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April 19, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:45
197 Parenting Part 2: Authority

An examination of the root justifications for parental authority

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It is a beautiful morning here in Canada on the 19th of April 2006.
It's going to reach 20 degrees Celsius, which is about Fahrenheit 9 billion compared to most of the winter.
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So, parenting part two.
We are going to talk about my view of the source of authority.
Now, there are a number of sources of authority, and this is sort of pretty important to parenting, right?
Because parenting is the ultimate form of authority, which almost inevitably seems to degenerate into the sort of frightening willpower situation.
And I remember being in this when I first spent time around kids, other than my friends growing up or whatever.
But the frightening willpower scenario is when your child is just disobeying you, or doesn't want to obey you, and you really want them to obey you, and you have to figure out how to get them to do what it is that you want.
And that is a frightening willpower scenario.
There's a scene, I watched I think a season or so of The Sopranos, Mostly because I was interested in the therapy side of things more than the whacking guys kinds of things.
But at one point, Tony Soprano says to his wife in bed, he says, you know, once they realize that we're just parents, like that we don't have any power over them, we're completely doomed.
And I think that's quite a common feeling, this desire that parents have to make their children obey them, and this fear and panic...
That occurs when the parents realize that, well, when the children disobey and the parents need or want to get them to obey for a variety of reasons.
It could be that they're in public and don't want to be viewed as bad parents.
It could be that they have their own issues of control in life and this is the only area where they feel they do have control and by God they're going to maintain it.
It could be that they've messed up their own life so badly by not taking advice, that they're desperate for their children to take advice, and therefore they come down really hard or bully or whatever.
There's lots of reasons why enormously bad parenting goes on.
And the other one, too, is that, don't underestimate this, that parents, in a sick kind of way, are actually, like, by being irrational and authoritarian and so on, are in a weird way preparing their children for life.
Because there's a lot of people like that out there, right?
I mean, one of the fears, I think, that people have around libertarian homeschooling is the idea that, oh, great, so my precious little angel grows up in a purely rational and logical and benevolent and emotionally together kind of environment, and then I sort of kick him out into the world where they get chewed up by the insane combine harvesters of other people's neuroses and craziness, which is...
I mean, it's an understandable fear, but I still think that...
I mean, otherwise you'd give up on the world, right?
I mean, if you don't want to teach your children to be better, and if you're not willing to put up with the slings and arrows of outrageous neighbors, then it would seem to me that you're sort of giving up on the world, right?
And saying, well, I have to kill the souls to some degree of my own children because...
We live in a land of the dead, rather than raising your children to be doctors or, I guess, resurrectionists and bring them back to life.
Which is possible, of course, but not the easiest thing in the world, but it wouldn't be any fun to do if it was easy.
So, the question around authority and what constitutes authority and so on, I think is fairly obvious in some situations and not in others.
So, you go to a good doctor and the doctor says, you've got to stop eating walnuts because I've got this test and you're allergic.
And here are the results. And by the way, you may have noticed that every time you eat walnuts, your left hand explodes.
Do you feel dominated by that doctor?
Do you feel that that doctor is just telling you what to do and being a meanie-poo and so on?
Well, I would assume not.
You would probably feel quite grateful to that doctor.
And so, it's very similar with parenting, right?
I mean, if you are somebody who can help your child to see the correlation between bad thoughts, bad habits, and bad results, or unwanted results, then that to me is something very important.
That's something that the child is going to feel grateful for.
I mean, I hope that to some degree I'm helping people in the world to...
Find the connection between inconsistent thinking, inconsistent actions, and unwanted results.
If you are very passionate about libertarianism in a political context, then it would make sense to me that it would be even more valuable to apply in a personal context.
That just seems to me to make sense, right?
I mean, politics is people, and your personal life is people.
So it seems to me that if you don't like bullying and manipulation in the political life, then you should eschew it in your private life.
It's just things like that that make sense.
And I hope, at least I haven't got any emails so far.
I mean, I've got emails criticizing me on just about every topic, except I don't think that anyone has ever emailed me and said that I'm a bully telling you or telling them what to do.
Because that would be a really creative interpretation of what it is that I'm trying to do.
