Image by Alpha India
XANDRA H
Recap: In my last article I spoke about the importance of the transactional bond between parents and children and how agents of the state worked out through the rapidly rising profession of experimental child psychology that, by transferring this bond to themselves, society as a whole could be more easily managed by a relatively few individuals. I’m not saying they had a master plan, just that as things unfolded, they took opportunities to make adjustments to fit what they wanted to happen.
This time, I’m going to look at some of the consequences of that switch. The NHS has been collecting statistics on the mental health of the nation for many years now. There is a sort of league table that tells you which are the most troublesome conditions and which are being managed well. Depression and anxiety have always been front runners over many years and still hold the top spot in terms of numbers, but more serious problems, such as early onset psychosis, bipolar and obsessive-compulsive disorder are creeping up the charts so to speak.
But why, when in this modern age discovering oneself at the expense of everything else and talking about your needs and feelings has never been more permissible?
Well, the criteria for diagnosing all mental health problems has expanded to encroach on what were once thought of as normal responses to particular situations. And, the inability to reach maturity leaves people frustrated and helpless no matter how kindly they are treated.
Another question might be, if maturity is so strongly innate, how does the State prevent it happening in individuals? After all, they can’t watch everyone all the time. Well, by getting the child to transfer their ‘safe base’ from the family to the State. Theoretically everyone is related under a sort of “super mother” now and in that sense there is no individual differentiation any more, just the proscribed group identity. Individual sections of the Group have favour or disfavour heaped upon them by “Mum” and those that cause trouble for the group are dealt with by other Group members, the former twitter storms are a good example of this.
How to be, is no longer a personal affair, to be worked out by the individual. The State puts several attractive ideas in front of its children to keep striving for maturity to a miniMum and eliminate it completely for the majority. A couple of the favoured ways at the moment are through education and psychological punishment. People of today no longer want equality of opportunity, but also demand equally of outcome. Super Mum obliges by changing the rules so that striving and overcoming are all but eliminated along with the risk of failure.
Psychological punishment is visited on certain groups to make them feel so worthless, that they stop trying and worth-fulness is then transferred to groups most useful to the state.
However, the people now elevated must maintain their former victim status or they would be in danger of being seen as the very people they have just replaced. This means that others must continue to see them as a special case for worth; even when it’s patently obvious they are not. This sort of imposed “double bind”, would make R.D. Lang and Timothy Bateman jump up and down yelling that they were right all the time.
Having transferred the transitional bond away from parents to the State in this way, the process of individual idiosyncratic maturation was halted. This is quite disastrous for the individual, because we have an innate need to achieve our own maturity, both emotionally as well as physically and it is only by tending to the child as an individual that this can be achieved successfully for each child.
The oft quoted saying by the intelligentsia that it takes a village to bring up a child, is used as a model for the child’s upbringing to be controlled by the State and not the parents. This is false on two fronts. Firstly the original “village” referred to probably consisted of about twenty or thirty people, the majority of which were related to the child in some way and secondly, in small groups, it is easy for a child to identify their place in the whole and accept learning based on it.
The USSR was ahead of the game in transferring power from parents to State in this way, and by the fall of the soviet empire had lost a generation of children who had become feral and directionless as a result. They are still trying to recover from this.
Conformity versus individualism is something that we negotiate all our lives, no matter if we have reached maturity or not. If you have gone through the curse that is A level maths, you will have learnt integration and differentiation when working equations. The point is, both sides have to balance. The same goes for conformity and individualism. A mature individual will have developed the skills to negotiate this successfully and can make satisfactory and “balancing” conclusions for themselves most of the time, an immature person has not and cannot.
One of our first learning strategies is to copy a trusted other doing something, or, to copy what the group is doing in order not to stand out and look vulnerable, or of low status to others. To justify our actions, we develop belief and loyalty to bolster them up by weaving a narrative around what we are doing, to show others why the actions were good and why those others should approve and accept them, or even admire and want to follow them.
As a rule of thumb, the infant usually copies trusted individuals starting with the mother and the later child and adolescent copies the group. Because of this, training children to transfer the bond usually starts at about four or five, when the child starts school and when the bond is first stretched, as the education systems are major players in this for the most part. Boarding schools have been doing it for centuries. As the person matures, they develop trust in themselves and their ability to negotiate different situations without recourse to others and do not need to rely on copying as their main source of interaction with the world.
This trust is now developing in the State and not the parent, so in future years, the now physically grown child will be less likely to question in any meaningful way things that happen. In order to successfully copy, there have to be agreed rules that show you who you should copy and who you shouldn’t. This forms part of your developing system for negotiating the world and fluctuates over the life span as knowledge and experience of life is gained.
Years ago most people used to trust doctors, or scientists in white coats in a way they never would today, and would obey more or less without question, accepting the belief that such indicators showed a person with superior knowledge who would put it to use for the benefit of others. Even today, a lot of advertising for everything from vitamins to toothpastes and mattresses uses this long held trust in “the science”. In itself this is a form of infantilisation because the underlying message is that you should just buy this, because clever people with specialist knowledge are saying this is the way to go; which saves you having to spend hours on all that tedious looking up and thinking about, on something you probably wouldn’t understand anyway: ‘We have made life easier for you with our expertise and should be thanked for it and allowed to carry on doing this in the way we think best without any questioning of our ideas and motives’.
