Chapter 2: Filicidal Imperatives
Control / Emulation / Caution /
Dissimulation / Negativity
Filicide:
To support this disturbing thesis, Milburn re-examines a number of the most dominant myths of the Western world--Oedipus, Abraham, Jesus, Hamlet, Faust, and Frankenstein--from the child's point-of-view. Such a perspective yields astonishing results, turning received interpretations of the old stories on their heads. As final proof of the extent to which the filicidal past is not merely still with us but is controlling our behavior in dangerous, unexamined ways, Milburn re-reads more recent narratives of contemporary mythology as embodied in the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Myra Breckinridge. Just one of several paradoxical conclusions: "Before George Washington was, Myra Breckinridge is." A book that challenges ideologies across the board from theology to science, from psychology to politics, Filicide offers hope for readers willing to re-examine some of our most fundamental assumptions in this increasingly unquestioning, theocratic age. Paperback, 178 pp.
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2.FILICIDAL IMPERATIVES The rules of filicide are unwritten, but they are more binding on us all than the terms of any written contract. They are behavioral imperatives operating at such a deep and hidden level that they may be easily mistaken for the human equivalent of animal instinct. A number of observers of the human condition, past and present, have, in fact, concluded that the behavior based on these rules is immutable (human nature), or, if mutable, then only with the greatest effort (will power, discipline, conditioning, psychosurgery, mind-altering drugs). We take these rules and the resultant behavior so much for granted that, in a sense, we have become the rules. It is difficult for us to conceive of ourselves as men and women in any other way except in accordance with the rules of filicidal behavior. We have constructed whole philosophies of life, of government, of science, of art, of religion, to justify and ennoble our filicidal behavior. We may have the ability to be free and the potential to exercise free will. As long as we remain so nearly perfectly amnesiac concerning filicide, such abilities and potentials are merely so much unused, rusting machinery. In pain almost too great to bear--certainly it is too great for our infant minds to deal with directly--we at a very early age forget the two terrible facts of our earliest life: parent as murderer, and child-self as victim. And we forget we have forgotten. We then set about emulating the behavior of our inadvertently murderous parents as we construct amnesiac lives as much like their amnesiac lives as possible. "Maturity," that is, socially respectable and responsible adulthood, becomes an endless series of self-deceptive maneuvers designed to establish and affirm for oneself and one's own time the unconscious belief in filicidal existence as normal and healthy. Out of this double amnesia grows a profound hypocrisy that haunts us all our days and follows us even--especially--into sleep. Filicide, with its concommitant amnesia, results in a splitting not just of the personality but of the very self. In fact, what we call the personality--that is, the persona, the "person" who I think myself to be, this filicidal "me"--is the behavioral entity occupying the visible, public side of that schism of the self. It is an almost robot-like creature whose choices and movements are almost wholly determined by fear. "I" am a defense mechanism, constructed in desperation out of the fear of filicide committed on me and the fear of the memory of that deed. As long as I do not recognize and act on the knowledge of the source of my fear, my desperate search for security and serenity is doomed. It is to this anesthetized, sleeping creature, this part of the larger self, that the platitudes of behaviorism speak with such forceful relevance and validity. The murdered self can only conclude that beyond freedom and dignity lies a wasteland of violent conditioning, because it has never known freedom and dignity. Whatever it is that exists on the other side of the schism of the self, we hide it from other people and from ourselves as well. There one finds those qualities and potentials we occasionally glimpse in the works of genius and in the lives of those whom we call holy or brave or inspired--or mad. Nietzsche spoke in disgust of "the disease called man." The symptoms may be those of disease; but the theory of filicide makes clear that the cause is a prison of our own devising. So great was our perceived guilt that we even came to believe that the sacrifice of a god was required to remove it. The filicidal schism is very nearly perfect. The ever-increasing pain and confusion of our private and planetary lives is eloquent testimony to its near perfection.The schism is imperfect to the extent that, as we have continued to rape ourselves, our children, and the world, we have made some genuine progress in humanitarian behavior. Our private and public consciences still function, though our pain and frustration grow seemingly beyond bearing as our best-intended, most humane efforts are shattered again and again in poisonous explosions of violence. We forget the murderous act which shapes our lives, but we continue to live--automaton-like, perhaps, but we do continue to live. In describing now the filicidal ways in which we live, I will use R.D. Laing's model of "rules." The rules of filicidal behavior are not actually rules as we usually think of the term. Perhaps something like "existential imperatives" would be more accurate, for these "rules" are,in effect, behavioral commands--for the most part nonverbal--"given" to us as infants and children regarding the ways in which we must exist if we are to survive. But even to speak of "existential imperatives," one still risks cataloging, compartmentalizing that which cannot be cataloged and compartmentalized. Our behavior is an organic, synergistic whole which cannot be so reduced without destroying the unity we are trying to understand. To avoid as much as possible the reductive distortions of a list of filicidal rules, I will speak first of the central imperative of filicidal behavior, which is control, and then sketch some of the principal variations on that basic "rule". This list which is no list should in no way be taken as exhaustive. To discuss our actual, real behavior as opposed to our pretended, ideal behavior is to find boxes