And I have never used the argument from morality to shame people.
Because that is inconsistent, right?
I mean... If I'm not going to use the argument for morality to shame myself, to shame my wife, to shame my nieces, to shame my boss, to shame politicians, to whatever, to shame policemen, then obviously the argument for morality itself would say that that should not be what's occurring.
So I think because I haven't used the sort of emotional tactics of anger at particular individuals rather than...
But I'm angry at specific actions that reveal general principles, right?
I mean, what does Dr.
Phil care about my opinion?
Well, nothing, right? He probably will never hear it, but...
I do get angry at the principle which says that somehow children are less requiring of protection than wives.
So, somebody from the board said, aren't you a little harsh on communists as opposed to Christians?
You know, are you being maybe too venomous in regards to communists rather than Christians?
I think it's important to rank your threats, and my anger, in general, tends to rise proportional to the body count of the ideology.
I don't face any particular threat from Christians in Canada.
I know that people feel a little bit more about this in the States, and I fully understand that.
It makes total sense to me. But here in Canada, I don't face...
Christians aren't taxing me at 50%, just to take one sort of simple example.
And then slapping another 15% on everything that I buy.
So that's not something that occurs.
Here, it's the communists, right?
It's the socialists who are doing that.
So it's the socialists who are robbing half my day and wrapping me up in regulations.
And it's not the Christians who are in charge of the youth indoctrination camps.
It is the communists.
And just looking at the 20th century...
You know, a couple of hundred million people murdered not by Christians this time, but by communists.
And of course, the communist body count vastly outstrips the Christian body count.
If you just take the 20th century, you just say 1917 to, I don't know, 1990, the body count for communists, 150 million or something like that.
And the church, of course, has never murdered 150 million people.
It's probably never even murdered one-fifth of that in its entire history.
Now, of course, it's prevented a lot of great things from occurring, but we won't count that.
Just look at the straight body count.
I mean, communists are far more virulent and repulsive than Christians, because at least in Christianity, you can take the individual conscience approach, which is not possible at all.
In communism, because there's this class consciousness in which...
False consciousness, and you can't think for yourself, you can only think in terms of your class advantage, so there's no personal conscience, which can be appealed to within Christianity and Judaism, and I have no idea whether it can within Islam, it seems a little less likely.
What I'm getting at there is that I get mad at Communists as a philosophy.
Individual Communists, to me, seem more like victims.
If you've listened to the second FDR call-in show, I am fairly nice to the Christian, which doesn't mean that I don't disagree with him.
It just means that I do see him as somebody who's buried.
It's sort of like a huge set of fishermen's nets and ropes fell on him as a child, and he's trying to get his way out.
Now, I would assume that the man has integrity.
I mean, it's not the easiest thing in the world to hang around on an atheist board where we openly talk about Christians' desire to have us killed, and it's not an easy thing to plow through these podcasts if you're maintaining your Christianity, and it's certainly not an easy thing to come onto a chat show with a bunch of atheists.
So, I thought that was brave.
And what I see that as, you know, rightly or wrongly, is I see that as a hand coming out from under this pile of junk that the person was buried in as a child and they're looking to get out, right?
I mean, he's not on there saying we should all be killed.
He's on there to talk about rationality, which is a hand coming out of the whatever, right?
So I view that as a very noble thing to do.
And to expect that person to change his mind to a more rational standpoint in one call or in one post is irrational.
I mean, certainly if you look at your own life, If you hadn't sort of figured out the argument for morality or you hadn't figured out how libertarianism is primarily a philosophy of personal relationships and only secondarily a philosophy of political relationships or the need to have none of those, then I think if you can sort of say, well, I've been a libertarianism for 20 years or 10 years or more...
And never quite got the hang of that argument for morality thing that there should be no state, that it's inconsistent, and that I should apply libertarian principles to my personal life first and foremost, then I think it's okay for us to have some sympathy for people who are struggling to achieve rationality, since that is in fact what we are all trying to do.
I had a critique and an excellent one of my Horus Jesus podcast of An Invitation to Christians Part 3 last week, which I used some material which was questionable and did not either find out or report that it was questionable, so I'm either going to have to back that up or talk about a retraction this afternoon.
