http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPhknmx5O08

That is my take:

I suspect that three million years ago, the entire life was very similar to childhood now. You could not leave the tribe without risking almost sure death. So coherence was crucial, and those who came before had the say.
The elders had a lot of experience which was personalised and not coded, but rather implicit. This embedded experience was crucial for the survival of the tribe. Hence the worshipping of the elders common among “primitive” or ancient people. But because their knowledge was not explicit and could not be questioned, it was dressed with a lot of irrational myths that explained why thingss had to be this way. Myth and knowledge were indistinguishably intertwined. In this kind of social (i. e. religious) organization decisions had very little factual basis but were to be decided on the basis of (social) power. That´s why ranking or pecking orders were such an important institution.
In my eyes this is the reason why violence had to be used regularly. If you have no scientific method and if you have to stick together, power has to decide. And if the power of one side (parents) is superior, children have to be violently coerced into conformity in order to ensure the harmony of the tribe.
The more rational and explicit knowledge is and the more evenly distributed within society knowledge it is and the less costly it is to leave the tribe, the less need there is for violence and the more could the capacity for empathy come to the front of human abilities.

I don’t think you’re a random victim. I think the moral responsibility is vastly different now than it was at the beginning of mankind. Our parents had access to better parenting methods.

For sure the big question is what makes us different. I think there are a lot of factors that play into this but it comes down to making the choice to think. I don’t think we always had that choice as a species but for sure your parents did and your parent’s parents did.

I think that this is a very interesting question you’re bringing up. I would like to hear more about the feelings around you being a random victim and why your life *had to* start with violence. These positions sound deterministic and remove moral responsibility from your abusers.

I guess I really just want some answers. I am tired of feeling like some sort of random victim. I want to know why that violence was even there in the first place in my own life. It makes me feel pretty angry and helpless just typing that.

When I talk about psychology it is safe to assume I’m talking about the family and the effect it has on one generation to the next. I have read Alice Miller and Lloyd Demause and agree with their theories of why we are here psychologically as a society based on the past few thousand years of human history and the horrid acts of violence and suffering that fellow humans (particularly family members) commit on one another.

I am taking my curiosity about this subject a step further and asking why did it even start with violence? Why have such horrible atrocities been committed against children for thousands of years? Why was violence the dominant choice for men to try to wield to solve problems from whenever you can pinpoint us as a species?

That also leads me to wonder how many of us and how long it will take to branch off from this path of blood and death that has paved the current evolutionary road. We few who accept and practice the non-aggression principle are few and far between. Are we the next evolutionary step? If so, why weren’t we the first? What was it that made violence so inherent in our ancestors?

The 2nd question “Why is that the dominant competitor in the marketplace of ideas?” Well, I would instinctively answer to this question that if there’s a gun in the room then it makes sense why he’s the best competitor. Monopolies come to mind, like the State monopoly on violence.

“How did society become so violent and divided in their minds in the first place?” There would have to be some violent precedent for there to be adults living out this violent division, right? I would suggest that the psychohistorical, and FDR, view of the State is a result of a long history of childhood abuse and neglect.

“Is this a result of the early tribal need to subjugate oneself to a stronger opponent in order to survive?”

Here’s a quote from Alice Miller that may help: ‘What becomes of all those people who are successful products of a strict upbringing? It is unconceivable that they were able to express and develop their true feelings as children, for anger and helpless rage, which tey were forbidden to dsiplay … it does not disappear, but is transformed with time into a more or less conscious hatred directed against either the self or substitute persons, a hatred that will seek to discharge itself in various ways permissible and suitable for an adult.’ (1983 – for your own good)

And this also begins an article in the 1996 issue of the Journal of Psychohistory ‘Children as parental purifiers” and the gist of the article is that since children cannot express rage at authoritarian parents they seek something to contain that, and politicans fit that role. The article, mind you, explains it in a lot better detail than I can. Let me know privately if you want to know more about the journal issue.

Does any of this help?