Over seventy years ago in reaction to the rise of Nazism and the resulting Holocaust in Germany, Adorno and colleagues (1950) studied and identified nine features of the “authoritarian syndrome.” Anyone watching the USA today can recognize most of these characteristics in political figures and in some citizens:
- Authoritarian aggression (aggression to enforce hierarchy and norms)
- Authoritarian submission (submissive to accepted authority figures)
- Support for conventional values (at least superficially and for others)
- Preoccupation with toughness and power (and fear of vulnerability)
- Cynicism about human nature
- Mental rigidity and a proclivity to engage in stereotypical thinking
- Reluctance to engage in introspection (low self-awareness)
- Tendency to project one’s undesirable traits onto others (scapegoating)
- Sexual inhibition
These are all species-abnormal traits.1 Interestingly, these also were characteristic of conquistadors, Victorian elite men, and many European colonizers. The syndrome seems to be spreading today.
Adorno and colleagues found that the home environment was fundamental to the formation of authoritarian features—specifically, having parents with these authoritarian characteristics. Such parents are aggressive and harsh towards children, even babies—for example, punishing them for not following expectations. They are cynical about the baby’s motives, projecting their own undesirable traits onto the child. And they are focused on maintaining power over the child (controlling sleeping, eating, etc.).
You might be thinking, ‘Aw, that’s German parents following Nazi parenting manuals telling them to break their children’s spirits so they’d have control of them for life. What’s that got to do with us today? Most parents are not Nazis.’ Ah, but parenting practices under today’s stressful conditions (e.g., in the USA) are exhibiting harshness and neglect, the very things that lead to authoritarianism. In a speeded-up world focused on money-making and efficiency, we are told it is normal for babies to cry, to spank children, and for adults to control children’s birth timing and their lives afterward. Nope. Species abnormal.
Many adults assume that it doesn’t matter much if you leave infants in distress, especially when babies stop bothering them by learning to “self-soothe” (i.e., shut themselves up to preserve life energy) in reaction to routine unnested care. With undercare, all aspects of the self are under- or mis-developed: thinking, feeling, acting, socializing, being. Babies self censor, self smother in order to survive.
Early life cruelty, which is often called early toxic stress, has long term effects. It dysregulates and impairs physiological systems like the stress response, immune system, and endocrine system—all intertwined in early life. The baby is raised with a biology of fear, put routinely into states of panic, fear, anger or dissociation (these are different innate systems in mammalian brains, like ours). I call these survival systems because they are built in to keep us alive, but early life cruelty enhances them, making them easily triggered going forward, undermining free will as they take over the brain-mind and one’s perceptions and affordances (action possibilities).
Such species-abnormal child raising comes about from the parents themselves being undercared for in childhood (lack of evolved nest). Without healing, parents will follow the same patterns, without awareness, that they experienced in babyhood. Such intergenerational trauma transmission has been going on for generations in the colonized world—that’s almost everyone on the planet now.
Most of all for our current discourse, babies will carry forward a deep sense of loneliness. They were not honored, not listened to. Dysregulation of all kinds is related to loneliness.
Without subsequent experiences of healing, the child will have difficulty finding a healthy pathway to adulthood.
Character Structure: Democratic or Authoritarian?
The evolved nest provides the species-normal pathway to full humanity and integration with Earth’s community. Re-connecting to mother and primary carers after separation at birth reassures the baby of security and makes possible their movement outward to connect to the community humans and non-humans. At the same time, responsive care (evolved nested care) encourages the child to listen to their inner compass—the spiritual guidance that aims for health, flourishing and reaching our potential.
Remember, the evolved nest is species normal. It used to be worldwide (and still is in some places) except in unusual circumstances like hierarchical civilization. The evolved nest represents love in action, promoting a biology of lovingkindness rather than a biology of fearful contempt that our trauma-inducing culture fosters. In other words, those who are treated with love develop psychological, social, and biological tendencies toward loving others and being relationally attuned. They also develop a democratic character structure, what Maslow noted was part of a self-actualized person.2 (See also Democracy Starts with Babies.)
On the other hand, those who are treated with aggression or neglect develop tendencies toward treating others the same way, and guard themselves against connection, further increasing loneliness and impairing efforts to heal. Placed in a bath of insecurity, disregard, and nonconsensual treatment instead of nested support, early life cruelty is an experience of authoritarianism. Capacities for democracy are impaired.