So, I make mistakes, you make mistakes, we're none of us perfectly rational, and that's not even an ideal that we want.
Happiness is the ideal, rationality is how we get there, but you don't have to be perfectly rational in order to be happy.
And you also don't want to completely change your entire personality in one day, because A, it's impossible, and B, it would be kind of destabilizing.
Let's say that you've got bad food in your life.
You don't go on a diet and stop eating everything.
You've got to modify your behavior over time, and it's a process.
So I think that we need to be kind to people who are being irrational and who are reaching out from the mental detritus that fell on them, unbeknownst to them, and without their responsibility as children, and they're sort of fighting their way free.
I think we need to be kind to that.
So, when it comes back to children, the question around authority is that authority, basically, that's the idea behind this.
Authority has to be benevolent, and authority is simply something that is based on either an extension of knowledge or an increase in knowledge, or it is based on a presence of abilities which can't be transferred.
So, for instance, the programmers that I work with don't like talking to clients and don't like conflict.
I, on the other hand, I mean, I don't like conflict, but I don't have any particular problem with it.
And so, when it comes to telling the client something's going to be shipped late, should that ever happen on my watch as a software manager, it would be entirely possible I would call the client ahead of time and let them know.
Dealing with conflicts where the client wants something for free that they haven't actually put in the contract and having those, they don't want to do it and I don't mind doing it.
Now, I've certainly offered to train them on conflict resolution if they're interested, but they're really not.
They prefer to code, right? I mean, that's their bag, man.
And so the authority that I have in that area, why I get paid more, why I'm the boss, is because I do things that they don't want to do.
And so they're happier.
I'm happier. I prefer getting paid more.
And they prefer not to have to deal with conflict and fighting with clients.
And especially, I mean, especially the public sector clients.
It can be a little bit scary, right?
Because, I mean, they can't get fired.
They're not fiscally responsible.
And they live in a pretty bullying environment.
So, you know, it comes down a little bit down the wire, actually quite a lot.
So they don't want to do that.
And so I do it, and that's why...
And I can do what they do, but I can also do this other thing, which is sort of deal with conflict, manage projects, and so on.
And also, there are people who are smart who don't like presenting, right?
So they don't like going to a room of 20 people and presenting for, like, two hours or whatever.
Can you imagine? You think these podcasts can be a little long.
You just imagine sitting inside one of my tasty, lengthy software demos.
Actually, I do try to make them fun and participative.
So... People don't like doing that, so I do that, so I get paid a little bit more from that.
Now, I don't want to learn about tax law, and I don't want to learn about EBITDA and finances, and so, you know, the CFO gets paid something, for some portion that I don't get paid for.
So, there's some skills which result in a kind of authority, right?
Which is the idea that you go to your doctor and you say, you know, doctor, whenever you eat walnuts, my left hand explodes, and he says, well, it could be allergic, you could be allergic, we'll do a test, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that person has authority because they have additional knowledge.
And if they're a good doctor, they don't assume that you're an idiot because you don't have this knowledge, or that you're deficient somehow.
A glass that's not full of water is not a bad glass.
It just doesn't have any water in it.
I mean, you just look at it and say, okay, well, somebody who doesn't have a certain piece of knowledge or who is struggling to integrate it, right?
Because to understand something is one thing, to integrate it is another, right?
I mean, you might say, yes, non-initiation of force or fraud should be the standard politically, and then you might spend 20 years having relationships where you allow that in your personal relationship, so you have understood the idea, but you haven't integrated it, sort of in my humble opinion. Just as I have not integrated all the ideas I'm going to have for the next 50 years, which I'm going to look back at these and say, wow, there was still a lot of stuff I didn't know.
And so a good doctor is not going to feel that the patient is any the worse intellectually or morally or anything for not having specific knowledge that that doctor has spent, you know, usually the better part of a decade acquiring and then practicing and so on.
And so it seems to me that parenting is sort of along the same lines, that you have additional knowledge that is of benefit to your children, and they are in no way deficient for not having that knowledge.
In fact, as I mentioned yesterday, it is advantageous to you that they don't have all the knowledge you have because you, my friend, have a lot of bad knowledge.
