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Feb. 7, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:47
90 The State and the Family - Part 2: Toddlers
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 5 p.m.
on Tuesday, the 7th of February, 2006.
I hope you're doing well.
This afternoon's song recommendation is If You Want Me To Stay by Sly and the Family Stone.
Fantastic song.
Also covered by the Red Hot Chili Peppers in not such a great live version, but if you get a chance to listen to that song, fantastic.
It's very catchy and very interestingly sung.
So, I wanted to continue on with family today, and possibly tomorrow as well, and my sort of mental map of where it is that I want to go.
I'm trying to make sure that I'm arranging things so that they follow some kind of sequence, and you don't end up with sort of a, you know, like Nietzsche's collections of aphorisms, which are all very cool, but, you know, are a little kaleidoscopic in terms of how they build on knowledge.
So, what I wanted to talk about this afternoon was taking after the step of infancy towards a step of toddlerhood in terms of how it is that we experience authority.
How do we experience authority?
Now, one of the things that is quite commonly known among parents and of course child psychologists is this idea of the terrible twos.
Some of the terrible twos when You learn to say no and your kid gets into everything and there's lots of fights and fusses and tantrums and so on.
And this seems to me a fairly unnecessary phase in the development of the human psyche.
And generally what is happening is that the child is beginning to come up against the first round of authority that they can talk about.
And so, what generally is happening at this phase, when the kid begins to sort of ball his fists and say no and cause problems, according to the parent's sort of definition of things, what's happening is that the child has a very large number of problems or resentments built up over, you know, sort of since birth.
And I know that the brain is pretty plastic at birth, but it does begin to have the ability to retain emotional memory fairly early on in life, a lot earlier than many people think.
My earliest memory is probably at around two, which means that that's sort of the one that I recall.
But that means that before that, I was still able to retain things, it's just I didn't keep that retention up to adulthood.
So the emotional map of the family and one's relationship to authority is what happens when we're very, very young.
And then when we get to, we have the ability to walk, we have the ability to say no, then the accumulated resentments of how we've been treated Generally come to the foreground.
So it's not that there's some big, you know, chemical change and therefore we are turned into difficult sort of the terrible twos.
It's that we've been badly treated from infancy and what has occurred is a sort of rejection of compassion and empathy towards ourselves as infants.
And then what happens is when we experience direct attempts to control us, As toddlers, we resist that mightily because we feel in our very bones that it's hypocritical.
The one thing that's so important to remember about children is that they don't know anything about the prejudices that are held by adults.
You know, children are born, you know, human beings in general, and we were born perfectly ready to be rational, wonderful, creative, healthy, great beings.
And we don't know anything about things like racism and sexism and prejudice, and we don't know anything about loyalty to the state, we don't know anything about nationalism, we don't know anything about war, we don't know anything about supporting the troops, we don't know anything about taxation, we don't know anything about all of the mechanisms of Social control that exists in the world.
What do we know about religion?
And how do we know that the guy in the weird hat you're supposed to do X, Y, and Z to?
And, you know, how do we know why bits of her penis are missing?
I mean, we don't know any of these things.
We come into this world fully ready to be entirely rational.
As we grow up, as we grow older, we, I mean, initially we simply obey our parents because they are powerful.
We don't have any idea of virtue.
But we do have a strong sense of a need for reciprocity, as I talked about this morning.
So we do know that if a rule is put in place that our parents don't follow, that something is fundamentally wrong.
So that's a particularly important consideration.
So, I mean, as a very young child, I remember that my mother would occasionally do that sort of classic press her temples to her forehead and, you know, this was always a precursor to sort of the rage, but she would press her fingers to her forehead and rotate them and flutter her eyes as if You know, the very fact that we breathed gave her enormous pain because, and this always happened when we were happy, right?
So if I had a friend over and we were giggling and enjoying ourselves or finding things very funny, then it wouldn't be long before, you know, the merry sound of children's laughter began to grate on my mother's evil being and she found it necessary to sort of come down on us like a ton of bricks.
This was when I was very young she would wait until she'd sort of make things uncomfortable till my friend would leave and then but you know should we got older she didn't even wait for the kid to leave so naturally my opportunities for relaxing playdates diminished considerably but so that would occur and you know so I would get the impression of course that to To cause noise to somebody who's looking for peace and quiet is a bad thing, right?
And that's the rule, right?
