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April 26, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:29
211 Childhood Prisons
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
I think I've calibrated the volume just perfectly now.
So there's enough of me and no annoying background sound.
So it is 525, April the 26th, 2006.
Tuesday, Wednesday afternoon.
And we are going to go on a journey, ladies and gentlemen, this afternoon.
We are abandoning traffic jams, which is what this series is titularly called.
And instead, we are going to go with traffic jazz.
I am going to try an entire improv show.
And what does that mean?
It means that, believe it or not, the other ones are not entire improvs.
Actually, they have a pretty good structure for most of them.
But this one is going to be me tight-wiring.
Tight-rope wiring?
High-wiring? Something to do with a high rope and a long fall with no net.
And the reason for that is I'm going to try and think on the fly.
And the reason I'm going to try and think on the fly?
It's just far too much work to plan these things out.
No. It is, in fact, because I cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot solve the problem of why stateless prisons is causing everybody so much grief.
I am telling you, it is astounding!
I have produced a lot of fairly controversial material, and I have received some hostile emails, some angry emails, not a huge amount, but holy, holy, holy, lordy, lordy, lordy, has stateless prisons absolutely triggered something in people?
And I consider this to be an excellent thing, because I am a man who lives to divide others.
But I think this is an excellent thing, because it helps me to understand Why?
We're not winning. See, this article was published on LewRockwell.com, and so most of the people who were there are kind of down with the whole libertarianism thing already.
I mean, you don't just accidentally come to LewRockwell.com.
You're mostly a libertarian already if you're there.
Now, libertarians, for those who are absolutely fascinated with these kinds of distinctions, libertarians, I think, are generally considered to include anarcho-capitalists, but also, before we go on, I want to talk about...
You know it's coming!
I want to talk about donations in that I have a new gift that I'm going to hand out to people like Candy.
And I hope that if you have a copy of The God of Atheists and you're plowing along, you will hop over to the boards.
I'll set up a section tonight for reviewing it and let us know, even if you're not done, how good it is, how much you enjoy it, or how much you don't enjoy it, or how bad it is, so that other people can figure out the value of it.
But I am going to come up with a new gift for people who donate $100 or more.
And that's Canadian, so don't think of it as a huge amount of money.
And if you really are troubled by it, just think of it as fiat money that has no inherent value anyway.
So if we were on the gold standard, it would seem real, but not so much.
I'll give you a new gift, which will be the opportunity to enjoy one of my books without cracking open a page.
So I'll leave it at that. And attempt to come back to where I was before I remembered that I'm supposed to talk about donations every show.
So most of the people on LewRockwell.com are libertarians, are minimalists, minarchists, whatever you want to call them.
They believe in small state, right?
It's the, I guess, the holy trinity of the state as described by Ayn Rand.
And the state as described by Ayn Rand is the police, the military, and the law courts, right?
That's what it's supposed to be all about, baby.
That's what the lady herself...
And this is pretty common for a lot of people, and that's because, well, there's sort of a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons is because it is just generally and overall considered to be too technically difficult and also too controversial to come up with a replacement for all state functions,
right? So people say, well, welfare is bad, and Unemployment insurance is bad, and Social Security is bad, but in order to avoid dealing with the real meat of the matter or really having to struggle with difficult issues, and they are difficult, of course, I am taking some swings at them, which I'm sure have as many hits as misses as hits.
So the basic issue is that people will allow the state to continue in existence conceptually and morally because this problem of the police, the law courts, and the military...
Are considered to be so problematic.
Now, I mean, they're a challenge, of course, but really that hard?
I mean, that hard?
I don't really see how it's that hard.
I guess unless you say that people are evil and there's going to be lots of bad people around and so on, then...
Of course, as I made the argument before, and we'll probably make it again, there's lots of evil people, you can't have a state, because the evil people will all end up in the state.
So you can't really have that as a situation that's going to make sense, and if there aren't that many evil people, then we really don't need a state.
I mean, we're going to end up being far more preyed upon by the state in that situation than we ever will be by private citizens who are criminals.
And by the way, just in case you're wondering, not only have I set myself a very difficult task of trying to work out a very difficult problem without any particular preparation, just to see where things go, not only have I set myself that task, but ladies and gentlemen, traffic.
Is at a standstill.
And you know, the longer that my drive takes, the more filler, I mean, the more high-quality podcasting you get for your podcasting dollar.
So, it's going to be a difficult problem for me to solve on the fly, and it looks like I might have a long time to solve it.
And even have a hands-free having one coffee and being able to make silly noises with my lips, I think that gives you a sense of just how busy traffic is.
And this is unusual because this, of course, is a private road.
Normally it's like hyperspace compared to the impulse power of the public roads, but right now we are not moving, except intellectually.
So let me continue on with my traffic jazz to see if I can solve this problem on the fly.
Now, why, oh why, oh why, do people think that private prisons are the final insult?
Like, I'll go with you all the way, but boy, I'll even go with you, like, DROs didn't cause this much controversy.
There were some people who were like, well, DROs will become fascists and blah blah blah, that's relatively easy to counter.
But there's private prisons, holy, I just can't tell you how much hostility I've gotten in my email.
I've posted a couple of them, not even the worst ones, a couple of them on the Free Domain Radio boards, which you can have a look at.
They're under, I have a section for letters, and there's pro, not so pro, and other.
And in not so pro, I actually set up a special section for the responses to stateless prisons, which you can have a look at and see as being, you know, just a little bit on the extreme side, and certainly more extreme than anything else I've ever received in my entire career.
