Problem: and that the single-cause hypothesis of Western malaise is inaccurate.

But that was not the purpose of this entry.

What if, besides (1) group-surviving strategies in Judaism—cf. this preface by MacDonald—, (2) the deranged altruism in present-day Christianity—cf. these comments by a retired blogger—, and (3) corporate capitalism—cf. this thread on Michael O’Meara—there is, still, a 4th (!) factor that we must take into consideration to explain Western deranged condition? While so many factors look like a nightmare and the primary temptation is to pick one of them and bias our search through reductionism, if we are to understand the basic etiology of our condition we cannot leave out any of the other factors from our worldview.

In the remainder of this post I’ll try to focus on the fourth factor since it has never been addressed seriously in the movement.

Two years ago I wrote an article, “Why do so many westerners hate the West?” that purported to explain the extreme hatred for traditional Spain of a Spanish woman, a practicing doctor. After ten months of interacting with her (she lived in Madrid but frequently visited the Canary island where I lived) I concluded that this woman, once committed to a mental institution for suicidal ideation, suffered from classic transference. Since she could not endure the pain of how she was treated as a child by her parents, she “transferred” all negative emotions onto her parents’ culture, specifically onto the most traditional aspects of Iberian culture.

Below I quote the introduction to my article:

Today’s suicidal ethos throughout the West is unimaginably deeper than anything that the common Western patriot, or even the most sophisticated intellectual, has ever glimpsed in his wildest dreams. While intellectuals in the white nationalist movement are good in describing the predicament that the West faces today, at the same time they are clueless about the basic etiology of the whys of the cultural self-hatred behind some of our people. Why is this so?

I have written a book from the viewpoint of deep psychology and cannot summarize my findings in this entry. Suffice it to say that the most extreme cases of cultural and ethnic self-hatred go back to the way we were raised by our parents, and the defense mechanisms that we unconsciously built in response to the family dynamics. Although I believe this is the universal cause of extreme self-hatred, in the sense of hatred toward our parents’ culture, in this article I will use a single case-study to illustrate why a westerner that I know hates her culture to the point of desiring its destruction. I analyze her not as a personal vendetta, but in the hope that those who defend our culture and ethnicity will become aware of what Alice Miller calls the forbidden knowledge.

This was my final thought after the main discussion of the article:

I wouldn’t have written this comparatively long analysis were it not for Teresa’s hatred of the West and her craving for its destruction. We already saw that she told me she really loved the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Moorish immigration that is taking away what force remains of Christendom in Spain, that she thinks that every single Western family is noxious, and that she wishes that “everything collapses.”

The sad thing about cases like Teresa’s is that there are many of them. What moves me to write this article is that in the nationalist movement there is no psychological analysis whatsoever, not even in the slightest form, of why leftist people hate their civilization. I believe that this case illustrates it. The volcano of rage that Teresa carries inside never explodes in the form of speaking out about her real aggressors. Never. (The cause for this is the problem of attachment to the perpetrator.) She re-directs it to the culture that, in her mind, symbolizes her family: the Francoist Spain and everything related to conservatism. Teresa gives a damn about the fact that in other cultures the treatment of women is far worse that what she got as a child. That’s irrelevant. What only matters is the destruction of the culture that crucified her. Period.

Teresa and I have the same age and we both suffered in Catholic families at the same time. Comparing the two biographies, it’s evident that I was a victim of more serious parental abuse than what she suffered.

But I don’t desire the destruction of my civilization. Before trauma, even big trauma, there still exists individual responsibility. That someone devotes himself to speaking out about child abuse (like me), or contributing to destroy the West through voting for Zapatero and by hating those concerned with Western preservation (like Teresa), only shows that there’s indeed something like surrendering our will to evil.

If leftist feminists were good persons, the first thing they would do is to feel compassion for the girls in Europe whose genitals have been chopped off at their parents’ request. But these women do exactly the opposite: they hate the System dissidents who pity the pubescent Muslims, as Teresa hated me in her quoted e-mails.

“A little woman chasing after her revenge would over-run fate itself” wrote Nietzsche. Teresa and the rest of the far-leftist women that feel extreme hate toward our civilization chase after an unconscious revenge. With so many voters like her in Spain and in the Western world, the fate of the West looks grim indeed. Teresa’s suicidal ideation, aborted by the psychiatric institution that she loathes so much, transmutes itself into the suicide of our civilization since, alas, instead of killing themselves many other empowered women have become West haters too.