within boxes within boxes. The best one can hope for with words is to point here and there and say, "Let us look in this box and see what it holds, and then in the box inside that box, and then in the box inside that box inside that box." Like the regress of images between two facing mirrors, the series is infinite and, to the linear mind, disorienting. Fortunately it is not the series but the experience of the perception of the series that is important. It is difficult to speak of our experience of filicide because, while it is universal, it is also universally forgotten. Nothing that I say here about filicide is unknown to any of us. It is just that we have all been a bit absent-minded about one of our basic, formative experiences. In the metaphor, we have forgotten both the perception of the infinite regress as well as the images themselves. In his own delving into the hidden recesses of the politics of the family, Laing discovered the existence not only of unstated "rules" but of unstated "meta-rules." Laing's meta-rules are two in number. The first states that the "rules" do not exist. The second states that neither the existence nor the nonexistence of the rules or the meta-rules is to be thought about or discussed. Here we have the source of our double amnesia. In fear we forget our filicidal experience; in greater fear we then forget we have forgotten. CONTROL The central rule of the behavior which grows out of filicide is: control. Because the central fact of filicide is that it is a controlling act. Homo sapiens, as we know it, as we are it, is the controlling animal. All other rules of filicidal behavior are implicit in the one rule: control. Men and women center their lives around control, though in somewhat different ways. A man is successful to the extent that he directly and consciously controls himself, members of his family, his work, and his world. A man is a failure to the extent that he does not control in this way. A woman is successful to the extent that she indirectly and unconsciously controls herself, members of her family, her household--which is both her work and her world. A woman is a failure to the extent that she does not control in this way. Confusion arises in societies in which the roles develop in such a way that one parent--in this patriarchy it has traditionally been the man--spends large amounts of time away from the home. In such cases the mother not infrequently becomes the de facto center of control. The parent, in committing filicide on the son or daughter, is controlling the son or daughter by literally creating the child's personality in the image of the parent. Filicide is the ultimate possible behavioral control. The primary formative experience of the human being as infant is that the way one gets on in this world is by being controlled, and by controlling. Such intimate interference is only violence in the guise of parental love. The pattern of the lives of humans is thus set very early. As infants we are controlled through some form of physical punishment, ranging from the blatant cruelty of physical pain to the less obvious physical punishment which consists of the withholding of physical affection. As we grow we find ourselves being controlled ever more abstractly by the threat of withheld parental approval of our actions. "Growing up" is a series of tests concerning how well we are learning to be filicidal human beings. As we enter adult society, other rewards--those of status, power, and money--are dangled before us to coax our obedience. Hidden behind those rewards are the threats of adult, societal filicide. The principal agents at the adult level are a primitive police force, and the principal setting is an equally primitive prison system. Our mindless obedience as adults to the unwritten dictates of society springs from the original act of filicidal control by our parents. Our pre-verbal perception of the filicide committed on us all teaches us that our physical survival depends on massive, in fact, organismic capitulation to the demands made on us by our parents. The inequality of the filicidal confrontation--the infant is no match physically or mentally for its parents--has many later ramifications. It produces a civilization built on such peculiar equations as: · bigger = better, · more = better, · faster, higher, longer, newer, etc. = better. In our double amnesia we are constantly and desperately seeking to prove to ourselves and to the world that we are at least as "big" as those creatures who committed filicide on us so long ago. What we are actually seeking to prove is that we are as filicidal, which is to say, as successful at controlling, as they were. It is an impossible quest (as so much of our literature shows); even in our adult bodies we are still acting and reacting unconsciously, in the manner of that infant-child killed in the forgotten past. At the most basic level the self still sees itself as being that small, which means its deeds can never raise it to the stature of the human giants it perceived hovering over it as control was originally established. Our most important product, progress, is therefore ultimately our most frustrating experience. The inequality of size and mental ability in the original filicidal confrontation also produces a society founded on competitiveness as the highest good. Control, if successful, means that somebody wins and somebody loses. There is no sense of shared experience. In the proto-scene there is no sense of parent and child growing together or exploring joyfully the world both inhabit. Parent wins; child loses. And child spends the rest of its life trying to win, never realizing that the parent did not really win but was compulsively continuing the ancient human losing streak. One of the reasons we fear sex so much is that it is a game in which, when well played, everybody wins. For the son, the universal lesson of filicide is: control at any cost. That is, if all other means of attempted control fail, the son is not only justified in resorting to physical control (violence), he is expected to resort to it. The filicidal end--control--justifies any means, up to and including whatever amount of violence is necessary to achieve control. We punish those who are "irrationally" violent (murderers), while we reward and revere those who are "rationally" violent (statesmen and soldiers). In our amnesia we are unaware that everybody loses in the game of violence, that the parent lost just as much as did the child in the act of filicide. We fail to see