As a guy who writes and talks.
Let's not get too technical here.
So, why is this going on?
Well, this is sort of my...
And, you know, please, I beg for your indulgence.
I beg for your indulgence. You want to see a brain sort of working out?
This is like, I don't know, washing scales, maybe?
Working out without structure.
I beg your indulgence.
I may beat around the bushes even more than usual.
And I may even have...
A tangent. Oh, heavens.
Well, you know, it's what, 209, 210?
It's going to happen. It's going to happen sooner or later, so today may as well be the day.
So last night I was talking about with Christina that I just can't solve this problem.
I just can't solve why people are so messed up about stateless prisons.
So I'm going to just tell you what I think, and then I'll probably tell you what I think again and again and again until traffic lets up.
I mean, until we've solved the problem.
We will continue to talk about it.
Now... Everything that is this emotionally volatile goes back to childhood.
It goes back to childhood, and it goes back to a truth in childhood that is denied as an adult.
That is always the case.
And I would say that, you know, 95% of people's political opinions are based on things that they experienced, traumas they experienced in childhood, that they don't acknowledge as adults.
And so you get all these defenses and projections and so on.
So what could it mean when I talk about a way of punishing criminals without using violence?
Neither emotional violence nor physical violence.
When I talk to people about solving even the problems of violent crime without using violence, which of course I'm sure you've heard about in the Stateless Prisons article if you've read it or listened to it, And if this has produced an enormous and hostile reaction,
and if almost all enormous and hostile reactions trace back to childhood, then what could stateless prisons be to people other than a metaphor or a projection for their own childhoods?
And one of the things that gave me a clue about this, and I guess I'll ask Christina's permission before publishing this because maybe I'll...
Cut here if Christina doesn't like this amount of personal revelation occurring.
And resume in about, based on traffic, 45 minutes or so.
But Christina had a dream last night.
Now, Christina's been working on an issue within her own psyche, which is that she went through a phase of, I guess...
I shouldn't say happy compliance is probably close but not quite right, wherein she believed that the Greek community was good and that her parents were nice and that they were really into family and education and they were very tight and it was a good thing.
She went through this phase in her sort of early teens of agreeing with the collectivism and the irrationality and the bullying that was all around her.
And not just like, fine, I'll go along with it, but like, yeah, okay, it is true.
And this has been quite difficult for her to resolve.
Because it's very hard, and I know this from my own personal experience, that when you look at yourself in your past and you say, okay...
I kind of went along with all of this.
I bought into it.
I went along with it.
And that wasn't so much, for me, the issue.
For me, the issue was, well, why was I the one who was always picked on?
Why was I the one who was always ground down and bullied and so on?
Why was it always me? I don't mean in general.
I was really bullied in general, outside of my family.
But in my family... Everyone came down like a ton of bricks on me, and I was only two and a half years younger than my older brother, so it wasn't...
So for me, it was that, like, what was there about me that invited this kind of aggression and hostility and bullying?
Oh, it was just terrible. I really had to work hard because I felt ashamed of being bullied.
And that I let that happen and that it went on for years and so on.
And I had a really tough time with that.
It was very, very difficult to try and find self-respect.
The first thing that you feel when you start to really feel your childhood pains, aches and pains and hopefully not worse, When you start to feel all of that, the first thing that you feel is pain, and then the second thing you feel is a recoiling, at least I did, and other people I know have as well.
You get a recoiling against this pain because it's overwhelming, and you want to take responsibility.
You want to move past it.
So you take responsibility.
Okay, well, I should have done this, and I should have done that.
And you say, well, that's how I'm going to solve it, which, of course, is nonsense, and I'll sort of get to why in a little bit.
Okay, maybe not a little bit because we're still going very slow in traffic, but I think you get the idea.
And so for Christina, when she looks back on her own history and she remembers what she considers this sort of semi-shameful time of acquiescence with immoral falsehoods of culture and we're the best and so on, well, she felt very ashamed about all of that.
And I was trying to, because I sort of went through this a couple of years ago, I was sort of trying to help her To understand that she should have respect for herself, her younger self, right?
Herself when she was like 11 or 12 versus entering puberty, right?
Which is the big time where during the terrible twos and early on, as I talked about before, you have a fair amount of resistance to irrational parental edicts, or we could just say parental edicts.
And then in latency, from like 5 or 6 to about 10 or 11, you kind of can get by just going along with things.
You don't have the hormones, you don't have the need for individuation that comes with puberty and so on, so you kind of check along.
Puberty comes, wham!
You really have to deal with the problem of individuation, and your parents won't let you.
They don't encourage it. They do maybe at a vague, abstract, intellectual level, but when it comes deep down to it, they're not going to Let you do it.
Everyone, you know, I'm going to give up on this pretense of if you had a good job.
Everyone was badly raised. Everyone is badly raised.
That's just everyone in the whole white world is raised really badly, and that's why the world isn't such a mess.
And the moment I meet somebody who was raised really well, and it's evident and clear, I will absolutely change.
But, you know, I'm giving up on this.
Maybe if you this, I don't want to impose my childhood on you or anything like, yeah, you may not have gone through what I went through, but you were badly raised.
Trust me. So, you know, otherwise you wouldn't be on the Freedom Aid radio boards.
Neither would I be doing this podcasting.
We'd all be living in Libertopia, I think someone called it, on the boards today.
So, yeah, we're healing, and we're healing because we were badly raised, and it's essential that we heal, and it's essential we talk about our healing so that mankind can become better, too.
