The first time a baby feels hungry, s/he cries and nature’s best food delivery system is pushed into his/her mouth. Instant satisfaction!
If that didn’t happen, we wouldn’t survive, but it has a negative side. Baby’s known world consists of him/herself and this natural milk bottle. Baby controls both! That is power.
Baby soon discovers there is a big person attached to that milk bottle – and baby controls her! Total control of the ‘known world’ is power any adult dictator would give an arm and a leg for.
Soon s/he must learn that s/he is not the only power in the world. It contains other people, and s/he must live in peace with them. Some learn that lesson and some do not. It may need a bit of spanking and maybe the a new baby brother or sister to take parents’ attention from him/her. Most three-year-old dictators learn they don’t control their, now bigger, known world.
A three-year-old whose favourite word is ‘Handidi’ still thinks he is the centre of the world. He thinks he can just refuse anything he doesn’t like. He is a nuisance who will probably soon be taught, with some short-term pain to himself, that there are plenty of other people in the world who expect people to take notice of them.
Most children learn this lesson. We don’t hear a four-ear old scream ‘Handidi’ so often. But some are slow to learn. Every year that passes makes teaching them sense more difficult.
A fourteen-year-old who still thinks he rules the roost can make life very difficult for a lot of people. That growing dictator thinks his preferences are all that matter, and he has already learned how to manipulate people.
He becomes shifty, manipulative and a bully. He changes his position according to who he is trying to influence. He tries to inspire fear in those he can frighten. Little boys can be threatened with violence. Maybe he knows the guilty secrets of some of his peers. They come to fear blackmail. Maybe he can make them fear someone else; then tell the he can defend them against this threat.
To someone more powerful than himself, he will grovel, crawl and put on his most ingratiating smile. But if that is how he approaches you, be careful. This will only last until he finds you have some weakness he can exploit.
Perhaps his mother believed her little boy could do no wrong. Nobody must be allowed to criticise or correct him. She must share a lot of blame for what her special boy eventually becomes.
If he lives another seventy years, he probably doesn’t need to learn many new tricks. He only needs to perfect his mastery of them.
I don’t see any person as evil. He does evil deeds, but I see in him little four-year-old Handidi who I should have punched on the nose when I also was four years old.
A little force applied in time to a growing dictator would save us all a lot of trouble.
Post published in: News