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Feb. 6, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:23
88 Human Beings - Good or Evil?
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Well, good afternoon everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is just after 3 o'clock on the 6th of February 2006.
I'm heading home a little bit early because the weather has turned fairly unpleasant, even for Canada, so I'm going to try and get home rather than have to spend two and a half hours in the car.
Because boy, oh boy, just imagine what a podcast that would be.
I think I would even burn myself out at that rate.
So I wanted to chat about a topic this afternoon.
It's a little topic, you know, something that I like to call, are human beings good or evil?
And I think it's a very interesting topic.
I do have a couple of ideas about it.
I guess I'm sort of fortunate and unfortunate in my life insofar as I've actually had the capacity or the opportunity To see, you know, both extreme good and extreme evil in human nature, in the people that I have known in my life.
And that is something that is kind of unusual.
I mean, a lot of people move in the same circles.
They either sort of stay in the same underworld, or they stay in the same decent world, and not so many of them sort of swing back and forth between the two in the way that I have.
But I grew up, as you know, in a very corrupt environment, and I have a most wonderful adult life with the most amazing and beautiful relationships.
And so I've sort of seen, you know, the yin and the yang, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the ups and downs and manic-depressive side of human nature.
So I would sort of like to talk about some of the theories that I have developed through those experiences and sort of share them with you and see if they ring a bell.
This is not scientific at all.
And I've also seen those things in myself.
I was a very good child, very sort of polite and respectful and honest and so on.
But when I went through puberty, I went through a short phase, probably no more than six or eight months, of pretty amoral behavior.
This is sort of when my mother had a mental collapse, but before she went into the asylum.
And, you know, things were just a desperate struggle and there's all the excuses in the world and I don't view myself as a bad person for having gone through those experiences and did the things that I did.
The things that I did were wrong, nothing major like, you know, shoplifting and things like that and underage drinking.
Never to particular, you know, repetitive excess, but I did go through, I guess you could say, a pretty wild phase, or in more accurate terms, an amoral phase during my life.
It had something to do with the company I was keeping.
It had something to do with the fact that I felt that there was no concern in society, from society to me, which meant that I didn't feel any particular reason to To respect or honor the social contract.
You know, this is a pretty important thing to recognize.
I mean, it's in myself, and I don't think I'm that unusual that it wouldn't be in others as well.
But I think it's fairly important to understand that when society has less to offer individuals, then those individuals tend to have less motive to respect the social contract.
And, you know, that's where some of the crime that you see in the world comes from.
It certainly was the case for me.
I was born a very good child and, you know, naturally honest and decent.
But I became, you know, pretty bitter and alienated through my early teens, through puberty and so on.
Because it's, I mean, fundamentally it just sort of felt like Morality was just a set of rules that are designed by the powerful to subjugate any potential rivals.
I mean, this is sort of not my theory, and I wouldn't say that I had abstracted it to that degree at that time in my life, but I certainly can tell you that it felt pretty real to me.
It felt pretty real, this thesis, and you know, this is an Nietzschean thesis as well, so I certainly don't claim originality for this, but the idea that Well, you know, what are moral rules for?
Why do you obey the teacher?
Do you obey the teacher because it's good to obey the teacher?
Because the teacher is right and moral and is appealing to your rational self-interest and steering you clear of, you know, potential problems in your life?
Do you obey a teacher the way that you obey a nutritionist or a doctor who's trying to keep you healthy and wealthy and wise?
Or do you obey the teacher because the teacher has power over you?
And the teacher is willing to exercise that power in an arbitrary and brutal fashion, and you are caught up in a system wherein, you know, the kids are always considered to be wrong, and the teachers are always considered to be right, and you can't appeal anything, and if it gets on your permanent record, oh boy, that's gonna be tough for you to get into university, it's gonna mess up your whole life, and so on.
I mean, the same question is true, of course, for any authority figures in your life.
Do you obey them because they are good or do you obey them because they are powerful?