Milburn & Conrad (1996; 2016) noted the empirical evidence relating corporal punishment in childhood to authoritarianism in adulthood. The individual displaces their anger about early life disrespect and mistreatment onto an acceptable scapegoat for their community—usually a minority group. Deep anger can be expressed towards women generally, rather than towards one’s mother for lack of expected nurturance. (See previous post on misogyny.) Authoritarians, as seen most vividly in films and stories about German Nazis, cannot bear disobedience and so display authoritarian aggression. They also tend to relish cruelty. Their early life trauma and unresolved grievances are turned into ruthless viciousness.
The Early Beginnings of the Authoritarian Syndrome
When does authoritarian disrespect truly begin? We can see it start at birth, with forced birth (before the baby is ready—due dates are guesses and babies vary by 55 days how long before they feel ready to breathe in the outside world). Authoritarian disrespect continues for males with infant circumcision. Most hospitals in the USA are not baby friendly (meaning supportive of breastfeeding). Instead, they undermine breastfeeding success by separating from mother, do not offer coaching and education about breastfeeding, and even feed sugar water or infant formula to babies (for no medical reason but to keep them quiet), undermining breastfeeding and the gut’s microbiome, the center of the immune system. (More on breastfeeding here.) Many medical practices were set up when it was believed that babies don’t feel pain and that early life experiences don’t matter. As a result, these are the first cruelties that traumatize babies, impairing self-expression, self-efficacy and health.
After birth, families are encouraged to continue the cruelty and toxic stress by, for example, bringing the hospital’s style home—with baby isolation in their own bed or room and dismissal of baby signals.3 The baby is marinated in misinformation—‘We love you [so go sleep and cry alone]’—potentially seeding lifelong distortions of reality.
A family life that ignores and coerces a baby is not providing that child with experiences of democracy. These experiences are too often followed by schooling that also operates according to a domination hierarchy—children being pushed around by teachers and authorities as well as by bullying peers. Thus, the child gets little experience of democracy at home or at school. When taking up a job later, typically there is not much democracy there either.
And so we raise children, adolescents and adults who not only are confused about who they are, why they are here, and how to get along, they’ve been raised in domination hierarchies that align with the survival systems that kept them alive in babyhood. And so they script their lives in the same way. According to this authoritarian script, in every relationship you are either the one that is up or the one that is down hierarchically. You want to be the one-up because that feeling of superiority makes you feel safer. But one-upness must be forcibly maintained, just as you experienced toward you in babyhood and childhood.
A domination hierarchy orientation affects what kind of rhetoric is attractive and gets transferred to political orientation. Strongmen, with all their propaganda about the dangers of “those people” promise to ensure security to those with an authoritarian syndrome. Like the media in pre-Nazi Germany and pre-massacre in Rwanda, contemporary media is flooded with ‘us-against-them’ messaging, giving a target for unhealed trauma and making it more likely that listeners will take action against “them.”
So how is a person to learn to be a democracy-capable and democracy-supporting citizen?
Adorno and colleagues point out that the most extreme authoritarians are next to impossible to heal. But authoritarianism lies on a spectrum. Those who are not at the extreme can be reached. So there is some hope.
Derek Black provides one example. He is the son of a Klansman leader who created Stormfront, the first and largest white nationalist online site. Derek built a partner children’s site. He was homeschooled after age 8. Yet, against the wishes of his family he went to college. He made friends but once they found out his background, they stayed away, wary. Then a Jewish friend started to invite him to his weekly celebrations of Shabbat. Over time, fellow students began to trust him again. During the rest of his college years, his friends convinced him that White nationalism was mistaken in multiple ways, and he renounced it.
Relational connection, patient friendship, offered a pathway out of loneliness and partnered Derek Black out of an us-against-them rigidity and the authoritarianism ideology. He was re-nested.
And a final cheer: All of us can offer our hand of friendship to those around us who are suffering from the effects of undercare. Together, we can re-nest one another and ourselves, and change the world.
1 Remember, I use as a baseline for normality the 99% of our species existence: 300,000 to 2,000,000 years of time on Earth, depending on how you want to count it, spent in egalitarian, small-band hunter-gatherer communities.
2 Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs was inspired by the Blackfoot People who demonstrated all the characteristics of self-actualization. But he got it upside down. Babies need all of his list of basic needs simultaneously as they self-actualize or self-organize around experience.
3 Remember that until age three or three-and-a-half, babies resemble fetuses and so need full nested support as they rapidly grow brain and body systems. This includes carers’ nearly 24/7 physical presence through touch.
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