All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 7, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:51
89 The State and the Family - Part 1: Babies

Our first experiences of authority

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, it's Steph.
It is Tuesday, the 7th of February, 2006. s.m-o-l-y-n-e-u-x at rogers.com.
Yes, I know, I need to buy a domain.
I bought one for my wife, which is why I'm hosting my podcast at the moment, but I need to buy one for myself.
Musical tip of the morning.
Have a look up the song, Freedom, by Colin James.
Fantastic singer-songwriter.
Canadian boy, hey?
And a great song.
It's got very strong soul elements to it and I think you'll really enjoy it.
So this morning I'm going to start on a topic that's not going to be inconsiderable in length.
Now I'm going to break it nicely down into podcasts for Easily digestible mental nuggets, but the topic is the state and the family.
The state and the family.
Or, as my wife would have it, the family and the state.
So one of the things that's amazing about being married to a psychologist is that for some reason I'm happy even when I'm wrong.
My coffee tastes a little bitter, but hey, I've never been happier.
It's that she provides a very strong insight into politics from a non-ideological standpoint, or I guess you could say from a psychological standpoint.
So one of the things that has been amazing about being married to Christina, one of the many, many, many amazing things, is that she has really helped me to understand that what I view as politics is really just an extension of the family.
And that is a pretty powerful topic.
And I think it's going to give us a sense of what it is we're up against when we're talking with people about political freedom.
And that's going to be a drag.
However, I think that what it does do is it helps answer what is, you know, otherwise one of the most baffling questions, which is, you know, when we're so right, how is it that we're so ignored, right?
Why is it that we know that we're right?
We have evidence, reason, history, statistics, everything that you can imagine is on our side.
Yet still, we exist in the margins.
We are not part of any centralized debate.
The word libertarian, of course, has been somewhat bastardized.
You know, and it can include people who just, I'm interested in legalizing marijuana, man.
I'd actually like another word, and if you're listening to this, I invite you to send me an email and see if we can't figure out a better word to work with for the freedom movement, because libertarianism is associated with not just a kind of libertine or sort of hedonistic approach to life, which is not the fault of libertarianism, but rather of those who Who would rather redefine words than oppose an idea?
But it has been... it is also associated with a political party.
So somebody asked me in an email this morning, did you vote in the last election?
And, you know, he said, because I hear there's a Libertarian Party up in Canada and so on.
And, you know, I don't vote.
I last voted... I went with Christina to spoil a ballot about four years ago and prior to that I had voted probably in my 20s.
Back when I sort of had a vague hope that the conservative political movement might actually do something to reduce the size of government, a complete pipe dream, of course, and I was disabused of that notion in part by Harry Brown and in part sort of just by looking at the evidence of what happened.
And so the problem is, of course, if you think that political action is the way, like direct political action at the moment is the way to solve the problem of freedom, Then you have a challenge, which is that you have to explain why in 40 years we've made almost no progress.
And I know, I mean, I am fully aware that it's not because Americans or Canadians or whoever doesn't believe in what it is we have to say, but there's the ballot access laws, there's the federal funding statutes and restrictions, there is the public school education and all these sorts of things.
But still, it's so important, if you take up a cause, it's very important to know what it is that you're fighting for, so that you can be as effective as possible.
Our time in this wonderful world is short, and our energies are restricted, and if, like me, you can't spend your entire day on the libertarian movement, but have to work for a living, than the amount of time that you can spend is pretty restricted.
So I would say that it's very important to focus on what it is that is the most important.
And, you know, writing is important, but I think that to some degree we write for each other.
There's a reason I've been doing sort of top ten myths about libertarianism and what is libertarianism, because I'm not sure that we are spending enough time doing outreach, right?
I mean, it's all well and good to talk To each other and reinforce our beliefs and that's not unimportant because it can be very scary if You know if we're wrong or if we've missed some sort of crucial evidence Then maybe we can join the mainstream and forget all this nonsense about freedom So it's important to talk to each other and to build up our ideas but one of the goals of course that I have through my dissemination of the argument for morality is
is to get people to realize that if you use the argument for morality, you don't have to become an expert in anything other than, say, the argument for morality, which takes about five minutes to learn.
