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Feb. 8, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:53
92 The State and the Family - Part 4: Adolescence
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Time Text
Good afternoon everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is twenty past five on the 8th of February 2006.
Thanks to everybody who wrote in to complain most vociferously about my recent series on the state and family.
I appreciate that I could be You're completely wrong on everything that I'm saying.
And, you know, as I mentioned at the beginning, it is but a theory.
And if it works for you, great.
If it doesn't work for you, then toss it out and don't worry about it.
The only thing that I would say is don't dismiss it out of hand, because what I do strongly believe is that If you dismiss something out of hand, which has strong emotional content, that it may be entirely possible that you're doing that because of an emotional reaction or a defense mechanism on your part.
So, of course, I mean, heavens, this is only a theory.
I have no proof.
I think there's some logic behind it, but there's no proof.
The other thing that you may be happy to hear is that this morning I became completely obsessed with editing my morning podcast.
and not because I thought it was such a wonderful piece of linguistics, but because I started to sort of notice all of the verbal tics that I have, right?
I mean, the three big ones are, you know, of course, um, and I can't remember the other one, but it was something that it felt like every...
Oh, there it is again!
It felt like every time I was listening to anything, I was running into those verbal tics, and so you'll be happy to know that rather than drive myself mad by trying to fix up my podcast afterwards, I'm going to make a concerted effort to not deploy as many verbal tics As I am wont to do.
So if you hear a slight detonation during the podcast, that's me having an aneurysm from trying to break my verbal habits.
So I hope that that doesn't happen.
At least not while I'm driving.
And thanks, of course.
I mean, look, I know it's been a real slog.
I know some people have liked it.
Actually, did anyone like it?
I don't know if anyone's liked the last couple of podcasts.
I know that it's heavy going.
I appreciate that you are sticking with this mad journey and seeing if anything can come out of it that is fruitful for you.
And I promise that this will be my last podcast for a while on the state and the family.
Not so much just because a lot of people don't really like it, but also because I'm almost done with the topic.
Next it will be the state, you know, seducing your wife or something equally offensive to people.
So we'll get to that just as soon as we humanly can.
So again, thanks for listening, thanks for hanging in there, and I hope that it hasn't been too awful for you to hear my theories of how influences of the state are generated through childhood experiences.
So let's march right along, fearlessly and bravely, to the brink of the hormone invasion, the tsunami of sex that are the teenage years.
And interestingly enough, I have a lady at work who I chat with from time to time, and she came in knowing that I'm a little bit of a British-derived sugar junkie.
She came in and offered me a Ferraro Rocher.
Oh no, was that right?
No, a Lindor.
Sorry, it was a Lindor.
Because she only wanted one, but she bought three, gave another one, and gave one to me.
And she also said that she had to leave a little early because her daughter was having a meltdown.
I've met her daughter, and she and I have chatted about her daughter from time to time.
And interestingly enough, her daughter is on the brink of puberty.
And that means, I guess that used to be 12, now it's 10.
10 is the new 12.
I guess it's because of all of the hormones that are supposed to be in the government-sponsored meat industry.
But her daughter is about to be going through puberty, so of course she's beginning to get all of the, you know, eye-rolling, sighing, short temper, and long sleep that is want to occur during the teenage years.
And without getting into any identifiable details, she said that her daughter was having a meltdown because her husband had found out that her daughter had not been doing homework for the past couple of weeks.
So what happened was they have some guests coming over and they were going to pull their daughter out of school for the next week, for a couple of days.
So they asked her to go and get all her homework and have the teacher give them a note saying what homework needed to be done.
And I think the teacher's note said, but homework hasn't been completed for the last two weeks or so.
And there was, of course, a big to-do, an enormous to-do about all of this, which caused a big fuss.
And I said to her, I said, do you mind if I give you some advice?
And I actually try not to give too much advice at work, because dealing with family issues is quite a sensitive topic.
But, you know, I met the kid, seemed like a very nice kid, and she said, no, I don't mind with that sort of Face-drained, pinched-lip view of parents who you are attempting to give some advice to.
And I said, you cannot get mad at your daughter.
And she said, oh, I thought it would be a bit more oblique than that.
And I said, no, you can't get mad at your daughter.
I said, this is my advice.
Take it for what it's worth.
And I am not trying to tell you what to do from any vantage point of wisdom, but I'm telling you, don't get mad at your daughter.
And she's like, well, I generally don't, but my husband does, and you know, but this is pretty bad.
She has kept this from us, blah blah blah.
And this is something I personally have never understood about human relationships.
Really, honest to goodness, I have never ever ever understood.
It's not to say I've never experienced it, but it is to say that I've never understood this about human relationships.
The level ...of a fence that occurs in familial relationships is just mind-blowing to me.
It just... my brain jets right out of my ear like a little water pistol or maybe a fire hose if I compliment myself.
But I just can't understand it.
I remember this as a very little kid, you know, seeing my parents, my mom would fight with her boyfriend or, you know, there'd be some, you'd hear these, you know, yelling matches going on in the apartment building that we lived in and so on.
I just remember thinking, oh my lord, why is it so hard to get along with people as adults?
Why is it that lovers and married couples have so many problems trying to get along?
