All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 21, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:04
109 But *my* parents were really nice! (Part 1)
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph.
It is 10 to 6 on Tuesday, the 21st of February 2006, and I hope you're doing well.
I just had a long and grueling almost three-hour management meeting where we're dealing with a wide variety of very interesting challenges, which I will get into hopefully in a week or two.
For those of you who I know are obsessively following the ups and downs of my little career.
It's actually been very interesting and I think it's worth talking about, but I can't do it yet.
So, just a teaser to stay tuned!
So, I'm going to talk this afternoon about a nice, juicy, uncomfortable topic for everybody.
And I don't want to do it, people, you're forcing me to do it, because I'm getting all these emails of people mistaking my views on child abuse, people mistaking my views on parental corruption, and what it is that I'm suggesting when I talk about it.
So, if you haven't listened to those podcasts, go listen to them, you're done, good, great, let's continue.
So, what is it I'm talking about when I talk about parental corruption, and the corrupting of children, and what it is that I call child abuse?
Well, let me take you on a little journey, because I haven't talked about myself in a while.
And, as we can all imagine, that's quite a strain for me.
So, my own journey in sort of understanding all of this started quite early.
You know what?
I don't think it was that early.
I mean, I knew there was stuff wrong with my family.
And, you know, as a number of people have pointed out in their emails to me, boy, you had a bad childhood.
I didn't have nearly as bad a childhood, and therefore I don't have to cut out my sort of family of origin in the way that you did, because my family wasn't that bad.
They didn't beat me, they didn't do this, they didn't do that.
Maybe they yelled at me a little, maybe I got spanked, but I certainly didn't go through what you went through, and so therefore I'm not subject to the same moral, say, you could say commandments, I guess, or the same moral strictures as you are, to cut off relations with my family.
Well, I think that's a fascinating viewpoint.
Let me tell you a little bit about my history of how I came about all of this sort of stuff, and then if that doesn't take too long, I'll tell you why it's important for me, why I want to clarify my position on these things.
If it doesn't take too long, isn't that funny?
It will take too long, so there'll be 12 podcasts on this before I get to the point.
I'm sure that's no shock to you.
What happened for me?
Well, I knew that things were bad in my family.
There's simply no question of that.
There was no doubt in my mind that my family was not like other families and so on.
As I've mentioned before, my mother was institutionalized when I was in my teens.
My brother and I worked very hard to get her out of the house when she was put back in the house by the wonderful authorities who were taking such good care of us.
I dumped my insane mother back among my brother and I to struggle through the remainder of our teenage years as best we could.
And what we ended up having to do was basically got her interested in taking some training courses out in British Columbia.
We packed her on a bus and away she went.
And she was gone for about a year, which was a wonderful time.
Just a wonderful time.
After the stress and strain of growing up with this crazy lunatic, and I don't just mean my brother, getting her out of the house for permanently was a wonderful thing, and it was very relaxing, and the idyllic state lasted for about a year, maybe 14 months, And then she just sort of phoned and she was over at the mall.
She'd made her way back from BC and we then got her a place, got her on disability.
She'd been on disability for a number of years.
Actually about a year, a year and a half at this point.
And so we sort of set her up shop in a rent control department not too far from where we lived.
And then I went away to university.
I didn't see her very often.
She came to visit me once when I was in the National Theatre School.
In Montreal, I lived in Montreal for about four years, doing two years of National Theatre School acting and playwriting and fencing.
And then I went to McGill to study history so that I could be roundly insulted by everybody who thinks that I have no experience or training in history.
I did then two years of history at McGill, which picked up a good chunk of history that I took earlier at York under my English degree.
And then I finished my history master's at U of T in the early 90s.
Well, I stayed with my mother then for... oh gosh, after I graduated from McGill, the economy was just in a terrible, terrible shape.
I couldn't get a job as a waiter, I couldn't get a job doing anything, and I've mentioned this once before, so...