And so when Christina hit puberty, she began to break out of this, I guess, thoughtless compliance that goes on when you're in the latency period.
And then you have this great problem.
It's the growth of sexuality, the growth of individuation, the growth of hormones, the growth of independence, the growth of temper, usually.
I mean, hormones produce that kind of stuff.
And so Christina went into this, as she sort of feels about it, went into this acquiescence mode or goes into this acquiescence mode.
And she begins to not just parrot the party line, I guess you could say.
And I said, well, you know, we can assume that that was because the pressures on you, as the pressures on all of us during that time, to comply with irrationality of whatever kind we're faced with is enormous.
It's enormous. It is airless in that cave, and the walls are closing in, and you have to comply.
You have to comply.
There's no shame in complying.
And you have to recognize that you didn't have a choice, and we've gone through all of this stuff before in the series on childhood to, I guess, toddlerhood to adolescence, but that the decision that she made to comply, the decision that I made to comply, perfectly moral, perfectly valid, absolutely the right thing to do.
We are all geniuses of survival.
That is our nature. And so whatever we had to do to survive, we did, and we should feel respect for it.
And then we had a conflict this weekend over something which is not really worth getting into here.
And during the process of working out that conflict, We started talking about her younger self for a variety of reasons.
And she said something like, that I do respect my younger self now and I don't want to feel any pity for her.
And I sort of, like, what?
And I said, well, I don't really understand why the two are opposite poles.
Like, if you have respect for decisions that you made when you were younger, when you were under extreme parental irrational duress...
And she's like, well, if I respect someone, how can I feel pity for them?
And I said, well, it seems to me that the reason that you're respecting the decisions you made when you were younger is because they were made under such duress.
If I become, let's just say, I'm an adult and I was raised well, I'm in the fantasy libertopia, right?
And I was raised well, and somebody frowns at me and I immediately cave and acquiesce, and of course that's not going to happen, right?
If you're raised well, that doesn't happen to you.
Then I could be accused of cowardice, but...
If I am raised, like, bullied all the time and so on, and then someone gets mad at me and I start complying, well, it's just scar tissue, right?
I mean, you're not an agoraphobic if you're locked in the house, right?
I mean, you may want to leave.
If you can leave and you don't leave, that's one thing.
But if you can't leave, then it's not diagnosable as anything, right, other than I can't leave, right?
And so I said to Christina that the degree of respect that you have for your younger self is the degree of pity and empathy you have for the terrible situation that you were in when you were younger.
And the two are co-joined.
They're exactly the same. If we see a strong man struggling under an enormously heavy burden that someone else has tied to him or lashed to him or something, then we are going to feel respect and admiration like he's struggling down the road to save his kid and somebody's tied three larks to his back or something.
We're going to feel admiration, but we're also going to feel pity for him for being in that situation.
So respect and admiration and respect and honor and pity and terror are all co-joined when you're looking at a situation of coercion.
So we talked about that for quite some time, and I think she's sort of really, really got it, and it takes a while to get those kinds of things.
And then when we were going to sleep, we had another conversation about it, which went just sort of one step further, and then she went to sleep.
And then, I guess around 3.30 this morning, or 4 o'clock this morning, I was startled awake because she was crying out in her sleep.
And I... Woke her up sort of gently and asked her what was going on, and she'd had this dream.
And it's a very short dream, but I think it's very power-packed.
And believe it or not, I'm going to tie it into stateless prisons.
I think I know how I can do this now.
It's all... I am Moses before the Red Sea.
It is parting. We shall stroll through to the other side.
And so she had this dream, and the dream was this.
She was sitting in the audience of a Dr.
Phil show, and I was sort of around somewhere.
She can't remember exactly where.
And Dr.
Phil, she has to remember the topic, but Dr.
Phil said, and now we're going to show you something.
We're going to do something really special.
Now this is something really special just for you.
And the lights went down, dimmed, and went off.
It was pitch black. And then Christina felt these gloved, furry hands close around her nose and around her mouth.
And she could barely breathe.
And it was like if you're wearing, I guess, fur gloves or something like that.
It was felt gloves or something like that.
But they closed over her eyes.
Her hands, sorry, over her nose and over her mouth, she could barely, barely, barely breathe.
And she was sitting there thinking while this was occurring, obviously, A, this is terrible, and B, okay, I have a choice in this situation.
This is the amazing thing about dreams, just how compact they are.
Like in the space of a 30-second dream, you can get your whole teenage years.
So she thought, okay, I can barely breathe, so I have a choice.
I can either fight and cry out, or I can pretend to be dead.
Now, if I pretend to be dead, I can still continue to breathe, because the person's not going to go limp or whatever, the person's going to hold on for another minute or two and then let go, but I can still breathe a little, so if I pretend to be dead, then I'll be okay.
Now, I can also, of course, cry out and try and get help.
Now, the danger is really large in that situation.
If I cry out and try to get help, and I'm in a place where people can help me and will help me and so on, then yes, if I cry out, they'll flip the lights on and security guards or maybe Dr. Phil himself or maybe Steph will pull this crazy guy with the fur gloves off my throat and mouth they'll flip the lights on and security guards or maybe Dr. Phil himself or maybe Steph
But if I'm not in a place where people can help me, crying out for help, crying out for salvation, will actually get me killed.
it.
you Because if the man realizes that I can breathe a tiny little bit, or she assumed it was a man, then he's going to change his grip so that I can't breathe at all.
