Translated to the world stage, this amounts to a seemingly endless replay of the same patterns over and over. One is contaminated as a child, one internalizes the contamination and accepts it as “the way it is,” and repeats the contagion throughout one’s life without questioning it (substituting instead a recipe for greed and accumulation) – and one wonders why one’s life is not better; has not turned out to be the bright promise one originally felt way back when?

Governments and religions take full advantage of this regressive stunting. Both treat individuals as if they were still essentially children – in loco parentis. As if, having achieved adult stature, one has not yet attained adult mental status. And usually because one has not, in fact, done so. Crippled by the internalized learning patterns of one’s first 3 years, and acting as if those earliest mandates were still true and operative, one re-creates the world demanded by the intrusive manipulations and coercions insinuated into the very cells of one’s brain by one’s earliest (ostensible) caregivers.

It is for this very reason that we live in a society that promotes the permanent war economy: “a semi-command economy, run mostly by corporate executives, geared to military production” (Wilson, 1944, cited in Chomsky, 2004). Through fear, citizens are asked to turn to our so-called leaders for protection, much as a child turns to his or her parents for protection. The major difference here is that it is the government itself that is creating the circumstances that encourage war as an economic pursuit. Much the same can be said for religions as mechanisms of social control, with their hell and damnation rhetoric.

If one is treated as a fearful child, it is only because one is, in fact, fearful; and may have seriously unresolved issues dating back to one’s childhood; issues created by being reared in a fearful manner, often replete with violence, abuse, and neglect – the memories of such treatment that resonate deep in the hollows of one’s brain, seething with rage, fear, and hurt; hungering for protection, expiation, and ultimately fulfillment of one’s vast potential beyond the fear and angst-driven conventions with which one was reared and had instilled. Repetition of any sort has the effect of embedding whatever material is presented. How much more so when the material is presented by one’s authority figures upon whom one is utterly dependent for subsistence? The context in which material is presented, especially repetitively, is extremely important as well. When one is coerced into abandoning one’s own felt-sense of self in order to honor the demands and mandates of one’s caregiver, there must be a certain sense of loss.

It is this lost sense that one carries throughout one’s life, until and unless it is redeemed (L., “to buy back”) by the only agent who can, may, and should do so – oneself. One must ultimately become the agent of one’s own successful rehabilitation, as it were – rehabilitation from wretched bad habits such as inappropriate dependence on the words and actions of others. Unless one can redeem the lost child within oneself, one may never function as a true adult. One will otherwise function only a caricature, a facsimile, the shadow of a truly definitive adult – because one re-enacts the situations of one’s childhood in analog fashion, as if one were still that lost and lonely child needing guidance and direction from an adult; as if one were still at the behest of one’s “superiors” in intelligence and learning, as government and religious figures attempt to appear – and fail miserably when one looks closely at their personal lives.