Just for those who may have forgotten all of the intricate and fascinating details of my life, as a reminder.
I stayed with my mother for about a year in her little apartment.
I stayed with my brother for a little while and then stayed with my mother.
Fortunately, she went and moved to Ottawa and stayed in some shelters there for a while, which was a huge relief for me, of course, just a wonderful thing.
So I only stayed with her for a couple of months and then she moved, went to Ottawa, lived there for about a year in a variety of locations.
And after that, it was sort of around this time that one of the things that was interesting that happened was when I was about 12, my mother went to Germany and lived there for a summer.
She wanted to do some of her recreational surgeries over there, and she was able to get those surgeries approved by the German government because she was a citizen originally, so she did that.
And my brother went to stay with my aunt and our cousins in England, which was lots of fun.
She had a great place, my aunt.
They lived in Tenterton, as I mentioned.
And my brother ended up staying for like two years, or a little over two years, and I stayed with some Friends of mine's grandparents.
I didn't even know them and I stayed there for a summer, which is of course not the most exciting summer in the world.
Most exciting summer in my life.
And my sister-in-law, my brother's wife, at one point we were, I was sort of sitting around a beanbag and we were chatting about things and at one point she said, I don't understand.
Why didn't you just go with your brother?
That's a pretty simple and basic question, and it's sort of part of the general propaganda of families that you just don't think, I never had thought to ask such a simple and obvious question.
And I was sort of in my early 20s or maybe 24 at this point.
And it really brought me up short.
Not so much that I didn't have an answer for it, but that I had never thought to ask it.
So I really began to delve into it at this point, and I really became quite fascinated with trying to figure out why.
So of course, like a clever little boy, I sat down and tried to talk about it with my mother.
And to ask her, and she had no answers and looked at me in a bewildered and hostile manner, and then, you know, if I persisted, when I persisted, she got angry, and so we didn't get very far that way.
And so I tried talking to her about The abuse, and she doesn't remember any of it, of course.
She is full of self-pity for how difficult life was for her, with no memory of the violence that she inflicted upon my brother and myself.
So I didn't get very far that way.
I tried talking about it with my brother.
I didn't get very far that way.
I think he probably felt a little bit guilty.
About taking off to England when he was older than I was.
I think he was 13 or 14 at this point.
Taking off to England and living there for two years.
I don't remember a single phone call from my brother or any of my extended family or my father.
They basically just threw me to the wolf, the she-wolf.
I sort of felt during this period of exploration that my brother had gotten airlifted to safety and had a couple of functional years, and crucially functional and great years, even by his own admission, in England while I was sort of put in as a sort of stopgap measure for my mother's insanity.
It's like, oh, let's leave Steph with mom and let's just go, right?
I mean, that was sort of the idea.
And now my mother, of course, in hindsight, there was a complex familial interaction going on here, as these things generally tend to be very complex.
The sacrifice on the part of the youngest child is pretty well known, both in culture and in art and in history.
So I'll just touch on it briefly, but basically the mechanism that I sort of worked out was that the great... and this is what led me onto the path of parental responsibility, The great challenge of parents when they abuse their children, and I'll get into sort of what I mean by that in a little bit, the great challenge is how do you keep the kids quiet?
And there's lots of mechanisms that you put in place to keep your children isolated and afraid and ashamed and guilty and self-hating and all that kind of stuff.
You isolate them, you can move them from school to school, Freak out their friends so the friends don't come over.
But there's this great unspoken commandment from within the family of speak no evil.
You can see evil, you can hear evil, but you cannot speak evil.
We are struck dumb by the evil within our families and we're not allowed to talk about it.
Now, I know that this question of evil is going to disturb some people, so let's just say for the moment that I'm talking about my mother only.
You don't even know her, you'll never meet her.
If you've at all been good in this life, you will never meet her.
And I think that it's fairly non-controversial to say that a woman who beats her children is evil.
If that's not evil, then I have a pretty tough time understanding what evil and morality might be.
