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Feb. 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:11
113 But *my* parents were really nice! (Part 5: Freedom)
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Good evening, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
I'm now experimenting with stereo.
So let me know if this sounds any better.
I'm also trying to adjust the volumes.
I so apologize for sometimes the mix being too loud and so on.
I'm just finding it hard to get the right balance and to not move my head in the car.
If you see a red Volvo with somebody doing a podcast, do not approach from the blind spot, whatever you do.
So I hope you're doing well.
I just wanted to top off This four-parter, now 4.5-parter, this is going to be a relatively short podcast, but I wanted to top off this idea of the families and why it is that I think it's important that parents who are not productive or satisfying or enjoyable or happy-making in your life should be ditched.
And, you know, the how to do it is absolutely up to you.
There's no easy way to do it, and I'm not even going to try and suggest any ways of approaching that problem, because it is a very difficult problem, and there is no easy solution to it.
And of course, you know me, I'm all about the easy solutions.
So I wanted to talk about another one of the reasons why it's important to do it, why I think it's a moral... I say moral imperative is probably too strong a word, but why I think it's very important to do this, and what effect I think it will have on the long term.
And one of the ways that I can talk about this is every now and then I'll watch a Dr. Phil with Christina in the evening.
She, as I've mentioned before, likes to know what's going on in the general therapeutic environment that people see who aren't professional social.
We'll tune in to old Baldy for a time and see what he's got to say.
And, I mean, I'm not going to get into a big review of Dr. Phil because I'm not sure it's particularly worth it.
Suffice to say that he is not so good with moms.
He's very bad with women.
I mean, I don't know if it's a southern gentleman thing or whatever, but he's pretty tough on the guys and real soft on the women.
And, of course, it's a female-friendly show, so you wouldn't want him I'm not necessarily confronting women who are sort of false and abusive and so on.
I'm gonna do that in another podcast when I have a little bit more time and at least 12 cappuccinos in me.
But what I did notice the other day in Anna Dr. Phil's show was one of these sort of bridezilla shows where the woman who is getting married is turning into a monster and she and her mom are fighting about everything and so on.
And during the show, the mother was saying something that the woman disagreed with her and began crying and seemed very upset.
And I think sort of genuinely, it didn't seem really manipulative or anything.
And the mom began sort of rolling her eyes and playing the imaginary violin as if her daughter was just some big drama queen who Was playing for sympathy.
And I thought this was just an unbelievably horrible thing to do.
I mean, what a disgusting thing to do to your own children who are, you know, trying to be honest with you and obviously quite emotional about what's been going on.
And Dr. Phil did not call her.
I don't think he did.
I didn't see it.
And I would just love one day for Dr. Phil to say something like this.
And this is why Dr. Phil has his show and I have mine.
But that's fine.
That's exactly the way that I want it.
Dr. Phil should say something like this.
So when he sees moms who are abusive, or dads who are abusive, And children, I guess they're grown up.
The simple woman I think was in her 24 years old or 23 or 24 years old.
Dr. Phil should say, in my humble opinion, something like this.
When the daughter says, well, Dr. Phil, what should I do?
He should say, you should run. - You should get out of this family.
You should move and run and cut your ties and never look back.
And the reason that you should do that is there's never going to be anything here for you.
I get a complete picture of what your childhood was like based upon how your parents are treating you now.
This is how they are treating you now in public on a Dr. Phil show when you are an adult and have all the choices in the world.
I can only imagine The way that they treated you when things were in private and you had no options and everything was secret.
So there is nothing for you here.
You will never have a productive relationship with this woman because she's quite vile.
In fact, she's very vile.
And you should absolutely get away and you should never come back and you should build your own family with the full knowledge that you have escaped a horrible and destructive and debilitating situation and that's my advice to you is RUN!
and then he should turn to the audience and he should say and let this be a warning to you parents out there who are mistreating your children at the moment when your children come on my show At any time in the future, I'm going to give them exactly the same advice.
I'm going to tell them, if your parents have mistreated you in any significant manner, in a way that is more than just accidental or the occasional bump and nudge of ordinary human relationships, that I'm going to tell them exactly what I'm telling this woman here, which is to run, to leave, to abandon the parents, to drop them off the wagon to get them off the island and never look back, because that is the price that you pay for abusing children.
That is the price that you pay for being bad to your children.
This is not two sisters fighting.
This is a mother and a daughter.
There is no equality of the power relationship.
There is no possibility of the daughter being ever able to affect her mother's behavior.
And so, anybody who's out there in the audience or watching this, you 20 million people, anybody who's out there, I'm telling you that if you're mistreating your children, I'm going to keep saying the same thing over and over and over again, that as soon as you can get out, you get out and you never go back!