that any kind of destructive behavior is at bottom self-destructive. Following the insatiable and compulsive need to control, we get to the point where we are today: so nearly perfect has our control become that we have turned the planet itself into a delicately fused nuclear bomb. For the daughter, the universal lesson of filicide is the same: Control at any cost. But the method is different. In this patriarchy a woman's control is necessarily subtler, since her filicide teaches her that she is to be physically and intellectually weaker than the man. Her control has been based traditionally on the assigned "feminine" qualities such as emotionality, coyness, and so on. The tool of her control has been the only negotiable commodity allowed to her: her body. Thus her chief source of power is sex. As the daughter grows up she further learns that her area of control is confined to the home, specifically to the day-to-day details of "raising" the children. All other areas of life are off-limits. When the children have grown up and moved away, the woman is left to become that almost lifeless ornamental figure of devout reverence embodied in the familiar stereotype: Mother. We have many names for control: we manage, we manipulate, we persuade, we coerce, we educate, we enlighten, we advertise, we rape, we fuck, we fight, we kill, we love, we hate, we convert, we capitalize, we ostracize, we imprison, we punish, we fine, we execute, we theorize, we attack, we legislate, we adjudicate, we research, we build, we destroy--all in mindless imitation of the frightening, intimidating, paralyzing, numbing, brutally manipulative act of filicide perpetrated on us before we could begin asking proper questions about the world. All other filicidal imperatives grow out of our need to control. They are variations on the basic theme of control. Developed over the millennia, they are the most effective means to the end of control. In discussing now these other "rules," what we are actually looking at is the best ways to be a successful filicide. Filicide is a double-edged sword. It is the means by which the parent controls the child, and the means by which the child-as-adult controls its life and world, including its own children. EMULATION Given the division and distance between the two sex roles, the child tends to emulate the parent of its own sex. While the miming extends to all areas--gesture, dress, grooming, speech, permissible activities--its basic effect occurs in the way one shapes one's consciousness. Mentally, the emulation imperative comes out something like this: For male children: Be rational, do not be emotional. For female children: Be emotional, do not be rational. The son learns the value of what the culture defines as intelligence as the primary means to the end of control. If the son fails as a man, it is because he was not smart enough. He was dumb. Compulsive rationality is the masculine way of fiiicidal knowledge. Man the thinker keeps his cool, exhibits grace under pressure, thinks before he acts--unless of course he has been trained rationally to act mindlessly, like a soldier, say. This rule comes into occasional conflict with the control imperative, which seems to say: Win at any cost. Through the ages we have learned the value of cooperation as a means to the end of collective control. The amount of pain which such cooperation, especially in this corporate age with its emphasis on teamwork, has caused within masculine souls is incalculable. Every team member has been trained from infancy to aspire to one goal--to be the leader, to be in control. Nowadays we have got to the place where we measure much of our progress and much of our individual success by the extent to which various team members are able to control their desire to control. This suppression produces many of the characteristics of modern living as we know it: behavior based on dissimulation, dishonesty toward oneself and toward others, selfishness, and so on, with all those qualities highlighted by not infrequent outbursts of rage and fury. Where the anger and frustration at having to control one's control remains bottled up, it often surfaces in other self-destructive ways, such as smoking or drinking, not to mention the various hypertensive maladies. For the son the obverse of the rationality rule is: do not be emotionaL Which is to say: freeze. Deny your emotions, your ability to give affection along with your need to receive affection. As the father murders the son by rejecting him as an independent entity and by forcing him into the masculine rnold, the son also murders himself by restricting his method of experiencing and dealing with himself and the world to the ways of rational control. The emotional freeze of masculinity is the specific means by which one isolates oneself from everything in the universe outside one's own rational, controlling consciousness. It is the means by which we create lives and societies characterized by alienation--from self, from other people, from nature. Without the empathy which a growing and healthy emotionality imparts, every person and every object becomes a distant thing to be used, manipulated, and controlled. The masculine ego in its emotional isolation and paralysis can assume only that it is king of all it surveys and then act to the fullest on that assumption. The son compares the way his father behaves toward him physically with the way his mother behaves toward him physically. The father touches very little. The mother touches a great deal. What conclusion can the son draw but that the father's far greater physical distance indicates that the father perceives the son's body as ugly and unlovable? This early impression is confirmed many times over as the son grows and observes how the father deals with his own body and with the bodies of other men, and learns how fathers in the past have dealt with the bodies of other men. The physical distance between father and son combines with the gradual death of the son's emotionality to produce a masculine attitude toward one's body which might best be described--so intense is it--as one of malignant indifference. Only a creature which hates its own body can do, or allow to be done, to other bodies those bloody things men have done and continue to do to each other and to women and children. Not infrequently as one achieves some level of security, masculine alienation becomes so severe that the lives of men are partially directed toward finding ways to overcome the alienation. Our many such attempts, even