Rootkit 14
Rootkit 14 states that 'In the good world, if you can’t stop someone from hurting your child, you are at fault.' It is FALSE. It is the fourteenth statement of the Rootkit Test.
Explanation of answer to Rootkit 14
Quoted from Puzzle One.
A small note first: in the survivarium, we never say ‘your child’. We say ‘our child’ or ‘the child’, or we use her name. In the survivarium, the person who gave birth to you is your childer. They’ve done a bit more for you than most people, and they were the first human you met on this earth and the first to give you milk, but they were only smoothing the way for you to meet hundreds or thousands of others and to be fed by all kinds of other people. Your childer is not responsible for your well-being: we all are. Yes, in the beginning there was your lalon, or the bunch of twenty doulas who did shift duty for you and your cradlemate and childers, looking after you all, but you also probably noticed that doulas from other lalons looked after you too, and other childers might give you milk when you were hungry. When you were older, you got to know everyone in the Circle of Love, and when you had no new friends to make there, you started venturing into the Circle of Games.
Whatever you did, there were always helpful and attentive doulas and childers of all kinds from whom to pick the ones you liked best and wanted to be with on any given day: you had no compulsory carers, only brooders who watched out for you because you were a kid and they were the adults. If you ever asked a question about this, you would have been told that in the survivarium, we don’t believe that the person who births you (a) owns you (b) is tied to your every action as if you never left their body and (c) is a terrible person who must be punished if you mess up or get hurt. In other words, we have no mothers here.
As for the idea that the wrongdoing of someone who hurts our child is your shame, it’s the old story: the hanyo hurts you and miraculously makes you ashamed of your own pain. You are a co-victim here. A hanyo who says, ‘Have sex with me or I will hurt your child’ is hiding the fact that he would be quite capable of hurting that child for some equally silly reason, or no reason at all. He’s getting his kicks by both hurting a child and shifting the blame to you, who love and care for the intended victim, and what he really wants is for you to do as he says, hoping he will indeed spare the child. He wants to avoid a fight right now, but that’s just today’s score: the game isn’t over. The hanyo knows that there’s always tomorrow, and furthermore he now knows the trick works. The next time he wants something, he’ll threaten the child again.
In hanyo town, we’ve all faced the fact that our obedience ultimately did nothing to save us from anything. The hanyos were playing a game with us right from the start, and they were always going to win because they invented the rules. So feel no guilt if the hanyos torture your loved ones. That is what they do.
I know this is a hard pill to swallow. All of us have had trouble with it, all of us have banged our head against the wall in the small hours because of the memories. But this is how the hanyos have ruled us for so long: they take our children hostage. They know we care about our children more than they do, and they have held it over our heads for millennia. Oh yes, these current monsters are not the first to have worked this out. The hanyos know that if you frighten a child’s protector, you hurt the child. It’s how they put the little hanyo in everyone’s head.
As for you, the hanyos see you as an opponent in a game which they are set up to win because they are stronger and more powerful (but they secretly fear that you are more wily and cunning). They tell you that if you fail to protect the child, you ought to have no respect for yourself. They know that people who despise themselves cannot desire their own happiness and are easily enslaved. The hanyos reassure themselves that we are stupid when they see that even though some of us know how the game is played, we still hope we can save our loved ones by doing what the hanyo wants. Then, when the bad things are done to our loved ones anyway, which could happen today or in a week or years from now, we blame and hate ourselves where we should blame the hanyos who have tied and penned us.
So let me repeat this: someone who would threaten to hurt a child for whatever reason, is someone who could hurt a child. Unless they’re bluffing, in which case you’re going to call their bluff anyway by refusing to comply. Either way, whatever happens, the shame for an action belongs to the one who did it.
When I was a child, the hanyos would routinely kill or torture other children in front of me to make me do what they wanted. The thing they wanted me to do was impossible, so I was helpless anyway. Once I tried to save one little kid by pretending to comply: they found out and gave the kid a really bad death. I felt like hell about it, then I thought to myself, I have no agency in this matter: I can do nothing. Therefore I have no guilt. I have immense grief, yes, but no shame because I did no wrong. Grief and shame are the only pains you feel in the good world. I was not the cause of any of the grief around me, because I was a prisoner. My will was not free. The hanyos wanted to think I was collaborating with them, they may even have believed it themselves, but I knew I wasn’t. I could not do what I wanted to do, because I was tied to a torture machine that punished me whenever I reached for my freedom.
One of the hanyos once told me a story to explain to me why he was superior and I was inferior. He said, I put you on a train. The train is hurtling towards some people tied to the tracks. But there’s a way out: you can flip a lever and switch the train to another track, where there’s one person tied to the track. This is your only choice. What would you do? He was very annoyed when I answered every variation of this problem in the same way: I refused to do anything. He asked why, and I said his problem was already tainted by evil, because it didn’t matter what I did, people would die anyway. He’d created a universe where I had no right choices. In other words, he’d created hanyo town, and there’s nothing useful to do in hanyo town except curl up into a ball and wait for death. He got very angry and said, ‘All right, so now there’s an equal number of people tied to each track, but now if you pull the lever the train will switch tracks and go twice as fast. What would you do?’ He wanted me to say I’d make the train go faster so the people would suffer less.
I was trained to be a RanDee, so I knew how to play this game. I told him his problem was like a math proof with a big hole in it, or an experiment with a cheat built into it: it was just sloppy thinking, not a moral problem. I told him, ‘You can’t make a math proof in which all the steps don’t follow, or one step is based on a huge error, and you can’t say, ‘For the purposes of this problem, you have to accept my mathematical reasoning as correct’ because that destroys all math, just as the trolley problem destroys all morality. In fact all you’re doing is showing that YOU have no grasp of mathematics. Or morality.’ I don’t remember what happened after that, but I suppose they tortured me. So don’t waste your time blaming anyone. Just work to get the hell out of the reach of monsters who hurt children. Save who you can, grieve over those you cannot, and come build your survivarium.