And that way, when you get old and you need help from your children, they won't be there for you.
And I don't know any other way to make parents nicer to their children than to say there are consequences for mistreating your children.
And those consequences are that your children will no longer be part of your family when they grow up.
As soon as they can get away, they will be as people who are unjustly jailed sprint for freedom the moment they spy a crack in the door.
Now, I can't imagine that Dr. Phil would last more than 20 seconds as a show after a statement like that, because that's a kind of fact that people aren't overly comfortable with, I guess you could say.
But you're not going to be able to say that.
If you were a good, a really good therapist, like if you are really honest and willing to really challenge people's perceptions, you would say to these people, look, this family thing is a complete mythology.
These people had sex, they gave birth to you, and they housed you when you were growing up.
That's it.
There's nothing that you owe them.
If you don't find pleasure in them, there's nothing that you have to give them at all, whatsoever, ever.
In fact, if you do give them things unjustly, you will make yourself miserable, you will make your husband or your wife miserable, and by God you are going to make your children miserable.
And that is something that is just so unspoken in society, and it's so unspoken in the general media.
Nobody ever hears this because it's true, right?
So anything that's said in the general media is false.
Now, not to be too harsh on Dr. Phil, I don't know the reasons that he doesn't say that.
I don't know if he ever says that to his patients in private.
Maybe he said it on the show.
I'm going off like half a dozen episodes here.
It is something that you never hear about, and will likely never hear about, except, you know, for me.
Instead, what you get is this just awful stuff that you hear on the Dr. Phil show.
Like this woman was saying, Oh, but she's my mother.
She's supposed to be the one who's always there for me, who always picks me up when I'm down.
She's supposed to be the one who takes care of me.
Well, like, says who?
It says, what mad propaganda ministry has come out with the statement that all mothers must be nice and wonderful and all fathers must be stern but fair and loving?
I mean, forget the theory, look at the practice!
I mean, how many people are out there who are like that?
When I talked about this morning, The ideal reaction of a family to somebody who's discovering the ideas of libertarianism?
Boy, you write me and tell me if that's the case!
I would love to hear it!
I don't want to be the bearer of bad tidings at all times, but it is... I'm just working from empiricism, and not just from my family, but from just many, many people's families that I've questioned and seen and observed over the years.
And a basic knowledge of philosophy, which is that to do right requires deep knowledge, none of which occurs, none of which is present in the popular media, or any kind of mythology that we currently feed on, or is rather more accurately feeding upon us.
So there is no capacity for people to act rightly in the modern world, and that's why I know that parents are bad.
It's like saying, well, okay, this kid was raised by wolves in remote regions of Borneo.
I wonder if he's a physicist.
Well, of course he's not a physicist.
He probably thinks that the moon is a, I don't know, some sort of sky goddess.
So, where there is no general knowledge transfer, where there is no general inculcation of right principles, There is no knowledge of right action, and therefore everything that occurs is wrong and bad and abusive.
I just know this logically.
The right action is a difficult and complicated thing to achieve, especially because human beings raised badly have exactly the wrong short-term, long-term incentive calibrations within their emotional systems, which we can talk about another time.
But that's fairly important to understand.
I think that it is very important to ditch your family if they're bad people.
And why?
Because if enough of us do it, families will become better.
If generally it begins to be understood by society as a whole, and by parents in particular, that if you don't treat your children well, they're not going to stick around.
Imagine what a blow that would be to corruption and malevolence in the world.
If we could get parents to behave 5% or 10% better, or 5 or 10% of parents to really explore this and become good, but without any threat, without any negative consequences, parents aren't going to do this.
Parents know, based on the popular culture and their own parental power and their own experiences with their own parents, No matter what they do to their children, they can beat them, they can whip them nine times out of ten, and I swear to God this is true, they can sexually molest them, and they will always come back for more, and they will always come back to support them, and they will always come back to take care of them, and they will always come back to give them money and resources when they're old.
So what risk are they taking?
What negative consequences are they taking?
No, there's no risks.
No risks whatsoever.
There are no negative consequences.
The children will come flocking back.
No matter what they do, they're like beaten dogs.
Actually, not like beaten dogs.
Beaten dogs, eventually they'll bite you back.
But given that the greatest power disparity in the world between a parent and a child has by far the least negative consequences for corrupt or evil actions, there's no question that that's exactly why parental corruption remains so enormously pervasive and horrible.
It's the greatest power disparity There's no capacity for the child to escape or fight back or appeal to reason.
There's no negative consequences in society, because you can keep it hidden.
I mean, yes, I know there's child services and all that, but that's so rare that it's ridiculous.
And the children are fairly aware, even when they are children, that there's not going to be a good solution for them.
