All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 8, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:43
91 The State and the Family - Part 3: Latency

Our third experience with authority

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, it's a family affair!
It's a family affair!
Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
That is two awfully sung lines from a song called Family Affair by Sly and the Family Stone, which, as my good friend Niels pointed out, is a far more appropriate song selection to the topic at hand than If You Want Me to Stay.
Also a great song, and they did so many great songs, so if you get a chance to check them out, I would certainly recommend it.
So, and I don't know, song recommendations for teenage alienation, which is the topic today?
Oh, there's just so many.
I would say that my particular favorite was, of course, The Wall, when I was that age.
The Wall had come out a couple of years before I got into it.
I actually started hearing it, or heard it, other than the sort of one or two radio hits that came off the album.
I heard it from a distant cousin.
I was in Africa when I was six, and also again when I was 16.
And when I was 16, I was there for, oh gosh, four or five months visiting my father.
And this guy was a little more hip than I was at that age, which It really wasn't very hard at all.
And he introduced me to the album, and I really got into it, and I started listening to it more and more and more, and there was a time where I would listen to sort of Side 3 of The Wall, for those who remember such things, before I went to bed most nights, and loved the album.
I mean, it really did capture something about the tricky and somewhat savage horror of teenage life in the modern West.
I mean, not just mine, I think it was true for most people.
So, we last left off the toddler yesterday afternoon, and we're going to have a sort of quick skip through.
I mean, the introduction of the school system is interesting because it's quite benevolent, at least when I was first... the first sort of memories that I have of school are, you know, I'd already been infected with war fever, of course, which was to last Gosh, 30 years or so, because I just remember drawing planes and bombs and all of the things that British boys are supposed to do, because of course I'd already learned all there was to know about war.
And the other thing that I remember was, there's very little work.
I was actually, for some reason, I don't have any memory of anymore.
I was staying at an aunt's place.
I went to school pretty far away from where I was brought up.
Not the boarding school thing, but before then I was in school with a cousin of mine, and this is people who lived in a town in England called Tenderton, and this is the...
The son of the uncle of my father's sister's husband.
This is the guy who was on the bombing raid.
It was a bit of a sad tale in that he was a pilot of course for many years and then when he was coming into land One day he had a blackout of a very temporary sort of blackout but this is in the days before automatic landing and so it was very risky and he was never allowed to fly again and so he became an ambulance driver instead because I guess he was good at speedy things.
So, I was in kindergarten, or whatever the British equivalent was, very early on.
I remember drawing lots of pictures of war, and I also remember being very confused about something.
I remember staring ...at the word R-A-R-E, and trying to puzzle it out, because the word is R. There's an R letter in the middle, but there's an A and the E on either side.
So it wasn't R-A, it was R, which was the same word, which is a word that had the same sound as the letter in the middle, but had these other letters.
And I remember sort of trying to puzzle that out, staring at a board.
I also had a...
This is sort of embarrassing, but why not?
I had a habit when I was very young of spelling my name.
For some reason, I could only remember how to spell it if I put a Y at the end, which made it Stephanie, which made for a few jokes.
I can't, for the life of me, imagine why that was the case.
The hiccup of the developing language centres is they're always quite fascinating, but they're sort of impossible to trace 35 odd years after the fact, so I sort of remember that as a fairly embarrassing thing.
Of course, it's only embarrassing because we have these stuck-up gender roles, man!
So, when you first get into school, it's relatively pleasant.
And it's only after a certain amount of time that you begin to realize just how pointless and boring it all is.
And there's a couple of teachers that There's sort of a couple of teacher types that you're going to come across.
One is sort of the completely indifferent teacher, right?
The droner, the person who you can't follow to save your life.
I mean, it's like they've been inoculated against communicating clearly, and you simply can't follow what it is that they're saying or trying to communicate, so you end up having to take voluminous notes about everything, and you have no idea what's going to be on the test because they never change their emphasis at all.
So, the droner is one.
The angry guy is, of course, another one.
And this guy actually can be quite passionate and isn't that bad.
I had one of these guys in grade 6.
When I came to Canada, we initially lived with my uncle in Whitby, my uncle on my mother's side in Whitby.
And I was in grade eight for, I don't know, six months or so.
And then when I came to Toronto, they put me back into grade six, sort of based mostly on my math skills, which was fair.