Why wouldn't you just be nice?
I mean, doesn't that... I mean, I know this is, you know, a ridiculous argument in some ways, but in some ways not.
You know, why wouldn't you just be nice?
And until I met Christina, I guess I kept asking that question, because I could never really get a sensible answer out of it.
Sort of the women that I dated, sort of dozens of women that I dated throughout my teens and twenties, and into my early thirties, I just found that, you know, they get You know, there'd be a sort of short honeymoon period, then they start to get upset, or they get angry or discontented, or you'd, you know, be five minutes late and apologize for it all evening, or there'd be something, you know, just the level of offense that occurred within supposedly affectionate relationships just amazed me.
And it seemed to show up like almost nowhere else in relationships, or almost no other relationships would there be this level of offense.
Certainly didn't occur particularly in the business world, it didn't occur among my friends, but And I would say that in general, although I had a shorter temper when I was younger, I have never been particularly predisposed to having a temper or to being sulky or aggressive or whatever.
So, you know, I could say, and you know, maybe everybody says this, but I could say, I think with some justification, that I was not the cause of these problems, but would try to manage them and play catch-up and so on.
And it got ridiculous at times, to the point where, you know, I would seriously think about having a tape recorder in the room.
So that when, you know, a woman would say something to me that seemed harsh, I would say, you know, oh, that seemed harsh.
And she'd say, well, I didn't say that or I didn't mean that.
It was usually a minute or two between these statements.
But, you know, it got to that point where I just felt like, wow, I'm just amazed at how much offense and aggression there is in romantic relationships.
Now, the reason that I can say this with a little bit of credibility is that I have, you know, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, I have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful wife who is, you know, gentle and firm and kind and all the... I could go on.
Let me not waste the podcast on that because, you know, you don't know her.
She's mine!
Mine, I tell you.
But I, you know, and we have very few conflicts.
And those conflicts that we do have, we resolve.
I mean, we've never raised our voices to each other.
We have never even, it was unimaginable to call each other names.
You have disagreements and you talk them out and you make sure that you're honest and respectful and vulnerable.
And we usually, through our disagreements, we come up with some absolutely wonderful learning experiences or absolutely wonderful insights come out of disagreements.
That's sort of why I'm plowing on, despite some somewhat fierce opposition to these podcasts, these recent series of podcasts.
You know, the fact that you disagree with me very strongly, if you're listening to these and you do, and I suspect that there may be some emotional reaction in the people who are listening to this to what I'm saying, The fact that you disagree strongly to this may be an indication that it's well worth exploring.
Again, it doesn't mean that I'm right.
It just means that these are very sensitive and deep issues and it may be worth having a look at your resistance or your difficulty with the topic and trying to figure out why.
And the why might be, well, Steph's full of malarkey and there's no reason to listen to him on this topic.
And, you know, dude, stick to politics and economics because your analysis of children and the family is nonsense.
That's all perfectly valid and maybe entirely true.
But if I've been right, one guy wrote to me today, a very fine gentleman named George, and said, you know, your podcast was such a mess.
This is the February 7th morning one, which I think was on babies.
He said, your podcast was such a mess, I don't even know where to begin.
But hey, you know, one out of a hundred isn't bad.
And, you know, whenever you hear, and I'm not saying that he's wrong, it may be a complete mess.
But whenever someone writes to me and says, I don't even know where to begin, it's usually because there's a fundamental premise that they don't like, and they don't know that they don't like it.
So they're going to dismiss, but they're going to indicate to me that something is so profoundly wrong that I'm going to doubt myself and just say, well, I guess I must be completely out to lunch here.
But I don't think that.
I mean, I generally try to say, look, if you have specific criticisms, please tell me where I'm incorrect, give me some logic or evidence.
But if not, then just telling me I'm wrong in general isn't going to convince me very much, right?
Because that's not an argument that is going to work with anyone who's logical, right?
I could just say, without comparing myself to anyone really smart, I could say, well, I don't buy chaos theory because it just doesn't feel right.
Or I don't buy the theory of relativity because, you know, Einstein is so mixed up, he doesn't even know which way is up or down.
And I don't think that that would really pass muster at a scientific conference.
And while I don't have the same kind of rigid and deductive logic going on in the last couple of podcasts, still, you know, do take a swing at them by all means.
But, you know, give me some logic or experience and that will obviously help sway my mind considerably.
Alright, I think that's the last defensive, possibly defensive self-justification.
Now on with the topic, I promise you.
So the first thing about the topic seems like a segue, but it's not.
So I said to this woman, you cannot get angry at your daughter, because if you get angry at her now, you are setting... you're at a fork in the road in your relationship with your daughter, and you are setting up how these teenage years are going to go.
When you are discussing things with your daughter in this area.
So if you get angry at her and you say, how could you?
And how did you think you were going to get away with it?
And what did you think was going to happen?
And how, you know, how could you be so X or whatever it is that you're going to come up with?
Whatever you do to come down on her like a ton of bricks is exactly how your teenage life is going to be.
You know, if you come down on her hard, you get angry, then you are going to set yourself up for another Eight years of Gestapo-ville, of her having to hide things from you, and you trying to find them out, and a series of upsets, and door-slammings, and meltdowns, and complaints, and conflicts, and ugh.