So of course there's going to be a complete expansion of corruption and a maintenance of corruption.
What you need to do is you need to provide negative consequences in order for people to change.
People don't change based on abstract moral principles as we know from libertarianism and the fact that we've been arguing it solid for 200 years and haven't won.
We know that people don't act morally or change their behavior based on abstract principles, except we happy tribe.
But we do know that if people face negative consequences for their actions, then they will do the right thing much more often.
Not perfectly, but much more often.
I mean, it's why people go to work, because if they don't, there'll be negative consequences.
And If children constantly flock back to support their parents, even if they don't like their parents, or even if they find their parents boring, or even if they are horrified by their parents, or even if they have nothing in common with their parents, or even if whatever whatever whatever, then parents are never gonna get better!
Parents are never going to improve, and the corruption that is at the root of society, which flowers into the black poisonous fungi of the state and the race and of God and religion and class systems and... I mean, I could go on and on, but all of the horrible concepts that so dominate and corrupt the human mind.
If parents never experience anything negative from their own bad parenting, if they never are faced with the threat of consequences, then they're exactly the same as public servants.
They're civil servants.
They can't get fired.
How hard are they going to work?
How honest are they going to be?
How productive are they going to be?
They can never get fired.
And it's funny to me how people in the free market don't see this, that all relationships should be voluntary for mutual advantage.
All relationships should be voluntary and for mutual advantage.
And capitalists, free market libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, whoever you want to call them, they're like, that's great!
But don't talk to me about my parents!
For God's sakes, man!
They're my parents!
Well, so what?
Are we philosophers or are we slaves to propaganda?
There's no value in your parents other than their goodness to you and your goodness to them.
Well, there's no value in your parents to you other than their goodness to you.
And if in the free market we believe that all relationships should be voluntary and for mutual advantage, and that exploitation is bad, and we don't like the public school because it teaches the children badly, and we want to privatize the public school and make the relationship between the child and that authority voluntary, Well, why not the same with parents?
It's a natural extension and centralization of the principle.
The child's relationship with his parents should be voluntary.
And I'm not saying it is when they're very young, because you've got no chance.
You're in the family prison.
There's nothing you can do.
What is it?
I call it the ABC, the accidental biological cage.
But when you get older, it has to be perfectly voluntary, and it has to be for mutual advantage.
And if it's exploitive, then morally you must reject that relationship.
Morally you must reject that relationship.
And if you don't reject that relationship, that's fine.
I'm not going to order you to do anything.
I can't.
But don't pretend to me or to anyone else that it's moral.
It's not.
You're just scared.
And I understand that fear.
I've gone through it for years.
I understand that fear of doing something radical.
Or what is perceived as radical, but which is actually just basic self-interest.
But don't tell yourself that it's moral.
Just say, yeah, I'm chicken and I'm not going to do it.
That's fine.
I mean, as long as you're honest, that's the first step.
But don't think that you're doing it to be a good son or a good daughter.
And don't fight the state and continue to support your own parents if you don't like them, if you don't love them, if they're not wonderful to you, if they're not great and kind and wise and helpful and curious and you just love to see them.
If that's not the case with your parents, don't oppose the state and then support them, because it's a complete contradiction.
If relationships should be voluntary and to mutual benefit, and you are in an exploitive relationship that is based on the fear of emotional blackmail and coercive manipulation, then you have no right to oppose the state whatsoever.
And it's pointless for you to do it, really.
I'm telling you, you won't get anywhere.
You'll just alienate everyone, you'll be frustrated, you'll be unhappy, you'll be depressed, because you're missing the point, which is that the state is your parents, that you live in a situation of coercion and control and manipulation which is familial and is only vaguely statist as an aftereffect of that.
And we always have to deal with the tyrannies that are closest to us first.
Before we go and deal with the big abstract tyrannies.
Because if we're not free ourselves, if we're not free, how on earth can we conceivably communicate freedom in any meaningful or passionate way to other people?
If we grumble about the state and then go over for Sunday dinner with a family that bore us, How free are we?
What on earth would getting taxation down by 20% mean relative to spending time with people out of guilt and fear and obligation and social habit?
That's much more of a prison than the state can ever do to you short of physically imprisoning you.
I would rather be in my situation paying 50% taxation and not having to see my family.
than I ever would want to be in a place where I had no taxation, no regulation, and had to see my family.
See, we can't do anything about the state directly, but we can do something about the tyrannies which really affect us.
That we can act on.
The state is not going to budge whatsoever.
In our lifetime, quite probably.
But we can do something!
about the tyrannies which are in our lives at the moment.