But, you know, it's kind of tough to say what would have I mean, in hindsight, and it doesn't really matter, but I probably would have preferred to be a bit further ahead intellectually, but then I would have had the problem of being the youngest kid, like two years younger than everyone else when I was in grade eight, which wasn't really that much fun.
But when I was in grade 8, I ended up taking a grade 13 English course, because I was very much into creative writing at the time, of course, and so I could definitely do stuff ahead.
And this is sort of the problem with the curriculum, as I mentioned the other day, that I was very good with language and very bad at math and science.
And I couldn't specialize even though I was able to take an English course sort of five or six years ahead of my supposed grade and pass it with flying colors.
I wasn't allowed to focus just on that and ditch the stuff that was sort of pointless to me.
And why?
Well, just because it's inconvenient to the teachers to have to design a more specialized curriculum for the students, even though it might have gotten me out of school, you know, five or six years earlier than I got out of and allowed me to start sort of earning a living much earlier.
Which would have, of course, been much better financially for me and for society as a whole, I guess you could say.
But no, none of that's allowed because, of course, the schools are not designed to help you profit from their instruction, right?
I mean, the schools are just designed to keep you penned up and, you know, scrub any independent thought and willpower out of you.
So, it doesn't take too long to sort of figure it out.
You're going to run into the droner, the angry teacher.
You're going to run into the friendly teacher, who's very rare.
You're going to run into the spaced-out teacher, who is just sort of weird.
Usually they're older, though they don't have to be.
I remember in grade 8 I did have an English teacher.
Oh, grade 7 I had an English teacher.
Oh man, she was such a druggie, or at least she was the effects of a druggie.
And a bad druggie, not the good kind.
And I just remember her sort of slowly waltzing around the room.
At one point she was saying, you know that big building that's downtown, the pointy one, you know, you know the one.
And she was referring to the CN Tower, sort of on the major landmarks of Canada, certainly Toronto, and to not know it would be kind of startling for somebody who'd lived in Canada.
But I guess, you know, she got high in other ways than going up the CN Tower, so there was that kind of teacher.
And she would sort of say, you know, pick a song that you really like and write me out the lyrics and I'll read them and, you know, just tell me what you feel about the song.
Which is not, I mean, I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing to do if it is, you know, if you're looking for sort of psychological testing.
But, I mean, what a ridiculous thing to do.
I mean, I remember I did the trial, which is on the wall, and wrote sort of my thoughts about it.
And she actually asked me, and I think one other guy, to give her tapes of the song so she could listen to them.
And that was it, though.
I mean, that was it, right?
So, of course, the fact that I had chosen a musical piece about the crippling effects on a young boy or a young man from a, you know, predatory and sociopathic mother.
I mean, of course, she was, you know, more interested in, oh, it'd be great to hear that song than, you know, huh, I wonder if this tells me anything interesting about this quiet but smart boy who's in my class.
No, of course not!
So, the angry teachers are interesting because, I mean, they're sort of divided into two types.
There's the angry teacher who is the intellectual, right?
So this is the guy who aimed for professorship but ended up teaching, you know, 13-year-old kids and is kind of bitter and is hostile towards those children.
That is not uncommon at all.
You do see this a little bit in professors.
But with professors you get much more smug superiority.
You don't get that as much, that sort of outright anger as much, because they haven't sort of aimed and missed, right?
But if you end up teaching junior high school or high school when you were aiming for a professorship at Harvard, you're kind of bitter, right?
You feel sort of ripped off and you take that out on the children.
So basically your attitude is, you little bastards!
You know, I'm not going to let you step out of line one bit.
You people don't care.
I mean, I did have one of these guys in university who assigned us a text to read.
It was Billy Budd, if I remember rightly.
And, you know, he started asking questions, and nobody had read it.
And I actually hadn't read it either, which was sort of unusual for me.
I had tried to read it, but I just didn't have any luck.
And I've never had any luck with those sorts of sea novels of the 19th century.
I mean, Moby Dick puts me into a coma, and I've tried it two or three times.
And Conrad is just killer.
So, and he was, you know, he would sort of say, well, he asked a couple of questions and people kind of shifted in their seats and evaded.
And then he said, hands up everyone who hasn't read the book.
And, you know, I put my hand up because, you know, might as well be honest.
And then he just sort of got up and stormed out.
I mean, and I just thought that was fantastic.
I mean, I just thought that was astonishing.
And it's the same kind of petty bullying crap.
That you just see it.