So when I talk about evil, just for the sake of this discussion for now, I think of it as my mother.
So the transaction that I began to unearth was that my mother wanted to go to Germany and she had a problem about where to place her children.
Now I've also, and I'm sure this is no surprise to people listening to these podcasts, I've always been the truth teller within the family.
I've always been the person who has the least to lose, as the youngest sibling often is, the person with the least to lose by telling the truth.
I didn't corrupt my nature by abusing anybody else.
I've never hit anybody.
I've never teased anybody.
I've never been mean to anybody that I can sort of remember.
And so I didn't have anything to lose from exposing morality, which is, I guess, one of the fortunate quirks of nature that I've had since day one.
I didn't exactly earn my moral nature.
I certainly refined it as I got older, but my generally happy and moral nature was simply part of my making at the beginning of things, which is great.
I mean, let's just say it's a genetic mutation that I hope to spread around the world to the degree that I can with these podcasts.
But in the realm of the family, My mother wanted to go to Germany.
She couldn't take my brother and I to Germany for a variety of reasons.
So what were we going to do?
Well, she couldn't put two children with this old couple because they wouldn't have accepted it.
And my brother also would have put up quite a fuss.
He was much more of a... Gosh, how can I put it?
He was...
My brother felt that fighting worked when he was a child.
So he felt like if I kick up a fuss, if I get angry, if I do this, if I stomp, if I scream around, if I do this, that, or the other, then I'm going to get my way.
And I never, ever felt that that was going to work.
Or if it did work, I didn't want the results, I guess you could say.
So I was never proactive in asserting my willpower, because you simply can't do it in a situation of extreme familial corruption and control, as parents have the ultimate level of control over another human being, over their children.
There's no greater disparity in the world.
Well, I just basically figured out that there was no profit in fighting in this manner, which is where some of my comments earlier, again somewhat controversial, about forget the argument from self-defense came from.
Fighting didn't work, and not fighting worked beautifully, because I became, I think, a good, happy, loving, affectionate, moral, upright, productive, effective person, and my brother, not so much.
So just from that sort of lab of the two of us, and not just the two of us, because I've kept in touch with a number of other people I knew, During that time and seeing that those who did put up a big fuss and fight and rent the fabric of reality in order to get their way didn't end up very happy.
My brother would not have gone with me to this little condo with the old people, so he went to England.
Now, the question, of course, would be, why would you separate the children?
Why would you separate the siblings?
Why would you send one sibling to England to stay with an extended family that they've known for many years?
We used to spend summers in Ireland with this family, so we knew them well, they knew us well, so why would you Why would you send one son, the oldest son, to go and live in this nice house with well-known relatives?
And why would you send another son to go and waste his summer going to the library and drawing and reading with these old people that he didn't know?
It's a fascinating question.
At least it was to me.
Maybe it's not to you.
In which case, I'm sure I'll come up with another podcast more relevant for you soon.
So, to me, the question was why.
Well, the answer, in my humble opinion, is that the secrecy needed to be maintained.
And so, everybody has an enormous blindness to the evil done to children.
I mean, it's far worse than any of the other evils that I've been talking about.
And I'm not even going to delve into it and do a great deal on this because it's a topic for another time.
But people don't want to know the evil that is done to children.
They deny it, they reject it, they repudiate it, they scorn it, they mock it.
Not in seeming agreement without taking any of it in.
So this is one of the greatest evils, if not the greatest evil, is the blindness that society has, the lack of empathy that it has for children.
And I'll get into that.
I can sort of read the tea leaves of this podcast and realize that I'm not going to get it finished, so I'll do that in the morning.
But this has an enormous effect on our psyche when it comes to empathizing with others.
I mean, if we don't empathize for ourselves, particularly as children, We're not going to be able to empathize with others.
We're not going to be able to have sympathy for them.
We're not going to have open and loving natures.
And I think that's why it's so important to look at this stuff.
