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Oct. 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

32:00

472 Children: Selfish and Evil? (Part 1)

The root of statism is our view of children

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	Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
	October the 23rd, 2006, and I have, I guess as of Friday afternoon, I have tried downing the resolution of the videos that I'm taking in my car.
	I'm using a Microsoft LifeCam, and I just sort of noticed that for the first few seconds, maybe 10 or 15, it was very smooth, and then it got kind of herky-jerky for the remainder.
	Which wasn't so evident when I kept my face still, but I'm quite animated.
	So I wanted to make sure that we didn't get that sort of stop frame animation that is not the goal of Freedom Aid Radio.
	We aim to introduce enlightenment, not Tourette's or epilepsy or anything like that.
	So I've downed the resolution and I've tested the audio.
	I believe that the audio... is still recording at 64 kps despite the video settings.
	I do have another program I'm going to test out.
	I would ideally like to up the audio quality and keep the video quality not so high.
	But that's not an option in Windows Movie Maker, so I'm going to give it another shot because I normally record in...
	I used to record in WAV before I did the videos, but given the number of video hits we're getting, I just wanted...
	I thought it might be worth keeping the videos going while still satisfying the audio.
	And, of course, I did buy a fantabulous Sony microphone, which has upped the audio quality, I think, even more than it has dipped through the introduction of video.
	So, we shall see.
	So, as promised, and for those of you who are watching the videos only, you can take them to go as well.
	You can go to freedomainradio.com.
	There's a feed there, or there is some links on the first page which take you to the shows which you can download.
	And you can also go to listen in.
	The shows are broken up to sort of podcast zero.
	To podcast 272, and then I ran out of space on the FeedBurner feed, which can only be 256k.
	Sorry about all the geeky introductions, but the reason that I'm telling you all of this, because I get the audio stuff, because I did one on Sunday, which is about sort of an introduction to the one that we're talking about now, the one I'm going to talk about this morning.
	And you might also, if you are so inclined and wanted to hear somebody other than me talking in this show, which I'm sure would be quite a relief for you, then you can go by there as well, because we also have shows on Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m. Eastern Standard because we also have shows on Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m.
	I think it was 5-5 minus Greenwich.
	And on those shows, I actually sort of hear people call in, and we have sort of criticisms, and we hammer the ideas out a little bit more closely, and we cover just about every topic that you could imagine.
	And also, I guess the last thing I'll say, this is not another request for donations, although I'm sure you'll know that'll come at some point, but also you can get, we've introduced a new feature, we're up to show number two, called Ask a Therapist.
	Of course, most of their first emails was, why as a therapist would you marry Steph?
	Other than, you know, perhaps PhD material.
	But people have written in with some very great questions about to do with psychology, relationships, work issues, family issues, and so on.
	Parent-child issues.
	And my lovely wife, who practices psychology...
	She has kindly offered to give people her feedback on these issues, so that's another feature, but that's audio only, because she's so lovely that the camera simply explodes, so we have to go with audio only for that.
	And so I just wanted to sort of mention that for the people who are doing the videos, only that there's a treasure trove, I tell you.
	Actually, I have almost 260 members on the free domain radio boards.
	There are 25,000 posts, and it's a great venue to hash out ideas.
	I've certainly learned an enormous amount.
	From a very civil, very positive, very wise, enlightened, and great crew that is out there toiling away, trolling away for your benefit on the Free Domain Radio boards.
	So you might want to come by and check those out.
	FreeDomainRadio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D. Okay, enough of the goody dangling.
	Let's get on to the topic of the morning.
	This is a topic that I have a tough time with.
	It's not syllogistic, but it's powerful.
	And it may be syllogistic, I just can't exactly figure out how, but it is a very powerful topic to talk about.
	And it is really to do...
	I was talking on Sunday.
	I'm not going to recap, but I was talking about I have this relationship to work that's a little sort of basic and Protestant.
	And by that, I mean that I feel uneasy unless I'm making great strides, contributing to the spread of freedom and wisdom as best I can during the course of a day.
	I feel... That it's not a good thing to do.
	It feels uneasy if I can't get that sort of stuff done.
