In this context, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" represents a basic template for the kick-down nature of the hierarchical relationship. But as basic as it is, that template did not come from nowhere. It expressed something deep in people's experience of the world.
It is revealing that this emphasis on human depravity emerged at the same time as certain areas of Western culture were fostering a particularly stringent set of moral demands. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism delineated how the take-off of capitalism, with its unprecedented productivity feeding a corresponding take-off in the wealth and power of nations, was made possible by an ethic of strict discipline, unceasing work, and denial of gratification in favor of continual investment.
In other words, the people who saw themselves as "sinners in the hands of an angry God" were people who had been compelled, as they grew up, to internalize a set of moral demands that was in conflict with their inborn needs and nature. Not for the first time in the history of civilization, power rested on a process of socialization that required the internalization of a judgment hostile to their natural inclinations.
Such a kick-down process of socialization can be compared to the sadistic hazing of initiates into a club: as active members do unto the initiates as was done onto them, so also in a society with a harsh morality the parents will be driven by the impulse to replicate upon their own children the same kick-down energy that was inflicted on them when they were children. The parents are moved to this recapitulation not only by social pressure, but by the emotional forces growing out of their own unintegrated psyches.
It is therefore not at all surprising that it is in those parts of America that conceive of moral requirements in the most harsh and absolutist terms that we find the strongest impulse to deal with those below them not with compassion but with punitive demands.
Identifying during childhood with the punitive power, in order to escape the painful experience of being the one punished, and in order to fit into the harsh world, a person must live a lie -- I am not the Sinner but the agent of the Angry God holding that sinner over the fire -- and find outside himself a scapegoat onto whom to project the parts of the self that he has felt compelled to deny.
It's a case of do unto others as has been done onto you.
And so here we have a substantial piece of the answer to the riddle with which we began: even if a person grows up to be rich and powerful, like O'Reilly and the Republicans listening to Romney about the irresponsible, dependent, slothful "47%," the old pattern of (parental) power beating down (a child's) weakness continues to foster the impulse to kick down.
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There are two points here that are central to the overall themes of my "Press the Battle" series.
First, that there are patterns or templates that get transmitted through the human world, and that these patterns are key to understanding how "good" and "evil" (or the forces of wholeness and those of brokenness) operate in our world.
The "kick-down" template, described here, is but one of those templates by which the pattern of brokenness gets transmitted.
And second, that a key aspect of transmitting the pattern of brokenness is the inculcation of a harsh morality. A harsh morality requires the growing human being to internalize cultural demands that run contrary to the needs and nature of the human creature. This fosters a war within, which is brokenness at the psychological level. And this war within, in turn, ramifies back outward into conflict in the world.
The urge to "kick down" against the already downtrodden is one of the forms that outward ramification can take.
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