Mass Psychological Conformity

Thinking about our current covid totalitarianism, columnist Roger Simon recently wrote:

What we have witnessed throughout the world [today] is millions, really billions, of people taking orders without thinking or, in the majority of cases, even seriously investigating what they have been told.

Simon states that witnessing this has helped him answer his long-held question (also held by many, including me): how could educated people in World War II Germany do what the Nazis did to Jews?

The best he could come up with:

We live in a culture of pervasive obedience….It’s everywhere—people giving up their personal agency, even their ability to reason, out of fear and willingly adhering to the mass.

A generation of conformists has been created as never before in our history.

Which certainly is true, but leaves the question “why?” unanswered. The best I can come up with is “mass psychological conformity,” or to elaborate, “mass psychologically-generated callous conformity, indifferent to harm caused to others.” The harm can range from “lockdowns” to mass extermination. In the case of the latter, “inhumanity” may be substituted for callous conformity.

Which still leaves the questions: “Why?” and “How?”

Various attempts to name this syndrome have been made: group psychology, groupthink, the madness of crowds, or true believers in a mass movement. Tulip mania, the current situation is not, though “herd conformity” is a phrase I have used before to describe it. Most recently, the terms “mass delusional psychosis” or “mass formation psychosis” have been offered.

“Delusion” is correct because in its simplest definition delusion means belief in something that is false, whether it’s “I’m probably going to die if you breathe anywhere near me” or “I’m Jesus Christ.”

And the syndrome is “mass” because so many people worldwide have gone along with their authoritarian public health and political leaders.

But these followers are not psychotic in the sense that they completely withdraw from reality, suspending conscious control over life and allowing the subconscious to take over.* Because thinking errors are the cause of neuroses, all psychological problems can be said to some extent to be delusional.

“Inhumanity,” according to Merriam-Webster means “being cruel or barbarous” and “the absence of warmth or geniality.” The past two years have certainly seemed inhumane, at least to those who have been harmed the most: children, small businesses that have closed and workers, if they still have a job, many of them single moms, who have to mask up to serve the laptop elite while the latter dine and shop. Then there are the non-virus related deaths, many by suicide.

Callous indifference, indeed! (See my post “They Just Don’t Care—Rationalization and the Need to Look Good.”

Who exactly am I talking about? The intelligentsia in particular: mainstream media, leftist teachers and professors, certain left-leaning entertainers and business leaders, politicians, and the public health cadre of unelected deep staters.

The latter two may even have a worse psychology. The past two years seem to have brought out their inner totalitarian, as in “we’re telling you who you can have in your home and when or if you can travel. Obey!”

Other people, such as the laptop elite who support the intelligentsia’s doctrines, would have to be included. The cause of all psychologies varies widely, in this case likely ranging from plain ignorance of the doctrine’s consequences to deliberate envious glee for those harmed (akin to many Germans during World War II).

Today, most people are just scared, thanks to the unrelenting propaganda campaign waged by the intelligentsia.

The root of the syndrome is psychological dependence, a psychology that does not depart completely from reality as a psychotic does, but one that shifts reality to other people as their source of beliefs and values. It is a passive acceptance of what those significant others think, feel, and do—a suspension of independent judgment to go along to get along . . . with the crowd.

We all often fail to seriously investigate, because we learn from books and other people and can’t escape the need to rely on experts.

But why the suspension of independent judgment? On the mass scale, this is where there is again a wide variety of reasons. The culture’s philosophy contributes in large part to explaining Simon’s observation of “pervasive obedience.” Germany’s duty ethics of self-sacrifice to the state (or Führer) eclipses independence. “It’s your duty to obey.”

The United States holds a nearly as strong duty ethics based on its predominant Protestantism. Just look at attitudes toward the military draft: “It’s your duty to die for your country.” (Should a big war break out, a new draft would be passed in a heartbeat by Congress and supported by the public. See The Ominous Parallels.)

