How tenaciously children and adoles

How tenaciously children and adolescents cling to the values, beliefs, abstractions, and generalizations that they learn depends on how disturbed they are at the time the learning occurs. The amount of displaced anger, grief, sexu- ality, or joy being suppressed at that time has a big effect on both what they learn and how they learn. In any given cul- ture, the brainwashed ones who fit in best (lawyers and teachers) assume much of the leadership. As a culture burns out or fails to renew itself through change, its educational and political leaders are often the least creative members— the ones who cling hysterically to old methods simply be- cause they once worked. The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of pas- sionate intensity."1 Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-m urder and cultural assassinati on.
Planting the Seeds of Moralism
A picture on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Tim es shows a uniformed policewoman carrying a young child out through an apartment door. The child, who is about four years old, is bruised and bleeding with one eye swollen shut. She is reaching back over the policewoman's shoulder and crying hysterically, trying to go back to her mother who has just beaten her so badly. The story reports that the mother claims to have beaten her little girl because she was bad, and that the little girl was screaming when she left, "Please don't take me away. I'll be good! I'll be good!" The poor little
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