From “Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What To Do About It” by Brian McLaren
For us to become fully independent adults someday, we need to start life fully dependent on the guidance of older, wiser Big People. They make the rules and we follow them. We ask questions and they answer them. They give commands and we obey them. We have problems and they solve them.
I call this first stage Simplicity because it revolves around a simple mental function of sorting nearly everything into one of two categories.
- Is this berry edible or inedible?
- Is that person or tribe a friend or an enemy?
- Is taking your friend’s toy permitted or prohibited?
- Is telling a lie or using violence a clever and effective way to get what you want or is it a punishable offense?
- Did this make me happy or sad, glad or mad?
For this reason, in Stage one, you set out to master the mental skills of dualism, of seeing the world in twos: this or that, in or out, right or wrong. Dualism may be simple, but it’s not so easy when you’re first getting started. That first, “No! You can’t!” or “Yes, you must!” comes as a bit of a shock for an infant who is used to being coddled and given whatever she cries for. Her original innocence is disrupted by a new responsibility to figure out what the Big People want, what they will reward, and what they will punish.
The Big People – your parents, grandparents, teachers, chiefs, and religious leaders – are central to your world in Stage One, because they’re the ones who know the rules and show them to you. They’re also the ones who enforce the rules. So Stage One is the stage of authority as well as the stage of dualism.
As far as you’re concerned, the authorities know everything, and you don’t, so you feel highly dependent on them. You trust them and want to please them, and you aspire someday to be as certain and all-knowing as they are. Sure, sometimes they make you sad or mad when they don’t let you get your way, but in the end, they’re the Big People, and until you become a Big Person yourself, you need to fall in line.
Before long, you find out that your Big People dislike or distrust some other Big People, and your dualism adds a new category: us versus them. Our Big People are good, their Big People are bad. We are right: they are wrong. Familiar and similar is safe; unfamiliar and different is dangerous. This social dualism creates a strong sense of loyalty and identity among us. It also creates a strong sense of anxiety and even hostility about them, the others, the outsiders, and the outcasts.