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When we attended an interview, we felt judged and afraid as the student drawings depicted graphically. We feared ourselves and our deeply felt inadequacy which we knew the interviewer would find quite apparent. It's not in our interviewer but in ourselves that we are underlings.
This sense of inadequacy and the fear that arose from that feeling, from that meaning perspective, could not have served as the higher purpose parental figures felt and served when creating an environment wherein children grow into and achieve that higher purpose. Parental figures will inevitably report that they want the best for the children in their care. They feel that they strive to achieve that end, that higher purpose of best-for-the-child. The question here comes in defining the idea of "best." Who decides what's best for the child?
No one at one moment generally decides what's best. That feeling of best-ness has arisen over many years and forms an essential part of the meaning perspectives of a culture and a society. It forms the basis of the dominator based conformity into which most of us have been trained to strive to find our place. No matter how much we rebel against that perspective, we will find no more freedom, no more attainment of the free, the autonomous self than the rebellious child finds.
Rebellion speaks the "No," as we have seen. It denies the usual and prevailing domination but does not affirm anything really new. If we speak only a "No," we remain as dependent on what we deny as if we agreed with what we deny. If we didn't have the original statement to rebel against, we would lose our momentum, lose our drive, lose what makes us tick. The rebel who lives in and with the rebellion for its own sake remains a conformist to the thing against which the rebel—rebels. In some ways, the rebel serves the ends of the conformist, dominator structure quite well. The rebel provides a clear target and a clear warning of punishment for such acts. The rebel shows the power of the dominator in fighting it without representing any cause of her/his own. The rebel is lost within the thing rebelled against.
Although we feel the higher purpose toward which we diligently and often painfully work with the children in our care means the best for the child, that feeling may be turned to another not higher but very different purpose, the purpose of the dominator structure of society. We live in a dominator environment and we need to find our way within it to achieve whatever success we can. In that inherent knowledge, in that meaning perspective, we recreate that environment in our homes. We remake that environment for the children in our care. The higher purpose actually functions as a demanding and demeaning purpose for the becoming self of the child and the adult for that matter. The higher purpose, in some utopian way, calls on us as parental figures to enter into an unspoken but palpable agreement to deflect children from their desire to become a fully articulated self and to continue indefinitely with that deflection of the child's development and individuation. As parental figures, we strive to fulfill the higher purpose of the dominator model so that these children can achieve not development of self but a semblance of growth within the dominator model. We teach them to accept that domination is the norm, to negotiate successfully with that domination, and to become a successful dominator themselves. To this unspoken end, as parental figures, we engage in the practices we have delineated here and more. All of which we feel we do out of love and devotion. That's where the irony lays.