That’s a good point. There’s an old school attitude that children will only ever behave because they’ve been dominated by their parents and therefore any “overindulgence” in a child’s desires is actually bad for the child because it violates the “natural” dominance hierarchy of the parent-child relationship and that’s why they misbehave.
There is a natural dominance hierarchy in the sense of “my child wants to run out into the street in front of traffic and I physically prevent them from doing so”. But the idea that a misbehaving child is misbehaving because they simply haven’t been dominated enough by authority figures is ridiculous. There are personality types which react to dominance with the exact undesired behavior (it me). And that’s to say nothing if the neglect that inevitably occurs when a parent-child relationship is damaged like this.
imo one of :jordan-eboy-peterson:’s stopped clock moments is how the flood myth can be seen as a cultural analogy for civil dysfunction. We build up giant systems collectively over generations and by the time they start falling apart due to corruption, the effects of their failure can really feel supernatural.