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“Democracy vs. Fundamentalism” know-how
by Antonio Rossin – Oct. 24, 2006
When a child
comes into the world the first authority she
senses, for understandable survival necessities,
is her mother. We can reasonably assume as the
more basic communication patterning the child
learns and gets imprinted with, the hierarchic
mother/child relationship.
Very soon a second authority enters the child’s
world: her father. Consequently a further
element influences the language mediated
hierarchic relationship that the child is
learning and being imprinted with. This
particular element depends on the particular way
her mother and her father communicate together.
Two basic options of this way can be considered:
1. Father and mother question each other in a
peer-to-peer relationship. The child won’t
detect and imprint any super-authority over the
first one she learned basically.
2. The mother submits her own personality and
opinions to the male parent’s super-authority,
by never questioning but always obeying it. This
implies that the attending child is bound to
learn – and becomes imprinted accordingly – that
here is a super-authority that transcends the
mother’s and cannot be questioned even but
always obeyed, beyond any understandable
survival purpose.
Let’s agree, the strength by which the
fundamentalist trait imprints into the child
parallels that of the male-dominated hierarchy
by which her parents perform their daily family
relationships at the very delicate age – zero to
three – in which she is learning both language
patterning and language mediated social
hierarchy linked together, and from that age
onwards. Vice versa, if the way her parents
relate together were lined up to the utmost
gender parity, reciprocal respect and dialectic
confrontation of opposite opinions, the child is
expected to learn and develop critical thinking,
the ability to question the authority and to put
flexible behaviours into action according to her
own individual responsibility,
self-consciousness and flexible thinking. (1)
Accordingly, fundamentalism in children – future
adult people – goes together with a male
dominated family and social hierarchy. No wonder
then if all religions are male dominated.
Actually, parents and educators have two options
– let’s call one of them “ Democracy” and the
other “ Fundamentalism” – at their disposal in
order to feed-back their children’s mindframe
self-fixing since babyhood. They should be
informed properly, in any country of the world.
With this aim, an European project is being
launched on this topic. (2)
Today’s religious fundamentalism is known as the
worst threat to the survival of humankind.
Yet, for fundamentalism to succeed, the
male-female hierarchy looks educationally
mandatory in parenting. Usually, within most
fundamentalist countries, such a gendered
hierarchy is imposed by force onto mothers and
women. But we also know that there are women an
mothers who still ignore that the origin of
fundamentalism depends on themselves so that
they voluntarily undergo the male dominated
family hierarchy even if they had the chance not
to do it. This raises a trivial question that is
not being addressed any where in the media or on
the Internet. The question is: how can our
Western countries hope to provide democracy,
liberty, and justice to the Middle East and
elsewhere in the world if we do not first
provide democracy, liberty, and justice to our
citizens as an example?
Let me conclude with a quote from a Doug
Everingham’s letter:
“ An early entrenched problem is widespread
acceptance of leadership as the highest virtue.
We foster authoritarian, dogmatic cultures based
on holy writ, race, gender, military and
economic power, nationalism and the information
industry. It works fine for training hunting
packs of animals that need to be shown who is
boss, even for competitive team games. It is
disastrous if it dominates our compassion in
child rearing.
We need to alert parents to their key role of
showing infants an example of mutual respect in
the family circle. Each of us needs to be
encouraged to take part in planning within each
one's growing capacities, not to accept
ideologies as unquestionable authority. In
developed countries this flexible thinking is
most tragically lacking in our first tree years
when language patterns and other habits of
interpersonal exchange are absorbed and tend to
bias our later thinking or hold back our social
maturity. This education long before school
years may be crucial.
Growing violence and drug misuse are problems
for parents and role models. Knee-jerk
'remedies' include censoring TV or policing the
Internet. Too late for the worst cases. Dr
Rossin suggests parents are most likely to
consider trying his suggestions first as a
preventive approach to one of the least
confident and least secure fields of parenting
-- drug misuse. His theory might then become a
factor for preventing fundamentalist rigidity in
stress reactions and decision making in a wider
sphere: fanatical militancy, bigotry etc…”
That’s all…
-Antonio
Rossin
Notes:
(1) Details at:
http://www.flexible-learning.org/eng/einstein.htm
(2) Details at:
http://www.flexible-learning.org/eng/objective_flexibility.htm
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