Of course, this harkens back to something that we talked about in November of last year around, you know, do you worship God because God is good or because God is powerful?
It's sort of a very important criteria or consideration to figure out between these two possibilities.
So I definitely went from believing that authority was good when I was, well not good exactly, but trying to act for some sort of benefit for myself when I was in boarding school.
To, by the time I came to Canada, just really feeling that authority was just a load of nonsense, was just a sort of ridiculous fantasy cooked up by people to abuse those who they held power over.
You know, which certainly is not an unknown aspect of authority.
In fact, I would say it's almost the definition of authority.
But I was very clear within my own mind that, you know, when the teacher said, don't do this or don't do that, that it had nothing to do with right or wrong.
It was simply all about the exercise of power over me and over others, of course.
And so it seemed to me that, you know, since morality requires a species of empathy, right?
You have to sort of feel that other people are like you.
It was very hard for me to maintain that sense of empathy that is required for morality.
If you don't have empathy, almost by definition, you're going to exploit people and you're not going to feel any pain when you do exploit them or steal from them because you lack empathy.
First and foremost, of course, you lack empathy for yourself and then you lack empathy for others.
We fail to develop empathy for ourselves when nobody empathizes with us.
We simply can't generate these things all on our own.
And so because I felt that nobody in society, or in school, or in my friends, or my friends' parents, or my circle, that nobody cared about me, despite, you know, very obvious distress signals like having no parents, you know, things like that, because nobody empathized with me whatsoever, It was impossible for me to believe in authority that was moral.
I sort of got deep down, as a very naturally empathetic child, that I wanted to be good because I wanted to feel good and I didn't want other people to feel bad and so on.
So I really got very early on in life that you couldn't be good if you weren't sort of sensitive to the feelings and needs of others.
And that doesn't mean sort of slavishly sensitive, and it also doesn't mean optimistic, right?
I mean, in my definition of the word, there's a difference between empathy and sympathy.
So, just to take a minor segue so that this is clear as we go forward, empathy is feeling the intentions and emotions of other people and sympathy is providing a sort of moral judgment to those.
So, for instance, a woman who is walking down a dark alley and who is being followed by a man who is kind of dressed all in black and sniggering to himself and giggling or whatever,
is probably going to feel pretty nervous because she is correctly ident... and if she takes a couple of twists and turns and the guy keeps following her, walking like 20 paces behind and slowly closing up, then she is going to feel the threat that is coming from the man, that he is intending to have her feel uneasy and possibly to attack her.
She is correctly empathizing with his feelings at that time.
It doesn't mean that she sympathizes with them, But it does mean that she is correctly interpreting those.
Whereas if she thinks that it's a harmless little prank and there's no danger in it whatsoever, or she feels that it's some sort of come-on that he wants to chatter up or something, then she's not correctly empathizing with what is so obviously threatening behavior.
So you really can differentiate between the two and understand that empathy does not in any way mean sympathy, but you can't have sympathy without empathy and you can't have morality without empathy.
Morality is not just about, you know, being nice to people or, you know, tell the truth, sit up straight, share and be nice.
Morality is also sort of like being a sheriff in the Old West, right?
You want to be a tough guy and you want to try and oppose, as energetically as possible, those who are immoral or amoral.
Which means that you have to correctly identify the bad motives of other people.
So, if you're around someone who is threatening you, you have to correctly identify that as a threat.
In other words, you have to empathize with their emotional state, which is the desire to bully you, or desire to threaten you, or to harm you.
And you have to process that internally.
You have to accept that they're threatening you, or want to hurt you, and that you are correctly identifying the situation.
And then, You want to react appropriately, right?
Now, the reacting to it appropriately can take any number of things.
You know, you can run away, you can fight, you can yell back, you can, you know, cut them down with some sort of verbal jab, you can be sarcastic, you can, you know, put them in their place in one form or another.
It really depends on the power disparity.
But, you know, the important thing is that you first empathize and then understand, and from there you can make moral decisions.
But if you can't empathize, then you can't read other people's intentions, which means you are always going to be too late to the game, right?
