Welcome, friends! Here’s another in a series on authoritarianism—where it comes from and how we can change it. Today’s offering is all about why it’s so “sticky,” still winning people over even after it seemed society was headed in better directions. Personal stories from writer Tara Westover and me set the stage for talking about why we need education—more and better education!—and why the fixes we need reach beyond even education.
If you already subscribe, please consider a paid subscription if this is possible for you. Every bit helps! But the content here will always be the same, no matter what—all free, always free. I hope every time you stop in here you are inspired to see the world in a slightly different light.
We are watching in horror as the current regime attacks everything that is good in this country, from forests and rule of law to libraries and human rights. And I am thinking about how underlying it all is an attack on our minds. Trying to convince us reality is other than it is. Lying about everything.
This is epistemic abuse: attacking our ability to know things for ourselves. Because if you can mess with people’s heads, democracy crumbles more easily.
Which leads me to a book I just read recently—for the second time, straight through, almost unheard of for me. The book is a memoir by Tara Westover called Educated. It’s a gripping story of growing up in a Mormon survivalist family at the foot of a mountain in Idaho.
Tara had what looks to readers like a horrifying childhood—working in her father’s junkyard, where dangerous accidents happened but no one ever went to the hospital because her parents didn’t believe in doctors. They didn’t believe in education either, so Tara never set foot inside a classroom until she was seventeen, and that was because she taught herself algebra well enough to pass the ACT and get into Brigham Young University. Then she had a whole lot of catching up to do because she’ d never heard of the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement or Rosa Parks. The only history she knew came through the radical philosophy of her father, which seems to have been made up of equal parts Bible verses and paranoia. After college Tara made her way to Cambridge University, where she earned a PhD in history. The book is a riveting story of finding her own voice—learning how to think for herself, and then fighting for that right.
The scene that rivets me every time is actually the climax of the story, so there are going to be spoilers here. But even if you know what happens in this scene, you really need to know the whole story to fully appreciate what’s going on here. So I do encourage you to read the whole book if you’re interested. It’s quite the ride.
In this scene, which takes place near the end of the book, Tara is living in Boston, working on her dissertation at Harvard, when her parents, who never travel, suddenly announce that they are flying across the country to see her. A year earlier she had confronted them about abuse in the family. When she was a teenager, an older brother had terrorized and assaulted her, and she suffered a broken toe and cracked wrists. But her parents had flatly denied any such thing could happen.
Actually, the story is more heartbreaking than that. Tara’s mother believed her at first, even admitting that she knew of the violence at the time, but when Tara’s father refused to believe that their son could do such things, Tara’s mother too began calling Tara a liar. For a year now Tara has been talking with family members, trying to bring this hidden violence to light, but it’s not working.
So now Tara’s parents are coming to see her, to save her from what they think of as the evil inside her that is destroying their family. They want to cast the demons out of her. And she wants more than anything to let them. She knows she is losing them, and the pain of it is almost more than she can bear.
So she fantasizes about simply changing her story. She imagines how much her parents will love her if she just denies that the bad things happened. She writes, “All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.”
Her parents arrive, and her father gets ready to pray for her, and Tara gets ready to let him. But then, she writes,
Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. . . . If I yielded now, I would lose . . . custody of my own mind. . . . What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.
So Tara said no. She would not swap her reality for theirs.
And it did cost her her relationship with them, which was so painful that it almost cost her her sanity too. It took her quite a while to find her own footing and make peace with leaving the world of her parents. To this day they still deny the violence, and Tara remains estranged from them.
Tara’s story is a crystal clear example of epistemic abuse—how her parents occupied her mind, deciding for her what she should know and think. And it’s a story of how going to college broke that spell by introducing her to ways of thinking beyond those she grew up with. So it’s tempting to read her story in an overly simple way—that it’s just about how getting an education opens people’s minds.
And yes, an education does do that! The more education the people of a country have, it turns out, the more likely that country is to be a democracy and to remain a democracy. But there are many ways to develop expansive and compassionate thinking, and formal classrooms may not even be the best one. The troubling part of Tara’s story is not the lack of education in the family per se, it’s the mental abuse—how her parents denied her reality in order to remain in control of her mind. How they demonized other ways of thinking. How they tried to rewrite her reality and silence her voice.
Epistemic abuse is fundamental to all abuse. Tara herself has said,
I have a theory; I think all abuse is foremost an assault on the mind. If someone’s going to have an abusive relationship with you, they have to invade your reality, and they have to distort it, and they have to change how you see yourself.
