Authoritarianism is a sickness.

[hunter]

109. Parents often pass authoritarianism onto their children.

I was raised to "Question Authority," even to push back and disrupt it whenever it became abusive, or to flee if the fight became hopeless.

That's probably why most of my ancestors came to the United States and why they often ran into the wilderness just as soon as their feet touched the ground. Most of them didn't leave any official records of their arrival. Entire crews abandoned ship in San Francisco, for example, and many of those ships are still there buried beneath the city.

The most interesting thing to me is how religion played a part in it. Claims of human authority could be canceled out of any moral equation by direct appeal to God.

The authorities are telling me one thing, God is telling me another. I think I'll go with God here...

Mostly that worked pretty well as this God is the "love your neighbor, don't kill him or steal his stuff," sort of God, with all those rules superseded by the "you're not somebody else's stuff, you belong to God" sort of God.

Wives and children are not the property of their husbands, workers are not the property of their bosses, and slavery is evil.

One of my ancestors escaped authoritarian Europe as a mail order bride. Unfortunately she ended up in Salt Lake City as one of multiple wives. The Mormons were convinced that polygamy was okay with God, but she was not. So she ran away with a U.S. government surveyor and established a wilderness homestead.

Certainly it may have been God telling her to do that, a conflict with her own religious beliefs, but more immediately she didn't like sharing a husband with other women in a patriarchal authoritarian society. Running off with the dashing young explorer must have seemed a wonderfully romantic and exciting thing to do. It's unknown if their first kid was the offspring of temporary Mormon husband or her forever husband, and it doesn't matter.

One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is some rather twisted beliefs about punishment. Authoritarians train their children to accept punishment, and they use punishment as a tool to enforce conformity to their authoritarian social structures. Some children rebel and escape these structures, but many grow up to become authoritarians themselves.

My own childhood was more of an anarchy than anything else. Neither punishment nor reward were used as tools of behavior modification. I don't respond to either. Every day was full of random shit and random reward, true hunter gatherer style.

Some days you get the sweet berries and salmon, some days the bears chase you away. I probably would have benefited from a little more family social structure, two of my siblings ran off when they were sixteen because there was just too much chaos in the household, but I do know that an authoritarian household would have likely destroyed me or set me loose on the world as a fifteen year old street kid. (My own runaway siblings got good jobs and found neat, very quiet places to live. How boring!)

Part of any family culture is genetic and the family culture adapts to the genetics.But I also think there are some authoritarian family cultures that are malignant and abusive and passed on from generation to generation.