We live in a semi-totalitarian system* where most families are forced to under nurture their children and themselves in order to eat and have a place to sleep. Many families fall through the cracks and are broken apart due to addiction, prison, child protective services, and other forms of trauma and its symptoms. We can only be partially human in such conditions. The support of community, human and non-human, is fundamental to our growing our full potential. No one fulfills their humanity by themselves or with a mother alone. A supportive community is missing or abusive in a totalitarian system. It is an unnested pathway
* I call it semi-totalitarian because not all of us are experiencing close policing of our behavior but too many of us are (e.g., dark-skin minority people as children, parents, drivers, etc.; LGTBQ+).
Fundamental to totalitarian systems, whether religious, political, or cultish, is the breaking of spirit. Humiliation. An individual’s spirit is ideally broken in babyhood, as the Nazis promoted, for later obedient conformity to the hierarchical system (Rowold, 2013; Schreber, 2011). Parents in the USA break their children’s spirits usually without realizing what they are doing, although some religious parent advisers explicitly advocate it (Dobson, 1992). Breaking a spirit means the dominator (parent, religious leader, political authority) will be able to trigger stress reactions in the child/follower (dissociation, numbness) and gain control over the individual’s reactions in predictable ways.
The internalized message of spirit breaking in babyhood is that ‘I am a separate creature, hardly worth attention.’ The breaking of spirit means that anything of value is outside of the child. ‘I’d better behave properly!’ Of course this is helpful for any authoritarian, non-democratic religion or sociopolitical system. When autonomy and freedom are squashed at the outset of life, capacities for their healthy development are impaired.
The breaking of spirit is unfreedom. One becomes more reactive than agentic. More unfree than free.
Humiliation starts young. As the late beloved Colwyn Trevarthen (2005) noted in his research with infants, a baby whose bids for conversation are ignored feels shame, visible in their nonverbal behavior (e.g., head down). This is one of the reasons that babies need to have a stable set of responsive caregivers who know them, who recognize their signals and respond compassionately 24/7. This experience of humiliation is contrary to our evolved heritage where babies were always in arms, always carried, no matter the circumstance, always attended to with pleasure by a community of friends, responsive kin and nonkin (Sorenson, 1998) (i.e., what our evolved nest provides).* As a nested child becomes mobile, they are increasingly in charge of their movements but always have the option of in-arms attention. Even after infancy, throughout life, everyone is surrounded with supportive relations, uncoerced and free.
*Recall that babyhood, conception through age 4 years or so, is different from childhood because babies are highly formatively shaped in brain function, personality, preferences, capacities, by experiences. Note also that many fetuses are pulled out of their mother’s wombs on doctors’ time rather than their own, so many children may be, in effect, premature, hence ‘4 years or so.’ But then unfortunately, these early births doesn’t mean the rest of babyhood they will receive the nestedness they need for healthy growth.
I recently returned from spending several days at the 40th anniversary meeting of World Dignity and Humiliation Studies led by Evelin Lindner and Linda Hartling. At these meetings, people from all over the world join together to have spontaneous dialogues about dignity and humiliation, honoring and respecting each person’s experiences and reflections. I was delighted to be a presenter at the academic part of the conference. I presented on Restoring our Nestedness (for young and old), which is fundamental to honoring dignity and avoiding humiliation.
In writing and presenting about dignity and humiliation, Evelin Lindner (e.g., 2010) defines humiliation in three ways: as a relational act, an emotional state, and/or as a systemic social mechanism. As a relational act or social mechanism, it is intended to degrade and control the other. As a social mechanism, humiliation is a form of conquest. One is categorized and excluded from communal wholeness. In every case, one’s personal wholeness is thwarted as one’s spirit is shut down. As an emotional state, it is one of felt shame.
Consider how often a baby in industrialized nations is ignored—i.e., humiliated—their bids and needs unmet: faced away from parents in a stroller, left alone in a playpen or crib, sent to daycare with overwhelmed staff, inattention of parents on their phones, or ‘babysat’ by a deadening screen. In my view, humiliation starts even earlier when medical personnel decide a child’s birthday rather than letting the fetus decide, using rushed and/or painful procedures to coerce the fetus out of the womb, undermining the mother-child dance of birth that keeps them attuned and safe in the process.
The infant may not give up and not yet take up an underling stance until they learn at home the repeated lessons of isolation due to modern child separation and control. Desperation and distress are regularized to the degree that the child dissociates from self, others, and life, seeking pleasure and comfort in some non-human other (e.g., security blanket, screens, food). Through all the inattention, they are taught to be sensually insensitive, imperceptive of others’ changes in facial expression and emotional signaling. They learn the same with food, eating junk food in the car or in front of a screen, inattentive to subtle flavors. And so on. Unfreedom becomes habitual, child humiliation routine.