So that's one way that you can begin to talk to people about freedom without having to become an expert in every single field and without having to constantly be chased back to the library or the internet because you're missing some particular piece of information.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that if we're going to take the scientific method, we need more of a universal theory and less of a sort of endless round of practical experiments.
Because the practical experiments can be exhausting and never-ending.
And actually, they're sort of, in my mind, they're designed by our opponents.
The sort of dwelling on factoids is designed by our opponents to send us running back to get more information, which is a hopeless quest.
It's like the Catholic quest for virtue.
You may grab it, but it's like a sort of oiled fish in your hands, right?
It's gonna... I mean, a live one, obviously.
It's gonna wriggle away, and you're never gonna be able to hold on to it.
So even if you achieve it... You know, I remember reading one Catholic guy's description of his wrestle with the sin of pride.
You know, he'd be like, oh, I feel proud today.
Oh, that's...
That's so bad.
And then he would sort of say, Oh, hey, I don't feel proud today.
That's great.
I can feel real happy about being proud.
Oh, wait.
Oh, that's right.
I can't feel proud about not being proud.
So, you know, and it was just this ridiculous mental wrestle that went on forever.
And I'm sure that's the case with most religions that they'll just create this crazy world wherein you're never right except for a tiny, tiny moment, and then you have to sort of come down on yourself again for the sin of XYZ, APC, and many, many other alphabets as well.
So if we talk about the state and the family, we are going to do something to understand why the government is the way it is.
And we're also going to understand why we're having so much difficulty.
And we're also going to understand how best to spend our time.
Possibly.
I mean, I'm not going to say that that's the case for you.
It certainly is the case for me.
But I'm not saying it's the case for you.
Everyone, of course, I mean, it would be ridiculous for me to suggest otherwise.
Everyone approaches their own Life and choices differently, but with more information, maybe you can make a different choice that might be more effective.
That's sort of all I'm throwing out there.
So, when we're born, of course, we don't really have any idea of something like the government.
Our early experiences of authority are directly related to our families.
And I know that there are people who grew up in orphanages and so on, and you know, that changes the thesis to some degree, but not enough for me to keep putting the caveat in.
So again, I'm only looking for a biological level of truth value here, not one derived from physics.
Therefore, I don't mind if there are exceptions to the rule at all, as long as there's a general trend.
So, our first experiences with authority are our parents.
Now, there is a lot of tension in parenting around the needs of the child, the needs of the infant in particular.
So one of the things that parents face when they first become parents is that the baby cries a lot and the baby has needs that are inconvenient to the parents.
And there is an enormous amount of tension within society at its very root around this problem of infant need.
And the tension is basically this right sort of one end of the spectrum you have Well, you should give the baby everything that the baby wants because the baby is obviously indicating distress and you know, therefore therefore right and at the other end of the spectrum ...is the proposition that you should, you know, within a week or two, train the baby to sleep through the night.
And you should do that by not, you know, making sure the baby's well-fed and well-cleaned, and then not doing anything to sort of take care of that baby, except, I mean, except in a complete emergency, not doing anything to take care of that baby overnight.
And that is a very interesting phenomenon, right?
This tension of sort of like the truth is somewhere in the middle of two extremes, because generally that's not the case in life.
I've talked about this before and I don't want to get into it again because I feel the undertow tug of the Segway, but I shall resist.
I shall swim straight to the shore as best as I am able.
So it would be odd if, as infants, you were to try to, um...
You don't have to choose between punishing your child through withdrawal or giving in to every facial tick of your child's and comforting them and so on.
Now, one of the things that's the case in psychology, especially psychology of the young, is that what is often a goal, or considered a desired goal, is something called self-soothing.
And that's something very different than it is for a teenage boy.
So let's talk about it in an infant.
So in an infant you want the child's emotional apparatus or neurological apparatus to begin to peak when they are experiencing distress.
So let's say they're hungry, the baby's hungry, so he's going to start Crying out.
And there is sort of a fine... and I know I worked in a daycare for many years when I was a teenager, so I've spent a good deal of time around this sort of breed.
And I also live with my brother when he had his two kids, so I know quite a bit about babies.
Obviously not nearly as much as many, many parents out there, but I'm not sort of completely going from having had my nose in a book.