I mean, that's an important thing to understand.
I also have a lot of bad knowledge because we all spent 20 years in the edugulags of the state, right?
I mean, we've had exposure to media.
We have exposure to all of the subtexts of movies and books and plays and all the stuff.
We have a lot of bad ideas.
And children don't.
Use them.
They are pure water. Drink off them.
So children have fewer good ideas when they're very young, but they have fewer bad ideas.
So learn from them.
If you are sort of looking at your kid who's disobeying you and feeling angry that you need to control them, then you're not learning from somebody who's in a purer state or a healthier state in many ways than you are.
So, instead of sort of saying, well, tell me what's going on, tell me why you don't want me to do, help me understand how we got to this point from your standpoint, tell me what you resent, tell me what's bugging you, tell me what, you know, I'm curious, I want to know, I want to understand what makes you think, not because I want to control you, But because I want us to have a better and more positive and enjoyable and fun interaction.
My God! Parents just don't seem to have any fun with their children and they don't view them as benevolent and positive and joyous additions to their lives.
It's like everyone with their damn marriages or damn relationships.
It's like, yeah, I'm getting some and that's, you know, I'm paying for it badly.
So, you just want to have as much fun as possible with your kids.
And if they're resisting you or they don't want to do something, that's a sign.
That's an important, important, important sign.
That's something that you need to learn about yourself.
Or you can just say that children are naturally willful and disobedient and they need to be crushed in some Soviet-style manner.
I would suggest the former, that if you ended up in a position with your children, where you're standing over them, raising your voice, or wagging your finger at them, or getting really angry, that's a clue.
It's a clue about your own bad ideas.
It's a clue about your own problems.
It's a clue about your own...
This is what helps you map your own scar tissue.
Right? I mean, we've all been wounded.
We've all been wounded.
And we don't get mad at the wound, and we don't get mad at the scar tissue, and we don't get mad at the knife.
We get mad at the person who stabbed us as children.
I mean, this is something I talked about.
It doesn't matter who.
I talked about this person who was feeling, oh, I should be stronger, I should be this, I should be more assertive, or whatever.
I'm so mad that I can't get mad.
I'm so mad at myself that I can't get mad.
Basically, it was because this person felt weak.
It felt like if only I was stronger, and I'm so mad at myself for not being stronger.
Well, that's scar tissue, right?
I mean, you can call it weak, right?
I mean, if you get stabbed in the side and you end up having to take some yoga positions differently because of the scar tissue, do you say, well, I'm just mad at myself because I'm so bad at yoga, right?
I mean, if you break your leg, you're not a bad skier if you try skiing within two weeks.
I mean, you've got a broken leg.
You've got a wound. And...
To get mad at deficiencies that result from a wound, from an injury, is completely irrational and self-abusive, of course, in the worst kind of way.
And the reason that you do it, the reason that you lash yourself, is so that you forget about the gun in the room, or I guess in this case, the hand on the knife in the room.
You get mad at yourself, and you create it as a personal deficiency so that you can still hang around the people who wounded you, right?
Because it's your issue. It's not that you forget about you.
It's a way of avoiding the fact that somebody stabbed you.
Once you get that somebody stabbed you and that they're not sorry, and that if you bring it up with them now that you were stabbed, that they will still blame you, then you have to get them out of your life.
I mean, sort of logically, right? In order to avoid that, you'll get mad at yourself.
For your supposed deficiencies, right?
Rather than, hey, I was stabbed and beaten or whatever, right?
I mean, I'm talking psychically, as I'm sure you understand.
So, with children, when you end up in a situation where you are in a willful conflict and you have the urge to control them and you have the urge to get mad at them and disobedient and, oh, why can't you just obey?
I mean, you see this with single moms all the time.
I don't just mean my own mom, but other single moms that I've seen where they just get so mad and frustrated with their kids for not obeying them.
When, of course, the single moms...
I've never sat down and frankly talked about, you know, the reason that I have this wisdom is because I've made mistakes.
And I don't want you to make the same mistakes.
And I've also changed, I've recognized, I've changed these mistakes in my own life.