	And that's not good, right?
	That's really not good because I'm all about the freedom.
	And if I don't have the freedom to not talk about freedom, that's not really being free.
	If you'd like to pretzel your brain a little around that one, it's anything which then becomes a positive obligation to you.
	By positive, I mean you should.
	A thou shalt rather than a thou shalt not.
	It's not very restrictive, right?
	Don't kill, don't steal, don't assault, don't rape, don't cheat, right?
	I mean, those are, I would say, those are negative obligations.
	They're all don't, right? And I think that those are universal, ethical, valid, as I've talked about in an article called Proving Libertarian Morality.
	You can find it on my blog.
	Okay, one more at freedomain.blogspot.com.
	But... I strenuously resist positive obligations, not because I'm lazy, but because they don't exist.
	And I just think it's a bad idea to imagine that there are things in your life which you have to do which you don't actually have to do.
	And that forestalls a lot of pleasure in one's life.
	And it forestalls a lot of morality in one's life.
	So, for instance, of course, if I have a positive obligation which says I must podcast twice a day, If I say that I have to do all of those things,
	I do them because I'm afraid of the emotional consequences of not doing them.
	And that's not really very free.
	It's not a positive thing that I'm doing then.
	I'm just escaping a negative thing, which is fear.
	It's like calling your parents that you don't like because you feel guilty.
	To escape a negative state is not the same as achieving virtue.
	That's sort of the basic. Oh my God, I could have distilled yesterday down into something that pithy.
	Oh, unthinkable. Let's just hope that I couldn't get to the pithy without the lengthy.
	So... I was talking with Christina yesterday afternoon about this sort of question.
	It was quite a fascinating discussion because, you know, she comes from a Greek heritage.
	So, of course, like most European or Mediterranean families, Saturday morning the boys got to sleep in and the girls had to get up and clean the house.
	And this was just a, you have to, right?
	And I sort of asked her, I said, you know, what would be, like, what would happen if you said, I would rather do X than clean the house?
	And she said, well, I would be tolerated for half hour, 40 minutes, but then it would be like, okay, okay, come on, come on, up, up, up, right?
	It would be like, there would be no possibility of not doing it.
	And I find this really quite fascinating.
	And I know that when I was a child, I had a great desire to sort of help, right?
	Help people. And I also know that I have nieces that sadly I can't see because of the issues with my brother.
	But when I was younger, I remember taking them, as I mentioned once before, to do laundry.
	I had to do laundry. I had them for the evening, which was great, and they were very young.
	So I took them to the laundromat.
	And I just remember how much they wanted to help.
	I didn't ask them to.
	I was perfectly content to do sort of my own folding and sorting, but they really, really wanted to help.
	And they wanted to learn about it and this sort of stuff, right?
	And I just remember feeling that it was quite an emotional experience for me, as I'm sure a lot of things to do with kids are, innocence and purity and all that sort of stuff.
	But they really wanted to help, and they did a great job helping, I mean, to the degree that they were able.
	And yeah, of course, it's certainly possible once the novelty wore off, they'd just see it as a chore and so on.
	But I sort of have the feeling, and you know, touch wood, let's find out once I become a dad, but...
	I sort of have a feeling that it's possible to get people enrolled or to motivate them, children in particular, into helping and being positive and doing the things that you'd like for them to do without sort of screaming at them and bullying them and coming in and just, you know...
	Having it as an absolute that they have to help and not appealing to any of their sort of self-interest or anything like that.
	So, and this is again, this comes...
	I also worked in a daycare for a couple of years when I was younger.
	I spent a lot of time around kids. And I was able to do that kind of stuff by appealing to a positive rather than threatening a negative.
	And so when I think of my own sort of history around the question of work when I was a child, I would say that without a doubt...
	I really can't think of any particular exceptions to this, and maybe you can.
	I really can't think of any exceptions to the basic rule that a child was lazy and selfish.
	Lazy and selfish.
	And I know that we're in...
	I was a kid in the early 70s, pretty much, when this stuff was going on, early to mid-70s.
	And maybe it's all changed now.
	I'm not sure that it has, but...
	Kids, children are lazy and selfish.
