I went to see the Michael Jackson movie and left thinking about the wrong man. Not Michael. Joe. Scenes with his father lingered with me: his heavy, pressuring presence, Michael succumbing to the pressure to join the Victory tour, despite already being the greatest. All these moments drew me back to old interviews, the ones in which family members vented about their childhoods.
Michael's words, repeated over decades, remained largely consistent: his father was strict and stern, and a single look could not only frighten him but also make him sick, to the point that he started to regurgitate. His father would rehearse them with a belt in hand, waiting for mistakes. He only praised the kids when he thought they did well; If he believed it was bad, he would stay silent, and the silence was quite uncomfortable.
One thing I heard him and family say is that Joe's harshness was essential to the family's success; they wouldn't have made it without it.
Hold onto this thread, because it's the whole reason I'm writing this essay: it's the most understandable sentence in the world, and it's also something we need to put under the microscope to uncover the hidden meaning.
The whole family was orbiting that fact at various distances from it. One sister described their incredible father as inspiring her to excel, while another labeled him emotionally abusive. Another wrote a book calling him an abuser but later withdrew it. Her parents did their best. Their mother said the whippings were just the discipline of their time. At the end of his life, the father said he was glad he was tough, because look what he made. Nine children, a single belt, and a range of different positions, from he hurt us to he was hard and hard was love to the one that keeps winning: the hardness is what built the greatest entertainer who ever lived.
That last sentence has a name, and it's called resulting bias, and it goes like this: we made it, so the pain must have been the point. You judge a long, tangled process by its final score: if the score was good, every ugly thing that came before it was necessary.
It is the same mechanism that turns a risky decision that paid off into a remembered act of courage, and it also explains how a family can see a terrified child and a genius in the same person and conclude that the fear carved the genius.
The real curiosity isn't about whether that's true, but about why it's so tough to stop saying it. Our mind doesn't get stuck there by chance; instead, it's actively driven by four different mechanisms all working together.
#1. The sunk cost of suffering
The greater the cost to you, the more justification you need for it to be worth it.
Hold "I suffered enormously" in one hand and "the suffering was pointless" in the other, and you go mad. The gap between them aches, and the mind will do almost anything to close it. Of course, the cheapest way is to decide that the suffering was necessary.
This is why the person you should trust least on this question is the one who was hurt the most. The brain desperately seeks meaning in it because 'it made me' is a thought you can bear. Social media is an ocean of that: notice how many people are talking about how growing up in tough environments helped them achieve X, Y, and Z.
#2. The ghost that can't testify
The proof that he'd have been great anyway was never born, so it can't take the stand.
We cannot rewind time to relive our lives, so we will never truly know whether Michael Jackson, raised in an environment of grace and support, without "the hard love," would have become the greatest entertainer in history. The outcome could have been different: either less or more.
You can see Thriller. You can see the stadiums, the records in categories that had to be invented to hold him. You cannot see the other Michael, the one raised by someone gentle, because he doesn't exist and can't be pointed at. Bias tends to emerge when one option is tangible while the other remains intangible.
The greatness is a fact sitting in the room; there is no way to know whether it comes from the harshness or despite it.
#3. The world has to be fair
Cruelty isn't meant to be rewarded, so cruelty that appears to create a masterpiece must be justified.
We tend to believe that people receive what they deserve. Acts of kindness should be acknowledged, while cruelty should have consequences. An innocent child should be protected and safe. That is the common sense most of us hold.
Now compare that belief with the facts: a man terrorized his son, who then became the greatest performer alive. If the world was fair, cruelty would be impossible because it often appears to win. The mind rationalizes it as tough love, discipline, or hard work, transforming villains into craftsmen and restoring a sense of fairness. It's simpler to view the father as a sculptor rather than accept that he harmed a child and was rewarded for it.
#4. Because, not and then
Our brains are built to find causes, and stories only work if there's a cause. So we invent one.
Spotting cause and effect helped our ancestors survive. They noticed rustling grass, then a predator, or ate a plant, then got sick. Linking events as cause and effect allowed survival, so we tend to see causes everywhere.
Now add story, which isn't just a list of events. "This happened, then this, then this" is a timeline, and it's boring, and it doesn't stick. What turns a timeline into a story is the word because. He lost everything because of one mistake; she survived because she never gave up.
When transforming real-life messy facts into a story, something we do effortlessly, we naturally insert a "because" between events that are originally connected only by "and then." The story requires a cause, so our mind automatically provides one.
The brain seeks a cause, so we place the belt earlier in the timeline than Thriller, causing both instincts to activate simultaneously. Your mind automatically links the two before you even consider whether there's a genuine connection between them.
One Michael
Here's a straightforward test that challenges all four.
If suffering were the engine, that house should have produced many Michaels. It had everything you'd need: nine talented children under one roof, one belt, same rehearsals.
There's one Michael Jackson.
The siblings are talented, don't get me wrong. None of them compare to the mind of someone discussing the greatest entertainer of all time.
(And yes, I know siblings don't really have the same childhood or the same parents. The oldest meets a different father than the youngest, the house changes, the money changes, everyone gets their own version. I'm generalizing, because there's no way to climb inside nine separate childhoods and measure them. But the point survives the rough edges.)
A gentler childhood might not have increased his talent but could have fueled his obsession and hunger to take forty takes, driven by love of the work and good expectations instead of fear of the man in the doorway.
You see, the outcome is the same, but one version sleeps without propofol drip.
So we need to stay attentive to the shortcuts our brains take, because they're quiet and feel like wisdom. For me, in particular, the lesson is the simplest one: Michael Jackson became Michael Jackson despite everything, not because of it.
He resisted and became himself anyway. He did it out in the open, in front of everyone, against considerable gravity.
That's not a story about what suffering produces.
That's a story about what talent survives.
May he rest in peace.
PS: A funny thought I had while writing this essay: we can't be sure he wouldn't have been 10x better without all that weight. I honestly can't imagine anything more perfect than what he already gave us, so that statement sounds ridiculous to me. Still, it's a real possibility that we'll never find out.