I mean, most adults, of course, in the modern world are just brutalized infants in adult clothing.
I mean, and this kind of behavior is just astonishing.
You know, instead of sort of saying, okay, well, I assigned this book that nobody wanted to read and nobody found worthwhile.
And, you know, I would have sort of said, if I was the teacher, I would have said, okay, well, this is very interesting.
So hands up everyone who tried to read it and didn't like it and then you would you know I guess more I'm sure some people I'm sure most people took a stab at it, but just found it really hard to get into and hard to understand the value and purpose of it because abuse of authority that's inherent in Billy Budd is Perhaps a little close to home for people who are in university, but there could have been a number of reasons as to why people could not get into it.
Maybe they didn't understand why they were reading it.
Maybe they couldn't understand the historical context.
Maybe they, you know, just didn't... Like, what's it about?
Is it about a bunch of sailors in the 19th century?
Well, if so, who cares?
Is it about the abuse of power?
Is it about the abuse of authority?
I mean, obviously, when people read 1984, they can recognize something about it.
Now, of course, it would be fascinating to teach 1984 with the War on Terror going on, because, of course, an enemy which can't be defined or defeated is perfect for the Big Brother type of society.
But to sit down and say, well, why didn't you?
Why didn't you read it?
Not to get all offensive and mad and storm off and slam the door and so on, and leaving us all feel like, once again, we had failed the teacher rather than the teacher failing us.
It really is just astounding how vicious this kind of mentality is.
And this happened in junior high school and high school from time to time as well.
I mean, there were, you know, the math challenged, or, you know, I guess you could say, Christina doesn't like it when I call myself math challenged, because she said, look, you had this, you know, you work with language, you do math in your computer coding, you've done your own taxes, you, you know, can figure all this stuff out, it's just that you were in an environment where You couldn't do any homework, and you weren't being taught in a way that made any sense to you.
And, you know, you kind of knew that you weren't... Because you didn't enjoy math, you weren't going to do it for a living, so... And nobody had ever explained to you about how it's to sort of help teach you logic, and therefore, sort of wrong to say that you're bad at math, or that you're stupid at math.
I mean, I don't say that I'm stupid at math, but I do sort of say that I'm bad at it, or...
She'd just say, well, you weren't taught, you had no environment in which homework was ever possible to get done, and so you ended up without this particular skill.
And of course, math wasn't an escape from my childhood for me in the way that reading, and later on Dungeons & Dragons, was.
That's another important factor.
I mean, I never was able to escape the difficulties of my situation by solving quadratic equations or anything.
So, that's sort of important to understand as well, just how teachers who get angry at you and slam the door and storm and rail and humiliate you for not doing your homework and not doing well in school are kind of sociopathic sadists, right?
They're definitely sadistic, whether a sociopathic would be another kind of diagnosis.
And Christina, of course, doesn't like it, and quite rightly so, when I throw around technical terms in psychology without truly understanding, which is why I haven't used the term borderline very often.
Except when I'm singing Madonna.
You know, so, sorry, just to jump back to this professor, he could have had a very, very interesting discussion, where he could have tried to bring people out of their self-defensive and semi-brutalized shells, which we all have, and sort of said, okay, well, so nobody wanted to read this book, or you tried reading it and you failed, well, what was it?
The language?
Was it the circumstances?
Did you not understand why it was assigned?
And of course, the question is, why?
Why choose that book?
A curriculum is like art, you know?
There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of books, probably millions, that you could choose from, and you choose these twelve or these eight to study.
So we did The Magus by John Fowles, which was a great book.
John Fowles is completely insane, but the book itself was quite good, and what I did get out of it was that life is not a test wherein you are going to get marked for good or bad behavior, or you need to please other people, or whatever.
And, you know, it's a great aspect of that novel.
Although I've never liked The Maggot or The French Lieutenant's Woman was just okay.
But I've never really liked his other stuff.
But I thought that book was good, although it's a bit of a slog.
But sort of why choose that?
What part of... I mean, I was taking an English degree at this time.
I was at York University and I'd glenned in campus and I took two years of English literature before I went to the National Theatre School.
Man, the reason I left was that you can't really fail in English and I didn't really feel like I was getting a good education or getting sort of my money's worth.
But, you know, there's no sort of thesis to the curriculum.
There's no sort of, well, you study this book because you want to understand this about life.
Because everything at the basis is about philosophy, right?
Why do you study?
