This will be the first of three articles, drawing together some of the things I have been writing about, to try and understand the psychological drivers that have resulted in the population ending up accepting the very worst and most unsuitable people in society as the ones fit to decide our fate.
This is not a social perspective and I don’t discount the fact that a lot of this deterioration has been very subtle over a number of years; but a psychological perspective drawing on things that we know about human development and functioning. How it evolves from a combination of nature and nurture and, how this seems to have been steered over a number of years to push the population into an agreed series of herd mentalities and set avatars at the expense of individuals and their wellbeing.
The reasons for this social engineering can be debated by others with a much better grasp of the machinations of societies over time than me. I am here to talk about the psychological effects of this on the individual and why I believe that we have reached a state where it is damaging not only to individual countries, but to our species as a whole.
As you can imagine, it is a huge topic, but I am going to try and cover what I see as some of the fundamentals in these articles which will hopefully get people not only thinking, but also becoming more self-aware in a useful, rather than narcissistic way.
Before I get into it, there is a caveat. I am well aware that, being human myself, expertise does not prevent me from being subject to the same forces just because I have specialist knowledge. Like everyone else, I’m reliant on other people to challenge me if I have gone a bit too far out in my theories and conclusions, so that I can test their veracity and modify if necessary.
Having said that, let’s get going.
I think the first place to start is at the beginning. Not only the beginning of life, but the beginning of our species. This is because a lot of what we have become rests on the manipulation of some basic fundamentals that have been present since the beginning. As our attempts to deal with them and the situations that bring them up become more complex, our responses often become weirder and less helpful as we try to negotiate our way through.
At the beginning, there is darkness, which is everyone’s first awareness. It is warm and very pleasant most of the time unless you are either not forming properly, or your host is a drug addict or alcoholic, or becomes ill in a way that affects your development.
At birth, you are hit by what must be a blinding light and a bit of a shock. Never mind, you are still attached to your lovely whole and can smell and cling onto the other part of you, so no need to panic.
Our proto human ancestors may have felt a similar way, when they started to become more aware of themselves as individuals in the world and huddled together in groups. All is dark and then light again. There are shadows too that help with pattern formation as well as other innate skills such as distance awareness and depth perception etc. There is not yet a sense of time, so everything that happens, even things that are repeated, appear random and new because in order to trigger memory, you need to become aware of time.
In the sixties, there was a big debate in child development circles about whether or not the child knew that the mother who left the room, was the same as the one who came back. This was settled by the infants ability to use smell and touch as a way of identifying that of which it had once been part of so intimately. Time starts to flow for the infant from these sorts of experiences.
Around about four to six months old, if mum has been fulfilling her role, the trouble starts; when realisation starts to creep in that you are not a part of a permanent whole, but a separate entity on your own in the world.
I won’t go into how this was deduced in detail because that is not the purpose of the article.
Anxiety forms as the realisation (none verbal of course) dawns that the infant can be accepted or rejected by the now separate instead of whole part of them and this can have serious consequences for its survival.
In order to counteract this, the infant forms a sort of phantom umbilical cord for want of a better phrase, a transitional way of remaining safely attached to the whole it was separated from, whilst its mental and physical development takes place. As the infant gets older and has less physical contact with the whole it came from, this early transitional form is superseded by a more concrete representation such as a toy or something else the infant associates with the whole.
Winnicott refers to this when he talks about the development of the true self and the false self in infancy. The false self is developed, like the phantom umbilical cord, to protect the true self from psychological damage and potential physical destruction. Because of this, everyone has both “selves” according to this theory, because no one can ever have the perfect upbringing. Individuals who have had what he describes as “good enough” parenting develop a balanced sense of self, with the authentic or “true self”, in the driving seat so to speak, at least for most of the time.
Fromm also discussed this aspect of human nature and development in his book “The Fear of Freedom”, which could also be marketed nowadays as the fear of maturity!
I have discussed in other articles about there being more than one thing that influences personality development and how we respond to the external, but I think early formation theories are a useful consideration for what comes later.
So what has this got to do with choosing toxic immature people as leaders?
Well, everything. The goal of the individual is to reach maturity, because maturity means that the individual is able to keep themselves safe and alive without recourse to an “other” life support system. This goal fulfils two basic functions. Firstly, knowing you are safe within yourself and have gained experience in overcoming obstacles means that your true self doesn’t need to hide, and you can express yourself freely and unselfconsciously in the world for most of the time. I’m sticking with Winnicott here to illustrate my point.
