7

GUILTY!

Until Proven Dead

Most “training” of children depends on a willful, specific employment of anxiety inducement. This consciously perpetrated crime is “guilting,” an activity with which we are all involved throughout our lives.

Guilting is built on fear but requires some language development for its inception. Guilting can become fully operative only in a mind split from its primary process. The roots of self-doubt, on which guilting grows, are found in earliest anxiety.

No child could be guilted were his parents or “mothering-ones” not fear ridden. Anxiety, as fear without an object, is induced “unconsciously,” but guilting is not. Guilting is induced very purposefully, though always cloaked under moral wraps. Guilting is employed by parents out of their own sense of guilt and anxiety, but always under the rationale that they are “training” their child.

Most parental “concerns” over their children generate from a fear of social censure. A child not supporting the cultural norms would reflect on the parents’ own social image. The parent’s own family is the strongest judge, and on a gradient come peer groups, neighbors, and then the larger abstractions, society, religion, and so on.

Even concerns over a child’s possible physical injury orient toward fears of social condemnation for not “caring properly.” Actual concern for the well-being of the child takes second place (as in public schools, where administrative fears of liability, public censure, school-board recriminations, taxpayer revolts, parental wrath, and so on, weigh heavier than concern for the child and account for the bulk of the disciplinary regulations and general air of distrust and mutual resentment). The pressure on parents to maintain a social image gives ample rationale for guilting under the wraps of “moral virtue.” The classical example of the “Jewish mother” illustrates a tendency shared by all, and we recall Jesus’s comment, “a man’s worst enemies are those of his own household.”

Newborns don’t smile, but they learn to rapidly. Frowns, smiles, tones of voice, all link with anxiety, satisfaction of needs, and survival. Judgment plays a dominant role long before any logical development begins. The infant survival system responds preverbally to a host of cues. The prelogical, preliterate modes of mind function outside language and “conscious” processes. Both infant and child pick up unexpressed negatives and fear.

As soon as there is any infant word play, the parent tends to shift to language-as-communication, long before the infant conceives of language in that sense. Most of the endless barrage of negatives resulting, the ceaseless “no-no’s,” register on the child as anxiety. Parental “reasoning” does not register on the prereasoning child. With the growing demand for verbal identification, the child is forced to focus less on primary modes of perceiving and more on verbal interactions. Language slowly enters as a grid intervening between data and response.

The child’s resistance to abandoning his center brings on verbal threats of consequences for failure to comply. The child’s threat syndrome is then called into play semantically. At that point the child’s physical identity, his placement of self in a world of real things, begins its slow shift to a social-semantic identity. His biological mechanisms for survival must start attending to verbal demands. An ambivalence enters, a division between inner balance and outward response to verbal stimuli.

A silent swat is worth a thousand words. Our organism is designed to learn by concrete interactions with reality. Animal mothers will bat their young about when necessary, and they learn forthwith. Nothing clears the air so quickly for a locked-in child as a single swift whack on the rear, just as nothing so confuses, fragments, and disturbs a child as the verbal barrage that passes for “reasoning,” or threat.

Don Juan offered strange advice to Carlos concerning a “ruined” child. He recommended sudden, unexplained, and silent thrashings by a stranger every time the child behaved in an unacceptable manner. Don Juan claimed that fright never hurt a child, but that nagging destroyed him or her.

Underlying much of our verbal assault on the young is a masochistic projection of our own frustration. Deep within we know that our words wound far more insidiously than anything else and leave no outward mark. The “battered-child syndrome” of current interest is a physical manifestation arousing our projected indignation. But the psychological equivalent is more prevalent. It just isn’t immediately detectable. The psychologically battered child is observable only in the irrational behavior of each next generation.

Parental verbal threat is always unclear in intent to the child. The parents’ own confusion, shifting focus, and muddy intent, create continual contradiction. The child lives in that underlying intent, too, an intent nearly always at variance with the surface “reasonings.”

Threatening the child with future recriminations (this will be done to you and that will be done to you if you don’t do this now) only furthers the flight-fight shift from physical reality to abstract verbal patterns.

The child’s image of self has been described as threefold: good-me; bad-me; and not-me. The young child will often shift “blame” or the actions of “bad-me” over to an imaginary self, a “not-me,” or an imaginary playmate. (“I didn’t do it,” our two-year-old Susan used to say. “My Susie did it.” My Susie was her shadow image, designed to take the edge off our guilting.)