And so, you know, I guess if you have changed them enough, then you don't need to have that conversation with your kid about your own deficiencies.
But, I mean, how does somebody who ends up as a single mom get the nerve to instruct children on how to live without humility?
I mean, that's... Sorry, that's a bad way of putting it.
If you're a single mom, if you want to tell other people how to live, you really should do so with a fair amount of humility, I think.
I mean, that would sort of be my approach.
That would be a sensible thing to do because, you know, you've obviously made some pretty significant errors in your life, assuming you're not a widow, right?
I mean, a perfect husband got hit by a bus or something.
Well, you've had kids, and now they don't have a father or they don't have a mother, and so as a single parent, you've kind of made some significant errors, so your correction might be, you know, might be...
Tinged with a slight amount of humility, like I'm not perfect, and understanding that the kids are going to be pretty suspicious of your authority.
I mean, if you were so wise and you could tell them everything that they should do, then how come you ended up as a single parent or without the original parent in your life, the partner in your life, and so on?
So that kind of authority, where you have true authority, which is simply a sharing of knowledge that is of benefit to the recipient, as I'm sort of trying to do here...
And that it's a conversation, right?
Then the people can come back to me and say, no, you're wrong about this and you're wrong about that.
And I can say, well, that's fantastic.
Let me look into that and see if I've got a hang-up or a problem like when I didn't feel like podcasting last week.
I sort of said, okay, well, what is it that's going on for me?
Is it something the board did? Is it something that I did?
You know, they're always open to correction.
Because that's the nature of truth.
We're all standing in relationship to truth.
Nobody's standing in relationship to my ego.
I mean, what the heck? As I've said before, I don't have anything to do with anything as far as your life goes.
And I'm just some bits on a digital device.
But we are all of us standing, like all of us orbiting the truth like planets around the sun, right?
We're all measured in relationship to the truth.
And nobody's measured in relationship to me or to you or to anyone else.
So the value of a parenting is measured in relationship to truth and wisdom.
It's not measured in relationship to obedience of children or anything like that.
And so as a parent, the primary thing that you need to do is to gain as much wisdom as possible and to communicate it in a manner that is going to awaken the self-interest of your children.
I mean, children don't want to fall down and get hurt more than anyone else.
And children don't like being told what to do, damn it, more than anybody else.
In fact, it's even worse for kids because they get it a whole lot.
So, I do believe that that is a particularly important thing to understand about parenting.
That it is a relationship of mutual learning because you have to unlearn some bad habits and the way that you find out what your bad habits are is when your children are resisting you or are upset with you or are whatever, right?
I mean, that's important. It's not a commandment that if somebody is upset with you, you are in the wrong and need to change.
I mean, that's certainly not a commandment at all.
But it certainly is something that opens up a conversation, or should open up a conversation, as I've tried to do with a couple of military men and a couple of hardcore socialists.
One or two other pod show hosts, I've tried to open up conversations with them.
The fact that they're mad at me and disagree with me and think I'm the worst thing since the last worst thing in their life, which, I don't know, maybe their paper was delivered late that morning.
The fact that I'm the worst thing ever doesn't mean that I have to change anything, but it does mean that I have the right to be curious about why they have a problem with me and what ways we can work to solve it that don't have anything to do with any of us obeying the other, but rather to do with rationality, empiricism, and the truth, objective truth, and so on.
So I think that it's exactly the same relationship with parents.
When was the last time that you tried to learn something from your kids?
When was the last time that you allowed yourself to be corrected from your kids and thanked them for it and were honest about something that you had gained from it?
When was the last time that you looked at the resistance that your children have towards your commandments or your edicts or your approach As an opportunity to learn something about yourself and communication and truth and honesty and integrity and so on.
When was the last time that when your kids resisted you, you completely respected their resistance?
Which doesn't mean that you just gave in, but you actually had a conversation about it.
And of course, if you really want to open up some sort of map your own scar tissue, just have a look at your own upbringing and ask that same question about how you were parented.
When were the times in your childhood that you got to teach your parents something and that your feelings and instincts were so respected that your parents probed them and tried to understand them and learn something about themselves?
