The Great Human Delusion: All Parents Love Their Children

By Robert J. Burrowes

25 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there is a widespread
belief that all parents love their children. This is not so. Many parents
are so badly emotionally damaged as a result of their own childhood
experience that they are not capable of loving their children. Moreover,
the fear, self-hatred and powerlessness that characterise most humans
means that parental violence against children is chronic even if one or
both parents are capable of love.

Evolution's great trick was to connect reproduction with intense but
transitory sexual pleasure, not love. Couples may engage in sex as a
result of love for each other and possibly the desire to create and care
for a child. But many children are conceived outside the loving long-term
relationship necessary to nurture a child and even those children who are
conceived within this framework will routinely suffer parental violence.
And without genuine communities, as occurs in tribal situations, modern
nuclear families leave children isolated from the readily available
emotional support options that a more closeknit community would offer.

Visible parental violence against children is a deep social problem,
constituting a substantial proportion of the cases of domestic violence
reported to state authorities. And cases of domestic violence are the
main, or one of the main, forms of criminal violence in all police
districts. In extreme cases, such as those in which children are forced
into sexual slavery, bonded labour or military service, parents are often
responsible for selling the child to improve their own material
circumstances. (See David Batstone, 'Not for Sale: The Return of the
Global Slave Trade – and How We Can Fight It'. New York: HarperOne, 2007.)

Unfortunately, these extreme cases should not be used to obscure the
foundations on which they are based: the behaviour of many ordinary
parents who, because of the damage they themselves suffered during their
own childhood, might have children for reasons other than love – for
example, a prospective mother might simply be trying to avoid or defer
undesirable employment; a prospective father might be trying to create an
acolyte who feeds the gaping hole in his own sense of self-worth – and
even if this is not the case, all parents still inflict what I have called
'invisible' and 'utterly invisible' violence on each of their children
throughout their childhood. See 'Why Violence?'
http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence and 'Fearless Psychology and Fearful
Psychology: Principles and Practice'
http://anitamckone.wordpress.com/articles-2/fearless-and-fearful-psychology/

One driving social force in this horror equation is the imperative to obey
conventions, commands, rules and the law, and few parents have sufficient
sense of Self to resist this imperative in defence of their child. This is
why virtually all Western children (and many others), for example, are
imprisoned and enslaved in school with active parental cooperation. The
True Self of any individual cannot be nurtured under a relentless regime
of submission to the will of others whether parent, teacher or other
controlling adult.

The Problem of Obedience

One central problem of terrorising individuals into obedience of
conventions, commands, rules and the law is that once the individual has
been so terrorised, it is virtually impossible for them to change their
behaviour because they are now terrified of doing so. If the obedient
behaviours were functional in the circumstances then, apart from the
obviously enormous damage suffered by the individual, there would be no
other adverse social or environmental consequences. Unfortunately, when
all humans have been terrorised into behaving dysfunctionally on a routine
basis (in the Western context, for example, by engaging in
over-consumption) then changing their behaviour, even in the direction of
functionality, is now unconsciously associated with the fear of violence
(in the form of punishment) and so desirable behavioural change (in the
direction of reduced consumption, for example) is much more difficult.

To reiterate: if all individuals are terrorised into obedience of
conventions, commands, rules and laws, then even when a convention,
command, rule or law is utterly dysfunctional, few individuals will have
the capacity to identify, let alone resist, the dysfunctionality precisely
because the fear of being subjected to violence (punishment) obliterates
both of these capacities.

The fear associated with behavioural change is a key reason why it will be
difficult to eliminate human violence and to prevent human extinction. We
are, to a large extent, terrifiedly locked into the behaviours that both
drive violence and the rush to extinction.

Children as Legitimised Victims

In the words of Anita McKone: 'Violence against legitimised victims is
invisible.' And who are 'legitimised victims'? Depending on the cultural
context, it is the peoples of Africa, Asia and Central/South America,
indigenous peoples, women, workers, non-white peoples, military personnel,
'criminals', 'enemies', non-human species and natural systems of the Earth
itself. But, in all cultural contexts, all over the world and all
throughout human history, legitimised victims always and pre-eminently
includes children (and that means you).

According to Anita: 'Violence against legitimised victims is always
presented by the perpetrator as necessary, reasonable and caused by the
victim. The victim may be portrayed as causing the violence against it in
one of three ways: 1. The victim is portrayed as intrinsically wrong,
dangerous or dysfunctional, and needing to be controlled with emotional or
physical force; 2. The victim is portrayed as deliberately behaving badly
and deserving vengeful punishment; or 3. The victim's inherent weaknesses
are portrayed as justification for its exploitation – the victim is seen
as a "natural victim" whose feelings, needs and contributions (as an
individual or as a species) do not need to be taken into account.'

Can a Child be Naughty?

No child is ever 'naughty'. Indeed, it is not possible for a child to be
'naughty'. 'Naughty' is a delusionary concept. The child at birth is
genetically programmed to seek to meet their own needs and they will go
about doing this with intelligence and increasing Self-awareness if
allowed to do so. The child is also genetically programmed to expect
parental and other adult assistance (primarily by providing a loving and
safe environment) with which to do this. And they are genetically
programmed to have feelings of fear, pain, anger, sadness and others so
that they can recover from incidents in which their efforts fail, or in
which the violent or unintentional interference of others make it fail,
and to determinedly keep trying until they succeed. This is how a child
learns to walk, for example.

Many adults equate 'naughty' with 'disobedient', without questioning the
functionality of obedience. A child is genetically programmed to seek to
meet their own needs, not obey the will of another. And in some cases,
forcing the child to be obedient will simply generate an equally
dysfunctional compulsion to disobey (thus making the prospects of mutually
beneficial cooperation even bleaker).

However, there is a deeper dimension to the problem of 'naughtiness' than
this. Because virtually all adults have been so dysfunctionalised by
violence, most now believe that chronic and compulsive interference in the
natural development of the child, and particularly in the expression of
their feelings, is 'normal'. Why? Because this violent interference is
regarded as necessary to 'socialise' the child in the ways of its society.
But the outcome is disastrous and tragic: this violent interference makes
it impossible for any child to become properly functional (which does not
include being obedient) let alone to realise their genetic potential for
consciousness (or Self-realisation).

Conclusion

Our world is in trouble. We fight wars, impose exploitative economic
relationships on many people and destroy our environment, among many other
manifestations of violence. Fundamentally, these problems are all outcomes
of our greatest delusion: that we humans love our children. If we are to
effectively tackle all of our other problems, then we must include in our
strategy learning how to love our children genuinely. Or all of our other
efforts will ultimately be in vain.

If you wish to publicly declare yourself to be a part of this effort, you
are welcome to join the worldwide movement to end all violence by signing
the online pledge of 'The People's Charter to Create a Nonviolent World'
http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com

If you love your child, then listen to their feelings and let them do what
these feelings tell them. That is what evolution intended. It had a few
billion years to work it out.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and
ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an
effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a
nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of 'Why Violence?'
http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is [email protected]
and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

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