The state has moved into its “mother knows best” phase. In the sixties, when these things were only half understood, experiments were carried out that nowadays would probably land you in the court of human rights if you wanted to repeat them; in order to try and understand how people responded to the pressures of conformity versus individuality.
When I first went to university, we were asked to design an experiment to illustrate this. What we did was to rope off one side of a staircase and put a notice up that said do not walk on this side, with no explanation of why not. We then sat in a place where we could see the activity and counted how many people obeyed. As it was a university, at least fifty or sixty people came through in the day we allowed for the experiment to run and out of them, only three disobeyed the instructions.
Sometimes, standing out from the group can be dangerous and an individual needs to have the skills and confidence to work out when to do it, if they are to become content and successful in their choice of how to live.
Many famous experiments have been done to test a person’s level of conformity, mainly on university students in America but many were also copied here. It was part of a programme to see how far people could be pushed before breaking down and refusing to cooperate.
All these experiments were done mainly on people who although academically able, were still developing emotionally and so the results would not necessarily apply to a fully-fledged adult in the same way.
In encouraging people to remain in late adolescence, the State (I use this phrase as a way of referring to whomever is in charge at the time and not in a purely political sense) thought it had been very clever. By using the fear of ostracism and the desire to be approved of by a trusted other, it was easy to develop group thought and produce a set of beliefs that could be managed by the group on behalf of the ruling class and made self-perpetuating through the fear of standing out and becoming dangerously vulnerable. By creating an in group and out group in this way, it was easy to train people about who to like and who to dislike based solely on their reactions to the approved group. Penitent out groupers could join the group if they acknowledged their wrongs and denounced their former group members.
However, the need for individual expression based on self-experience and self-development was still there and although even if they agreed with the group as a whole, members could not always reconcile their individual experiences in the world with what they were expected to believe, without standing out against the group think. Such dissonance caused psychological distress in ordinary people as they tried to suppress their individual thoughts and needs in order to survive in the group, which they really needed as a result of their arrested development. Many people become depressed or anxious, through trying to construct a narrative that will make them feel ok about themselves without having to make changes that will challenge what they currently subscribe too.
This was recognised as a problem around the beginning of the new millennia and a way forward was sought by using celebrities and the growing influence of ‘influencers’ using online media to promote certain ways of being. All conventional media programmes had a message underlying what was supposed to be entertainment to reassure people that everyone who was good thought in a particular way and those who didn’t were punished.
You could call it morality tales for children and “young adults” and it is relentless.
Having brought up its children to be either one of a herd of sheep or goats, to use a biblical expression; the State now had to create a series of acceptable avatars for them to aspire to, for them to believe themselves to be individuals and in control of their life and thoughts, in a way that was acceptable. The ‘Right’ was just as complicit in this as the Left, and the only thing allowed for the individual in the majority was to choose which group they felt more comfortable in.
This was the era of the “role model” and discovering your individuality through set markers such as your generational name, ethnicity, its culture and its history, which could take several different forms depending on which culture it was being attached too. This was the start of the “my truth” phase. People were encouraged to become avatars of their type, even down to the most superficial level such as how you look, how you wear your hair and what clothes are associated with your type.
It is the era of Ken and Barbie. In order to acquire individuality that is acceptable to the state, you must choose from a series of approved role models, developed from the above by modelling them on approved social theories and historical narratives and – this bit is important – never on a model you have developed for yourself based on your life experience. In the present, Dawn Butlers rant about Kemi Badenoch is a perfect example of this.
I have often wondered if all black women really want to wear their hair in corn rows or appear in clothes made from Kente cloth whenever they are talking about race. The Muslim insistence on covering females is another example of this. We are lucky to be able to see that in countries where this is State law, women go to quite extraordinary lengths to protest about it, regardless of religious beliefs. This shows that underneath conformity for the sake of safety, the spark of needing to create one’s individual self is still alive and well and fighting for its rights.
In the sixties, immigrants, like the native population came in a variety of idiosyncratic types making their individualism obvious to other people and allowing them the luxury of making their own friendship groups and relationships with people of their choosing. Now, we are given the people we can choose from and that includes our politicians.
These articles were written to give an account of how we might have been manipulated into accepting this without open rebellion before it got off the ground, through the use of Psychological insights. This manipulation of our infant fears and needs through control of our emotional responses to set performance pieces; along with a friendly expert to explain it all for us was, at the end of the twentieth century getting quite good at steering people’s beliefs in the required directions.
What the state didn’t factor in was that in order to keep influence on an underdeveloped population, it would need to come down to that level itself, and so the masters made themselves as infantile as the people they sought to deny maturity to, with only money and contacts keeping them in prime positions. They are all false parents and hollow men, the ones that a lot of our fellow citizens cling to now. Hence, we have sayings such as “the grownups are back in the room” and Kier Starmer talking about making hard decisions and going against the herd, or goats if you prefer.
What the movers and shakers failed to understand from psychology is that present it how you will, there is no escaping basic human nature, no matter how much you believe you are a cut above the average.
In my final article, I shall be looking at how language was used against the population as a whole and how the cracks in the grand plan are starting to appear, showing that it’s never too late to make a change for the better, no matter how dire things seem to be at present. I hope you can join me.
This article (The State Consolidates Its Grip) was created and published by Free Speech Backlash and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Xandra H
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