A scientific description of evil: self-deceit

Evil is the exercise of power, the imposing of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion. The core of evil is ego-centricity, whereby others are sacrificed rather than the ego of the individual.

—Scott Peck

At Counter-Currents, last Thursday Greg Johnson quoted some of the words of Dr. M. Scott Peck from a Wikipedia article. According to Peck, a psychologist, ego-centric persons are utterly dedicated to preserving their self-serving image. They cultivate an image of being good persons but specialize in self-deceit and thus are “people of the lie.”

Adapted from Wikipedia:

Peck discusses evil in his book People of the Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil and also in a chapter of The Road Less Traveled. Peck characterizes evil as a malignant type of self-righteousness in which there is an active rather than passive refusal to tolerate imperfection (sin) in one’s mind and its consequent guilt. This syndrome results in a projection of evil onto selected specific innocent victims (often children), which is the paradoxical mechanism by which the People of the Lie commit their evil.

Peck describes Roger, a depressed teenage son of respected well off parents. In a series of parental decisions justified by often subtle distortions of the truth they exhibit a consistent disregard for their son’s feelings and a consistent willingness to destroy his growth. With false rationality and normality they aggressively refuse to consider that they are in any way responsible for his resultant depression, eventually suggesting his condition must be incurable and genetic (the main lie of biological psychiatry I may add).

Evil is described by Peck as “militant ignorance.” The original Christian concept of “sin” is as a process that leads us to “miss the mark” and fall short of perfection. Peck argues that while most people are conscious of this at least on some level, those that are evil actively and militantly refuse this consciousness. Peck considers those he calls evil to be attempting to escape and hide from their own conscience, through self-deception.

According to Peck, evil people (in the bulleted phrases I will now paraphrase Peck to refer to my evil parents)—:

• Are consistently self-deceiving, with the intent of avoiding guilt and maintaining a self-image of perfection

• Both of my parents (as well as other evil parents) deceive others as a consequence of their own self-deception

• My parents have been projecting their evils and sins onto their offspring (scapegoats) while being apparently normal with everyone else (their insensitivity toward us has been selective)

• My mother commonly has hated us with the pretense of love, for the purposes of self-deception as much as deception of relatives and acquaintances

• My mother has abused political and emotional power to impose her will upon her oldest children by overt or covert coercion

• My mother has maintained a high level of social respectability and lies incessantly in order to do so

• My parents have been consistent in their sins. Evil parents are characterized not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency of destructiveness

• Both of my parents have been unable to think from the viewpoint of their victims (scapegoats)

• Both of my parents have had a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury

Evil parents realize the evil deep within themselves but are unable to tolerate the pain of introspection or admit to themselves that they are evil. Thus, they constantly run away from their evil by putting themselves in a position of moral superiority and putting the focus of evil on their children. Evil is an extreme form of what Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, calls a character disorder.

Ultimately Peck says that evil arises out of free choice.

* * *

The very last phrase of my 700-page book, Hojas Susurrantes (Whispering Leaves), now available through a print-on-delivery house says, “Pero mi padre escogió el mal” (But my father chose evil). The following is a translation of what I wrote for the back cover of my book:

The author was born in 1958 in Mexico City. The eldest of artist parents, his original vocation was to become a movie director. His plans were shattered due to devastating abuse in his adolescence coming from the same parents who had instilled his artistic sensitivities.

With Whispering Leaves, a work of a quarter of a century, Tort presents a multifaceted work. It recounts not only a heartbreaking tale at the beginning and the end of the volume: the runaway abuse that nearly destroyed his young mind. Whispering Leaves also contains a searing exposé of so-called mental health professions which tend to side with the abusive parents, thus re-victimizing the child who already was a victim of such parents.

The book also contains a lengthy introduction to the thinking of the most relevant theorists on child abuse: Alice Miller and Lloyd deMause, and includes a psychohistorical section that aims to explain the unconscious motives of child sacrifice in Mesoamerica. All this thematic, including the criticism of psychiatry and the criticism of the anti-Western anthropology of our times, is always interwoven with a new literary genre, the total autobiography: a narrative of the murder of a soul.

