“There are probably antirational memes operating when parents are feeling compelled to go along with the standard coercive approach with their children despite their doubts about its rightness.”
– Sarah Fitz-Claridge
“Why do I sometimes say or do coercive things that are out of alignment with my noncoercive intentions?”
“In some moments, it is as if I am possessed by a coercive demon. What’s that about?!”
“Why am I doing things I do not even believe in, and that I do NOT want to be doing? It is like something has taken over my mind and is compelling me to coerce my kids. WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?”
“Why did my mother’s coercive words fly out of my mouth?!”
David Deutsch explains1 that parents coerce their children because their own parents coerced them in ways that installed antirational memes in them that both suppressed their ability to criticise the memes and compelled them to behave in ways that install the memes into other people, including especially their children.2
“What are memes? What are antirational memes?”
Memes are ideas that cause behaviour that causes others to adopt the meme. An example of a rational meme (or set of memes, memeplex), is that native English speakers enact English grammar whether or not they explicitly know anything about grammar. I can write, but I have never been taught grammar explicitly, and I can’t tell you the rules of grammar, but clearly I enact them.
Rational memes like the rules of grammar thrive in a critical environment because they are true and they solve a problem.
But antirational memes work differently. According to David Deutsch, they interfere with or hobble our ability to criticise them. They act as an entrenched authority in our unconscious mind, such that when we question the idea, this antirational hobbling part of our mind is opposing our attempted criticism, and making us feel bad or wrong any time we even think about questioning the idea.
When you hold an idea in an entrenched way, that has a potentially large adverse effect on the whole knowledge-creating system.
And not only do antirational memes work by fighting your criticism of them, they make you feel compelled to treat your children in ways that in turn make them feel compelled to enact the same patterns of thought and behaviour. Antirational memes propagate from person to person and down through the generations by suppressing our ability to criticise them and compelling us to behave in ways that coerce others (especially our children) into adopting them and in turn doing the same to other people (especially their children).
In general, when you have noticed that some ideas in your mind are conflicting, you naturally resolve the conflict using your creativity. Our minds are actively solving such problems all the time—and it feels good to be solving problems. But where an antirational meme is involved, that is not what happens. They resist criticism, so every time you have a conflicting idea running up against that antirational meme, the antirational entrenched authority part of your mind is actively suppressing your attempts to solve the problem, and that hurts. Having antirational memes in your mind is painful.
Antirational memes are not only passed from parents to children, they exist more widely in our culture. This is why other people seem to feel so free to judge and criticise you if you are taking your child seriously, and it is why complete strangers in supermarkets command your child to thank the cashier, or tell you to keep your child under control.
And this is why the corresponding antirational meme in your own mind has you feeling rebuked, ashamed, upset, and defensive, whereas under other circumstances when some stranger says something spiteful to you, it does not adversely affect you in the slightest—because in that area of your own mind there is no antirational meme operating.
So one of the ways that antirational memes maintain their power is by making the society endorse the meme and penalise deviations from it. So there are probably antirational memes operating when parents are feeling compelled to go along with the standard coercive paternalistic approach with their children despite their reasonable doubts about its wisdom or rightness.
Notes
1. See David Deutsch’s mind-blowing 1994 essay, The evolution of culture, for a much deeper understanding of antirational memes.
2. I prefer to put this slightly differently, if more clumsily, for four reasons:
- to try to avoid giving the impression that antirational memes are ‘installed’ or bucket-theory-of-the-mind style poured in to a passively-receiving mind;
- to avoid giving the impression that they are coming from outside our mind, as opposed to being inside our own mind and (unconsciously) adopted by us ourselves;
- to avoid giving the impression that these antirational memes are immutable so taking children seriously is impossible;
- to avoid channelling readers into the learnt helplessness and resignation of a powerless victim mentality.
See also:
- “How can we express approval when our children do something good without manipulating them by implying that we would disapprove if they had made a different choice?”
- Children do not need what conventional wisdom says they need
- Dental coercion disaster
Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 2022, Taking Children Seriously FAQ: ‘“Why did my mother’s coercive words fly out of my mouth?!”’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/why-did-my-mothers-coercive-words-fly-out-of-my-mouth/