So the woman wants to figure out the man's intentions, who's following her before he grabs her by the throat and starts snarling at her, right?
Then it's too late.
So, for most women who are in that kind of situation, what they generally do is they will immediately, you know, cross to the other side of the street.
That's sort of the means test for figuring out whether the man is simply sort of thoughtlessly following a woman without realizing how scary it is for her or, you know, he sort of has bad intent.
Now, of course, if he's just sort of thoughtlessly following a woman late at night without realizing how scary it is for her, then, well, by golly, he already lacks empathy to begin with.
And so, the woman is going to be at some level of risk no matter what.
Because, you know, a sort of sensitive and intelligent and caring man... Well, actually, sensitive and caring doesn't necessarily mean intelligent.
What's he going to do?
Well, he's going to immediately stop and let the woman get a couple of blocks ahead so that she's not worried about him following her.
Or he's going to cross over to the other side of the street so that she doesn't worry as much.
You know, because, you know, bad guys out there.
You don't want to frighten women and so on.
So, to be able to be moral means to be able to correctly identify the motives of others because if you wait until it's too late, morality doesn't really help you that much.
You know, what you need then is Kung Fu or the Royal Air Force or something like an insurgency movement.
So to be able to empathize is to be able to read the emotions and intents of others, and is required for morality.
And because I experienced no empathy within my family... I'm sorry, let me rephrase that.
I did experience empathy within my family, but I experienced no sympathy within my family.
So, insofar as my brother was sort of a pretty cruel sadist, he knew exactly what to say and to do to hurt me.
So that's an example of empathy combined with cruelty.
So he knew what I was most sensitive to and what was going to hurt me the most, and that's what he would say or do to manipulate me into sort of feeling bad or hurt.
My mother was not so much a sadist as she was just raging crazy, so she didn't actually arrow in on my personal sort of vulnerabilities psychologically or physically.
She would just sort of rage whenever the mood struck her.
So from her, I experienced neither empathy nor sympathy.
From my brother, I experienced a cruel kind of empathy and no sympathy whatsoever.
Now, when it came to larger society, to schools and bosses and policemen and so on, well, I experienced no empathy whatsoever.
I mean, I remember one evening my mother called the police because I had the temerity to fight back when she was being physically violent.
And, of course, the cops showed up and, you know, I was in quite a state and the cop just started lecturing me about, you know, this is an example of the generation gap.
Now, I mean, this is just some doofus cop who knows nothing about anything and who's taken like one course on lecturing children about their own failings when their brutal parents are at them.
But it was sort of enough to help me understand that the cop, you know, wasn't gonna have any empathy.
There was no teachers who stood out and no parents and no, you know, nobody sort of stood up to help.
And so I didn't experience any empathy from anybody.
And in not experiencing empathy, I sort of realized that if I was going to continue to have empathy in a situation where other people did not have empathy, why then I was simply going to be exploited?
That's something that is fairly clear, you know, if you sort of think about it for a moment, that if you feel the emotions of other people, but other people don't have any interest or feeling for your emotions, other than to sort of control, manipulate and bully you, Well, then you're going to be susceptible to guilt, and they're not.
You're going to be susceptible to social pressure, and they're not.
You're going to feel their anger as a terrible thing, and they're going to feel your anger as a thing to be mocked, a sort of ridiculous, empathetic thing.
So, empathy in a situation where there is no sympathy is a liability.
Unless you're willing to go sort of full tilt boogie sadist on their butts, you really can't afford to be empathetic in a situation where the only empathy that's around is that which is used by sadists to sort of further harm you.
So, when that process sort of clicked in my mind, this was around puberty, and due to another sort of large number of external stressors, I did enter into an amoral phase, where I sort of became a petty shoplifter, like I stole a candy bar, and I stole, I think, a toy train, and I stole a remote control car, and, you know, eventually the guy I stole things with, he got caught, and we got dragged into the police station, and You know, nothing, I mean, really happened because it was so, sort of, innocuous.