For over 120 years, American culture has been assaulted and battered unendingly by the progressive left demanding that to be moral we must sacrifice ourselves to the collective, the group, the state.

And in non-Judeo-Christian cultures, asceticism and self-denial are widely held doctrines, with authoritarianism not even questioned.

Hence, worldwide, pervasive obedience.

Psychologically, independence derives from a strong sense of personal identity and self-responsibility. Courage, integrity, and self-esteem are consequences. Parental and formal education (the “how” of this issue) are both crucial in helping us develop these traits, but preaching self-sacrifice and victimhood erodes or blocks the development of independence.

“Dependent personalities,” as I have written before (p. 105), “gravitate to groups as the source of their identity, such as their religion, nation, race, class, ethnicity, or private clubs. They gravitate to the government as their caretaker.”**

Depending on the level of deficiency in self-esteem, dependent personalities will blindly accept whatever the government and its public health officials say, even if they are asking us to give up our rights.

It takes a confident mind to stand up to the irrational onslaught we have been going through over the past two years.

Perhaps the best explanation of mass gutlessness is the bureaucratic state. Bureaucracy is how governments manage their affairs and rules and laws are their tools. “Rules are rules” is the battle cry and “I don’t make ‘em, I just enforce ‘em” is what we have been up against for many years.

Those who respond by saying “Oh, okay”—without understanding or questioning what is being asked of them—encourage the totalitarians to continue with more total control.

The rules and laws—far too many of both in the United States, for about a century—all allow both citizens and bureaucrats to rationalize what they are doing as good. “I’m just following (or enforcing) the law.”

Rationalization is a strong defensive habit that allows us to make excuses for our behavior. Criminals thrive on it. So did many Germans in Nazi Germany.

Deference to authority comes first. Then, the obedience. Rationalization does not require or allow examination.

The bureaucratic state of Nazi Germany had gangs of secretaries typing orders to send Jews to the death camps. How could they do it? The explanation has to be that they thought they were doing something good! See “The Reductio of Bureaucracy” (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21) and William L. Shirer’s book.

Deference sacrifices independent judgment. Obedience makes one a follower and in extreme cases a killer.

Are we going to reclaim our rights, our personal agency, and, most importantly, our ability to reason to assert independence from the madness of crowds?

Or are we going to continue to go along to get along?


* Psychotics usually have episodes. They are not constantly “out of their minds,” living in a “waking dream,” as psychosis has sometimes been described. Even statuesque catatonics are aware of their surroundings and occasionally will respond to a nearby conversation before retreating to their trance-like states. And one psychiatrist asked a psychotic to “stop acting crazy now so I can talk to you.” The response? “Oh, okay.”

** Psychologist Edith Packer (p. 264): “Such people want to be taken care of, and in return they will gladly obey. A nation that breeds a dictator is a nation of people who are afraid of life.”

The Deference to Authority Studies

Psychological independence, or more specifically independent judgment, means that one’s self-esteem, integrity, and courage, should be sufficiently strong to resist outside pressures for conformity.

Independent judgment should be a fundamental aim of parenting and teaching, but, unfortunately, is not.

A number of well-known studies from the twentieth century, however, have examined, albeit superficially, the relationship between independence and conformity.

Solomon Asch in the 1950s explicitly approached the issue in terms of independence versus conformity, and even referred to Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People and Ibsen’s notion of a conforming “compact majority.” Ibsen’s protagonist, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, stood uncompromisingly to his judgment while one by one losing nearly all who were supposedly his friends. In fact, they were the compact majority.

Asch’s studies exposed a group of subjects to four straight lines on a card. The group’s assignment was to judge which of three lines was equal in length to the fourth; only one of the three was equal. All subjects but one were confederates of the researchers and were instructed to give identically incorrect answers. The test was to determine how independent the lone, unaware subject would be against the pressures of the group. A number of trials with variations was also conducted.