Well, to learn philosophy in order to be a happy person.
the same way that everything that you study in medical school is related to health, then everything that you study in a sort of arts should be related to truth or thinking.
And, you know, that's true of the sciences as well, but you learn to think in order, in order to be happy, right?
That's sort of the major goal.
That's the only goal of life.
Everything else is subsumed to that, and you should be taught what you're taught in order to help be happy.
So if you're learning grammar or Well, you need to learn grammar so that you can understand language better.
You need to understand language better so you can communicate better and organize your thoughts better.
And you need to organize your thoughts better into logical structures so that you can be happy.
That would sort of be the purpose.
The same thing with studying Euclidean geometry.
You do that so you can learn how to reason better, so you can spot false arguments, so you won't be led astray, so you'll learn how to distinguish truth from falsehood.
So you'll be happy.
The happiness is dependent upon truth and honesty.
I mean, it just is the way things are.
The same way that health in the body is what results when the body is aligned with its designed purpose.
Then that's great.
You feel healthy and you feel vital and so on.
And the same thing with the mind.
You are happy when your mind is aligned with its designed purpose, which is to be rational and creative and communicate and love and sing and dance and all that kind of stuff.
But the fundamental is it has to be in line with reality.
Our mind is designed to adapt to reality.
And, of course, once you adapt to reality, you are a strong person who's no longer influenced by the whims and bullies of others.
And, of course, that's the last thing that the state wants.
I mean, they just would do anything rather than have you be that way.
So you have the angry intellectual who... I mean, and I just sort of give you one last example of how ridiculous that is.
And it's very hard for us to understand how ridiculous our education is.
But, of course, I work to sell, to build and sell software in the private sector.
And we do sell to some public sector clients, but the fact is that we're in the private sector, so it's up to us to prove and deliver value to our clients.
That's the basic sort of fact.
Now, can you imagine if I had sent what's called an RFP, a request for proposal, which is a response to a series of questions, Can you imagine if I was in a room of 30 people or 20 people, which I sometimes am when I'm demonstrating the software or talking about the value proposition and so on.
Can you imagine if I was in there and I asked people a couple of questions and they seemed hesitant to answer?
And then I asked them sort of point-blank, I said, well, you know, do you mind just telling me who here has, just so I could sort of frame my discussion, who hasn't read the RFP, right?
And if a couple of hands went up, Can you imagine me, you know, snarling at them for being idiots and storming out and slamming the door?
Can you imagine how insane and unprofessional and abusive that would be?
Even if none of them whatsoever had read the proposal, it's not, they're paying me!
They're paying me!
They are potentially going to be my customer!
Getting mad at them for not reading some literature that I'd asked them to read is ridiculous!
Now, I probably wouldn't sit down and say, well, it's interesting you didn't read my RFP.
Why is that?
I'd just say, okay, well, no problem.
Let me touch upon the high points of what the RFP contains.
I might need to go in a little bit more detail, and I'll try to reference the RFP pages where I can from memory, so that you can refer to those later.
You would have to be polite, and you would have to, and then, you know, you could sort of figure it out yourself.
What I would do is assume, of course, that the RFP that I'd written was the problem, especially if this happened a number of times, and I would then have to give it to someone else or hire an editor or someone to help me figure out how to better communicate the value proposition so that it was something.
Or maybe it was too long.
Maybe my RFP was like 300 pages full of dense nine-point squint-o-vision type, and that was the problem.
But the idea that you get angry at people for not doing the work that they're supposed to do, of course, the real relationship is that parents are supposed to be paying the teachers to do a good job with their children.
And the way, of course, that it always comes out is that your teachers are like arbitrary bullying bosses.
I mean, to me it's so funny that leftists will talk about exploitation, and of course they never talk about parenting, right?
Or if they do, it's sort of as a function of, well, they're tired from being exploited by capitalists, so they come home and yell at their kids.
But it's just amazing to me that leftists, when they talk about power disparities and exploitation, never talk about public education.
Of course not, because, right, I mean, they're funded by unions and they've got this absolutely blind, irrational loyalty to state power, right?
Which means that They're sort of picking on the capitalists the same way that an older brother picks on a younger brother.
And I'm aware of the psychological ramifications of that in my own life, so please don't write to tell me that I've revealed another part of myself that I'm unaware of.
But, you know, industrialists are picked on the way that younger brothers are picked on by older brothers, rather than the older brothers identifying correctly the true source of the problems within the family, which is the parents.