	They don't want to help.
	They just want to sit around.
	They don't want to get involved. They just want to be wasted on hand and foot.
	They don't want to pick up their toys.
	They don't want to clean up after themselves.
	They couldn't be bothered to take their shoes off when they come in.
	From outside, muddy linoleum floors and so on, and they just don't want to help.
	And you have to enact them, and you have to bully them, and you have to conjole them, and you have to wheedle them, and you have to bribe them to get them to help.
	And I find this just an absolutely fascinating thesis.
	It certainly was not my emotional experience as a child.
	I wanted to help, but I wanted to be respected.
	I mean, that sort of is the basis, right?
	In the show Prison Break, of course, the prisoners are all seen by the guards as lazy and skiving and cheating and thieving and so on.
	And, of course, they are, right?
	But for the guards, it's like, well, you're in here because you're a bad person.
	And you'll notice that there are no drug offenders in...
	Prison break, right? They probably couldn't have got the cooperation of the authorities to film in John Wayne Gacy's cell if they had actually shown how many nonviolent offenders there are in prisons, right? They all have to be these violent or thieving people.
	And the black guy who's in there, this is nothing I think that's giving anything away, but the black guy who's in there, who's an ex-army, he's not arrested for transporting drugs, but for transporting stolen goods, right? It's the great dirty secret.
	You can't talk about how many nonviolent offenders are bound up in the criminal system, but anyway, we'll get back to that another time.
	But the gods view the children this way, and I guess I'd sort of like to open up the kettle of worms that is the cause and effect of the supposed traits in children.
	Because certainly if you do not respect children, then they will not want to do work with you.
	They will not want to contribute.
	People who are not respected do not want to contribute.
	Now, of course, parents would say, I believe...
	That it's not that I didn't respect my child, it's that I kept asking my child to do things, and my child didn't do those things, and therefore I lost respect for my child.
	That's generally the sequence that people talk about when they're talking about the relationship that they end up with with children.
	I would submit that that's entirely not true.
	I would totally and completely submit that that is entirely not true.
	That parents do not respect their children.
	They view them as little toys, not as...
	I think kids are pretty brilliant, pretty perceptive, pretty amazing.
	And parents do not view these children as, you know, they're sort of retarded little toys for a lot of parents, frankly.
	You know, they're cute, they're exasperating, they're exhausting, they're a burden.
	And a lot of times, it's a great dark secret of parenthood.
	A lot of parents don't really enjoy being parents, right?
	They get sort of sledgehammered with all of this work, and they have all of their issues, and the kids are, they're ruining the kids, and they know that they're ruining the kids, but they have to blame the kids, right?
	I mean, this is not all parents, but this is a good number of them.
	And so they really don't have a good time with their children.
	And so...
	They end up yelling at their kids or being exasperated with their kids or always being inconsistent with their kids, right?
	Because a lot of parents have kids in the hopes that being loved is going to make them feel happy.
	In other words, the parents being loved by the children are going to make them feel happy.
	And so what happens is they don't discipline the children with any consistency.
	By discipline, I just mean sort of firm guidance kind of thing, right?
	The super nanny stuff.
	So they don't discipline their children with any consistency because they don't want to not have their children's affection.
	They don't want to threaten their children's affection for them and so they go for the short-term easy answers and are inconsistent and therefore end up with the children don't respect them and the children don't want to obey them because the children like totally get emotionally that the parents just want them to do stuff for the parents convenience And the parents are not addressing a simple reality, like a simple basic reality.
	And the simple basic reality that parents don't talk about is If you have to bully someone to do something, then obviously it's not a fun thing to do.
	It's not an enjoyable thing to do.
	It's not a satisfying thing to do.
	You don't have to bully children to watch Saturday morning cartoons because the Saturday morning cartoon makers are very much attuned to what children want and try and provide them what pleases them and so on.
	It's sort of the free market side of child raising or child entertainment.
	But What happens with parents is that parents say, you have to do X. You have to clean up your stuff.
	You have to clean up your stuff.
	Go clean up your stuff. Why haven't you cleaned up your stuff?
	I'm not going to come up there and clean up your stuff for you.
