When social psychologists run experiments to see how mean people can be, they discover that most people can be very mean indeed. Very cruel. Amazingly mean.
Yeah, right.
A “few bad apples” did not spoil it for Germany. Tens of millions of folks gleefully followed Hitler. They followed him because he spoke to them. He spoke aloud what was secretly in their soul: a clear, unambiguous message of hate. They secretly hated; he publicly hated; and his public messaging of their private desires opened the floodgates of massacre.
Even though we know this, we find this terrifically hard to acknowledge and accept. Decent people balk at the idea that a quarter of the people around them, or a third, or a half, are full of hatred and eager to act cruelly. They may find it hard to believe in part because they have chosen as their friends those folks who tend toward fairness and kindness. These friendships distort reality for them and make it seem as if there are more good people in the world than there actually are.
Social psychological experiments and stark history ought to convince us that ordinary people are vicious right under the surface. In some cultures, and at some times, a thin veneer of civilization, mightily won by heroic democrats, does manage to keep these haters marginally in their place. But give them an opening, give them a set of circumstances, give than an inch—give them any license—and their hatred spills out in pogroms, secret police, disappeared persons, and all the others horrors we know too well.
In the home, where they need no license, they routinely mistreat their children, who become victims of an authoritarian wounding that is one of the best-kept secrets around. The same cruelty that we see in public atrocities like slavery, honor murders, religious wars, civil wars, and all the rest, is played out behind closed doors in millions of households worldwide.
It is the pandemic that can’t be stopped. The authoritarian wounding of children at the hands of cruel mothers and fathers, a secret pandemic that has gone on from the beginning of the species and continues today, is the biggest “mental health risk” in the world. It causes more pain and woe than any other single feature of the human experience.
Maybe you are not convinced that this is really going on, given that most families present as nice and decent when they are on their best behavior in public, at church, at the community barbecue, or at a school function. How friendly and upstanding everyone seems! But all you are witnessing in these public settings is the playing out of that very thin veneer of civilization: a public display of okay-ness hiding massive anger and hatred roiling right beneath the surface.
There is currently a pandemic of authoritarian cruelty in the family and there always has been. We may not be able to stop it but we can loudly announce that it is not okay. And we can offer its victims at least this much: we can affirm that your wounds are real and that you have the right to hate what happened to you. That someone comes armed with the title of “mom” or “dad” shouldn’t provide them with cover to act cruelly. This pandemic of authoritarian cruelty is occurring behind closed doors, so we can’t see it, but we can see its consequences: millions of children turning into anxious, depressed, addicted adults.
There is no vaccine coming. But we can say out loud, “Look, rats carry the plague, even if they are hiding in the walls where we can’t see them. Be very alert!” Let us wake up to this pandemic and say to those parents who take it as their right to act cruelly toward their children, “That isn’t okay.”
They will tell us to butt out: they will loudly assert that raising their children is their own business. And it is. But it our business, too, because children need allies. A child can’t stand up to a cruel parent alone—decent grown-ups have to stand with him or her. We can’t end this pandemic—but we can at least stand with its victims.
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This post is part of a 20-part series designed to help you heal from the authoritarian wounding you may have experienced in your family of origin (for example, at the hands of a parent, sibling, grandparent, etc.), in your current family (say, at the hands of a spouse or adult child), or elsewhere (in the workplace, at church, in team sports, etc.).
You can follow the whole series by subscribing to my blog posts. You can learn more about authoritarian wounding in my book Helping Survivors of Authoritarian Parents, Siblings and Partners. If you would like to contribute to the book I’m currently working on, which focuses on the experiences of adults who grew up with an authoritarian father or mother (or both), I would greatly appreciate that help. Drop me a line to [email protected] to learn more.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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