the cleverest of them, have failed because we have relied on the very behavior which produced the alienation in the first place, that of compulsively rational control. Masculine visions of the end of history tend to be empty. Marx saw literally nothing at the point where the dialectic of history would have at last moved us beyond communism. The word "utopia" is based on Greek roots meaning "nowhere." Whatever Jesus' vision of heaven may have been, we have turned it into a realm of existence in which all but the most vegetable of us would be bored silly. Orthodox masculine rationality is incapable of contemplating or conceiving of the validity of any mode of experience other than its own. For the daughter the central meaning of the emulation imperative is: be emotional. In practice the result is what has been traditionally thought of as typically feminine behavior, ranging from the social mannerism known as "flightiness" to the heavier burden of compulsive emotionality known as "love." The daughter, having at least on the surface abdicated responsibility for her rational and intellectual abilities, becomes the universal source of emotional support and compassion. Daughter-as-woman is supposed to forgive men everything, including our most repulsive and repetitive acts of violence on the bodies of women. Since women cannot think, they are supposed to feel. They are of course not allowed to participate in rational discussions of a crisis, whether these discussions take the form of the man's problems at work or the form of global councils of war. Just as the father's physical distance from the son reinforces a behavior in the son centered on hatred, the mother's physical closeness to the daughter reinforces a behavior centered on love. As the rational qualities of her mind are repressed, the daughter pays more attention to her emotionality and to her body as a tool, a means of expressing herself and her emotions. Women have been fully as involved and implicated as have men in the long process by which they have been turned into sex objects. Each filicide, whether on the son or the daughter, results in behavior so exaggerated that we would surely long ago have died laughing at ourselves if we did not consider the behavior so normal. Masculine behavior is a tragicomic acting out of a very peculiar misapprehension of the nature of genuine rationality. Feminine behavior is a tragicomic acting out of a very peculiar misapprehension of the nature of genuine emotionality. One is tempted to describe the two behaviors as childish. In the terms of filicidal reality they are childish. When we filicides say "childish," we mean something less than human, something mindless, verging on the idiotic. The father freezes the son into a rigid mold of emotionless rational control. The mother smothers the daughter into a rigid mold of nonrational emotional control disguised as weakness and dependence. It is all "childish"--but only as long as we accept the old view of children as nothing more than filicidal adults-in-the-making. That rationality of which we speak here is at best a pseudorationality. Filicidal rrian is so thoroughly indoctrinated into compulsive rationality that he rarely glimpses any possibility that men may also be something other than rational and that that something might be as good as being rational. The son's rationality becomes compulsive and all-consuming. He can't stop thinking. The successful man is a thinking machine, always cool, always planning, always scheming, contriving, coping rationally. We accept this kind of rationality because it promises great things--successful control and thus security--and because it frequently seems to deliver on that promise. The fact that it is a pseudorationality may be seen in two ways--first, in the ever rriore apparent and dangerous flaws in this civilized world our rationality has created; and second, in the lives of individual men who fail, who do not win in the way men are supposed to win. The lower and middle echelons of all occupational hierarchies are filled with the tragic figures of men who, having failed in the rational way of knowledge as it applies to their lives, are left with little to do but live out their days in a kind of zombie-like trance. On the more grandiose level orie sees a similar kind of existential shock in petty tyrants who have fallen off their thrones. Our so-called rationality offers us almost no preparation for anything except the success which presumably comes from exercise of that rationality. One would think it obvious that a genuinely rational approach to life would include attention to one's growth in areas other than that of compulsive rationality--such as those in which one for a time would stop being rational. Obvious examples are those areas of experience conoerning emotional and spiritual growth, yet they are so unknown to men as to be alien and frightening. Our excessive and irrational fear as a society of mind-altering drugs surely stems from an awareness that our much-vaunted rationality is actually a very weak and fragile thing. The traditional rationality of men is of course not rationality at all but an unthinking, compulsive imitation of the father's consciousness, which itself was but an unthinking imitation of his father's consciousness, and so on in infinite regression beyond the beginnings of history. A similar analysis applies to the emotionality of women. Men think of women as weak because they are so emotional. Many women think of themselves as weak for the same reason. Genuine noncompulsive emotionality with its ready laughter and ready compassion is as rare in women as genuine noncompulsive rationality with its symbol-manipulative virtuosity and its joyous games-playing is in men. Yet the potential for such emotionality is just as surely one of our greatest potential sources of health in dealing with the vicissitudes of this life. Emulative confusions abound, a fact which only adds to our difficulties as children in constructing proper filicidal personalities. For a given son, his mother's emotionality may be much more convincing as a way of dealing with the world than is his father's poorly developed rationality. Or for a daughter, her father's rationality may be far more attractive than her mother's flighty emotionality. We all of oourse learn our filicidal lessons from both parents as well as from the society at large. Our individual perception and practice of the combinations and nuances of the various imperatives result in a wide range of private and