Whether it's a bad relationship with your husband or your wife, whether it is a bad relationship with a boyfriend or a girlfriend, whether it is your family, whether it is your boss, whether it is your extended family, your parents, your cousins, whoever is in your life who is not open and curious and excited and happy and wise and wonderful and great.
That is your state!
That is your prison!
That is what you need to break free of.
That's what you need to escape to these sunlit planes of individual choice and voluntary interactions.
To mutual benefit.
Spend time with people who make you happy, who make you excited, who make you thrilled to be alive, who bring you joy.
That's freedom!
And you can get that in a prison camp.
And if you don't have that, it doesn't matter what the rate of taxation is whatsoever.
And until we have that in our lives, the state isn't going to budge anyway.
The only way to overthrow the state is to overthrow the tyrannies that we have within our own lives.
Because that's something we can do with SomethingAbout, that is an example we can set, and that is a message that we can send out to people who are bad.
That they do not get to interact with moral people if they are bad, or negative, or hostile, or undermining, or cynical, or sarcastic, or Dull!
If they make no effort, if they talk about the weather.
Don't give up your gold for nothing.
Don't give up the gold of your soul and your being for nothing, for the lazy, for the incompetent, for the hostile, for the bitter, for the negative.
Don't do it!
Because you're only going to get this one life.
And every day that you spend in the company of people who aren't filling you with joy is a day that is a wasted life.
I don't think Dr. Phil's going to be saying that either, come to think of it.
But it needs to be said.
Forget about the tyrannies of the public sphere.
They're interesting, and it's important to understand them, and it's important to know them.
But they are so far down the road, in terms of us freeing people, in terms of us actually allowing people to get a taste of the kind of liberty that is possible in life.
We have to do that ourselves with what we have control over, which is our time, our resources, and who we spend time with, and how we spend that time with them.
Spend that time with people in great conversations, and play laser tag, and have fun.
That's freedom.
That can't be taken away.
They can put me to 99% taxation.
I can live in a single room, and I can still have that.
It's what they used to say in Russia, in the Stalin-era, that the only free speech is under the covers with your wife.
And that's true!
Because we have this thing called free speech, but everybody speaks robotically, so what's the point of that?
They may have free speech politically, but they have no free speech personally, because they're programmed by public schools and by their families.
The only rights of freedom, the only things that make us free, are the things that we have effect in and have control in in our own lives.
And that's why this is Freedomain Radio, the logic of personal and political freedom.
Personal freedom first.
Personal freedom first and foremost, above all else.
And then later political freedom, if we can get there.
But personal freedom first, because that's something I can affect every day in my life now.
And I'm not thwarted or frustrated by the fact that there's a monolithic state, because I'm free.
I'm not saying it's the easiest thing in the world to attain.
It's really hard!
If it were easy, then the world would be free, and this battle would be not worth fighting.
But the world is not free, and the world can be free, and it can be such a beautiful and wonderful place.
But we all have to act, and it's very difficult, and we have to go against social convention, and we have to, if we believe in the free market, and we believe in the principle of voluntary association for mutual benefit, then we have to get rid of the people in our lives who do not benefit us.
Regardless of what society says.
I mean, if we're so concerned about society and what society says, why would we be libertarians to begin with?
I had a... I think it's podcast.net or one of these things.
I've got this rating.
I get these ratings.
Podcast, I think it is.
And these ratings are... I mean, I get mostly pretty good ratings, and that's great.
And the only reason that I care about it is because it keeps me at the top of the list of people who can come in and listen.
They don't have to sort of search for it.
I'm right there on the front page.
I'll give out the website tomorrow, just if you get a chance to go and vote.
I'd really appreciate it.
But I got a sort of three-star thing, and one guy was saying something like, I can't remember the quote exactly, but it was something like, you know, call me old-fashioned, but this show doesn't have any post-production values.
It's just a guy rambling.
Which I think is great!
Because, you know, what's really important about this podcast is not the intellectual or emotional content of what I'm saying, or the truth value, or the logic, or the philosophy, or the psychology, but a good opening piece of music.
That's what really makes it special.
I just thought that was kind of funny.
But if you do get a chance to vote, sorry, I can't remember the The actual email address or the website address just now, but if you go to freedomainradio.com, it's the one that says I'm the top rated podcast on such and such, and if I can't crawl back at least into the top five, then I'll have to change that.
So if you go and vote, that would be great!
So, again, thanks so much for listening.
I hope that this has been helpful to you.
To me, it's very important to focus on freedom.
My life's goal is to try and bring as much freedom as I can to people, because I know the joy that it creates in my life.
And if you've got joy, I mean, I think it seems only humane and kind to try and spread it as much as possible.
So do let me know how your adventures in defooing go, and keep me posted.
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