“I finished reading your book. It’s so shocking and disturbing at times that I had to leave the reading because of the sadness and pain that I felt. It made me think and once I got to stop and cried because I was about to wet the leaves…”
……………………………—Paulina C. Moctezuma

Although I have criticized the 9/11 conspiracies theories believed by many nationalists, we need to expand criticism to more substantial topics. For example, in an article that was published a couple of days ago at Counter-Currents, “What is the best Hitler biography?” Andrew Hamilton stated that David Irving “is not a ‘Holocaust denier’ as Jews claim, though he does not believe in every jot and tittle of their religious narrative as everyone else does.”

Breaking away from “orthodoxy” in white nationalism not only means seeing beyond the single-hypothesis (Jews) prevalent in some quarters. It also means starting to harbor second thoughts about the history of the 20th century. For example, as soon as Irving’s book on Himmler is released I will surely order it with interest and can only hope that other nationalists will read it too.

The same with other “impolite” topics in white nationalism. Last month at Radio Free Northwest, Axis Sally spoke about spanking and other (abusive in my opinion) childrearing methods as the business of the parents alone. Sally and the commenters of the Northwest blog who harbor similar views will think it twice if they knew it was precisely the beatings that Teresa endured as a child what—she told me—caused her trauma. (An unprocessed trauma that she eventually transferred onto her parents’ culture because our Hispanic milieu didn’t allow her to overtly hate her parents.) It’s not my intention to belittle Radio Free Northwest. On the contrary: in the previous podcast Harold Covington had said: “At seventeen, when my deranged father threw me out of home…” I believe that precisely because, unlike Teresa, Covington allows himself that safety valve, he is far more integrated psychologically that his (childless) brother who has fallen so low as to resort to the SPLC to defame Harold.

As to date there’s only one chapter of Whispering Leaves that has been translated (by me) with the syntax corrected by a native English speaker. If white nationalism has for the first time in its history the beginnings of a meaningful intellectual scene, as Trainspotter believes, then it is high time to consider childrearing subjects as relevant for white interests: the fourth factor I listed above among the culprits of our spiritual and cultural degradation. I simply cannot conceive a breed of white haters of the culture of their parents if, as children, they had been treated with a little respect by the same parents.

I welcome comments on the translated chapter of Whispering Leaves (here). In fact, given the importance of benign childrearing to raise the level of political intelligence among us, I am tempted to freeze this blog for a while with this post and take a break. If I decide to do that, I could use that time to add hundreds more blog entries to my site in Spanish to annotate the insights already presented in my book.

Whatever I chose I will continue to discuss in the blogosphere, including here. Those willing to contact me directly can do it through the email that appears at my profile.

Tags Jewish question (JQ)

Autobiography

All is about valor and honesty

Post author By C .T.
Post date April 5, 2011
13 Comments on All is about valor and honesty

The article “The Jews and White Nationalism” republished on October 4, 2009 at The Occidental Quarterly Online when it was under the watch of Greg Johnson opens with the sentence:

Surfing the blogosphere, I stumbled upon The West’s Darkest Hour, a blog written by a TOQ Online reader and Lawrence Auster fan who has some concerns about the presence of anti-Semitism in the White Nationalist movement. Like Tanstaafl, it appears that Chechar learned of us through his involvement in the anti-Jihad movement. In his previous post about White Nationalism, Chechar described his odyssey from liberalism to spectator of the racialist underworld as being like awakening from “The Matrix.” Each revelation is the tip of a much larger iceberg.

The next year after the article was published I deleted the two above-linked articles because they spoke of a stage when I still held politically correct views about the Jews and Judaism. In this article I will briefly recount how after a series of revelations I finally woke up.

In an unpublished work that consumed a decade of my life, Hojas Susurrantes (Whispering Leaves), I recount how I grew up in a traditional family and how I was relatively well treated in my childhood. Alas, both of my parents started to abuse me and my sisters when we reached adolescence.

Since in those times nobody talked about child abuse or was willing to listen, my sisters and I grew up carrying over ourselves massive doses of unprocessed pain. In fact, my Hojas is a sort of mourning to deal with the pain caused by our parents’ betrayal and the society’s deafness toward the calls for help coming from the minor that I was. The mourning I endured since my late teens and throughout my twenties allowed me to see through the society’s denials. And it was precisely the long mourning and the consequent soul-building what allowed me, a year ago, to see the stark realities of the Jewish question.

