THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICAN CONTROL FREAKS

Immersion in mini-cults or in a cult-like atmosphere results in groupthink, authoritarian behaviors, and a lack of critical thinking

Attitudes of Superiority or Inferiority Are Learned and Practiced

Labels such as “control freak”, “narcissist”, “paranoid personality”, etc., are constantly being applied carelessly or inappropriately by ordinary people in this current environment in the 21^st century, with far too many amateur psychologists or critics and angry family members, coworkers, friends, or politicians who believe they have the ability to accurately diagnose others and who have no hesitation about doing so. One should use multiple grains of salt when hearing such labels, and we should all use greater constraint in casually or speciously attaching psychological traits and labels to people.

Psychology and psychiatry are not parlor games and should not be practiced without sufficient knowledge, especially when the consequence is treating someone poorly or discriminating against them according to sloppy and unprofessional evaluations. One should study psychology or psychiatry formally to know what one is talking about if categorizing people is something which one finds interesting and worthwhile.

Having expressed the above disclaimers, it can be correctly stated that there are indeed too many people in influential positions and in positions of power at the beginning of the 21^st century who could be called control freaks, and almost certainly more than ever before, without stretching that label too far. We have in the US and elsewhere in the developed world a surfeit of people who have pronounced authoritarian tendencies, who exhibit a conspicuous desire to control others, (and who in many cases are obsessed with self-control, as well, I believe). The reasons for this are complex and not particularly well understood. But we need to start somewhere, and we must make certain changes to alter the landscape before we will be able to reverse this treacherous trend, if it is not already too late. You can be confident in calling Trump an insane sociopath, by the way.

It is not just the sanctimonious Republicans, Christian nationalists, white supremacists, free market fanatics, or bigoted and moralistic police who have a strong penchant for control though. It is the HOA that patrols the neighborhood for grass that is uncut or not green enough. It is the editor who automatically rejects any submission not in APA style or in the correct font. It is the anti-vaxer or the health fanatic who scolds family, coworkers, or strangers for occasional diet lapses or inadequate exercise routines. It is the corporate landlord who causes a sticker to be placed on a vehicle that is leaking a few drops of oil daily on the parking lot pavement, threatening to have it towed within 48-hours if not removed, and without any other notice, option, or mercy.

People with authoritarian personalities may remain in a state of latency if they do not ever achieve a position with the ability to exert much power over anyone. Nevertheless, such individuals usually tend to make life miserable for others and they typically try to find ways to force others to bend to their will in various devious ways (commonly known as manipulation, often with much success). The behaviors and attitudes are learned and are usually reinforced through many potent experiences. Once they gain control over others, they are likely to be aggressive in exercising that control and in attempting to expand their reach.

A confirmed authoritarian who reaches a high level of power over large numbers of people generally has little if any restraint on the use of that power. Ordinarily they will not stop in their pursuit of increasing levels of power and domination until stopped by some greater authority, or in the case of political leaders, through the expression of strong decisive and direct public sentiment in opposition. We have, unfortunately, not been able to draw clear lines of distinction between the kind of necessary authority which is arbitrary, but which tends to degrade into capricious and excessive authority (to be used extremely judiciously), and that which is based on a solid rational framework of well-grounded criteria, standards, and defined rules and which is never arbitrary or capricious (typically institutionalized with clear boundaries and limits).

There are cycles or pendulum swings in either direction regarding authoritarianism which have permeated societies throughout history. But certain circumstances have combined in recent decades to swing that pendulum towards both more authoritarians and towards more willing followers of such forceful and demanding people than anytime in recorded history. The list of factors causing this extended swing is long, and books have been written about some of them. No attempt will be made here to catalogue them all.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s there were changes happening which were especially threatening to conservative people. They reacted as reactionaries most often do, with fear and loathing. Some of the hugely important factors leading toward the desperate advocacy for increased social control were the backlash to progress made advancing civil rights for minorities and particularly to the integration of public schools after Brown v. Board, as well as the restrictions on public prayers in governmental spaces and especially in schools, along with declining church attendance and rumors of a “sexual revolution”.

One prominent factor which is recognized by scholars as significantly leading to excessive domination by big business and corporations and increasing authoritarianism in the US was the “Powell Memo” drafted by Lewis Powell. Powell was a corporate lawyer who became a Supreme Court Justice in 1972. He believed that the “free enterprise system” was under attack by liberal forces and social activists or “socialists”. He was behind the organization of radical right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council). His famous memo has suddenly become very relevant.

