AUTHORITY AND EMPATHY

Q. You don't emphasize the obedience of children. Yet, how can children possibly learn to get along in the world as adults, if they haven’t learned to obey authority figures as children?

A. Two evenings ago an ex-student and beloved young friend, now about 10 yrs. old, called. She was weeping as I picked up the phone. Her intense dislike and avoidance of homework had resulted a failing grade on her report card. Was my most helpful role to empathize with her woeful dilemma or to authoritatively admonish her to bring up her grade?

Two contrasting examples offer clues as to how we can best support children.

Recently we discussed two heart cells beating in unison and keeping one another alive on slides. Along similar lines, Cleve Backster (Primary Perception), shares remarkable discoveries of the energetic exchanges between plants and other life forms in his lab. On a whim, he decided to connect a dracaena cane plant to the polygraph machine, of which he is the designer. Noting that the machine recorded a somewhat irregular and alive electrical pattern, he decided to test it for a human-like reaction. After only minor reactions when he dipped a leaf in hot coffee and tapped it with a pen, he sat back to contemplate the plant.

Several minutes later, Backster’s musings led to an unvoiced speculation. “What if I get a match and burn the plant’s electroded leaf?”

At this mere thought, he noted that the polygraph pattern moved to the extreme, recording dramatic excitation. The plant was 15 feet away.

 Backster continued his experiments, recording the plants’ sympathetic excitation in response to endangered creatures from other kingdoms, including brine shrimp, yogurt bacteria and chicken eggs. Meanwhile, the plants continued to track Backster’s thoughts and feelings.

Of interest here is the quantum level sympathetic responsiveness between living beings. If this is the natural state of all living entities, in line with heart-to-heart resonance, it bears close consideration—and nowhere more than in our relationships with children.

By way of contrast, Stanley Milgram (Obedience to Authority) designed an experiment carried out at several universities to explore obedience to authority figures. The purpose was to see to what extent adults, schooled in authoritarian institutions, would override an inherent sympathetic impulse, and continue to obey an authority figure while causing someone pain.

For the experiment Milgram hired two actors: The authority figure wearing a white lab coat, and the ‘learner’, to enact reactions to escalating levels of shock treatment for wrong answers to a test.

Over a 4-year period, more than a thousand people came to a psychological lab to participate in this experiment. Each was designated the ‘teacher’, whose job was to administer a ‘test’ to the ‘learner’ and punish him with increasing volts of painful shocks each time he answered wrongly. The following is the scenario:

The ‘teacher’ observes as the ‘learner’ is conducted into a room and seated in a chair, his arms strapped down with an electrode attached to his wrist. In the presence of the ‘teacher’ he is told to learn a list of word pairs for a test.

The authority figure in the white coat guides the ‘teacher’ to an adjoining room to be seated in front of a shock generator. In 15-volt increments, the horizontal line of switches ranges from 15 to 450 volts. Verbal designations range from Slight Shock, to Danger, to Severe Shock.

The authority figure directs the ‘teacher’ to push the switch to deliver intensifying shock punishment each time the ‘learner’ answers incorrectly. The ‘teacher’ experiences growing internal conflict as the ‘learner’ receiving the shock begins to grunt in discomfort, then moan, then cries out and finally screams in agony.

In the first experiment, of the 40 subjects, 14 ‘teachers’ refused at some point to proceed further, while 26 obeyed the orders of the authority to the end, proceeding to punish the victim to the most potent, 450- volt shock of the generator, accompanied by agonized screams.

Can it be that empathy for the plight of another, as in the resonant heart cells and plants, is an inborn trait, which authoritarian discipline tends to suppress in its participants? During the past 47 years, my child teachers have taught me there is a hardening of the spiritual arteries when, in obeisance to authoritarian hierarchies, we judge the suffering of others, including children strapped to academic strictures. Our imposed curricula and scores are equivalent to punishments to children who long to be free.

In the dialogue with my young friend, the heart indicated the highest path – to help her listen to her interior authority – the soul. “Spread a healing salve on her sense of failure induced by the report card score of ‘63’. Share her pain with your own recall of homework miseries. Help her access the interior voice that asserts, ‘I can overcome anything, even by degree, the ability of homework to make me miserable.’ Find the words for her to hang up and fall asleep comforted by the sense of ‘I am loved for who I am’.”

In obedience to the inner authority, she decided that a realistic goal that she could stick to was to raise her score by 5 points each six weeks. That way, by the end of the year her score would be a passing 78.

This blog is dedicated to all the weeping, suffering children who have come to my notice for the past 50 years.