Because that is a wonderful thing when that happens in a relationship.
That is something that would just give you shivers of delight.
Because it is about honesty, it's about integrity, and it's about humility in the face of rationality, right?
I mean, I'm not right. Rationality is right.
I just try to be as rational as possible, right?
This is what the, to my sort of minor aside way of putting it, or minor tangential approach, this is what happened to Ayn Rand.
She sort of mistook that reality is right.
You just try and serve that rightness as much as possible, right?
When people get mad at me, it's like you're getting mad at the wrong person and you're getting mad at the wrong thing.
Because if you're getting mad at me for what I'm saying, then that's sort of pointless.
Of course I could be wrong. There's no point getting mad at me.
You can just tell me where I'm wrong relative to reality and we'll both be the better off and I'll be happy and thank you.
What a wonderful thing. The last thing I want to be is an error.
And so when you were a child, when did your parents ever say when you disagreed with them or got mad with them?
Wow, that's fascinating. I am so interested.
You're absolutely right to be mad.
Gosh, let's sit down, figure out, let's go through this step by step, figure out how we got here.
Because this is really, I mean, it's interesting.
I'm sorry that you're mad. It certainly wasn't my intention.
I'm sorry that you are mad. I recognize that you are mad.
You're right to be mad. Let's figure out how we got here.
And while we were in the grocery store and you didn't get the candy bar and you had a tantrum, let's figure it out.
I mean, let's go hunt the feelings.
Let's figure out what happened. Actually, that may be a little bit older than kids, right?
Tantrums in the grocery store, but let's figure out how we got to this place and what can I learn about myself.
Now, one of the reasons that parents don't do that, I think the main reason why parents don't do that, is because they are violently and deeply ashamed of themselves.
Children know everything about their parents.
Children know every single, down to the last atom, better than anybody will ever know you, probably.
Children know everything about their parents.
All their hypocrisies, all of their good, all of their bad, all of their right, all of their wrong.
And the reason that parents don't want to respect the feelings and instincts and resistances and emotional natures of their children is because the kids are right.
The kids are right.
If you are in a grocery store and your child is acting up, And you snap at that child like the child starts screaming and grabbing at things.
I mean, just a worst-case situation, right?
Well, if you get angry at that child because beforehand you've said, like, if we're going to go to the grocery store, I'd love to go to the store with you.
I always love spending every moment that I can with you.
You're a great kid. Love you to death.
If we're going to go to the grocery store, here's what I think will make it most enjoyable for us.
Here's my suggestion that we're going to go to the grocery store and I'm going to let you buy one pack of sugarless gum.
Maybe the kid's got a cavity.
Who knows? One pack of sugarless gum.
But we're going to go do the groceries.
We're going to have fun. We're going to chat and do this and that.
But is that okay with you?
Because if not, no problem.
We just won't go to the grocery store.
We'll go to the convenience store and just pick up the essentials and you won't get anything.
And so the kid's going to say, okay, well, you know, I might bargain back and forth.
Maybe you end up with like one small candy bar or something like that, right?
And so you say, you look him in the eye.
Before you go in, you get that connection.
You get that eye contact. You say, okay, we're on the same page here, right?
We're going to go in. We're going to spend no more than an hour because I know you're not thrilled about it.
Neither am I. We'll get in there and in and out as quickly as possible.
We'll be like a SWAT team.
And you can have a small candy bar.
You'll be able to buy it up to 75 cents.
You know what that is, blah, blah, blah.
Now, if then the kid...
I mean, I'm not going to sort of go through the whole steps of it, because I'm sure you can imagine that this could happen.
I don't think it'll happen over time, but it certainly will happen.
It could happen. I mean, maybe the first time or the second time.
Now, if you've got that all set up with the kid, and then the kid just starts grabbing candy bars and has a tantrum and so on, then you're going to get mad at them.
And you're going to get completely legitimately mad at them.
Because you had a deal...
And they unilaterally broke it.
You had an agreement, right?
Everything in a child is negotiation.
We want to teach kids how to negotiate so that they're good at life, which is a lot about negotiation.
You can get mad at that kid.
We had a deal. You looked me straight in the eye and said, this is what you were going to do.
