Society is a reflection of the family

I had a friend once who was horribly abused by his mother.

She would hit him with a long electrical conduit. She even kept it in a special location, threatening him even when not in use.

What kind of evil, horrible behaviour is it to hit a child with such an implement? Can you imagine the sensation of it being whacked across your butt or back? The welts it would leave? The fear as your mother raised her arm back, ready to strike?

Now just imagine if the roles were slightly different. Imagine the mother was a man, and the child was his wife. There is no question that people would consider this vile, disgusting, in-excusable abuse for which the man should rightly be jailed.

Yet, this was the action of a mother toward her own child. The power differential between a husband and a dependent wife is big. But not as big as the power differential between a mother and her child.

A woman can leave her husband. A child has no such recourse.

We don't say to the wife of an abusive husband that she should "forgive" him. Yet, adult children often "forgive" their parents of such abhorrent behaviour, as did this friend of mine. He explained she'd apologized and he seemed satisfied with such an apology. But I can't quite get my head around what such an apology might look like. After all... She would have absolutely known, 100%, without question that it was deeply immoral.

The parent child relationship is our first and most formative introduction to power. We're biologically programmed to bond with our parents no matter what and as such we're biologically programmed to figure out ways to make their behaviour "fit" with our conception of morality.

If someone continues to associate with their parents after such abuse, when they encounter a definition of morality that places the actions of their parents in the realm of evil, that person will have a viscerally powerful aversion to those ideas.

And this is why most people vehemently defend the state. The state takes the role of parents into adulthood for most of us. The state intervenes in disagreements, the state punishes those who "are bad" and the state must be exempted from the rules of morality in order to do so.

The state is a reflection of the family. The state is downstream from the culture fostered by what we accept within families.

Until we reform the family, the evil of the state will continue to exist. And it all starts with how we treat our children.