They just sort of pick on the younger brothers.
And why?
Well, because it's easier and the younger brothers aren't going to fight back, right?
This is why people pick on capitalists, who are safe to pick on, because capitalists aren't going to, you know, pull any dirty tricks.
They're not going to, you know, you don't work for them usually when you're a lefty intellectual.
And they're not going to fight back.
They can't plant drugs in your car and get angry at you.
They can't throw you in jail.
They can't bar you from teaching.
They can't pull away your license.
They can't do any of these things.
So everybody picks on capitalists because they're cowards.
I mean, they're filthy cowards.
and capitalists don't fight back because they're win-win negotiating people who don't have any power over these guys anyway.
They get angry.
Like if you've ever been in a company where there's been an unjust attack launched against the company by some paper or intellectual, the whole point is, okay, well, we're not going to fight back.
We're going to take the high road.
We're going to do this.
We're going to do that.
You know, you do that against a union and you're going to find a car bomb, right?
I mean, so people pick on capitalists because they're sort of evil, filthy little cowards.
Who won't talk about the true nature of power disparity, which is first of all parenting, second of all teaching, third of all universities, and then way down the list, like 850 after all of the government agencies, the taxation, the military, the police, all of the vast apparatus of state power, there is the evil capitalist in a small town where there aren't any other jobs.
I mean, which is just so... such a ridiculously innocuous power disparity that it's scarcely worth mentioning, but everybody focuses and picks on that person, because it's mostly, you know, evil exploitive capitalists are mostly fiction, and those that are out there can't do anything bad to you anyway, so that's why everybody loves to focus on them.
But the power disparity that occurs within a classroom, where you can be expelled, you can be publicly humiliated, you can be yelled at, you know, until, I guess, the 1970s, you could be hit.
I mean, I don't think that there are any capitalists who go around belting their workers, but you get raised in the public school system, and this is where parents come from now, right?
I mean, the public school system in the post-war period still allowed corporate punishment, and I was certainly caned when I was a boy.
And so that level of power disparity, and of course, what they can do, they can put you back a year, They can, you know, if you get expelled your sort of future life becomes enormously difficult and, you know, you are very much outside the norm, socially you're wrecked.
So when you get exposed to that level of power and that you can't talk back, you can't argue, you can't question, you can't challenge, you can't criticize, And you can't think for yourself.
I mean absolutely no way in heck can you ever conceivably remotely think for yourself.
That is an absolute fact.
We talked about this in public school so I won't go into it here.
Just suffice to say that teachers that rely on state power and blood money for their paychecks are not very interested in those who have any kind of moral curiosity.
Or any kind of rational or logical abilities that are not focused on these useless and specialized areas, at least at that age, of sort of math and science and so on.
Of course, there are nice teachers and pleasant teachers and so on, but it sort of doesn't really matter.
The fact is that there were nice prison guards in the gulags as well, and so Solzhenitsyn writes about some of these in the Gulag Apokolago.
There were some nice prison guards, guys who would smuggle you food if you were in solitary and so on, but it doesn't really matter.
I mean, the better thing is not to have that kind of power at all, right?
As somebody memorably once said, it's not the abusive power that's the problem, it's the power to abuse, because you don't want to be reliant on that.
And so, when you get into school, you're going to run into all of these embittered teachers, and you're going to have all of these problems, and there's going to be this enormous cloud of suspicion that's over you.
Now, I'm talking about my teenage years, which is 25 odd years ago.
Time flash.
Anyway, I'm back.
And so you're going to get exposed to all of these ridiculous petty rules, hostile teachers, weird teachers, spaced out teachers, angry teachers.
Up in here, up in Canada, we of course had the teachers who had fled the Vietnam War.
So we had completely insane gym teachers who, you know, had gone through, I don't know if they were in the military and then fled, but they seem to have some pretty military, military bearing, I guess you could say.
Stomach's back.
Sorry, stomach's in, shoulders back, head erect.
Run, run, run!
Get up your weed!
You know, that kind of stuff.
And, I mean, these people were just completely insane.
But if you're a gym teacher in Canada, you're probably not at the pinnacle of your success.
And, of course, we had these completely spaced out guidance counselors.
Or, as a friend of mine once memorably said, I think, you know, why would you ever take career advice from somebody who ended up as a guidance counselor in high school in a suburb of Toronto?
Just, you know, quite accurate.