So you want to make sure that you listen to your baby's cries, and if your baby sort of cries and is uncomfortable and so on, then you do have to go through that difficult challenge of figuring out what the baby wants and so on, and that's not always easy.
And if you don't, if you immediately, like the moment the baby cries, you immediately jump in and say, ah, I'm going to give you whatever you want.
I'm going to get tense or stressed or whatever.
Oh, don't cry, don't cry, that kind of stuff.
Then the baby does not learn to get the basic principle that if he cries out, somebody's going to listen and to respond, and therefore his cries can be something which merely alerts those around him that he needs something.
He's doing the best he can.
He can't even work his arms and legs very well, so there's not much he can do to fix himself a sandwich.
So, that's sort of what you want.
They want the child to sort of get the message out there and have that message responded to, and that allows the child's emotions to sort of rise in terms of, oh, I'm hungry and I'm gonna cry, and then recede because their wants are taken care of.
And the wants, of course, may not be anything to do with Hunger, or you know, diaper change, or gas, or anything like that.
I mean, it might be for company, right?
Babies like company as much as anybody else does, and a lot of times babies are just kind of deep-sixed into a crib, and it's sort of, oh, here's a mobile, you know?
Here's Bram's lullaby for the eight millionth time.
So, there's lots of reasons, of course, why a baby might start crying, but what you want, ideally, I think, is for the baby to be heard and be responded to.
I mean, that's sort of what the point of the crying is, right?
I need something and come along and help me with it.
And, you know, that's also true at night as well.
I know it's, you know, it's difficult and it's painful and it's exhausting, but, you know, when your baby cries at night, you want to go and see what the heck the problem is.
There is this idea, of course, and it's largely planted in through Christianity, but there's also sort of state-run and military systems that have this belief as well, That the child is manipulative, that the child is, ah, if you spoil them then they will have you wrapped around their finger for, you know, and it's completely ridiculous.
I mean, the idea that a baby is manipulative is hilarious.
And a complete reversal of the actual facts of authority in this situation.
You are the parent, they are the baby.
It's your job to be the boss, so to speak.
And the idea that the baby or the infant is doing something to you, or even the toddler is doing something to you and trying to control you and bully you, Well, that's an indication that you've already failed as a parent.
It's not an indication that the child is sort of innately mean or difficult or dangerous or something like that.
It just means that the child has fully recognized that your authority is based on bullying and therefore the child is going to switch to that second mode of being, which I talked about yesterday, which is a far more aggressive and with empathy but no sympathy, that approach to a sort of social interactions.
And that just means that you failed as a parent and it's going to be very difficult for you to reverse that.
I mean, certainly by the time they've hit their teens, it's pretty clear that whatever you've done as a parent, you can't undo anymore.
It's far too late.
You've no credibility left after, you know, say 12 years of being a jerk.
And sort of one of the reasons why people resist the idea of freedom and moral responsibility is because they harbor within themselves terrible guilt about how they've handled their children.
The guilt and rage and fear and the guilt is how they handled their children and their rage is about how they were handled as children and it's a very complicated primordial soup of violation and sort of mutual violation to and from.
Not something that's much productive.
It's very productive to get into with people because you simply can't Get them to see something where they are complicit in a crime.
You really can't get them to see that crime.
This is why I don't spend a lot of time trying to convert public school teachers or, you know, union leaders or politicians.
So, you know, but the fact is that there's this idea that either you instantly spring to whatever the baby needs, almost to prevent any problems, and then you are considered to be, you know, oh, I'm a bad parent if I can't get my child to stop crying and so on.
And people are, you know, bothered by babies crying.
I know it's a difficult sound to hear and so on, but, you know, it doesn't really matter.
It's like somebody who's got a jackhammer going on down the street.
That's, you know, going on for a month or two or five or ten and every time it starts up they're like, oh my god, that jackhammer's driving me crazy!
It's like, well, it's a fact of life, right?
You have a baby, you're gonna get some crying.
And, you know, to sort of get fussed about it is not so great.
Now, the baby is also looking to the parent for advice, sort of non-empirical but non-verbal advice on how to manage emotions.
So babies, of course, you know, for a baby, the crib and the parents is the entire world.
And it's one of the reasons why children know so much about their parents is that they observe them very, very closely because they need to sort of understand what kind of ecosystem it is that they're working in.
