Freedom to Disobey

This is an excerpt from an article by Miki and Arnina Kashtan who strive to support rapid restoration of our capacities to heal and transform ourselves moving towards a collaborative and vibrant future.

When parents and adults shift from obedience, shaming, and right/wrong thinking, to freedom, love, willingness, and caring dialogue, children can and do find and cultivate their organic and genuine desire to care for the well-being of others, both adults and children, alongside their own. No “should,” punishment, or reward which prioritize the needs and perspectives of the parents; no “permissive” giving up on the parents’ needs, perspectives, or values, either; only trust in the unfolding of life and in the capacity of all, together, to come up with solutions that work for everyone in the family. Patriarchy, as we understand it, emerges from a fundamental separation from self, other, life, and nature. As such, reproducing patriarchy requires obedience so each new generation will internalize the separation and continue enacting patriarchal ways of being at all levels. Much is needed, at all these levels, in order to interrupt the reproduction of patriarchy. One of the core necessary pieces is to transition to collaborative parenting being the norm rather than the rare exception. Without it, even if we somehow manage to transform the larger political and economic social structures, each generation anew will be exposed to the impossible internal conflicts and compromises that patriarchal training demands of us, internalize the dominant version of reality in order to survive, and inevitably recreate the existing relations and institutions. More significantly, without shifting our parenting, we might run out of sufficient collective capacity to love.

For any mammalian species it is what the young learn and then conserve that drives evolution, since everything else dies off. This means that our very survival depends, in part, on how we raise our children.

Under conditions of patriarchy, we raise children in an environment of obedience, shame, scarcity, and often narrow self-interest, fully interfering with the flow of love and with children’s ability to experience freedom, belonging, natural abundance, and genuine care for the whole. Each new generation’s innate trust in life and, specifically, in the adults who care for them is broken many times over.

Patriarchy and its main educational institutions (parenting and schooling) have achieved this feat of maintaining domination over so many generations through direct coercion when possible, and through indirect coercion in the form of shaming when not. The result is twofold. One is an activation of the fight/flight/ freeze mechanism in a way it wasn’t designed for and the other is a residue of internalized shame. Both of these serve to reproduce the dominant patriarchal paradigm.

It’s no surprise that patriarchy requires coercion, since it fundamentally goes against our evolutionary makeup. This is why coercion is particularly directed at children. If you think about the core value of patriarchy in relation to children, it’s, sadly, obedience. It’s seen as a virtue rather than as a traumatic experience.

A very small minority of us choose freedom, recognizing, consciously or not, the immense cost that this choice incurs: living without safety, belonging, or being seen. Without the option of choosing freedom over belonging being named, and since, as children, we are so dependent on others for safety, it is not surprising that only few of us make that difficult choice, almost tantamount to a willingness to risk our lives for freedom.

We come out of childhood fractured. Darcia Narvaez concludes: “The caregiving environment that has been normalized by culture represents an aberration in human species history, creating systematic ‘undercare’ of children, denying their evolved needs.”7 This affects our capacity to live fulfilled lives as well as our capacity to care for others, both peers and, eventually, our own children, the new generation. This is in deep contrast to the persistent findings, starting from early European accounts of contacts with indigenous, matriarchal populations, and continuing well into the 19th century, of what Narvaez calls “a common prosocial personality that is inclusive, humble, egalitarian and generous.”

In stark terms: our upbringing primes us to compete and fight with others for the few positions of dominance, where those are even available, or to submit to others’ dominance. How? By making love absent or conditional, by shaming us, and by creating impossible choices that divide us internally and keep us struggling with the fear of our secret “wrongness” being exposed. Within a patriarchal world, maintaining dominance also requires external divisions between people, starting with gender and age, and extending to class, race, and beyond. As Riane Eisler said: “These traditions of domination and submission in the parent-child and gender relations are the foundations on which the entire dominator pyramid rests.” Such upbringing is necessary because no amount of external physical coercion could ever be enough to sustain patriarchal rule without patriarchal messages getting internalized. This is precisely why every patriarchal system controls both the upbringing of children and the stories that propagate in the culture. Both serve to bind people emotionally and cognitively to the patriarchal rulers so they will support the social order with ostensible willingness. In addition, the vast majority of us lack role models or inspiration to even imagine a different possibility, and only very few of us manage to muster the immense courage to wake up from the ongoing nightmare, adopt a new consciousness, and reach for full connection with self and other, within our families and beyond.