You know, why would you want to pull the pin on that grenade, given that you're going to have to sit on it for another eight years?
It would be a very dangerous and counterproductive thing to do.
And so she said, well, what would you do?
I don't think she said it quite like that, and I think it took it a little bit more convincing to even get her to ask the question.
But to her credit, she did say, what would you do?
And again, this is not because I'm any sort of genius parent, but simply because an outside eye can sometimes be very helpful.
I said, well, you have to develop that hardest, what seems to be the hardest thing to develop in human relationships, which is curiosity.
And I've mentioned this before, of course, so I'll just touch on it briefly.
But you have to find out why your daughter did not do her homework.
You have to be curious about it.
I mean, you can't get mad at your children, especially when they're on the brink of or in their teenage years.
You can't get mad at your children for not trusting you.
You can't get mad at your children for hiding things from you.
You can't get mad at your children for doing bad things.
I mean, you can, but it's sort of like punching a mirror.
I mean, children are, to a large degree, a product of their environment, and the primary ingredient in their environment is you as a parent!
I don't think that's too radical a thought for people to absorb.
So, you can't get mad at them.
It's like a sculptor working for ten years to build a sculpture, and then looking back and saying, this is the ugliest sculpture, I hate it, without any sense that he himself had built that.
Now, I'm not saying that the cause and effect is as direct, but it's pretty causal.
The relationship that the child has with the primary caregivers is pretty causal in the child's formulation.
Not of their underlying personality, of which I think there are strong genetic factors, but of how they relate to people, of how they trust people, of how they work with people, of their capacity to experience vulnerability, to express affection, to express anger.
And anger does not have to be destructive, as I've talked about before.
The first thing that has to happen, though, is that we have to develop curiosity about our teenagers.
We have to develop, I mean, we should develop it from the very beginning, because if you can't develop curiosity with those you love, then you are always going to be out of communication with them.
You're always going to be out of sync with them.
Because we don't always know why we do what we do.
Children almost never know why they do what they do, unless they've had very Good parents, and I've never seen a child who's been able to do this, but I guess theoretically it's possible that would be the world we'd want to work towards where children understood their own emotional apparatus and were able to process their own feelings and able to communicate them and able to understand them.
and able to go through an experience where they felt odd or discombobulated or in some manner different than their normal happy state, and be able to trust that that was valid, to pursue it, to find out what the actual cause of it was, and all of these sorts of things.
That would be a wonderful world to live in, where people's emotions helped them rather than undermined and destroyed their capacity for intimacy and joy.
But in order to do that, the first thing that parents need to do is to develop curiosity about their children and to accept responsibility for how their children have turned out in the teenage sense, so that they're not just going to get angry at their teenagers as if their teenagers just mysteriously turned out to be secretive or difficult or bad or...
angry, or passive, or resentful, or whatever you want to label these natural scar tissues of difficult childhoods, of which I think just about everybody has, not to the degree that I have, just as I have not to the degree that others have.
But we live in a very corrupt culture.
We live in a world where lies are the foundations of moral hypocrisy.
And moral hypocrisy rules the world.
This is not an easy world to grow up in.
When I have children, it's going to be a real challenge to bring them up in a world that is corrupt and is going to be even more corrupt despite the fight that we're putting out there, despite the communication and the conversation that we're all in.
It's still probably going to be a much more corrupt world when my children grow up.
It's going to be very hard.
How am I going to get them to understand that I'm not going to tell them about religion, except to say that it's a cult that a lot of people believe in.
So, of course, they're going to be playing with their neighbor's children.
I have a Christian living on one side and I don't know the religion of the guy on the other side.
He's going to be playing and they're going to say, oh, we have to go in for prayers.
Well, my daddy says that prayers are mindless chanting of the sheep.
I mean, I wouldn't quite put it like that to my children.
Use some sort of, you know, more friendly animal.
But, you know, how long is that going to last?
Well, it's not going to last at all.
I mean, the parents are going to get upset, the children are not going to be allowed to play with them, and my kids are going to face that.
And they're going to face that, you know, that's why homeschooling is very important to me.
They're going to face that wherever they go.
If they're in public school, they're going to be like most libertarians are in university.
They're going to be quite opposed to everything that's being said and they're going to have to be stuck there for years and years and years with this chafing of everything that gets said against everything that is actually true.
Because it's one thing to understand the level of propaganda that goes on towards children in society, which is typically through the state nationalism and religion.
You can't overestimate the amount of rhetorical guns that are pointed at our children.
Wherein if they don't accede to these commandments, they face a life of social ostracism, difficulty, economic problems, because it's going to be hard for them to have jobs and so on.
So it is, you know, as I talked about in what is Conformity Paying these days, which was a podcast I think of a couple of weeks ago, It is easy to underestimate the negative consequences of telling your children the truth, and that is going to be a very difficult thing, and I would doubt that any of us who are listening to this were brought up perfectly rationally.
And if they were brought up perfectly rationally, they still have a lot of scar tissue from chafing against the craziness of the world.
So, it's hard to just get angry at children, even if you've been a great parent, if they act in a difficult manner.
