#55 - What Are We Getting Wrong? Why Are There So Many Dysfunctional Politicians?

 By KC Johnson

Of course, the answers are different for different people.  A revered cultish leader supporter will despise any supporter of an opposing party.  Every line of thought will have its dedicated supporters, in some cases , they may be willing to destroy the accepted governmental system.  We can go to war over perceived injustices if we endure enough programming and propaganda or experience enough personal difficulties. 

We often support politicians who look best, speak in glib stereotypes, and who seem leader-like even though those candidates may be the least supportable for a healthy-minded citizen.  Our elected officials are giving us a picture of the dysfunction we exhibit in our own lives.  Apparently, we admire elected officials that mirror who we are.  But what exactly is that, and more importantly, why are we making these choices that bring us such chaos and division?

When have you ever heard that we, as adults, are the product of our childhood experiences?  Often, a person filled with fears, dysfunctional behaviors, and a manipulative life-style can be so trapped within their emotional world that they just want someone else to solve their problems for them.  A politician who says all of the right words even when untrue, repeats all of the best emotive slogans, and promises to solve everyone’s pressing problems will likely get elected.  But this politician is only speaking to the person who doesn’t see through the glib pronouncements and promises.  There may be a way to avoid these future dysfunctional candidates.

All of us go through several stages of emotional development eventually, whether within our present lifetime or succeeding lifetimes to an enlightened state of awareness.  In early childhood there is a need for the dependent child to make self-serving decisions, for having life meet the needs to feel safer.  It’s the child’s path for survival.  As the child becomes more independent and able to manage activities, friendships, and values, then the child discovers personal powers to create more of a life that is satisfying.  As the young person approaches adulthood there becomes more opportunities for self-expression and decision-making.  This is perhaps the time when many people experience life beyond their own immediate circumstances.  Seeing the world beyond one’s immediate needs opens the possibility that they will begin understanding the needs of others over their own. 

This is the age an emotionally healthy person may begin discovering deeper connections to universal consciousness and begin exploring their existence.  They can become more idealistic since they have had fewer life challenging experiences that moderate their idealism.  However, an emotionally challenging childhood can result in consolidating the fear-based experiences into protective behaviors without the desire to reach out to heal the world beyond themselves.   This become the source for liberal and more conservative thinking that define much of the rest of their lives. 

Does It All Come Down To Our Childhood Experiences?

Childhood experiences are often seen as traumatic to some lesser or greater degree.  Since every experience a child has becomes a building block for additional experiences, it makes sense to examine the source of our earlier experiences if we are to understand our present personality.  Choosing a candidate that deceives us with platitudes is an indication of the type of foundational experiences we had much earlier in our life.  Our willingness to default our personal well-being to a manipulative politician has to be much better understood if we are to make more rational decisions that serve us and our neighbors.

The world we live in today is complicated, maybe too complicated, for non-deep thinking people to manage.  Crafty politicians, like manipulative corporate sloganeers, have learned how to trigger our reflexive responses to their promises and ideas.  Most of us have neither the time to parse through these statements for veracity, nor the questioning mind to do so.  We become conditioned to rely on the pundits and those we trust for what to believe.  Basically, we give up our personal power to decide what is best for us to others who exercise power over us for their needs.

German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel theorized that human history is merely a series of constant philosophical conflicts.  He believed that the highest state of mankind can only be attained through constant ideological conflict and resolution.  When the dialectic moves to the next level, it is invariably moving to a more perfect level.  To relinquish our personal powers to control the information we base our life on we no longer have deep thoughts about what we believe.  We default to the views of others to resolve our conflicts in beliefs.  In effect, we fall back on our most basic childhood needs and reactions to our early experiences.  Our philosophy about life reverts to our most basic reactions to life.

Will a citizen raised in a fully nurturing and loving household that made the child feel safe and protected make the same kinds of political decisions later in life as would a person who grew up in an abusive household that made the child feel less safe and supported?  Let that sink in for a moment. 

Could it be that the politicians we are electing that are creating chaos and division among us are just reflections of the chaos and division we feel within our own selves?  Does it all really go back to what we experienced when we were a very young dependent child?