So everything that our parents tell us becomes a rule.
And the reason that we transpose these bullyings into rules is because we're terrified, absolutely stone terrified of the idea that those in charge of us are hypocritical moral lunatics.
You know, which is kind of like the same as being evil, right?
So, you know, we resist that notion because we're helpless, we're dependent, we can't leave, we can't do anything, we simply have to obey.
And so what we try to do with our perceptions of our parents' rules is we say, okay, well, all right, so the rule is that if somebody wants peace and quiet and you're giggling and making noise, then that's bad.
Okay, so that's a rule, right?
So we attempt to formulate our parents' Commandments into general rules.
Because otherwise, two things happen.
One is that if we recognize that they're not rules, but just bullying hypocrisies, then we face the disaster, which I've mentioned before in the parable of the invisible apple.
We face the disaster of realizing that we're sort of ruled by petty sadists, right?
And that's not only terrifying, but it's also humiliating.
I mean, it's one thing to be ruled over by a powerful person who is, you know, masterful and so on, full of vigor and, you know, whatever.
But to be ruled by parents who are, you know, basically petty and vindictive and so on, it's pretty humiliating.
Because it's clear that it's simply the power disparity that is bringing out the bullying in them, which means that they themselves are cowards in the outside world.
I noticed that, of course, to be the case with my mother and my brother too, that You know, when they were around me, they could sort of lord it over me and sort of swell up with evil power.
But when they were around others, they were quite often very subservient and aware of the other person's needs and kind.
And that was twofold.
One, it was because they are, you know, bullies or cowards.
You know, if you abuse power, you're afraid of power, right?
That's sort of the nature of the game.
And the second, of course, is that it was doubly humiliating to me, and that's sort of the purpose, that's the sadism behind it.
It's doubly humiliating to me.
If they're nice to other people but cruel to me, then they actually, they're sort of telling me that they have the capacity to be nice to other people.
They just choose not to be.
Nice to me, right?
So it's doubly humiliating, right?
I could not hit you, or I could not tease you, or if I didn't, I have the capacity not to, but, you know, by golly, you just bring it out in me and, you know, that's what you deserve.
So it's always more humiliating to be abused by somebody who has the capacity to not abuse, right?
So, and this is also how you know it's evil rather than mentally ill, right?
It's evil, If an abuser doesn't do it in public, doesn't do it in front of a police officer, doesn't do it in the open, doesn't do it when friends are over for dinner, then you know that they have the capacity to not do it.
They just relax that capacity when they won't get caught, and that's how you know it's evil, right?
So we do face that challenge when parents are giving us instructions and we naturally have to begin to, inevitably, like almost without thinking, we begin the process of trying to turn our random grab bag of bullying and contradictory instructions into a rough approximation of some kind of moral law.
So, for instance, with my mother, one night I remember she wanted to type a letter to someone or other, probably her lawyers for the court case, and the electric typewriter happened to be in my room, and it was one of these clackity-clackity-clack.
You know, sounds like a bunch of people doing the bossa nova in your brain.
And she just typed all night and smoked all night and typed all night and smoked all night.
And of course I got no sleep and had to get up and go to school, exhausted and so on.
And I tried complaining about this, but it was like, you know, this is important, you know, that kind of stuff.
So, you know, clearly when I was causing her pain or mental distress because I was making noise when she wanted quiet, That was bad, but of course when she wanted to type a letter and didn't feel like moving the typewriter, then she could just type in my room all night and not sort of give a fig about what that did to my sleep habits.
So, I mean, this is just one minor example of countless examples that sort of make sense around power.
So, of course, another example would be any sort of anything for my brother where You know, he would have this rule sort of like, you know, you have to take care of other people's things and then, you know, he would lose something of mine and not care, right?
So anytime he lent me something, it would be like, you better take care of this or anytime I borrowed something.
And then, of course, if you borrowed something from me, like money and, you know, blew it on something useless, it would be like, well, you know, you don't want to be so square about money and blah, blah, blah.
You know, this is how most people live, right?
Most people live their lives with these sort of pathetic and ridiculous ex post facto justifications trailing after themselves.
So, you know, they can't just sort of be greedy jerks and assholes and just take whatever they want and do whatever they feel like to people and live that kind of narcissistic hedonistic world and say, yeah, that's what I do because that's what I do.
No, no, no, no.