Now, how would you feel about that?
I mean, if I come to your school, I say, I'm going to come pick you up at 4 o'clock, and I just don't show up.
How do you feel? Don't you feel kind of mad and betrayed and angry and confused and resentful?
I mean, of course you would. Well, that's exactly how I feel, because we had a deal.
And if I can't trust you with a deal about what we're going to do, then we have a lot of problems.
Now, you're always totally open to revisiting the deal.
The deal is not like chains around your neck.
I mean, if you want to sort of say, halfway through the grocery store, I want more, you can always reopen the negotiation.
I want two candy bars or whatever, that's fine.
But you can't just unilaterally break your agreement at the end.
Unless you feel it's okay if I just, whenever I feel like it, break an agreement with you.
So if I say we're going to the zoo on Saturday and then I wake up and just say, nope, you know what, I'm just going to sit here and read all day and go and amuse yourself.
If you would feel upset at that, then you understand how I feel upset.
I mean, you can legitimately get angry with a child as you would with an adult who unilaterally breaks an agreement that they have committed to.
And that's one thing.
But if you've been an inconsistent parent, and if sometimes when the kid has a tantrum, he gets two candy bars, and you never have any rules, and you never have any structure, I'm taking an extreme, of course, here, then if you get angry at your child who's acting up or having a tantrum in a grocery store because you're humiliated, then that is completely unjust.
I mean, that's completely unjust.
Imagine, I mean, if you sort of put yourself in my shoes and sort of say, okay, well, Steph and Christina are out for dinner at a gathering of her psychological associates, right?
And they ask me if I'm an atheist and say, yes, by golly, I am an atheist.
And that's like 0.01% of what I believe or don't believe, but that's one small component for sure, in the same way that I don't believe in leprechauns and ghosts and so on.
Now, if she then got really angry at me because a lot of these people were religious and she needed this or that, right?
If she got really angry at me and was really cold and we left in a huff and she talked to me all the way home, well, that would be completely unjust.
Now, if she said to me, listen, I need you to dodge for X, Y, and Z reason.
I don't think she ever would, but I mean, imagine she did, right?
She said, I need you to dodge this question of religion if it comes up because of X, Y, and Z. Then I can say, you know what, it's better that I'm not there, because I don't feel comfortable doing that, so go have a great time, and I'll stay home.
Then that's one thing. And if I say, no, I can't do that, but I still want to come, and she says, well, I don't feel comfortable with that for X, Y, and Z reason.
Well, those are all things. But if I say, don't worry, I will be as silent as the grave about religion, and I will dodge the question, and, you know, somebody says, are you an atheist?
And I say, well, religion is a complicated topic, which it is.
It's just ways of not answering the question, right?
And, you know, you define for me what religion is, and I'll tell you what, you know, whether I believe in this or that or the other.
And, you know, you just keep asking them questions about religion and its history, and it's, you know, you can exhaust them long before they get to asking you a simple question, right?
And so, if I don't do that, like, if I then just go and say, no, I'm an atheist, and I think people who are religious are evil, and there's some huge...
And then Christina would have every single right to get angry at me in that circumstance.
And of course she would, because I had an agreement, and I broke it.
And so she can't get mad at me if we don't have any agreement and she just feels humiliated and she acts out.
That's completely unjust and petty and brutal and bullying.
She would never do that in a million years.
But if she did feel angry and humiliated, then we would have that discussion.
She would say, you know, I feel really angry and humiliated in there.
Isn't that interesting? Let's figure out what happened.
And I will say, yeah, I really got that when I said this atheist thing and the whole room went cold and, you know, it was really weird and let's sort of figure out what happened.
And we would figure it out.
And then we would sort of say, okay, what we need to do is have these sort of discussions beforehand in these sensitive situations, ways of solving problems, come up with a negotiation and so on.
And so, the way in which you, I mean, I guess the next big topic, at least for me, is the way that you communicate to children in a way that indicates that you're interested in their self-interest, fascinated, enamored of their self-interest, and are doing your best to try and have them as happy a life as possible.
We will talk about that this afternoon.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
Feel free to come by and donate, or I'll sing the whole next podcast.
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