Because the world is difficult if you're good, and really difficult if you're corrupt.
And most children are corrupted.
A few retain the capacity for goodness.
And for those who do retain the capacity for goodness, and I would put myself in this category, and of course most of my fabulous listeners, Then it is also very difficult because we are against the norms of society.
By our definition, what is called normal is mentally ill.
And that's not a very good situation for somebody who's rational to understand about the world, especially when they're young.
So, there is trauma.
Even if you had wonderful parents who raised you rationally, there is trauma because the world is crazy.
And even if you can accept the fact that the world is crazy, your children have to grow up in that world and you have to probably tell them a lot more about corruption in one form or another than you would ever want to in a sane world where corruption was very much the minority.
So there are endless difficulties for teenagers as they begin to move outside the orbit of the family and try and find their position in a larger world.
Either their family's crazy and now they're scared the whole world is crazy, or their family is sane and now they're discovering just how crazy the world is.
Because sexuality, the growth of the sexual impulse, the sexual commandment almost, in the teenage years does destabilize a lot of personality structures, destabilizes a lot of family structures in the same way that drug use does.
And so when this woman, and this is sort of the point that I'm trying to get at in this sort of first bit about teenagers, To be curious about why your teenagers are doing what they're doing is a great challenge.
And it's a great challenge to get them to talk about it if this has not been a habit within your family hitherto.
My nieces are terrible this way.
And again, terrible is only relative to their parenting, right?
I mean, they are...
I like all children.
As I think Cordelia said of King Lear, he is a man far more sinned against than sinning.
And while that's not true of an old king, it is certainly true of a young girl or a young boy that they are far more sinned against than sinning.
So when I chat with my nieces and I say, what's new?
Nothing.
What did you do at school?
Nothing.
How so-and-so?
Fine.
You know, and it's not because they don't like me or don't want to talk to me.
They simply don't know how.
Because nobody's ever been particularly curious about why they feel what they feel.
I mean, my brother's terrible habit, of course, since he's such a... well...
My brother's terrible habit is to sort of make fun of them, right?
Because he's a teaser.
So he's like, oh, come on, don't be such a drama queen.
You know, if they get upset about anything, it's like, oh, it's not so bad.
Oh, come on, don't be so dramatic.
Oh, come on, you've got all the attention you want.
Don't trust me.
The whole family has realigned itself to your drama.
Everything's fine.
You know, he has these horrible caustic things which are designed to sort of belittle and erase his daughter's capacities for emotional authenticity or emotional processing.
And so, of course they don't have any capacity to talk about themselves, except for sort of the mindless babble that children have with each other, especially as they get into their early teens, wherein there's no sort of intellectual or emotional content.
It's just, did you hear this?
And she's all that, and you know, so-and-so did this, and so-and-so says that, and then she's all, and then I'm all!
And you know, these sort of petty one-upmanships and one-downmanships that occur in these sort of preteen and early teen social cliques.
That's the level of social interaction that they're able to manage because they have no capacity to organize their own feelings.
So I hope that this fine lady will take my advice.
I think she will.
And I said it's teeth gritting because your daughter is going to be provocative.
And I can't tell you why she's provocative, because I don't know enough about her or your parenting, but I will tell you that it is going to be one of the hardest things that you ever do to retain your curiosity.
And not to just go through the motions, but to be genuinely curious about why your daughter is not doing her homework.
You know, it could be that there's a bully, that she's scared.
It could be that she's been socially ostracized for telling the truth about something.
It could be that she's had a fight with someone over some moral issue.
It could be that the teacher has just had it in for her because of X, Y, or Z.
It could be... Oh, there was a couple of other things that I came up with, but... Oh, it could also... The other one is that it could also be that she's finally figured out what she's good at and is now alarmed, horrified, and angered by the fact that she's going to have to spend another seven years in school learning all these things that she doesn't care about and she's depressed.
It could be that she is realizing that schoolwork is useless busywork designed to keep you sort of chewing the cud in your pen rather than build any sort of intellectually stimulating world for yourself.
There could be any number of reasons why she has stopped doing her homework.
If you get angry at her and tell her to sit down and do her homework, and you're shocked and appalled about this, that, and the other, then you have lost the opportunity, not just now, but in the future, to become curious about her.
You know, every time you don't do it, it gets that much harder.
Like, every time you call your husband or your wife a name, or raise your voice, or attempt to bully them, you have that much less opportunity to resolve things peacefully the next time, because resentment gets built up.
I actually have a line in one of my novels where I say Debbie is the woman's name.
I said Debbie had collected injustices throughout her marriage in the same way that an elk collects burrs.
At this point in her marriage she was far more burr than elk.
And of course a burr is a kind of thistle that attaches itself to an animal's fur and that's how it sort of transports its seeds.
But that is what happens when you have aggression or manipulation or sulking or brooding or whatever in relationships, that it corrupts them at the very core and it becomes very hard to regain trust after that.
They say it's sort of a 10 to 1 ratio.
10 times the number of good interactions as bad interactions and so on which is sort of why I don't see my brother anymore because There's no possibility if I lived to 300 and he acted perfectly from here on in we could probably be friends But I don't plan on being able to live that long unless something wonderful happens with stem cell research So, curiosity about teenagers is very hard for parents and a lot of times it's hard for parents because of guilt.