	I'm not going to do that for you.
	All this kind of stuff. Anyway, so the parents are sort of saying to the children, you have to do X. In other words, they're saying to the children that you have to be disciplined, you have to take care of yourself, and you have to take care of your stuff, and so on. But of course, the parents aren't exhibiting that behavior.
	And this is what I mean when I say children are brilliant.
	They totally get this. They totally get this.
	And so the question then becomes, well, why do I have to clean up my room?
	That's sort of the age-old question of teenagers, right?
	It's like, just close the door if you don't want to look at it.
	Why do I have to clean up my room?
	And parents really can't come up with a good answer, right?
	Because a good answer would be something that involved self-interest, right?
	But when you bully someone to do something, you're automatically saying it's not in their self-interest to do it.
	It's in your self-interest that they do it, but it's not universal.
	And again, I'm not saying that kids pass it down in this way, but they totally get it instinctually.
	Because they're born philosophical.
	We have to make them mystics over time.
	We have to grind them into a fine conformist powder over time.
	But they're born rational.
	They're born philosophical. And they're born wise.
	So, you know, when the mom screeches at the kid, you have to clean up your room.
	There's a whole lot that she's saying to the kid at that point.
	She's saying, I don't respect you to do the right thing.
	You do the wrong thing.
	I do the right thing, and I know the right thing, and I'm telling you to do the right thing, and I don't like you for not doing the right thing.
	I think you're a bad kid for not doing the right thing.
	And that they know that they're not speaking the truth, right?
	The truth would be something like this.
	The mom would say, look...
	I feel uncomfortable when your room is messy because I was raised to have a clean house.
	So I need you to clean up your room as a favor to me to alleviate my stress, my tension.
	I don't like that your room is messy.
	It makes me anxious.
	It makes me upset because I'm afraid that someone's going to come in and see it and criticize me for being a bad mother.
	It reflects poorly on me.
	My ego is invested in the tidiness of your room and I need you or I would like you to clean your room so that I can reduce my anxiety, my fear of being criticized as a mother.
	I mean, a teenager could totally hear that.
	And that's really what's going on.
	I'm not saying that all desire for tidiness arises from a fear of criticism on the part of mothers in particular, but I'm not saying that at all.
	There's great value in tidiness.
	Let's just say I'm not going to pan the webcam around my car anytime soon, but there is great value.
	This is one of the things I've learned from being married.
	There is great value in tidiness.
	You save time, save energy, so it becomes a self-interest thing for me on a number of levels to keep things more tidy than I would have when I was a single man.
	Obviously, I am sensitive to the fact that if I don't tidy it up, Then my wife will tidy it up and I don't want to put more work on her.
	That's obviously a basic sensitivity that's involved in this.
	But also I can find things more quickly.
	To get everything ready the night before, especially the CES show that I have running in my car here, to have all this stuff ready the night before is hugely beneficial.
	Less running around, less stress, less panic, less having to drive fast and all that kind of stuff.
	So that's just a matter of sort of preparation.
	Right? So that's just something I do.
	And Christina has never... She asked me to do stuff, but she never...
	There's never an act. Never.
	Not once. And she helps me to see the value through demonstrating behavior.
	She helps me to see the value of tidiness and neatness and so on.
	And it's nicer. It's a nicer environment.
	And... So I do that now for my own self-interest.
	Nobody ever wants to do anything.
	Fundamentally, nobody ever wants to do anything to shore up somebody else's anxiety, to stave off somebody else's anxiety.
	They might want to do that if...
	The person who is asking to do something says, the speech I gave earlier, you have to do it because I feel anxious when you don't.
	It's a favor to me. It's a weird thing on my part, but I would really appreciate it.
	You ask it as a quirky favor.
	I remember having this with a girlfriend once.
	Those are the amazing things that I used to put up with when I was dating.
	I went out with a woman.
	And as it turned out, she preferred, when we were walking along the sidewalk, that the man walk curbside and the woman walk inside.
	Now, I'd never really heard of that.
	It didn't really make much sense to me.
	I mean, it's not like if a truck comes barreling up, my body is going to prevent it from hurting her or something.
