2 Chronicles 10:11 · World English Bible
Now whereas my father burdened you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.’
A young ruler mistakes cruelty for strength and answers a plea for mercy by threatening worse. He imagines that fear compounded will bind people tighter to his throne.
From the Clinical Psychology reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
A young ruler mistakes cruelty for strength and answers a plea for mercy by threatening worse. He imagines that fear compounded will bind people tighter to his throne. The opposite is coming. Tyranny escalates because it cannot inspire loyalty, so it reaches for terror, and terror is the confession of a leader who has nothing else.
Strength does not need to promise scorpions. The man secure in his competence can afford to lighten a burden without losing his authority. Threaten those already straining under you, and you teach them they have nothing left to lose. People who have nothing left to lose will eventually walk away, or turn.
Clinical Psychology lens
When I reach for fear to get what I want, what am I admitting I have run out of?
Whatever is forced goes against the grain of things and wears out fast. Violence rebounds on the one who uses it, and the harvest after an army passes is thorns.
He wrote that the cruelest rulers are the most frightened ones, since a man who must be feared can never stop watching his own back. Fear binds nobody; it only teaches people to wait.
Hatred has never once been ended by more hatred. It ends only where someone decides to stop adding to it.
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Clinical Psychology