And the reason that you want to do it before, the reason that you want to try and establish great communication and trust with your children before they become teenagers is for sort of one very fundamental reason.
I'm facing a challenge at work at the moment, in that I have not had my expenses paid for a couple of months.
Cash is tight and so on.
I've been fighting tooth and nail in a way that I think is productive and respectful to the company, if not to the CFO, to sort of get the money.
My only next plan is that I've tried to be nice, I've tried to drop hints, I've tried to be outspoken, I've tried to be firm, and so on.
I don't even get, look, it's going to be two months, there's nothing I can do.
I get next couple of days, next couple of days, and I've had this been going on for sort of two and a half months.
Now, the only thing that I'm going to be able to do now is that the next time there's a major demonstration I'm going to say that I'm not going to go until my expenses are brought up to date.
I mean, that's the only thing that I can do because they obviously don't, at the very senior level, my boss is great, but at the very senior level they don't have any particular commitment to dealing with this for me in a prioritized manner.
So I'm going to have to raise the ante and simply refuse to do a high-value demo which, you know, they absolutely need because I'm the only one who can demo the software to the degree that they are with the skill that they need to close big deals.
And when I say demo the software, I don't just mean sort of click-throughs but, you know, value propositions and analysis and so on.
I'm going to simply have to say, look, I can't do it until this is cleared up.
I mean, just emotionally, I can't.
I mean, I won't have the motivation.
I won't do a good job.
And I also am beginning to sort of feel exploited by all of this.
So I'm going to have to, you know, insist that my expenses get brought up to date.
Now, if they do bring my expenses up to date, they have not solved the problem.
That's kind of significant.
So, if they had voluntarily said to me, oh, you need your expenses paid, so let's do it, we're so sorry, blah blah blah, here's when it's going to be paid, and so on, then that would be one thing.
But once it comes to a kind of brinksmanship like this, like what is coming up in my job, then there is simply no way to regain trust.
If the CFO, after I say this, comes with a cheque to me that afternoon, so I say in the morning, look, I really can't do this until you get my expenses up to date, then if he comes with a cheque to me That afternoon, then it's very clear to me that they could have paid me at any time, they simply chose not to.
And not only did they choose not to, but they lied to me about it.
And that's sort of the major issue that I have, right?
I don't mind if payables are slow in coming, but I do expect to have the truth told to me, obviously for obvious reasons, but also just for sort of financial planning reasons.
And so if they come and pay me the check, so if I say I'm not going to do it or whatever, they come with the check, then they have not repaired the relationship.
All they've done is actually made it worse.
I mean, they've made my financial situation better, but they've made the relationship worse.
And so when it comes time to experience, when someone has the capacity to threaten you in some manner, then responding to them in a malevolent fashion simply confirms all of their worst fears and theories about you.
So, what I mean by that is that children can't do anything to harm their parents, right?
They don't have the independence.
They don't have the resources.
They don't have any money.
They can't have any choice about how they're dealt with by their parents.
I mean, fundamentally, they just can't.
Now, as you start to get into your teens, Things change.
I'm going to briefly mention my own experience, though of course I'm not going to say that that's true for everyone, but I'm trying to extract principles that are helpful to everyone.
When you become older, then you become bigger.
That's one of the things.
My mother was physically violent to me when I was younger.
And then when I got older and, you know, when she stopped sort of slapping down and she started slapping up, I guess you could say, then it began to look kind of silly, right?
It began to look like me trying to sort of take down Mike Tyson with strongly worded language.
So, at that point, she stopped hitting me.
Now, she stopped hitting me because I warned her back to stop hitting me, right?
To say, you know, if you... now that I'm bigger than you, if you do that to me again, I'm gonna do it back to you and you don't want that to happen because I've got a lot of anger about this stored up in me or something like that.
So, she didn't, right?
She stopped doing it.
Now, did that repair our relationship?
Well, of course not!
Because she only stopped because I got bigger.
So she only changed her behavior because I was able to threaten her back in the same way that if I get my expense check, if it comes to this, and I'm sure it will, then it's only changing because I've threatened them.
This in no way repairs the relationship.
Now, innately, teens have a growing ability to harm their parents' interest.
And again, I'm not talking about, you know, they're gonna steal from them or anything like that, but just because they're getting older, they have more independence, they are less susceptible to punishment, they have more independence, more free will, if they've got a job they have more money, they are more independent of their parents' punishments.
And what generally happens Is that by the time your teen gets old enough to... I don't mean sort of hold up their fist and shake it at you or anything like that.
What I mean is when they get old enough to be outside your sphere of control as directly as when they were children.
Then it's too late for you to change your style of parenting.
That's what sort of people don't... I didn't get into this with the lady today.
But once they get that big, you can... anything that you do to change your style of parenting will be interpreted by the teenager as simply a response to their growing power and independence.
And therefore it's going to be similar to anyone that suits... it's the guy who gives me the check for my expenses the moment after I threaten him.
It just confirms that he was out to exploit me and there was no way that I was going to get that money without threatening them, but the moment that I did threaten them, then they were able to.
It's not a moral thing, right?
