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Social conditioning is a deindividuation process almost all children are subjected to. While everybody is born with an individual identity, children are forced to gradually replace their individual identities with the collective identities of their parents or caregivers. These collective identities are founded on the pillars of conformity and compliance, i.e. unquestioning loyalty to both the group and its leaders. (Asch, 1956; Milgram, 1963; Zimbardo, 1971)
Lenny would like to play on the swing. Instead he finds himself in a dark room where a threatening voice tells him that someone died a horrible death because of Lenny's moral failures, and afterwards he would eat and drink what he is made to believe is the flesh and blood of the murdered man.
In school Karen is taught that Christians from Europe brought civilisation to the rest of the world and learns to associate civilisation with white Christians. Other civilisations may be mentioned but portrayed as inferior, and she will not be taught about the genocides and massacres white Christians committed out of their Abrahamic sense of entitlement to colonise the planet.
Paul loves flowers and has taught himself everything about them. He is able to name the most exotic plants and enjoys arranging them in creative ways. When he grows up he wants to be a florist. His parents tell him to stop talking nonsense and prepare him for a career in accounting.
Wendy is rewarded for behaving in a way that pleases the person in authority, especially by learning the things she is expected to learn, and therefore neglects the subjects that really interest her. Being rewarded for compliance becomes her only motivation.
Like everybody else in her class she is taught by rote. She doesn't really grasp what she is learning, but as long as she can repeat what she heard, she is doing fine. This also teaches her that any claim that is made repeatedly must necessarily be true.
Peggy asks her mother for a haircut. She really loves her long hair, but all the girls in her class wear short hair, and she doesn't want to be the odd one out.
(All these examples are taken from the culture that attempted to condition me, but you will find similar examples in any other culture.)
Those who in the slightest deviate from mainstream society by retaining at least part of their individual identities are pathologised with labels such as autism or ADHD, and increasing efforts will be made to break these children, such as authoritarian parenting or ABA.(Conrad, 2007; Nadesan, 2005)
I posit that being forced to give up their identity and take on collective identities instead causes psychological trauma to every child exposed to social conditioning, even if they undergo a seemingly 'normal transition'. And although it happens to almost everybody, it's still trauma, and I argue that this trauma is a springboard for mental disorders. (Hughes et al., 2017)
Social conditioning teaches children that they don't matter as individuals, only as functioning members of their groups. This dismissal of their selves can lead to them developing low self-esteem and consequently falling into depression and even suicidality, and it may cause anxiety disorders as well. Others may become so eager to fulfil the social expectations of others that they become people pleasers as is common with Dependent and Borderline Personality Disorder. (Kernberg, 1975)
Social conditioning may also cause some to defy society altogether and put themselves at the centre of their world with little or no regard for others, as in Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
But social conditioning doesn't only hold back the child but society itself. As I demonstrated in the Deindividuation Resister Hypothesis, human progress is driven by individuals who successfully resisted social conditioning or who weren't exposed to it in the first place, and if more parents allowed their children to retain their individual identities, this world could be a better place for everybody. (Nemeth, 2018)
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