It is from our earliest experiences, which are necessarily of the parental type, that follows the attitude we will later have towards the other. We may then, with the help of reason, moderate this imprinting, going even as far as reversing it, and thus switch from being prone to believe that the other is fundamentally good to thinking that he is fundamentally evil, or vice versa, but usually reason will only help to find points supporting of the imprinting. Thus we will end up with points supporting the thesis that man is born good or the opposite one (that he is born evil), while in reality, cut to the bone, every debate about man, and about men, will be nothing but a weighing of such points against the prototype of the results of the earliest experiences.
I suppose it is not hard to guess why, since pretty much forever, the thesis has prevailed that men are “weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious” (the judgment that Ivan Karamazov has the Grand Inquisitor state), i.e. evil and dangerous: a society built on that judgment will have to renounce freedom in exchange for security, and in exchange for bread and hope it will entrust its fear to an authority, and since every authority tends to perpetuate itself, it will do so by reproducing itself in the parental relationship, which in turn will raise itself as the model for social relationships. The child must be prepared to become a man prone to a convenient distrust towards his kin: being unable to ever completely rely on a pact between kin, he must feel the need for a power that rules him because “so awful it will seem to [him] to be free”.
As I write this, it’s been less than two or three centuries since we figured out that reason can be put to a better use: for example, challenging the meaning of “good” and “evil”; for example, stopping thinking of freedom as an absolute and learning to pair it with responsibility; for example, abandoning the belief that a society cannot hold without being founded on some transcendental principle. Three examples that let us understand that we will not have a different child, not until we have a different family, not until we have a different society: nothing left but to imagine the possibility of some human progress built on reason’s ability to deconstruct that imprinting.
With one implication: the more we understand the society that created Dostoevskij’s parents, the more we will be able to do without the Grand Inquisitor.
Malvino, April 4th 2011 blog post (original)
FWIW, that strikes me as a bit long for a quote. I’ve upvoted longer quotes in the past, but only when they had a really good payoff.