Through verbal play of “as-if ” performances, the child attempts to manipulate the reactions of others and ward off guilting. Concealing through playacting that which might otherwise bring anxiety is a defensive step, but also the first step toward lying and an important element in the growing split of the psyche. As the child’s outer compliance grows, his inner centeredness slowly transforms into a reflection on this semantic world of ambiguous and contradictory impingements. Sooner or later he must become what he beholds.

He resists being pulled off center, however, and this becomes the concern of educators. The child must be convinced of his insufficiency to deal with life; otherwise he will not pay attention to us parents, educators, preachers, policemen, politicians, doctors, lawyers, sergeants, billboards, Pentagons, undertakers.

Preliterate cultures depended on willing imitation. Imitation is play. The child was incorporated into the adult action world through concrete action. Little language is needed for imitation. One “sees” and does. All children pick up most of their initial reality picture through imitative play. Imitation can only be of real events if it is to lead a child. Modern education must rely on motivation and the verbal, since nonreality can’t be imitated.

Childhood play should be apprenticeship to adult play. Only in the literate cultures have work and play been so categorized and split. Play is suspect in a literate culture based on a hostile universe and an incompleteness in life itself. A culture that can’t play has no accommodations for playful apprentices and must create a separate world for its young. Play is for playgrounds under careful supervision.

A smiling, laughing child is suspect in a school, for instance. He surely is, or intends to be, naughty. The drawn face; the slight, pensive frown; the serious-student look, quiet and attentive, is the paradigm, expressing prediction and control.

Language is as complicated an activity as the mind giving it birth. Yet the child grasps this inordinate complexity generally by his fourth year, and of his own volition. Most of the child’s reality explorations are extensive and functional by his sixth year. And all this growth takes place spontaneously, through playful imitation and participation. A child knows joy in reality learning and seldom resists activity that is for his actual reality welfare. He is programmed to respond affirmatively to life. Play is his programmed response. Play is learning. The intellect grows by play. The highest forms of operational logic develop through play and are short-circuited and thwarted by schooling.

Nothing we could do could force our children to do that which they naturally, spontaneously, and even joyously do within their first six years. Joy and spontaneity prove stronger than our anxiety inducements and guiltings, else the child would simply go autistic entirely.

Why is this situation of creative response so dramatically reversed after the sixth year? The child resists the negative and the irrational just as he rejected the anxiety nipple in the beginning. The child resists the fear and guilting involved in acculturation as vigorously as he accepts early reality exploration and learning.

One summer I daily watched a tiny boy, not yet turned two, swimming with his older brothers. The little one would dive into the water with abandon and faith, in imitation of his paradigms. Occasionally he strangled, spat, sputtered, cried, regained his breath, and plunged again. He never exceeded his limits. He sensed his capabilities. No one ruined his spontaneous response to the water with fear talk. I am sure his paradigms in that (Mexican) family had all learned to swim in the same way and never gave it a thought.

Generally the parents’ fear of social condemnation for “irresponsibility” is projected as “concern” for the child. Parents seldom distinguish between their own general state of anxiety and a concern for their children’s actual well-being.

This has led us, in our strangely abstracted illusions, to an extreme overprotection of children that has hilarious results. Television is surrendered to so unanimously because of its safe and stable placement of children for long hours. On every hand our society sets up buffers between the child and reality, lest that child be “hurt.” (Never mind what TV does to that psyche, the body is safe and so one’s image-as-parent is safe.) Every aspect of the child’s life is supervised in one way or another as a security device. Dangers are systematically eliminated. One isn’t allowed fireworks any more but goes to the stadium to watch a fireworks display. (I am not championing fireworks; the example is simply very much apropos.)

Buffering the child against danger throughout his formative years, we then, somewhere around his sixteenth year, put him behind the wheel of two or three hundred horsepower, turn him loose on the free-ways, and wonder why the vast majority of automobile accidents occur with young drivers.

Don Juan points out that the “body likes danger.” The “body likes to be frightened.” Anyone with children knows that children love to be play-frightened in “let’s pretend” with safe parents. Children play at fright all the time. Young people decisively need to confront danger and seek it in anticultural counterfeits.

Specific fear-with-an-object can serve as an enormous relief valve for our homeostatic forces overworked by anxiety and the constant maneuvering of death avoidance. Witness the strange doomsday exhilaration of wartime; the attraction of horror movies; the panderings of television; the holiday malevolence of public hangings in our recent past; the avid, nonrational, riot-tinged push to witness fire, disaster, tragedy, wreck. The more insular our bufferings to life, the more extreme our vicarious indulgences in violence and death.

