Abuse is POSIWIDvely Useless
Explore the fallacy of abusive practices in musical achievement and uncover the truth about their ineffectiveness. Empower yourself to pursue music without sacrificing your well-being.
More on the title later.
I’ve always been a big believer in the concept that Jesus taught on the sermon on the mount of “an evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit.” Most people believe this idea on a superficial level, but I’ve noticed a lot of behavior that flies in the face of this injunction among musicians.
For instance, many musicians seem to behave as though working yourself to death, guilt-tripping yourself to oblivion, and enslaving yourself to musicians’ cultural norms is necessary in order to have success.
Unfortunately for them, this isn’t true and is actually counterproductive.
Let me prove it to you:
Abuse Can’t Lead to Good Things
What happens when you drop a pencil? It falls to the ground. Every cause has its effect, and causes do not cause effects that they don’t affect.
And if you can keep that straight, we’ll be in good shape for the rest of the article.
Okay, then. What effects does abuse cause?
According to abusers, abuse serves the purpose of helping someone get better at something.
Abusers aren’t exactly the most reliable sources of information, though, so let’s examine this claim by looking at the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of torture.
Here’s a good one: “This essay demonstrates that contrary to the myth, torture and the closely related practice, torture ‘lite’ do not always produce the desired information and, in the cases in which it does, these practices may not produce it in a timely fashion. In the end, the essay concludes, any marginal benefit the practice offers is low because traditional techniques of interrogation may be as good, and possibly even better at producing valuable intelligence.”1
In non-fancy language, this means that:
Torture doesn’t always work
Even when it does work we don’t always get valuable information in a timely fashion.
Even when we do get information in a timely fashion, traditional methods of interrogation are just as good as torture.
So in other words, torture is good for nothing. Cool.
Glad we settled that debate.
Turns out that Jesus might’ve been right.
POSIWID Heuristic
You probably haven’t heard of the POSIWID2 heuristic, and if you have you probably read as much as yours truly. Which is definitely too much. Go touch grass, come on now.
For everyone else, POSIWID is short for the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. Like Occam’s Razor (simplest answer is usually correct, all other things being equal), POSIWID is a good rule of thumb for examining human behavior.
To illustrate this principle, let’s apply it to our current topic.
IF: Someone is abusing someone else.
AND: Abusing someone doesn’t result in more efficacious, timely, or desirable results.
BUT: It does result in hurting another person.
THEN: The purpose of their abuse is to hurt the other person.
The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of abuse is to hurt people.
Now, some might argue that we could also use Hanlon’s razor (never attribute to malice that which can be equally explained by stupidity) to explain why abusers abuse. Let me counter with this: why can abusers turn off their abusive behaviors around people they respect? If they’re so stupid that they can’t see that their abuse isn’t working to accomplish their supposed ends of making things better, why do they not abuse everyone, constantly, all the time?
The answer to this is, of course, that they are not stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing. They’re just hoping you’re stupid, naive, sensitive, scared, weak, or oblivious enough to let them get away with it.
Not that you actually are any of those things, of course. That’s just what the abuser thinks.
Not the Damn Marshmallows Again
Alright, so torture and abuse isn’t effective, but how do we know that, say, if you sacrifice your own well being now in the short term for the sake of learning your instrument, that in the long term you’ll be better off?
This comes down to the marshmallow study. I know, I know. Bear with me for a second, though.
Just in case you aren’t familiar with this oft-repeated study, it goes like this. Some children were presented with a marshmallow and if they waited for 10 minutes before eating it, they’d get another. The study then followed these children around for another few years and discovered that the children who waited before eating the marshmallow were more successful in their adult lives.
Big whup, Emma. Everyone knows the marshmallow study. What does this have to do with abuse?
Well…most people aren’t aware that this isn’t actually how the story ends. There was a follow up study done, where they gave the kids who didn’t wait to eat their marshmallow a second chance at the study. What they found was that these kids eagerly waited the 10 minutes and earned their second marshmallow on the second try.
So what does this mean?
It means that the kids who didn’t wait to eat their marshmallow didn’t do it because they were impatient or unable to delay gratification. It means they did it because they didn’t believe that they would actually earn a second marshmallow. They did it because they were insecure. They did it because they were afraid of being lied to.3
In short, because they had been abused.
Hm…so when people are treated better, they make better decisions and are more successful in the future. Could this mean that perhaps abusing people isn’t the best way to help them succeed?
Who would’ve thought.