public behavior which, in practice, often has little direct relation to the sex of a given individual. But all the while we maintain the rigid public pretense that; Dad is a real man, Mom is a real woman, and, depending on whether / have a penis or a vagina, I'm doing my best to be one or the other. CAUTION The principal motivation behind our filicidal behavior is fear. As infants we can perceive the fact that we survive our violent indoctrination into the beginning stages of adulthood only in negative terms. So overwhelming and painful is the enforced adjustment and narrowing of our consciousness by parents and society that we must conclude that the filicidal agents stop short of our physical death not out of love but for reasons as obscure as the reasons for filicide itself. The whole process is so painful and mysterious, and our resultant belief in our own value and integrity so precarious, that our lives from then on are characterized by the exercise of extreme caution. Another of the imperatives is: be careful--all the time. A man is successful to the extent that, as he seeks rational and emulative control, he does not make mistakes. Spontaneity is to be avoided because it is behavior in which control is relinquished. Sex is such a problem for us in part because full sexual release means that for a time one has to give up rational control of oneself. The son learns that spontaneity involving other people is advisable only in circumstances where the behavioral limits are clearly defined. Note, for example, that business law is the only area of legal activity in which all fifty states have adopted the same code. The son learns he may be somewhat more spontaneous in his exploration and exploitation of the world of things (science and technology), because, if you are just a little careful, objects will usually not hit back the way people will. A woman's caution centers initially around her body and her sex. As her sole area of control, her body must be kept ready for her husband. There is a second, terrible area of control which females learn. It concerns the ways in which the woman may fall victim to masculine violence. While the woman may have great sexual power, she must exercise it very carefully. If pushed too far, the man may lose control. In such a case, the nearest woman is likely to be the immediate object of masculine fury in the form of rape or murder--this apart from the fact that such attacks may occur without warning and with no provocation on the part of the woman. Masculine pride is such in this patriarchy that the man can see no limits to the areas of his life where he must exercise caution. Everything is his responsibility (or so he thinks)--at home, at work, internally, externally. The caution of the woman-as-mother is centered in her home and her children. Restricted to that tiny world, the mother is frequently driven to the most extreme forms of possessiveness as a means of fearfully cautious control. For both men and women, the caution rule effectively teaches: Don't trust anyone or anything, including yourself. Without trust, relaxation--mental or physical--is impossible. Which means we come to exist in an uninterrupted state of mental and physical tension. And being unable to trust further means we are unable to love. In the confusing maze of our lives based on these hidden imperatives, the only people we can love are people who have agreed to participate in, or who have already participated in, an intimate filicidal event or relationship with us: our parents, our spouses, and our children. In this reality, "I love you" too often means, "I like to be filicidal with you"--for filicidal behavior is the only historically successful interactive model we have. DISSIMULATION The brutal experience of filicide at the hands of the persons on whom one is completely dependent and whom one is supposed to honor, if not love, causes even the best of our later behavior to be based on a foundation of deceit and dissimulation. As long as the realities of our behavior are not faced they must produce a deep-seated hatred toward the perpetrators of filicide. But such hatred is inadmissible in the social reality each generation inherits. So we must pretend love and deny hatred toward the persons who have in effect murdered us. Any real love or gratitude we may feel toward our parents is rather thoroughly poisoned by, first, the urresolved and very powerful negative emotions we feel toward them, and second, by our pretension that those emotions do not exist. Our genuine, deep feelings of love are smothered under a blanket of social and familial duplicity. The dissimulation toward one's parents as individuals fits into a larger pattern of social deceit. As children we are continuously indoctrinated verbally into a set of attitudes labeled "goodness" and "proper behavior," which is superficially at variance with the deeper, on-going filicidal indoctrination. On the surface the parental lesson is simple: Do as / say. Observing the inconsistencies in adult behavior, children rapidly realize that there is an unstated clause here: Do as / say and not as / do. The real parental lesson--the one which produces the actual behavior desired--is a bit more complex: do as / do even though it seems like / am teaching you to do as I say and not as I do. ln other words: dissimulate. It is this early, basic lesson in dissimulation which produces the later widespread behavior in which, for example, a person when challenged for alleged wrong-doing convincingly denies any error whatsoever. Filicidally that person is correct: the person was only doing what was perceived as correct. Persons whom we call criminals frequently assert their innocence even when confronted with the most conclusive evidence to the contrary. Their problem is: they did not learn the intricate ways in which one is permitted and expected to be dishonest. Not having learned this lesson, they are failures, filicidally. It is that failure--and not the overstepping of certain moral or legal boundaries--which makes them criminal in the eyes of society. As unsuccessful filicides they cannot see the justice of filicidal injustice. Functioning on the basis of this imperative to dissimulate, our virtuous behavior remains virtuous only as long as it produces the desired effect: control and survival at any cost. Hence the ease with which we, as societies and as individuals, resort to physical violence as an ultimate solution. Through our deep-seated dissimulation we learn the efficacy of pretended trust and