And so if people get stressed about the baby crying, then the baby is obviously going to get more stressed and more upset because through the modeling of the parental behavior, the baby is realizing that his crying is an imposition, that the response to crying should be additional stress, and that's where things start that the response to crying should be additional stress, and that's where things start to spiral out of control with babies
Now, if you don't respond to the baby, though, like you sort of shut the door, soundproof the door, and make sure the baby is changed and fed and comfortable, and then you just don't respond to the crying of the baby, well, then what's going to happen to the baby?
Well, the baby's going to quickly realize that there's almost no correlation between upset and a response, between sort of complaints of discomfort or upset and somebody responding to those.
And of course, this is completely how you kill empathy, right?
There's no accident that this is pretty much de rigueur in military households.
Don't you coddle that child!
You know, he's got to learn to sleep through the night.
You know, you can't be there for him every time he cries.
All this kind of stuff.
And that's really not a good approach.
I mean, it is a good approach if you want to raise a military man, you know, which is Kind of a stone evil thing to do, but it's not a good approach if you want to help children develop empathy.
Now the other thing that children, and I'm sort of speaking a little bit older now, the other thing that children don't get much of at all, in fact I'm sort of going to say I've almost seen none of it except in my interactions with children, They get almost no reciprocity.
And what I sort of mean by reciprocity is, I'll sort of give you two little examples, and it is that you want to mirror the child and interact with the child.
And that doesn't mean, you know, sit there and play with a child where the object is a third entity like, you know, a toy or something or a board game or cards.
But you want to interact with the child sort of one-on-one, and there's very very little of this in families, and this is a terribly sad thing.
It's one of the reasons why children feel so lost and lonely these days, and, you know, overeat, and they're on MSN chat, and they're playing video games, and the chat rooms are pretty funny too, right?
I mean, it's a hunger for interaction that they're just not getting.
And so they're interacting, unfortunately, with other people who never got any interaction, so it's not very positive.
But when one of my friends brought his baby over, Christina and myself and he and his wife were sitting in the backyard, and his baby had been a little bit over coddled in my view, insofar as they carried her everywhere, because it was faster than letting her walk.
And so she still had legs, but they weren't very strong, and so she wasn't able to walk.
And every time, of course, she tried to walk and wobbled, they'd pick her up, oh, it's okay, and they'd sort of cuddle her.
And, I mean, I'm not talking about that kind of stuff where you're preventing a child from learning how to walk.
That's not very good for the child.
And, of course, the child is not evidencing any distress over learning how to walk and falling and so on.
So, to pick them up and to comfort them when they're not experiencing distress is just about the parents using the children to comfort themselves rather than anything to do with the child.
But we were sitting there and this little girl came over and she sort of tore up some grass and so I held out my hand and she put the grass in my hand and then of course I screamed at her for ruining my lawn.
No, I'm kidding.
So then what I did was I said thank you sort of very clearly and looked her directly in the eyes and then I picked up some grass, tore some grass out of the ground and I handed it back to her.
And so she sort of looked at the grass, looked at her hand, looked at me, looked back, and then she reached down and she ripped up some grass and she handed it to me.
And that is a sort of a fundamentally important thing to do with your children, right?
It's fundamentally important to mirror them, especially the younger you can do it, the better.
And to mirror them is to interact with them and to do what it is that they're doing and help them understand.
This is how you build empathy.
She was just playing with some grass.
I held out my hand.
She gave me the grass.
I ripped up some and gave it back to her.
That's very important because it gets the child to understand that there's reciprocity, that there's trust, that there's empathy, that What I do to somebody else, they can do back to me.
I mean, you sort of knit this web of interconnectedness between humanity that's pretty important.
I mean, that's a pretty grandiose phrase, I know, to be using something like Handy Cross around, but if you do this consistently, it's going to pay off very well as a parent.
In another example, it was toothpicks that another friend of Christina's brought her daughter over one Christmas when we had a party.
And her daughter was, I think, 13 months or 14 months.
No, I'm sorry, about 18 months.
And the same thing.
The kid was playing with some toothpicks and, of course, nobody was interacting with the kid because the parents were all blabbing on to each other and so on.