Lindner contends that humiliation is the ‘nuclear bomb of the emotions,’ the cause of all wars. According to Lindner, instead of a clash of civilizations we have “clashes of humiliations,” clearly seen in Germany’s reaction to its humiliation after World War I. Humiliation retributions can be seen in the ongoing wars in the Middle East today. Demeo (2011) proposed an interesting hypothesis, that the Abrahamic religious invention of circumcision (practiced by Muslims and Jews) is directly related to the warrior orientation of Middle Eastern societies. See my prior post on circumcision.
Humiliation leads the child to humiliate others in turn. Think of the young child intentionally stepping on ants. How did they think to do that except from imitation of elders or similar humiliation and cruelty experienced themselves? The child’s woundedness, their experience of not being recognized as a person, is transferred as nonrecognition of the Other. They learned that power rules.
Humiliation is fundamental to maintaining an undemocratic, hierarchical group, institution, or civilization. It puts and keeps people in their place, looking for an escape.
John Lamb Lash (2006) describes how the Roman Christian church took up the reactionary Hebrew group Zaddikim’s victim-perpetrator narrative in its theology. This institutionalized religion was distinctive from the teachings of Jesus and from the beliefs and practices of diverse groups inspired by Jesus’ teachings. Not only did the Roman church establish a patriarchal system out of a variety of options among Jesus’ followers, it highlighted the humiliation and victimization of Jesus by non-believing authorities, emphasizing that Jesus’ suffering was designed to redeem human suffering (victimization, humiliation, oppression). Feelings of sinfulness or badness grow from humiliation in childhood, which causes various forms of suffering. But they are told that suffering is the normal human condition because of sinfulness.
This salvationist Christianity, adopted by the Christian Roman empire and spread through the world, provided a redemption theology for those who felt victimized. Believers are told they have suffered because they are sinners (fallen), but if they believe and obey the Church they can be saved from their shameful sinfulness. And they can win (relief from guilt, eternal life) if they are the perpetrators of violence to those who won’t be converted. Part of the victim-perpetrator syndrome is the sanctioning of suffering and violence, such as child corporal punishment and the eradication of infidels.
Donald Trump’s magic over his followers taps into the victim-perpetrator and salvationist narrative. He emphasizes how his followers have been victimized/humiliated and how he has stepped forward to save them. He will be their retribution against the victimizers.
Hothschild (2024) describes the anti-shaming ritual that Trump displays to his followers. He (1) first says something outrageous, which (2) catches criticism from non-followers. He interprets this as being victimized for ‘being himself.’ (3) He then asks his followers if they have ever been victimized, humiliated, criticized for what they have said, done, or who they are (Answer: yes). (4) Then he tells them that he will protect them from, and even punish, the non-followers who has victimized them.
Why does this resonate? Because virtually everyone in the USA has a sense of humiliation from childhood, with victimhood experiences still unhealed. And it fits into the right-wing narrative that has been purveyed for the last decades, that the ‘others’ are evil, whether immigrants or government officials.
Rigid, enforced hierarchy is a recent aspect of human life, not characteristic of the nested pathway, 95-99% of human existence where honoring the dignity of the child with non-coercion was the rule. Child humiliation may be one of the primary roots of human destructiveness.
References
DeMeo, J. (2011). Saharasia: The 4000 BCE origins of child abuse, sex-repression, warfare and social violence, in the deserts of the old world. Brownvale, Alberta: New Energy Works.
Dobson, James C. (1992). The New Dare to Discipline. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House.
Hochschild, A. (2024). Stolen pride: Loss, shame, and the rise of the Right. The New Press.
Lash, J.L. (2006). Not in his image: Gnostic vision, sacred ecology and the future of belief. Chelsea Green.
Lindner, E. (2010). Gender, humiliation, and global security: Dignifying relationships from love, sex, and parenthood to world affairs. Praeger Security International.
Piaget, J. (1952). The origin of intelligence in children. New York: International University Press.
Rowold, K. (2013). Johanna Haarer and Frederic Truby King: When is a babycare manual an instrument of national socialism? German History, 31(2), 181–203.
Schreber, D.G.M. (1839/2011). Das Buch der Gesundheit oder die Lebenskunst, zweite Auflage [The book of health or the art of living, second edition] reprint. Nabu Press.
Trevarthen, C. (2005). Stepping away from the mirror: Pride and shame in adventures of companionship: Reflections on the nature and emotional needs of infant intersubjectivity, In C.S. Carter, L. Ahnert, K. E. Grossman, S. B. Hrdy, M. E. Lamb, S. W. Porges, and N. Sachder (eds.), Attachment and Bonding: A New Synthesis (pp. 55-84). Dahlem Workshop Report 92. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Sorenson, E.R. (1998). Preconquest consciousness. In H. Wautischer (Ed.), Tribal epistemologies (pp. 79-115). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.