being, which makes me
responsible, not for the child, but for my certain duties towards the
child, and for maintaining the dynamic flow between the child and
myself as genuine as possible: that is to say, not perverted by ideals
or by my _will_.

Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying. But what is
bullying? It is a desire to superimpose my own will upon another
person. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is
more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally
good for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and I seek to enact
this ideal in the person of another. This is ideal bullying. A mother
says that life should be all love, all delicacy and forbearance and
gentleness. And she proceeds to spin a hateful sticky web of permanent
forbearance, gentleness, hushedness around her naturally passionate
and hasty child. This so foils the child as to make him half imbecile
or criminal. I may have ideals if I like--even of love and forbearance
and meekness. But I have no right to ask another to have these ideals.
And to impose _any ideals_ upon a child as it grows is almost
criminal. It results in impoverishment and distortion and subsequent
deficiency. In our day, most dangerous is the love and benevolence
ideal. It results in neurasthenia, which is largely a dislocation or
collapse of the great voluntary centers, a derangement of the will. It
is in us an insistence upon the one life-mode only, the spiritual
mode. It is a suppression of the great lower centers, and a living a
sort of half-life, almost entirely from the upper centers. Thence,
since we live terribly and exhaustively from the upper centers, there
is a tendency now towards pthisis and neurasthenia of the heart. The
great sympathetic center of the breast becomes exhausted, the lungs,
burnt by the over-insistence of one way of life, become diseased, the
heart, strained in one mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerful
lower centers are no longer fully active, particularly the great
lumbar ganglion, which is the clue to our sensual passionate pride and
independence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppression. And it is
this ganglion which holds the spine erect. So, weak-chested,
round-shouldered, we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves. It is the
result of the all-famous love and charity ideal, an ideal now quite
dead in its sympathetic activity, but still fixed and determined in
its voluntary action.

Let us bewar