A child burdened with handling an emotionally abusive environment may never mature enough to fully understand the needs of others, never become clear-minded enough to question the truth behind political promises, and never feel strong enough to become an independent thinker and decision-maker able to engage in deep philosophical thoughts about what they want their life to be. 

We Are Creating Our Dysfunctional Society By Not Encouraging Deep Thinking In Our Children

Perhaps our society is unconsciously creating a dysfunctional world that is not sustainable because we are not valuing and nurturing and loving our children enough.  We need to help our children feel safe and feel that the world is a safe place for them and for others to live in, a safe place to explore ideas they are encouraged to change, and to have trial-and-error experiences that are not criticized by others.  By being allowed to try on various ideas to see if they belong within child’s belief system, a young person can build a solid foundation of values and become an authentic human being.

Perhaps the state of our political chaos is only a referendum on the state of our child raising effectiveness.  We can’t just magically evolve into aware adults once we reach a certain age.  We will always be a reflection of our childhood foundation to some degree.  Yet, because so many of us experienced emotionally challenging childhoods that we would prefer to leave behind in adulthood, we are unable to understand just how powerfully our past is in shaping our adult world views.  Basically, we lead our lives reacting to our past experiences, and that includes our political views and expectations for our political leaders.

It's as though we are at war with our children, or maybe, we are at war with memories of our childhood, and we are trying to forget our past pain and emotional challenges.  Consider this, our schools are in a perpetual state of financial starvation for funding, day care is an illusion for most parents, and parents are forced to work taking time always from family life.  But primarily, parents do not hear about the vital importance that fulsome nurturing provides for their children. 

Parents often follow child-raising practices that withhold touching and holding a child, and especially well into childhood.  This is how a child learns that it is accepted as a worthy human being, how it discovers love at the deepest levels, and how it develops the foundation for healthy emotional growth and attitudes into adulthood.  But parents also seldom encourage deep thinking, seldom share ideas and concerns the child can use for developing independent thought.

Back in the 1950s Dr. Benjamin Spock revolutionized child rearing by promoting better nurturing over the antiquated “spare the rod and spoil the child” and “seen, but not heard” mentality coming from the farm life centuries before.  Instead of Dr. Spock’s wise words became the foundation for even deeper understanding of best-practices for raising children.  Has it become a forgotten historical footnote in how to raise children today?  How different today would have been had we ensured parents understood the benefits of fulsome nurturing including generous appropriate touch, hugging, having nonjudgmental verbal give and take communications with their child, and accepting a child’s views and self-identity through the child’s years of growing.

Today, we are reaping the benefits of withholding fulsome nurturing, not just from our children, but from each other as adults.  We may be a wealthy nation, financially, but we are a poor nation emotionally.  And as goes our nation's emotional health level, so goes our physical health, our sense of community and caring for others, and our decision-making, not just for political leaders, but for how we want our society to respond to each other’s well-being. 

There is a stronger desire now for selfishness that tolerates manipulating others, especially the weakest among us, and that includes allowing ourselves to be manipulated.  We have so relinquished our sense of personal power that we seldom think we have any, nor do we understand how important it is to exercise our power to design our own lives.  And it all starts at the earliest stages of our childhood life periods.

It is possible to create an emotionally healthy world around us?

We can become aware enough to understand why a significant number of people vote for the least beneficial candidates who don’t really care about our survival.  They are simply concerned about gaining power to hide their fearful inner child.  But we don’t have to let fear-mongering become the driving force in our political system.  We must learn to follow the techniques for nurturing our children, and our own inner child, so that we are not influenced by the most fearful candidates and leaders among us.  We can learn to reclaim our personal powers to control what we believe, independent of the outside media noise.

We have created this chaotic atmosphere and we can change that trajectory we are following.  It will take time, it will take hearing more holistic nurturing messaging continuously.  It will take caregivers honoring their responsibility for providing loving support for the emotional needs of all children.  And it will take the adults making amends with their inner child who suffered the emotional challenges they were ill-prepared to handle.  It is about healing our emotional selves, and in so doing, healing the world around us.  People do this every day, we just need to be intentional about doing it. - kc