The Door Someone Else Walks Through
In 1912 a father went to court in Madras to get his sons back.
Jiddu Narayaniah had let the Theosophical Society take charge of his two boys. Three years earlier one of them, Krishnamurti, had been picked out at the Society’s Adyar headquarters as the likely vehicle of a coming World Teacher, and Annie Besant, the Society’s president, had become the boys’ legal guardian and begun steering their upbringing toward England and the role. Narayaniah had signed the arrangement and come to regret it, and he sued to undo it. The Madras High Court ordered the boys returned to him in 1913; Besant appealed to the Privy Council in London, which reversed the order in 1914 — not on the merits of the guardianship, but on a point of residence, the boys having already been moved to England — and they stayed with the movement. Raising the child to his destiny had begun by removing him from his father, and it outlasted the father’s attempt to take him back.
The same move sits in the Republic. Plato’s city is governed by a trained guardian class, and to secure it he dissolves the guardians’ own families: their children are raised in common, parentage deliberately obscured, so that the city can form the young directly instead of competing with the household for them. The family is not reformed but removed, and the removal is what lets the guardians shape the child to the city’s specification — the arrangement set down plainly, two and a half thousand years before there was a profession to carry it out.
The profession, when it arrived, said it in a manual. In Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928), John Watson told parents that the well-raised child has “no great attachments to any place or person,” and had them ration affection to match — a handshake in the morning, at most a kiss on the forehead at night. The stated aim was the child’s independence; the thing prescribed was the loosening of the child’s closest tie, on expert advice, performed by the parent in the home. What Plato ordered by decree and Besant secured by guardianship, Watson asked the mother to do herself, and to read as the child’s liberation.
The word that keeps arriving is freedom. The boy is freed for a higher destiny; the guardian city frees the child from the accidents of birth; the infant is freed from a smothering attachment; and a generation after Watson the same word would march down Fifth Avenue selling cigarettes to women behind Edward Bernays’s staged slogan, “Torches of Freedom.” Robert Nisbet set out the general shape of it: loosen a person from the near ties of family and place and you do not get a free person but an exposed one, available to whatever larger authority is standing by to receive him. That is Nisbet’s argument, offered as a reading rather than a proof — but the cases it reads are documented, and each of them runs in the same order.
The order is what the custody suit put on a court docket. The movement’s charge of the boy came first; the father’s attempt to reverse it came, and failed, second. In each of these the child is detached before he is shaped — lifted, rescued, emancipated, freed — and the freeing is the door through which someone else walks in.
Grounded in. The reference nodes this essay stands on — hover to read each.