One of the great miracles and great tragedies of humanity is that we are so adaptable. We are so adaptable that we will change in response to however the world is represented to us. Which also means that people will behave in the manner of the thing that you treat them like.
It also means that we are vulnerable to being twisted and distorted by our environment. It also means that if someone stands between us and the environment and twists and distorts or removes its feedback, that we won’t be able to adapt to it or correct ourselves, or that they may be able control and manipulate our adaptation for their own ends.
Humans respond to incentives. Incentives are both explicit and tacit. But whichever they are, they come down to our world asking something of us, telling us what we need to be. And we respond, often without thinking. That’s how amazing our adaptive capabilities are. We don’t even need to know that something is working on us, much less understand how. We already possess the tools to respond unconsciously.
As a result, what incentives we experience, the demands and feedback we get from our world that tell us what we need to be to secure our place in it, that tell us what sort of thing we should be, will drive our instinctive emotional responses and behavior, often without us needing to be aware of it.
Because so much of the mechanics of how this process works are unconscious, it’s not something that we can do to people consciously very easily. Or rather, we do it easily but do it very poorly or in a very confused and contradictory and silly manner. Because we never stand outside the system ourselves. Even when we are attempting to consciously navigate how to respond or how to manage incentives, as a parent, a boss, a teacher, or public policy expert, we ourselves are also subjects. We are ourselves caught in the web of incentives and adaptation, not only to other people in the broader world, but from the very people we think we are working on.
The degree to which children teach us how to treat them has been grossly underestimated. They instinctively punish and reward us and train us in how to treat them long before they ever have any conscious idea of such manipulations. Far from being a blank slate, they often treat us as if we parents were blank slates that could be molded to fit their needs and desires, despite the vast differences in our capabilities and the huge difference in plasticity between us. The fact that it is almost childishly easy for a tiny, barely developed human to take control of the behavior and emotions of a grown adult and turn them into a sycophantic thrall only escapes being absolutely shocking to our beliefs and sensibilities because it is so easy and common that we don’t even notice it as anything unusual.
Maintaining control in a parent-child relationship should be effortless and easy, if the parents were truly in charge and on the outside, shaping and socially determining the child as they saw fit. But the reality is that it is desperately difficult to remain in control, and the great pressure at all times is to simply give in and let the child run things. And that doesn’t start later on, that starts on the first day and continues throughout their whole lives. The illusion that we are somehow in charge is maintained by the fact that our adaptive instincts are so powerful that we can’t distinguish our children’s demands on us from our own voluntary actions.
A parent that completely neglects or abuses a child in response to their demands, that parent is in charge of themselves, in a way. They’re doing exactly what they want to do and aren’t being told what they should do by anybody else, much less a demanding child. They aren’t responding to any incentives and punishments being heaped on them from the outside. The parent that locks up their child in a crate, that does whatever they wish with them as if they were a mere object, that parent is a social determinist. That parent is treating their child as a blank slate, a ball of unformed clay they can do with just as they see fit.
Everyone else is caught in something far more complex. A kind of dance, a struggle. Desire and reality, venture and feedback, give and take, testing the limits of capability, developing a relationship of dynamic input and feedback. As much as we like to imagine ourselves as our own creations, we are the product of an immense architecture that brought us to this point and that we carry forward with us, whether we like it or not. When a child shows up, they immediately, without needing to be aware of it, know how to incentivize and punish their parents. Those mechanisms put out feelers, looking for subjects to act upon. And without hardly even realizing it, they sieze on things deep in us that we didn’t even know we were carrying around. We have receptors ready-made for the inputs that infants are ready to supply.
But that’s merely the beginning of the process. We aren’t deer, who carry most all of that needs to be done in life in their unconscious instincts. Our species is far too developed and complex and adaptable for us to do that, and our children are far too helpless and undeveloped when they are young for us to do that. Many mammals can stand up, or at least make their way to whatever it is they need to do, within moments or days of birth. And within mere weeks they may be quite capable, compared to our young, who can do virtually nothing at that age.
In fact there is only one thing our infants can really do well at that age, and that is: communicate with their parents. Not consciously; instinctively. That’s what human babies can do. They know how to work on us adults. They’re almost completely useless themselves. But the small noises they make, even the shape of their heads and eyes, their smell, all the little ways they react and reach out, all these things are powerful actions upon the world, upon the only world that matters to them at that moment, their parents.
Deer and horses can already manipulate and navigate their environment at a very young age. So can human children, but for them the environment that matters and that must be manipulated and acted upon is people. That is the most fundamental innate environment for humans; one another. And the way we navigate and act in it is through communication, a thousand different tiny ways of sharing information that we don’t even know we’re doing.
We are born able to navigate this world of people and communication, and grow immensely in our ability to do so in our early years, almost entirely unconsciously and instinctively for quite a long time. In fact infants are such powerful communicators that many adults find them almost irresistible. You can’t argue with an infant. You can’t ignore them. And if you do so they will punish you in ways that can shred your psyche. Have you ever been stuck somewhere in close proximity with a crying baby? Then you know the kind of weapons they wield and how vulnerable adults are to their effect. They’re not something you can argue with.
Infants make demands on an instinctive level that goes straight for your most basic motivational and psychological systems. A child can build you up or break you down in moments, in a way that adults can hardly hope to achieve. It’s possible, certainly. Some adults are very good at it; they’ve wedded conscious effort to innate capacity. But children can do it without thinking, from day one. Nature, as part of their development, gradually deprives them of some of their early tools (fortunately) forcing them onto more equal playing ground with other members of the species. And when they find that they are up against other children who are just as capable as themselves, they learn to negotiate and adapt and communicate in ways that are more democratic and less autocratic. But make no mistake, parents only rule their children insofar as they avoid being ruled by them.
Making Nobody Happy 