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Feb. 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:46
119 Female Violence (Part 2)
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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 3.30 on Tuesday afternoon, the 28th of February 2006, and I hope you're all doing most excellently.
I wanted to continue on the joyful and exhilarating topic of female violence, not to pick on women, not because I had a violent mother, as I'm sure everybody is aware,
That I try to be as honorable and objective as possible in the formulation of my arguments, and where I'm not able to do that, either because there's no way of testing the hypothesis, because it's experiential, or because it's anecdotal, then I try and preface that with the disclaimer that it's merely an opinion.
However, I think it's fair to say that the cycle of violence that we talked about this morning, which is mother to son to wife, to mother to son to wife, and also mother to son to daughter, as the son grows up, mother to daughter, to husband to daughter again, there's a whole ecosystem of the cycle of violence that I think it's important to examine within your own life, within your own heart, within the people that you know,
And so you can understand the subtlety in why this bloody chord of violence is so strangled, so strangles the neck of society.
It's very hard to see violence clearly.
It's very hard to look at violence in the face and understand the depth and penetration of its influence, because we are trained not to see it.
We're trained not to see it in our own hearts, because we experience it and it's traumatic, but we're also trained not to see it by those who exploit the after-effects of violence.
So, as I've often said, and I think I've tried to make it clear, if not mind-bendingly redundant, for which I apologize, as I've tried to make it clear, the state It simply cashes in on the aftereffects of familial violence.
The state, totalitarianism, is in the home.
The state simply cashes in on the destruction of the true self and on the destruction of integrity that occurs in the home long before you ever get out into the real world and do inconsequential things like vote and hold political opinions.
Everything is smashed and broken up in the home long before Citizens are launched out into the world to become willing slaves of political overlords.
So that's why I do spend so much effort and time talking about the family.
And it's important for libertarians, as I've mentioned before, when you're looking for something called freedom.
Which can only result from truth, from honesty, from acceptance, from reality, from what actually happened and how you felt about it.
To be free in your life means to accept the truth, because the truth is power, the truth is consequence, the truth is integrity, the truth is morality.
And you want to be free in your own life, and the only way that you can do that, since we're not going to take up arms against the state, or at least I would never recommend that that be done, because it's suicidal.
The only way that we can do that, in any way that we have power over, is to get evil people out of our lives, and to get corrupt and people out of our lives.
And the only way we can do that is to accept the reality of emotional or verbal abuse, or neglect, or I call it eclipsing, which is where somebody simply, you say something to someone and they don't get angry in return, they just give you that thousand-yard stare and don't react to it, right?
As libertarians we have this all the time with political, in political matters.
So people are saying, well we should, George Bush is this and George Bush is that, and then you say, as I had lunch today with some people and we were talking about politics and they were grumbling about George Bush and I said, oh please, George Bush is just a symptom, just a symptom.
Because you're saying, well, it would be better if Kerry was in that position.
But my question would be, why does that position have such power to begin with?
Because let's say that you think it's a good idea that we should have this imperial presidency where the commander-in-chief can order whatever he wants, and then you say, well, let's create that structure of power, and then let's really hope that only nice guys want to use that kind of power, and that they're only going to use it wisely.
Well, it's never gonna happen.
You're never going to be able to set up a situation where people have near-absolute power and not have that power corrupt them, not have that power be used in an abusive manner.
And even by some miracle, if you do get some philosopher king up there sitting on his throne of wisdom and only using the power of coercion and brutality for good, what about the next guy?
Can you guarantee that from now until the end of time, no one but noble people are ever going to want to Exercise that kind of power?
Well, of course not.
That kind of power of life and death and corruption and brutality is only appealing to people who are already evil and corrupt and mentally ill.
If George Bush were a successful human being in any way, shape or form, he would never be drawn to something like the presidency.
And it's clear that before he was the president, he was a failure in everything that he turned his hand to.
So, as has been stated before, the problem is not The abuse of power.
The problem is the power to abuse.
And I'm trying to bring that home.
I'm trying to bring that principle home to where you really have some power and some effect in your life.
Getting mad at George Bush won't change one bullet in one soldier's gun from its destination.
Not one shred of one tiny thing will we change about George Bush by getting angry at him.
And I've talked about this before.
Don't bother rallying against politicians.
If you want to look for the abusive power within your own life, look at those who commanded your life when you were young.
And get those people out of your life, unless you love them to death.
In which case, more power to you.
I think that's wonderful.
But it is not the case.
It's not the case.
