revert to their essential selves, to their own history. Gorbachev and
glasnost were an aberration; now we are back to fatal normality.”
But these were not to be normal times. For one thing, Gorbachev had
not governed in the tradition of the czars or Stalin or any of the line of
oppressive postwar rulers who had not allowed even a breath of free-
dom to the masses. He had ceded them certain rights and choices. And
when these now-established freedoms were threatened, the people
lashed out the way a dog would if someone tried taking a fresh bone
from its mouth. Within hours of the junta’s announcement, thousands
were in the streets, erecting barricades, confronting armed troops, sur-
rounding tanks, and defying curfews. The uprising was so swift, so
massive, so unitary in its opposition to any retreat from the gains of
glasnost that after only three riotous days, the astonished officials relen-
ted, surrendering their power and pleading for mercy from President
Gorbachev. Had they been students of history—or of psychology—the
failed plotters would not have been so surprised by the tidal wave of
popular resistance that swallowed their coup. From the vantage point
of either discipline, they could have learned an invariant lesson:
Freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight.
The lesson applies as well to the politics of family as country. The
parent who grants privileges or enforces rules erratically invites rebel-
liousness by unwittingly establishing freedoms for the child. The parent
who only sometimes prohibits between-meal sweets may create for the
child the freedom to have such snacks. At that point, enforcing the rule
becomes a much more difficult and explosive matter because the child
is no longer merely lacking a never-possessed right but is losing an es-
tablished one. As we have seen in the case of political freedoms and
(especially pertinent to the present discussion) chocolate-chip cookies,
people see a thing as more desirable when it has recently become less
available than when it has been scarce all along. We should not be sur-
prised, then, when research shows that parents who enforce discipline
inconsistently produce generally rebellious children.^16
Let’s look back to the cookie study for another insight into the way
we react to scarcity. We’ve already seen from the results of that study
that scarce cookies were rated higher than abundant cookies and that
newly scarce cookies were rated higher still. Staying with the newly
scarce cookies now, there was a certain cookie that was the highest rated
of all: those that became less available because of a demand for them.
Remember that in the experiment the participants who experienced
new scarcity had been given a jar of ten cookies that was then replaced
with a jar of only two cookies. Actually, the researchers did this in one
of two ways. To certain participants, it was explained that some of their
196 / Influence