	But this was her quirk.
	Right? And maybe it's more common that I've just never heard of it, right?
	And so she said to me, it's something like, that's what men do.
	That's what men do.
	They walk on the outside.
	Now, there's a whole lot packed into that statement that began to unravel things for us, which was that she didn't say, look, it's the way I was raised.
	I would really prefer it.
	It's not something you have to do, but it would certainly make me feel better.
	I'd be like, absolutely, sure.
	No problem. It doesn't hurt me.
	I'm perfectly content to do it.
	If it makes you feel better, so much the better.
	That's great. But when she basically used the argument for morality, or in this case, the argument for masculinity, then it was like, you are not a man because you don't do this.
	You are somehow deficient in masculinity because you don't do this and you don't know this.
	In other words, it's a bad thing to do what you're doing, to walk sometimes on the outside and sometimes on the inside, and you, as a man, are deficient for not knowing this and doing it, and a real man, this is all the implications, a real man would do it and know to do it just by the by.
	And, of course, I completely lost it.
	And then I didn't want to do it because I felt bullied, right?
	And so, well, anyway, we don't have to get into all of that.
	But this is sort of the genesis of resistance, right?
	Of disobedience, of lack of respect, is that people aren't just telling the truth.
	And when people aren't telling the truth, And they're trying to get you to do something.
	They will always, always, always use the argument for morality.
	Always, always, always use the argument for morality.
	And it will be a false argument for morality.
	But that's absolutely inevitable.
	It's completely and totally inevitable.
	Because you always have to exaggerate an irrational deficiency, as we talked about before.
	An irrational deficiency calls, clean your room because I feel anxious when you don't.
	Welcome to my show!
	Talk about the variety of defenses that have been defined in psychological circles.
	Sorry, a little bit of a yawn there.
	I'm on a slow curve, so I can't get my coffee.
	Oh, but I'm thinking about getting my coffee.
	Ooh, a deep snort from a straw.
	Actually, I should probably just put coffee grinds on my ground coffee on my microphone and snort it from time to time.
	Yeah, that wouldn't get me arrested.
	It's Colombian dark.
	It's the foreign accent I do from time to time, which has no specific locale.
	So people, when they want you to do something for themselves to avoid anxiety, but they also want to avoid that they want you to do it.
	Because people feel sort of humiliated, as I talked about, or rather yelled about in the podcast on children.
	They feel humiliated, so they're really not good at asking for things, right?
	When you ask someone for something in a healthy relationship, then it's a positive thing which builds trust and love and affection.
	When you ask someone for something on any other relationship, it's power.
	It's a power situation which is going to end to your detriment in some manner.
	That's not insignificant, right?
	You're going to pay for it and so on.
	I also remember having a pretty cold-blooded friend when I was younger, I guess in my very early teens.
	And we went dirt biking together and I didn't have any gloves, right?
	I was a poor kid.
	And it was freezing and my hands were on the...
	I can barely move my hands, it was so cold.
	I asked him, you know, he had these huge ski gloves, right?
	And I was like, hey, can I just borrow those for a few minutes to warm my hands up?
	And he was like, why didn't you bring your own gloves?
	Then it became, you're incompetent for not bringing your own gloves, right?
	I mean, these are the wonderful crew that I hung out with back then.
	A bunch of thugs. Anyway, so...
	This question of respect really comes from children getting at a fundamental level that they're being lied to and bullied and they're being manipulated in a horrible kind of way.
	And rather than the mom saying, I need you to do this for me, Because I'm afraid of being criticized and thus everything that parents demand is a rule, right?
	And that's why people who demand irrational things always have to use the argument for morality.
	So if the mom says, and it could be the dad, but if the mom says, you need to clean your room because I get anxious when you don't, I'm afraid of being criticized, then basically what you're saying is you should get other people, you should manipulate other people into doing things that are irrational because of your own fears.
	I mean, that's the rule, right?
	That's the rule that parents manifest when they don't have this kind of self-knowledge and are not willing to face up to their own issues, but instead ask, demand that their children fill in the gaps for their own issues and problems.