So the secrecy had to be maintained about the abuse that was occurring within the household.
And so the family, as an organic structure of cancerous falsehood, I guess you could say, decided in its wisdom and corruption that, and this is not something that's whiteboarded, of course, this is all unconscious, well, if we can only send one child to the distant relatives where he'll be safe and secure, let's not make it the youngest child who has the least to lose from telling the truth.
Let's not, for God's sake, let's not send the youngest kid Who has gained nothing from this corrupt and destructive hierarchy within the family, and is absolutely going to throw caution to the winds and speak up, in one way or another, or let it be known or reveal things.
Or at least, at least I can guarantee that I was going to test the waters.
So when people say, well how are things in Canada?
Of course my brother's like, oh they're wonderful!
Oh my god, I couldn't be happier!
It's a walking orgasm every day.
And I would be like, oh, not so good.
And then they would be in a moral situation, right?
Okay, well, the kid's complaining of particularly problematic things.
What do we do?
Nobody wants to hear that, at least nobody in the modern world wants to hear that, and probably nobody in history wanted to hear it either.
Because what are you going to do?
Are you going to say, oh, tell me more, tell me everything, what's going on?
Well, uh, no.
Most people aren't going to be interested in doing that because they don't want to know.
And the reason they don't want to know is because it happened to them or something happened to them.
Or they simply recognize that there's nothing I can do, so I don't want to find out about it.
Or they believe there's nothing they can do without realizing that you don't have to do anything.
When a child complains of problems at home, you don't have to do anything.
You should listen.
And as long as the child recognizes that there's a sane voice out there who's heard and understands, that can go a hell of a long way into keeping that child stable.
But people don't want to make that effort because of a variety of reasons, which we can get into another time.
So they sure as heck weren't going to send me to England because I would have told the truth or at least begun to tell the truth about what was happening at home.
And they didn't want to know that.
They did not want to know that.
This is what happens when you don't make moral choices or you make bad moral choices in your life.
You end up having to cover up more and more and your own life falls apart.
And this family did end up falling apart eventually.
And I think a lot of it had to do with knowing that my mother was evil and crazy and violent.
And they all knew that because she was married to their brother.
And not doing anything about it.
And letting the kids go off, and not talking to them, and not figuring out a better way.
And this has destroyed my father's life, obviously, as the evil agency has destroyed my mother's life.
I think the complicity with which my brother kept the secret about the abuse, which would have been bad enough psychologically, but given that I was still in an abusive situation, and of course this is when my mother ceased to be able to work while everybody was over in England, You know, I was getting eviction notices and there was simply almost no... I mean, there didn't seem to be any way out of that bleak canyon of despair that I was very much alone in this situation, despite the fact that there's four aunts and uncles and all that, but they were all in England and I was in Canada.
They airlifted my brother out to safety and they didn't feel that much concern for me.
Now, in hindsight, They were kind of right.
I'm not saying that I agree with the moral decision, but I can understand if unconsciously they're able to gauge the strength of the children that I was the one to leave behind, and my brother, who is much more vain and fragile, would be the one to get out.
But I still think it's a bad decision, right?
I mean, just because it was the right decision given a particular premise doesn't mean that that premise is One kid has to stay is the premise, so let's make it Steph.
That's the right decision, but I would argue that with the premise that one kid has to stay behind.
And so what happened then was I began to really examine the moral nature of secrecy within the family.
I began to really introspect and try and figure out my own relationship to secrecy.
I began to unravel the natural guilt that is associated with coming from that kind of background, which I've talked about in my podcast on The Libertarian Love Doctor.
And I began to really examine all of this sort of stuff.
And then it sort of struck me one day.
It struck me one day, and I won't go into the circumstances because I'm sure they're not that interesting.
But it struck me one day that I came out of the place I was living, and I was going to go to Starbucks to write.
I was quitting smoking at this point, so I had to break the associations.
And I saw a gentleman in a wheelchair.
just wheeling himself along the street.