There is no capacity for the non-abusive power in modern culture and in almost all cultures throughout history.
Because morality and epistemology, ethics and metaphysics has been so corrupted by irrationality and the abuse of power already that nobody can hold power and not abuse it.
These days.
Maybe I would put myself in the very minority of exceptions, and even the small power that I've had as a company owner, I have not abused that power, but that power was still difficult and dangerous, in that it drew other people to attempt to exploit me, and sometimes they did it with varying degrees of success.
So there's no possibility that people can benevolently wield power, and by that I mean parental power, not political power, in the modern world.
No parent can reinvent the missing history of rational philosophy and ethics sitting around while they're commuting and doing their job.
That's not going to happen.
So there's no capacity.
The capacity does not exist for the benevolent exercise of parental power.
It would be to imagine that A parent could become a physicist just by sitting around and thinking about it.
No.
It takes years of training to become a physicist.
Now, does that mean that nobody who does not devote years of study to philosophy can be a moral human being?
No, of course not.
Because I know that the world is round, although I could not snap you through the logical proof.
I accept the premises of the theory of relativity, though for the life of me I could not prove it mathematically.
Because I've read a couple of books.
It really was that simple.
Once the work is done in philosophy, transmitting the conclusions is really not that difficult.
But we who are in this conversation are trying to build a new and more accurate and more humane and more reality-based kind of ethics.
And we are attempting to unravel the knots and convolutions and self-destructive loopholes that infest every aspect of modern what is called morality.
Which is nothing more than a corrupt and vaguely codified trough of self-binging self-interest and destruction, and a sop for violence, and a cover for evil, and a cloak under which assassins quietly steal.
So parents aren't going to be able to come up with the unraveling of all the mistakes and horrors and convolutions of modern moral philosophy?
I mean, come on, it's not going to happen.
The only people who ever devote years of study are those who are paid by the state to further promote this kind of corrupt, postmodern, relativistic, violent, excusing philosophy.
So that's why I'm trying to bring it back home into the family, because we can do something about that.
And power creates abuse.
Power is the exercise of violence and control without consequence.
And if we continue to see our parents, despite the fact that they have not been good to us, then we are absolutely and unequivocally agreeing with and approving and sanctioning and rewarding The exercise of brute power without consequence.
So how on earth could we complain about the state?
So that's really why I'm focusing so much on this, and I've talked a lot about parents as a whole, but the primary chair of this despotic regime called the family is the mother.
So let's take a look at this from a slightly different angle and look at the issue of moral logic regarding victimization.
I think it is a perfectly valid approach to dealing with the problem of victimization to take a look at the logic of it and make sure that we're not doing something unjust and unfair.
And I think that it is something that is so respectful of women To say that they are subject to the same moral laws as men.
If we excuse women from the just and universal application of moral laws, are we not saying that they are a sort of different and weaker species?
A different and weaker gender?
If we excuse female violence by portraying them in the role of victims, then we insult all women.
We insult all women who are moral.
So we really do have to avoid this Victorian notion that women are the gentler sex and the weaker sex and they need to be protected and they need to be saved from themselves and they need to be excused and they need to be managed.
Women do not need to be managed.
Women are subject to all of the same moral laws as men.
And they are equally, equally as powerful a moral agent as men.
Whatever men are capable of morally, whatever men are responsible for morally, women are capable of morally and responsible for morally.
I say that because I have enormous respect for women and I refuse to create a set of standards for women that is less than the standards that I would apply to men.
Because that would be to say that men have the strength to achieve virtue but women do not.
And women do.
But the degree to which we excuse women's vices, and violence, and corruption, and control, and abuse, and verbal attacks, and hostility, and temper problems, and dissociation, and manipulation, and weaselly behavior.
The degree to which we excuse that is the degree to which we damn women.
It is the degree to which we say, you are beyond help.
You cannot be helped.
You women, you poor women, you don't know what you're doing.
You're not strong enough to be moral.
We have to make up all these excuses for you because we think you're just that pathetic.
Well, I don't think women are pathetic.
I think women are incredibly strong.
I think men are incredibly strong.
I think that when you lower standards for people, you debilitate them.
You weaken them.
You destroy their moral fiber.
You undermine their upright natures.
It does not do any good to lower standards for people.
And therefore, since we are interested in a conversation about the argument for morality and the universality of morality, I will not accept lower standards for women.
And given that we understand the abuse of power that comes from the exercise of violence or control without consequence, We know for a simple fact that a situation wherein parental abuse is not punished by a withdrawal of sanction and resources from the children as they grow up, that we are doing everything in our power to further and exacerbate the abuse of power that is in motherhood and in fatherhood.