Powell had become convinced that conservative voices and influences were being drowned out and was alarmed by the (erroneous) impression that there were liberal, progressive, atheist, anti-capitalistic, socialist, or licentious ideas flooding and overtaking the entire country perniciously. It is hard to imagine a more consistent postulate in conservative and conventional thought than the scary theme of society being engulfed by the ostensibly dangerous tendencies among unrestrained or liberated humans toward disorder and permissiveness. Anxiety-prone people who lean toward high levels of authoritarian control and who consistently identify as conservative fret constantly about the lack of discipline or the need for a potent authority to keep others in society from self-destruction or from the destruction of the systems of productive and organized society.

Powell was inspired ostensibly by Russell Kirk who was called the “father of the conservative movement” who had earlier been considered a fringe figure in his predictions claiming that prosperous and liberated working people and the middle class would soon diminish the influence of the conservative and religious right (which was represented primarily by the upper-class wealthy and privileged elites). Kirk published the book, “The Conservative Mind” in 1953, which was largely ignored until the 1970’s.

Obedience to authority is a prime directive for those who are solidly conservative, even as they mouth words like freedom, liberty, and democracy. In this article, the primary focus will be on a different but closely related factor which has been largely overlooked. We will show how public schooling has become the perfect soil in which to grow both authoritarian personalities and passive, obedient followers.

Illegitimate Authority – the Rule Now, Rather Than the Exception

There does not appear to be any doubt that we are currently awash in systems in which individuals are subject to control by illegitimate authorities and bureaucrats, some of whom clearly qualify as authoritarians or as control freaks. Possibly one of the best sources for a thorough and illuminating discussion on this topic is the book, “Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian – Strategies, Tools, and Models”, by Bruce E. Levine (2018).

While Levine leans toward an anarchist philosophy, he does not appear to be an extremist, or a zealot, and he is not preaching against some conspiratorial and imaginary “deep state”, “big government”, nameless “government bureaucracy or administrative state”, or “socialism”. He identifies many incidental and intentional ways in which our lives are regulated by control-oriented people who have distressing levels of power or authority over us and which seems to increase by the day and is clearly not justified.

I believe that Levine’s book reveals that morbid power and wealth come more from unregulated capitalism, excessively conventional thinking on the part of functionaries in institutions and corporations, and from supposed experts or professionals who presume or pretend to have knowledge and abilities which they do not actually possess, if I recall his analyses correctly. He speaks primarily about the high priests of academia and of managerial types who are obsessed with rules and promoted under the Peter Principle. He is not a libertarian in my opinion. Anyone who is self-respecting, and who is capable of critical thinking has probably become aware of the ubiquity of these kinds of problems.

It's All in the Family

At a more fundamental level, historians and scholars have discovered or deduced, almost certainly accurately, that authoritarian ideation and habits are originally derived from an archaic psychological phenomenon known as the “Strict Father Metaphor”. That is a prototypical relationship within traditional family units beginning from the earliest societies studied in which the male (father) nearly always exerts a degree of dominance over the female and the children in the unit, or often as a patriarch in the extended family in patrilineal societies.

That male dominance is attributed to a larger average physical size and strength, a role as protector, and most likely a status within communities which typically elevates certain males as leaders, fighters, or authorities. Matrilineal societies are less common in which women take on more significant roles, but who may exercise authority, which may confer similar power over family units and groups. Primogeniture (first born) or birth order and success in mating and fathering large broods have also been important factors in establishing social dominance leading to positions of authority and control.

Male authority has become formalized and institutionalized in groups via tradition and more permanently through religious beliefs or superstitions. The Judeo-Christian deity is male, and it or “he” has been part of the religious doctrine to regard men as the exclusive leaders of the synagogue or church for centuries. The notion that the people or “the masses” need a powerful person to control, protect, and guide them flows directly out of these ancient and anachronistic traditions. Oddly enough, a feeling of inferiority, smallness and weakness, or having been in a position of subservience has driven some men (and a very few, rare women) to develop a Napoleonic complex in which they brutally and obsessively acquire power and abuse authority as a compensatory measure. Trump appears to fit into this category to a large extent.

