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Sept. 8, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:07
406 Who Is To Blame Part 3: Parents?
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Good afternoon everybody, it's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It is 4.20 on September the 8th, 2006, and we are going to have a little chat about my continuing obsession of who is to blame.
Now, the reason that I want to work on this sort of issue of who is to blame, and the reason that I'm trying to put so much mental energy into it, is for a couple of reasons.
First of all, I don't want to be unjust in my approach towards ethical questions about morality.
And so I really don't want to end up blaming people who are not to blame, getting angry at people who have no Other way of understanding things are no possibility of understanding things.
And so I'd like to sort of try and figure this out and see what we can't get a hold of as far as a logical supposition goes.
Now, there are a couple of reasons why I think this is an important topic.
It's not that I have this sort of free-floating rage that I need to attach to something or someone.
And it's not that I think that it's absolutely essential that we come up with a scapegoat or somebody to blame for the state of the world.
It's just that it seems to me that people do blame other people for the state of the world.
So we have libertarians blaming the general population and We have Marxists blaming the capitalists.
We have the capitalists blaming the people on welfare.
We have the Republicans and the Democrats blaming each other.
We have people blaming 9-11 on foreign policy or government actions or on evil Muslims or on conspiracies.
And so it seems that we can either try and rationally analyze our conceptions or ideas around who is to blame or we can just kind of let it happen.
Given that it's such an important aspect, then I think it's worth spending a few minutes trying to sort of figure things out.
Now, as I mentioned last time, there are some aspects of things that exist within history and things which have existed in the present across the world that give some indication that free will is more limited than a lot of people say it is.
And of course, I would be One of those people who'd have no problem saying this around free will, and I would think that it would be a fairly important thing to understand.
So, as I mentioned in the last podcast on this, when we think about the average soldier or the average person who enforced the edicts of the state within Hitler and Germany in the 1930s, then it's fairly clear to see that many more of these people were willing to do evil than would be the case in other areas.
And... So we can see for sure that in the Muslim world, most people become Muslims.
When people get burned at the stake for not being Christians, lo and behold, most people become Christians.
That most people who are brought up in government schools, or I guess even those who aren't brought up in government schools, seem to have a sort of significant problem seeing state violence for what it is.
So there seems to be lots of commonalities around how people are raised.
People who grow up on desert islands alone or who are raised by wolves don't tend to become Christians until they encounter it.
So it seems that there is an enormous amount of environmental influences on the way that people think.
So you didn't have a whole lot of what we would now consider scientists in the Middle Ages, but now we have scientists because the scientific method has been disseminated and people get trained in this and so on.
So, it seems to me that there are factors which cause a commonality of thinking among human beings, and that human beings don't themselves invent these factors, because these factors are common to cultures throughout history and across the world as it stands today.
So, there are cultures within North America that there are certain predictors of what people are going to believe based on their political affiliations and based on their geographical sort of where they grew up, like people who grew up in the South of America tend to be more So,
there are some pretty significant factors around what it is that people believe, and these factors tend to be created by, you could say, by intellectuals, and that's certainly something that I will argue for, and that intellectuals have a good deal of responsibility for How people believe, or what people believe, or the sort of environment that creates people's beliefs.
Because most people simply cannot think for themselves in the realm of philosophy.
And this doesn't mean that they're stupid, and it doesn't mean that they're incompetent, and it doesn't mean that they're idiots.
It simply means that philosophy, moral philosophy in particular, as I mentioned last time, is an extraordinarily challenging and focused field to work in, and the experts have not had any luck creating a consensus after banging away at the problem for three thousand or so years so imagining that the average person is going to have a very strong idea of abstract morality and how to apply it to non-culturally sanctioned areas like the police and the military is simply asking too much.
It's like asking every single human being to be a neurosurgeon in the Middle Ages when medicine was still fragmented and barely helpful, just as these days, moral philosophy, philosophy in general, but in particular ethical theories, are fragmented and deleterious.
Or destructive to society.
Expecting the average person to solve the problem of the ages and to be able to apply consistent moral theories to disparate and socially dangerous areas of society is really asking too much, though.
I mean, to take a sort of silly example, I was watching an old Boston Legal the other day where this blonde secretary decides not to pay her taxes because she's against the war.
And... There was quite a lot of focus on civil disobedience within the show.
It was basically the prosecutor said, so you're against the war.
She said, yeah, the war was a mistake.
And he said, are you against the troops?
And he's like, no, I have nothing but respect for the men in uniform.
This is, of course, a ridiculous argument, but it would be almost impossible to imagine her or the writers or intellectuals or professors or anyone to come up with moral theories that would span things like murder, rape,
Foreign policy, the existence of governments, the reality of soldiering, the reality of police, it certainly would be beyond the capacity of most of the people who inhabit these realms, particularly the realms of the police and the military, to ask these particular, in particular the foot soldiers, to come up with theories that would clarify their moral position as hitmen willing to do people's biddings and shoot whoever the leader points at.
Absolutely ridiculous to expect people to come up with that.
It's like getting mad at a medieval peasant for an art coming up with a scientific theory and saying that he's stupid and incompetent for believing what he believes.
Well, given that the experts haven't been able to consistently come up with a vision and transmit it in a way that's effective enough to help people to understand these sorts of things, I think it's ridiculous to ask the average person to do it.
It's not an insult to their intelligence, it's just that it's an extraordinarily difficult field.
People who believed in Newtonian physics prior to Einsteinian physics coming about in the early part of last century were not stupid, especially those who weren't physicists.
And this was during a time when we had objective experimentation and the scientific method had been around for a couple of hundred years.
And there's no particular methodology for understanding particular moral questions that is even remotely commonly accepted, even among the experts.
It's, you know, it's a combination of what people feel like, what their social prejudices are, what their history has given them in terms of motivation.
But as far as common strict methodology, this is not even the case.
Moralists can't even argue for objective, consistent morality.
It's cultural morals and this sort of stuff.
I was just reading a book on the science of ethics, or I've just started it by the former editor of Skeptic Magazine, who says that he's become an agnostic.
And there was a sentence in there which says, and we should allow religion to do what it does best, which is the examination of morals and this and that and the other.
And so here we have a supposed rationalist saying that the examination of morals should be left to people who believe in sky ghosts and devils and supernatural things of all kind.
Well, of course, this is somebody who's devoted quite a lot of mental energy to trying to become rational in his examination of and understanding of the world.
And he can't even come up with anything remotely coherent about ethics and morality and religion and logic and so on.
So expecting the average person, completely and totally impossible.
And this is something that I'm going to continue to argue with libertarians.
I wrote an article recently called Respecting the Sheeple, which was published on leorockwell.com.
It's also available on my blog.
at freedomain.blogspot.com and also in the articles section of freedomainradio.com that for those of us who have a capacity to push forward the science of ethics we should recognize what an extraordinarily rare capacity this is.
I've taken a little bit of a different approach now, and of course I'm going to start focusing on some parents.
So I'm going to take some text from an article that I think is very, very important, and it's a short article.
It was written in 1998 by Alice Miller, and I'm just going to read little bits of it, because it's copyrighted and I want to sort of respect that.
And there is her analysis, which I think is quite important, of Adolf Hitler's childhood, And what this meant in terms of Germany, right?
Because what I'm going to make a case for is that it is the people who are currently the most responsible, in my mind, as I'm sort of circling this, are those who create the norms for child raising.
I think that's the most concrete example of culpability.
And I'm not necessarily speaking moral.
I'm just talking about causal responsibility.
those people who put theories forward around the corporate punishment, particularly the corporate punishment of children.
Just about everyone I've ever talked to lived most of their life in a terror of some kind or another, a dread of some kind or another.
And Adolf Hitler, of course, had a particularly brutal childhood, so we will have a look at a little bit of this.
Of course, a famous quote of Adolf Hitler's is, what good fortune for those in power that people do not think.
Now, so we'll have a quick skim through this article.
And she says, It is still possible in today's Germany to escape the realization that without the mistreatment of children, without a form of child-raising based on violence to inculcate blind obedience, there would not have been a Hitler and his followers, and thus not there would not have been a Hitler and his followers, and thus not millions of
Probably every thinking person in the post-war period has wondered at some point or other how it could have happened that a human being devised a gigantic machinery of death and found millions of helpers to set it in motion.
Yet the monster Adolf Hitler, a murderer of millions, master of destruction and organized insanity, did not come into the world as a monster.
He was not sent to earth by the devil, as some people think, nor was he sent by heaven to bring order to Germany to give the country the Autobahn and rescue it from its economic crisis, as many others still believe.
Neither was he born with destructive drives, because there are no such things.
Our biological mission is to preserve life, not to destroy it.
Human destructiveness is never inborn, and inherited traits are neither good nor evil.
How they develop depends on one's character, which is formed in the course of one's life, and the nature of which depends in turn on the experiences one has, above all, in childhood and adolescence and the decision one makes as a child.
Like every child, Hitler was born innocent, only to be raised, as were many other children at the time, in a destructive fashion by his parents, and later to make himself into a monster.
He was the survivor of a machinery of annihilation that in turn-of-the-century Germany was called child-rearing, and that I call the concealed concentration camp of childhood, which is never allowed to be recognized for what it is.
And so she goes on to talk about how when Hitler was beaten by his father, the Fuhrer, when he was obviously the leader of Germany, once told his secretary that during one of the regular beatings his father gave him, he, the Fuhrer, was able to stop crying, to feel nothing.
And even to count the 32...
Blows he received.
So, of course, Hitler completely distanced himself from the emotional horror of his own concentration camp upbringing, and...
What happens, of course, is that a very primitive personality develops, incapable of empathy, and has all these latent feelings of hatred and revenge, which he can never express against his own father, and so he creates a state that reenacts the same emotional horror that he experienced on the general population, who themselves accepted because they experienced the same thing.
And Hermann Rauschning reports nocturnal fits of screaming on Hitler's part, along with what he called inexplicable counting.
And Alice Miller traces this back to the counting he did during the beatings of his childhood.
So that is a very, very sort of important thing to understand.
And throughout Germany, and of course in more than Germany, A lot of people had experienced the same kind of upbringing, what Alice Miller calls poisonous pedagogy.
And although they weren't conscious of all of these experiences as children, they kind of took the following principles to be self-evident, and this was really derived from their childhood.
So the first was that order...
And obedience are the highest values.
This is something that gets inculcated in childhood.
And also that violence is the only thing that can be used to create and preserve order.
And creativity embodied in the child represents a danger for the adults, and it has to be undermined and destroyed.
Obeying one's parents is absolutely the highest law.
Disobedience and criticism are unthinkable because they are punished with beatings or the threat of death.
And I was actually talking about this with Christina the other day, that the only thing that...
She's sort of working on some issues of her own past, and she wrote something down where she said, I was very afraid of disapproval.
And, of course, I jumped all over that in a kind and hopefully helpful way.
And said that I didn't consider that to be a true or useful statement to say I was afraid of disapproval.
Because we are not such delicate little flowers.
We are not such fragile hibisci that when somebody frowns at us, we shatter and fall apart like a dropped chandelier.
My wife and myself, when I was a child, we were not afraid of disapproval.
That would be to completely denigrate the strength of character that we had as children.
And I sort of used the metaphor.
I said, you know, if you're a therapist and a patient comes to you or somebody comes to your practice and says, I have stage 4 lung cancer and I'm afraid of dying, that would not be an irrational fear.
That would be something which you would work through, but you wouldn't say, well, that's weird.
But if somebody comes to you and says, I am perfectly healthy, but I'm terrified to leave the house, then you would say, oh, okay, well, that's agoraphobia, that's a deviation from a normal fear reaction, and that needs to be treated as a sort of minor form or even major form of mental illness.
And so if a patient comes to you and says, you know, doctor or yo, therapist, I'm terrified of being disapproved of, that's one thing.
If somebody comes to you and says, I live in a terrible neighborhood and everybody gets beaten up and I'm afraid of getting beaten up, you wouldn't say that that's an irrational fear.
You wouldn't work on that person trying to then reconcile themselves to that fear.
You'd say, well, yes, statistically, you have a good reason to be afraid, so you should really move, right?
That would sort of be the approach.
So if we look back at our own childhoods and we say, I was afraid of disapproval, we're basically saying that we're fragile and neurasthenic or neurotic cowards.
And that doesn't seem to me to be in accordance with the robust strength and energy and capacity and drive for survival that children have.
So I said to Christina instead...
That she was not afraid of disapproval.
And I played Yo Socratic, and we finally got to what I believe to be the case, that all human beings, particularly as children, are not afraid of disapproval.
They're not even afraid of being yelled at.
They are afraid of the only thing that human beings are really ever afraid of, and that is violence.
Violence is the only thing that we're afraid of.
And when people have irrational absolutes, as all parents do, irrational absolutes at their root must always be enforced through violence.
That's really the purpose of violence, is to prop up irrational absolutes and to cause people to conform.
In terror.
And so when you look at the fears that you experienced as a child, they were always of physical violence.
And of course for most of us who are older than, I guess, 30 or 35, there was physical violence within the schools was quite common.
Christina remembers watching children get their hands beaten with rulers.
I myself was caned as a child and beaten in the home.
So it really is physical violence that we are afraid of.
And the reason that we're afraid of disapproval is that if we buck disapproval, then we're going to get rejected, which, of course, abandonment is the other terror that children have, because it's the same as violence when you're dependent upon someone.
Then if you're rejected by them in a fundamental way, that's the same when you're a child with physical violence.
So we're afraid of rejection, we're afraid of physical violence, and As children, and that's the important thing to understand about what people experience and why they're so frightened of authority, why they're so volatile, why they're so punchy, why people can't get together to solve problems in a win-win way, why they have to sort of either be bullies or victims, why they have to either give way to somebody else's willpower or impose their willpower on somebody else, why people are so terrified of confrontation.
And why things escalate between human beings so quickly is because of violence, the violence that we all experience as children, both in an institutional sense within the school system, But more primarily in a personal way, in a very sort of personal way.
The other thing I said, but of course to Christina, I said, you know, if I sort of bring my hand up very quickly, you're going to say, oh, do you have a spasm?
Do you need to scratch your head?
You know, what's going on?
You're not going to be frightened of that particular gesture.
But if I was the kind of jerk who...
You know, beat his wife every day for 20 years, and every time before I beat my wife, I whipped my hand up very quickly, then she would be afraid of my hand whipping up.
Not because she was afraid of my hand whipping up, but because she was afraid of the blows that would follow.
And that's an important thing to differentiate.
It's important to understand the degree of courage that you needed in order to get through your childhood.
And saying that you were afraid of disapproval It's like somebody saying, I'm afraid of somebody raising their hand quickly.
Well, of course you're not. At all.
The one thing that we're afraid of, because that doesn't necessarily lead to something bad.
I might have a tick. I might think there's a bug on my head and I am lifting my hand quickly.
The one thing that always leads to terror is directly, without anything else, is violence, right?
One thing we seek is happiness, and one thing we don't seek for the sake of something else is happiness.
And the one thing that we are afraid of, which does not require any other addition or subtraction, is violence.
And, of course, it can come from siblings as well, but, of course, the responsibility for that goes back to the parents.
Now, so when, you know, a lot of the Germans in this sort of time period, in the sort of early 20th century, and still, to some degree, I have some German cousins, and this went on as well for them as well.
So when disobedience to authority and criticism or questioning of authority is unthinkable, you're punished with beatings of the threat of death.
It's very common. The living, sort of vital child has to be turned as early as possible into an obedient, empty robot, a slave, or somebody who's nice, somebody who's there for others, somebody, whatever.
Undesirable feelings and real needs must therefore be suppressed by the child as vigorously as possible.
Mothers must never protect their children from punishment, from violence by the father, but after each incidence of torture must preach to them to honor and love their parents.
And Alice Miller's List, she translates these kinds of particular things.
So, of course, not life, but order and obedience are the highest values, as learned in the family.
Translated in a political sense, this is the will of the Fuhrer, is the highest law.
The Fuhrer will forcibly create order and make Germany into a paradise of the Aryans, the master race, right?
And that's, of course, only by means of violence can order be created and preserved.
Those who submit like robots to his orders will be rewarded.
Whoever dares to offer criticism will be sent to a concentration camp, right?
Whoever questions the leader, the authority, the divine authority, is sent to a concentration camp, which is exactly what happens in children, right?
So free art is dangerous and degenerate, Like every other form of free creativity, it must be persecuted.
And just to quote Ms.
Miller a little bit more, hopefully this won't get me sued, she says, from the history of human sacrifice, from cannibalism to the Aztecs, we can learn how some religions have sanctified such acts.
In order to exonerate parents' crimes against their children, whoever reads this history with open eyes is struck again and again by the same pattern.
If I do to others what was once done to me, then I don't need to feel all the pain I would otherwise have to experience.
If I put everything in ideological or religious packaging and repeat all the lies those around me have been taught to believe, I will have many followers.
If, in addition, I, like Hitler, make use of my acting talent and imitate the manner of the threatening father, whom almost everyone once believed blindly and absolutely, and whom everyone feared, then I'll be able to find countless helpers for every conceivable crime, all the more easily, the more absurd, the crime.
This is sort of very important to the Milgram experiment, which he mentions, which I've talked about before.
The electric shocks of increasing intensity given in a fake research setting.
This occurred in North America, right?
So this is a very important thing to understand.
Children who are brutalized by their parents have to normalize that and have to recreate that.
Otherwise, they have to feel all the pain of being lied to and brutalized by their own parents.
And, of course, the more that parents are brutal, the more that we need to create this mythology of the ultimate virtue of family, the virtue of parents, and so on.
And what progress gets made in 100 years?
Well, as recently as 97, more than half of the parents in Western Germany were in favor of corporal punishment as a means of bringing up children.
This is beating children, of course.
And that is because they wish to exonerate the evils that they went through, rather than to...
Deal with it in an honest, mature, and open way, and to manage their emotions, and to grow the species forward by dealing with their own histories, rather than reinflicting those histories on others.
Now, of course, there's pretty voluminous literature about how children who misbehave who are beaten Do not get better.
They do not become more social.
Beating for antisocial behavior increases antisocial behavior.
So it's got nothing to do with wanting to help children, wanting children to be better off or anything nonsensical like that.
Of course, to get to a sort of understanding of why it is that beating children...
is so culturally acceptable for a lot of countries, a lot of cultures.
We do need to go to the source, right?
And of course the source is the Bible.
We have to look at the Bible and its sort of understanding of how it is that we should Look at the discipline of children when we are Christians.
So we're going to go and just have a look at Proverbs and have a look at this.
And of course everybody knows this one's Proverbs 13.24.
He that beareth his rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.
Now you can come up with all the nonsense that you want about what Rob Rod means, in the Hebrew word, shebet, but basically this is beating a child.
Proverbs 22.15 Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.
Proverbs 23.13 Withhold not correction from the child, for if thou beatest him with a rod, he shall not die.
Proverbs 23.14 Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.
Proverbs 29.15 The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.
And in our good old chapter of Deuteronomy, 21, 18-21, If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them, then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, And bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place.
And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious.
He will not obey our voice.
He is a glutton and a drunkard.
And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones that he die.
So shalt thou put evil away from among you, and all Israel shall hear.
And fear. Now, of course, many of the greatest moral philosophers in the history of the world, and by greatest I mean sort of most influential, were raised by pastors or by priests.
One of the artists, a German artist named Hermann Hesse, Welcome to my show!
One of the things that he writes out, that she quotes, which I think is wonderful, Hess writes in his story of Child's Heart.
He writes, The adults acted as if the world were perfect, and as if they themselves were demigods.
We children were nothing but scum.
Again and again, after a few days, even after a few hours, something happened that should not have been allowed, something wretched, depressing, and shaming.
Again and again, in the midst of the noblest and staunchest decisions and vows, I fell abruptly, inescapably, into sin and wickedness, into ordinary bad habits.
Why was it that way?
And, of course, he had the normal, ordinary, brutal, and destructive parents.
And so, of course, like all good children, so to speak, he tries to please his parents, and then he writes a little bit later in his life.
He says, It is a bitter and horrible moment when we suddenly recognise that the current within us wants to pull us away from what is dearest to us.
Then every thought that rejects the friend and mentor turns on her own hearts like a poisoned barb.
Then each blow, struck in defense, flies back onto one's own face.
The words disloyalty and ingratitude strike the person who feels he was morally sound, like catcalls and stigma, and the frightened heart flees timidly back to the charmed valleys of childhood virtues, unable to believe that this break, too, must be made, this bond also broken. unable to believe that this break, too, must be made, This bond with the parents.
So his desire for independence, well, he has this moral absolute that he has to love his parents, and the parents abuse and exploit him for their own self-aggrandizement, but demand that he worship it.
This, of course, is analogous, as I've talked about before, with the average citizen's relationship with the government, that we must love the country, love the government, respect the leaders, respect the troops, respect the cops, although these very same people hold guns to our heads and exploit us in the worst kinds of ways.
In Historia Child's Heart, this is the last thing I'll quote, that Alice Miller is quoting from the drama of The Gifted Child, which is not a good title, but Herman Hess writes, If I were to reduce all my feelings and their painful conflicts to a single name, I can think of no other word but dread.
It was dread, dread and uncertainty, that I felt in all those hours of shattered childhood felicity, dread of punishment, dread of my own conscience, dread of stirrings in my soul, which I considered forbidden and criminal.
And this seems to be the case for just about everybody who I've talked frankly about— Relative to their own childhood.
There's a lot of bravado and a lot of, oh, it wasn't that bad, and this and that.
But it does seem to be very strong and constant experience when you ask people to describe the history of their own childhoods, that this dread that Hess writes about seems to be quite common.
And really, when you think about it, the cultures that exist within the world, our own included, are really around attacking and controlling children, that the fundamental...
The fundamental prop of power, the fundamental central support of power, rests upon the attack and diminishment of the true self, of the curiosity that people have.
Because society is really nothing but lies.
I mean, culture is nothing but what we make up to gain ourselves transitory relief from pain.
So, society is really made up of little other than lies, right?
I mean, that That teachers are knowledgeable, that your parents are virtuous, that the government is good, that God exists, that we are better than other people, that we are free, that the services that are provided to us by the state are given to us out of generosity, that the government pays for things sort of like a rich uncle.
You could go on and on, and I'm sure you know all of these yourself.
But society is really just nothing but falsehood.
I mean, culture is nothing but lies.
Because if it wasn't culture, it would be science or philosophy.
And so given that children are really lied to continually, and I talked about this in an early podcast on the Apple at Dinner, given that children are lied to continually and brutally, right?
They're not just lied to like little white lies, right?
Like if your mom's going into a hospital and she doesn't want to frighten you, she might just say, I'm going to visit a friend for a couple of days.
I'm not talking little white lies.
I'm talking some of the fundamental lies that those in power are there to serve you, that you are free, that we are a democracy, that exploitation is bad, that violence is bad, but of course nobody ever tells you that our whole system of state compulsion and education is It's based upon the initiation of the use of force against generally disarmed citizens.
So everything that we're told as children is a lie.
And so, of course, a child trustfully or trustingly believes in what he is told or she is told and then begins at an unconscious level to feel anxiety.
Because there seems to be a lot of contradictions in what he or she is told, and the method by which the rules are enforced tends to be arbitrary, brutal, and full of emotional manipulation, coercion, either explicit or implicit, blackmail, withdrawal, and so on. And so a child, and I've written about this in my book, The God of Atheists, in my novel...
Children begin to question the ethics and virtue of their parents, and this, of course, comes to full flower in the teenage years and the artificial extension of dependence from children through the teenage years, one of the ways in which we don't get to break away from the falsehoods that surround us.
And So what happens through this process is that because culture is nothing but falsehood, and false arguments for morality, as I term them, what happens is that curiosity becomes an enemy to be expunged through violence and terror.
If you're afraid, then you're not going to rock the boat.
And so the inculcation of fear in the minds and the hearts of children is really the fundamental purpose of society.
Society exists to frighten and bully and control children, because everything that is taught in society is pure nonsense, and it is taught, obviously, not explicitly, not in any sort of conspiracy theory sense, but it's taught pretty explicitly for the benefit of those who are in charge.
Of course, that's never taught to children, of course.
So, given that everything that's told to children is a lie, and a degrading, humiliating lie, and a hypocritical, morally false lie, curiosity and intelligence and perceptivity within the courage within the minds and hearts of children is something that must be crushed and destroyed violently and perpetually throughout childhood.
And violently doesn't mean through beatings or anything like that.
But basically, through the threat of ostracism, should you ever ask any questions, through the social discomfort, through all of the things which are very, very frightening to children.
Not just disapproval, but violence and abandonment, which is basically what is used.
And so, fundamentally, sort of what I'm arguing is that Anybody who contributes to the lives within society is responsible for the hell of society.
And everybody who has the capacity to see the truth and does not see the truth is also responsible for the hell that is society.
And I'm going to go into this in a little bit more detail.
Sorry, this is not too much detail already.
I'm going to go into this in a little bit more of a rigorous detail and a little bit more of a theoretical detail.
I'm going to go.
I'm going to go.
Their own parenting rules.
They just kind of inherit them either from their own parents or whatever.
But parents do change if authorities come up with better ways of parenting.
And of course, not beating your children is a lot better in terms of parenting and this sort of empirically provable, as well as just sort of intuitively and morally right.
And so I would say that the people that I put at the forefront of the problems within society are those educators.
And I would put priests first and foremost among this throughout history.
And of course, in many countries in the United States and many of the Muslim and theocratic countries, the priests are first and foremost in this area.
This is another one of the grave dangers that religion poses to humanity, that it is really around terrifying children into conformity with nonsense.
And you can only conform with nonsense and believe that it is true if you are too terrified to think for yourself.
And that seems to be a very common factor in all state-run institutions, from theocratic institutions in the Muslim world to theocratic institutions in the West, and particularly, of course, to state schools.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
Thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to your donations, and feel free to come by.
Freedomainradio.com. We've got a new look and feel to the website, which I think is pretty cool.
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We have now 203 members on the board, and I really appreciate that.
I think it's a fantastic conversation, and I will talk to you soon.
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