But, you know, the interesting thing was that nothing happened from my mother either.
She just sort of laughed about it.
And nothing happened from the police who would say, well, why would a, you know, a good student be a, sort of, become a petty thief in this sense.
So again, that sort of confirmed my feeling or belief that power was nothing to do with virtue.
That power was simply dominance.
It was simply power over exploitation of other people.
And that's of course where I began to sort of examine the way, the most common way that people in power abuse those who they have power over is through the argument for morality.
And of course I didn't frame it in that way when I was a child.
But it's clear to me now, looking back on it, that that's where I began to suspect that morality was in fact very powerful, because I was very susceptible to moral condemnation, but that it was something that was used like a sort of wrecking ball, or a scud missile, or I guess a ball-peen hammer at its most delicate, to sort of wreck the emotional structures and personality structures of others, of those who were dependent and who had the misfortune to retain empathy in a sort of cold and sadistic world.
And through that process, I sort of developed, well, and sort of it wasn't long after that that I started reading Ayn Rand and realized that philosophy and Nathaniel Brandon and Aristotle and Locke and realized that that philosophy, moral philosophy, could be an enormous benefit.
You just kind of had to give up everything that you'd been taught and oppose, as the evil, everything you had been taught as the good, and lord, as the good, everything that you had been told was the evil.
Which kind of made sense to me, at least, because the world was such a horrible place to live in when I was younger.
That it didn't seem to me too unlikely that, you know, up would in fact be down, black would be white, and so on.
Because, of course, if morality were not such a negatively stunted science in the modern world, well, then the modern world wouldn't be such a sort of cruel and horrible place.
So, I would say that I began to develop this theory, which I then worked out a little bit more in my sort of early to mid-twenties, which I'll sort of share with you now.
Which is that human beings have two survival strategies.
One is exploitation, and another is cooperation.
Now, in a situation of plenty, in other words, in a situation where people aren't fighting tooth and nail for every last scrap of seed and every last ounce of meat on the carcass, in a situation where there's some level of plenty, Why, then, cooperation is the most sensible social strategy and survival strategy.
Because if you try to exploit people when there's enough to go around, you kind of look like a, you know, a jerk, I guess is the technical term.
And so to cooperate when there's a system of plenty in place or a situation where plenty is available to you makes sense, right?
So this is sort of why in the modern world and sort of capitalism most people don't turn into sort of jewel thieves and so on.
They become cooperative people who work in the marketplace for win-win situations.
I mean not those who work in the government and not those who run poverty programs and Not the police and not the military, but, you know, everybody else.
But there's another option for survival, which is if there is a situation of scarcity around, then to be exploitive, to have a win-lose situation, is your best survival strategy.
So when there's lots going around, you want win-win.
Because if you take win-lose, then you're obviously greedy, and people are going to reject you, and sort of kick you out of the tribe, and you're not going to make it.
But if there's a situation of scarcity around, then if the other person gets the crust of bread, then you don't, and you die.
So you better be pretty aggressive when it comes to acting for your own survival.
Because if you don't, then you're just going to be sort of nice and share your food, and everybody else is going to sort of just get by, and you're going to sort of curl up in a corner and die, because there's just not enough to go around.
Now, one of the amazing things about the human mind is that it is adaptive very quickly.
It is adaptive within a single lifetime, right?
So, most of nature takes many, many, many generations to achieve a mutation or to achieve a sort of fundamental change in nature.
But it's my personal belief, based on some evidence that I've talked about with psychologists and sort of evidence from my own life and some of the stuff that I've read, that in a situation of scarcity, the human personality begins to adapt itself towards An exploitive or aggressive or win-lose negotiation approach.
So you grab what you can to help with the week, you know, push everybody out of your way and just get to the crust of bread that's lying there because if you don't get it, you're going to starve to death and there's not enough to go around.
So you better get going, you know, sort of head low, elbows out, fist pumping.
However, in a situation of plenty, the human mind adapts itself to a more gentle, kind, empathetic win-win.