We are taught to believe that only through the constant alert watchfulness of the trained intellect can the inadequate, hostile life forces be kept in check. Trust in natural processes is unknown in the acculturated, just as it was natural and unquestioned in the child’s early explorations. We first caution a child about the dangers of water and of his inability to survive in it. To make sure he heeds our warnings we play on his fear and anxiety. We give him a target to fear. Then we might prepare to teach him how to swim. By the time our preparatory ventures are over, he will be locked in a knot of fear that will need all our training techniques to undo.

The learning he then must undergo is channeled through verbal instructions, incessant commands, a sea of verbiage drowning him if the water doesn’t. The response, which could have been a joyous, simple one of discovery imitation, becomes a series of clumsy, stiff battles of muscle against muscle, response against response, until finally the body can take over that which it could have done in the beginning.

Motivation is of great concern to educators. Motivation is thought of as a kind of internal machine that once set in motion might drive the child to do what is desired of him. Motivation works only indirectly. If the child does as desired it is generally only to avoid the guilting of those trying to “motivate” him.

Education is formalized acculturation. The seeds of our current madness are liberally planted in the schoolroom, f lower in the university, and reseed over the land. Most children dislike school, though they feel guilty about it. This attitude is mirrored back and forth between teacher and student. Only threats, reprisals, recriminations keep the lid on.

Kindergartners love school. It is a form of play. The first grader goes along with the game. It was fun the first year. By the second grade things have started souring. By the fourth grade the jig is up. By junior high school all hell breaks loose. High school is quieter only because of the apathy setting in after the abortive, futile outbreak of junior high. An uneasy truce then exists between teachers and students to ride this thing out with a minimum of trouble to all concerned.

The “as-if ” performance takes on new twists in the student-teacher battles for survival. A strange sense of fair play often surfaces. A visitor will bring the children rallying to the teacher’s defense by putting up a good front. They know intuitively that the teacher is as much a victim as they are. When scrutinized by the public eye there is an unspoken gesture to play as-if, and bail the teacher out.

Everyone on the “outside” knows what really goes on in school, for all went through it. Everyone simply pretends not to know once they are free of it. Or they practice selective blindness for their own sanity, knowing the situation to be both intolerable and irremediable.

Or having suffered themselves, some adults feel that such suffering must, therefore, be “good for them,” making a virtue of necessity rather as the legionnaire’s snarling, drunken glee over the “young hippies” getting sent over to Vietnam—“make men of ’em” (should they survive).

More often is the sad double-think hope of so many parents that somehow, this time, with their children, the machine might not make hamburger of those children, even though the parents know it is a ham-burger machine.

School is the most clear-cut, embarrassingly naked example of the acculturation process at its best. The more unsure the whole procedure, the more muddy its intent, the greater grows the administrative cry for more of everything—more money, buildings, teachers, administrators, counselors. The bankruptcy of the whole bureaucracy would become apparent were “blame” not tossed out in every direction.

As Arthur Ceppos said of most education: “It is an endless preparation for something that never takes place.”

Yet, in spite of “more of everything,” the morass simply grows heavier and more impossible. A generation of householders has virtually bankrupted itself in response to the bankrupt cries of education, to no avail. The outpouring of money for lavish physical plants has been like upholstering an electric chair. The victims still resent the end result.

Inauthenticity and inadequacy are the constant accusations from the school and reverberated in the home. Consider the recent rash of billboards put out by the educational association devoted to the horrors of being a high school dropout.

On every hand we are threatened, as is the student, with every kind of reprisal. We are even threatened for not believing we are in a bad way and working madly to amend some “failing.” We are easy to intimidate since in our deep knowing we are aware that we are fragmented and off balance. Having no specific reason for this anxiety, cultural guilting easily finds roots to feed our disease.

We have no way of articulating our anxiety. Acculturation convinces us that our “condition” is due to our personal failure to comply properly with the culture. The success of our culture is dependent on convincing us that there is no split of mind at all—but rather that we have only failed to acquire the proper “bridges” to wholeness offered by the cultural system. Or, equally effective, those bridges need repair and updating, jobs that only our life investment can attend.

There could be no swimming teacher were all children initiated into the water as the young child at our pool. To be a successful swimming teacher you must first have a pupil, one convinced of his natural lack. The age of the professional rests on producing the incompetent.

The inducement of fear never ceases. As adults we are just getting into the full swing of it. We both inflict and suffer guilt and anxiety on an ever wider basis. All of us are daily accused by every billboard, advertisement, newscast, authority pronouncement, Pentagon alarm, political war cry, or recent horror from the imaginative laboratories of the American Medical Association. We are ignorant, inadequate, unworthy, unnecessary, unlovable, unacceptable, vulnerable to the plunder of the opposition party, vulnerable to the ravages of endless disease, subject to the horrors of hell on death, and we smell bad.