On average, two-thirds of all naïve subjects, in at least one of several trials, did not conform to the majority. Twenty-five percent did not conform at all in any trial.*

What does this prove? Not much. It does show the serious shortcomings, especially the contrived nature and shallowness, of the “experimental-positivistic-behavioristic” methodology, to borrow Abraham Maslow’s apt description of the epistemology used in psychology for the last one hundred years (Toward a Psychology of Being, pp. 7-8).

The studies only establish that some people are independent, at least in a perfunctory sense, and others are not, though, as Asch points out, there are “individual differences” in the behavior of all personalities. Follow-up interviews provided some, but not a lot of, insight into the thinking of test subjects.

Because of the absence of any further probing into the thinking, especially of the subjects’ “core” and “mid-level” evaluations, to use Edith Packer’s terms (Lectures on Psychology, chap. 1) for the fundamental thoughts or conclusions that determine our character, personality, and motivation, the concept of independence used in these studies must be described as existential, not psychological.

Existential independence is sound, not independent, judgment (Applying Principles, pp. 206-08). It is sensible decision making that looks at externals, such as straight lines on a card. Without further in-depth inquiry, there is no way to determine whether or not independent judgment or psychological independence was exercised. (Sound or existential judgment usually refers to people who are responsible in an external or existential sort of way, that is, by paying their own bills when leaving home and not remaining dependent on their parents or anyone else to support them.)

Subsequent studies have shown results similar to those of Asch, namely that some people are independent, and others are not, and that the shallowness of the methods used provides no comprehensive understanding of the participants’ psychologies.

Stanley Milgram’s obedience-to-authority studies, under a pretext of being studies of learning, asked “teachers” to repeatedly increase the voltage of electrical shocks to a “learner” (who was a confederate of the researcher). The shocks were not real, but the teachers initiating them did not know it.

Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment divided students into “prisoners” and “guards” in a mock prison situation for several days. Realistic submissiveness and depression of the “prisoners” and aggression and sadism of the “guards” caused the intended two-week experiment to be shut down after six days.

These studies may be interesting to read, but they still only confirm the obvious, namely that some people are independent and others are not.  They provide existential—historical, not theoretical—data about how different people may behave in different situations, but that is all. Not everyone increased the voltages in Milgram’s studies, and not every prisoner in Zimbardo’s study was submissive or depressed, nor was every guard aggressive or sadistic.

Psychologies differ—and it matters. Psychologies were hardly examined. This reveals the fundamental flaw in logical positivism and its so-called scientific methodology, especially as it is applied in the human sciences.

Every subject in these studies is viewed not as an individual exhibiting universal traits or universal core and mid-level evaluations or various levels of self-esteem, but as a member—a single unit—of a statistical group that enables the researchers to calculate averages and percentages, and to compare the subjects to hundreds or thousands of others before “projection by successive approximation” can be made (Applying Principles, pp. 322-24).

Viewing people as members of a statistical group in order to calculate averages and percentages and make projections strips them of their individuality and collectivizes them. At the same time, it abdicates the scientific search for universals, the search for answers to such questions as, “Why do some people go along with the group and others do not?”

These deference to authority studies were motivated in part by a desire to understand the Holocaust of World War II, to understand, for example, why some people would hide and protect an Anne Frank, others would tolerate the hiding but not do it themselves, and still others would inform on the protectors.**

A clue comes not from one-dimensionally descriptive surveys or ostensibly causal studies, but from the scientific observation of Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 36). As a concentration camp prisoner, Frankl observed with his eyes and through communication with his fellow inmates. Although he did not use the term, self-esteem was what enabled prisoners of “less hardy make-up . . . to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.”

A “life of inner riches and spiritual freedom” is how Frankl put it.

Self-esteem, integrity, courage, and psychological independence are what give us that inner strength—to withstand evil or to go against a compact majority.