So if I cry out and I'm not in a situation where anyone is or can or will help me, Then I'm going to die.
And what a terrible choice that is.
What a terrible risk that is.
And how many of us would take that risk rather than pretend to be dead?
Because the person obviously wants to choke you, right?
Pretend to be dead, hope the person's going to think you're dead, and go away.
It's the same thing you're supposed to do with a grizzly, right?
A grizzly attacks you and play dead, right?
Because they don't like to eat stuff until after it's decayed for a couple of days.
So you play dead and they'll wander off.
Now she, in the dream, decided to sort of...
to try and sort of shout out, right?
Get some sort of salvation.
And, of course, that's part of her unconscious working with the real world in that I'm in the bed next to her and I'm going to wake her up and talk to her and comfort her and so on.
And this is an incredible dream.
I mean, most dreams are amazing when you sort of sit down and think about them.
But this, of course, is the choice that she was facing when she was 12 or 11 or when puberty hit and she had individuation and hormones and so on starting to run through her body.
Well, she is about to be taught something.
Dr. Phil's like a father figure here, right?
And her father is bald as well.
And so, Dr.
Phil's like, ah, here's something really special.
I'm going to teach you something. This is going to be great.
This is going to be a good thing.
It turns out to be a really terrible thing.
And the lights are down. The lights are down means nobody can see it.
It's in the home. It's silent, right?
It's about the family. And...
The choice when you want to grow into rationality and individuality and so on, and it turns out that...
You can't. Nobody's going to let you.
It's impossible. Everybody is arrayed against you.
Everybody fights you.
Everybody diminishes you.
Everybody squashes you.
Everybody chokes you off.
And we all experience this even as adults.
I mean, I'm 39 years old, for Christ's sake.
And I still have this in conversations when you bring up a basic or elemental moral truth.
And I don't say this every time I go to pick up an ice cream, but if people are talking trash about ethics or whatever, I'll bring up a sort of basic truth.
And there's a weird shudder and everyone gets hostile and cold and weird.
And of course, because you're trampling on their families and their whole sense of what it means to be a good person and so on.
And so with Christina, when it was like, always wear a skirt.
Why? Because it's respectful.
To who? To your father.
Whatever, right? Always wear something nice.
Be nice, be clean, be pretty, be silent, be agreeable, be this, be that.
Why? It's respectful. Why?
To your elders, to God, to the church, to being Greek, to your father, to your mother, to your cousins, who knows, right?
She didn't want to go to church. Well, we have to go to church.
Why? Because we have to go to church.
Well, why do we have to go to church? Because we pray to God.
Now, that's it. Get up and get to church.
I mean, you may not have had this.
You may have had it in any number of other ways.
But you had it for sure.
Absolutely guaranteed. You had this smackdown on your personality when you hit puberty.
You had a complete smackdown on your personality because it's reflexive.
People don't even think about it.
If you want to not blame your parents directly, fine.
They had no other way of doing it.
It happened to them even worse than it happened to you.
They were a huge step forward. Who knows, right?
But you absolutely had to smack down on your personality.
And if you were irrational, then you had a smack down on rationality.
If you were rational, then you had a smack down on irrationality.
Whatever you were was smacked down, and the opposite was held up to be the ideal.
And it is the base oppositional nature of parental authority, illegitimate parental authority, and all parental authority is illegitimate because nobody knows smack about ethics these days, or integrity, or truth, or honor, or respect, or virtue.
I mean, we're all just completely blind, and this is another reason why the lights are out in this dream.
And so the only way that parents get children to obey is through bullying and using false arguments from morality.
And so in this dream, this hand closes over her.
Her breathing apparatus, right?
Her source of life, right?
The true self. And she's allowed a tiny, tiny space to breathe.
And she decides, rationally, most of us would decide to play dead rather than to cry out.
Because in reality, there was no one who could help Christina when she was 11 or 12.
There was no one who could help validate her rebellion against the false ethics of her community, the false conformity, the pettiness, the stupid blind idiocy of all of these stupid, stupid ethics.
That you're handed down. Respect your elders.
Go to church. Respect your teachers.
Go get a good education.
Get a good job. Wear a skirt.
Be nice. Be clean. Be polite.
Be subservient. Be obsequious.
Be this. Be that. Oh, it's all virtuous.
All of that shite that you get stuffed down your throat in one form or another.
This can be patriotism.
This can be true to your school.
This can be any kind of crap.
But all you were fed was crap when you were in your sort of latency to mid-teenage years.
All just nonsense and all just false and hypocritical and ridiculous.
And bullying, right?
And destructive. Well, nobody was going to help her.
Was she going to go and talk to her cousins?
Her cousins still go to church every week.
Her cousins get all their kids baptized.
I mean, they were the same people back then.
Was she going to go to anyone? Was she going to go to her wasp friends who all, like, had single-parent households and loved the Greek communities and loved the very idea of having that many people over for a barbecue and all those sad little wasp gatherings with, like, one parent and two friends?
Ugh! I mean, she wasn't going to get any.
Was she getting any truth from her public school teachers?
Well, of course not. Was she getting any truth from her priest?
Of course not. So there was no one who could help her.
And so who could she cry out to to get this choking conformity demand off her throat?
Nobody. Nobody at all.
Now she cried out now because I'm around and I can help her with through these things as she helps me through other things just because I have had a bit more experience in this area and have gone through this process of trying to figure out early humiliation and what it means and so that you can actually have a huge amount of respect for your history, for the choices that you made when you were younger, while simultaneously feeling pity and terror and horror at what you had to go through.
