The Psychological Cost of Authoritarianism
A story about indoctrination (Scroll to the end to listen)
Imagine you’re three years old. I don’t know what your life was like when you were three. Chances are you can’t remember, either.
So let’s imagine you were an only child. Your father worked outside the home, and your mother stayed with you. Your dad didn’t talk to you much, and when you tried to engage with him, your mom always reminded you to leave him alone after another long day at work.
You didn’t have any friends unless they were your mom’s friends who visited sometimes. She always expected you to act like an adult, even when she recounted embarrassing things you did and they all laughed like you weren’t standing there, in the frilly frock your mom dressed you in like a doll, dying to be included so you wouldn’t be so lonesome and weird and achey inside.
If one of her friends had a child anywhere close to your age, you broke out in hives of excitement. You almost never had a playmate. Most days, you played with three pretend friends; you spent hours alone with them. Kids usually didn’t want to play with you, no matter how enthusiastically you tried.
Your parents blamed the other kids’ standoffishness on you. You were too much. You tried too hard. You scared them. You were too intense. You came on too strong.
Finally, it was time for you to start kindergarten. You’d be in classes with twenty or so kids. You could leave your pretend friends behind and make some real ones, right? For weeks, you fantasized about the new flesh-and-blood friends you would have.
The school your parents chose was religious. Everything revolved around God and Jesus and the Ten Commandments and being good and listening to the pastor and avoiding sin. These rules were more important than listening to other kids or being flexible or getting along with your classmates. It was your job to be perfect, or at least better than them.
Any time you found fault with the Bible, you were told not to question. If you pushed, your teachers held you up as a bad example in class; they embarrassed you in front of your peers; or they punished you.
And if you were punished at school, you were also punished at home.
As you grew, male teachers taught your boy classmates to laugh at you when you opened your mouth. You were told your body caused all kinds of problems for boys, and it was up to you to save them from themselves, which is why the school shoved you into dresses by fourth grade.
You still didn’t have any real friends. You were too busy paying attention to what box you were supposed to be in to be deemed “good enough.” You were inflexible and snooty and judgmental; somehow, you were always losing friends, and you didn’t understand why. You always did what the pastor and your teachers and your parents told you to do: Be good; study; make good grades; want godly things; don’t compromise. Why did that make everyone dislike you?
The church and school had unwritten lists of things you could and could not say as a girl. In seventh grade, you had to sign another long list of things you’d refrain from doing because they displeased God. You broke a few rules but were mortified of being caught.
You saw what happened to classmates who got caught. Paddlings. Suspensions. Expulsion. Being paraded in front of the whole school to have your sins recounted before you apologized. A few girls were even forced to sit in a special place in church because they were pregnant teenagers. Everyone pointed them out as harlots and hussies, stared at them, and talked about them behind their hands. Including you. Because if you condemned them, maybe you wouldn’t become them.
By the time you graduated, you were a model student. So prudish and inflexible and repressed, you were practically untouchable. You didn’t have a single close friend in your graduating class. You never pondered how this could be your fault, because you were doing what the Bible said. You were a godly Christian young lady, uncompromising in your commitment to the Bible and God’s directives.
This broken radar for making connections and understanding people will follow you for the rest of your life. You’ve done a lot of work on yourself, but you are still one of the loneliest people you know.
As I listened to Tato Torres, a Doctor of Clinical Psychology and Family Therapist, talk last week, I relived a lot of my childhood. I came home and cried for the little girl who had no friends, who tried so hard to be good, who joyfully embraced the rigid boxes she was indoctrinated to occupy.
I was doomed even before my parents put me in Christian Nationalist kindergarten, because I was practically always alone. I never learned how to share or play or listen or get along with other kids. I certainly never learned how to negotiate or compromise.
I’m not unlike millions and millions of broken Americans, people who grew up in incubators for authoritarian thinking. Or the millions more red-state public school children Christo-fascist Republicans are itching to make into another generation of stunted, broken souls by denying them trained school counselors for therapy, forcing them to read the Ten Commandments, denying them sex education and blaming them when they become pregnant, then forcing children to have babies, and shaming them for who they or their families are.
According to Tato, children between 3 to 6 yrs of age learn to listen with their parents’ support. They learn how to talk with others, to play, and to share with others. It is through playing and home and social rituals and activities that they learn to share and listen and negotiate with others.
This is where they learn how to compromise. Or where they learn to become inflexible authoritarians who psychologically abuse the rest of us.
People ask me all the time how I could have been indoctrinated. THIS IS HOW. From a very young age, I wasn’t given the tools to develop normally. I was isolated at home, at church, and at school. I was only rewarded when I occupied the “right” boxes. I was relentlessly ridiculed, gaslit, shunned, and punished when I refused. I was taught that compromise was a sin that displeased God.
Tomorrow, we will drill into the traits that attract people to the authoritarian leaders of Project 2025. We will compare and contrast those traits with specific examples from my Christian Nationalist upbringing to demonstrate how so many Americans have grown into adults who are willing to jettison democracy. By the end of the week, I hope we’ll all be thinking of ways we can dismantle this programming so that it never happens again.
But I can already name one: STOP VOTING FOR CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST REPUBLICANS AT EVERY LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT. We don’t have a hope of repairing this psychological damage if we give them power to keep inflicting it on future generations.
This entire election is already ruining my life.
There is no escape and there will be even less when the Bloated Yam is back in power.
How we forgive them is to remember that people have their own individual problems and most of us are just working through life as best as we can. That’s why I feel very strongly that it is our responsibility to lift others up. Who knows when I might need the hand.
People are often envious of wealth. But wealth doesn’t equal happiness. It’s gratitude. Looking outward often fixes the stuff we have going on inside. I didn’t realize my family was barely getting along financially because we had each other and our dreams.