"If our childhood experiences found their determination in a higher purpose for the child, what would we describe as that higher purpose?" I asked. My students went back to the idea of parental figures teaching children how to live in the world. By then, however, we all recognized in what ways the parental figures did not know how to live in the world themselves. What they taught, they taught out of their own experience as children. Parental figures operated and taught out of and toward a higher purpose but had no direct and clear idea what that purpose might be.
Rather swiftly, we returned to the idea of discipline. People had to have discipline to live in the world, so parental figures felt the powerful need to instill discipline in children. That's why the whole model we discussed had its value even if it looked very flawed in its prosecution and execution. Parental figures must discipline children, punish children if necessary, to instill that discipline or the child would be—lost.
The lost child held a very powerful symbolic value for us all, and we looked at the nature of that loss. If lost, from what lost and to what lost? That would depend on the discipline we wanted to inculcate into the child, or that which the child would learn in some other way. Discipline comes in two varieties at least. We either practice the discipline of the culture in which we live, conform out of fear, or we develop self-discipline. In another way of seeing and saying this, we inculcate the coercive discipline of obedience to some dominator model: "Do what you are told, when told and when observed," We could rather offer the path of self-discipline, the one where the individual acts as we have defined the self as acting. We could better do that for our children when we could do that for ourselves:
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 of those choices and results, and the process begins again.
If we still felt some basic agreement with this definition of self, then the loss we fear for the child must relate to the definition we constructed for the self. We want children to grow into the kind of person described here, the kind of person that Carl Jung and others call individuated. If children learn and surrender to the dominator model of life, they will lose that definition of self, the individuating self. That has its charms. In that world of dominator self, or non-self, the individual lives with the seeming comforts of conformity and recognition from the community in which the individual lives in domination. Erich Fromm explores this idea very fully in Escape From Freedom and other of his works. The seeming rewards of living the dominated and conformist life do exist, and we can feel that children lose something of value if they don’t enter into it. This holds especially true if we live inside that model ourselves.
In the moments of our class discussions, we found ourselves looking into the mirror of our own choices, critically reflecting on the meaning perspectives by which we live ourselves.
When we live within the conformity of the dominator meaning perspective, it will affect every area of our lives, if our lives remain our own at all. Indeed, if they remain our own, we feel our life best when we cheat, when we escape and defy the conformity and the dominator meaning perspective, when we get away with something that violates the very conformity we have chosen. That violation does not free us from that conformity and that domination. It affirms them and their power over us as a self because our violation stems from our surrender of responsibility for our acts to conformist institutions and the domination that its law represents. This relationship to responsibility stems or at least reflects from where we choose to position our locus of control.