Everybody has to grab these pathetic moral justifications to shore up what it is that they do.
And that's, of course, why I am so focused on the argument for morality.
Because without that, they actually have to look at the evil that they're doing.
And they have to actually recognize their own blackness, right?
They can't sort of create these rules which justify everything that they do, right?
Like the example I gave of my sister-in-law who dated this guy because he was the best guy in the world and then broke up with him because it was the right thing to do.
Everybody always constantly and forever justifies their own actions after the fact, right?
So...
I'm sure that if you look in the lives of those around you, particularly in your parents, you'll see this everywhere.
I mean, it's just... It's as natural as breathing to people who are broken and corrupted and, you know, largely evil.
So, you know, it's not natural to human nature, right?
I mean, it's no more natural to human nature than, you know, bound feet, as I've mentioned before, will make you hobble around.
And if everyone has their feet bound, then everyone's hobbling around, and that's perfectly natural, given that your feet have been bound.
But it's not natural to human nature any more than foot binding is to the human body.
So people justify in these pathetic ways because that's what they learned as children, right?
I mean, they justify their own behaviors in these morally insipid and pathetic ways with these ridiculously Complicated, convoluted, and self-contradictory principles.
Not because it's natural to them, but because that's what they did as children when they were given these contradictory instructions from their parents.
They tried to bend their brain into these kaleidoscopic pretzels, nine-dimensional weirdnesses, in order to be able to pretend to themselves that their parents We're giving them moral rules because their parents cared about them and were moral, not because their parents bullied them because their parents had power.
I mean, it really is essential, if you want to understand politics, to understand that politics, as a sort of field of study, arises from a disparity of power, right?
I mean, so the state has the police and you and I don't, right?
I mean, the state has the guns and the military and you and I don't.
The state has the law courts and the prison system and you and I, you know, have podcasts and emails and, you know, I guess, consciousness-raising attempts.
This disparity in power is what is called political science.
It is the study of brutality.
It is the study of legalized armed might being deployed against legally disarmed and helpless citizens.
You can't understand politics, which is a form of power disparity, Without understanding the family, which is the most extreme form of power disparity that exists in the world.
And everything that happens in politics is a mere reflection, a mere reflection of everything that happens in the family.
That is the most crucial point to understand when you are trying to understand the family.
If you look at your own history, There is some reason why you're a libertarian or some reason why you're listening to these podcasts.
And it's not because you've had a very beneficial relationship with authority.
And it's not because you have become yourself a corrupted and abusive authority figure.
It is because some part of your experience has given you a glimpse into the true nature of power.
Now, the most important thing to do is to understand how this affects you personally in your family history before you go off and claim to understand everything about political power.
You start with what is closest and most personal to you and understand its effect on yourself, on your own soul and psyche, before you race along to come up with all these theories about the state.
And the reason, the reason that libertarianism has failed so fundamentally is that we have not been introspective enough.
We have not understood the effects of our own histories and our own relationships to power based on our relationships to our families, and this has left us continually at a loss.
when talking to other people.
And this is why we get so knotted up in trying to explain economics and philosophy and statistics and all of the foreign exchange.
I mean, I do this too, but trust me, the only reason that I'm able to do these podcasts is because I have, to a large degree, both on my own and also through Christina's help, had a strong dose of self-knowledge in regards to my own family and my own history of relationship to Authority and abusive power.
So the reason that I'm able to come to the conclusions that I do, the reason that I have the intellectual freedom to speak as I do, is because I have a good deal of self-knowledge about my own relationship to authority, and therefore, when I look at the state, I'm not constantly confused, because most people's perceptions of the state arise directly from their own perceptions of their parents, or of their authority figures.
The state is a mere dim echo.
It is a mere inconstant shadow of what occurs in the bosom of the family.
And if you can't look at your own parents and your own authority figures and your experience of the random authority and the abusive authority that I guarantee you, you experience, not because you're a libertarian, but because you're a human being.
And society is such as it is at the moment because we have a brutal parenting structure.
We have what is called poisonous pedagogy.
We have irrational, destructive and abusive parenting.
And as a result, we have the war on drugs and the war on terror and the war on illiteracy.
And the more that we focus on the political at the expense of the personal, the less power we have in debates with people.
You know, we need to learn our own histories.
We need to learn our own hearts and minds and souls in order to have real power in conversations with people.