We are doing everything in our power to exacerbate and increase that fundamental corruption in society, that fundamental violence against the most disarmed, weak and helpless victims in the universe, which are children.
We are doing everything we can to prop up the despotic regime of the parents.
If we do not break with parents who are immoral when we get older, we are reducing or eliminating the consequences of evil behavior.
In other words, we're expecting people to be good regardless of their self-interest, regardless of the consequences to their behavior.
Which means that we're socialists or communists in that case.
Because we believe that some alternate human being can exist who is going to make a good choice regardless of consequences or personal self-interest.
Which means that we're socialists, that we believe that there is another kind of human nature that can be created where people can be moral without self-interest.
In which case, it's fine.
Go be a socialist.
Contribute to the decay, destruction, and cancerous spread of violence in the world.
But if you're going to be a libertarian, and you're going to say that the free market is important because consequences for moral and immoral actions are part of the self-reinforcing mechanism by which humanity struggles to become more moral every generation, then great!
Join us in this quest!
But the first place you need to apply these lofty principles to is your own life.
Not to the state.
Not to the gold standard.
Not to the Federal Reserve.
Not to foreign policy.
Not to the minimum wage.
Not to unions.
Not to teachers.
Not to the public schools.
Not to corporate welfare.
Not to private welfare.
But to your own life.
The tyrannies that you have yourself experienced as a child.
So I won't accept any lower moral standards for women.
Because that is the worst cruelty of all.
The worst cruelty of all is to have lower standards for people.
Because that sinks them into a morass of emotionally, morally, and financially subsidized underachievement and corruption.
I will not accept that as a valid moral standpoint.
So let's have a look at the logic of victimization and let's have a look at what people say, sorry, what people mean when they say that women are not as morally responsible for their actions because they are exploited by the patriarchy, they have less power, and so on.
Well, let's have a look at that.
So the logical premise behind that Of course, it's that men, in this patriarch era, men have more power than women.
Okay, let's accept that that's true.
Let's accept that there's some place in the world, and I'm sure that there are, where men have more political power than women.
I mean, I can think of several examples, mostly in our friendly neighborhood Muslim countries.
But let's say that men have more power, and therefore women have less moral capacity to act in a good manner.
So they're not a strong set of moral agents.
So they're more excused for their behavior.
Because, as you would imagine, right, so you get some woman who's married to some guy who's abusive to the children, and she says, well, I can't leave him, because where would I go?
I'm in a village in Somalia.
I can't go anywhere.
The government doesn't let me move.
And this guy's beating up on me and my kids.
And if I leave, I'll starve, and he'll just take it out on my kids, so at least I can be there to bandage their wounds.
All of the stuff that you would hear, which I have a good deal of sympathy for.
I really, really do.
I mean, that's a very difficult situation to be in.
And let's also, furthermore, to make the case even stronger for the feminist argument, let's furthermore say that the woman was in an arranged marriage where if she didn't marry this guy, she'd be killed outright.
So she's forced to marry this guy, she's not given access to birth control, and he beats her if she uses it, so she's forced to have lots of kids, and she can't leave because of X, Y, and Z. Absolutely.
Let's look at that and let's say that she is a victim, And she is therefore less of a moral agent thereby.
Fine.
So let's then look at the patriarchy in that equation.
And we're going to assume, and I don't think this is true, but let's assume it.
Let's make the case for the opposition as strong as possible, which is generally a good way to find out the logic or ethics of the situation.
We're going to assume that the man is a moral agent.
That he does have the capacity to exercise free choice.
So there's this magical situation where the woman is completely enslaved within society, but men have all the power in the world.
Now, this is not the case at all.
If you look at something like Saudi Arabia, the women, yeah, okay, they're beaten down, they're oppressed, they've got to wear burqas.
I don't even know if they're... I don't think they're allowed to drive.
There's lots of problems.
If not Saudi Arabia, certainly other Muslim countries.
But how free are the men?
Do they have all the power in the world?
Of course not.
It's a dictatorship.
The men aren't free either.
You try going to Saudi Arabia, not going to a mosque, and trying to open your business without $15,000 a day in government bribery.
You get thrown in jail, you're going to get ostracized, you're going to get beaten up, you're going to get threatened, you're going to get, I mean, sanctioned in some significantly ugly way.
So let's not imagine that in this situation where the women are beaten down, that the men are not beaten down either.
And this is one of the things that really bothers me about feminism.