I mean those two things I think are very important to co-join in your personality.
If you only have the respect, then you think you're invulnerable and it actually weakens the respect that you should have for yourself.
And if you only have the pity and the horror without the respect, then you're continuing to abuse yourself because you don't recognize and respect that you did the best you could under the circumstances that you found yourself in.
Now, this dream and its aftermath has been very, very powerful.
And, of course, the whole goal of this is, for me, is to make Christina a better therapist.
She's fantastic already.
Her clinic is growing like wildfire.
I want to make her a fantastically better therapist so that she can hire more people, get more patients, and I can finally become this kept man that I've been wanting to be.
Oh, gosh, probably since I was in my last womb.
So, you know, really, really hoping to get that wifely umbilical reattached because, you know, this working thing, at least not working on Freedom Aid Radio on these podcasts, it's not really my calling.
But, hey, we'll get there.
We just have to be patient. So...
So, this is a way of sort of me setting up the discussion here and just think, it is now 28 minutes and 30 seconds into the podcast.
If traffic were good, we'd almost be done.
I'd have to go really fast through the next bit.
In other words, I'd actually have to be...
I don't know.
I can't even pronounce the word. Oh, I'm sure you know that.
So... This is my way of saying that childhood is a prison.
Our childhoods, our collective childhoods, were prisons.
And I know I'm going to get even more emails about this.
People are like, I had a good relationship with my mom and dad.
They were fine.
They were this, they were that. No, I'm sorry.
I've got to tell you, and I hate to say it because I don't mean to be a bully, but you're wrong.
Everybody, unless your parents are like brain-arcing geniuses who have managed to figure out all of the ethics that we're struggling with...
And all of the epistemology, all of the metaphysics, and have figured out, I mean, and know how to apply that to child raising and this and that.
If they are deities of the mind and spirit who can overcome 5,000 years of crap that we've been force-fed, which is just the icing on the cake of, like, 50,000 years of tribal stupidities, if they've managed to do all of that and fully integrate it into their parenting, by God, you can raise my children. And me.
So... Please give me a shout.
Failing that, your childhood was a prison.
And it was a prison that didn't matter.
And it didn't matter how many other people were in the same prison.
It really doesn't matter at all.
And that, I think, is very important.
History, one's personal history, has nothing to do with statistics.
At all. At all.
At all. At all.
It'd be like, okay, well, yeah, other people had it worse and other people were the same as I. It doesn't matter.
Your own personal experience of life is always relative to your true self, to integrity, to reality, to empiricism, to rationality, to integrity.
And that's involuntary.
The comparison of your existing situation to a better situation is completely involuntary.
Completely and totally. And the statistics mean nothing because you don't know any of that when you're a kid.
And it would be like saying, well, okay, so I have cancer and it's causing me a lot of pain, but lots of other people have cancer too, so I'm not going to feel any pain.
It's like, well, it doesn't matter. It's your nervous system.
It's your history. It's your life.
So... That is something that's very important, I think, in my humble opinion, to understand.
Your childhood was a prison.
Now, if you accept that your childhood was a prison, and what do I mean by that?
Well, you couldn't go anywhere. I mean, you couldn't leave.
I mean, when Christine and I have kids, we're not going to be sort of saying to them when they're six, so you want to go someplace else and be raised somewhere else, or are you going to stay here with us?
Well, they don't have that option. Right?
Because I'm going to need them to do the mowing.
And fix the roof. And we might have a leaky skylight by that time as well.
So there'll be lots of things for them to do.
And I don't like paying for labor.
So obviously they're going to have to stay.
So... Childhood is a prison.
And it doesn't mean that that's a bad thing.
I mean, obviously, it's hopefully a prison of education, instruction, and guidance.
But children don't have any choice about where they stay.
They're stuck with you. You give them food and water.
You confine them to their quarters if they're bad.
And yes, they get to run around and so on, but it's a pretty short leash.
They always have to end up coming back home.
And if they don't like you or you don't like them, you're still stuck with each other.
So childhood is a prison.
Now, can childhood ever not be a prison?
Well, yeah, I think that's possible, but I think we're quite a ways away from that.
So, you know, maybe down the road at some point it won't be a prison.
But now, yes, pretty much with the prison thing.
And certainly in the past, right?
So childhood is a prison, and like most prisons, or I guess like all prisons, there's a variety of relationships that one has with one's prison guards, right?
One's parents. Some prisons are Abu Ghraib, and some of them are like minimum security walkabouts.
But there are still prisons, right?
I mean, still, as a child, you don't have choice about where you live and who your boss is and so on.
And you have to obey. I mean, you have to obey.
Our power corrupts. Parental power is so extreme these days that there's just a lot of corruption involved in it.
So, your childhood was a prison.
So, when I start to talk about stateless prisons...
I think that people...
I think what's happening, personally, this is sort of my jazzy theory, I think, that I'm sort of working out as we go.
My basic theory is that when I talk about stateless prisons, I'm directly tapping into people's experiences of authority as a child.
So as long as people believe that the state must exist, even just for violent criminals, they are saying there is a legitimate use for violence, for coercive centralized violent authority in the world.
And as soon as you come along with the whole no state thing, then people will go with you for a ways.
But when you start to talk about prisons, I think it really hooks into their unconscious memory of their own childhood experiences.
And I think that's why I'm getting so much hostility.
Okay.
And I think it's a clue as to how we can solve the problem.