And so I was sort of on the ground and I was chatting away and, you know, I sort of did the same thing.
I sort of held out my hands, got the toothpicks and so on and put the toothpicks back.
And we handed this, this game went on back and forth and she was just delighted because somebody was interacting with her.
I mean, isn't it a little heartbreaking that a child should be so desperately happy to have a back and forth rather than to sort of be picked up, to be fed, to be read to, to be played with in terms of like a third tool?
A third object, like a toy, to be changed, to be dressed, to be taken to malls.
I mean, really, it's like a suitcase, like a highly demanding suitcase that people feel that they have to carry around.
But there's very little interaction with children.
There's lots of, I'll read to you, and there's lots of, I'll tell you a story, and so on.
But that's not really interaction.
That's sort of one way.
And so it's sort of no accident that children grow up and you sort of say, well, how was your day at school?
And they're like, fine.
You know, they just, they don't know what it means to share their thoughts and feelings with people.
So, you know, the other thing that is pretty important to do, which is almost never done, is to help the child to understand his feelings.
So, you know, if you're driving along the highway and there's a car crash and you have to slow down because everybody's rubbernecking and you complain about that and then rubberneck yourself, if you're anything like me, then your child may see that and they may sort of go a little white and so on, and then you want to help them understand their feelings and process their feelings.
Not in any way to distance themselves from their feelings but to understand that their feelings are an important part of themselves and also to train children to handle and absorb negative feelings.
We have such a dysfunctional culture emotionally that generally when people feel something bad the first thing they do is repress it or dismiss it or get rid of it.
And that's, I mean, enormously unhealthy.
I mean, what we call sort of bad feelings is exactly the same thing as what we call, you know, bad sensations in the body, which is something we need to take care of.
I mean, if you step on a nail, you kind of want to know that you have a nail sticking out of your foot and it's gonna hurt like hell, but you want to do that, right?
I mean, I remember riding a bike and I've never broken a bone or sort of spent any time in a hospital, but the one time I did sort of fracture my forearm, I was on a bike and I I took a spill.
It was very, very intelligent.
I was carrying a set of Venetian blinds for my handlebars, and they went into the spokes.
Completely predictable, and not one of the brightest things that I've ever done in my life.
But, you know, I mean, if I hadn't... if my arm hadn't hurt so much...
Then I wouldn't have got the medical care, and I didn't need a cost, but I didn't need a sling.
So I just wouldn't have done that, and it would never have healed as well as it has, so that I could now continue to lift weights and not have any problems.
So you really need that physical pain.
You may say, oh, this is inconvenient, but it's not nearly as inconvenient as not having it and not taking care of yourself.
Now, this is with the caveat, of course, that, you know, on your deathbed, man, I mean, when I'm on my deathbed, it's like you jacked me to the nines with morphine, because, you know, it's not like the pain's gonna do me any good.
It's not like I'm gonna get better, say.
So, I have no problem floating off on a nice, pink, fluffy cloud, but, you know, I'm sort of talking about more practical and long-term effects, or short-term effects of pain, where you can actually do something.
So, I would sort of say that when you're driving along and you see this car accident and your kid goes a little white, that they're their first impulse, because that's sort of what's modeled in society.
It's what's modeled in cartoons and video games and children's books, for the most part.
You know, what's modeled is sort of, be nice, think ahead, listen to your parents, like all the standard fascist crap that is handed around with children to make them convenient, to make children more convenient for narcissistic parents.
Which is to say, parents don't really see any examples of contrary situations.
So you want to make sure that you can try and get your child to feel their own feelings and to recognize that a negative feeling is very important to feel.
Nobody has any problem giggling and feeling happy and having a tickle fight, but when people feel sad, parents' first instincts is to comfort the child and make the sad feeling go away, which of course is entirely counterproductive and it is completely there for the comfort and narcissism of the parents not because it's sort of any good for the child.
And so I mean it would be the same impulse like if your kid took a spill off a bike and you know bumped their head badly then if you could sort of snap your fingers and have that pain immediately vanish then you know I guess it would give you some comfort as a parent but the problem is that your kid would say oh that's great so I can drive really dangerously on my bike and You know, mom can snap her fingers and the pain can go away, so I don't really have to worry about it, which is not really what you want.