And I'm not talking all feminism, because the feminism that strove for equality of rights for men and women I have nothing, of course, but praise and admiration for.
But the kind of feminism which looks at something like Saudi Arabia and says, you know, the problem there is the patriarchy.
Like, all the men are free and all the women are enslaved.
I mean, that's just nonsense.
It's insulting nonsense.
And what it does is it begins the process, or it exacerbates the process, of getting men and women to fight among themselves rather than turn at the common enemy, which is the state, which is the dictatorship, which is the rule of brute violence.
Getting men and women to fight amongst each other when they're all subject to this coercive and brutal power of the state is a pathetic and destructive approach to solving the problem of human liberty.
And it's almost like it's paid for by the government.
Well, of course, in the West it is paid for by the government.
I mean, feminist studies and the academic level, all sort of sanctioned by the government.
And they love it!
They love the fact that we're fighting amongst ourselves and getting all fussed about the patriarchy while they're taking 50% of our income and sending our sons and daughters off to die in Iraq.
They love it!
It's beautiful!
Let's not focus on the national debt.
Let's not focus on the FBI, the CIA.
Let's not focus on foreign policy.
Let's not focus on... Let's fight each other.
Men and women, let's fight each other.
That's really going to work.
That's really going to help solve the problem of state coercion.
Is to get angry about who has a penis and who doesn't.
That's really productive.
So, let's say that we have this fantasy society, women are beaten down, men have more power, and therefore men are responsible for their actions and women are not responsible for their actions, to varying degrees.
We can argue about it, it's never going to be absolute.
But, to take that argument for its logical root, we would say that the root of the man's moral agency, relative to his wife, Is his comparative freedom, his comparative power, his comparative authority, his comparative knowledge.
Let's say that women are not allowed even to be educated.
Fair enough.
And the woman's relationship to the man is that of a lesser moral agent.
In other words, somebody who's not as morally responsible for her actions.
A lesser moral agent because She is less powerful, less free, less knowledgeable, and so on.
Fine.
Okay.
That's great.
Let's accept that as a premise and say that the woman's off the hook and the man's a complete jerk.
Or violent, or evil, or whatever you... A tool of the patriarchy, whatever you want to call it.
Fine.
Let's then continue down the chain of hierarchy all the way down to the bottom and let's have a look at the children who are being raised by the mother.
Certainly true in these societies that child-rearing is the purview of the mother or of the matriarchy.
Or if you're not comfortable with that term with women in general, fine.
So now, the woman in relation to the child is more powerful or less powerful?
Well, you gotta say, a whole lot more powerful.
And I gotta tell you, I don't care what the laws of this society are, the man's power relative to the woman is nowhere near as great as the woman's power relative to her children.
I don't care what system you set up.
There's just no capacity for two adults to have a greater power disparity than an adult and a child.
Even to the extent of a gulag.
It's just not going to be the same.
But we're just talking about husband and wife here.
I don't care what kind of sanction you have in the background.
There's just no capacity that a man is going to have more power over his wife than his wife has over their children.
It's just not possible.
So, the general theory, then, is that men will negatively abuse this power.
They'll abuse the power because it is disparate.
So, the vast majority of men are going to abuse their power over their wives because they have more power over their wives.
Well, that's fine.
Let's just accept that as a theory.
I'm not saying it's true.
Let's just accept that as a theory.
Well, that's fine.
Then, the logical argument, then, is that where there is a greater power disparity, there is abuse of power on the part of the person who has Fine!
Fine.
Are we saying that the greater the power disparity the more the abuse?
has more power will abuse.
Fine.
That makes men jerks and women victims.
Fine.
Let's look at the mother and her child.
Does she have a greater power disparity?
Absolutely.
Are we saying that the greater the power disparity, the more the abuse?
Absolutely.
Therefore, given that the woman in relation to the child has a greater power disparity than the husband in relation to the wife, and given that a greater power disparity results in a greater corruption and destruction, then the woman is more evil than the man.
I'm not saying all of this is objectively true, but it is absolutely logically true, given the premises of the feminist critique of the patriarchy.
There is absolutely no doubt that women have more power than their children.
There is absolutely no doubt that men are blamed because patriarchy gives them an excess of power against their wives, and because of that excess of power, they use it negatively.
They abuse it.
So, absolutely, logically, and consistently true, based on the premises of the argument, women are Manifest greater evil in their moral choices than men.
So women, while not moral agents in this theory relative to their patriarchal all-powerful husbands, are moral agents relative to their completely dependent, helpless and uneducated and unknowledgeable children.