*S. E. Asch, “Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments,” in Readings in Social Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1952), 2-11. Asch, “Studies of Independence and Conformity,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 70, no. 9 (1956), 1-70.

**Milgram, of course, refers to his studies as research on “obedience to authority,” but historian Christopher Browning says obedience means compliance with commands, whereas deference is the more correct term. Deference means submission to superior claims—of the researcher, in the case of Milgram’s studies, and others. The “deference to authority” studies are not Nazi-style situations of obedience backed up with a gun pointed at you. Consequently, agreeing with Browning, I have used “deference” in the title of this post. Christopher R. Browning, “Revisiting the Holocaust Perpetrators: Why Did They Kill?” (lecture, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, October 17, 2011). Why did the perpetrators kill? First, they dehumanized the victims, then they followed the crowd. Independence, if ever present, was jettisoned, though some in at least one battalion were allowed to opt out by their commanding officer. Others who had no choice would misfire, aiming above or to the side of the victims. Even in the Holocaust, some were independent, some were not.

Parents: Be Your Children’s Friend—Give Them the Easy Life

“It's not our job to be our children's friend and make life easy for them,” so states a mom blogger recently. She is apparently responding to the modern disease known as “helicoptering,” the parental behavior of hovering over one’s children to make sure they suffer no pain in life.

Many issues are raised in the above false dichotomy. Let me focus on friendship and the easy life.

In Praise of Quitters and Failures

“What are you? A quitter??”

These warm words of support, heard by many children, adolescents, and even adults who have dared to vacate an activity, speak volumes about the speaker, not the quitter or failure. The activity left behind may have been the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, a sport, a college, or a job.

Quitting and failing is a natural part of life. Bill Gates quit; so did Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, to mention three notable quitters. And entrepreneurs are notorious failures, failing many times at ventures before, during, and after their successes.

Life Lessons from Sports: What about the Sixty Years after College?

In ancient Roman schools, boys who failed to learn their lessons were beaten on their bare backs with a ferula, a long piece of flat wood. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and we rarely hear about corporal punishment in the classroom, even of the kind I recall from childhood, like the paddle, knuckles rapped with a ruler, or kneeling on raw peas. Treatment of this type by a teacher today would be called assault and battery.

Yet in collegiate sports a coach who shoves his player “to motivate” him merely gets a mild rebuke from the university administration. Another coach, who threw basketballs at his players’ heads and knees, kicked them, and called them insulting names, has recently been fired . . . but only after the smoking gun of video went viral on the Internet.

Life lessons from sports? To be sure, quite a few life lessons are being learned by the victims of these coaches. What it’s like to be abused by a caretaker would be one. And, paraphrasing Menander, the lesson that you haven’t been trained unless you’ve been flogged. Sadly, many of the players, typical of abuse victims, defend their abusers by saying “it was for my own good.”

Remove the physical abuse from consideration and a dictatorial drill sergeant mentality, which would not likely be tolerated in a classroom teacher, still dominates coaching in sports. The mentality is often defended under the blather of providing valuable “life lessons.” Dependent robots and obedience to authority are what these coaches want and get.*

Independent thinking is the life lesson kids most desperately need to be learning—at home, in the classroom, and in sports. They need to be thinking about what they will do with their lives after the sports end, and the sports will end in college, if not sooner, for nearly all of them. What happens then? Get a job stocking shelves at Walmart?

Half of all college athletes after they graduate make less money than their non-athletic counterparts. Why? Because they don’t have the work experience and internships to put on their resumes that the non-athletes have. Athletes are expected by their drill sergeants to spend up to 45 hours per week on their sport. Throw in two hours of homework for every hour in class and not much time is left in the week. The “solution,” of course, for college athletes is to take fewer units and perhaps not ever graduate, or take puffcake courses like billiards, bowling, and water color painting.

Walmart is a fine place to work, but working there after college is not why one gets that degree.

