These questions always stimulated a good deal of energy of one kind or another during interview class discussion. Often that energy continued to deny that we parental figures teach through fear to create fear. "I love my little Charlie, and I don’t want him to feel fear. I just want him to learn how to behave." That's an interesting phrase. We all know how to behave, every living being behaves. Plants behave in a certain way in response to the environment. Animals behave in certain more complex ways in response to their environment. When we are born, we behave as a new born behaves. Parental figures seek a specific kind of behavior which they believe, according to meaning perspectives they developed growing up and living in the dominator model, manifests the right sort of behavior, one that satisfies the parental sense of right behavior. Such demands for behavior express a need to impose a forceful introduction onto the becoming self of the child to the dominator model by which we all generally live.
This model forms a structure in which people within it display only two forms of essential behavior. We either dominate others, make them a means to our end, or we obey that domination; we submit to a subordinate status become a means to some else's end. In such a system, almost everyone operates in both roles, both meaning perspectives. As a parental figure, I get dominated by many forces, especially the meaning perspectives I have internalized, and I also get to dominate others, generally the children that have become part of my life. As we noted before, we subordinate ourselves to the dominating order as we find it, or we attempt some form of insubordination, a punishable crime. When we in-sub-ordinate, we place ourselves outside the law of domination. We become an out-law. Such a person threatens the dominator model in many ways and exposes weaknesses of that model by simply existing. Outlaws must be controlled. Given that we are all born free of the idea of domination, we are all born as de facto outlaws whom parental figures must control until we internalize that control. That begins with our obedience, our submitting ourselves as completely as possible to our subordination to another, our parental figures and caregivers.
Meaning perspectives form an internal structure of right and wrong. We do not question them. We are scarcely aware of them. And we believe in down to the ground with the kind of passion that comes only from something deeply felt and which dominates the way we see and form reality. If we form reality in such a way, and someone else does not, that other becomes an outlaw to our passionately held meaning perspective, our form of reality. When we feel the presence of an outlaw, we can feel very threatened because we have no real answer to the outlaw perspective. We feel what we feel is right and if the other, the outlaw, doesn't feel what we feel, the other is wrong in some essential way and feels dangerous to our deeply held meaning perspective of reality.
Every child enters the world as a potential if not actual outlaw.
We come into the world without knowledge of any meaning perspective about behavior. In that sense, we do enter the world innocent, untainted by any specific meaning perspective, any construction of reality. We enter as someone unaware of dominator models and any meaning perspectives that restrict our behavior. We cry and expect the world to respond. It will, but it may not respond in ways that help us in becoming a full expression of our becoming self.
The world tells us that we must behave. As with outlaws, when we don't behave, show the discipline that keeps us within the meaning perspective the world defines, we get punished. Punishment comes as the raw form of domination. Such raw domination through punishment asks us to learn nothing but submission by endless and internalized obedience. The dominator model does not care if we learn that through understanding. It doesn't explain itself much anyway. Those who answer to an unquestioned meaning perspective generally don't understand that perspective. They feel it and see through its lens, but they don't understand. They don't have to. It's just true. Dominators don't explain; they dominate. If the first level of domination doesn't work, they dominate in the same way—harder.
Domination takes the form of punishment. Punishment is not consequence. It doesn't follow from an action logically or as a matter of course. It is arbitrary. It happens one day and may or may not happen the next. Punishment comes down on the punished, on the outlaw, in unpredictable and often seemingly irrational ways. Its purpose is not to educate about the nature of the punished act. Its purpose is to promote fear in the punished. The dominator seeks obedience through a fear of punishment. If we fear punishment because of the pain it caused us, we may not act in the same way again to avoid that punishment. We obey because we fear. What punishment teaches is fear, and if we learn, that's what we learn. If we learn irrationally, our obedience is also irrational. We can irrationally respond to fear in many ways. Indeed, we have no way to respond to fear rationally. Fear by its nature is not rational. In that very irrationality, it makes a powerful instrument in creating meaning perspectives. If that meaning perspective always takes the form of obedience, the dominator might feel satisfied, at least to some degree. However, once we have entered into the irrational, and punishment and the fear it produces are irrational, the product of this irrationality happens outside of domination. No matter how powerful, the dominator may find it impossible to dominate the irrational response to its own acts of irrationality. Once we fear, an irrational state, anything can happen.
When we learn through fear, we may learn things, meaning perspectives that are at variance from the dominator's intention. Oddly that still may not encourage us or allow us access to becoming a full expression of self. We almost inevitably find the freedom of choice we need to become fully our becoming self denied to us even when we do not obey.