And if the abuse of power occurs from the man to the woman because of the disparity of power, then it also occurs from the woman to the child based on that disparity of power which is far greater.
So any theory which posits that women are not moral agents, because of the disparity of power relative to their husbands, must condemn women much more than it condemns men.
There's simply no way around it.
That is an absolute logical fact.
So, in other words, there is simply no possibility that women are victims.
Except in a very localized matter, when you look at one specific relationship, which, based on the premises of that relationship, the corruption entailed within it, They reproduce in a far more corrupt manner with their own children.
So that's a very important thing to understand.
Women are moral agents.
They absolutely are completely free moral agents.
Doesn't mean that they're all perfectly free in society, but neither are men.
And everyone is more free than children.
So you simply can't portray women as victims.
Because victims can only be considered victims to the degree to which they are subject to an arbitrary and omnipotent power structure.
And given that there is no more arbitrary and omnipotent power structure than the mother-child relationship, you could say the parent-child, but 99 times out of 100 it's the mother-child.
I'm not saying that men would do any better with this level of power either.
Then there's no way to condemn the patriarchy without condemning the matriarchy even more.
I don't mean to say that this means that women are more evil than men.
I'm just saying that the degree to which you condemn men for the abuse of power, you must even more so condemn women.
There's just no way around it at all.
And of course, this is something you never hear.
So, if women are moral agents, fantastic!
Then they're subject to the same moral rules as everybody else, i.e.
men.
And therefore, if they abuse children, they're completely evil, and they're evil in the worst kind of way possible.
They're far more evil than a man who beats his wife, right?
A woman who beats her child, or screams at her child, screams verbal abuse at her child, or is cold or hostile to her child.
is far worse than anybody who does that to another adult.
If somebody turns a cold shoulder to me as an adult, what do I care?
So they don't like me, who cares?
But somebody who is my mom or my dad who turns a cold shoulder to me is jeopardizing my entire existence.
As I've said before, children are entirely dependent on the goodwill of their parents.
And if that goodwill is not forthcoming, they're going to curl up into a ball and die.
Because they're not going to get any resources, the resources they need to survive.
So, coldness, withdrawal of affection, hostility, rage, verbal abuse, physical abuse, all of these things are, to a large degree, and certainly more so than men in general when children are younger, are perpetrated by women.
And it's the worst and most evil abuse in the world.
So, either women are perfectly responsible for that abuse themselves, or they're not.
And if they're not, then that's fine.
They're pure victims of a disparate power structure, in which case they're far more evil, because they are the abusers in that disparate power structure.
Now, you could end up with the one with their children.
The only way you can get around that is to say that women are somehow immune from the corruption of power.
That women can exercise enormous and destructive levels of matriarchal or parental power, and yet they cannot be harmed by that power.
They have this magic immunity to corruption.
And that argument is made.
It's perfectly ridiculous, of course.
Women are human beings just like everybody else.
Women are in no way, shape, or form absolutely immune to any kind of abuses of power.
The idea that if women ran the world, there'd be no war.
It's all just silly.
It's all just complete nonsense.
Plenty of examples of women throughout history who had positions of power.
Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher, the variety of queens throughout history.
They were just as abusive and evil as all the men.
There's no indication whatsoever that women are immune to the predations of power.
So that theory is completely ridiculous.
There's no evidence for that whatsoever.
You could say that women do not show as much abuse of power in the public realm, but that's fine.
That's just because they get their abuse of power fixation in the private realm.
They get it in the family.
They get it in the homestead.
They get it in regards to their children.
And so I just think that that kind of theory is just ridiculous.
And it is one of these things that creates this moral dichotomy between men and women that sets us at war with each other.
Men and women should not be at war with each other.
We should respect each other morally.
We should recognize that we're all subject to the same moral rules.
That we're all subject to the same moral temptations and abuse of power, if we get it.
And that we are brothers and sisters, united in the fight against the state.
We should not be opposing each other.
We should not be fighting amongst ourselves.
We should be opposing the real enemy, which is those who use violence against us without our consent.
And the best way to do that, to bring men and women together, is to start dropping these ridiculous notions that women are sort of innately more moral or immune to the abuses of power or not responsible for the abuses that they perpetrate on children.
Then we can start to have a really interesting and productive conversation about moral responsibility and we can stop fighting amongst ourselves and actually start fighting with our real enemy who we really should be dealing with in a more proactive manner.
And forget about this silly infighting between men and women, which gets us nowhere whatsoever.
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