If  the words “fraud” and “exploitation” come to mind in relation to amateur sports, there is good reason. The National Collegiate Athletic Association deserves the epithets the most. Fraud because, as scathingly chronicled, with analogies to slavery, by civil rights historian Taylor Branch (1, 2), there is nothing amateur—in expertise and, especially, money—about today’s sports. And exploitation, because the kids never see a penny of the billions they earn for their universities.

Scholarships are payment, no? No. The so-called full ride, contingent on not getting injured, still leaves an average of $3200 a year to cough up out of pocket, leaving some of the kids from poor families without grocery money or bus fare home for spring break. Another life lesson learned!

The obsession that parents and coaches in youth leagues have over landing a scholarship to college is, to put it mildly, absurd. Aside from the minuscule chance of being granted one, scholarship is still not necessary in most states to get a college education.**

In my thirty-plus years as a college professor, I have had my share of athletes in the classroom. One Division 1 football player told me his practices were from 2:00 – 6:00PM. My class started at 6:00, so he was always late. After four or five weeks, I never saw or heard from him again.

Another football player (at a different school) attended my class just after completing his first season in the National Football League. He made two pointed comments to me about why he was in that seat. One, that unlike his teammates he was determined to finish his degree. The second was his observation that when playing in the NFL you are just a  highly paid blue-collar worker. Meaning there was no way he was going to remain a blue-collar worker (or become a stock clerk at Walmart) when his playing days were over. This student went on to a successful career in the NFL and now has an equally successful career in business.

Projecting and setting goals beyond sports. That’s a good life lesson.



*”Legal, even celebrated child abuse” in Olympic gymnastics and figure skating was exposed by Joan Ryan in her 1995 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. “Absolute subservience” is how she described the demands of certain famous coaches.

**This assumes that education is what these parents and coaches really care about, as opposed to bragging rights about the child getting a scholarship to a Division 1 school. Forty percent of students in the California State University system receive no financial aid at all. They earn their education the old-fashioned way, going to community college for two years, then working 20-40 hours a week to earn the rest at a Cal State. And California is no longer among the least expensive states in which to attend college.

On Killing Creativity

To create something means to come up with something new, to rearrange existing objects or ideas and put them into a form that has not been done before. Everyone is creative because learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge, values, and skills by rearranging what we already have in our minds and integrating that content with what we are acquiring. When we learn, we craft new concepts, principles, values, and skills.

How creative each of us is varies and the process can be, and often is, stunted and destroyed. Some cultures are known to be more creative than others. For example, the Japanese education system produces students who score higher on standardized tests than Americans, yet American students and American culture are said to be more creative. How has this come about?

Ken Robinson, in a 2006 TED talk and, later, in his book The Element argues admirably that creativity should be just as important an objective of education as literacy and that our current one-size-fits-all system destroys it. This is the progressive idea of focusing on and stimulating the individual’s interests and therefore the individual’s imagination and inventiveness. It is this progressive influence in education and, no doubt, the overall non-authoritarian atmosphere of American culture that has allowed Americans to be more creative.

Robinson, however, like the progressives, erroneously clings to the government as supplier of education and blames the rise of  “one-size-fits-all” on the so-called factory model. Yet, it is precisely the government and all forms of authoritarian control that arrest and prevent imaginative thinking.

Government bureaucracy, using government guns as its means of control, only knows one-size-fits-all. In education, that calls for a core curriculum and both types of grading: evaluation and age-sequencing. Catering to needs and wants is something governments cannot do, or do very well.

As discussed in last month’s post, any type of physical force, trauma, neglect, or emotional abuse, severely hampers the development of self-esteem and independence. Without high degrees of these traits, children and adults become fearful of risk-taking experimentation—that is, they fear making mistakes that might be disapproved of and vilified by those who have been forcing, traumatizing, neglecting, or emotionally abusing them.

