Two of the more interesting theories to come out of psychology are Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs, and Kohlberg's Moral Scales. They mesh interestingly.
click for the big diagram
Abrahm Maslow's heirarchy of needs - replacing the chakra system so eloquently elucidated in the animated version of Avatar, the Last Airbender - posits a heirarchy of biological needs. Food, water, and oxygen (and maybe a survivable degree of warm and dry) before safety, ultimately. Safety before friendship, community and connection. Social connection before self-esteem and faith in one's abilities. Self-esteem before the joy of wonder. Cognitive curiosity and wonder before wondering if this graphic design is really good enough...
...and shortly after you wonder if the interior decorating is harshing your buzz, you apparently drop acid, realize the rat race means nothing to you and all the "shoulds" and models for life which were shoveled to you all your life are bullshit, drop out, and search for enlightenment or go back to the land and become an organic farmer. We feel it is important to note that this theory was proposed about three decades before the summer of 1969.
Lawrence Kohlberg, conversely, spent the 1960s and beyond asking philosophical and ethical questions of small children (and sometimes others) and grouping the results. The six stages of moral reasoning they came up with were...
1. Obedience and punishment.
2. Greed and/or an exchange of favors.
3. Social conformity.
4. Law, order, and authority.
5. Social contract and the utilitarian best good for the most.
6. Universal ethics.
The two interact very, very interestingly.
The first thing to notice is that all stages except trancendental universal ethics... are unnatural. It is impossible to have an ethics which extends only towards obedience and the fear of punishment if one has never had anyone to obey, or experienced punishment. Similarly, someone who lives in isolation in a hut in the wilderness cannot value social conformity, as it is not possible. Kohlberg's layer four, "the holocaust was good because those were the people in charge," assumes a heirarchy, which woud have people in charge; it's a sad little reprocessing of layer one, without the "what if you could get away with it."
In other words, Kohlberg's basic categorizations propose that very ethical babies are broken into being less ethical people - because the other categories aren't even possible outside special conditions.
This is backed up by the literature; children of roughly eight months of age are known to both recruit help and directly support a peer in distress (Liddle, Bradley, and McGrath, 2015), and has been seen as early as three months (Davidov et al, 2020). From at least five months of age, they also prefer to avoid persons displaying cruelty towards others (Paz, Uzefovsky and Davidov, 2020).
The "morally good children, bad adults and bad society" model isn't just located in Kohlberg's findings, most of whose conditions are impossible without interpersonal cruelty (alone in the woods, are you afraid that a tree is going to punish you?), but the "good children dragged down" model (at least the "morally good children" part) is supported by the literature.
One clue is found in (Hay, Castle, Davies, Demetriou, and Stimson, 1999). Sharing with other children decreased between 1.5 and 3 years of age... and those who still shared were targeted for bullying by their mother.
As such, we see a world in which infants who start out at a Kohlberg 6, "help people in distress, don't be cruel to people," are dragged down by being held captive by persons for whom kindness is actively punished by active, sadistic bullying.
The key layer seems to be the second layer, "physical safety." Being yelled at can put a child in fear of their physical safety, while other measures actively compromise their physical safety. A Kohlberg 3, "social conformity as the highest ethics," looks at first like a failed "social affinity and belonging," since you cannot be loved for who you are not, and Donald Winnicot's proposal of the conflict between the true and false self may be of interest here - but honestly, may well simply be an issue of physical safety.
Yeah, homie. You're literally living among the Drow from the Forgotten Realms universe.
It's at this time that one might wish to mention Galtung's triangle, postulated by Johan Galtung. Direct violence is what it sounds like. Structural violence tends to involve things like differential political voice or being turned down for mortgages for political dissent or being the wrong ethnicity or the like. The absence of intelligent child characters in centralized media is an example fo structural violence which edges slightly towards cultural violence. Cultural violence, on the other hand, is where things get evil. Denying burial in a graveyard because the targeted group is subhuman, or the demand that the lesser class lower their gaze between their relative unworthiness, are examples of cultural violence; it is the constant effort to remind the targeted group that they are less than human.
But the babies - the hardware - are good, kind people. It's mostly the weight of child abuse manifesting as traumatic stress echoing through the ages, dragging people down to the bottom of both Kohlberg's and Maslow's model.
The store Target canceled it's pride month celebration because of directed bomb threats. Whether at home or at large, the "safety" layer is the key layer of Maslow's heirarchy, with an attempt to control the physiological needs of others to extort them.
Despite the brutalist campaign beginning at home, in infancy, and continuing to a regime of mostly domestic terrorism, most people escape, and just quietly do the minimum leading a quiet life rather than climbing to the top of a heirarchy by crushing others. With bullying at home, from infancy, coupled with a state internment center for children basically infamous for its nightmarish social dynamics, where the staff (mostly administrative) is the only thing creepier than the popular kids, that's actually an impressive survival rate, even if it's partial survival. The hope remains, however, to get all parties a little closer to their natural state - self-actualization, kindness, and mental health.
Reducing child maltreatment so that the concern for kindness first can survive, while helping everyone up from a lifetime of major and minor stressors so they can explore themselves and live in accordance with kindness and their conscience, seems to be a major focus, as is decentralizing society so that terrorism is largely ineffective. Regardless, there seems to be a bit much of pushing people down Maslow's chart for the purpouse of pushing people down Kohlberg's chart.
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