Authority is NOT the Problem or the Cause of Authoritarianism

Legitimate authority is in fact an indispensable feature of having a safe, stable, organized society. Anarchy assumes a type and level of innocence and perfection which have never been observed among humans. Anarchy will never evolve into a system whereby there will be no need for authority to balance the interests of all people with a measure of fairness and equality. Rules, norms, and laws create an environment in which citizens can survive and thrive without exploitation or inordinate domination by one person or entity. A society without rules and enforced norms is not a society. There must be enforcement mechanisms and controls to preserve and protect the orderly actions and interactions of the whole group and to prevent inequality, violence, discrimination, or abuse.

One of the primary functions of legitimate authority is to establish systems in which authority is not abused and where no individual, family, or group has the opportunity to establish a dynasty or to exercise authority on a level which oppresses those within its influence and control. Our founders designed the first complex governmental system which has come close to providing those conditions and protections, which has aspired to operate in perpetuity.

Unfortunately, there was no way to guarantee that devious actors and unwitting leaders would not ultimately undermine the devices and mechanisms the founders developed for limiting power and abuses of power. The Supreme Court has been a weak link, assuming or boldly ascribing to themselves inordinate authority, the executive has been too jealous of the power held by the other branches, and the Congress has been too easily distracted, corrupted, diluted, and compromised.

The weakest link of all it turns out, however, is the education of we the people. We have prided ourselves on having the best schools and we have tried to ensure that education is universal. We have believed our own fantastic stories and pretended that school failures are negligible or easily correctible. Denial and delusion have been our downfall or at the very least are taking us perilously close to our downfall. Our schools do NOT accomplish their stated mission even minimally. In too many instances, they do irreparable harm. Moreover, a mythology has prevailed which endlessly echoes a deceptively glorified vision of the traditional schools.

It is not by accident that Levine devotes a great deal of attention to academics and those who have inordinate or illicit authority over schools, children, and what we call systems of education, as well as those in the professions of medicine and health who deal with and diagnose mental health or disease. He points out how invented conditions, such as “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” and ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) listed in the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) are used against beleaguered children whose healthy and normal reactions to controlling and oppressive school conditions regularly pit them against the rules and authorities. He very sensibly rails against the crime of using drugs to mollify and pacify children, instead of officials and professionals doing what needs to be done to correct the misanthropic, counterproductive, and self-defeating circumstances into which so many children are forced.

Levine has many other examples in his book. Teens and young adults who are not yet mature, who are in the process of becoming independent of parental or school supervision, who are discriminating, critical of systems, and daring to skirt laws in their experiments or explorations with defiance and deviation frequently find themselves victimized by a brutal justice system which is often unjust and unforgiving of youthful indiscretions. Authority and control are given too easily and indiscriminately to people willing to play the certification or accreditation game to acquire “badges”. He refers to authority titles, such as probation and parole officer, truant officer, psychiatrist, and board member as badges. These badges and powers are misused routinely and often become part of networks of conspirators against unwitting or innocent individuals.

An Unintended Lesson of Teaching, When Teaching is the Main Focus

“I think one of the problems [with raising intelligent children in modern society] is compulsory schooling...and that children are sitting there, and they are taught and told what to believe; they are passive from the very beginning – and one must be very, very aggressive intellectually to have a high IQ [...] the child is taught. Right from the beginning, it's a passive process. He or she sits there, and they simply try to believe everything they're told?”

Marilyn Vos Savage (reputed to have an IQ of 228 – highest ever recorded)

Most students develop a great admiration for their teachers over a period of months or years. Many eventually come to feel strong feelings that can only be called love for dedicated and effective teachers, most who make sacrifices and who love their students dearly. Even when teachers have been extremely demanding, intolerant, or somewhat abusive, children frequently experience gratitude or love when they finally move to the next grade or graduate in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of dynamic.

Whether those students actually learned more or became better people as a result of rigidity and sometimes severe criticism is highly debatable. However, the unrecognized effect in most instances is an overly accepting orientation toward authority on the part of many children. “The child is taught” as Savage says. Their mindset is passive. The authority they have seen modelled leads them to perceive it as some level of needed dependence. They are awed, trusting, and their faith in the concept of authority and in the personal potency of authority figures is heavily reinforced for twelve long years.

For the typical student after twelve years, obedience has become their default mode, an unconscious conditioned reflex, a strong positive value, and a way of life. Those who rebel often quickly regret it and revert to old habits feeling guilty and ashamed. Classes too easily take on a quasi-cult nature under compulsory attendance, which necessitates a hierarchical and unyielding system.