Secondly, it allows individuals to create their own secure base as in Bowlby’s theories and protect it from the interference of others when necessary. Being able to do this is a prerequisite for forming one’s own family life and true friendships with others. People who can agree to disagree and still see the positive aspects of another person show maturity and the ability to live safely with others.
We used to be very good at such things in this country at one time. An illustration of this is a series of documentaries made by the late Dave Allen who travelled round the country interviewing people with an unusual take on life; there were quite a few. Anyway, he spoke to a woman whose husband was so taken with gypsy caravans that he lived in one in their garden. She lived in the house, and he would appear every now and then to have a wash and meet family who came to visit. When asked what she thought of this strange arrangement of their marriage, she just said he’d always been a bit “like that”, but he was a lovely man in other ways so if he wanted to spend most of his time in a caravan, why not?
Can you imagine that today? It was this sort of flexibility to accommodate the individual’s idiosyncrasies within the group that made Britain, on the whole, such a great place for immigrants and a great place full stop.
Back to trying to mature. So, like all primates, humans take many years to reach maturation and the transitional object between attachment and being cut off and alone in the world, that is the parent, will spend a lot of time watching the child go forth on its own, and then get spooked and come running back to the secure base to have its psyche patched up and process what has been learned. Learning to live without recourse to the transitional bond takes many years and only the dependent knows when they are truly ready to let go. Sadly, some people never make it, even with a sympathetic upbringing; their personality is too timid to take the risk, even after brain maturation at twenty-five.
Eventually, fledging will occur if all goes well.
But, what happens if all doesn’t go well? Suppose maturation is delayed, or even prevented from taking place for whatever reason?
One of my old professors used to opine that successful child rearing was the right combination of encouragement and security, with age-appropriate dollops of insecurity and obstacles to overcome. I don’t disagree with that myself.
Mostly, these things used to be done by instinct and by copying family parenting styles, or not if the family wasn’t very good at it!
However, after the Second World War things changed quite dramatically. Actually, it was a combination of the first and second world wars being so close together and between them causing the complete and almost instantaneous destruction of what most people had understood as normal life for generations, that in my opinion, put a spanner in the works.
At the beginning of the fifties, the country had been in two world wars in relatively quick succession with catastrophic results for the nation’s psyche, even though we had won.
Those who came back were not the same people they were before they went. Fatherless and sometimes motherless children were common and the collective feeling from both the top and the general public was that the current crop of children should never have to suffer what the adults had gone through, if society was ever going to recover.
Like most dramatic ideas, this was started with the best intentions without it being thought through; but like anything that relies on a certain amount of social manipulation, there are always people watching to see how they can take advantage of what was being discovered about human nature and child development in particular.
Various psychological theories started to be applied to child development and new ones created through testing and observing infant and child behaviour. The goal was to find the perfect way to bring up a child so that they would never suffer distress and trauma.
In those days, there were basically two schools of thought. Those that took the Spartan view, children should be left to get on with it and could be “trained” into good citizenship by operant conditioning as espoused by Skinner, and those that believed that infants had the ability to entertain a rich inner life and should be paid attention to and helped to develop this, as espoused by Anna Freud and her contemporaries.
Dr Spock’s book on child rearing was in the Skinner mould. A lot of parents in the fifties and sixties liked it because it was a legitimate reason not to have to be tied down by the needs of your child; after all, they were only doing what the doctor recommended.
Winnicott and Fromm are on the Freud side of the argument, but often saw the child as the most important person in the room, rather than part of several interlocking societal systems. This period was the beginning of child rearing being taken away from the parent having sole responsibility in favour of “science” and the state having an increasing stake in how it was done and what it should be achieving.
All child development theories focus on how the child achieves maturity, tested by the ability to control or express emotions when needed and to problem solve in times of heightened stress and complexity. Without these skills, maturity cannot be achieved because they are the basics that keep us alive as adults without recourse to help, which might not always be available.
These theories also purport to explain why this process might go awry and what might be done to correct it.
At first, they were mostly aired in academic discussion, safely restricted to hospitals and universities and, like theories of adult disorders, used only on patients.