I'm not saying don't give your kid an aspirin or anything like that, and don't, you know, give them children's Tylenol if they're feeling poorly, but, you know, it wouldn't be particularly productive if you had this sort of magic finger snap to take away pain.
And the same thing is true of the emotional life of a child.
That, you know, to sort of say, well, how do you feel and what do you feel?
And I say, you know, when I see something like that, I feel really bad.
I feel like, oh, those poor people in the car accident.
I hope they're okay.
I worry about driving.
I make sure I'm very careful about everything.
Driving is a dangerous thing.
I mean, for the most part, it's very safe and you can do a lot to make it more safe, but it does make me scared.
So you sort of talk about your own feelings and then you ask the kid what their feelings are and all the complexities that's going on for them emotionally.
And just get them a sense that, you know, bad feelings are important to explore, right?
I mean, there's tons to go into around this, but sort of what I'm touching on is so involved with everything that I'm touching on is so involved with how people end up perceiving the state later on in life, right?
Because our first definition of authority is our parents or our primary caregivers, then it is teachers, and then it is the state.
I mean, I'm sort of generalizing.
There's a couple of school of sort of after-school jobs you're gonna have in the middle, but you know, it's parents, teachers, state is sort of a pretty strong continuum.
And so when children, for instance, if you don't... if when they complain you give them... like if either you completely coddle them and fuss and so on over them, then they're going to have this idea that they should be taken care of in every potential situation, that there's no need for them to develop something like self-care or something like, you know, being able to manage their own emotions and deal with the stress and so on.
And therefore, they're going to be more prone as adults to believe in something like the welfare state.
Well, why should anyone ever suffer?
I mean, it's completely cruel that anyone should ever suffer.
And everyone should always be perfectly taken care of.
And the moment that anybody feels distressed, somebody should jump in and save them.
They're going to be more prone to things like that.
And, of course, if you don't help your children at all, deal with their emotions as babies, so if you sort of lock the door and soundproof the door and let the kid cry so you can get a good night's sleep,
then the child is going to grow up with the feeling, or the surefire feeling, that the only thing that authority is going to do is to exercise power for, you know, its own benefit and not do anything to, in terms of reciprocity, to those who are subject to that power.
So, sorry, that's a pretty long windy phrase.
I'm trying to figure out if I should switch lanes.
So, sorry that I got distracted for a moment.
Because, you know, it's so important for me to get to work two minutes faster.
It's kind of funny the way the mind works.
I must be efficient regardless of the goal.
So you're going to end up with those two polls.
So one of them is going to be somebody who is pro-state power because they've never been taught to or have any experience in managing negative emotions.
So they're going to say that the government should jump in to solve Whatever problem there is, right?
So, if there's a hurricane, by God, the government better jump in and deal with things because people can't be exposed to something as negative as, you know, their house being destroyed or, you know, whatever, their yacht being blown around.
And, you know, if there's somebody's poor, or, you know, if somebody had, it's like, oh, you've got to rush in and take care of that, right?
Because the two poles of dealing with an infant's distress, they're two sides of the same coin, right?
It's about the parents, it's not about the child.
Right?
I mean, if the parent is comfortable and able themselves to process what we call negative feelings, sort of pain, anxiety, distress.
My wife says mad, sad, bad and glad or something like that.
I don't know where BIMU's resignation fits in there, but that's okay.
I'm not a professional.
Do not try this.
This is a closed course.
So it's the parents' distress that they are managing themselves.
The sort of military-style parent can't handle any negative feelings, and those negative feelings provoke rage, because their own negative feelings were thwarted and destroyed and undermined, and they were punished through their own negative feelings by being abandoned.
Then, you know, they're going to feel a lot of rage and hostility towards those negative feelings, and it's going to express itself as contempt for them, right?
You don't coddle that child, you let him suffer, kind of thing.
And so it's really the parent managing his or her own feelings through sort of the pseudo-abandonment of the child, right?
So, I mean, the parent can't handle negative feelings and therefore they punish the child for having negative feelings.
It's got nothing to do with the child at all.
It's just a way of sort of mentally managing your own feelings by, you know, hurting somebody else.
Actually mentally destroying your own feelings, like further destroying your own feelings.
Feelings are very insistent, like they never go away until you deal with them.
