Milgram is famous for his experiment, in which he showed that 2/3 of the people blindly obey to "authority", even when the order is straightforward killing another human being. I have always wondered why humans are so obedient. This book offers part of the answer, looking at the family as the smallest political unit of society at large. The majority of the adult population comes from a family in which the father was dominant, and where obedience, discipline and fear for punishment as a "value system" was imposed. Shere Hite discovered in her investigation that 81 percent of the testimonies on the father included the word "fear". In spite of this fear, children are expected to love their authoritarian fathers. "Children must feel gratitude ("after all, we brought you into this world, without us, you wouldn't be here") and so, in their minds, this gratitude is mixed with love." Power structures are thus enhanced through guilt. If something bad happens to you, then you are to blame, never the system. If you don't have a job, that's because you don't search enough, not because capitalism will always produce some level of unemployment. If you suffer cancer, that's because you lead an unhealthy way of life, not because corporations have poisoned our food chain and our environment with carcinogenic substances. If people in the third world have hunger, that's because they have too many children, not because they are underpaid and exploited, if they are lucky enough to have a job.
Now, it will cause no surprise that families in which fear prevails don't produce real happiness. Fathers consider they are "sacrificing" themselves making enough money in order for their families to function on a "social acceptable" level of material "welfare". But they don't express emotion, let alone love. "He always did his duty. But he didn't really know who any of us were - myself, my brothers and sisters, or my mother. Weird."
Those fathers head straight for a midlifecrisis. "By the age of fifty or so, according to The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality, many men express a great feeling of emptiness and anger : "I did what I was supposed to do, I denied myself all of my life, kept my feelings in check, provided for a family, worked at my job. Now, where is my reward ? Why don't I feel more fulfilled ? Why do I feel ripped off ? What does life mean, anyway?"
Mothers are probably worse off, the author says : "According to my research for this study, the majority of women coming from two-parent families feel great ambivalence and distress in relation to their mother : 73 per cent feel a deep love and tie, but also great disappointment or anger about her subservience, "passivity", or even "cowardice" in the face of her husband's domination."
If we want to improve societies, families will have to be based on other values. This is no utopy. It just requires a change of perspective, and the author shows some families already got on this road : "The love and affection I have for my children is deep and very gratifying. They were born out of an act of love and I love them. No matter how busy I am, I find time for my family. Another job I can find tomorrow. Another family is impossible to find."
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