Because otherwise we are constantly going to be weakened by the ignorant certainties of others.
If we build an edifice of political and economic knowledge on a lack of personal self-knowledge, we are inevitably going to end up not having any effect and speaking only to people who share our particular approach to politics and economics and so on.
We are not going to break out into the wider sphere until we learn deeply about our own histories and can face the problem of violence without prejudice, without excuses, without irrational aggression, without the constant confusion that comes from covering up early crimes in our own histories!
In our own histories!
The state is an imperfect shadow of the first evil, which is the family.
And you can't fight the state unless you understand your own family.
And if you don't understand your own family, you're going to be ineffective in fighting the state.
You will be ineffective at fighting power and abuse as a principle.
You will be unable to process the true nature of exploitation if you are blind to the exploitation that you experienced, which was the foundation of your political beliefs.
And it's not easy.
I know, I know, I know.
It's not easy.
I have a 600-page book at home, which is my attempt to claw through my history and get to the truth.
It's not easy.
It took me years!
And it was hell.
And it was exciting.
And it got me a great wife.
You know, sort of by the by.
You know, some people have said to me, hey, where did you get Christina?
She's great.
She sounds great.
And it's like, well, I got Christina by facing up to the demons of abuse and exploitation within my own history.
Now, you don't have to have A history like mine, and I'm not saying mine wins any kind of prize for abuse.
My history is peculiar, not because it's so particularly bad, but because it was unusual, right?
It's unusual to sort of have to parent yourself from your mid-teens onwards.
It's unusual to end up with no parents, right?
I mean, that's not that common, and also to end up with no foster parents.
And no sort of external adults of any kind.
However, I guarantee you, I guarantee you a hundred and fifty percent, I would stake all my riches on it, that you yourself experienced a surfeit of exploitive and abusive authority figures in your childhood, in your home, in your school, in your Boy Scouts, in your church, in your choir.
Everywhere you go, it's the same story.
And that's what you need to understand and accept if you want to be a powerful communicator and somebody who's able to really find the truth.
It's very hard.
There's a reason why nobody does it.
There's a reason why human history has been staggering from one brutal master to another with very, very rare, even partial diminishments of the brutality of authority throughout human history.
It's hard to face up to the early trauma of abusive authority.
But you have to.
I mean, if you don't want to, then don't be a libertarian.
I know that it's asking a lot, but it's not me that's asking it.
It's just the facts.
It's just human nature.
We can't fight in others what we have not experienced and acknowledged in ourselves.
We cannot fight the abstract and derived authority of the state without first facing up to our real experience of abusive authority, which we have actually directly had contact with.
I have never been to jail.
I've only been arrested once.
I've never had any real contact with the state because I pay my taxes and I do what I'm told to do.
But boy, oh boy, did I have experience with direct and corrupt authority growing up in the form of parents and teachers and so on, and priests.
So that's what we need to connect with emotionally if we're going to have any real power in the world in getting people to change their minds.
Because there's almost nothing that can stop or diminish or slow down a mind that is fully integrated with its own history and that has taken the universal morality that applies through all times and in all places and cast it backwards to reveal the ugliness of the past and to absorb and accept the evil that was done to us as children in the past.
And if you can't do that, and I'm not saying it's easy and it may not be worth it for you, but if you can't do that, don't muck about with libertarianism.
Libertarianism, or anarchism, or anarcho-capitalism, or whatever the heck we want to call it, is the last stage of dealing with family, of dealing with abusive authority, of dealing with the effects of teachers.
That's what comes at the very end of it, not what comes at the beginning.
It often manifests itself at the beginning because it's easier to understand and analyze and fight against the power of the state, which we've never really experienced, because we obey.
It's easier to focus on the state than it is to focus on oneself and one's own family.
And the reason that it's easier is because it's less painful, but because it's easier, it's crippling.
Because we don't actually deal with the problems of authority by projecting our own historical traumas onto the state, and then pretending that if we understand and fight the state, that everything's going to be okay.
That's not the case.
That's not how it works.
So this process that we go through as children, wherein we attempt to rationalize and to madly try to organize every single one of the tens of thousands of contradictory narcissistic and self-serving rules that are imposed upon us, As children, that process is how our minds become destroyed.
The process is what results in our perception of authority, which is that we are helpless before authority.
And I'm talking about most people.
Libertarians have a particular psychology which we can talk about another time.
