Tantrums

Some toddlers just want to watch the world burn

Midjourney: Toddler having a tantrum (note the hint of an extra finger on the right hand)

The psychologist Alison Gopnik has a theory of the terrible twos.

Parents all know, and dread, the "terrible twos". While one-year-olds seem irresistibly drawn to forbidden objects (that lamp cord again), the two-year-olds seem deliberately bloody-minded. She doesn't even look at the lamp cord. Instead, her hand goes out to touch it as she looks, steadily, gravely, at you.

This demonic behaviour is quite rational, though. … The terrible twos seem to involve a systematic exploration of [the minds of other people], like an experimental research programme. Toddlers are testing the extent to which their desires and those of others may conflict. The grave look is directed at you because you and your reaction, rather than the lamp cord, are the interesting thing. The terrible twos reflect a clash between children's need to understand other people and their need to live happily with them. If the child is a budding scientist, we parents are the laboratory rats.

I like this demon-toddlers-are-running-experiments theory. It might be right. But I want to discuss here a specific aspect of the terrible twos—tantrums—and explore a different account.

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I’ve long been interested in perverse actions.¹ The classic example comes from Confessions^⁠, Saint Augustine of Hippo’s report of his youthful descent into sin and later conversion to Christianity. Augustine begins the book by promising us tales of debauchery, but—to the disappointment of many young readers over centuries—the only sin he talks about in detail is when he and some friends stole some pears from an orchard.  Nothing more—but the theft fascinated Augustine. At least his sexual sins made sense. They were driven by his appetites. But what motivated the theft? Augustine and his pals had nothing against the owner of the orchard. They weren’t hungry and didn’t try to sell the pears; they threw them to pigs.

Augustine comes to a troubling conclusion. He did it just because it was wrong. As he goes on to tell it, the act was “gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself.” He concludes, “I loved the evil in me.”

Some perverse acts are awful. The embodiment of malevolent perversity in modern culture is the Joker. In Christopher Nolan’s film The Dark Knight, Alfred describes the Joker like this:

Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Not all perverse acts involve the infliction of pain, though. I’ve been collecting stories of perverse acts for a while now (contribute your own here), and here are some milder examples:

When I first became of legal drinking age I used to go out to bars with friends and when I spoke to new people (particularly males) I would lie about who I was: I had a set story, I said that my name was Peach and I was studying medicine - obviously completely untrue. When I think about why I did it, it was just because I could.

Sometimes I walk on the grass instead of the path just because it’s wrong

On one occasion in my early twenties I was out with a friend. He decided to get himself an ice cream and, before he had a chance to try it, I stuck my finger in it. I played it off as a joke. But really I had had the sudden thought "man, it would be fucked up if I just jammed my finger in his ice cream.

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One motivation for perversity is a desire for autonomy. Here is how I put it in a New Yorker article from several years ago.

[Acting perversely is] a way of establishing oneself as an authentic and autonomous being. We might call it existential perversity. A person can ask: If I only do what makes sense, what use am I? Why is my consciousness relevant at all? The desire to exercise your autonomy might motivate you to turn against the expected, the reasonable, and the moral—to show yourself, and perhaps others, that you are free.

Suppose this is right, and we are driven by an urge to be free, to rebel against the constraints of rationality and morality. Where does this urge come from?

It might be the product of Western culture. Here’s Joseph Henrich, from his excellent book The WEIRDist People in the World, describing how the WEIRD (those from Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies) differ from the rest of the world:

We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time. When acting, we prefer a sense of control and the feeling of making our own choices.

This could be right—the desire for autonomy may be a cultural value that’s present in some societies and not others.² If so, then people from outside the West shouldn’t care about autonomy. And 2-year-olds shouldn’t care either, since they are too young to have picked up this value.

But maybe it’s not right. Maybe the urge for autonomy and control is universal and emerges early in life. Maybe it’s why children have tantrums.

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Many tantrums are rational. There is something that the child wants—a sweet treat, say—and the parents refuse to hand it over. Here, a tantrum, with screaming, kicking, and crying, is doubly reasonable. First, it makes sense to get enraged when your wishes are thwarted. Second, this sort of freak-out, particularly if it’s in a public place like a grocery store or a TSA line, might persuade the adults who care for you to reconsider.

But some tantrums make no sense at all. Here are some examples that made me laugh. (From here and here).

1. "Our daughter cried because she didn't get to go to her parents' wedding — seven years before she was born."

2. "My kid screamed at his balloons for an hour because they wouldn't stop floating."

3. "My 2-year-old screamed bloody murder every time she finished the water I poured into her cup. She literally got mad because SHE drank all her water."

4. "Our toddler found a photo book of my wife and I before kids having fun on vacation. He melted down saying we went out for fun and didn't take him. I told him, 'It's because you weren't born yet.' He fired back, 'I exist! I'm right here!'"

5. "My toddler got ticked off because the trees are taller than our house."

6. "My toddler loves being tickled, so I was tickling him one day. He let out a huge fart and immediately started crying and screaming. I asked him why he was screaming and he replied, 'I was saving that for later.'"

7. "My daughter had a complete existential breakdown one day when she found out that she was going to have to pee every day of her life."

8. "My toddler demanded to know how to say 'Hola' in Spanish, but wouldn't accept that it was already in Spanish. Cried for hours."

9. "My nephew had a breakdown when his boot wouldn't fit on his head like a hat."

None of these tantrums are rational in any simple sense because there’s nothing anyone can do to solve the problem. And they’re not just motivated by disappointment—that would cause tears, not kicking and screaming.

My sense is that the two-year-olds are enraged by their lack of control over the world. They want things to be different and scream because they can’t make them so.

Do children raised in non-WEIRD cultures have these sorts of tantrums? I’d love to know—if they do, it would show that the desire for control isn’t a cultural value; it’s part of human nature.

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1. Some of what follows was discussed in one of my first posts for this Substack, here.

2. There are other cultural analyses. A friend of mine (who, perversely, insisted that he not be named) sent me a quote from War and Peace saying that rebelling against the convention is a specifically Russian trait:

[There is a] vague and quite Russian feeling of contempt for everything conventional, artificial, and human—for everything the majority of men regard as the greatest good in the world. …

It was the feeling that induces a volunteer recruit to spend his last penny on drink, and a drunken man to smash mirrors or glasses for no apparent reason and knowing that it will cost him all the money he possesses: the feeling which causes a man to perform actions which from an ordinary point of view are insane, to test, as it were, his personal power and strength, affirming the existence of a higher, nonhuman criterion of life.