And the relationship is done at that point.
It's like when you decide to leave someone and you say, well, that's it, I'm going to leave you, and then you sort of pack your bags.
I mean, you can't restore the relationship to any kind of equilibrium because if the person is only going to change because you're about to leave, then obviously they could change, but they just didn't because you haven't threatened them enough.
But if they're only going to change because you threaten them, then they're not at all interested in changing for any kind of moral or reason or to sort of help you with difficulties you're having in the relationship.
They're just going to respond to being bullied, which means that they're A. going to bully you back and B. the moment you stop bullying them, they're going to revert, right?
So you can't ever manage that from that standpoint.
So, with teens, generally what happens, though, is that parents, as the teen begins to grow in independence and in autonomy, then the parents will generally try to crack down.
So the parents completely dissociate themselves from their own parenting when the kids were younger.
And the teenager becomes some foreign beast that has sort of been beamed into their family and that they must manage like a caged lion or something like that.
And of course it's usually, you know, not always in terms of aggression and so on.
There's lots of different ways to do it.
But there is usually that problem that as teens assert independence, parents clamp down more as if they're not responsible for all the problems that the teen has.
And so the teen then becomes sort of resentful, sullen, withdrawn, and so on.
And again, I'm not saying this is the case in all families, but sadly in far too many families.
And the main reason, in my view, that the teen is becoming so sullen and withdrawn is that the teenager is, as his power and independence grows, is beginning to suspect the worst.
And it's beginning to suspect that which has been hidden from him since his very early childhood to close the circle of psychological development that I've been theorizing about for the past couple of podcasts.
So, when the child is very, very young, a baby, the question is, are my parents exercising power over me because of morality, because they're wise, and because they want the best for me?
Or, are they exercising power over me because they like to exercise power over me?
Because they, you know, this power disparity is corrupting to them and so on.
Well, I think that that, I mean, that question certainly gets buried in most children in the latency period.
They're going to have some irritation towards their parents, but they are generally going to accept, you know, that they chafe and they sort of complain and they're, you know, I want to stay up late, I want to go out with my friends.
They whine, they sort of growl a bit.
But in general, they will, during the latency period, sort of go along with the idea that their parents are doing it for their own good, right?
This hurts me more than you, I don't like to be the bad guys, I'm doing this for your own good, you don't know the world, I know better than you, I'm older, you'll understand when you grow up, and so on.
And they mostly go along with that, and they to some degree will go along with that in terms of their teachers and other authority figures in society and so on.
But then when the teen starts swelling and getting the manly voice and smelly bits, Then that suspicion begins to reawaken itself, because they now are having to launch themselves into adulthood, or that's the preparatory phase when you get into a teenage body, like you take it on like another suit, when your body begins to change into a teenage form.
Then you have this problem that goes on in your mind which is, well, people are still exercising power over me but now I'm beginning to understand a lot better.
I mean, most of what goes on in the latency period is the development of the brain, right?
That's one of the reasons why Human beings, I think, other than elephants, have both the longest gestational periods and the longest latency periods.
Chimps just go straight through.
They don't sort of hang around in a similar physical development from the age of 5 or 6 or 7 to 10 or 11 or 12.
And the reason is so the brain is developing, right?
So the brain is developing and then when the brain's ready, off go the hormones and along comes puberty.
And yet there's no relaxation of the degree of control, at least for sure in school, over children, right?
So you're still not allowed to choose your own courses when you're 13, you're still at 12, when you hit puberty you still have to do X, Y and Z. Around home there's no, usually in most families, there's not a particularly strong recognition of the new capacities of the child.
I mean there's some relaxation of certain forms of control but then This massive control begins to clamp down on the sexuality, right?
So the moment, in the latency period, right, there's not so much chafing, you've kind of given up on finding sense in your parents' rules, or in society's rules, if you're more comfortable with your parents' rules.
But then when you get into your, after puberty, one set of rules gets relaxed.
To some degree, but another set of rules around sexuality come down like a ton of bricks on you and also if you start to question your parents' ethics or beliefs or morals, if you start to doubt as your brain develops, and this is a very strong period of development of the human mind.
As your brain begins to develop, you begin to strongly get the suspicion, whether it's conscious or unconscious, that a lot of what you're told kind of isn't true.
School loyalty, the country, the natural authority of those who are older, the wisdom of your parents, the existence of God, the existence of the virtue of the government, all of these things begin to become manifest within you.
And that is one of the reasons why the teenage years are so difficult.
It's the last area of significant skepticism for most people in their lives.
So you get this eye rolling and like, mother!
You know, there's this embarrassment around your parents and so on.
Which is pretty significant.
That's not what you would expect from children who are raised well.
They would suddenly become enormously embarrassed by their parents.
But your parents start to look kind of silly and petty and you can see them trying to exercise control over you or power over you and you realize it's got nothing to do with virtue.
It's got nothing to do with what is good for you.
I mean, my wife's parents would say to her, you know, we're only doing this because we love you.
We know what's best for you.
Trust us.
Well, the fact of the matter is that they really didn't know her at all.
Because they were never curious about her.
Once you're curious about someone, you have a legitimate capacity to give them advice, because you know them as an individual.