They're like repetitive dreams.
And whereas the other parents can't handle emotional feelings or what we call negative feelings anyway, but they take the other approach, which is that the moment any negative feelings show up, they immediately jump in to solve those or to bypass them.
It's got nothing to do with helping the child to navigate and to manage negative feelings.
It is simply because the parent can't handle them and therefore will just jump in and try and make them go away and so on.
And that's obviously two sides of the same coin.
Both people, neither parents and neither sets of sort of typecast parents can manage their own feelings and therefore are manipulating the child's emotions to avoid the child from feeling or experiencing negative emotions.
Now, the child who grows up from the sort of military-style family where you don't coddle anybody is not going to have any sense of reciprocity from authority.
So they are never going to feel that they can ever sort of, you know, in the sort of typical situation, ask for a raise or negotiate the different terms of working conditions if they need them.
They're just going to feel that authority is what it is.
You don't question it.
You don't fight it.
You don't oppose it.
It just is what it is.
And if it grows, then it just grows.
And whatever it does is for your own good, even if you don't understand it at the time, and blah, blah, blah.
So that is... You see this sort of myth in... I mean, to take a ridiculous example, the Kung Fu masters, right?
Wax on, wax off, if you ever saw the old Karate Kid movie.
It's, you know, I don't know why it is that I'm doing this, but I'm sure I will find out, but I must just trust my master.
So, you know, that's just sort of the nonsense that people come up with.
So it doesn't happen just in military, but in mystical cults very much that way, right?
I mean, you just have to obey and shut up and listen and sit down and don't talk back and, you know, all will be made clear to you in time and so on.
And so both parties, both sort of types of people, the government is perfectly happy with, right?
Perfectly happy.
The one group of people advocate a constant, you have to... No discomfort, no pain, no problems.
If anybody has any problem, the first thing we need to do is just impose unilateral authority and jam our way into that problem and just try and make it go away as quickly as possible.
Because they can't handle negative feelings, right?
Is this a little bit more female than it is male?
Well, I guess it could be to some degree.
But, you know, these are people who just can't handle, and it does tend to be a little bit more, I would say, female than male.
That if you don't like, you know, someone looking poor, then, you know, that raises anxiety and guilt and fear within you or some sort of negative feeling, and so you sublimate or transpose that into political activism, right?
I care so much about the poor that I want them all to be better and all, you know, and you don't care about the poor.
What you're doing is managing your own feelings of guilt, probably induced by religion over your own relative affluence compared to the poor.
It doesn't mean that we can't be charitable or anything like that, but it's very important to be charitable in the right way.
So, for instance, you know, one of the things that I just published an article on TheRockwell.com about abortion, where, you know, when you get rid of the consequences of poor sexual choices, so you have unprotected sex with, you know, a doofus.
I think that's, again, a sociologically technical term, so look it up if you need to.
Then you end up with no consequences or few consequences for that financially, which means that, you know, people have rushed in to help single mothers and what they've done is they've taken away the pain of being a single mother to a large degree, which is only encouraging single mothers in the same way that if you can snap your fingers and get rid of your kid's pain from banging his head, then he's going to be much more likely to bang his head in the future.
And again, this isn't any kind of tough love, right?
Because, I mean, you do it because you too love the kid and you want them to be safe.
And because biology put the pain there for a reason and you sort of snap your fingers and make it go away would be a pretty bad thing.
And so the people who end up in this kind of situation, the state is perfectly happy with them because there are always going to be problems in human life.
And the state is perfectly happy with people who think that every time there's discomfort or a problem to any degree that, you know, the government should rush in with a social program to fix it and make it all better.
The government loves that and these come directly out of those people who were never allowed to process their own negative feelings as children but had the parents rush in and fuss over them and, you know, blow their negative feelings away in order to manage their own parental distress at the existence of negative feelings.
The other type, sort of the military type, or the mystical type, they don't care.
They'll just go with whatever the government does, right?
So, I mean, they don't believe that there's any reciprocity in authority.
They don't believe that they have any relationship to authority.
Authority is just to be appeased, implicated, and obeyed.
So they won't be the ones necessarily rushing in to say, let's do state programs, but they are going to be the ones who turn into the cops and the policemen and so on, who who enforce state programs, so they're not necessarily going to be the same.
