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.

@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."

@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

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.”

@HeavenlyPossum

Again, sorry for observing an underlying topic here, but I felt I had to.

And regarding the topic itself, this idea of regulating people on doing things, following a framework that doesn't take into consideration living instead of existing, embracing nature instead of feeding the capitalism machine, imo, is what put us on an environment of anxiety and struggle to be happy in the long term.

Indigenous communities were free, and they wanted that way for their descendants. Tks.

@desertplains

“Settler colonialism” is a term used to distinguish between kinds of colonialism, not as a euphemism to paper over what they did. Settler colonialism was common in the first phase of European imperialism and entailed the expropriation, replacement, and often genocide of indigenous communities. This is why populations in places like the Americas and Australia is primarily of European descent.

In contrast, the later stages of imperialism were marked by minimal European settlement in favor of highly extractivist economies and indirect rule—think of the plantations of the Kenyan highlands or mines of Zambia.

It doesn’t mean the perpetrators weren’t invaders; it just specifies what kind of invasion they were committing.