But if you say, I am doing what is best for you, which is what teens hear quite a lot, but there's not the corresponding degree of curiosity, then it's very hard for teens to take that seriously, and I can sort of understand that.
So not only are they realizing that a lot of things that they've been told are false, this is like the Santa Claus part two, but also they're really strongly getting back to the sort of suspicion that they had to, for sort of reasons of psychological survival, that they had to abandon when they were very young.
They're getting back to this understanding that Power is being exercised over them not due to any benevolence or virtue, but simply because of the pettiness and the flush of controlling another human being and bullying.
And a lot of it has to do, and I don't mean to pick on the moms here, but I think this is a little bit more true on the female side than the male side, although I wouldn't be able to speak to that too accurately, having grown up without a father.
But the sort of phase or the problem of social correctness begins to rear its head pretty significantly at this time.
So, you know, if you don't want to go to church, you have a problem.
If you do end up having to go to church, then you have another problem, which is that your parents want you to look good.
And as my wife, I think, once said when she was in her early teens to her parents, You know, if Jesus Christ himself showed up at this church, you wouldn't let him in if he was in jeans, which is kind of funny, right?
Especially for Christianity, which is supposed to be so non-materialistic.
But the problem or the fear of social embarrassment, particularly in sexual matters within certain communities, is pretty significant.
And then you sort of begin to get the understanding, if you're a sensitive teenager who thinks about these things, You begin to get the understanding that another reason why your actions are controlled is to appease the social touchiness and vanity of your parents, in which case it's sort of corrupt manipulation on their part to tell you you should do this or you should do that.
Because, I will be embarrassed if you don't, is a particularly pathetic reason to demand that anyone do anything, because it's so much a direct appeal to your own vanity and so much against any self-interest that they might have.
In fact, it then becomes a point of pride almost for the teenager to roll their eyes at this and to fight it tooth and nail, because it is a time of discovering the falsehoods of society.
And then, of course, I mean, to sort of finish it up, What society has to do is it has to dangle the goodies, right?
It has to dangle the goodies in front of teenagers.
It has to say, OK, so... I mean, this is sort of the unspoken conversation or message.
It has to say, OK, sorry, we kind of lied to you the whole time.
We said it was for your own good, and it really was for our own vanity.
We said that we knew something about goodness, but as you question us, we really don't have a clue.
We pretended that we were all wise.
We're in fact complete morons.
We have no idea what is right or wrong.
We just know that certain things work because others approve of them, and certain things don't work because they're considered to be bad.
That's the extent of our knowledge.
We're sorry that we passed ourself off as knowing something when we in fact know nothing at all.
But, on the plus side, we got a bag of goodies for you.
We've got some stuff that we think you're gonna like.
We've got university, we've got jobs, we've got social status, we've got moving out, financial independence, a car, you know, we've got all of these things that we're going to kind of bribe you with.
to continue this sort of charade of obedience.
That's all that we have to offer you.
And that's the sort of carrot, the stick, is that if you continue to question us, if you continue to disobey, well, we're going to have to dose you with Ritalin, or we're going to have to keep sending you to the principal's office, or you're going to get expelled, and you're not going to get into university, and you're going to live like a bum, and you're going to work at a donut shop, and you're going to, like, this is the negative, the downside.
People don't conform to irrational standards because human beings are irrational, right?
They conform to irrational standards because it's economically and biologically productive, right?
It'll help you reproduce and help you have a better life in a material sense and so on.
And I have done this too.
I mean, I don't put this out as some sort of horrible thing.
Like, you've got to sort of be this Howard Rock pure guy who never lets his soul get corrupted by a single tinkt.
But, you know, try and find your compromises as rational and as healthy as possible.
And one of the central things that happened to me was I got married, and therefore I needed more money for a variety of reasons, of course.
More money than when I was a single guy living alone, and I'd taken a couple of years off after selling my last company.
But I sort of needed more money, and I would rather spend time with my wife than not, and so I go to work, and so on.
So, that's the thing that happens that society uses to control this.
That's sort of what public school is all about.
There's a reason why public school has to go on until they're so old, right?
Until people are almost out of their teens.
It's because You have to have some goodie bag to bribe the growing independence, back to suffocate the growing independence, skepticism and suspicion of teenagers.
And so, you know, you have to sort of get the teenagers pointed at the goodie bag so that they'll, you know, sit back down, shut up, obey, you know, that sort of flare-up of independence that comes with puberty and skepticism.
And, you know, you want to harden that into cynicism or, you know, despair or whatever it is.
You have to break that questioning.
You know, society tries to renew itself biologically, right?
You want skepticism in every generation of teenagers so that the collected illusions of society It can be cleared away.
It's like a snake discharging its skin.
You need that regeneration within society.
The one of the problems with state schools is that it freezes and destroys that capacity for regeneration for a variety of reasons which we've already gone into.
And so society gets stuck in this terrible set of illusions which just makes everything get worse and worse until you end up with situations like the Patriot Act and the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq.
You could go on and on, right?
But things just get worse and worse because children who grow into skeptical teenagers are bribed with sort of state goodies and state coercion and state power in that the state controls the educational system and therefore you better obey the state if you want to get ahead in life.