And I do remember sitting in a guidance counselor's office and staring at all of the, I think I may have mentioned this before, but staring at all of the occupations that, you know, said, if you don't take math, you can't be an accountant.
You can't be a this or that.
It's like none of those professions seemed even remotely appealing, you know?
You can't be a forensic auditor.
You can't be an astronaut.
Okay, well, yeah, I'll hold my breath to become an astronaut.
I just thought this stuff was kind of funny.
You can't be a physicist.
None of which I wanted to do, so I was like, OK, well, that confirms that.
Let me drop math.
No, no, you can't.
So you're going to run into all of these weird rules, and so your hall passes and monitors, and then, you know, there's some of the, you know, you're going to get punished by having to write out lines.
It's a completely ridiculous punishment.
And nobody is ever going to be curious about your behavior or your reasons for it.
Of course, the whole system is completely corrupt, and the whole system is a complete bully pen for the young, right?
So those of you who've written to me to say we're homeschooling, or we'd like to homeschool, or we have homeschooled, good for you.
Good for you.
I know that it's a complete ripoff, but this is your children's brains that are at stake.
And there's really no point having children and putting them into public school unless it's completely unavoidable for you to do that, because you're just going to get mutilated both mentally and socially.
There is a real underworld of Lord of the Flies, wolf children, and not just for me, but for most of the kids.
There's the rules, which you pay lip service to and face value to, and then there are the other rules.
The other rules are that it's the law of the jungle, that the big dominate, that the strong dominate the weak, That those who are crueler dominate those who are more sensitive, and that boys dominate girls, and so on.
I mean, it really is a state of nature.
This is even more the case, I found, in Canada than it was in England.
It was that way in boarding school, for sure.
I mean, the level of physical brutality in boarding school is quite astonishing.
But of course it's not that astonishing when you realize that kids are getting caned, they've been ripped away from their parents, they don't have access to any outside agency.
We would never sort of imagine that it would be a good thing to never have access to law or any sort of dispute resolution of what I call the DROs.
We would never imagine that a good society would exist wherein one group had complete dominance over another group and that other group had no recourse.
Like we're shocked when Bush detains or authorizes the detainment of hundreds of people without access to family or lawyers.
Yet, boarding schools, I mean, that's the case.
You go there and you're just completely at the mercy of everyone around you and you have no recourse to any kind of mediation.
You can't complain.
It's like prison, right?
I mean, if you're in prison and you get raped, which happens just with appalling regularity, particularly in American prisons.
I mean, Amnesty International has been complaining for years about the incidence of sexual abuse in American prisons.
You go to the guard and he's not going to do anything, right?
You're just going to have to become somebody's girlfriend.
And that is just a horrendous situation.
But the same thing is true in boarding school.
Not so much the rape, although fortunately I wasn't there long enough for puberty to hit.
But the situation wherein you have abuse occurring, I mean regularly and somewhat brutally.
I escaped the worst of it for a number of reasons.
mostly because I had a quick tongue and was witty, right?
So I could sort of make kids laugh.
And so I escaped the kind of violence that a lot of the other kids did.
And of course, I was a cute little blonde, blue-eyed younger kid.
And I had no hesitations whatsoever about playing all of that stuff up.
And so I was sort of cunning enough to manage to escape the major brutalities that occurred for most of the kids who were in my school.
But, you know, a lot of them weren't so lucky.
And of course, we had no recourse to any kind of resolution whatsoever.
We couldn't go and complain to anyone because of course there's this whole snitch paranoia that goes on among children and that's something that people who say that the state has kind of authority just don't understand.
People just don't talk about it.
And all of this, of course, adds up to, in the end, the problem or the challenge that are faced by children after they've been exposed to this kind of brutalizing regime in the public school system.
And, you know, the presence or absence of corporal punishment has some effect.
But not a very large effect on this, right?
Because, I mean, what's stunted is the intellectual development.
And the physical punishment that occurred was never enough to really harm the children's bodies, right?
Not sort of since the Victorian era.
And therefore, that was just sort of one method of humiliation, which is sort of an affliction of physical punishment.
But the physical punishment was always more around the mental humiliation than it ever was around sort of hurting the flesh, right?
I mean, so the caning.
Although it sounds harsh, it was never really that painful.
What was painful was realizing that you were in a situation where you could be beaten at whim and humiliated.
And of course, if that humiliation occurs for a variety of reasons in public school, it's still as bad.