Epistemic abuse is key to authoritarianism. A wannabe dictator has to control people’s minds first.
Authoritarian cultures lead to authoritarian parenting, and authoritarian parents raise up children who have a hard time learning to trust their own perception. I know this because Tara’s story resonates with both my story and my mother’s story, which is why the book is so compelling for me.
Like Tara, I grew up in an intensely religious community—in my case Mennonite—but our home was isolated from others, my parents always stricter than other parents and more fearful of anything new. Like Tara’s parents, they tried to control what their children could think. So I am familiar with epistemic abuse. And it was education that helped me too break free. I attended a Mennonite college that introduced the students to bigger worlds and encouraged us to think, and in that school is where I got radicalized. My faith changed, my politics changed, I learned to see other points of view. And then, like Tara, I went on to get a PhD—and in a field closely related to hers.
And yet learning to stand on my own two epistemological feet has been a lifelong challenge. I’m always tempted to check around to see what others think, try to get confirmation for my views. It’s just a reflex. It’s certainly part of my habit as an autistic person, always trying to hide my differentness: I check the surroundings, read the room, copy what’s there, fit in. But it’s also part of the way I was raised. It’s the residue of an authoritarian family system.
My parents grew up during the Great Depression in a rigidly authoritarian church, where the local bishop dictated the details of life down to the length of the sleeves on women’s dresses. My mother, as a young adult, had moved away from that tight community to get a nursing education—almost unheard of for a woman there before World War II. But after she graduated, her dream of being a nurse in a foreign country had been thwarted. So when she found herself back in the hometown, married with children, and no longer even able to be a nurse because my father and plenty of other people in the 1960s believed a mother shouldn’t work outside the home, she sank into depression. Her body broke down, her rage exploded, her mind turned anxious and brittle.
So my relationship with my mother was troubled, to say the least. She was sweet by nature—I could feel her intentions—and yet the older I grew, the harder she tried to control me, invading my privacy, reading my journals, laying down mindless rules, trying to force my life into paths she wanted. I worked for decades afterward to heal those wounds.
But healing was complicated in part because the trauma was not so clear-cut as in Tara’s case. No one ever threatened my life with violence; no one ever demonized me or called me a liar. Besides, it’s normal for young people to fight for their independence, and I’d only had to fight a little harder than my friends. So why was I in so much pain?
It took decades to understand, and that understanding came long after the healing—many years after the memories themselves no longer held a charge. And understanding finally happened through a vision.
One day I am sitting in silence, meditating, when I see an image of a tall vase filled with water sitting on a table. In the vision someone steps out of the shadows and approaches the vase, and I realize it is my mother. She lifts the vase and raises it to her mouth. She begins sipping.
A wave of horror passes through me as I finally get it. The vase is me. The water is my vitality. My mother, in her pain and panic, was trying to drink from my vase. She was stealing my water of life.
The abuse I faced was spiritual. It was soul abuse—stealing the very being of another. My life was threatened after all, but in a way no one could see.
“Hurt people hurt people,” as they say, and my mother was in desperate pain. I suspect her pain was complicated by unrecognized autism. She had spent a lifetime feeling profoundly different from others, which I’ve been told by a psychologist is a reliable marker of autism. And for my mother, “different” morphed into “bad,” as it so easily does when autistic people don’t get support they need for being who they are. My mother hated her looks, so she scratched out her face in photographs. She worried she wasn’t acceptable to God. She felt sinful. So when her church or her father or her husband told her what to do to be good, she tried to obey.
Authoritarianism short-circuited my mother’s attempts at independence. It taught her that being different was unacceptable. It taught her to be good by obeying others. And my mother never abandoned that urge to obey. She abandoned herself instead.
My mother could not find her own waters of life. My mother was dying of thirst.
What was perpetrated on me was an authoritarian wound. What was perpetrated on Tara Westover was an authoritarian wound. It’s tempting to think that authoritarianism only happens in extremist families or repressive churches, but the truth is, that wound has been perpetrated on all of us. All Americans, and all societies shaped by European colonialism, inherit an authoritarian wound from the past—from the deep past, the ancestral culture in the Roman Empire and long before. Any wannabe dictator in the present has a lot less work to do when the ground has been prepared by thousands of years of authoritarian habits.