Perhaps only those whose souls have been ploughed through pain could understand what do I mean. In the chapter “The Soul and the Barbed Wire” of The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn wrote insightful passages about how the human soul rotting in solitary confinement finds salvation through a metamorphosis that allowed him to turn the abyssal pain into wisdom. Like so many abused children and teenagers, the barbed wires of the Gulag islands drove many Russians mad. Solzhenitsyn managed to escape psychosis through soul-building as his defense mechanism. This is not easy. Not easy at all. But every time I read those Gulag pages I see myself through all those years in the self-imposed confinement of my study to find out how on Earth could such tragedy befell upon my beloved family. However, what Solzhenitsyn calls the ascent of the soul is such an enormous subject—wasn’t it Voltaire who said that man could know the universe but that it would need eternity to learn something about his soul?—that I will leave it like that.

* * *

Fleeing from Zapatero’s degenerate Spain, on September 11, 2009 I printed and ring-bind twenty-five articles of The Occidental Quarterly. One of the first articles that I started to read crossing over the Atlantic, “The Seven Pillars of White Nationalism,” fascinated me, especially the author’s stance about how “National Socialism might save us.” I had never read anything like that in a serious journal. The author’s views seemed extreme to me; I stopped reading the article, and tried to get some sleep in the plane.

The following days, weeks and months the whole business of White Nationalism struck me as extremely engrossing. Despite of what I then perceived as a flaw in the movement, anti-Semitism, I found myself discovering that the matrix in which I was previously sleeping was far deeper and alienating than what I previously thought. So alienated from reality I was that it may be said that in the last fifteen years I have been awakening from a series of different though inter-chained matrixes, with “each revelation as the tip of a much larger iceberg,” until reaching the real awaking point.

In 1995, after a long process of digesting the literature of the skeptics of the paranormal, I gave up my old belief in psycho-kinesis: the subject of the first entry of my blog. (Since my late teens and twenties I had gone astray in New Age magical thinking precisely because it was my flawed defense mechanism during my dark night of the soul—a night in which I quixotically strove to heal the family wounds through paranormality.) Alongside with my awakening from para-psychological beliefs, in my thirties Octavio Paz’s essays debunked in my mind much, though not all, of the ideologies of the Spanish-speaking Left. His many critiques in Vuelta represented a fresh waking up from the dogmas I had been taught in High School.

But those awakenings were transformations allowed within the matrix system in which I still mentally inhabited, as was my next awakening.

Closely related to child abuse are the mental health professions that during intergenerational conflicts always side the parents, and therefore, the perpetrators of the abuse at home. For example, on the parents’ behalf some psychiatrists prescribe psychiatric drugs to rebellious, albeit sane, children, especially males. It was not until a 1998-1999 mental health course at the Open University of Manchester that I discovered the most important books of the main critics of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. I awoke to the fact that such professions function like a political pseudoscience to enforce the will of abusive parents, which moved me to write down those findings in my native language.

What precipitated that awakening was the footnoted information that I collected still within the fringes of the university system. Then in 2002 I discovered the work of Swiss psychologist Alice Miller, who unlike the previous critics of the mental health professions is a real taboo in the academia. Only thanks to her I discovered that the psychic toll of parental abuse on children is a forbidden issue in all societies (I write about this in the third book of my Hojas).

But that was not all. In 2006 another non-academic author surprised me. Lloyd deMause answered my email questions about child abuse in the Ancient World and advised me to read a couple of chapters of one his major works.

I was impressed. The discovery of deMause’s psychohistory widened the vision I had previously learnt in Miller’s works. After assimilating psychohistory I found myself with a meta-perspective that comprised child abuse studies from early civilizations to modern man. The “unified field” provided by my inward soul-searching process thanks to Miller, and the outward historical research provided by deMause, made me feel I had an unrivalled point of view to see the tragedy of my family in particular and of Homo sapiens in general.

I was deluded, if we take into account that psychology is not unrelated to sociology and that an authentic free press only started with the advent of the Internet.

By the end of September of 2008 I discovered the blogosphere; watched some online documentaries about the Islamization of Europe, and learnt how the prolific Muslims may overrun Western civilization by the end of the century. Originally skeptical about these apparently preposterous claims, in Madrid I purchased a translated copy of Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept. By the end of 2008 I was still a liberal and could only read fairly liberal stuff. Since the family that destroyed my life are very traditional Catholics, conservatives had been anathema thoroughout my intellectual life. Only after Bawer convinced me that there was indeed a demographic problem in Europe I dared to purchase English-Spanish translated copies of both Oriana Fallaci’s trilogy on Islamization and Robert Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam. Spencer is only a scholar on Islam. But it took me a Sabbatical year to digest the material from the more intellectually-inclined counter-jihad blogsites in English.

