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This is a highly condensed presentation, full of ideas, where clinical data are confronted with significant ethnological observations made by Moloney during his war service in Okinawa.
In our civilization the so-called 'significant' parent usually abuses his authority. As a reaction children develop neurotic symptoms, behavior disorders, and character trends toward either opposition or conformism. Reactions range between overt criminality and passive submissiveness.
Due to social stratification and various minority situations, every group and every individual can gratify both components of their sado-masochistic strivings. 'Like the anxiety-sparing technique of acting out, the individual can become the oppressor as well as the oppressed, the king as well as the slave… This external duality provides a paranoidlike outlet for the internal conflict emanating from the authoritarian-submissee dichotomy that goes into the formation of the king-slave complex.'
The compliant individual feels threatened by persons and groups different from himself or his group—hence his intolerance. 'Those who differ are a painful reminder to that part of himself that once had the courage to take issue with the authoritarian parent.' Crusades and bloody wars, political persecutions, and racial hatred are but derivatives of an infantile relationship to parental authority.
Observations made on Okinawan children convinced Moloney that, with permissive upbringing, a culture can develop free from sibling rivalry and