Uncle Adolf Syndrome (UAS): A mental health problem of pandemic proportions.

See also: • Patterns • Good God the Oppressor • Double Bind • ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) • Educating Children

UAS

Uncle Adolf Syndrome.

UAS is a mental health acronym. It stands for Uncle Adolf Syndrome and like many other mental health conditions such as ADHD, BPD and PTSD the number of people affected is alarmingly high. More than three quarters of the parents and teachers examined in the UK were suffering to some degree from UAS. UAS is the condition whereby a person reacts to a legitimate enquiry by transferring guilt from the guilty to the innocent in an attempt to protect the guilty. The following is a real life example from a fictitious victim.

When Uncle Adolf comes round to tea he often brings his dog Blondi. We were sitting on the lawn one day eating cucumber sandwiches after playing croquet and discussing his lovely new pink outfit. Uncle Adolf was benignly removing the cucumber that Blondi doesn't like from a sandwich and giving her the lacy thin bread and butter. I asked Uncle Adolf about the morality of using cyanide gas to kill Jews. My mother immediately scolded me saying that I was being unkind and there was no reason to bring that up now. "You really are a horrid boy! Look, Uncle Adolf is such a nice and gentle man. See the way he is carefully removing the cucumber for little Blondi. How could you be so insensitive as to bring that subject up now and upset him?"

The mother suffers from UAS.

There are serious problems for human being around the issues of oppression and freedom. On the one hand we all seem to agree that freedom is an essential requirement for humans. If we remove people's freedom we get all sorts of problems. There are the subjective issues like the fact it is unkind and cruel. It causes suffering and misery. It seems to remove fundamental rights from individuals and takes away their ability to live a full and healthy life. Then there are the more objective issues like the fact that it invariably causes trouble. Take enough freedom away from enough people and you get revolutions and war. Lots of malfunctioning human activity. Not good. Then on the other hand there is the opinion that we need law and order and people must be controlled in order for society to function in a healthy way for the majority.

There are lots of philosophical works discussing these issues but the concern here is with the paradoxical nature of those who not only profess a belief in freedom but seem to believe it as well whilst being some of the worst oppressors on planet Earth.

It all revolves around the idea of the benign oppressor. The benign oppressor works by creating an environment in which they can control the pain levels of people in it. They then impose a level of pain which they reduce when the oppressed behave the way they want. They rarely (if ever) sit there calculating all of this consciously. This observation is not part of the blame game of making them culpable in a vindictive way somehow justifying a punitive attitude toward them and incidentally making "us" out to be somehow better than them. This is observing reality in an attempt to improve our ability to function creatively and successfully in the real world.

There is a general tendency for people in authority to very quickly reject any question of their own morality by applying a negative moralistic judgement to the person raising the question. Tragically this is soaked into our culture. A child that questions a teacher is very quickly accused of being rude. This is a paradoxical and damaging accusation. It is not true. The problem our culture has is that the concept is so much part of the way we operate we believe it to be true. It is possible that the English society is less oppressive than the Saudi Arabian society. It is possible that American culture is less punitive and controlling than the Iranian culture. But by judging other cultures as worse than our own there is the very real danger that we cannot look at what is wrong with our own. We are perhaps living in fear and protecting ourselves from a perceived threat by making sure we are at least "not as bad as" the other fellow.

Whether or not Uncle Adolf is a nice bloke it is still reasonable to question his actions. Any oppressive, insulting, criticising, judgemental response to prevent the question being addressed is almost proof in itself that the subject being questioned is wrong. The condition of UAS is common but not universal. I once asked a director who was very near the top of the hierarchy of a large and well know pharmaceutical company what the difference was between the pharmaceutical company and the criminal drug suppliers in Columbia or the Mafia. He gave me a very satisfactory answer. He put into perspective the democratic system, the legal system and the commercial system and said basically that the pharmaceutical company finds it profitable to abide by the laws created by the democratic system. It's all the checks and balances that our society puts in place to try to make things work better than they might. Whether this behaviour is right or wrong is not the point. The point is that in most circumstances this would be regarded as an illegitimate question for fear of accusing the pharmaceutical industry of being no better than criminals. (My view is that there is little difference but that is another matter.) It is rare to get an uninhibited, fair and fearless answer to a question like that. But it is notable because it is not the norm and it is the correct and reasonable response.

This particular pharmaceutical executive obviously knew his own mind better than most people do. He also took full responsibility for his own actions whether or not anyone else agreed with him. What is typical in UAS is that the sufferer cannot bear to face the paradox of their own judgement and their own actions. They are in fact behaving in a way that they learnt to behave in order to survive but they knew that such behaviour towards them was unjust. So they objected to the behaviour but surrendered to it for the sake of survival. Now they can only behave like it because it is how they learnt to survive but deep inside they still reject the behaviour as wrong. If there is a danger that they may become conscious of their objection this could cause them to stop behaving in this way and the consequence of that is that their life is at risk. All this is going on emotionally and below the surface. The resulting behaviour is to act aggressively to any threat to reveal their own truth. Of course the patterned behaviour (see patterns) is complex and clever and will attempt to masquerade as rational if possible. But if you push it the pattern will resort to any technique to stop you in your tracks.

The blatant contradiction in the Uncle Adolf Syndrome is that by questioning someone you might reveal that they are wrong. In so doing they might be upset. To upset someone is unkind and so you are accused of being unkind which hurts you as if you deserve it. I call this kind of convoluted intellectual rationalisation spaghetti nonsense because it is all tangled up and from one step to another it seems connected and reasonable.

Children are being brought up all over the world in "civilisations" with utterly contradictory messages (see the Double Bind, Education or Indoctrination and Educating Children). Without a doubt this is causing aberrant behaviour. By complying with the oppression the people become carriers of the oppression and can do little more than operate it. It is imperative that we take every opportunity to stop the contradictory behaviour of the adults bringing up the children. Authority must be questioned. And it must accept it. If it does not accept it then it loses its mandate of authority immediately. It is then, without question, oppressive and wrong.