We have dual problems in schools. One is the emphasis on teaching, as opposed to a clear unitary focus on learning, on students, and on their own initiatives and curiosity as being much more central and important in the process. The other is that teachers are ‘authority figures’ whose authority is not based as much on knowledge, competence, skill, and concern for the student, as it is on brute power and control which is arbitrary and therefore, fatally compromised. This is immutable. This is the sclerotic, established law.

Autonomy MUST ordinarily take a back seat. Curiosity and intrinsic reward and learning MUST play second fiddle. There are always those supposedly indispensable authorities looking over the teacher’s shoulder to be satisfied, pacified, and obeyed. Rather than education and opportunity to learn and grow as autonomous people, students are programmed and propagandized. We then have as an inescapable result pseudo-education which does great harm. Classes begin to resemble cults, and school is a cult.

Even as the popularity of homeschooling and privatizing schooling with schemes such as vouchers and charter schools have increased, the great majority of children in the US still attend public schools. The proportion of teachers who are big school boosters and who frequently enthusiastically reiterate the wonderful benefits of schooling and the need for compliance with their mandates is surely still somewhere in the high-nineties range. Most parents obligingly repeat the mantra, also.

This is the mantra. Children are forced to attend. Ergo, school must be good for them, they must be persuaded to go and participate, and those who do not do well must be failures. A reality for students is heavily reinforced in which it is absolutely essential to sit, pay attention, perform as directed, answer all the questions, speak only when spoken to, and memorize the material verbatim. The teachers and school personnel are the authorities. End of story. This is the way it is, and this is the way the adult world operates. So, they MUST all learn the rules and be willing to obey and follow orders.

We have lacked the imagination to believe that this does not accurately model the real world and does not equip students to design and live in a world which could be much better. The student is subservient; take it or leave it. Pay the consequences if you leave it. Knowledge is what the people in charge say it is, and nothing beyond that. No one should be at all surprised that being disrespected during their formative years has resulted in millions of people who lack self-respect and self-restraint. No one should be surprised that democracy is on life support when democracy is absent in schools.

“The landscape of public society was being reconfigured as thoroughly as the wind was rearranging the physical landscape.”

From “The Children’s Blizzard” by Melanie Benjamin (Comparing social changes happening rapidly in 1888 to the destructive fury occurring during a fierce blizzard in the mid-west).

What we have as a direct consequence of all this is many people who want to be the authorities with that kind of power and influence, and most of the rest who are satisfied to be obedient followers. Those who feel powerless develop no desire or need to think for themselves or to work within the group to find better, more appropriate answers. They have been rendered incapable of creating a new useful exclusive knowledge of their own from life experience, study, and diligent exploration.

The picture of reality one sees is most often a reflection of the reality one has most often seen and lived. For students what they have seen and lived is obsequiousness and servility. What is missing are many more people willing to reject arbitrary authority and who are willing to forge ahead against oppression and exploitation with the confidence that there is a better way. Those are the people who fit the definition of anti-authoritarians.

Levine chronicles several people who he places into the category of anti-authoritarians, whom he praises and admires. Among those are Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, Emma Goldman, Fredrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, George Carlin, Thoreau, and Chomsky, along with several others. The potential list of people who could fit into this category includes innumerable others, just in the last generation who have achieved recognition and fame, and many who have not. I have my favorites, such as Arundhati Roy, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivens, and my own niece who delighted and occasionally shocked everyone with her unique ability to point out the silliness and absurdity of certain social, religious, or family rules and traditions from a very early age in a humorous and captivating way. Sadly, she died last year because of a brain anomaly that was not treatable.

Attendance Law Deprives People of Control – With Awful Consequences

Coercion in schooling is a lose-lose-lose situation. Students and learning are incompatible with control and arbitrary authority. Learning is always the objective; teaching is merely one of several avenues to learning and is seldom the best.

Authority and control are specialty power tools which can be used to build or to tear down. They should only be used sparingly by qualified craftsmen and craftswomen and only when one of the other many tools is not available or effective. They are rechargeable, and the power source used must be of the right size and strength. They should be kept secure in the toolbox and especially in the case of use around children should not be used except by trained professionals or loving parents, and then only when there is no better option.

If one were asked to truthfully describe school as we know it today in one word, the most apt word would not be education, tolerable, or great; the word would be “control”. More than anything else ‘controlled’ and ‘programmed’ define the experience of students in traditional public schools. That is the way it must be under a compulsory paradigm. Compulsion and coercion are appropriate for guard dogs, pigeons, or prisoners, not for aspiring scholars and citizens. As a legal requirement, attendance law must be enforced, and the mere threat of enforcement is hazardous for both teachers and children.