It was progressive educator Maria Montessori who realized that choice was crucial in the development of self-esteem and independence Her method of education, as a result, allows a maximum of choice in a structured environment. Montessori children who move on to more traditional schooling are known for their confidence and creativity.

Freedom to choose, which means freedom to make mistakes without fear of criticism or denigration, is the key to encouraging original thinking. Dictating to children—whether by parents, teachers, coaches, tiger moms, or stage moms—what the children must think and do is nearly as stunting and destructive as hitting or beating them.

In organized youth sports, the fear of making mistakes and lack of creativity and imagination has been pointed out by former National Hockey League star Wayne Gretzky. Lamenting today’s excessive control and domination by adults, Gretzky finds the origin of hockey creativity on the adult-less pond of yesteryear. In the current environment, he says, if kids are sent to the ice to play a scrimmage, the first thing a child will ask is, “What position do you want me to play?” The pond, Gretzky’s point being, as was the sandlot in the earlier days of baseball, was what taught kids how to make their own decisions. Today, they must bow to the dictates of the adults in charge, lest they be criticized for going against a coach’s system. The quality of play becomes cautious and mediocre, and often not fun.

The killing of creativity can be subtle and performed by apparently well-meaning adults. The premise of demanding obedience to authority can be expressed quietly and without obviously abusive techniques. It stems from the denial of choice. A parent, teacher, or coach who criticizes a child’s mistake and singles the child out as an example to others is demanding obedience to authority. The message to children under such a leader’s watch is that cautiousness, not imagination and creativity, is the path to the adult’s approval.

The well-meaning adult thinks that such criticism is what teaching is all about. But allowing mistakes and, as Montessori demonstrated, saving the correction for another time when a new teaching moment arises, are what build the foundation of creativity: namely confidence, self-esteem, and independence.

All forms of demands for obedience to authority, whether physical or mental, blatant or subtle, must be rejected.

The Root of Dictatorship

In Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (p. 117), I gingerly suggested that the root of dictatorship is the parent/child relationship. The simple reasoning was that if one thinks it is right to coerce children, then it must also be right to coerce adults. (Restraining children who are about to harm others or themselves is not counted here as coercion.)

It seems, however, that my comment was too tame and needlessly cautious. At least that is my conclusion after reading works by Alice Miller, Lloyd deMause, and Bruce Perry.

Miller, a Swiss psychologist (and former psychoanalyst), provides the strongest link in her book For Your Own Good,* in which she quotes the untranslated German text Schwarze Pädagogik, a collection of extensive excerpts from child-rearing and educational guidebooks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. “Black pedagogy” is the literal translation of this work, but Miller refers to it as “poisonous pedagogy.”

The upshot of advice from this period is to break the child’s will, to beat the wickedness—which usually means the budding assertiveness and independence—out of the child, and to command strict, unquestioned obedience to authority (of the parent, teacher, and other adults).^† In the course of enduring this brutality, shame, and humiliation, children are expected to thank their tormentors for the “discipline” and in some cases to kiss the hand that has just viciously beaten them. It is, after all, for their own good. (Even without these demands, Miller points out, abused children defend and cling to their abusive caregivers, because the small amount of caregiving they have received is all they know.)

Hitler and all the leaders of the Third Reich, says Miller, suffered this “pedagogy” and proudly passed it on to their children and subjects. Hitler often bragged of not flinching when his father repeatedly beat him. In For Your Own Good and elsewhere^‡ Miller cites D. G. M. Schreber, whose nineteenth-century book on child-rearing went through some 40 editions and preached self-renunciation and self-denial. When his nanny fed his child before herself, Schreber fired the nanny, thus sending a message to all of Germany that the goal of child-rearing is to harden children and rid them of alleged weakness. They must learn to sacrifice from the first day of infancy on, said Schreber. With this kind of upbringing, asks Miller, is it any wonder that the German people became attached to Hitler as a father-substitute and were only too glad to obey his commands?