REINTEGRATION: HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION FOR PARENTS

What else can we do if we are aware that “The history of human beings is carried by children, not by adults” and that, therefore, “human lovingness will be conserved or lost through the upbringing of the children”?9 The paradox we live in is that we are creatures that need love in order to give love, and we have created the worst conditions for anyone to be able to receive consistent love. Somehow, we need to find a way to bootstrap ourselves despite this difficulty. How else will we find, quickly enough, a way to infuse enough love at enough levels to make our children’s lives more whole?

Reversing the effects of patriarchal upbringing means nothing short of undertaking the monumental task of reclaiming wholeness and bridging the two need triangles, regardless of which of the two we gave up early on. If we gave up freedom and authenticity, the process of reclaiming it means risking again loss of belonging and safety in order to choose, freely, to show more of ourselves. If we gave up security and belonging, the process of reclaiming it means choosing vulnerability and, once again, opening up to the potential disappointment of not being seen or loved adequately instead of protecting ourselves by separating or hiding our vulnerability from others.

“As we tackle this enormous challenge, deepening our understanding of the broader systemic context—beyond personal and familial realities—allows us to extend compassion to ourselves and others. This journey offers us a chance to shift our basic way of thinking. Patriarchal conditioning taught us to always focus on finding blame and meting out punishment, whether towards ourselves, our children, or those in power.”

As we take on this gigantic challenge, deepening our understanding of the wider systemic context - beyond personal and family realities - allows us to extend compassion to ourselves and others. This journey offers us the opportunity to change our basic way of thinking. Patriarchal conditioning has taught us to always focus on blame and punishment, whether of ourselves, our children or those in power.

We can choose, instead, to adopt a radically different frame for making sense of life: the perspective that everything that any human being ever does is an attempt to attend to needs which are common to all human beings, regardless of age, gender, race, class, or any other category that divides us. This is one of the core insights that Marshall Rosenberg, who formulated the core principles and practices of Nonviolent CommunicationTM, brought to the world.11 When we apply this insight to self and other, it can support us in the shift from the fear-shame-blame frame to a love-vulnerability-curiosity way of living. This shift is the foundation on which we can begin to transform our parenting practices and consciously choose the biology of love as our approach to relating to our children.

We need to find a way to do the near-impossible— parenting outside the patriarchal norms—in order to make a future truly possible. This is a key way in which we can create support for this generation of children to carry forward and conserve a renewed capacity to live in the biology of love. This means nothing less than supporting children in having the freedom to disobey. As we hope we have made clear earlier, changing patriarchy requires transforming the actual systems of patriarchal capitalism, at this point at the global level.

If we manage to remove the intense pressure to consider a tradeoff between core needs, maybe our children will be able to continue the path of love with less effort than it took us. Maybe this will mean they can pass it on to their next generation without the heroic efforts our generation of parents is asked to undertake.

This means nothing short of fully orienting to children’s needs without giving up on our own; working out disagreements without ever resorting to punishment, including guilt as a form of self-punishment; encouraging children’s own choices and responsibility without invoking “shoulds” or praise in the name of concern about their future; listening to children, taking their ideas seriously, and exercising respect for who they are and what they are trying to teach us; using force in extremely rare circumstances, only when imminent physical risk is present; and making decisions with children and not for children, fully expressing our own needs, too, in ongoing collaborative dialogue consistent with our evolutionary legacy.