pretended virtue. When a crisis occurs, when a breach of this shallow trust happens, or when an assault is made on our fragile virtue, it is only human nature--as we all know--to respond in ways which totally give the lie to our supposed trust and virtue. Our unfaced, unexpressed anger at our own dissimulation warps our sense of equitable justice. We want not merely an eye for an eye, but two--or ten--eyes for each one lost. The parent sells its own dissimulation to the child as part of the larger package of filicidal behavior. We never say these things, not with words, but our behavior communicates them constantly. If one could reduce the sales pitch to words, it might sound something like this: ff you ever doubt the value of dissmulation, just remember this. Would I, your parent, your creator, who loves you and to whom you are the most important person in the world--as you can tell by the many sacrifices / have to make to put up with and train such an unworthy creature as yourseff--would / have done what / have done to you if /, who am so much older, wiser, bigger, and stronger, were not absolutely convinced that it is for the best? My behavior toward you may seem at times rough, brutal, even cruel. It seems so precisely because you are only a child, while / am an adult and furthermore an adult who is your parent and who therefore loves you and whom you therefore must love.. It is because / love you that I do these things to you which hurt me as much as they hurt you--but for. which you will one day thank me. And sure enough, assuming that we learn and follow the rules, that day arrives when we, as successful grown-ups, do thank them. By definition, the successful grown-up is the person who successfully forgets the filicidal experience and who also forgets the act of forgetting. Obviously, the successful grown-up child can never be grateful enough because--again, by definition--to be successful, the grown-up child must be convinced of its own ugliness, its own unworthiness. As a proper grown-up it can only marvel at its parents for having done so much for such an unlovable creature. For the man the dissimulation rule effectively states: You are what you do, because what you are is nothing. Hence the masculine drive for accomplishment, for successful control of the world. Hence the ease with which the man comes to build his identity around his job, his work. Hence the masculine emphasis on the importance of reputation. What other people, outside authorities, judge a man to be is all that matters. Reputation allows us to move somewhat more easily into the dreaded experience of old age with its alleged frightening loss of control and then to accept the far more dreaded experience of the ultimate loss of control, death, with a certain forced equanimity. We know our survivors will treasure our memory: He was a good man. For the woman the dissimulation rule effectively states: You are what you are, and nothing you do can change that fact. In this patriarchy what she is, of course, is "woman"--not a female human being with all the potential that implies, but "woman": the person restricted to the narrowly defined role of reproductive and child-rearing machine prescribed by generations of mothers and fathers. To the extent that the daughter successfully deceives herself and other people concerning her actual human potential, she concentrates on what she is taught to perceive as her "self," that is to say, on her body. Beauty becomes the chief criterion by which daughters judge themselves and by which sons judge daughters. As the daughter ages, her homemaking abilities take on additional significance. The ability to make a good apple pie or to iron a good shirt may override shortcomings in physical appearance. Both men and women come to judge themselves by externals. We then deny our inherent worth. One of the great filicidal virtues resulting from this denial is a very peculiar kind of selflessness. We find ourselves living our lives for other people, primarily our spouses and our children. Fathers in this patriarchy are able to justify almost any destructive behavior they may wish to undertake by thinking: I'm doing this for my family. "This" may be anything from working eighteen hours a day to making a wasteland of some small foreign country. The mother can justify her own destructive behavior, which in this patriarchy is almost wholly self-directed, in the same way: It is worth it to smother myseff and my talents here in this house because / am doing it for my family. So perfectly, if distortedly, selfless has this living for one's spouse and children become that we frequently arrive at the end of our lives only to find that we have not lived at all. NEGATIVITY The last imperative is not so much a single command as a set of attitudes determined by the preceding imperatives. If these attitudes can be summarized in one final rule, it might be: be negative. With filicide as our central, personality-forming experience, we are forced to conclude that this world and this life combine to form an extremely negative reality characterized by pain, suffering, and evil. These attitudes, which--like our memory of filicide--are for the most part hidden, form the actual operative attitudes by which we lead our lives and make our day-to-day, year-to-year decisions about our lives. Such a thorough-going, hidden negativity goes a long way toward undercutting even our best conscious efforts to be less controlling, less violent, less compulsively cautious. They do so by causing us to tend to see our reformative efforts in negative terms instead of in positive ones. We try to control our desire to control instead of seeking ways of being in which control" is a noncategory. Following is a short list of a few of the widely held, comfortable negative beliefs generated by filicide: It is a jungle world. Might makes right. You will lose because you don't deserve to win. Punishment is the only way to learn. It is our lot to suffer. Death is better than life. Sickness is better than health. Total freedom is extremely dangerous. Security is more precious than gold. You pay for what you do. You get what you pay for. Everybody is guilty but I'm guiltier than anybody. Everybody is afraid but I'm more afraid than anybody. Work is the only cure-all. All cures are temporary. It's all hopeless in the end Things are what they seem to my normal, filicidal consciousness. Nobody, least of all me, can heal me. War is inevitable. Human nature does not change. Humanity is evil. Children are wild creatures