They can sort of handle looking at poor people without flinching, but they can't disobey any orders of authority, and they can't question authority, because they've never had a reciprocal relationship with authority, right?
So if you view authority as sort of a cold, distant figure or as this warm, tender, concerned group of people who's only living and breathing and waking motive is to help those who are less fortunate, then you can pretty much figure out what your own parents were like pretty easily.
I mean, we don't sort of just come up with these things because we feel like it.
I sort of talked about my own experience with family and what role that had in the development of my philosophical and political ideas.
And you really should do the same for yourself, right?
I mean, not because it means that you're wrong.
It's, you know, it's not that at all.
I mean, just because you find a psychological motive for a particular theory doesn't mean that that theory is incorrect.
It doesn't mean that it's correct either.
That's the more important thing.
Just because it feels right based on your own family history or family experience, whether that's libertarianism or fascism or communism or, you know, sort of mixed economy, social democracy or whatever it is that you feel like, You know, the fact that it sort of feels right, the fact that it sort of fits you mentally, is no criteria whatsoever for thinking that it's true.
That's why, you know, as Socrates said, right, the unexamined life is not worth living.
And what he meant by that was it's actually sort of not possible to live with the unexamined life.
You're just kind of existing.
And so, you know, you need to look at your own parenting, the parenting that you experience and possibly the parenting that you're providing, to figure out if you are giving children a sort of the capacity to process negative emotions, the capacity to have and understand reciprocity with authority, So that they understand that authority, in its legitimate form, is just a kind of guidance.
It's just a kind of mentoring.
It is a teacher-pupil relationship, and not a kind of public school teacher-pupil relationship, but a really productive one, wherein those who have greater knowledge are productively sharing with those who don't.
And that's a beneficial relationship.
It's win-win.
And it's reciprocal, right?
I mean, the teacher is thrilled when you progress and, you know, likes the money that you're paying him or her.
And you enjoy the thrill of progressing and also the additional income that you're going to get from being a more skilled person.
So this is just to get started on this, you know, very complicated topic of the state and family.
But I would certainly invite you to look back upon your own parenting, the parenting that you experienced, and sort of figure out what effect did that have on your view of the state.
Very few of us have any direct Very few of us have any direct interaction with the state, but we've all been parented for many, many years.
We all had many, many teachers, and I'll sort of talk about teachers a little bit.
Not from a public school standpoint, but just from a sort of disciplinary standpoint, so that you can understand that the next major interaction that you have with authority figures is public school teachers, at least 95% of us.
And it's important to understand what role that had in helping you to develop your political ideas so that you can have sort of more control over your own thinking and a more deeper and richer understanding of your own thinking.
And once we, I mean, the most important thing that I'm trying to say is that once we understand the effect that parenting had on our own political beliefs, then we can start to have a real sense of sympathy and empathy for the effect that parenting has on other people's types of political beliefs so that we realize then we can start to have a real sense of sympathy and empathy for the effect that parenting has on other So we can try to identify what type of person we're dealing with and perhaps have a discussion
I mean, I'm not saying it's the easiest thing in the world, but before you start arguing with politics with someone, you might want to sort of ask them a little bit about their family history in a nice sort of conversational way.
Oh, what was your dad like?
Oh, you know, how did you end up in this field?
You know, what was your mom like?
There's ways to do that that are sort of socially innocuous, and they give you a strong sense of what that person's upbringing was like.
And, you know, that way you can begin to talk to them about politics in a way that is going to be much more effective than quoting statistics at them, which they may sort of be superficially interested in, or even political theories they may be superficially interested in, but it's not going to touch their sort of basic bedrock experiences of authority.
Because if you don't understand those in yourself, you won't be able to understand those in others.
And it's going to make you a much less effective communicator thereby.
And, you know, since we are on this very difficult road, I think we should try and become, you know, high jujitsu, Zen masters of communication as much as possible.
And that starts with an introspection about our own relationship to authority.
And, you know, much later down the road, does it end up with us trying to help other people to see the truth?
So I hope this has been helpful.
I'm going to nip up to work and start coding madly away.
I'm doing some R&D at the moment to try and figure out what the next platform of the software is going to be.
So I hope you have a great day and I will talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection