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Aug. 11, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:15
366 Unearthing Crimes Part 1 (audio track to a video podcast...)

Following the blood back to its source...

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Time Text
Good morning everybody. I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. We are going to try the video podcast this morning, and I'm going to start off...
It's August the 11th today, 8.26 in the morning.
So, we're going to start off with a quote relative to the podcast that I put out two days ago, which I think was 3...
Oh, you know what? I'm not even going to try and do these dates and times, because it's the next one after the last one, but before the one to come.
So this was around the podcast entitled The Joy of Hatred.
And a gentleman wrote and said, It occurs to me that the problem with sort of, quote, negative emotions is that we're confusing the emotions themselves with the object of their avocation.
When we feel hate, we feel it for something.
But to hate the hate itself does not feel good.
It feels quite bad, in fact.
If I'm understanding the podcast directly, then I think the emotion is meant to remind us of our disdain for something that is bad.
But without knowing for sure what that something is, I can see how we might conflate the feeling of hate for something bad as a feeling of hate as something bad.
So a feeling of hate for something bad as a feeling of hate as something bad.
I think I understand that. And I said, that's why philosophy is so essential.
If our values are logical, our feelings will be too, and sometimes we can work the other way as well.
Our feelings can be more logical than our reasoning, our sort of conscious reasoning.
He said, interestingly, I still can't think of much that I'd actually say I, quote, hate, though.
Hmm, the idea of the state, most politicians, the idea of religion, most of the clergy, many of my department's bosses.
Sure, I know that you would ask next, and my family?
Well, actually, the honest answer is still no.
Disappointment, indifference, irritation, sure.
But hate? Should I? How would you feel if you saw your...
And then, sorry, I wrote back and said, how would you feel, and I know this gentleman has a niece, how would you feel if you saw your father beating your niece with a belt?
Because he's very close to his niece, and he was hit himself by his father with a belt.
I said, so how would you feel if you saw your father beating your niece with a belt?
Why are you less deserving of sympathy and protection?
He wrote back, holy crap!
Well, that certainly does put things in perspective.
I think you hit the empathy jackpot with that comparison.
And I said, take the time to sit down and really, really picture it.
Every thud, every scream, her crawling for safety and being dragged back for more beatings.
Then imagine what you would do to your father to protect her.
Work with that image over and over and over again.
That's what the podcast is about.
Activating empathy.
And then he wrote back, I don't know why tonight, but the minute I read that, the picture just popped in my head and now I can't get it out.
I was prepping for an interview, now I want to just go sit on the porch.
Well, I can understand that.
And the only thing I said was he said the picture just popped into my head.
I said the picture was in your head and has been for decades.
Good luck on the interview.
All right. So let's kick it into gear, and we will have a chat about this on the road to work.
Look at this. Now you get to see the making of in the lab.
And let's see.
I'm just checking it out. It's not too bad.
It's not too bad.
Okay. So let's get going to work, and we'll talk a little bit more about this, because this may not be clear.
And of course, this is something that I have Talked about for many moons, but a certain amount of repetition is required, generally, in order for us to be able to feel empathy towards ourselves, particularly ourselves as children.
It's all long in the past, and we've all been well trained to pretend that none of these things occur.
So, How can we use these images or these metaphors to be able to shock ourselves into empathy?
This is sort of what I'm trying to do.
What I'm trying to do is to tell you that You need to have empathy for yourself as a child.
This is the very first step towards really gaining joy.
And we'll talk a little bit more about the joy of joy.
I don't want to have the whole series be the joy of hatred and anger and rage and, you know, skinning bunnies or something.
But I do want to be able to get you into having empathy with your younger self.
Now, I've talked about this kind of stuff before.
The connection that I made For this gentleman was obviously a little bit more helpful than some of the other stuff that I've done.
And so I wanted to be able to talk about that a little bit more so that maybe it would help for you as well to be able to see this kind of stuff.
Just checking our light. Okay, if I lean way back here, you get some light.
Or maybe if I lean way up here.
Oh, that's too close to the Mars landing.
All right, so we shall have to live with whatever light we can grab.
Anyway, so how can you shock yourself into empathy with this kind of imagery?
This is part of the violet imagery that I went through, or that I basically had experienced or had inflicted upon me my whole life, which I then was able to understand, By working through the imagery when I was in Morocco in 1999, all too vivid for words.
Well, we have all experienced a significant amount of bullying and violence in our life.
Sadly, there's no way to avoid that at all, because either through our parents or through our siblings or through our school or something like that...
Let's see if I can just make this a little bit...
Welcome to the world of high-tech podcasting.
All right, here we go.
All right.
How's that?
Any better?
Don't worry, I'm stuck with the light.
All right.
Yeah, that's it. I can hunch down and do the Driving Miss Daisy.
Alright, let's try it that way instead so you don't get the whole wheel thing here.
Okay, so back to traumatized childhoods.
Enough fun with technology, let's get back to the important stuff.
The other interesting thing is I have no idea how to edit the video, so now you're going to get all the verbal tics in the world.
And so I would like to talk about the childhood stuff so that it sort of makes a little bit more sense To you, and helps you, I think, to try and get a hold of the emotional content of this kind of childhood stuff.
So, in this particular instance, we had a violent father who would beat his children with a belt, and I think there were other implements that were used, but the belt was the one that was the most feared.
And this, of course, is a mighty, mighty horrifying situation.
And it's very hard for us to remember when we are adults.
It's very hard for us to remember what that's like.
It's very, very hard.
Because it is lost in the can't-talk It's lost in that.
It's also lost in general, in the fact that we have a pretty violent society as a whole.
And it's also lost in the fact that there's no place to talk about this violence.
This violence has been very heavily normalized, I guess you could say, by our society at the moment.
And so you can't talk about it.
You can't express it.
You're not allowed to remember it.
The entire weight of society, and I don't just mean the family, right?
I mean, the family is sort of the origin of this kind of violence, but it's society as a whole that is entirely predicated on the obscuring of violence against children.
And I don't, I just, maybe you weren't beaten with a belt or anything dramatic like I don't simply mean impactful in the physical sense.
I don't mean that there was any kind of drama associated with having to deal with this kind of stuff, which is, you know, a pure moral horror to have to deal with.
But if you weren't beaten in this sense by a guy with a belt, then it was something else, something else that occurred to you.
Some sort of passive aggression, some sort of manipulation, some sort of control.
Ah, hello to our friends, the police.
You know, I always feel that they're going to stop me for some damn thing.
You know, that uneasy feeling that you get with the police in the background is always something standing in.
Sting said that about the reason why he chose the name The Police for his band, or the band that he was a part of.
And he said that he wanted to be able to recreate that uneasy feeling that everybody gets when they look in the rearview mirror and see The Police, which I thought was very interesting because So,
anyway. So, even if it wasn't something as dramatic as that, it was some form of bullying, some sort of control.
And this is not just because your parents are evil or bad or anything like that.
It's because that's the culture.
And there are very few people who can raise themselves out of the fog or the smog or the bog of culture and actually end up thinking for themselves.
It's a very, very hard thing to do.
And most memes, I guess you could say, Most memes just reproduce themselves blindly.
Most people will do what came before.
Now, what has changed over the past couple of generations...
Do you sense the slowdown, my friends?
Do you sense the fact that the podcast might be just a little bit longer?
Yes, I think you do. So, this is a part of the challenge of this kind of stuff when you're working in traffic.
You have ideas about the topic, and then, lo and behold, oh my heavens, there's somebody right in the median.
Wow, did they ever get off the road?
There's somebody, there's some traffic jam, and then you kind of have to do it in your head, say, okay, well, how long is it going to be?
How can I sort of structure and pace it, and so on?
It's the end-length show.
Oh, good. Looks like a short one, so probably only added a few minutes to it.
Excellent. So, you face some sort of corruption What we learned about today, as opposed to, I don't know, like five generations ago, is that today it's not socially acceptable to be true children.
Right? And this is the very interesting thing about our parents, that in the Middle Ages, I mean, there's some people who say, and it may be true, I don't know, but there's some people who say that the very idea of childhood did not exist before Thought to be...
We will have to go back to our regular...
Alright, we'll just go back to our regular here so you can see the four-headed action.
So, Talented was not really considered to be a It was a very strong idea that childhood was a separate state that was deserving of different kinds of approaches.
There was no such thing as age inappropriate, and of course you can just imagine the degree of incest that occurred, or the degree of child rape and molestation that occurred in these kinds of environments, especially because of the theocracies in place.
And so we can just picture the amount of emotional horror that children went through, and given the emotional horrors that children go through in those kinds of societies, It's not that hard to figure out why you end up with something like the Spanish Inquisition and the religious hysteria, what was sometimes called the Sinaitis dance.
And this, I think, I remember it from French history, though I don't know if it occurred in other places.
I'm sure it did. What happened here was that a religious mania would grip a town to such a degree that they would end up dancing.
Until they either died or collapsed with exhaustion or dehydration.
And this, of course, is the kind of mass hysteria illogic that is inevitably going to occur when society is basically one big scar tissue.
And childhood is just one set of emotional hell that we can't even really comprehend.
Because at least we have a standard in our society which says that beating children with a belt is bad.
Now, our parents, this is why I say this to, this is why I'm glad I'm not podcasting in the 17th century for a wide variety of reasons, of course.
But this is why I say that our parents are responsible, because they were exposed to a social ethic Which said that, and they subscribed to a social ethic, which said that beating your children with a belt is bad.
And the reason we know that is that they didn't do it in public.
They always did it in private.
Now, because they always did it in private, we know that they didn't think it was a good idea, or at least they didn't think that it would be approved of, and they were very sensitive to social disapproval and criticism and so on.
And so we know for sure that our parents knew that beating your kids was at least frowned on or considered bad, and so they would refrain from doing it in situations where they would be caught and possibly punished, right? So this is the classic bully, right?
you get the little kid alone in a stairwell away from the teacher, and you punch them in the kidneys to get their lunch money, but every time the teacher's around, you turn around and say, "Oh, we're just playing, miss!" or something like that, you know, in this kind of "fuck you" approach that bullies have, which of course further adds to the humiliation of the victim, right?
It's humiliating in But it's all the worse to realize that the power structure, a power structure that's supposed to protect you, your teachers say, just talk about a school example, to get into it sort of through the side door.
When you see how easily the power structure is manipulated and that the power structure will not protect you, right, so you're kind of doubled over and the bully says to the teacher who's walking by, oh hi miss, we're just playing, or something like that.
99 times out of 100, the teacher will just sort of walk on past because she doesn't want to get involved or he doesn't want to get involved or something like that.
And so, I just have to check, I'm not sure if the power consumption involved in the webcam is more than the battery can take, so I've let the screen turn off, which I often don't do, just to make sure everything's still hunky-dory, but I just, every now and then, I'll have to check to see if the computer is still running,
because if it's not, I really am just talking to myself, which, not the end of the world, not the first Makes me look a little less deranged than passing motorists, but I really would prefer to get it down.
So anyway, it's just if I glance there, it's not because I'm petting my ferret.
It's a whole different kind of webcam scenario, I guess.
But I just want to check out the battery life of the computer.
So, we know that our parents knew that it was wrong, we know that they hid it from us, and also we knew that they were very good at manipulating the power structure that was supposed to protect us by knowing exactly what to say, right?
So, if your parents beat you with a belt or mocked you or humiliated you, They went to meet with your teacher, and they went to meet with whoever, some authority figure, that they didn't say, oh yeah, when he doesn't, they'd say, well, is he doing his homework?
They wouldn't say, hell yeah, because when he doesn't do his homework, I'd beat him with a belt, buckle and out.
They don't say that. They say, no, no, no, we're very interested, we're very concerned, we're very this, we're very that, we try to make sure, but, you know, kids these days, blah, blah, blah.
So, your parents knew what to say, right?
Once you know what to say, you actually know what to do, and therefore you're responsible for not doing it.
If your parents went to a PTA meeting and said, hell yeah, we beat them with the belt buckle side out, you want to see the welts?
They're cool. Well, then your teacher is going to be obligated to report this to the authorities, and your parents are going to be brought up for child abuse charges, and Because, of course, the state is all about the protection of children, because when the state protects the children, it actually breeds people who aren't afraid of authority.
So, yeah, the state is all about protecting the children.
In the reality of it, though, and I know this from my own experience and also from Christina's time with child services when she worked at the hospital for 10 years, The state is about pretending to protect children.
If it just said, we don't protect children, then the state's moral argument for morality and moral validity would be questionable.
Children, then children would grow up with a sense of authority as benevolent and therefore would not support things like taxation and war and welfare and things where the state is clearly not beneficial.
So, the state has to pretend to protect children while not actually protecting children, right?
That's the additional conceptual rape and beating that occurs along with the physical ones.
So, just so you understand that, the amount of energy that the state puts into protecting children is prodigious.
The amount of protection that those children actually achieve is non-existent.
And that is very central to allowing authority to abuse everybody.
That's how they keep us children our whole life.
That's how authority gets to abuse children all the way through, through adulthood.
Because we then believe that the state is, quote, good.
And then, when the state doesn't protect us, we feel that we did something wrong or we just sort of fell through the cracks.
Well, the whole damn thing is a crack.
It's like calling the grandkids. The whole damn thing is a crack.
And this is why the state pretends to do all of these things.
First of all, it's to get the money, to get the power, but second of all, of course, it is to ensure that we feel that we could have been protected but weren't, and that somehow it was our fault, and the state is trying to protect, but this and that and the other.
So, your parents knew the right thing to do.
They absolutely knew the right thing to do.
And you see this if you watch Dr. Phil, I haven't watched it in a while, but I do remember when we did see it, that you would see this all the time, all the time.
Dr. Phil would have some crazy, sicko, psycho, child-beating monster on the show, and he would say, do you think that it's a good idea to beat your children?
And they'd say, no, absolutely not.
And then they'd say to the husband, did you know that your wife was beating the children?
No, didn't have a clue.
Heavens to Betsy, I just thought they were spontaneously bruising and limping.
I thought that they were internally broken, or perhaps they were baking too energetically and thumped themselves with a spoon.
Or perhaps, you know, invisible devils attacked them in their sleep.
Or some damn reason why these idiots don't protect their children.
So, there's always something that people have as a reason, and of course, generally, when people come for help, it's around self-pity, right?
It's around self-pity. You never see someone going for help in these kinds of shows where they say, well, I enjoy the beatings, of course, because they relieve stress and they make me feel powerful and they make, you know, they justify what happened to me when I was a kid, I normalize it, and so on.
What always happens is these sicko-narcissists come in and they say, Oh, Dr.
Phil, you have to help me stop beating my children.
It's so painful for me.
I mean, I'm generalizing a little bit, shockingly enough, but that is the story that you get from these people all the time.
That it's so painful for them!
They're beating their children and they're scared they're gonna do something bad to them!
Right? So their fear and their own pain is what drives them into treatment.
And always, always, always, it is around the same time.
And I don't know if you can think back on your own history of abuse and come up with the same kind of stuff, but it's always around the same time.
It's always around the end of latency.
And for those who don't know these pseudo-technical terms, the latency is the period from about 4 or 5 to puberty, sometimes 5 or 6.
And latency is after the growth spurt and heavy, heavy intellectual and linguistic development of basically birth until 3, 4, and 5.
Then the child settles into a sort of more general kind of growth, and there's a period of relative calm and relative relaxation and relative pleasantries.
I've heard this from a number of parents, you know, that infancy is tough, the terrible twos are terrible, and the threes and the fours are tough, and then when the kid settles into latency, yeah, they're pretty pleasant, they're not rolled in their eyes, they're not hyper, it's pretty sexual, so those hormones aren't coursing around.
And what happens is that during this period, towards the end of this period, the child is beginning to develop significant social contact outside the home.
And the child is beginning to go out into the world and to forge alliances, to have friends.
The child is having unsupervised social interactions around 9, 10, 11 years old.
And this is a very important phase to understand for the parents.
This is when the great crime might come out.
This is when their evil might be radiated out into the world, and this is where repercussions might occur.
So, when you're very young, of course, you're totally in your parents' power and you can't speak, right?
So this is when a lot of abuse occurs.
But then when you can speak and you begin to verbalize opposition to your parents' whims, wishes, and desires, then you provoke the narcissistic rage and they begin to...
And I went through all this stuff in Parents 1 to 4, so you can go back and listen to that if it's not clear to you or if you're skipping.
When you get into latency and things are a little bit more pleasant, you've probably figured out that you're not allowed to have a personality at this point, so you've just become kind of compliant, and you look for whatever small pleasures you can get a hold of, candy and playing and so on.
But then what happens is when you get into late latency, you are starting to have unsupervised visits, so you're having playdates We can be gone for hours at a time.
I was actually just talking to somebody I went to see the Van Morrison concert with and his wife, just saying that when I was a kid, you just kind of went out.
You know, you'd come home, I wouldn't do any homework, but some people would, and then you just sort of go out and play.
And you'd come back for dinner and then you just go out and play again.
It's like, you know, when the street lights come on, then you come home.
And there was no supervision.
Nobody drove me anywhere.
I didn't have any structured activities, at least until I got into high school.
And then the junior high high school is on the swim team and the country team and so But, tennis, league.
But you basically just went out and fend for yourself and you've gone for hours.
Now this begins to provoke anxiety in the abusive parent, right?
Because you have now a situation wherein you have unsupervised contact with other people.
If you know anything about gulags and concentration camps, you're really not allowed to have that.
That's double plus ungood.
You cannot, like, every time you talk to the media in the gulag, the guard is with you, so you can't slip notes saying, you know, I'm starved and raped daily, right?
You can't say that.
You have to have things doctored.
You have to have things controlled.
Now, the parent can't control that once you And then puberty and then thereon, right?
Now, puberty, of course, the humor comes down with a vengeance in puberty because of the heavy need to control the development of the personality, the last stab of which, in an easier kind of way, occurs in puberty.
So... The reason that we know that our parents are bad is because they only start to reform, quote, reform themselves, or start to worry about the abuse that they've done in sort of two environments.
One is when you begin to have unsupervised contact outside the home, and they're afraid that you're going to blurt out something around the abuse.
And the second is when you're older and they begin When you begin to need your resources, then they become nicer.
When they lose power over you, then they become nicer.
And this is not always the case, right?
With certain kinds of personalities, more on the sociopathic side, their self-interest is their only possible response To an expansion of freedom and independence on the part of the child is further abuse, right?
So the narcissist can still have some sense of his own self-interest.
The sociopath has almost no control over his rage other than brute social reinforcement.
The sociopath still will hide his crimes, but when you start to become more independent, you will simply get beaten up more.
So I'm not saying this is a constant.
There's lots of different ways that this can occur.
But for sure, your parents are going to seem a lot So, the reason that I keyed into this conversation with this gentleman, I know he has a niece that he's talked about freedom with,
and the niece has been quite receptive, seems like a very sweet kid, which is great, but the reason that I keyed into this particular image was I was talking recently about the need to go through violent imagery with your parents, not to provoke any kind of sociopathy, but rather to activate your defenses, to shock you into empathy for yourself.
So, this gentleman Great stuff.
And so he obviously likes her and has empathy for her as a child who's relatively defenseless.
I think she's 12 or 13 or something like that.
And so the reason that I put this image into his head, well, that I've reached past the false self of alienation and dissociation and I'm trying to get the true self to tunnel up through the false self to consciousness, to independent judging consciousness.
The reason that I'm trying to do that is because down there he does have empathy for himself, and down there he does remember how awful, brutal, terrifying, and horrifying it was, and how much rage he has against his father for beating him with a belt!
I mean, of course you're going to have anger towards somebody who beats you with a belt, or who humiliates you, or who verbally says that you're worthless, or who opposes everything that you think of.
I'll talk about, perhaps this afternoon, another post wherein somebody is talking about the Christian mother.
But, of course you're going to have rage towards that.
It's inconceivable that you wouldn't.
You would have to be a robot not to fail rage towards somebody who beat you when you were helpless with a belt.
It's just very hard for us to feel it because we've gone through so much propaganda called "Don't feel it, it wasn't bad, nothing happened." Or if it did, it was your fault as a child.
We have all of that kind of crap floating around in our heads.
So it's very hard for us to go back and empathize with ourselves as children.
But there are ways to do it, as I've talked about before.
You probably have a child in your life that you like.
I mean, that you enjoy spending time with, or at least can recognize as a pretty good, sweet, defenseless little kid.
So, the simple way to get through to this kind of empathy is to imagine that your father, when he was young and healthy and vibrant and virile and evil sort of way, or your mother, that you open the door to a basement or a room and you saw your father beating this defenseless child that you like,
who's not you, just some kid that you like, that you saw your father, you see your father 20 years ago beating This child, or screaming at this child as she cowers in fear, and you want to make sure that you work the image in a very deep way, that you personalize and sensualize the image.
Centralize just means make it, translate it to your senses, don't just think of it in the abstract.
And that's why I said, Or even worse, imagine the nose screams because the child's not allowed to scream.
Imagine the child curling into a ball or imagine the child voluntarily exposing their buttocks or their legs or their backs or their hands or whatever's being beaten because if they don't they'll get beaten even worse.
Imagine the child crawling for safety under a glass table or under a table and imagine your father dragging her back out to beat her some more.
You want to work that image into your very nervous system because I'm not trying to inflict something on you.
I'm not trying to put something into your head.
I'm trying to connect with something that is already in your head.
Right? This was your experience!
And it's easier, because we've been traumatized, it's easier for us to feel empathy towards others, towards other children.
The self-protection that we were not allowed to manifest when we were children.
Here they come! I don't know if you saw that shadow.
That's the exit from the private roads.
So, the self-protection that we were not allowed to express or to act out when we were children, we now can at least feel towards other children.
At least we can feel it towards other children.
And that is the start, my friends, of empathy towards yourself.
That's the start of empathy towards yourself.
And that is the joy of rage.
Because the second image that I put into this, or that I evoked within this person's imagination, which of course is nothing new, it's already there, I'm more of an archaeologist than an inventor, What would you do to your father if you saw him attacking your niece in this way?
So if you see your father or your mother or whoever attacking a child that you like in the same manner which you were attacked or undermined or humiliated or whatever, what would you do?
How would you feel? Well, of course, you would do whatever it took to stop the attack on the child.
Any decent, honorable, vaguely ethical human being with a shred of human empathy would prevent an adult from beating a child with a belt.
So, let's just say, you walk into this basement, you see your young and healthy father beating a child that you treasure and love with a belt, and you say, Dad, stop!
And he doesn't stop.
He says, you try and stop me.
You're next, buddy. Well, what happens then?
What are you going to do? Oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't realize that you really wanted to do it, so good luck to you, and I'll be in the next room.
I'll be reading, maybe listening to some Free Domain Radio.
Just give me a shout when you're done, and we'll go for coffee.
Of course you wouldn't. Of course you wouldn't.
You would do whatever it took to protect that child.
So, let's just say that there is a baseball bat leaning up against the sofa, and you come into the room, you stand by the sofa, and you see that your father is beating this child with a belt.
And you say, Dad, stop, and he won't stop.
You're next, if you try and stop me, he says, or something similar.
Well, I know what I would do, and I'm guessing I know what you would do, because you're obviously interested in ethics, so you wouldn't become to podcast 12 million.
I'm going to pick up the bat.
Right, if it's valid to use self-defense, I mean, this is what's so funny about libertarians, and especially those who've had difficult childhoods, as most of us have, not just libertarians, but most of us in general and overall, is that we're all about self-defense, but we don't recognize the degree to which we were violated, beaten, whatever, as children.
So I'm picking up the bat, and I'm saying, you put one more blow on that child's hide, and you're going to get some taste of it in return, you son of a bitch.
You think it's so great to beat people?
Let's see how you like it.
And if he did hit her again, I'd hit him with a bat.
I wouldn't try and kill him, because I'd want him to languish in prison and find out what it's like to be subjected to somebody else's authority.
If they're having trouble understanding and empathizing with the child, then I'd like to put them in prison so that they can understand a little bit what it's like to be subjected to somebody else's arbitrary authority.
Bubba, the cellmate from Venezuela.
So, yeah, I hit him with a bat.
Absolutely. And aim to do enough damage to have him stop hitting the child.
Right? Obviously. Obviously, if the only way that you can stop someone, I'm not going to go in and start wrestling with the guy because he's strong and he's got a belt.
Right? So I'm going to hit him with a bat in the arm or the leg to bring him down.
That's what I'm going to do. And then if he continues, I'm going to hit him again, I'm going to hit him again, I'm going to hit him again until he stops hitting the child.
That's called defending another human being.
If we talk about it, and if he ends up saying, yeah, you know, I kind of went a little nuts there, I'm going to go into anger management, I'm going to go into therapy, then I don't know, maybe I would or would not report him to the DRO, the authorities, whoever.
That's another question.
But if you saw your parents, now this is just physical abuse, or verbal abuse is more complicated, but the principle is basically the same.
That if you see somebody verbally abusing a child, you're stupid, you're an idiot, if you don't come to church you're going to burn in hell forever, whatever sort of homicidal crap they're shitting on the child's brain, then you tell them to stop it.
And if they don't stop it, then you try and get the child out of the situation.
And if they try to prevent you from getting the child out of the situation, then you tell them to back off.
And if they don't, you pick up the bat.
This is self-defense.
Defense of the helpless is innate to self-defense.
Do you lose the right for self-defense just because you happen to be old or you happen to have your arm in a sling?
Does your moral nature change and you no longer have any right to defend yourself?
well, of course you don't lose those rights.
So, that's all I'm trying to sort of get at with this stuff, is to say to you, look, why is it that some child that you know, who's not even you, who you haven't spent why is it that some child that you know, who's not even you, who you haven't spent nearly as much
why is that child worthy of your protection and love and defense, but you yourself are not?
I mean, what kind of logic does that make?
Is there some huge and fundamental difference between Between you and this child?
No, of course not.
There's no difference.
The moral natures are identical.
And if this child that you are thinking of, that your parents are abusing, is worthy of your defense and protection, then so, my friend, are you.
And this is what I mean by shocking you into empathy for yourself.
And wrapped up with that is going to be rage at your abusers.
Of course! Rage is what helps you to protect the child.
Rage is essential. But you can't protect a child who's being beaten with a belt without getting angry.
Because you're going to lose.
Because you're going to intellectualize.
Because you're going to be cowardly.
Right? So that's sort of the one side of things.
And we can talk about the other side of things a little bit later.
I've actually made it to work. The other side of things that we can talk about in time is that I did mention that What would it feel like if you just said, oh, you open the basement door and your dad is beating some kid with a belt and you say, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
I'm going to go into the next room and read a magazine.
Then, if you understand that, then you can understand what it's like generally to be your mother.
And we'll talk about that perhaps another time if there's enough interest.
But I just wanted to sort of help you understand how important it is to...
To get this empathy, to understand this empathy for yourself.
And the only way that you can really do it is through effective visualization of things which you have already experienced.
I'm not asking you to make anything up because I bet you don't have to.
But I just wanted you to understand that so that you can have empathy for yourself.
So that you can have... I mean, I know you're a good person.
I know that what happened to you was terrible.
And I also know that you would do just about anything to protect another child.
And so all I'm saying is that you are as worthy and deserving of that protection you would grant others yourself as well.
And if you can do that for yourself, boy, is it ever a powerful and wonderful thing to do.
And it gives you a lot of strength in situations that otherwise are very, very, very difficult.
All right. We're done.
Thank you so much for listening.
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