Of course, empathy is one of the key differences between the two of these.
To exploit others, you need empathy but no sympathy, and so it's important to be empathetic to other people's greed and need and capacity to be exploited in a situation of scarcity.
But in a situation of plenty, both empathy and sympathy are your best survival strategy.
Because there's no need to grab and push people out of the way.
Because you just kind of look like an idiot and a bad guy.
It's like sort of cutting in line or pushing people out of the way when there's an all-you-can-eat buffet that's sort of stocked full and there's like five people.
I mean, it looks like you kind of look like an idiot.
But it sort of makes sense when you are some poor Somali person who is ringing around the UN food distribution truck, and if you don't get this food, you're going to starve to death, or your kids are going to starve to death, then it's perfectly understandable to be nasty, to push people out of your way, to kick and gouge and scream and scrape to get at the food.
So in the one situation you look like a jerk for doing it, in the other situation you look weak for not doing it because you're just not going to survive.
So it's my personal belief that everyone has within them the capacity to sort of go either way.
And we know that this is true in some situations in life wherein If you're not exposed to language during that sort of critical language window, you will never ever be able to learn language properly.
I mean, they've done studies on kids sort of raised in the wilderness, or raised by wolves, or raised without human contact, that if they miss that language window, they can get maybe a hundred, two hundred words down, but they never become fluid with language.
So we know that the brain has particular paths of development or non-development based on stimuli at certain periods in its development.
And so it seems to me to make sense that the sort of human organism scans around, like when you're a baby or you're a toddler, you scan around for excess or deficiency of resources.
And if there is an excess of resources then you grow up sort of contented and happy and you want to share and you let other people in front of you in line because that's going to raise their goodwill towards you and so on.
And you're not going to be rejected for being cruel and you're not going to be excluded, right?
Because if you're in a situation of plenty and you sort of elbow people out of the way and push old ladies into the mud to get at the food, then you're going to be excluded from the tribe.
You're going to be punished.
You're going to have fewer resources than if you were just cooperative.
But if you are in a situation of scarcity, well, then you have to do those things or you're not going to survive at all.
So, empathy is required for both.
More empathy is generally needed for win-win situations, whereas in win-lose situations, which scarcity enforces, right?
When there's only one crust of bread and two people and they're both starving, it is a win-lose situation.
It's only win-win if there's an excess of resources and they can trade.
And so, it's important to understand, I think, that you can go either way depending on the stimuli.
So, when you're very young and you sort of scan around and you say, okay, well, am I hungry all the time?
Okay, I'm hungry all the time, which means when food presents itself, I better just grab it and run and not worry about the consequences.
There is a sort of graphic illustration of this in 1984 when the young Winston Smith remembers grabbing the chocolate bar from his younger brother and just running.
And that's sort of an understandable situation given that it's sort of a very violent environment.
They're in the middle of a sort of endless war.
I can't remember if it's Eurasia or East Asia that they're at war with at that time, but it's a very desperate situation and it sort of makes sense that you kind of are going to grab.
And that's why these sort of lifeboat situations don't really work.
In a situation of scarcity, we revert to the biological and generally there's really not much point talking about morality, right?
Morality involves choice, requires choice, and therefore in the sort of lifeboat situation where one person has to be thrown overboard or, you know, there's two people drowning, you know, one son and a daughter and who do you say?
Those things don't have any relationship to morality at all.
They're just, you're back into the state of nature in pure biology.
Morality requires an excess of resources, or at least an excess relative to starvation sustenance.
And it requires choice, right?
The choice that that excess represents.
And so, when you look at the development of a child, and you look at how that plays out as an adult, I think it's important to understand that the child is constantly scanning his environment, and the environment is going to have a very strong determination on how His brain, his capacity to empathize and to sympathize with others, how that is going to manifest itself.
So, of course, there's a couple of situations which are going to rouse a child to develop sociopathic traits, to develop non-empathetic, non-sympathetic traits, or empathetic and sadistic traits.
