This diseased form of thinking was primarily caused by improper childrearing: inculcated in the child early on by the very people whose words were to be taken as categorical fact—his parents, his teachers, his religious leaders. The child was never given a chance to think for himself, to trust his own judgment and experience. Instead, he was coerced by lies, threats, and punishment to accept on authority, without rational explanation or reference to reality, all sorts of religious notions and cultural prohibitions—which became his superego. And if he happened to escape the supernatural clutches of religion, the same task would almost certainly be accomplished in his nearly decade-and-a-half of compulsory schooling, where acquiring a superego essentially becomes the child’s full-time job. There he is force-fed a veritable glut of arbitrary information that he has neither the time, nor the first-hand experience to understand fully, nor the desire to learn in the first place—and with the inevitable result that he will categorize and memorize instead of learn, and acquire a floating, top-down superego instead of an experientially-based, bottom-up knowledge.
— Roman Gelperin, The Master Mind of the Self-Actualizing Person