	So, if you put forward to a teenager the principle that you should be afraid of disapproval from your peer group and you should manipulate other people into doing things for you to maintain the respect of bad people in your peer group, then that would be a pretty bad lesson to give a teenager, right? Because, of course, teenagers are always told to avoid peer pressure and to think for themselves and to, you know, whatever, whatever, right?
	But, of course, their parents don't do anything of the sort, I mean, in a very fundamental way.
	And this is true also with children as well, right?
	If, say, doing, I don't know, if cleaning the bathrooms is like a living hell, then you have to sort of, I mean, the first thing you have to do is say that to the kid.
	This sucks, right?
	I mean, it's a basic reality check, right?
	You say to the kid, yeah, I hate doing the bathrooms too, but here's what happens.
	You show them a picture of, I don't know, my bathroom when I was 28 or something.
	You say, this is what happens when you don't clean your bathrooms.
	Actually, I shouldn't say that. I did clean my bathrooms, but you know what I mean, right?
	You get mold, and you can't get rid of the mold, and it starts to smell, and it's just really unpleasant.
	So this is kind of like nobody wakes up every day saying, my God, I just can't wait to brush my teeth, right?
	That just gives me a fluttery thrill that is almost out of this world in terms of mindless pleasure.
	No, it's like you've got to brush your teeth, floss, and use your Listerine because if you don't, things are a whole lot more unpleasant.
	And nobody sort of gets up and says, ooh-wee, tooth brushing, but it's something you've got to do.
	And I certainly do remember that.
	About the age of seven, or six or seven, I was like...
	Because I used to have to get bullied to brush my teeth, right?
	Let me smell your breath. But I sort of figured out, hey, they're my teeth.
	You know, they're my teeth.
	If I don't clean them, bad things will happen.
	So, this issue around this sort of basic idea that children are considered selfish and lazy...
	It's total projection on the parts of the parents.
	The parents are selfish because the parents want to bully the children into doing things that will avoid the parents' experience of anxiety unjustly.
	Because the parents are fearful of peer groups and wish to have control because they wish to feel power.
	If you are a sad enough and pathetic enough and corrupt enough soul that you wish to feel power through power over others, then that's nothing that any sane human being could ever respect.
	That could never.
	Be something that anyone would respect.
	So, from that standpoint, of course parents are totally selfish.
	And parents are totally lazy.
	Because they're not doing the elemental self-work to say, gee, I wonder why it's important for me that my kid have his room be clean.
	I wonder why it's important to me that this, that, and the other.
	Why am I getting so upset when I don't get what I want?
	And then, of course, you mock the kid or get angry at the kid for having a tantrum.
	And, of course, most parenting is just one long, drawn-out tantrum, to be perfectly frank.
	I mean, most parenting that you see is just one long, drawn-out tantrum.
	And that's a real shame.
	It's desperately sad for kids.
	But this selfish and lazy is a total projection on the part of the parents into the kids.
	And I'm sort of really committed to fighting this issue in myself around the have-tos, right?
	Because I was certainly raised both in boarding school and at home and in public schools and so on with the very strong perception or the very strong belief that by my nature I was selfish and lazy.
	I really didn't want to do the right thing.
	If given an inch, I would take a mile and I was totally happy to turf all of my work onto the laboring backs of others and all this kind of nonsense.
	I want to spend the second half of my life laboring under that perception because it is fundamentally totally false.
	And so I'm going to continue to work on it.
	And I would like to work a little bit more this afternoon on this issue, more from the sort of historical genesis of the idea, which has its roots in some very interesting phenomenon that have gone on throughout, I mean, almost all of civilization.
	I'll talk mostly about sort of Western civilization, but...
	This sort of question of the perception of children, the moral perception of children, heavily influenced, of course, by the issue or belief in something like original sin.
	So I'd like to talk a little bit more about that this afternoon.
	I'm absolutely going to give you another 30 seconds of filler.
	Donate, donate, donate. That would be nice, nice, nice.
	And because I'm just coming up to a light here, and I certainly don't want to be irresponsible enough to attempt to stop the podcast while currently in motion, especially when I'm doing all these curves.
	Thank you so much for listening.
	I massively appreciate it.

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