Ironically, when you decide to give up abusive practices, people will often accuse you of being unable to delay gratification, even though the opposite is true. Taking the time and effort to preserve your health and humanity is one of the most wise and low-time preference activities any individual can do.
What Is Abuse?
This doesn’t answer the question of what exactly constitutes abuse, though. Certainly people have to push themselves in order to achieve excellence in their given endeavors. After all, Olympic athletes train for upwards of 12 hours a day. Are they abusing themselves?
The answer to this is no.
Olympic athletes have crazy intense diets that allow them to maintain this lifestyle, and then the other 12 hours of the day they’re not training, they’re sleeping.
So what’s the line between pushing yourself and abuse?
It’s your own happiness.
If you’re able to go through your day to day life with a sense of well-being and purpose, if you’re able to go through life with enthusiasm and excitement, if you’re able to feel inspired and action-oriented, these are all indications of a lifestyle that is not based in abuse.
In order to perform this test, though, you have to be self aware enough to realize that you have a sense of well-being in the first place. A tactic of abusers is to keep their victim so busy and so dissociated from reality that they can’t even develop the self awareness to realize their misery.
For musicians, this often looks like spending every waking moment of every day obsessively worrying about music, compulsively practicing on pencils or whatever else is around, hustling to be “the best,” and just generally acting neurotic. Whether these neurotic tendencies come from the culture, the professors, the upper-classmen, or the abusee’s own head, the effect is the same: perpetuating the cycle of abuse.
How Do you Stop Abuse?
Alright, so let’s suppose that you have been abusing yourself for quite a while. How do you stop?
Notice when you are abusing yourself. You don’t have to stop abusing yourself at first, just notice it.
When you’ve started noticing it consistently for a few days or weeks, try to notice how you’re feeling or what you’re thinking when you begin to abuse yourself. Are you tired? Are you thinking of a certain person or experience? These insights can help you crack the reason why your abuse started in the first place.
When you’ve started noticing thought patterns or behavior patterns, allow yourself to feel the feelings that those thoughts bring up. Do those thoughts make you sad or angry? Feel those feelings until they subside. This could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. This is called the grieving process and nobody really talks about it for some reason (especially musicians).
P.S. There are no thoughts or experiences that are too trivial to not have caused you grief. They don’t exist. If it comes up in your brain and it makes you sad, then it caused you grief. The end.
When you’ve grieved your griefs (or solved the emotional part of whatever you’re going through), then you can resolve to do better in the future (solve the rational part of whatever you went through to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.) You can’t do this backwards. Emotions come first, reason comes second.
Change your beliefs, thoughts, behaviors, whatever you have to to become the person that won’t allow yourself to be abused again.
P.S. Any alleged purity, virtue, or innocence that comes from not standing up for yourself isn’t actually virtuous or pure at all. POSIWID, remember? If your purity gets in the way of your not being abused, then the purpose of your purity is to allow yourself to be abused. Doesn’t sound so pure any more, does it?
Get new friends. They don’t have to be completely new. Reach out to someone you used to know, or reach out to some musicians who seem to be out of touch with the abusive milieu that is normal musician culture. Get away from abuse practices, people, and philosophies. It’s not worth it.
Breaking the cycle of abuse is one of the most difficult and courageous things individuals can do, and I’m not going to sit here telling you that it’s going to be easy. It’s going to be one of the most heart-wrenchingly difficult things you could ever imagine. You’re going to have to give up things that you thought loved you, you’re going to feel betrayed, you’re going to feel abandoned. And most of all, you’re going to feel clueless about what to do next.
But it’ll be worth it.
And your musicianship will thank you for it.
And literally your entire life will be better.
How does that sound?
Final Thoughts
Abuse is not the way to become a mature and competent musician. If someone has a broken leg, is the way to help them walk again to hit them? If someone can’t play the piano, is the way to get them to play to scream at them?
Despite the excuses abusers repeat to absolve themselves of guilt (e.g. “It’s for your own good,” “I only do this because I love you,” and “You wouldn’t be what you are today if it weren’t for me!”) abuse only ever causes the effects of abuse.
Give up your abusive practices, and let yourself enjoy the security of mature musicianship.
Remember that the POSIWID, and peace out.
https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/indana83&div=14&id=&page=
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/6/17413000/marshmallow-test-replication-mischel-psychology
I had a friend tell me once of a fellow musician in the NSO who was relentlessly ridiculed in front of the whole orchestra by a guest conductor for a mistake he had made. It got so in his head that even after the guest conductor left, he couldn’t play without mistakes anymore and it ended his music career. Pretty sad story 😔