That's how the natural skepticism and criticism of the teenagers, which is desperately needed by society.
Skepticism is the lifeblood of society.
It is the renewal.
Skepticism is the children of philosophy, and without children it dies.
And so you have to bribe them with skepticism and so on.
Now one of the problems with bribing teenagers with skepticism, just kind of briefly, is that It will tend to diminish over time, right?
So one of the things that you don't want to do as a society, but which always ends up happening, is you don't want to find that because you have so much government and so much brutal state power redistributing income and running up the national debt and undermining the economy and destroying opportunity,
You really don't want to have a situation arise where you have really skeptical and aggressive young men and young women roaming the streets and you can't anymore bribe them because the goodie bag is kind of empty, right?
This is sort of what happened to Germany in the 1920s.
You had this sort of hyperinflation and then you had a recession and then you had a depression and then you had the crash of 29.
And there was nothing to bribe the young people into submission with, right?
There was no longer any goodies left in the goodie bag.
So people kind of said, okay, well, everyone lied to us.
It's all nonsense.
It's all bullcrap.
And you know what else?
I don't care about going to school.
Why would I care about going to school?
What's the point?
Well, so you can get into university.
Okay, maybe I can get into university.
But so what?
All I then is end up graduating from university with a lot of debt and I can't get any jobs in my field.
So what's the point?
And so when the teacher says, sit down, shut up, obey, what are you going to say when the kid says no?
Oh, I'm going to send you to the principal's office.
You might get kicked out of school.
It's like, so what?
Kick me out of school.
I hate it here.
And it doesn't lead anywhere anyway.
There's no jobs out there.
There's no savings.
I'm not going to earn as much as my parents did even.
I'm going to end up working in some dumb low-rent job or sitting on welfare or unemployment insurance and I've got no future and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And of course, this is the root of some aspects of society where crime is still pretty rampant.
And so, as the goodie bag gets emptied to bribe all of the sycophants and hangers-on on state power, society, a corrupt society, has less and less to bribe teenagers with, and teenagers then become that much harder to control.
Now, teenagers, because they've been so untrained in philosophy or personal self-knowledge or psychology, they end up making the same mistake that every generation makes, which is that they get violent rather than rational.
I mean, that's just a natural tendency, right?
in Japan and you get this in Italy in the 1920s and Germany and the Roman Empire this happened to as well I mean you just get kids who give up and their skepticism hardens into belligerent cynicism and then it further hardens and destroys itself into nihilism and you know there's all of these terrible things and that end up with society turning into a real slaughterhouse and
And I'm not saying that's imminent here, but it's definitely where we're going, right?
I mean, the natural march that has been constant since the Industrial Revolution, the natural march onwards and upwards of income, has for the past 20 years slowed and stopped.
And now it hangs before a fall.
It's like a slow motion arc of a bowling ball thrown up by a cannon.
I guess a cannonball thrown up by a bowler.
And its income is hanging and is on the edge of the great fall that happens when state power gets too great for any economy to sustain.
So, how are we going to control the next generation of teenagers?
Well, there's no way to do it.
There's nothing in the public treasury to bribe them with.
The school system is getting worse and worse, which means they're even less trained in any sort of faint echoes of enlightenment rationality that us and our parents and their parents had in a diminishing sort of way.
We will be able to give them almost no opportunities.
They're going to end up dependent on the state in one form or another to have any kind of life.
Then that lack of opportunity is going to harden their nihilism into just aggression.
And there's no genetic difference between our children and the children of the Nazis, or the Japanese, or the fascists in Italy, or the Bolsheviks, or whoever you want to pick as the sort of slaughter merchants of history.
So my particular concern, why I think this topic is so important, is that, you know, there's grave danger in the sort of Nietzschean blonde beast, you know, the angry, virile, violent youth whose instincts for hypocrisy, for the hypocrisy of the society around him, are very finely tuned and have made him very aggressive for having been so sort of violated in trust throughout his entire childhood.
If society runs out of things in the goodie bag with which to sedate these people and redirect their aggression to social obedience, I'm not saying that's exactly the same as virtue, but generally it's better now than where it's going in terms of the level of violence in society.
As the public debt begins to overwhelm the economy, as war, as social security, as the welfare state begin to overwhelm the opportunities, then they were going to have nothing left in the goody bag to bribe the teenagers with, and that's why we better start telling the truth to our children now.
So that we don't end up in the situation where we have to overwhelm their natural skepticism with bribery from a bank whose account has run dry.
So that's, I guess, the culmination of sort of what it is that I've been trying to talk about for the last four podcasts.
I hope it's been helpful, and I hope that, you know, if you do have children, that you'll take my hopefully not offensive advice and, you know, speak the truth to them about everything that you can, be as honest with them about everything that you can, And share with them your own skepticism so that when they hit that teenage time that you can be on their side rather than on the other side of the fence, which is where you don't want to be and where I don't want you to be either as a citizen who's going to have to live in the world for hopefully another 50 or 60 years.
Thanks so much!
Actually, probably closer to 50, come to think of it, although I did have a grandfather who lived to 97.
So, I hope you're doing well.
Thanks so much for listening and we will start with a brand new topic tomorrow.
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