Lloyd deMause, psychoanalyst and founder of the Journal of Psychohistory, traces the bleak history of childhood, concluding that it “is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken” (1, p. 1; see also 2). While his psychoanalytical jargon can become a bit much, his historical facts are shockingly accurate and well documented, for example, the extensive infanticide, usually of baby girls, practiced in ancient Greece and Rome and the legal right of Roman fathers to kill their children.^§ Brutalization, terrorization, and sexual abuse were common throughout history, gradually improving over the centuries such that the descriptions in the above paragraphs are actually an advance over the past!

Although traumatic childhoods per se do not trump free will and deterministically turn children into dictators or sacrificial lambs, those experiences certainly make recovery difficult, and it would require an unusual child to break free of the circumstances. Bruce Perry, neurobiologist and psychiatrist, specializes in childhood trauma and neglect. He acknowledges (without endorsing free will or volition outright) that children do make hundreds, perhaps thousands, of decisions while growing up (The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, pp. 119-20). It is those decisions, not genes or environment, that ultimately determine whether one neglected child (such as an infant left home alone every day for hours in a dark room) becomes a psychopathic killer and another an emotionless, socially awkward adolescent.

To be sure, Perry insists, early discovery and non-drug, empathetic psychotherapy are the remedies to such disturbances. Trauma of any kind—and this includes spanking by hand—overloads the brain’s stress response systems, causing a loss of felt control and competence by the victim. That is, the trauma prevents or erodes the development of self-esteem and independence. It does not have to be physical force. Trauma can be emotional abuse brought about by raging insults, name-calling, and belittling, or the lack of nurturing warmth, hugs, and empathetic understanding. Neglect, Perry points out, is not the prerogative of the poor and uneducated. There are also many uncared for infants, children, and adolescents among the educated well-to-do.

For as far back as we can go in history, children—at least those that have been allowed to live—have been beaten by their caregivers, abused, manipulated, and commanded to obey authority. Obedience and independence are opposites. A parent/child relationship that commands obedience from the child is one that prepares the way for dictatorship. A free society thrives on independence; it requires a healthy disrespect of authority, which is acquired through nurturing, warm, and affectionate caregiving. Coercion of any kind, physical or emotional, in the parent/child relationship must be eliminated.




*Alice Miller is well known for her first book The Drama of the Gifted Child, also published under the more correct title Prisoners of Childhood. Its thesis is that childhood experiences, many of which are traumatic, influence our adult behavior, trapping us in the futile pursuit of infantile needs that were not satisfied by our parents.

^†“The only vice deserving of blows is obstinacy. . . . Your son is trying to usurp your authority, and you are justified in answering force with force in order to insure his respect, without which you will be unable to train him. The blows you administer should not be merely playful ones but should convince him that you are his master. . . . this will rob him of his courage to rebel . . .” J. G. Krüger, 1752, quoted in Miller, pp. 14-15.

^‡“The Political Consequences of Child Abuse,” Journal of Psychohistory, 26:2, Fall 1998.

^§Carl A. Mounteer, “Roman Childhood, 200 B.C. to A.D. 600,” Journal of Psychohistory, 14:3, Winter 1987.

There Are More Important Things in Life Than Softball

The impetus for this post is once again my daughter’s softball. She is currently playing in what is called “travel,” as opposed to “recreational,” ball and the seemingly endless string of practices and games almost every weekend tempt me to recite the title of this post to other parents.

Not that I want to take anything away from my daughter’s talent and desire to excel in a fun sport, nor the same of the other parents’ daughters, but a sense of perspective may be in order, especially considering the low odds of winning an athletic scholarship to college, the risks of injury (1, 2, 3) and burnout before even getting to that point, and the studies that now show multiple sports experiences and deliberate (unorganized) play develop better perception and decision making than the single, year-round specialization many young athletes today endure.