And some of those are violence.
Of course, violence is a pretty key one.
If violence is the methodology by which goods are being distributed in society, then you'd better not grow up as a sort of, no, no, no, you first, please, I insist, kind of guy, because you're just going to get taken advantage of.
I mean, you're just going to be like the, you know, the sickly, short, feminine kid in prison.
You're just going to be completely exploited and brutalized, and if you survive, it'll be a miracle.
So, if you're in a situation where you are exposed to violence, aggression is the most logical, from a biological standpoint, it's the most logical approach to take to the problem of getting resources for yourself.
Because violence is, of course, always associated with Conditions of scarcity.
It doesn't mean that, of course, it's always co-joined with those, absolutely.
I mean, in my family growing up, there was a lot of violence, but we weren't short of resources.
I mean, certainly relative to most people in history, we had a roof over our head, we had enough to eat, you know, so we didn't have a car.
I mean, neither did anyone throughout history, so I don't consider that aspect of things to be too catastrophic.
So, that's one thing is the violence.
The other thing, of course, is belittling, right?
Because belittling and sarcasm and, you know, I mean, these things sound relatively minor compared to something like violence.
But when you have an older sibling or parents really strongly attempting to belittle you and to put you down, then what they're trying to do is to diffuse your capacity for aggression.
Which means that they want you to be someone that they exploit.
It can't be win-win because you're in a situation of scarcity and therefore sort of emotionally aggressive, belittling, humiliating approaches to dealing with a child is going to begin to provoke one of two things in that child.
I mean either it's going to work In which case, that child is going to become a sort of beaten down, more than willing to be exploited, you know.
If you want my cloak, I'm going to give you my shirt as well.
And if you want me to walk a mile, I'll walk an extra mile with you.
And, you know, that sort of Christian beaten down, hang dog, shuffling along, staring at your feet kind of guy.
A slave.
Or it's not going to work, in which case you're going to provoke an enormous amount of aggression and so on.
So it's a very finely tuned thing.
If you are in a situation of scarcity or you're developing personalities in a situation of scarcity, it's a very delicate thing.
You want to break your child down to the point where you can exploit them.
But not so much that you're going to provoke any kind of murderous rage in them.
And, of course, most parents do this magnificently well.
I mean, again, it's something that's sort of hardwired into us.
The saddest thing, of course, of all, of course, is that it's showing up in a historical situation of almost unprecedented abundance, right?
So that you have these stone age brutal rituals and approaches to child raising that is based on incredible scarcity to the point of near starvation and we are sort of pursuing this abusive parenting and this violent sadistic parenting in a situation where there's no scarcity to speak of at all so So that's one of the things that makes it so sad and so wrong.
Of course, it's wrong in any situation, but in a situation of extreme scarcity, I mean, it doesn't really matter that it's wrong.
It's still something that people are going to do.
So that's another important thing to understand.
So you've got violence.
You have starvation.
I'm sorry.
You have violence and you have a sort of emotional belittling and sarcasm and humiliation and so on.
But you also have actual physical want, and this is not too common that you're going to have a situation of extreme physical deprivation, but also at the same time you are going to have sort of pleasant parenting, right?
The two almost always will go hand-in-hand.
So if there's a sudden catastrophe, more than a crop failure, but something like a war that strikes a homeland of formerly peaceful and pleasant people, Then the children will grow up in a situation of scarcity, but it will not be something that is sort of permanent, because their parents were raised in a situation of non-scarcity.
And it's sort of, in my opinion, that you can sort of go both ways, and perhaps this is sort of one of the explanations for people who are sort of passive-aggressive in cycles, or manic-depressive, or sort of subjugated and then aggressive, sort of sadistic and masochistic.
That they were exposed to both of these things at crucial points in their development, and so they retained access to both of them.
If you learn two languages when you're a very young kid, then if you keep them up, you can retain a pretty easy and lifelong access to those languages.
If you don't, then becoming a sort of polyglot or a multilingual is much, much, much, much more work.