who have to be tamed. Old age and senility are bad. Youth is foolish. Wisdom comes only with age. Our bodies are dirty Our minds am dirty. On the surface our implementation of these rules of filicidal behavior may seem inconsistent, possibly less than universal. As moderns, few of us are guilty of literal filicide. And few of us lead such totally desolate lives that they are not occasionally interrupted by periods of release, surcease, and rest, such as the state known as "being in love," or in the period immediately following what is called "religious conversion." That our filicide is a continuing process is indicated by the fact that such periods are brief in duration and generally weak in effect. It is not long before we fall back into our old ways. Further, it is only in tinies of grave danger that our filicidal behavior becomes most apparent. The readiness with which we as nations have throughout history acceded to the periodic use of the "solution" known as war is an indication of how widespread filicidal behavior is. We know no other way as individuals. Therefore we know no other way as societies. How willingly fathers and mothers ship their sons off to those wars, and with what enthusiasm the sons allow themselves to be shipped off. The complacency and condescension with which we view the bloody violence in the world as we sit in the serene isolation of our homes and offices is at best shortsighted and amnesiac, and at worst, dangerously self-righteous. The theory of filicide reveals the way in which we are all implicated in and by the planet-wide system of violence whether ours is the hand that wields the knife or pushes the nuclear button, or whether the hand is that of a surrogate. Our complacency is even greater in the face of the modern plague of non-bloody violence. Behavioral manipulation through various forms of subtle and overt coercion is an ancient art. The tools of science and technology have enabled us to raise that art to unprecedented levels of sophistication and to apply it to unprecedented numbers of people. In the West, we were righteously indignant, even shocked, by the phenomenon of Communist brainwashing. Such a reaction is justifiable only if we are also aware of the mind-destroying conditions in our own prisons and mental hospitals--not to mention the irony of our laissez-faire attitude toward the almost inescapable mind-rape of modern advertising. Control, caution, rationality, emotionality--such behaviors are not in themselves destructive. It is only our compulsive and unconscious reliance on those behaviors that leads to the incessant pain and suffering of our lives. Becoming aware of one's own filicide does not mean that one then discards everything associated with filicidal behavior. It means only that one begins exploring possible solutions to the problems and challenges of existence other than those of violence. As infants we were terrified and intimidated by the incessantly controlling behavior of our parents. In that state of terror we learned, through observation of what was being done to us and how we responded, the efficacy of violence. It worked. We submitted. We are thus cowards from the start and (men particularly) must deny that we are by constantly proving our bravery through public displays of our ability to control. As creatures malformed through violence we seek to deny that fact in every possible way, even by crucifying those who attempt to preach and live lives of love and peace. By destroying such persons we think we have thereby won. In our amnesiac state we remain unaware of the internal price each of us pays for the false victories which violence yields. We, who are so anciently and thoroughly pervaded by violence and who cannot remember ever having been anything other than violent, are enormously threatened by anyone who will not hit back. Only the person who is not afraid can choose not to hit back. Perhaps our greatest filicidal fear is the fear of not being afraid. Women, though their role has usually made them the bystanders as men have perpetrated the most overtand destructive physical violence, can escape their accessorial complicity only by becoming aware of their own behavioral violence. Women have great cause to hate men for having been the enforcers of the system of male supremacy and female slavery. To respond with hatred is to respond in the values of that system. Such a response only perpetuates the whole system of violence. A man waking up to what he has been raised to be and do with the sarne system has as much reason to hate other men--and women as well, for his mother after all stood to one side and allowed the filicide to happen. The filicidal trap consists in inducing us to respond over and over in kind. Hate feeds on hate. The filicidal maw of hate can never be glutted, no matter how much we feed it. It can be starved. War is only furthered by those who hate war--whether the war is between nations or within oneself. Peace comes only to those who love peace. It is easy to determine whether and how well one is following the rules of filicidal behavior. If you are a rnan and are following the rules, other people will respect you, call you a good man, a good provider, a hard worker, a pillar of the community, pay you more money, give you more power over people and things, obey you unquestioningly, seek your advice and opinions, use you as a model for their children, and speak well of you when you are dead. If you are not following the rules, other people will laugh at you, call you a coward, sissie, queer, lazy, a poor father, pay you little money, give you little power or deprive you of whatever power you have, ignore you, get angry at you, imprison you, execute you, deride your opinions, warn their children against you, and avoid speaking of you when you are dead. If you are a wornan and are following the rules, other people will call you a good wife and mother. If you are not following the rules, other people will call you a bad wife and mother, whore, bitch, shrew, dyke, man-hater, or emasculator. Following the rules also produces a certain semantic fIip-flop in one's life, hinted at in the negativity rule. What one calls pleasure becomes a kind of forced, habitual pain. What one calls love becomes a habitual action of repressing hate. Life itself is lived in a day-to-day comatose state which is usually nearer to lifelessness than to life. Death is perceived as some kind of future life in which one will somehow be rewarded for having worked so hard at not living in this life. Play