Mastodawn

HeavenlyPossum Apr 27, 2024

When European settler colonists first encountered the indigenous communities of northeastern North America, many things surprised them about the indigenous communities.

Among these, the Europeans were surprised to discover how restrained and personally responsible the people in these communities were. They very, very rarely engaged in interpersonal violence. They didn’t insult each other; they didn’t lose their tempers around each other.

The Europeans were also surprised to discover that the people in these communities rarely, if ever, disciplined their children. They were, the Europeans believed, impossibly indulgent with their children, allowing them immense personal freedom.

I think it would surprise many contemporary readers that those two things don’t conflict with each other. People living in contemporary state-capitalist modernity tend to assume that children require quite rigid discipline, the routinized order of mass schooling, and fairly constant coercion to keep them out of trouble and turn them into civilized, responsible adults.

It turns out that lots of things we assume to be self-evidently true are not actually true at all.

It’s a baked-in, unquestioned assumption in hegemonic contemporary society that there’s this whole class of people who intrinsically can’t make decisions for themselves and self-evidently must be coercively managed as a result, and meanwhile there are entire societies in which adults don’t even *raise their voices* at children because why would it be ok to shout at people in anger?

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/685533353/a-playful-way-to-teach-kids-to-control-their-anger

HeavenlyPossum Apr 27, 2024

“But children don’t know better and have to be forced to do things for their own good”

This logic has also been used to control and abuse women, the disabled, and members of minority communities *in our own contemporary society.* It has been employed to justify the enslavement of Black people and genocidal assimilationist policies for indigenous peoples. Whose good is it really for?

HeavenlyPossum Apr 27, 2024

I suspect that the vast majority of behaviors parents feel compelled to impose on their children—“I don’t believe in domination but I can’t have my kid doing xyz”—are not at all about the well-being of their child but rather about conforming to the constraints that capitalist modernity imposes on us.

I have to be at work by a certain time set autocratically by my employer, so I have to get my kid to bed at a certain time so *I* can get enough sleep to get to work, or risk losing access to the revenue I need to keep me and my kid alive. The school will impose fines on me and potentially deploy armed truancy police if my kids arrive at school after a time set by bureaucrats who are only superficially responsive to public preferences.

This is one trivial example. It’s worth reflecting on other ways you behave towards children, which believe yourself compelled by responsibility but are actually compelled by authoritarian structures imposed on us from above.

Licho Apr 27, 2024

@HeavenlyPossum I can't have my kid eat this battery or they will die. I have to force-feed them this antibiotic or they will lose hearing in their infected ear. I have to constraint them so they don't run into the road or they will get roadkilled. I'm at the toddler stage. Yeah, it's weird being anti auth and having a toddler.

HeavenlyPossum Apr 27, 2024

It’s not really coercive to take action to protect someone who has no control over themselves. If an adult were to sleepwalk towards a cliff, I wouldn’t consider it authoritarian to interpose myself between them and the cliff to stop them from dying.

Licho Apr 27, 2024

@HeavenlyPossum see? They don't know any better and have to be forced for their own good. There's no hard line to draw. It's incredibly difficult. Us parents are doing literally best we can. Except some extreme cases, we are driven by the most innate love and instinct a human can have. It's easy to see it as oppression but at the end of the day, you have to do it. Have to forcefully open their mouth and feed that antibiotic. Screens are less extreme, but they cause brain underdevelopment - much more so in a developing brain that doesn't yet fully understands 3D. It's less harmful to the adults.

FoolishOwl Apr 27, 2024

@HeavenlyPossum There's toothbrushing, that I've worried about as a problem in non-authoritarian parenting. A lot of things, you can explain to children as having immediate consequences. Tooth decay is pretty abstract.

However, children tend to trust adults, if they do not abuse that trust, so if most of the time you can explain why they should or should not do something in terms of immediate consequences, they'll usually accept the occasional, "Trust me, it's important to brush your teeth."

HeavenlyPossum Apr 27, 2024

My kids brush their teeth and I can’t recall ever having to coerce them into it. While there’s inevitably an intrinsic power imbalance between adult and child that will always carry an implicit threat, I’ve always just…talked to them.

FoolishOwl Apr 27, 2024

@HeavenlyPossum Yeah, in practice, it was just calling out a reminder to brush their teeth before bed.

HeavenlyPossum Apr 27, 2024

I think it’s telling that we get stuff that’s genuinely not coercive (talking to people, persuading them) mixed up with things that are (violence, threats of violence, deprivation facilitated by violence) under the rubric of “parenting” or “discipline.” It’s so normalized that everything gets kind of jumbled up together.

Violet Madder Apr 28, 2024

@HeavenlyPossum @foolishowl

The respect and trust that is built by NOT being coercive, means resistance is a lot less likely to even happen.

NickBell Apr 27, 2024

@HeavenlyPossum
I love this and wholeheartedly believe in it. I think similarly about workplace cultures. Arguing and scolding are often considered compatible with professional behaviour, which makes no sense to me at all. I think that if I speak or act in anger, then I've intrinsically failed as a colleague, but in some fields that would be seen as weakness. In fact, anger is so ingrained in our culture that at first, I read your post as sarcastic. (It's not, obvs!)

NickBell Apr 27, 2024

@HeavenlyPossum
More so since I got into teaching. Nothing positive can come out of showing anger in class. It's hard though. In 6 years, I think I've yelled in anger once (maybe twice?) and it might help to shock someone to attention, if used sparingly, but it sure doesn't feel like being in control.

mnemonicoverload Apr 27, 2024

@MrBehemo
Workplaces with that dynamic are certainly ugly. I consider myself fairly lucky that I've only experienced that once in my life, unsurprisingly when I worked as a retail salesperson. The floor manager thought it was appropriate to literally yell and scream at me in front of a customer for a minor breach of store procedure while I was in the middle of making a large sale. My response of a raised eyebrow and quietly walking away from the situation (to go into the back and immediately clock out early for an extra long lunch) left her standing there in stunned silence and she didn't say a peep to me when I got back.

@HeavenlyPossum

Weedkiller Apr 27, 2024

@HeavenlyPossum Systems that rely on mutual agreement and persuasion rather than a reign of terror are far more resilient because the participants are personally invested into making things work. If you don’t have a say, you’re far more likely to want to see it all burn. Funny how the “elites” keep missing that part because it makes them redundant. Same with landlords who believe they “provide” housing.

HeavenlyPossum Apr 27, 2024

I think our elites are perfectly aware of how tenuous and brittle their rule is! That’s why they’re so quick to deploy overwhelming and brutal force against the gentlest of public critiques (ie, campus protests), even in self-styled “liberal democracies.”