We forget just how authoritarian Roman society was. Romans were strong traditionalists, to begin with. They revered their ancestors. What the ancestors thought became the guide and guardrail for their thinking. Truth was inherited. Knowledge was handed down. It was a profoundly conservative milieu.
And its conservatism was reinforced through a rigidly hierarchical social system. Wealth inequality was massive—though maybe somewhat less than in the US today. Roman law protected inheritance, so huge estates passed from father to son, keeping the social order fixed. Most people were impoverished. A few hundred wealthy landowners in the Senate made the rules for everyone else, though they lost even that power after Julius Caesar pronounced himself “dictator for life” in the first century BCE. Roman fathers were heads of families, with wives and children under their authority. Well-to-do families owned slaves. People offered public sacrifices at the many temples and shrines throughout each city, praying to the gods and goddesses in the heavens to wash away sin and bring down divine blessings on the community.
So knowledge, power, wealth, and blessing all moved vertically in Roman society; they came down from above. It was a coherent and unified system. Every person could know their place in a social order aligned with the ancestors, with the gods, with ultimate reality.
This is the profoundly conservative cosmos that Christianity grew up in, and these are the rules it eventually adopted—but not right away. In the first centuries Christianity was a social upstart—laughed at for being new instead of old, sometimes persecuted because it looked secretive and antisocial. Christians refused to perform the sacrifices that everyone knew kept the whole community safe. Their neighbors did not trust them.
All this changed in the fourth century when Constantine the emperor converted to Christianity and suddenly made the upstart religion respectable. Soon other wealthy people converted too, and when they died they started leaving their huge estates to the church. So the church’s economic power multiplied overnight—and in the very same decades when the political power of Rome was fading.
In this anxious time of change, with barbarians charging the borders, a man named Augustine gained prominence as a church bishop. And his thinking set the tone of the Western world forever after.
When he was a young man, Augustine had tried his best to be good. But he couldn’t escape the hold of his secret desires. He still craved respect and honor and wealth; he still hungered for the love of women. And then he discovered help. When he converted to Christianity at the age of thirty-one he was transformed. Such a miracle! It happened in an instant with no effort at all. Augustine wrote, “My mind was free at last from the gnawing need to seek advancement and riches, to welter in filth and scratch my itching lust.”
God had wiped away his sin—a complete gift. The church of the time already thought that because of Adam and Eve, the whole human race tends toward sin, but Augustine pushed the idea one big step further. He said we can’t escape sin; we inherit it just by being born. He called it “original sin,” and only baptism can wash it away. The idea took hold throughout the Western half of the empire: goodness does not arise within us. We need help. And we have to go through the church to find it.
An idea like that opens the door to political oppression. Because if we can’t find goodness within, then goodness has to be imposed from without. So the Western empire settled in for a thousand years of authoritarian rule, buttressed by Augustine’s teaching that everyone inherits sin. As Rome crumbled, the church stepped into the vacuum of power, gluing society together by controlling people’s access to God.
It’s hard to imagine a more complete culture of authority—the power of heaven itself imposed in every arena of life, primarily by men: in politics and religion, in the town and in the family, in law and custom. This was the scaffolding of feudalism.
When some people are allowed to make decisions for others, force and violence often follow. Because authority is dangerous. Few, if any, people can hold it with integrity. Power corrupts, as they say. A system built on authority breeds arrogance in those who have it and subservience in those who don’t. And arrogance tries to make everyone alike. Being alike may look like community, but it’s really only conformity. And conformity requires force to be sustained.
So Europeans in the Middle Ages built a culture of conformity, often resorting to violence to sustain it. They sometimes demonized neighbors who thought differently and expelled them or burned them at the stake. They persecuted Jews in pogroms. Husbands beat wives, and parents beat children to make them obey. Eventually Europeans took domination outside their borders, marching against Muslims in the Holy Land, sailing to foreign lands to pillage and subdue, enslaving Africans and trying to exterminate Native Americans. The long centuries of colonialism rest on that foundation of arrogance and authoritarianism.
A system built on authority breeds arrogance in those who have it and subservience in those who don’t. And arrogance tries to make everyone alike. Being alike may look like community, but it’s really only conformity.
Power coming down from on high is an ancient habit in Western institutions. By contrast, democracy is so recent it’s almost brand-new. Only in the 1700s did Europeans reject the divine right of kings. Only in the 1800s did Americans outlaw slavery. Only in the 1900s did women receive the full rights of citizens in this country. We are still dangerously close in time to those ancient habits.
