Recipes against unhappiness, chapter 2 - Children

This chapter is about what NOT to do, rather than what to do, to make people less unhappy in life.
One of the most despicable things that humans can do is brainwashing their own children. This is done when they are growing up and learning, when they are most vulnerable and need the support of the adults that surround them, those same adults they trust with their own safety and security. That’s exactly when they get betrayed and permanently damaged. The aim of this subjugation procedure is to install in the youth’s mind functional narratives such as religion, nationalism, patriotism, ethnicity, culture, even preposterous tribal totems such as sport fanaticism and traditional cuisine. It has always been done, and it’s still done nowadays, even where a great emphasis is placed on children’s rights.
Grownups, who were brainwashed themselves when they were kids, don’t seem to understand the kind of psychological manipulation they underwent (or maybe they understand it way too well) and allow various institutions to brainwash their children. They even contribute themselves to perpetrate this monstrosity at home. Brainwashing is carried out mainly to form workers or soldiers of various kind. And once individuals have completed the training phase they will stick to the same principles of the society that brainwashed them, even when it comes to sacrifice their reputation, their life or the mental independence of their own offspring. Children are offered as sacrificial victims on the altar of tribalism.
And real warriors they become, ready to fight and sacrifice everything they have in the name of the myth they have been indoctrinated to protect. No kidding, I’ve watched people lose every shred of common sense, dignity and self control to defend not only the colors of their national flag or the sacred scriptures of their creed, but even the “honor” of some stinking, oily and outrageously salty regional sausage. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears, but I swear it did happen.
Brainwashing at an early age works perfectly by the way, and that’s why it has been practiced worldwide since we stopped being roamers and started to build modern societies: it helps molding citizens who can do any sort of self-destructive thing in the name of organizations that benefit someone else rather than themselves. Pawns who become expendable and can be squeezed at work or turned into cannon fodder.
One of the oldest, most effective, cruelest forms of social engineering, a practice that no one seems to plan to extirpate and that, on the contrary, is seen as a fundamental block of any human organization.
That is simply sickening horrible. We're talking about children, for fuck sake!
Well, this is the recipe then: children should learn what's good for them, not what's good for someone else.