But this is how we end up with this perception that The state is all-powerful, that the state does not need any kind of moral consistency that would be comparable to anything else in our life.
I mean, how many times have you had this thought or this conversation with people where you say, they say, oh, rent control is great.
And you say, well, would you take a gun to your landlord's head and say, if you raise the rate in rents, I'm going to shoot you.
And they say, oh, no, well, that's it.
But the state is different.
Well, this is where it comes from.
It comes from making up imaginary rules that justify parental abuse.
This is why people think this way.
This is why they create entirely separate rules for the state.
This is why they can't apply any kind of moral absolutes to people in power because they can't do it with their parents.
Because their parents have abused the argument for morality and used the ultimate club of moral absolutism to beat their children physically or verbally or psychologically into mute and broken submission.
This is why nobody can apply any moral reasoning or standards to the state.
It's got nothing to do with the state.
The state is simply cashing in on the brutality of parenting.
I can't even imagine what kind of parents politicians have, but I bet you they're pretty singular.
And there's no point.
There's no point trying to talk to people.
about moral authority, about moral absolutism, about the ethics of liberty, if they are fundamentally blocked, broken, falsified, hypocritical, and unable to face the horror of the inevitable result of realizing that their own parents were evil.
And I know, I'm gonna get the same responses that people had before about, ooh, my parents did their best and this and that, and we can certainly look at that another time.
But morally, in an objective moral sense, it certainly is evil to give children contradictory rules and claim that all of them are absolutes and you can't question anything and, you know, I mean, and most parents don't do that absolutely.
Of course what they'll do, because all rules have to be inconsistent, is they'll say sometimes, oh, you really can question everything, no, I like it when we have these discussions, and other times they'll come down on you like a ton of bricks.
A parent who is perfectly abusive is not perfectly abusive, because abusive is about having absolute rules that constantly change, right?
A dictatorship is not a situation of iron laws, but a situation of no laws.
And the modern parenting is a situation of no laws.
My mother could be wonderful when I got sick.
She'd put me on the couch, she'd bring me soup, she'd say, oh, we don't want to stick you away in your room, blah, blah, blah.
So whenever I was helpless and dependent, she was great.
But, you know, any time I had a thought or a question of my own, not any time, but a lot of times, I'd get... I'd get... there'd be hell to pay.
And then other times there wouldn't be, and you could never know.
And this is the sort of cinquanat of abusive parenting that you just never know.
But...
The first thing to do is to untangle our own experiences.
To make sure that we are clear about our own histories and the abuse that all of us inevitably and absolutely and perfectly were submitted to or were exposed to or had it inflicted upon us.
And then once we understand that, once we understand our own relationship to universal morality, to ethics, to power, to what happened to us, then we can begin to talk to people, frankly.
And then we will have a kind of power behind our words, an emotional clarity behind our words that is going to be very hard for people to just brush aside.
Don't you feel that in your history when you talk to people that people can just brush libertarianism and rationality and objectivism and Evidence that can just brush it aside like it never existed and we feel kind of helpless.
Well, that's because in our history, whenever we tried to apply rules to our own parents or our own teachers, we were simply brushed aside and had no power.
So you can't win.
against corruption in others unless you have fully examined the corruption that's within yourself.
And the corruption within yourself is not that you experienced abuse.
The corruption within yourself is that you are not accepting the fact that you experienced abuse.
And I can tell you that you're not accepting it, for instance, if you still have contact with your parents.
If they were bad people, right?
Because you can't Say, oh yes, no, I accept the fact that I was, you know, horribly treated and so on, but still maintain, you know, friends and buddies or even intermittent relationships with your parents.
You simply can't do it.
It's hypocritical and it's wrong.
And there's no point talking about morality and then hanging out with people who abuse children.
As I said before, it's the greatest power disparity in the world, and there is no place that that kind of abuse can ever be accepted.
You know this thing with the Lord Acton's phrase, right?
Power tends to corrupt absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
Well, you know, every idiot and his brother, and myself included, up until a couple of years ago, thought that this was all about politics.
It's not.
It's not.
The reason that that phrase sticks in people's minds is not because of politics, but because of the family.
Because there is no greater power disparity in the world.
From Stalin to the lowliest guy in the gulag, there is no greater power disparity in the world than that between parents and children.