becomes work, and work becomes drudgery. When one says, I'm relaxed, one means either, I'm not quite as tense as I was, or, The aspirin-alcohol-dope-tranquilizer is working. Sleep beoomes intermittent wakefulness, and one's waking life becomes a kind of sem-articulate somnambulism. Semantic confusions are only the surface symptoms of much deeper behavioral confusion. Where universal amnesiac behavior has existed for generations, it becomes extremely difficult to discern behavior for what it is, as opposed to what it appears to be to our well-trained, forgetful selves. Laing speaks of such convoluted behavioral inversions as knots. One such filicidal knot concerns our confused and contradictory attitude toward pleasure. The knot goes something like this: Since as a resuft of filicide I, as a man, am not allowed to know real pleasure, I will not allow others to know pleasure, except in the behaviors which I have tested myself and know to be falsely pleasurable, though of course I pretend they are highly pleasurable. If it is neceswry to allow some apparently real pleasure in others--for example, in women and children--I will view their behavior and them as vain and silly, effeminate and childish. In other words, private inhibitory behavior becomes public prohibitory behavior. Filicidal morals are the opiate of us all. Another similar knot: Since I, as a man, was not allowed to be weak, I will not allow others to be weak. If it is necessary to allow some weakness in others--for example, in women and children, I will deride it and despise them for their weakness Or: Since I, as a woman, was not allowed to be rational and intellectual, I will not allow other women to be rational and intellectual. If it is necessary to allow some rationality and intellectuality in other women, I will deride them as being masculine and butch. Filicide is the sins of the fathers and mothers visited on everybody unto the nth generation: My parents said through their behavior that I can best control myself the way they controlled themselves Their parents had said to them that they could best control themselves the way my grandparents controlled themselves. And so on backwards into the mists of prehistory. Therefore I am controlling myself the way my great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents told my great-great-great-great-great grandparents to control themselves. In essence I am affempting and pretending to be the same person all my forebears attempted and pretended to be. The rules allow so little behavioral variation that, when followed well, they produce persons who are individuals in name only. Hence our fascination with regimented schools, regimented work, football teams, and armies. The filicidal catch is: who is that person we are all pretending to be? It is the father/mother who never existed. We are sons and daughters striving to be the perfectly controlling father and mother who never existed. Adulthood as we know and attempt to realize it is an illusion. The father role is an illusion. The mother role is an illusion. No wonder Kafka found an empty castle. My guilt as a filicidal child approaches sufficiency as I approach full awareness of how inadequately I am being my parents. No wonder Kafka endured a trial in which no evidence against him was presented but which produced a guilty verdict and a death sentence. The more inadequate I feel, the more control I exert to compensate for my feeling of inadequacy, and the more inadequate I then feel as that greater control fails to produce the desired result of making me more like my parents, so I exert still more control and feel even greater inadequacy, etc. Neither a man's nor a woman's work is ever done. The behavioral variations which result from all this constitute the round-dance known as history. Since our filicidal personalities are formed by an outside agent, most of us spend our lives looking for--and often finding--some outside agent in whom we can put our trust as mindlessly as we did as infants. The agent may take the form of a person--usually the spouse, but often one's own child plays this role--or it may be an institution, a government, a nation, a religion. Filicide, since it deprives us of the opportunity to creatively participate in the free exploration of our individual potential and the formation of our personalities, forces us to the conclusion that: 1. The problem is me, but 2. The solution is outside of me. Finally, beneath all the external destructiveness which characterizes our private and public lives, is the most destructive behavior of all: the hatred of self. We never forgive ourselves for having allowed filicide to be committed on us. However irrational that attitude is--we as infants after all have little choice about what is done to us--it is the gnawing pain at the heart of our masculine and feminine souls. Self-hatred is the wellspring of human violence. If love myself, hate is impossible. If I hate myseff, love is impossible. As tonq as I remain asleep and unawere of the filicidal processes working inside me and in the people and the world around me, I can never finally forgive the world for being so obstinately threatening, my wife for being so damnably feminine, my husband for beinq so damnably masculine, and my children for being so damnably childish. I cannot, because I do not know that I need to first forgive myseff for lettinq my father and mother so limit my ability to explore and develop my potentials that they in effect killed me. We spend our lives running from ourselves, seeking vengeance or salvation through outside agents. In this patriarchal civilization children function universally as victims to the masculine bias of social life and the feminine bias of family life. We are buried roses in the barren garden of filicidal history. |
If "interference is violence; and violence, interference," then it
follows that the acculturation of children, in Douglas Milburn's startling analysis of the
mythic reality of childhood, is the most pervasive and violent of civilized acts. So
limiting to our seemingly infinite potential is the act of child-rearing that Milburn sees
it as a kind of filicide: the psychic murder of children, carried out, tragically, with
the best of intentions, Milburn argues that, whatever its long-ago survival value, this
process of acculturation now only sows the seeds of continuing violence, both psychic and
physical. As adults we then spend much of our lives trying to find a way out of the small
cultural prison in which we've been placed.