Which is why authoritarianism remains so tempting for millions of people. And why the fascists in this country have had much less work to do to secure power than they might have had if American democracy were more than 250 years old and we had put more distance between ourselves and our authoritarian roots.
The cure for lies is truth. The cure for authoritarianism is a people who know the truth. So education in media literacy and critical thinking are crucial for building democracy, because a population that can think critically does not throw in with fascists.
But the fixes for authoritarianism run deeper than offering new courses in schools. Because the habit of authoritarianism infects Western education itself. Daniel Wildcat, a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, is a college professor who calls higher education “one of the most conservative Western cultural institutions in America.” Others Native thinkers echo this view.
I will never forget watching a Google talk by Ilarion Merculieff, of the Unangan people of the Aleutian Islands. “Under today’s paradigms,” Ilarion says, the first thing that happens when a child is born is their parents say, “You must obey me. You must learn what I tell you to learn.”
It continues in school, he says, where desks are lined up to face the adult in front. “We give away our personal power to the person who is authority,” he says. “We learn this thing about authority from our parents, and we carry it through school and all the way up to postgraduate degree. . . . Our minds are indoctrinated to give away our personal authority.”
He adds, this is “totally opposite of how I was raised.” “It’s a crooked thing to our people,” he says. “It’s not aligned in harmony with all.”
It runs crooked because to Ilarion’s people, human nature starts in the exact opposite place than what Augustine and the Western world thought. Ilarion’s people believe that knowing is inside us. “Every child is a genius when they’re born,” Ilarion says. But, he adds, that genius “is taken out of us as we live.”
I have a lot more to say about this—so much that I’m writing a book about it: that what we need to fix the ills of the modern world isn’t just more education or even a reform in education. What we need is a whole new cultural paradigm. We need a worldview that starts in a different place: by honoring the knowing—the genius, the intelligence, the spirit—within each person. And honoring the genius and intelligence and spirit in every part of nature as well—every mountain and river, every tree and bird and rock, even the tiniest lady beetle on the front door.
This is the worldview that most if not all Indigenous cultures have held since forever, and they’ve used it for centuries to make their decisions in more democratic ways, to share power with one another. Because when you start with the knowing inside each person, then bowing to some other authority becomes an offense against the spirit within. Giving your power away to others becomes, as Ilarion said, “a crooked thing.”
Epistemic abuse is spiritual abuse—trying to control the knowing within another. Invading their inner sanctum. So resisting authoritarianism calls for spiritual solutions, and it starts by claiming the knowing within. Honoring the genius within each being. Raising up people who can drink from their own waters of life.
Which is what I want to talk about in the next episode. But for now, I’ll leave you with three simple things we can do, every day, to stay in touch with our own waters of life. Those three things are:
Touch silence. Touch joy. And touch grass. Every day, spend a little time with each one.
(1) Come into a few moments of silence. Because entering silence gives us the gift of our own heart. It leads us home to our own waters of life.
(2) And every day, contact your own joy, wherever you find it. Because joy is the energy of life; it’s the fuel for resistance.
(3) And every day, touch the living Earth. Hug trees, walk in grass, swim in water, listen to birds. Because lies can’t stand up to reality, and the deeper we root ourselves in the reality of the living Earth, the more stable we become in knowing and aligning with the truth. Connecting with the Earth, every day, grows our wonder and awe. It keeps us humble in the right way—brimming with love and amazement.
So until next time, I am wishing you enough joy to keep your steps light, enough silence to hear your own soul, and enough curiosity to keep your heart lively in these challenging times.
Namaste.
Do you resonate with Tara’s story? Does seeing the long history of authoritarianism put any pieces together for you?
How do you stay in touch with your own waters of life? Let us know in the comments!
Thanks for being here, and don’t forget to hit LIKE before you go!
For digging deeper
For more on the knowledge within, or “sovereignty of mind,” as Aboriginal author Alexis Wright calls, see episode 39, The Knowing Inside.
Political psychologist Karen Stenner wrote the book on authoritarianism: The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She distinguishes authoritarianism from conservatism: conservatives are uncomfortable with change while authoritarians are uncomfortable with difference, wanting everyone to be alike. For a summary of her main ideas, see Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt, “Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, but an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies,” in Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America, ed. Cass R. Sunstein (New York: William Morrow, 2018), 175–220, available for pdf download from the Publications page of Karen Stenner’s website.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020) is a terrific resource for understanding how authoritarians and dictators operate.
