"Society, though, is not made up of heroes. As long as the tables were set
for only a minority, and the majority had to serve the minority's purposes
and be satisfied with what was left over, the sense that disobedience is sin
had to be cultivated. Both state and church cultivated it, and both worked
together, because both had to protect their own hierarchies. The state
needed religion to have an ideology that fused disobedience and sin; the
church needed believers whom the state had trained in the virtues of
obedience. Both used the institution of the family, whose function it was
to train the child in obedience from the first moment it showed a will of its
own (usually, at the latest, with the beginning of toilet training). The self-
will of the child had to be broken in order to prepare it for its proper
functioning later on as a citizen.
Sin in the conventional theological and secular sense is a concept within
the authoritarian structure, and this structure belongs to the having mode
of existence. Our human center does not lie in ourselves, but in the
authority to which we submit. We do not arrive at well-being by our own
productive activity, but by passive obedience and the ensuing approval by
the authority. We have a leader (secular or spiritual, king/queen or God) in
whom we have faith; we have security . . . as long as we are—nobody. That
the submission is not necessarily conscious as such, that it can be mild or
severe, that the psychic and social structure need not be totally authoritarian, but may be only partially so, must not blind us to the fact that we
live in the mode of having to the degree that we internalize the authoritarian
structure of our society.:severe, that the psychic and social structure need not be totally authoritarian, but may be only partially so, must not blind us to the fact that we
live in the mode of having to the degree that we internalize the authoritarian
structure of our society."