So, it's certainly my belief that in these situations you have exposure to both of those, and I know for sure that this is the case for me.
So, sort of to jump back to me as the sort of mini-lab here, when I was very, very young, I mean, shortly after my birth, like within a day or two after my birth, My mother was hospitalized for depression and was in for the hospital for like two months or longer.
And I had a nanny who was, by all accounts, I've never met her again and don't even remember what she looks like, of course.
I had a nanny who was just wonderfully compassionate and kind and, you know, cuddly and affectionate and so on.
And I think she took a real shine to me or had a real bond with me because I found out sort of many years later that she'd named her son Stefan as well.
Now, my brother, of course, didn't go through any of this.
He was just sort of raised by sort of my two crazy, abusive, sadistic parents, so it certainly would explain to some degree why he had some more tendency to turn out the way he did.
Of course, you know, it was still something he could have stopped because he did stop it in public and so on, but it's something that had an influence on his personality for sure that I didn't have.
So, I'm not sure how long this nanny took care of me, but it was certainly for a couple of months.
And, of course, those first couple of months are pretty crucial.
That's where your nervous system and personality is being developed.
Not exactly from a blank slate, but to a large degree from a blank slate.
You know, like my brother is.
Sort of the mirror evil image of me in some ways.
We share a lot of skills.
But, you know, I try to use them for good and him, not so much.
So I think that sort of would be an example, and maybe you can think about this sort of in terms of your own life, you know, if you think about your capacity for empathy and your capacity for sympathy, is it true that if you sort of don't have a lot of empathy or sympathy for people, that you went through an early phase of deprivation or abuse?
Or, is it sort of true that if you are sort of a nice person who, you know, cries at movies and, you know, is kind and sweet and lets people cut in front of you in line with only a sort of mildly resentful murmur, and don't have much of a temper and so on, or, you know, if you do, you know how to use it to its right effect, then, you know, did you experience sort of more affection and plenty when you were younger?
And I think affection tends to be the biggest gauge, of course.
I mean, there's no real way that a baby knows You know, how much their crib is worth, or how big the house is.
But it does seem to be affection, soft tones, and so on, that has a strong effect on a baby's capacity to develop empathy.
Because it did sort of strike me when I was originally thinking about these topics.
Well, I mean, it's fairly well known that if you abuse a child, you are likely to raise somebody who is going to be abusive in turn.
And, you know, why would that be the case?
I mean, you've always got to sort of ask these questions from the ground up.
Why would it be the case that a child who is abused turns into somebody who's very aggressive?
Why wouldn't it be that the child who's abused turns into somebody very nice?
And so, in thinking about that and talking about that with my brother-in-law, who is a psychologist, We did have some success in defining this sort of approach, or I guess I had some sort of success teasing out from him some more case studies about this sort of thing, this sort of solution.
And so if you think about it in your own life, or in the lives of the people that you know, it's important, I think, to try and tease this one out.
You know, it's a theory that I have, and of course I don't have any proof for it, Other than sort of things that make sense within my own life.
But if you sort of think about it yourself, I'm sort of curious what your sense of things are.
Like if you think about the people that you know, the people that you've maybe lived with or loved, or not loved.
What is this, how does this theory sort of play out for you?
Does it make any sense for you?
Because if it does, you know, that would be great.
I'd sort of like to pick up some anecdotal evidence for or against it.
But it might have some sort of explanation as to how human beings can be both sort of good and evil, and how they can be such extremes of good and evil in human nature.
And if that is the case, that we have sort of stumbled upon something here that can be useful, then, you know, let's try and get as much evidence for it as possible and start talking about it as much as possible.
Because if it is the case, then the first thing that we need to do is focus on parenting.
And that's going to be something that I'll talk about a little more this week as well.
So thanks so much for listening, as always.
And I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph signing off.
Oh, wait.
Yes, that's right.
freedomain.blogspot.com freedomain.blogspot.com and s.m-o-l-y-n-e-u-x at rogers.com.
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