I don't agree with everything the following website says on this subject - but, grains of truth and all that.
That said: From http://www.trufax.org/paradigm/paradigm/escape3.html (bolds mine):
When we first read this account, we realized that it summarizes what happens in societies that systematically traumatize their citizens for purposes of control.
Dominator societies don’t want us to be who we are. Our being who we are proves inconvenient, because dominator systems want us to be who they tell us to be. They don’t want our creativity. They want our obedience. They don’t want our real selves.
They want our traumatized selves, our frozen rabbit selves, ready to sacrifice everything for the promise of safety and security.
[...]
Whenever we give up being who we are, we can be fooled into aiming our anger or contempt at a scapegoat—from a person to a race to humanity in general, “the dumb masses.” All our trauma-energy gets fired like a bullet at “the other,” especially if that “other” reminds us of our own helplessness. As Alice Miller puts it, “Contempt for those who are smaller and weaker thus is the best defense against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helplessness” (The Drama of the Gifted Child, p. 67).
Daily traumatizing can also create the helpless victim, the second, lower tier of society. Psychiatrist Sandra Bloom (and she represents pioneering work on trauma theory) explains that our self-efficacy—our ability to deal effectively with dangerous situations—is put to the test when any trauma threatens. If we can respond to the trauma, then we learn effectiveness. Our sense of selfhood becomes more secure and confident. We understand our abilities and our creative potential, especially if we can, as Viktor Frankl indicates (see Man’s Search for Meaning), turn suffering into meaning.
[...]
If, however, there is nothing we can do, then we learn helplessness. If the control-paradigm parent, teacher, spouse, or boss cannot be stopped, then our self-efficacy disappears. And because this is so often our experience in families, schools, and jobs—along with the social traumatizers mentioned above—we’re conditioned into helplessness constantly.
Many times, we’ve been told that the problem with humanity is that no one wants to fix the broken world. If we listen to pundits or angry neighbors, we’ll hear that we humans are just lazy. Or passive. Or sheep. But what’s really going on is what Sandra Bloom and her colleagues call “learned helplessness.” She writes, “in an environment in which some important outcome is beyond control, an animal will give up trying to alter its situation and will come to expect that nothing it can do will change the outcome. The animal learns to be helpless, and this helplessness persists even when conditions change” (Creating Sanctuary, p. 22).
The same phenomenon occurs in humans: “For children raised in abusive or neglectful homes, this failure to achieve a feeling of competence or efficacy often pervades their entire development. Regardless of what they do, how hard they try to please, how fast they run away, how strenuously they try not to cry—nothing stops the abuse.
As a result they often give up any notion that they can affect the course of their lives in a positive way” (Creating Sanctuary, p. 23).
The abuse doesn’t have to be physical to have this effect, Sandra Bloom notes (and as we’ve said, it doesn’t happen just with children):
“[Children’s] sense of self-efficacy can be seriously undermined by disparaging comments and by ridiculing and humiliating statements from parents, teachers, schoolmates, and other caretakers”(p.23).
[...]
By contrast, Sandra Bloom writes, “trauma theory has taught us that this [“official” psycho-medical] perception is nonsense, that
most [so-called] psychiatric disorder is the culmination of normal reactions to abnormal situations, situations largely created by the failure of our social systems to provide traumatized children with the protection and care to which they have a right” (Creating Sanctuary, p. 11).
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