All the needed correctives can be had, of course, by our proper response to the cultural priests dispensing the commodities of salvation. Or if none of this suffices our particular bent of mind, then we should cook up some healing salves of our own to peddle and not stand around complaining.

The great accusers—governments, businesses, Pentagons, CIAs, churches, schools—jails have always been with us in some guise and may always be. These things are culture, and they are self-perpetuating. For every young person trying to “drop out,” a dozen thoroughly programmed, well-acculturated students quietly go ahead training to sustain the system. The dropout makes news, but he makes no changes and he has nowhere to go.

Though they change vestments with ease, the cultural priests have never changed functionally, nor can they. Our contemporary culture is maintained, however, by convincing you that you can change things. Our culture convinces you that you can “throw out the rascals in Washington,” or wherever, or the robber barons or the egghead liberals, and by your energy help redress the wrongs. Our culture survives by keeping you filled with the hope for change and the notion that everything can be changed.

A person is considered “normal” or properly acculturated when fear and guilt are his norm and buffers to such “natural conditions” are his life pursuit. Most people who fault culture are convinced that great remedial changes are in the offing. This always means better buffers for all. These activities leave the central issue carefully untouched and spin the merry-go-round even faster.

That we are left only with our intellect as “protection” against a hostile cosmos, and that our intellect is a semantic creation, with semantics subordinate to and supportive of the cultural process, brings us full circle.

This circular definition of reality can be summed up as the death concept. Every accusation of guilt is a threat of death in some guise: death of one’s self-image, hopes of fulfillment, sexual prowess, attractiveness, security, ease, comfort, health, and on it goes.

Literal death is threatened indirectly. The war makers threaten death at the hands of the current enemy unless we properly prime the death machines with our energies and money; the disease makers threaten, in fact guarantee, death from every latest death fad, should the counter-actions not be sought (regardless of staggering cost); the lawmakers promise more penalties and stuff the overstuffed prisons; the scientists assure us of death, not just of our life but of all life. If the big bang must be abandoned, there is the New Black Hole. Or as a last resort, though dull, there is always the second law of thermodynamics to fall back on, to get everything and everybody in the end. Insurance companies remind us of our death in the form of the worse fate for those left behind—should we fail to apportion those companies their fair share of our energies and toil. The preachers remind us of our death and the fate of our elusive souls should we be the spiritual equivalents of high school dropouts.

Yet death is strangely taboo. Even as there is no greater current guilting than not sending your “loved one” to the death factory to be drugged into his or her personal oblivion, doctors will have little to do with death. Such is for nurses and orderlies and the machinery of the “intensive care ward” (probably the most macabre device of all twentieth-century nightmares). And all of us willingly give over our responsibilities and surrender to the death profession, lest we should have actually to feel, touch, see death itself. We give in to guilting and allow no one the right and dignity of dying his or her own death. To enter consciously into that last great adventure has become anathema.

The drugged dispensing is followed by a final obscenity, the undertaker and his “embalming.” “We make them look so real,” one ad ran, in the odd pretense that it hasn’t really happened. And then the “ever-lasting plot of ground” marked with marble memorial—“show that you really care.” “Memories are all you have now, you know.”

Guilting focuses all attention on the cultural context and leaves no place to hide. Guilting brings on judgment of neighbor against neighbor, family member against member, government against government: each dispensing equal executioners periodically to uphold their just decrees, and so on throughout the whole globe.

Culture requires an inordinate amount of energy to maintain itself. (Don Juan claimed that the cultivation of well-being required no more energy than the maintenance of our disease.) Culture is the most jealous of gods. Fear and isolation are held as our natural state, inflicted on us by a hostile universe. “You can’t change human nature,” the Naked Ape proponents chime. Contexts can be changed, however, and all energy must be expended toward that end. Any move toward centering is suspect.

Every breakdown in our buffers to despair is an opportunity for embracing that despair. To be in despair is to be without hope. Don Juan and Jesus live without hope. Hope is futuristic. The whole man lives in the eternal moment of now, and needs nothing more. Psychiatry, like religion, is designed to reinstate one’s buffers should they collapse. Psychiatry is the priest standing at the door allowing no one entry to the Kingdom. The psychiatrist mediates for one until one’s mediation devices can be restored. Psychiatry, as religion, buffers against despair. (Ronald Laing caught a glimmering of this, but apparently, as did Luther, drew back from the awesomeness of the implications.)

Culture is hope. Hope keeps one contextually oriented. Any move toward centering is suspect, since only the eccentric man, off balance and outside himself, is predictable and controllable. Nothing so upsets the bishop as the rumor of a saint in his parish.