There are lots of ways to raise children. Children can be raised so that they are more or less brought into alignment with ideas of good order. And they can be brought into alignment by means of persuasion or by coercion, by love or by fear, or combinations of all of those.
The greater the role that pain --or the threat of pain-- plays in the socializing of the child, the more deeply entrenched will be the role of fear in the child's emotional universe.
Let me close this installment first with this passage from my essay, "The Concept of Evil," which can be found in its entirety at www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=91:
The broken regime of racial persecution in the American South–as Lillian Smith showed in her classic Killers of the Dream— built upon the broken psyche of white Southerners brought up with harsh moral strictures that prevented the harmonious integration of natural sexual impulses. The forbidden impulses were then projected out to be rediscovered –and punished—in the darker race.
In Nazi Germany–as Alice Miller showed in For Your Own Good—the broken regime of ethnic annihilation built upon the psychic brokenness created by generations of child-rearing practices that legitimated the systematic brutal treatment of children. What was driven underground in the child emerged with a fury against “inferior peoples” to be destroyed in the name of the noble Fatherland.
This passage appears in a section about "brokenness," which in this case applies to the inability to integrate, to reconcile, to harmonize, all the aspects of one's experience and motivations and consciousness.
And finally, there's this: my book OUT OF WEAKNESS: HEALING THE WOUNDS THAT DRIVE US TO WAR develops the idea that the traumas of history have made people afraid of several very fundamental aspects of their own experience, and this fear is a powerful force toward making the world a more dangerous and destructive place.
When fear is excessive, it therefore makes the world a more dangerous place.
Here's a hidden and deeper truth behind FDR's famous statement about fear. While it may not be true that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, it is certainly true that being excessively governed by fear is something we have good reason to be afraid of.
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