And I sort of had a vision, and I don't know where it came from exactly, other than that these things tend to happen when you're examining your life and yourself.
You tend to get pretty potent visions.
I don't mean sort of waking dreams or anything, but emotional impulses.
As you begin to uncoil or uncurl your cramped emotional apparatus, you begin to get these, you know, like shoots of emotions, like Like when your leg is waking up from being really badly asleep, right?
You get these tingles and these shoots of pain that are half pain half pleasure and so on.
And this was definitely occurring.
I was getting lots of intense dreams and lots of really strong emotional impulses during this time in my life.
And this was probably in my late twenties.
Well, I saw this gentleman rolling himself along and I suddenly had a real vision of somebody beating that person up.
And it wasn't just, you know, hitting them or whatever.
It was also screaming at them and, you know, pushing them over, pushing their wheelchair over.
And I just had a... I thought I was gonna retch.
I just... Very strong and powerful moral reaction.
A moral, emotional, gut-level reaction to that level of abuse.
Well, that level.
That's an insane level of abuse.
And it suddenly struck me, again, very forcefully, that If my mother had a habit, let's say, of beating up on people in wheelchairs, then I would consider that to be just unbelievable evil.
So, if I saw my mother doing that, if I saw my mother beating up somebody in a wheelchair, then I would be so appalled that I would never see her again.
And that really struck me.
And then the third thing that struck me.
It was like a 1-2-3 from the moral Mike Tyson.
The third thing that struck me was that the guy in the wheelchair has almost infinitely more choices than a child does.
The guy in the wheelchair can call the cops.
The guy in the wheelchair can get away.
The guy in the wheelchair has his own job.
The guy in the wheelchair has his own apartment or his own house.
The guy in the wheelchair can go to the hospital and isn't going to get assigned to a foster home where things might be even worse.
The guy in the wheelchair can get away, can scream for help, can fight back, can plot revenge, can dissociate, can move town, can whatever.
None of these options are available to a child.
At all.
Children are near infinite slaves of their parents.
Just biologically, there's nothing you can do about it.
It's just a fact.
As a child, you're completely dependent upon your parents.
And there's so little that you can do, and children comply, and they ignore the pain that is inflicted upon them, because they know that biologically the only other option they have is to fight and resist.
And children do try this, of course.
They do try and resist the brutality of their parents, or the Well, let's just call it brutality.
We'll come back to the other topic later.
They do try and fight back, but of course they recognize pretty quickly, if they're under the power of a certain kind of parent, that if they continue, they will get physically injured to a pretty bad degree, or even killed.
And I know that that sounds melodramatic, and I know that not lots of parents kill their children or even maim them, but that's only because children comply.
And we get this pretty early.
When you're in a violent situation as a child, you get it.
You get it in your gut pretty quickly.
That if you keep pushing things, you're gonna get really badly hurt.
So I didn't, obviously.
I mean, that's why the whole idea of self-defense to me, you know, it's not necessarily the best idea in the world because you really can get hurt.
And of course, I'm very fortunate and was wise beyond my years to get through my childhood without any injury, right?
I mean, it's not easy to be born into a situation of Yeah, somewhat considerable violence, and to live there for, you know, a dozen, fourteen, fifteen years without receiving any injuries, yeah, that takes some doing, that takes some work, that takes knowing, and also to retain yourself, right?
To retain your true self, so that you don't just become, you know, a complete slave to the violent people around you.
and lose your identity completely and just become nothing but a massive scar tissue which you then act out on other people when you get older so that balance of keeping your true self knowing that you're hurt but not fighting back much i mean i did fight back to some degree and i mentioned that when i got older i certainly stopped the physical abuse but knowing the how to how to toe that line is a complicated complex business i mean the Negotiations as an adult are nothing.
They're the easiest things in the world compared to the negotiations that I had to undergo or that I had to navigate or achieve as a child in a situation of violence.
No capacity for escape, no desire for or no real desire for total surrender to violence.
