Life, Love, and Liberty

Aster of Wellington says what I was thinking:

I would also point out the continuity of this sort of child prison brutality with the generally accepted patterns of childraising in general. While reading through this chronicle of abuses I couldn’t help but think that it sounded like a compilation of all the things I’ve seen or heard parents do or threaten to do to ‘their own’ children.

Conservatives often say that ‘criminals are just children who never grew up’- i.e., that ‘civilisation’ is the project of breaking the stubborn will of the stubborn natural barbarism of children. In this view, which is obviously linked to Christian notions of original sin (or equivalent ideas in other authoritarian religions and moralities), ‘making people behave’ is precisely ABOUT beating them down into submission- ‘productive citizens’ being those beaten down enough, and ‘respectable’ people being those who have accepted repression and control as the norm. According to this view, there is a natural link between the proper treatment of children and criminals- the first have noy yet, and the second have failed to, internalise discipline adequately.

Of course under such a system there can never really be too much discipline, or any real objection to brutality. This is the same mentality which justifies torture- and insofar as the ideology of racism is linked very strongly with the perception of nonwhites as ‘half-devil and half-child’ (i.e., less naturally self-disciplined than white people), it’s very strongly linked to racism. And of course this psychology is the natural corollary of oppressive systems as such, which of course function primarily by pressing people to do things they just plain hate to do.

But none of it is comprehensible aside from a certain view of human beings- as bad things which need to be made ‘moral’ by constant orders and harangueing… and a certain institutional treatment of children. I personally don’t see this torture camp as something distinct from ‘normal’ childraising- it is merely a more extreme form of the way children are usually treated by conservatives. I think this kind of atrocity is implicit whenever one’s natural approach to evil is to yell and moralise and shame.

~ Comment on Charles Johnson’s blog

Well, I wasn’t thinking of it exactly in those terms, but I wholeheartedly support her message! I am a staunch unschooler who supports the right of children to decide how they want to learn.

For liberty!

For happiness!

For children too!

I will be writing more on these issues in the future. I strongly believe that the libertarian and anarchist movements must understand that context matters. In this case, the context that children grow up in will have an effect on the type of society we live in. If you believe that the “good” comes from discipline with children, then you will be more likely to believe that the “good” comes from discipline meted out to adults by other authority figures.

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