Every child’s ideas of what is evil are formed according to the parents’ defense mechanisms: “evil” can be anything that makes the parents more insecure,” like disobedience. (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, p. 138)

Someone who has learned at his or her peril to obey unwritten laws and renounce feelings at a tender age will obey the written laws all the more readily, lacking any inner resistance. But since no one can live entirely without feelings, such a person will join groups that sanction or even encourage the forbidden feelings, which he or she will finally be allowed to live out within a collective framework.

            Every ideology offers its adherents the opportunity to discharge their pent-up affect collectively while retaining the idealized primary object, which is transferred to new leader figures or to the group in order to make up for the lack of a satisfying symbiosis with the mother. (Ibid., p. 86)

“A child cannot acknowledge the negative side of his or her father, and yet these are stored somewhere in the child’s psyche, for the adult will then be attracted by precisely these negative, disavowed sides in the father substitutes he or she encounters…”

            When a father speaks to his child, it is the way he speaks that counts, not what he says. “The more he builds himself up, the more he will be admired, especially by a child raised according to the principles of ‘poisonous pedagogy.’ When a strict, inaccessible, and distant father condescends to speak with his child, this is certainly a festive occasion, and to earn this honor no sacrifice of self is too great. A properly raised child will never be able to detect it if this father—this big and mighty man—should happen to be power-hungry, dishonorable, or basically insecure. And so it goes; such a child can never gain any insight into this kind of situation because his or her ability to perceive has been blocked by the early enforcement of obedience and the suppression of feelings…

           [W]hen a man comes along and talks like one’s own father and acts like him, even adults will forget their democratic rights or will not make use of them. They will submit to this man, will acclaim him, allow themselves to be manipulated by him, and put their trust in him, finally surrendering totally to him without even being aware of their enslavement. One is not normally aware of something that is a continuation of one’s own childhood. For those who become as dependent on someone as they once were as small children on their parents, there is no escape. A child cannot run away, and the citizen of a totalitarian regime [or of country in which state-supported private tyranny reigns supreme] cannot free himself or herself. The only outlet one has is in raising one’s own children. Thus, the citizens who were captives of the Third Reich had to rear their children to be captives as well, if they were to feel any trace of their own power.

          But these children, who now are parents themselves, did have other possibilities. Many of them have recognized the dangers of pedagogical ideology, and with a great deal of courage and effort they are searching for new paths for themselves and their children.” (Ibid., pp. 72, 73, 74)