Brainwash
You need to be independent.
I honestly couldn't believe this when I first suspescted it. Communist brainwash. I can't believe such people still exist, but then again maybe I'm too idealistic and trust that most people by now accept homosexuality for example (unrelated issue).
I'm not talking about people being brainwashed into blindly believeing and following (communistic/socialistic) ideas. There will always be such people for any idea, that I find normal, if disturbing.
What scared me, what I still find difficult to believe are people without... how should I can it?... people without anything human about them, people with no... self. I'm not talking about character (sadly, as it would have been an improvement) since that was obviously developed during an earlier stage of life, which was not so badly influenced by politics, religion (or the lack thereof) and other broad social factors.
Character is developed ever since a person can speak and act on his/her own. My subject indeed has character, but I also have a theory (that just cleared up) for that. Communism/Socialism is all about being an ideal society, which in general excludes differences between people and, therefore, personal character. After a certain age going to school (not necessarily after graduating, though) getting cookies or whatever children find excessively important at some point or another play a smaller role in a person's life compared to more national or global factors as wars, politics, surviving (to put it basically). Even if a child pre- or in early puberty might not fully understand these factors, they still influence it. Therefore, character development in a child living in a communist/socialist country is suppressed, roughly estimated, before puberty. My subject has an extremely selfish character, is ready to pout, ramble about herself, complain even if no one's listening plus a number of other (quite annoying) traits. Does that not sound a little... childish to you? Consider that the subject I'm talking of is past-middle-aged! It does make sense to have a such an infantile behaviour if that is all you got to 'build.' But it is not my subject's character that got me to write this...
As I mentioned (and I could be completely wrong here, but this is my personal opinion), communism/socialism suppress the, well, person in a person. My subject shows absolutely NO individuality and even fear of such! Since she is retired (as implied above), she basically has to stay home all day. She asks me what to do. She expects me, in a way, to tell her what to do with her time with herself... to order her! For pretty much the first time today, I went in depth explaining that she should be self-sufficient, she should find her own interests and explore them, use her time to her advantage and find how best to spend it. I told her she has to be independent and her response amazed me. Several times she answered me either in a desperate way, trying to tell me she can't do anything, expecting me to give her an idea, to tell her what to do. A couple of other times she was mad at me, seemingly or as far as I understood, for even suggesting something like that. In the end after giving her options and ideas to my best ability, she started crying (as happens often, which is not all that surprising considering the above paragraph) and explaining she can't go on like that, she has to do something (insert me repeating all of the above, how she can do everything she wants to and her ignoring me) and she can't do anything. She said she wanted to die and when I told her that's the easy way out, when I said that was cowardly she laughed and told me not to say it again. Of course, most suicidal people would answer me that, but meh...
She still persists there is no 'use' to an existence like hers, she wants to die, there is no point in not doing anything (which is only her fault)... I don't know... It's not all that annoying as it is... scary. I am mortified to find out there are still people whose only purpose in life is to serve.
Promise I'll never be like that?
