Being cruel one moment and kind the next is characteris­tic of manipulators—in particular of lost, loveless, impatient parents who, whenever they feel guilty for driving their offspring to desperate acts, finish them off by becoming their “friend.”

And once you have been corrupted by cruelty and then “helped” by the tormentor-turned-savior, you are set up to be addicted to a succession of confounding hate/love involvements with lower and lower low-life people. 

Schizoid parents often set their chil­dren up to become criminals; then friends/fiends egg them on. From this it is easy to see how you can become afraid of “love,” and why young people often react to kindness with vio­lence.

Such striking out is a child’s way of hurting the source of a hurtful love, to stop it from “loving” and possessing and corrupting. But what do most par­ents do when their children hurt them? They become upset, angry and violent themselves; then feeling guilty for this, they work harder at “loving” the child to overcome his rejection. 

The corruption that begins at home continues at school. Considering how cruel teachers can be to children, it is practically a certainty that your child will pick up wrong friends to soothe the effects of bullying in the classroom. And so he becomes the puppet of both bullies and friends. 

The spirit of rebellion, once estab­lished, will seek both provocations and support to justify its expression. The fallen soul’s very existence, co­mingling with pride that has entered, depends upon intrigue and reaction in the extreme.

If there is nothing to rebel against, boredom and anxiety set in. Unconsciously perhaps, you will set about to engineer something to resent. You will find someone to spoil until he takes advantage of you. You will needle someone into rebellion against you so that you may struggle against his rebellion.

Spoiled by having his own way, a willful son knows how to trick his mother into being a nag. He simply drags his feet over doing some petty chore, timing it to upset her and to make her pressure him so that he can then utilize her pressuring to justify his continued stubbornness.

"The spirit of rebellion, once estab­lished, will seek both provocations and support to justify its expression."

Later, the irre­sponsible nature formed in this game will need a wife to nag it. And what kind of a woman marries such a man, may I ask? The kind who needs to be a nag, one whose stubborn sense of worth depends on the thankless task of shaping up an ungrateful rebel. 

The kind of goodness that appears as a resentful rebellion against evil is not genu­ine. Say you have a dis­gusting brother. He is a dope fiend who intimidates you all day long into tolerating his vile ways. You rebel by being outwardly the good brother.

But such goodness is an expres­sion of an egotistic value judgment, the sense of worth it gives existing only in contrast to someone’s being worse than you. “Good” guys often take their role from disgust and judgment based on re­sentment.

Often they seek to validate their phony goodness and assuage the guilt it makes them feel through “posi­tive” reinforcements, the traditional “kosherizing” emblems of churchgoing, degrees, success. Their love of worldly authority provides a refuge from the authority of conscience. If you are one of these, you send out confusing signals to your own children. 

A subtle yet powerful signal of vio­lence projects through a sterile, rigid “love.” Apparently normal, establish­ment parents and teachers have been responsible for incalculable misery since ancient times. In a democracy, the hypocrisy of the establishment is the main cause of social chaos.

Rebellion against the smiling, hypocritical “nor­mal people” of society produces a variety of abhorrent and violent behav­iors—bad guys rebelling against the cruelty of conforming phonies. No wonder they cried, “Give us Barabbas!” The hypocrites in Christ’s day, as in ours, could not bear the contrast of pure goodness. 

From the intrigue between the appar­ently good and the obviously wicked, hell evolves. And each “loyal” citizen responsible for a part of the horror around us is guilty and afraid of facing the truth.

When the establishment bureaucrats are in power, their incred­ible insult to common sense inspires re­bellion and crime, which serve to dis­tract us from seeing guilt at the source. As the rebellious, low-life element of society hardens and multiplies, it strikes at the foundation of democracy to over­whelm it eventually on its course toward anarchy and dictatorship.