Because that would destroy any capacity for future happiness.
And also, no desire to provoke, to react, to the point where I'd get injured.
That's pretty complicated.
Doing stuff later in life.
Negotiating software contracts.
Bah!
I mean, gotta tell you, that's nothing.
That's nothing compared to what occurred when I was younger.
So, it really struck me in that very strong sequence.
Guy in a wheelchair.
My mother beats up people in wheelchairs.
I was much more helpless than a man in a wheelchair.
So, the natural conclusion then, the natural honest truth conclusion from all of that, is the simple basic fact that if I would not associate with a person who was cruel, Towards a person in a wheelchair, because I considered that morally abhorrent, of course it is.
If and if the power disparity is what makes it morally abhorrent, even more morally abhorrent.
I mean, it's wrong for the guy in the wheelchair to beat up on the guy not in a wheelchair, but at least there's not that same level of power disparity.
If the power disparity is what makes it morally abhorrent, and if there is no greater More power disparity than between that of a parent and a child.
Then what the hell am I doing seeing my mother?
I mean, what the hell am I doing having any kind of interaction with my mother at all?
If I would cut off contact with her because I saw her beating up someone in a wheelchair, just once, Then how on earth could I maintain any contact with her if I was the person in the wheelchair and it was a lot worse than a wheelchair and it went on for a dozen years?
I mean, it would be crazy!
That would be moral subjectivism of the most corrupting kind.
And this is to some degree in response to some emails that I've been getting about...
Well, my parents are nice.
They're not that bad.
They were this.
Then you start to dig in.
I start to ask people through these emails.
And you find out, well, yeah, OK, there was violence.
OK, it only happened a couple of times.
But it doesn't matter.
OK, I only beat up a guy in a wheelchair a couple of times.
Are you still going to be my friend?
It doesn't matter.
It only has to happen once.
I mean, come on!
So, that's the sort of moral journey.
And I just want people to sort of understand that perspective.
Like, when I talk about parents, To understand, the power disparity greatly enhances the moral corruption of those who are violent.
I mean, if there's a power disparity, then we recognize that there's a stronger moral issue than if there isn't.
So, if I get into a fistfight with a guy, you know, I'm like six foot, I'm just under six foot, I'm 215 pounds, and I work out, and I'm a pretty husky guy, I guess you could say.
Then, if I get into a fight with a guy my size, you know, okay, so it's fisticuffs and it's bad and it's wrong and it's immoral, but it's not unequal.
Now, what if I haul off and punch full in the stomach a pregnant woman or punch her in the face?
Wouldn't you go, oh my god, you are sick?
A pregnant woman, a guy in a wheelchair, however you want to characterize the power disparity, all of these people have a far greater degree of autonomy, freedom and moral authority, resources, alternatives, whatever you want to call it.
They have far more options than a child.
The child is a complete slave to the parents.
I mean, even if the parents are nice, I'm still a complete slave.
You can't get up and say, I'm leaving.
That's it.
I quit this job.
I'm out of here.
You know, mock me as not attending the next meeting.
I'm going on my own.
You can't do that when you're a kid.
You're stuck with your parents.
And it's the greatest power disparity in the world.
So when I talk about morality, I mean, I'm not kidding around.
I'm talking about morality.
If you would be horrified, let's just say that your parents yelled at you.
They yelled at you.
I mean, let's not even say they called you stupid.
They just yelled at you.
Well, how would you feel if a friend of yours yelled at somebody in a wheelchair?
Regularly.
When they didn't get what they wanted, they just yelled at that person.
Would you think, oh gosh, I can't think of a better friend in the world.
This guy's the best guy ever.
Oh, I'm so lucky to have him in my life.
No, you'd think, my god, what a... What a bumhole!
Or something equally inoffensive.
Still trying to retain my iTunes rating.
So...
You would absolutely disassociate with somebody who yelled at or screamed or spanked or, I don't know, intimidated a guy in a wheelchair.
