All this hurt, all this pain, and what do we want the child, the becoming self to learn out of all this. According to the above, we want the innocent child to learn discipline. When we say "discipline," we do so confidently, but we may not think about what it may mean, especially in this context. If we act on something as seemingly vital as this, something that takes effort and denies our natural, emotional revulsion, we might consider whether we act out of an unconscious meaning perspective and not from an idea we hold after some reasonable critical reflection.[16]
My students had trouble finding what they meant by discipline although they used the word with confidence at first. That sort of thing happens quite a lot when we someone has the courage to ask us what we mean by a certain word. We feel that we know the content and meaning of a word we use, but we also find that we struggle to give our felt or emotional meaning a clear linguistic expression.
One expression of the idea about discipline comes straight out of a dominator model meaning perspective. Our internalized sense of the dominator model of seeing the world and responding to it speaks very loudly about how we treat our children and each other even when it does everyone involved a good deal of harm.
Silvia, she and I are married, had a roommate in college called Farzaneh (which means "wise" in Farsi). Farzaneh had a boyfriend. When she made a statement about the world, or asked a question about the world, the boyfriend would answer: "This is the way it is, Farzaneh." That settled it. The dominator model serves as the boyfriend, and all the rest of us exist as Farzaneh. The dominator defines the world, and we just listen and believe even when the dominator changes "the way it is" to another "way it is" as soon as the very next day. George Orwell fiercely depicts the utopian extent of the dominator model in 1984. Newspapers in this world print news that contradicts the reality of experience or even of yesterday's news. The dominator maintains a "memory hole" to dispose of any real information that disproves the dominator reality of the immediate time. One way the dominator expresses its complete domination comes in getting the protagonist, Winston Smith, to not only agree that two and two equal five but to deeply and completely believe, even see that imposed reality as absolutely undeniable, that two plus two equals five. In the end, the dominator creates an environment wherein Smith feels he has no choice but to love the dominator—Big Brother.
When we find ourselves acting in ways that we know to serve some higher purpose that we cannot fully express, we might look for the dominator model working unquestioned inside us to see if the higher purpose is not higher at all.
Teaching and learning discipline may well represent such an internalized dominator meaning perspective. Discipline, in the dominator context, means to teach us to follow orders, to obey a higher authority without question. For some, that might seem an acceptable definition of discipline toward children. We just want them to do what we say. At their age and development, we feel we know so much more, know so much better how life is lived, we just want them to learn to follow our orders until they can make orders of their own. After all, that makes for a peaceful home and well behaved children, something most people admire, at least from the outside. Parental expression of dominator discipline may well have served as a primary meaning perspective for a very long time. Indeed, people often use one of our most well known and repeated myths about the beginning of human life, the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man, to validate dominator discipline and punishment. From this way of forming reality, we learn a meaning perspective about obedience. We must all obey the higher authority, the parental figure, or suffer punishment as determined by that higher authority.
This dominator way of seeing reality and relationships has generally held much sway for endless years, time out of mind, but it doesn't fit the definition of the self we constructed:
The self exists as a conscious, independent entity which perceives the world, takes information from that perception, learns from that information, makes choices based on that learning, and acts freely on those choices. The self experiences the results of those choices, accepts the responsibility for those choices and results, and the process begins again.
The dominator/hierarchical/patriarchal model denies the essence of this definition and thus the essence of the becoming self. It denies the entity its independence, its freedom of perception, of choice, and of action. Without that independence, the becoming self has limited or no access to a direct perception of the world, and all the processes that follow are denied. The self is not a self but a kind of simulacrum, an extension and continuation of the dominating force. That's what many claim the Edenic myth tells us about the nature of existence and of human life. The original sin is disobedience to the divine parental figure who has punished humanity ever since. We can use our definition of the becoming self to choose to make an independent perhaps individuating interpretation of that myth that better supports the construction, the form of reality and self in which we choose to believe and which also feels proper and liberating. In such an interpretation we can find some of the essence of independence, autonomy, and individuation. That's our choice.