I mean, it's just without the slightly added justification for anger later that occurs with physical abuse.
But the idea, of course, that you can be humiliated and bullied and sort of marked down or cast back and have your whole economic future threatened, pretty much on a whim.
Like if you just run into a bad teacher.
And that was really a sort of underground railroad of information about bad teachers in my high school.
You really want to get this guy's class because he's easy.
There was never any, I don't remember a single case where it was like, You really want to take this guy's class because he's, you know, he'll teach you a lot.
I mean, that was never the case.
It was like, this guy's a jerk.
Whatever you do, don't get this guy.
You know, this guy has got really bad body odor and his breath will kill you.
So don't take that guy.
And, you know, there's lots of sort of these sorts of things.
And the teachers themselves, they were constantly going through these emotional traumas and divorces and sort of, you know, they had their own kids who had lots of behavioral problems, which is kind of funny, right?
I mean, that should be one thing that you'd probably want to wonder about.
If a psychologist you're seeing has terrible problems with his or her children, you'd probably want to wonder about that.
And almost all of the teachers that I knew had pretty bad relationships with their own children.
I mean, it's that we'd sort of heard about.
So, I mean, that was just sort of another indication.
But the real end result of this is that by the time you hit puberty, this is sort of... I was going to talk about the teenage stuff before, but I guess I'm talking more about the latency period, sort of psychologically between the age of 5 or 6 and 11 or 12, that you're sort of systematically... your capacity or your feeling that you can have any kind of effect on the world is systematically whittled away and diminished and destroyed.
This happens at home to some degree, but it happens in school to a much larger degree.
It's something we really shouldn't underestimate.
The depression and anger and pettiness that strikes people much later in life, usually sort of in their 20s, mid to late 20s, early 30s, that sort of sense of helplessness and hopelessness That occurs, really does occur, because of what happens during this time period, in the latency period, when they're in public school, and their wishes mean nothing, right?
They can't... Nobody ever says, well, what kind of school trip would you guys like?
And nobody ever says, well, what would you guys like to study?
What's of interest to you, personally, that you would like to get involved in?
Or at least that wasn't the case when I was there, and it certainly, if it is now, it's going to be even more ridiculous, because, I mean, it's not like society is healthier now than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
So the children are never consulted as to what it is that they want to do.
They're just sort of lined up in these sort of veal-fattening pen rows, and lectured at, and they get to draw stuff, and they get to play games, and none of it makes any sense.
None of it is building towards any kind of common goal.
There's no framework under which they can ever judge whether their education is good, or bad, or indifferent, or positive, or negative, or useful, or useless.
They're just taught, right?
And you learn to become sort of passive.
And you learn, you're bullied, you're sort of inflicted.
Passivity becomes a huge scar tissue.
Which grows over the absence of any kind of concern for your feelings, or any kind of interaction with you, or any kind of curiosity about you as a human being.
Which is, of course, why people grow up with no knowledge of themselves, and no feeling that they can ever challenge the might and the power of the state.
I mean, that's just an after-effect of what happens, as I mentioned yesterday.
What happens as children, you know?
We're just sort of told to sit down and shut up and do our work, and if we don't do our work, we are blamed.
I mean, nobody ever says, Gee, Steph, I wonder why you haven't done your math homework for five years?
You know, it's just like, ah, you're lazy or, you know, you're good for nothing.
I mean, it wasn't often put that bluntly, but it was pretty much.
We were blamed for it.
And generally what happens is this passivity and despair and complete blindness to any kind of identity or self.
The self is, at this point, by the time the kid hits puberty, The true self is so buried under accumulated years of neglect and indifference and humiliation and punishment and scorn and boredom and so on, that by the time the kid hits puberty, you have sort of the unstoppable force hits the immovable object.
So the fact that the personality is completely undeveloped and that you have this vain and useless and petty false self that is being grown like an evil weed in an untended garden, this is what, this is sort of the position of the personality when puberty hits.
So when the unstoppable force of hormones and nature's not-too-subtle attempts to get the family going, when that hits the inertia and deadness of the personality, you get the real difficulties of the teenagers, which I think is probably worth chatting about this afternoon.
So I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph signing off, and I will probably stick to the topic this afternoon.
I mean, I'm on the topic in general, which is not too bad for me, but it hasn't been quite as focused as the last couple, but that's all right.
I mean, this is sort of an exploration for me as well, as I look over my memories and ideas.
▲
Export Selection