Abuse that is inflicted upon an adult man is inflicted after his So, Lord Acton is not talking about Stalin.
he has the capacity to retell that abuse within his own context and not listen to his abusers.
But there is no greater vulnerability and dependence and need and power disparity than that of a child to his parent or her parent.
So Lord Acton is not talking about Stalin.
Stalin is a mere effect of bad parenting.
The Russian people's susceptibility to Stalin, to communism, is a simple effect of brutalized parenting, of brutal parents.
This is the cost that we pay for failing to deal with our pasts, is a cycle of continual slavery to power, of continual surrender to ever-increasing, ever-aggressive, ever-expanding power.
And that's why I said that this topic of parents and the state was going to take more than one or two podcasts because, you know, I think it might be entirely possible that I get an email or two out of this one.
But it certainly is the case that we haven't been effective.
It certainly is the case that parents are abusive universally.
Does that mean that there are no good parents?
No.
I've seen a couple of good parents.
I've seen some nice people who are parents.
But it's not statistically relevant.
As I mentioned before, there are fruit flies born with 16 wings, but they're not statistically relevant.
It's essential to say that no fruit flies have 16 wings.
So, that's another thing that I sort of wanted to get across to you.
That, yeah, you might have known some nice parents.
Your own parents may have been nice too and good.
But, you know, the good that they did was accidental because they did it without understanding.
And the reason I know they did it without understanding is that nobody understands freedom as yet.
And I'm not even saying that I understand it either because I was raised in a non-free environment and I've had to struggle too.
free myself from those effects by learning about my history and learning and accepting the pain and the horror of what occurred and So I'm still learning about it.
I can only glimpse it.
I can only see it like Like a light in a fog over a hill but I think that's still a lot further than most parents have ever gotten to and Given that they themselves that the past has reached up through them through their own parenting into the way that they parent themselves You know, we're lagging usually a generation or two behind in terms of freedom.
And so it seems to me more likely that... I mean, what we've done is we've switched from the army metaphor, which I mentioned this morning, to this sort of indulgent metaphor, which I talked about also.
That is really not progress at all.
In fact, it could be considered regressive, because the parents that are nice but irrational are even more dangerous than the parents that are brutal and irrational.
And I know this from conversations with Christina and her culture.
So, you know, that's something that's also very important to understand, that nice parents are very dangerous, because you don't even have the obvious scars of trauma to deal with the irrationalities that, you know, that they have inflicted upon you, and the narcissism and so on, and the abuse that occurred because of the power disparity.
And until we can really understand that the greatest brutalities in the world have nothing to do with state predation, but are to do with what occurs in the crib, and are to do with what occurs when people are very young, and then when they go to school, and by the time they become teenagers, they are, you know, broken and mutilated, almost beyond repair.
And until we understand that, we're not going to have any luck communicating to people what freedom, what Independence, what morality really means.
And it's a long way for us to go as a species because it's not something that's ever really on the table.
People like to talk about the gold standard.
They don't like to talk about mommy and daddy.
But until we do, we are forever going to be in the fringes and we're going to lead these dissatisfying lives of having very little effect on the central social discourse.
And I think, I personally think that it's well worth throwing the dice and getting out there and talking to people about their histories, talking to people about their families.
And forget about talking about the state.
Just for a little while.
Just try it.
Just see what happens.
Have a conversation about your feelings.
Have a conversation about your experiences.
Assume, like, get back to that part of you that Knew that what was happening to you was wrong despite the fact that it was happening to everybody and everybody was doing it.
Despite the fact that all of your friends had the same thing and everybody in school was humiliated and all the teachers were the same and all the parents were the same.
Forget about that.
Get back to the part of you that truly remembers what it was like to Before you realized that this level of violation was inevitable.
Before you realized that this level of attack upon your personality and intelligence and integrity and honor was inevitable.
Before, in order to survive, you had to hide and give up your true self.
Reach back to that time.
Find that.
That is freedom.
The pain that you have to go through to get that, to grasp it, to hold on to it, to nurture it, to grow it.
That is freedom.
That is where the future lies.
That is where the power of the movement lies.
That is the unstoppable true self, which can never be defeated.
And it's not easy to get to, but it's well worth trying.
And please let me know what happens, if this is of any use to you, what happens in your conversations with people.
Talk about the family.
Forget about the state.
Forget about economics for a little while, because those are just the after-effects of what happens when we're very young, at first.
Thanks so much for listening, as always.
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