What if you need not to defer your own gratification (the Marshmallow Test and all that) but someone else’s? But what if doing that causes you so much grief you have to stop? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t etc – something akin to what Gregory Bateson had in mind with his concept of the “double bind.”
In an August issue of the Big Issue (a very good magazine that homeless/vulnerably housed people can sell, keeping half the cover price for themselves) its founder, John Bird, tells of growing up with an, uh, ‘improvident’ mother…
She would smoke all of her cigarettes, which she would die for (and did eventually), between Thursday’s payday and Tuesday morning. Then she had around three days cigarette-free. We would go into the ABC tea room in Westbourne Grove nearby and she would ask to buy cigarettes from men, always realising that they would give a cigarette but take no money, a hidden form of begging. It was a good thing the never asked for payment because she never had any money, or only enough to buy a long-lasting cup of tea….
She hid from the rent man and eventually we were evicted… Then I would take and hide cigarettes from my mother’s packet and give them out to her on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Perhaps two cigarettes a day.
She was addicted and like addicted people she could get very vicious if you didn’t surrender her fix. So in the end I had to give this practice up because she was hitting me hard when I refused, on a Tuesday, to surrender her allowance for Wednesday and Thursday. Then she would punish me because I had not had the perspicacity to take more from the cigarette glory days after payday (emphasis added).
What do we learn? That those with power resent anyone trying to impose any limits, any sanity. That they will use force against those who are physically weak and unable to defend themselves, even though those weak vulnerable people are trying to act in everyone’s best interest.
I am sure there is somehow a connection here with the state-corporate nexus and its stance towards climate activists, but I just can’t see what it might be at the moment…
References
Bird, J. 2023. Planning a life of efficiency. Big Issue, August 14, p. 15
marchudson.net 
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