The extensive reading on these broader sociopolitical issues not only shattered my former liberal worldview and turned me into, God forbid, a conservative: it convinced me that those concerned about the Islamization of the West were right, and their Lefty detractors in gross denial. Now I surely was mature psycho-historically and politically, I thought.

Nope! I was a chick still struggling to break free from his eggshell to glimpse the real world. By the time I started to read The Occidental Quarterly at the international airport I knew that there was a group of people who in the previous decade had coined a new term, White Nationalism. It is true that by the end of 2009 I still disagreed with the nationalists about the Jewish question. This difference aside, after discovering the existence of such an important group of intellectuals that the system had screened off from my vision for half a century of my life, I felt I had finally broken the last of the Russian dolls-like eggshells and that I could finally hear the voice, “Welcome to the real world!”

Alas, I was still sleeping!

But the last Morphean dream could not last long. Thanks in part to the efforts of Tanstaafl, in February of 2010 I was “struck by a lightening bolt” that cracked the last shell. I realized that I had gotten the Jewish question all wrong and that the Jewish problem was not hallucinatory as I believed. It was all too real after all!

Before that most crucial day of February 24, 2010 I used to interchange emails with two of the best Jewish minds in the blogosphere active in counter-jihad. Paradoxically, these pair helped me to wrap my head around the question of their tribe. Of course: both got mad after I flipped sides. But what convinced me of the essential truth of anti-Semitism is that neither of these two intellectuals could say anything rational about my February challenge:

If by March I don’t get a convincing rebuttal of Avery Bullard’s statement [that Jews are never overrepresented in movements that represent our interests, only in those that weaken us] from those who have advised me in e-mails to shun those who criticize the Jews, I will have no option but to remove the “non anti-Semitic” clause before “White Nationalism” in my blog’s masthead.

After this provocative challenge the pair did not engage in civil discussion. They simply ignored the new world I was starting not only to glimpse beyond the outer, now ripped membrane, but ignored too the clarity of my vision once I finally passed through the shell and stepped outside this last prison for the white mind.

One of them said in his webpage that he would never talk to me again unless I reverted my paradigm back to my previous views on the Jewish question. The other intellectual behaved even more irrationally. Infuriated, he told Tanstaafl, “I see you as my direct and mortal enemy” and threatened in my blog that he would “have nothing to do with Chechar as long as he has anything to do with you.”

The Jekyll-Hyde transformation of a famed author for the readers of The Brussels Journal took me by surprise. But the reaction of the non-Jews—the Christian, agnostic and pagan commenters at the blogsite Gates of Vienna where I had originally met them all—taught me a lesson. Ned May, the GoV admin emailed me telling that he would stop publishing the rest of my psycho-historical book. Obviously, neither he nor other of these deracinated whites dared to discuss the issues. For we gentiles, criticism of Jews is considered beyond the pale. Nationalist readers will find comical that the Norwegian Fjordman, one of the most notable gentile bloggers in counter-jihad, has stated: “It appears that the only people who can denounce genuine anti-Semitism yet at the same time criticize liberal Jews are people who are part-Jewish themselves, such as Larry Auster or Takuan Seiyo.” In other words, only the Jews can criticize Jews. [Note of August 2011: It now looks that Fjordman is Jewish on his father’s side]

These gentiles are beyond our reach however we approach them. The sad truth is that due to their unwillingness to see the elephant in the room these whites, who fancy themselves as defenders of the West, are, inadvertently, undermining their civilization.

Granted: like them I was a philo-Semite most of my adult life. I blame Hollywood and the general culture for this nasty and incredibly hard to crack outer shell that walled-off my mind from the real world for so long. But the main difference between me and these Jews and non-Jews who cling to neo-conservatism is honesty or the lack thereof.

* * *

If there is a moral that can be deduced from my spiritual odyssey is that the dishonesty of the family, psychology friends and counter-jihad conservatives I left behind is a byproduct of deep, ingrained cowardice.

In my teens, when I was abused at home, I believed that compassion was the main virtue of humankind. In my twenties and thirties, when I struggled with the religious demons of my parental introjects, I believed that reason in the sense of the Enlightenment philosophers was the main virtue. In my forties, when my haughty family refused to read the heartbreaking autobiography I had written, I believed that humility was the main virtue.

In my middle age I have come to realize that all is about valor and honesty.