Sports, of course, are not the only activity of youth in which a nearly 24/7 pressure-cooker atmosphere exists. Music, dance, and drama teachers, and the children’s parents, not to mention the academic teachers, can also lay it on thick; the term “stage mom” (1, 2) that comes to us from the theatre keeps coming to mind.

Part of the obsession many coaches, teachers, and parents have about sports, or the arts and academics, stems from a misunderstanding of the differences between the less accomplished and the more accomplished, or between “amateur” and “professional.”

By “professional” here I mean only a greater degree of skill and dedication, not “paid professional,” though the young persons may be aiming for professional careers in sports or the arts or science and the coaches and teachers may be grooming them for that goal. In softball the difference is between “recreational” and “travel” ball and in the arts it may be the difference between performing in the local community and attending a select arts high school.

The assumed differences between these two levels, as stated by one youth baseball organization, include the possibility of failure and rejection in travel ball, but not in recreational; the alleged life lesson to sacrifice leisure to hard work so success will follow; and the supposed lack of need for instruction at this “nearly professional” level. There are kernels of truth in all three of these differences, but these kernels get distorted when coaches, teachers, and parents lose perspective, forgetting about the whole of life.

Take the difference about the possibility of failure. Even at a lower level of skill, such as in a marching band or softball, not everyone participates one-hundred percent of the time. Only some band members may perform in the pep band at basketball games and even fewer in the swing band. Soloists at the spring concert may be fewer than a handful. The same is true for softball; not everyone can be pitcher.

More important, not achieving an initial goal need not be viewed as failure. A clarinetist, for example, who transfers from a small-town marching band to an arts high school orchestra may not earn one of the top four positions in the orchestra. This eye-opening awareness of the greater skill of others should be experienced as motivator, not a threat to success or happiness. There is no more important attitude to cultivate than seeing others’ achievements as an inspiration.

To say that youth should sacrifice leisure to hard work so success will follow is misleading, especially if it is presented as “we expect you to give up your vacation” for the sake of softball, or music, etc. Paid professionals do not do this, except on occasion, mainly because they know their schedules well in advance. The problem with youth sports is that communication, advance or otherwise, is often lacking, leading to surprises in the schedule.

Hard work, yes; and all children who enjoy an activity, whether it be sports, the arts, or a business or science club will, if not hampered by authoritarian adults, devote long hours of concentrated attention to improving their knowledge and skill. This concentrated attention is sometimes, unfortunately, interpreted by adults as “sacrifice” in the sense of giving up a higher value for the sake of a lower one. “Dedication” and “self-motivation” would be better descriptors.

The notion that higher levels of skill do not need instruction stems from the term “director,” such as the director of a play or conductor of an orchestra. Some coaches claim the same prerogative for their advanced teams. But direction means guiding the skills of others to produce the effect the director envisions.

That in itself is teaching, and all directors, including conductors and coaches, provide a variety of instructions to their performers to accomplish what they want. That coaches at the highest level of professional sports are teachers became obvious during the 1987 National Football League strike when secondary players were hired as substitutes to play games while the stars were walking picket lines. Much commentary was made about the expert teaching abilities of various coaches.

When a coach, or conductor or director, says that he or she assumes a certain skill level and is not there to teach, I would beware that blind obedience is what is wanted, as in “I expect you to have the discipline to do what I say.” “Discipline,” however, means acting in accordance with one’s own self-imposed guidelines. It is the mark of an advanced skill. Even at an advanced level, coaches, teachers, and conductors should aim to help turn caterpillars into butterflies.

Total commitment at the expense of everything else—spending every weekend and a few week nights on one’s sport or art, because “that’s the way we do it here” or because “that’s the only way to get a scholarship”—is obsession of the stage parent type. When the commitment does not originate in the child, injury or burnout or even parental estrangement can result. Perspective on why an activity is being pursued needs always to be kept in the forefront of parents’ minds.