If schools existed for education, the best descriptive words might be “freedom”, or “thinking”, or “growth”. But schools exist primarily to mold and behavior-modify or mollify children. They exist to satisfy the legal requirement that all attend a school and all subject themselves to a cookie-cutter common-core curriculum which is state approved. The state has different and incompatible priorities which are antithetical to intellectual autonomy or education. Using authority of any kind to prescribe and affirm knowledge is inappropriate and fraught with danger.

Marilyn Vos Savant, quoted above, is said to have believed compulsory schooling discourages independent thinking, leaving many unable to navigate counterintuitive problems. As a genius with the highest IQ ever recorded, it might be wise for educators to note that she was one of the few people who has drawn a clear connection between the attendance laws and the chronic debacle which our traditional schools have become.

How is it possible or even thinkable, that in this modern age, that we should have millions – not an exaggeration – millions of children who still feel imprisoned, alienated, or insignificant in our schools every day? How is it possible that the people who are called educators and professionals in the communities, and people who should know better, such as a famous and brilliant progressive talk show host, who blithely still use the terms school and education interchangeably, with no apparent recognition of the miseducation, frustration, and psychological damage which children experience routinely are unable to bring themselves to acknowledge their chronic failures? It is a given that school is about controlling students, dampening and damaging their spirits and their imaginations, and actively discouraging exploration, enthusiasm, and criticality.

What Makes US So Special?

We have allowed ourselves to be so devoted and faithful to the Jeffersonian principle which urges that a well-informed and educated citizenry is essential for democracy to thrive, that we have inadvertently effectively defeated that very ideal. I recently read about half of a biography of John Adams when I switched, and I am currently on page 460 of the excellent biography, “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History”, by Brodie (1974). There has been no mention in either of those biographies of a need or desire to force any child to submit unwillingly to schooling.

The concept of using laws to compel education is total nonsense. Jefferson, for whom individual freedom and dignity was precious and who said, “…a man is a master of his own body and may govern it as he pleases” would surely extend that sentiment to children. He would be appalled at the idea of the induction of children into a grand “educational” scheme confining them involuntarily for a major part of their developmental period.

To force all children to attend schools by law is to make an asinine assumption that we, somehow through our official ‘state’ government apparatus, possess the correct formulae, the proven adequate curricula, and the special cognitive capability of transmitting and delivering the minimal degree of knowledge and information to masses of students in our schools merely because we have made the decision to do so! This is stunning arrogance and a paranoid delusion. This ignores completely the well-documented and inevitable negative effects of exercising phenomenal control over kids.

Laws exist for the express purpose of exercising control. Control, power, authority, engineering, manipulation, and instruction all fall under the category of indoctrination when the state is the legal authority and enforcer. No one should be surprised that this monstrosity has been a spectacular failure, despite the incessant denials and rationalizations. No one should be flummoxed that we are now or are rapidly becoming Control Freaks R Us.

When this kind of overweening control and domination is enshrined into law and children are enveloped by it for their entire youth, it overtakes everyone’s consciousness. It is not merely a choice; it is not just one way of living; it is the way to success and satisfaction. Thankfully, there are good parents and great teachers who do their best to mitigate against these harmful influences. Thankfully, some percentage of children still value personal autonomy and still find ways to escape and to think for themselves. However, the institutions under these destructive laws and conditions get no credit for any of that. We will either wise up to these realities, or we will soon see the end of our democracy and of our freedoms.

In this current environment with this splendid controlling prototype teaching us all proper behavior, why should we not expect to see men who think of women as objects to control? Why should it surprise us that property managers are able to have vehicles towed which are temporarily parked in their lot on the basis of some arbitrary rule? Why then would we object to an insurance company having the power over one’s lifesaving treatment or medication? Why complain when a president orders the investigation of an official who has exposed his wrongdoing or violations of the law and Constitution? They say that those with the gold rule, do they not? We white people score higher on tests, so who can complain if we get the best high-paying jobs?

The entire nation now operates on the same principle as the school. Those in authority get to decide and to have control over others. Only the strong survive. The fittest or most willing to submit get the benefits. Just deal with it. Reality is what they say it is, and nothing more or less. “Knowledge” is power, and power is to be worshipped.