Why would you have someone like that in your life?
It's insane!
And, you know, as I was talking yesterday, was it yesterday?
Yeah, I was talking yesterday about these massive extrusions of up-is-down, black-is-white, good-is-evil into logical spheres like physics for God and morality for the state.
Well, guess what?
Guess where it all begins, man!
It begins in the family!
This is why you can't be free in a political sense until you deal with your family.
And I know your family wasn't that bad, and I know that I had a worse childhood than you.
You can tell me all of that, and that's fine.
We'll get to that another time.
But the fact of the matter is, when you look at your parents, if they did things that you would not find acceptable, that one of your friends would have done to somebody in a wheelchair, Then it's not acceptable.
And it's in fact about a bajillion gazillion quintillion times more unacceptable.
Because a child is much less free than somebody in a wheelchair.
An adult in a wheelchair.
And that's what I talk about when I talk about morality, and that's what I talk about when I talk about the family.
If you want to understand why nobody can see the corruption of the state, it's because they can't see the corruption of the families.
If you can't understand why people can't see the corruption and falsehoods of religion, it's because they can't see the corruptions and falsehoods of their family.
The state is an effect of the family.
The state is a product of the destruction of the family.
The state merely cashes in on the corruption of parenting.
Now, of course, the next logical question or problem or issue is the one where you say, inevitably, and I understand it, I never said this myself, but I understand that it's a pretty common issue or question, which is, well, my parents didn't know any of this stuff.
They didn't think they were corrupt.
They thought they were the best parents ever.
All my friends wanted to be adopted by my parents.
My parents were great.
If they did anything wrong, they didn't know, they didn't understand.
They did the best they could.
Ah, they did the best they could.
Yeah, we never say that about the welfare state, right?
We never say that about the welfare state.
We just say, no, it's evil.
We don't say, well, you know, the people in the welfare state are doing the best they can.
They don't understand.
They don't know.
No, of course not.
Because we're displacing all of the moral judgments that we have towards our own parents, towards those people in the state, and that's one of the reasons why we're so ineffective.
Because we're fighting the wrong battle.
Fighting the battle to free people from politics comes a long time after fighting the battle to free people from the family illusions of parental morality.
Now, it certainly was true, and I completely accept, understand, fully sympathize and agree with the proposition that your parents, you know, didn't know.
That your parents did the best they could.
That your parents weren't at all aware of what it is that they were doing and how bad it was and blah blah blah blah blah.
And again, they don't have to do what my parents did in order for them to be bad people.
You just have to apply the test of the guy in the wheelchair.
And this is true.
Noam Chomsky has this argument where he said to an anarchist who questioned him in Ireland, he said, well, the fundamental important insight of anarchism is that all power structures need to be questioned.
But if my two-year-old granddaughter is wandering out into traffic, I'm gonna grab her and stop her.
And that's legitimate exercise of authority, which is a craven, queasy, sick approach to justifying the exercise of power.
Because if somebody, a blind guy in a wheelchair, is wandering out into traffic, of course I'm gonna stop him too.
There's no moral difference between how we treat adults and how we treat children.
None whatsoever.
And that's what the world doesn't understand.
And that's why the world is so sick.
And that's why we have Governments, and why we have religions, and why we have countries, and why there's a military, and why there's war, and all of these things.
The greatest extrusion that we place this alternate reality, this up-is-down, black-is-white world, where nothing makes any sense and no reason can be applied, is the morality of children, is the moral nature of children.
That's where the corruption of the world comes from.
That's the basic fact of reality.
So you're going to write to me, and I fully accept and understand this, and I'll try and do my best to deal with this in the morning.
You're going to write to me, and you're going to say, my parents, oh, they didn't know.
They did the best they could.
It's the way they were raised, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm going to tell you why you don't believe that deep down tomorrow morning.
Isn't that an exciting thing to wait for?
Thanks so much for listening, as always.
▲
Export Selection