Reply #11: I think Alice Miller comes as close as anyone to identifying some root causes of evil

[MikeH]

Hi Peggy. My post here is in response to what you said in your post:

I am waiting
For our people to find the causes of evil instead of punishing it


The Swiss writer and psychotherapist, Alice Miller, in her books and on her web sites, deals with the issue of child abuse and mistreatment, and the long term consequences of such abuse and mistreatment.

I myself had a very difficult father, who did some very good things, but who at times bordered on being abusive, especially emotionally and psychologically. It was an important milestone for me to realize that much of my father's behavior was actually abusive and disrespectful; i.e. it was not just something wrong with me that I had problems with him and was often angry at and resented things he said and did, which anger and resentment spilled out into other areas of my life, and toward other people. I have found the perspective provided by Alice Miller to be very helpful.

Here is what she says in an article titled The Roots of Violence are NOT Unknown:

1. The development of the human brain is use-dependent. The brain develops its structure in the first four years of life, depending on the experiences the environment offers the child. The brain of a child who has mostly loving experiences will develop differently from the brain of a child who has been treated cruelly.

2. Almost all children on our planet are beaten in the first years of their lives. They learn from the start violence, and this lesson is wired into their developing brains. No child is ever born violent. Violence is NOT genetic, it exists because beaten children use, in their adult lives, the lesson that their brains have learned.

3. As beaten children are not allowed to defend themselves, they must suppress their anger and rage against their parents who have humiliated them, killed their inborn empathy, and insulted their dignity. They will take out this rage later, as adults, on scapegoats, mostly on their own children. Deprived of empathy, some of them will direct their anger against themselves (in eating disorders, drug addiction, depression etc.), or against other adults (in wars, terrorism, delinquency etc.)

Her book For Your Own Good (a phrase my father very often used) documents the horrific upbringing recommended by child rearing manuals of past centuries, in particular one which was very popular in Germany in the late 1800's and early 1900's, at the time when those who would become perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust were young children. She documents that all of the perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust, as far as she could tell, had very "strict" upbringings, and she has an entire chapter on Hitler, documenting how he was constantly abused and tormented by his father.

In another article titled The Political Consequences of Child Abuse she has this to say (scroll down to near the end of the article):

In the lives of all the tyrants I examined, I found without exception paranoid trains of thought bound up with their biographies in early childhood and the repression of the experiences they had been through. Mao had been regularly whipped by his father and later sent 30 million people to their deaths, but he hardly ever admitted the full extent of the rage he must have felt toward his own father, a very severe teacher who had tried through beatings to "make a man" out of his son. Stalin caused millions to suffer and die because even at the height of his power his actions were determined by unconscious infantile fear of powerlessness. Apparently his father, a poor cobbler from Georgia, attempted to drown his frustration with liquor and whipped his son almost every day. His mother displayed psychotic traits, was completely incapable of defending her son and was usually away from home either praying in church or running the priest's household. Stalin idealized his parents right up to the end of his life and was constantly haunted by the fear of dangers that had long since ceased to exist but were still present in his deranged mind. The same might be true of many other tyrants. The groups of people they singled out for persecution and the rationalization mechanisms they employed were different in each case, but the fundamental reason behind it was probably identical. They often drew on ideologies to disguise the truth and their own paranoia. And the masses chimed in enthusiastically because they were unaware of the real motives, including those operative in their own biographies. The infantile revenge fantasies of individuals would be of no account if society did not regularly show such naive alacrity in helping to make them come true.