Sociopath Community

Clinton's story doesn't demonstrate that people can simply propel themselves out of an alcoholic environment through ambition. It demonstrates that one person with substantial ability, education, connections, opportunities, and political support managed to succeed despite an adverse childhood environment. He went to Georgetown, worked for Senator Fulbright, got a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, went to Yale Law, became attorney general and then governor of Arkansas. He also had Hillary Rodham Clinton as a highly educated political partner. That's a very different situation from someone whose alcoholic environment also involves poverty, instability, neglect, abuse, poor education, lack of support, or other disadvantages that can compound one another.

His success doesn't even establish that his childhood environment had no negative effect on him. It's entirely possible for both of these things to be true: Clinton was capable of overcoming his circumstances, and those circumstances made his eventual success less likely than it otherwise would have been.

The mistake is treating "possible" as equivalent to "equally probable." One person demonstrating that someone can succeed despite an alcoholic environment tells you almost nothing about how difficult or statistically likely it is for other people. You can't look at the survivor and conclude that everyone who didn't escape simply lacked ambition. That's survivorship bias.

His later life was hardly psychologically uncomplicated. It's possible some of his later problems were influenced by childhood trauma or learned behavior, though that would be speculative. Someone can become highly successful while still carrying lasting effects from a dysfunctional upbringing.

Ofvalue said: 

Bill Clinton was child of alcoholics and became successful; why can’t some people propel themselves on ambition and out of alcoholism

 Addiction.

I can ask Ai for you if you wish. I believe you'd turn to ChatGPT so I'd use that one instead of the more powerful models. It would just explain the struggles of addiction while you probably heard of it all before.

That's why though. You're very welcome. If anything else just ask. Bye now, and good luck.