Now, traffic has really eased up, so I'm not sure.
I passed a big wreck with a bunch of, actually, three Range Rovers that seems to have decided to just crash into each other for funsies.
So, because traffic has opened up quite a bit, I'm not entirely sure that I'm going to be able to solve this today.
But don't worry. I can always do more, baby.
Wow. But I really think that this idea ties into people's experience of their own childhoods.
And I think it's very traumatic for them at a very deep level.
Because deep down, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down, we all know that as children, we did not need to be bullied.
We did not need to be bullied.
We didn't need to be bullied or humiliated by our parents, by our teachers, by our priests, by our extended family, our aunts and uncles, grandparents.
We didn't need to be bullied at all.
We were eager, eager to be good kids, eager to be happy kids, eager to get along with people, eager to help out.
We really, really, really wanted to.
And all that happened was we were just bullied.
Bullied, bullied, bullied, bullied, bullied.
And it could have been overt.
It could have been covert. It could have been through disapproval.
It could have been through physical violence.
It could have been, God forbid, through sexual violence.
It could have been through frowns.
It could have been through the withdrawals.
It could have been through whatever.
It could have been through, as one of the FDRers has put it, that in private he was allowed to ask questions, but in public, the asking of those same questions was very much discouraged.
And so, yeah, your father's thing is asking questions, but the mom gets all embarrassed and guilty and...
It shames the child or expresses that kind of negativity when the same questions are asked in public.
Your own individuality becomes a guilty secret.
That's the kind of prison I'm talking about.
It can be that innocuous.
You get the message nonetheless that being who you are is not okay.
Being who you naturally are as a child, which is both curious and cooperative.
And the cooperative is driven by the curiosity.
We really want to know that we're doing the right thing, and we're helping out, and so we want to ask questions.
But the moment we ask questions, we start tripping over all of the minds that are left over from our own parents' childhoods, which are brutal and prison-like, and probably more so than ours.
So we all know that we didn't need to be bullied.
We didn't need any coercion or emotional manipulation.
We just needed some honesty.
We just needed some truth. We didn't need our parents to be perfect.
We just needed them to be honest.
So if we say, why do we go to church?
And somebody says, we go to church because we like to get along with people and people will get mad at us if we don't go to church.
Well, maybe that's not something you hugely respect in terms of content, but you can sure respect it in terms of form, and that the person at least is telling you the truth.
But of course, parents don't say that, because they can't confront their own hypocrisy.
So they have to say, well, we go to church because it's the right thing to go to church, right?
And when Christina says to her mom, why do I have to wear a dress?
Why can't I just wear jeans?
It's like we're going to the park.
It's Sunday afternoon.
No one else is going to be there.
Well, if her mom says, look, I mean, I judge my value as a mom by how much you comply with what the community says is okay.
And so you have to wear it so that I don't feel like a failure.
Well, again, you can sort of say, well, I don't respect it, but at least I can respect the honesty.
I don't respect what you're doing, but I can respect that you're being honest about it.
But parents don't do that.
That's respectful to your father.
Well, what the hell does that mean? Respectful.
And if you go to your father and say, Dad, do you respect me more if I'm wearing a dress?
He'd be like, go talk to your mother. And you get this runaround, right?
But we didn't need any of that.
We didn't need any of that when we were kids.
I would have worn a dress anyway.
No, wait. Sorry, we're talking about Christina.
Let's not talk about that. So, we would have been absolutely...
So, violence of any kind, of bullying or shaming or manipulation, was not required for us as children.
We would have been just fine and happier and better off and better kids for it if we hadn't been exposed to any of that stuff.
If our parents had just been honest and said, Why do you have to go to school?
Because if you don't go to school, I get thrown in jail.
Why do you have to respect your teachers?
Because if you don't respect your teachers, they're going to pump you full of Ritalin and you're going to lose 5-10% of your brain mass.
I mean, all of these things are perfectly valid.
Why do I obey the laws?
Because if I don't obey the laws, I come hold a gun to my neck and I kind of like hanging out with you guys rather than sitting in a cell, coldly eyeing Bubba, my larger-than-life roommate.
So, if they've just been honest, eh, you know what, asking for a miracle, but not asking for the world, just asking for a little honesty, just asking for the facts.
But nobody can look at that in themselves.
All they can do is make up all of this just...
Moralizing, sanctimonious, hypocritical shite that they just force-feed us.
I mean, that's the second umbilical, right?
It's a complete reversal. Instead of taking waste out of our system, it's putting them back in.
So, I think then, when I talk about the state or...
When I talk about stateless prisons, and I'm saying that society...
That society doesn't need to use violence even to deal with the worst among us, the most evil and vile human beings.
That society doesn't even need to use violence for these people.
But they can voluntarily and cooperatively put themselves in a prison I think that what it's hooking into people, with people, is that they didn't need to be bullied or have emotional or social violence against them when they were children.
But it did happen when they were children.
They were bullied. We were all raised in prisons.
All raised with bullying or shaming or manipulation or violence.
And I think what it does is...
It taps into a very early part of people's psyche when we eagerly bounded into a family situation wanting to help and somebody just snapped and snarled at us.
And that's okay. I mean, that happens.
That's not the end of the world.
But then justified it and never apologized and never took it back and never set up a standard of behavior that was different.
And then just continue to escalate in terms of I'm treating you badly because you're a bad kid.
You're making me feel bad. You didn't obey.
You didn't do this. And you get into this vicious cycle of controlling children who then naturally want to resist control.
