Do you think authoritarianism is new to the USA? Hardly. The society is imbued with authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism here refers to external idealistic power imposed on a living being.
It starts in fetalhood when the expectant mother is stressed from little support and welcoming by the community. This impairs fetal brain development. (For some, we can point to the authoritarianism of rape-to-pregnancy.) The authoritarianism is barely started. It looms large with the medical profession deciding the ‘due date,’ instead of the baby deciding their birthday according to physiological readiness. Medical personnel disempower the birthing mother and baby in a myriad of ways. They push mother and baby out of their natural healthy rhythms for the sake of profit and convenience. Subsequently, the newborn is not treated as an agent, a being in the making but a product to be prodded and isolated, again for convenience.
Parents take home the hospital modeling of baby separation and scheduling and nonresponsiveness, often operating as unwitting authoritarians.
An infant’s freedom requires the support to grow which nestedness provides. Authoritarian infant treatment is contrary our species’ evolved nest and thwarts infant freedom. Lost liberty continues in toddlerhood when children are not allowed the freedom to follow their drives to explore and learn in every environment. Self-confidence and sense of self are undermined, making the individual more conformist to external pressure, ready for authoritarianism. We develop false submissive selves to survive.
It is especially in the first six years that the seeds of authoritarianism are sown, largely from missing nestedness but also other forms of trauma (various forms of punishments and their unpredictability as advocated by some “Biblical parenting” advisors; violent neighborhoods and media). Such experiences promote moral shrinkage, an instinctive self-centeredness oriented to defensive safety.
Authoritarian behavior indicates a lack of holistic consciousness, as if one’s narrow view of the world is the only one that matters and should be supreme.
Authoritarian behavior shows the triggering that happens in authoritarian-designed brains when faced with uncertainty from unnested early life. They want predictability and sameness. Authoritarianism shows a lack of skilled knowhow, flexible relational attunement and co-creation, to embrace diversity.
As with domestication, across generations, the species’ capacities diminish. In fact, for humans the worry is that we shift our nature from homo sapiens amans and homo sapiens donans—the loving, giving animal that we observe among nested people (egalitarian hunter-gatherers) shift to homo sapiens agressans and homo sapiens arrogans (Maturana, Vaughan). One can see that aggressive and arrogant adults were mistreated as children, affecting their functional adaptation (how they learned to behave to get some basic needs met) but also their epigenetics—which neurobiological map they carry for finding their way in the world.
In sum, we are swimming in all sorts of authoritarianisms that bubble up to the more-obvious political realm.
With authoritarian treatment of children, adults impose their will on children instead of co-regulating and co-constructing relations and fostering the child’s unique gifts. Instead, undermined is species-normal:
- Neurobiological development
- Psychological development
- Social development
- Spiritual development
- Social relations
- Self-transformation (learning)
- Relations with the rest of Nature
- Relation to Land
- Community relations
- Intergroup relations
- Etc.
These are accompanied by the resulting ecological crises caused by authoritarian androcentric (male-centered) profiteers and their submissive supporters—global warming and climate instability, degradation of the atmosphere, massive species extinction, and toxification of air, water, food (E.O. Wilson, 1991).
We have become species abnormal. It will take some time to learn to re-nest ourselves. Will you join us?
References
Maturana, H. R., & Verden-Zöller, G. (2008). The origin of humanness in the biology of love. Imprint Academic.
Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture and wisdom. New York: Norton.
Vaughan, G. (Ed.) (2019). The maternal roots of the gift economy. Toronto: Ianna.
Wilson, E.O. (1991). Biodiversity, prosperity, and value. In F. H. Bormann & S.R. Kellert (Eds.), Ecology, economics, ethics: The broken circle (pp. 3-10). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Watch Darcia’s Lecture: Human Pasts, Global Futures: Trauma or Wellness?