Overwhelming the public with lies makes people easier to control; political psychology research shows that when people feel uncertain about what to think, they tend to adopt conservative and authoritarian beliefs. See J. T. Jost, et al., “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 3 (2003): 339–75, also John T. Jost et al., “Are Needs to Manage Uncertainty and Threat Associated With Political Conservatism or Ideological Extremity?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33, no. 7 (2007).
Increasingly, people’s political preferences track with their level of education; see Johanna Alonso, “Education-Level Voting Gaps Are Highest Among Men, White People,” Inside Higher Ed, Nov. 8, 2024. See also Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, The Role of Education in Taming Authoritarian Attitudes (2020).
In domestic abuse, gaslighting is the usual form of attacking the mind, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline website says gaslighting is so effective because it leads victims to question their sanity. Their website includes a great page devoted to gaslighting. Also see Susan Krauss Whitbourne, “The 6 Sly Ways of the Gaslighter,” Psychology Today, April 11, 2025.
Quotes from Tara Westover’s book, Educated: A Memoir (Random House, 2018), are from pages 300 and 304. I enjoyed this PBS interview with her: “‘Educated’ Author Tara Westover Answers Your Questions (Extended Version),” PBS NewsHour, May 31, 2018, also an interview with Oprah, “Tara Westover Best-Selling Memoir ‘Educated’: Super Soul Sunday S9E6,” OWN, May 5, 2019, where the quote about abuse of the mind comes from. You might also enjoy a New York Times op-ed she published a few years later: “I Am Not Proof of the American Dream,” New York Times, Feb. 2, 2022. And I just discovered a very recent interview with her: “Educated: Tara Westover in Conversation with Lily Cole at the New Orleans Book Festival,” April 1, 2025.
There are many ways to become an expansive thinker, and my favorite is nature-based education. See the Children & Nature Network, “Learning Outside.” For research into its benefits, see Jeff Mann et al., “Getting Out of the Classroom and into Nature: A Systematic Review of Nature-Specific Outdoor Learning on School Children’s Learning and Development,” Frontiers in Public Health, May 16, 2022.
The pattern of organizing society hierarchically into systems of patriarchal authority is actually thousands of years older than the Roman Empire, and I outlined its roots in Episode 34, “Facing the Past.”
To get a feel for the Roman way of life and values, a couple of great reads are Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (Yale University Press, 2003), and Joyce E. Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman (Routledge, 1997).
Historian Peter Heather traces Roman wealth inequality in The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (Oxford University Press, 2007). He says less than 5 percent of families owned 80 percent of land (138), though other historians estimate that less than 1 percent of people were landowners. For side-by-side comparison with the US, see “The United States Has Worse Inequality than Ancient Rome,” The Intellectualist, Nov. 4, 2023.
In Augustine’s Confessions he tells the story of his conversion, and parts of it read like it could have been written last week. The most readable translation is by F. J. Sheed, 2nd ed. (Hackett Publishing, 2006). (Be sure you’re getting the second edition.) I love the slightly more classical cadences of the text I quote here: the translation by Maria Boulding, OSB (New City Press, 1997), available at the Internet Archive.
In Kissed by a Fox (Counterpoint, 2012), chapter 4, I told the story of Augustine and how he got his view of original sin adopted as official church doctrine (though other thinkers never went completely along with the biological inheritance part). In chapter 5 of Kissed by a Fox I told the story of how the Protestant Reformers recentered the theology of Augustine, so his pessimistic view of human nature passed into modern European philosophy and came to influence both the theory of capitalism and Darwin’s theory of evolution. (Disclosure: If you order my books from my author page on Bookshop, I get a little bit extra.)
Finland has awesome media literacy programs in their schools; see this 17-minute story from CBS Sunday Morning, “In Finland, Classes in Recognizing Fake News, Disinformation,” Sep. 29, 2024.
Disinformation is especially a problem in authoritarian societies because it is pushed from the top; see this Turkish study by Zsofia Bocskay, “Why Misinformation Thrives in Autocracies: Spread from the Top, Delivered by TV, Believed by Partisans,” Review of Democracy (2025).
Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) and Daniel Wildcat (Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma) wrote an invaluable book analyzing Western education and offering Native models and philosophies: Power and Place: Indian Education in America (Fulcrum, 2001); quote about American education is on page 10, in a chapter by Daniel Wildcat.
Ilarion Merculieff, “Mother Earth Speaks: Talks at Google,” Dec. 6, 2020.