And then you have to apply more control.
And it's the same thing that happens with states, right?
And we know this, right? You pass a law that's oppressive and people just find a way around it.
So you have to pass an even more oppressive law.
But it all comes back to the family.
It's all stuff that we experienced when we were kids, right?
So when I talk about stateless prisons, I say, you know, we don't even need the government for prisons.
We don't even need violence for violent criminals.
We can get them to come along as quietly as a lamb if we are just consistent and moral and acting with integrity.
Whether you believe it or not, whether you believe the argument for the stateless prison or not, that's fine.
But I think that part of people really does understand this argument and really does understand that, look, if we can deal with a rapist without using violence, then what the hell were my parents doing with me when I actually wanted to help and had done no wrong at all?
And if it is possible to have a moral standard, a completely pacifistic moral standard, wherein no violence needs to be applied against the most evil in society, then you open up the possibility of a world With no violence as a moral standard at all.
A little self-defense.
Forget about that right now.
No violence as a moral standard at all.
Complete and total pacifism as an ideal.
I'll tell you why I think that is so powerful for people and why they react to it so strongly is that I really believe that that's where we all started from.
We all started from a place of no violence.
We all started from a place of perfect and idealistic pacifism.
I mean, we had to.
We couldn't even work our fingers, let alone our arms, let alone punch people.
As babies, we have no capacity to initiate the use of force at all.
All we can do is let rip with a significant foot.
And so we all started from a place and idealizing with a place of no violence.
And that's where we were all going.
We were all going originally in our lives to complete pacifism and cooperation and love and happiness and obedience to ethics and universality.
We were all heading to Libertopia.
That was our ticket. That was what was stamped on our ticket.
Next stop, anarcho-capitalist Libertopia.
That is our natural state.
That is our natural place of existence.
Pacifism, cooperation, voluntarism, respect, honor, integrity, virtue.
It's totally natural to us.
And so when I talk about a society which allows no violence, I think it touches a very early part of us, a very...
Straight from the womb into the prisons of her families, that consciousness that occurred before we became aware of the constraints and controls and bullying and impatience and manipulation and violence and scolding and blah blah blah blah blah.
That sort of slowly constricted us like a friendly, happy, foggy boa constrictor.
Slowly closing around us.
Like that gloved and furred hand over Christina's breathing airways.
that slowly, the social control and the emotional and physical bullying, and you can't be who you are, and you've got to do this, and you've got to get up to school, even if you're a night person, you've got to get up at the same time as everyone else, and you've got to study with everyone else, even if you're totally different and are interested in totally and you've got to study with everyone else, even if you're totally
You've got to plod along with the mainstream idiots, or if you're going to be stuck in some class with geniuses, you've got to try and sprint to keep up with them, nothing is for you, nothing is individual to you, nothing is specific to you, you're a cookie cutter kid in a cookie cutter world.
Thank you.
And that kind of bullying of making everyone the same, who is very much an individual, is a real horrible shock.
When you're not allowed to be who you are, which is naturally curious and cooperative, because people are threatened by your curiosity, and also threatened by your cooperation.
Don't misunderstand this.
The parents provoke disobedience within children to protect their own parents.
If you live a life of pacifism as the ideal, of non-violence and cooperation, it doesn't mean never losing your temper, it doesn't mean never raising your voice, but it means doing it honestly, doing it openly, doing it directly, not doing it through manipulation or shaming or bullying or control or withdrawal or, you know, nothing like that.
It doesn't mean don't have emotions.
It means be honest, be accurate, be authentic, have integrity.
But if parents who were themselves, right, as Wordsworth put it, the child is the father of the man, parents, in order to protect their own parents and to try to, and usually very successfully, to evade the pain of their own childhoods,
They absolutely provoke disobedience in their children so they can clamp down on their children so that it becomes an absolute fact that you have to clamp down on your children and you have to control them and you have to tell them what to do and you have to make sure that they behave right and you can't rely on them meeting you halfway.
You can't trust them and be open to them and have the basic respect for another human being that says, you know what?
I bet you if I go 150%, you'll go 200%.
And if I go 200%, you'll go 300%.
Have the basic trust in innocent humanity, which children are always starting out with, that you don't need to bully children.
You don't need to control them. You don't need to tell them what to do.
It doesn't mean that you never modify their behavior.
It doesn't mean that you don't...
Anyway, I've already given my theories on childhood, and I'm sure I'm going to get another 5,000 emails from parents telling me I don't have a clue what I'm talking about, so I don't want to get distracted in that conversation.
But we do start as children from a place which says, there's no need for any of this.
There's no need for any bullying or control or manipulation or falsehoods.
There's no need for hypocrisy.
None. I love my parents.
I want to help them. I want to be a part of this family.
I want to have fun. I want to learn.
I want to grow. I want to understand.
I want to be all that and more.
I want to become who I am.
I want to stay who I am.
I don't have to come back to it later and try and recover it.
I'm trying to regrow a foreskin if you were unfortunate enough to be part of the lopped generation.
So, we're all starting from that, and then boom, we get clamped down on in one manner or another.
And so, when you start to talk about there's no justification for violence, even for the violence, then I think what that translates to, it's like a direct rope snaking its way down a dark well to our original true self from when we were very, very young. And it says, you know what?
You were mistreated.
Although everyone else in the world went through the same thing, what you went through was a bad thing.
It was an unnecessary thing.
It was a bullying thing.
It was a hypocritical thing.
It was so unnecessary.
You would have cooperated with rational...