The movers and shakers who wanted to reshape a “better world” after the two world wars showed a great interest in this sort of work. I think they realised early on that allowing the population to reach maturity and “grow up” mentally, would make it almost impossible to bring their plans for world integration in order to end war, to fruition.
I don’t know if they always had evil intent so to speak, but working towards keeping the population of your country in a state of immaturity to allow your own ideology to prevail seems a bit harsh to me.
So, what did they do? Well, firstly there was the creation of the rights of the child as an individual, sold on the back of protecting the child from abuse by parents or carers. That was fine as a strictly defined set of criteria to protect infants and children from harm, but the criteria kept getting expanded to encompass an ideological rather than a purely safety perspective and is still expanding today.
If you think of how this was done, it was devised to cause the severing of the transitional bond between the parents of the growing child at the discretion of the state, not the child. Only in extreme circumstances where there is acute danger to the child should this be done. I shall be going into this more in part two.
Secondly, they conflated innocence and immaturity. Even though they can share several superficial features, they are definitely not the same. This allowed for the child to be given an equal voice to that of an adult, with increasing adverse consequences for society as a whole.
Thirdly, the cult of youth was encouraged to the extent that it was seen as an ideal state to be in with no further development needed, as “society”, would take care of the things that their parents would see as a personal and not state responsibility.
The sixties were the start of this phase, and several levels of maturity were encouraged before the ideal was settled on; which was able to do work and reproduce but unable to develop a self-created and independent way of being. This ideal, which still holds for most people, is that development toward maturity is halted somewhere between fourteen and eighteen years old. Much of the population, through a combination of school input and the increasing of the “rights of the child” over the remaining adult population now find it difficult if not impossible to parent children successfully. This leads to a rather stunted version of the transitional bond, which is very easily disrupted.
The cruelty in this dressed up as the right to freedom of emotional and personal expression for the child never fails to anger me.
Half grown children cannot make their own way in the world on their own terms, knowing that they can sustain themselves in adversity and solve their own problems without help if they need too.
The abrupt severance of the transitional bond between parent and child at the whim of the State is to my way of thinking just wicked.
At the beginning of this, I spoke in some detail about how this bond developed and why it is so important to the child’s survival, and why it is important that this bond is broken by the child when maturity is achieved and there is a genuine confidence in the child that a transitional bond is no longer needed.
By fooling the child into thinking that as soon as they develop an opinion and a set of preferences, they no longer need their parents and can use the State to get them out of the way; they have not only broken the parental transitional bond, but enabled it to be transferred to themselves.
Now that has got to be the ultimate in legerdemain, by anyone’s standards.
Children of course will always be drawn to someone who seems to embody a life where they are forever accommodated, never criticised and can tell their parents what to do. Like all of us, we would rather not face frustration and difficulties in life if we can avoid it and just stay huddled in our group, doing what makes us feel good until the sun comes back again. Developing maturity is such a pain, especially when we are having fun as an adolescent. After all, we live in such different times in such a cosseted way. We don’t need to learn all those skills our ancestors needed to survive do we; we can just “be” exactly as we are now and that is enough.
Successive governments have been more than happy to encourage this. They realise that there is more to maturity than just survival, which is why people are actively discouraged from achieving it.
The main problem with being ossified between childhood and adulthood is that you will always need a transitional bond to ensure your psychological survival in the world and guess who holds it now!
Yes, the State is now the ultimate parent from a psychological perspective for many people born from about the nineties onward. Unfortunately, this surrogate parent does not have an interest in people as individuals, but demands belief and obedience to be shown by following their world view in order to be worthy of their blandishments.
The need for a transitional bond in developing humans is so strong that I have seen children crying with guilt and shame at having behaved so badly, that mummy or daddy got cross and upset social services. Now they can’t be together anymore, and the child thinks it’s all their fault.
This power now resides in the State. A developed and mature personality would have no problem challenging it when necessary and defending their interest; an immature personality would not and would show as much of Winnicotts “false self” as is needed to placate the parent in the interest of their own survival.
They show solidarity with the parent figure, especially when it’s against their own best interest, in order to prove loyalty and worthiness to survive and more importantly, to avoid abandonment.
Please join me for the next part of this when I will be looking at the effect of this psychological shift on both children and their actual parents, and how this feeds into accepting the unacceptable when it comes to who is allowed to set out the rules, especially when enhanced by the rise of social media.