"How Machiavelli Saved My Family" Pt 2

Note: This is a response to another student's response to the "How Machiavelli Saved My Family." I've redacted that student's name from this text, but left everything else alone.

[Student] brings up an excellent point with regards to Evans’ methods in her quest to make her household what she wanted it to be. [Student] mentions that Evans “was manipulative”, and that is absolutely correct. I think, too, that’s what bothers me about her story. I understand that she’s at her wit’s end, trying to manage a household seemingly on her home (as [Student]also points out, where’s the husband in all of this?), and that her children don’t seem to be interested in her ideas regarding of how they should be raised. What bothers me, I think, is the idea that what matters most are the results (in this case, children ‘not running wild’, or rather that the children conform to Evans’ ideal of how children should be successfully raised). Her emphasis is clearly on the end game, and so she doesn’t seem to be concerned with whether the methods she uses are ethically ambiguous.

There are certainly pervasive stereotypes about how manipulative women are in order to gain what they want, and this story feeds right into those stereotypes. “Can’t get what you want?” it seems to say. “Well, don’t worry, you can manipulate your loved ones in order to get the life that you want.” To me, this is distasteful. I can’t abide the idea that I would ever put my own desires above those of the people I love to the point where I would coerce them into doing what I want them to do. Do I want things from people that I can’t get just by asking? Of course--my desires often conflict with the desires of others. It’s a side effect of being a social animal in social situations. Sometimes you need to reevaluate your desires, and realize you’re just not going to get what you want.

I can’t speak to what Evans desires, but the feeling I got from her article was that she had a specific vision of what a successful family was, and her family wasn’t meeting that expectation. Instead of reevaluating her desires, she decided that she would keep aiming for her goal, and would achieve her desires (seemingly) regardless of the methods used. Now, it is fair to point out that her methods don’t seem overly harmful in the physical sense. She wasn’t beating her children, and the “hand them the only money they’re allowed to spend” bit does strike me as genius (more because it gave her children a concrete idea of what money is, rather than keeping it this abstract thing that their parents used to buy stuff). The two out-right manipulations she used--pitting the brother and sister against each other, and coercing her husband into getting a vasectomy--left a bad taste in my mouth. She doesn’t seem overly concerned with why her son might have been doing poorly in school, only that he was doing poorly in school. Her focus on the results, rather than on how she gets them, strikes me as morally ambiguous at best.