Beneficial, curious, honest people, your parents, you would have cooperated with them and been happy and obedient to the nth degree.
Because you're not obeying them, their personal irrationalities and bullying, you're obeying the truth.
The way that I try to be a slave to logic, except in this podcast, and some others, but at least I'm honest about that, I try to be a slave to logic and the scientific method as much as humanly possible.
It doesn't enslave me, it sets me free!
It's like saying, I don't want to be enslaved by using English to English-speaking audiences.
I don't want to be enslaved by grammar.
I don't want to be enslaved by actually plugging my microphone in to do a podcast.
I mean, it's not being enslaved, it's being liberated.
But because parents don't understand the truth, don't understand reality or rationality or empiricism or ethics...
Then it's just a battle of wills.
It's just obey me because I'm bigger.
Obey me because I'm taller. Obey me because I'm bullying you.
Obey me because I control you.
Obey me because it's my house.
Obey me because it's my food.
Obey me because I can get you kicked out of school and you have no alternatives.
And I don't care how bored you are.
And I don't care how stupid you think the rules are.
And I don't care about this. You just obey, damn it.
Sit down, shut up, and obey.
And that happens at one time.
This guy on the board who's saying my mom was embarrassed when we were asked those same questions in public, that's the same thing.
That's sit down and shut up.
It's done in a different way, but it's exactly the same thing.
In fact, it's even worse because it's not verbal.
It's subtle. Christina's having a harder time grappling with her own conformity than I ever did because at least I had external physical violence and she had spanked and stuff like that.
And not that that's inconsequential, but relative to what I went through, it's pretty moderate.
And so she's having a very tough time with her own compliance because it was a soft form of compliance.
She wasn't beaten. She wasn't screamed at all the time.
She wasn't whatever, right? So my experience was, yeah, I confound with the crazy irrationality because I didn't want to get injured or killed, right?
I go, I'm there.
Sign me up. I'll lick your boots twice if you want.
But she had more of an idealized and subtle and emotionally manipulative and based on Greek pride and all this kind of stuff, right?
So she has a hard time understanding her own compliance because that's what the dream was, that you couldn't breathe, right?
Nobody was hitting her. They were just choking off her capacity to breathe.
And the felt was important, right?
It's soft. It's subtle.
And so what the mom does, I mean, it would be better to have a dad who says, sit down, shut up, you're embarrassing me, goddammit.
I think that would be better.
Myself, I think that would be an easier thing to deal with.
That's honest, right?
But the mother just getting cold and weird and distant and blushing and shooting you looks of horror and shame, it's kind of slimy, right?
It's kind of gross and icky and manipulative.
And that, I think, is a harder thing to deal with.
It's harder to see that kind of bullying and manipulation.
It's harder now. When you were there, it was completely obvious and totally easy to see, but, you know, we obscure things over time because it's painful to deal with the truth, right?
It's hard to look at families sort of honestly and openly.
So... That's my overall take on why I think that the stateless prisons as the final place where people justify violence, right?
The final place that people justify violence is not even in war so much.
I mean, that's less common these days because capitalist nuclear powers don't go to war with each other, right?
They have enough money and they're not starving to death and also mutually assured destruction is a great way to have peace, right?
That's how we know DROs would never take over each other, right?
All DROs would have nuclear weapons, let's just say.
Of course they'd never. They'd have pretty good reciprocity agreements and so on.
But we justify violence...
As a last resort, and I don't mean sort of self-defense, I mean in a state sense, right?
In a government-based sense.
We justify that authority can use violence at the last resort based on evil.
Now, if you get rid of that, then you're saying that institutional violence, state violence, violence from authority is justified under no conceivable circumstances whatsoever.
And this is true for children.
You cannot hit your child and ever call it justified.
You can grab them if they're wandering into traffic exactly the same as you would with a blind person as I talked about before, but you can't go around hitting them.
It's just evil.
It's far more cowardly, as I talked about before, than beating someone up who's in a wheelchair.
And so if violence from authority is never, ever, ever, ever justified, either emotional violence or anything like that, and I think that this came alive for people because it was a conversation.
It wasn't just syllogistic reasoning.
It was portrayed as a dramatic conversation so they could sort of almost picture it.
And so because it was portrayed as a social conversation, something which they could picture, I think that they really...
It really connected with an original true self part of them.
Now, obviously, the people who wrote in with their complaints and horror of what it was that I... These people had pretty bad childhoods, right?
I mean, worse so than the norm.
So it definitely triggered them.
If you say violence was never justified, then what it does is it provokes the original vulnerability.
The way that we get rid of that vulnerability is to say either just blind rage at the parents, which ends up with angry anarchist skinheads, and blind rage at the parents, which is just a reaction and not a judgment.
Or you end up with blind rage at the state, which is displaced, right?
So you're getting mad at the state when you should be dealing with your mom and dad, or both.
Or you end up with this acquiescence of violence in some form.
Violence is justified somehow, and I experience violence, and so at least you can avoid the actual question.
But as soon as you sort of come over that horizon, you see this beautiful shining city of no violence, and no violence justified in any central or coercive authority in any way, shape, or form whatsoever, ever, ever, ever, ever, then it really sparks the injustice of your original prison.
Which was your childhood.
And I think that's my theory.
I think that it actually was good that there was a bit of traffic.
I think it sort of helps me sort of clarify things.
Sorry if it was too long for you.
But hey, you can always play these a little faster and turn me into a fax-like squeal.
So I hope that was helpful.
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