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Oct. 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:40
473 Children: Selfish and Evil? (Part 2)
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Time Text
Good afternoon.
Good evening, everybody.
It's 22 minutes past six on October the 23rd, 2006, and we will be driving into the bluey darkness this evening, my brothers and sisters.
So I hope that you don't mind as the forehead goes down into the darkness.
And we're talking about the topic I'd like to sort of continue from this morning, which is the question of children...
And ethics. Sort of the ethics that are viewed.
The ethics that are...
That society...
Lordy, lordy. Remember that topic from this morning?
The one where I could actually speak?
That was fun. I really liked that.
Okay, I'm just going to mime this.
It's so good that I've got the video going.
So, the way that society views the ethics of children has a lot to do with how society ends up viewing the ethics of the state and of the church, and these sort of two things are heavily put in sync with each other.
The three major institutions that insult the natural ethics of children are the state, the church, and the family, of course.
And I did a little bit of reading today about original sin, but it all gets far too creepy and sick for me to be able to hold my nose in there for a while.
And then I just kind of pop out.
So I'm not going to talk too much about that.
And it's all, of course, all this insanity.
I was looking up in the Catholic Encyclical and all of this Madness is really put forward as, you know, kind of sweetly reasoned statements, some combination of empiricism and revelation with, you know, the minor emphasis on faith and the major emphasis on rational argument, right?
It's like being a physicist saying that up is down, black is white, and the world is banana-shaped, and let's go from there.
But I did, I had sort of this on Sunday when I was chatting about this with Christina.
I had a... Epiphany!
Which was very cool. I don't know that I will be able to reproduce that.
I hope it's not one of these epiphanies where, you know, you sort of write something down, you wake up in a feverish dream in the middle of the night, write something down, and then the next morning it just says, you know, my hammock needs a new sweater.
And you figured that was the answer to life, the universe, the truth, and everything.
But you were just a tad mistaken.
But the epiphany that I had, which I'll try and build up a little bit towards, not necessarily because traffic is slow, but because I didn't make this light.
But the epiphany that I had was around this sort of question or this idea that I remember so strongly from my childhood of just...
Feeling that everybody looked at me like I was some sort of little cheating kind of weasel and that without a stern discipline and a harsh hand and focused manly staunchness that I was always on the verge of turning into a ne'er-do-well.
If that phrase doesn't date me, I don't know what will.
But I was always on the verge of, like, it just took one little Pinocchio poke to have me fall into the pit of iniquity and to become a bad person.
And there were so many tales of evil children and so many tales.
And I remember the story of Pinocchio with the bad kids in it.
It scared the hell out of me when I was a kid.
Really, the kid who turns into the donkey and all that?
Ugh, it's a nightmare.
Alright, let me just fix my rattling equipment here.
For those listening to the audio, it's not what you think.
But this question of the evil...
Of children was just so ingrained in sort of popular myth and popular sort of literature.
And if you look at a lot of these different kinds of stories, a lot of them are about, you know, the child who disabays the logical instructions of the parents and so on and so on.
Fairy tales are all about that, of course.
So, for me, this idea that I was innately wrong or bad or I tended towards slithery, sneaky kind of eat the cookies, wash my hands and pretend with a smiling face that nothing happened.
And that parents and teachers and disciplinarians were all sorts of, you know, on the realm of prison guards who sort of felt that the prisoners are always shifty, as I sort of talked about this morning.
Now, of course, I had boarding school, which is probably a little bit more than most people who are listening to this had.
But that was a pretty strong feeling.
I remember when I was about six, maybe six and a half, maybe seven.
Anyway, it was the first year I was in boarding school.
And I lost a pen.
And somebody said, you know, there was an announcement which said, if you've lost a pen, come and blah, blah, blah.
And it was a nice gold pen. And I said, no, that's not mine.
The guy was shocked. Like, oh, that's extraordinarily honest.
I guess a lot of aristocrats went there to whom extraordinary honesty was not common.
But... This idea, and I remember also we had these waves of hysterical behavior that used to overcome us when we were in boarding school.
And you would get these fads, right?
So one of these fads was paper airplanes.
I can't remember. There were a whole bunch of them.
There's one I remember sort of in particular.
Paper airplanes.
And... They were just like, it would be night and day.
This would be the thing. And I guess this is a way of sort of establishing independence or whatever.
But these paper airplanes were a real fetish for us kids.
And we'd sort of make them and fly them different configurations.
Somebody would invent a new way of doing it.
One guy even folded a paper biplane with thread.
It was remarkable. And I remember once I tore out...
My mom had given me the Book of World Records or something.
And I tore a page out to make a paper airplane for some reason that I can't remember, and this was sort of found out.
And so, of course, I got dragged up in front of the vice, I guess what would be called the vice principal, vice headmaster.
And as if being headmaster alone wasn't a vice.
And, you know, had one of these, had to endure one of these, and these happened quite regularly when I was a kid.
These are like long, grueling lectures about, you know, your mother worked very hard to give you that book, and to tear it up, and to desecrate the this, and to irresponsibility that, and learn to respect other people's gifts, and, you know, like, it just went on and on and on, like literally for 10 or 15 minutes, I remember standing up there in front of the class.
And, of course, he didn't do this in private.
He did this in front of the whole class, right?
This sort of Slow, grinding, sadistic, wearing down and...
I mean, it's a fucking piece of paper and a book, like...
Who really cares?
It's my book. It's my property.
I remember there was all of this stuff around you had money, but you could never get access to it.
I don't know if they invested it in Peruvian stocks or something, but I remember we went to a county fair and I wanted to try.
I knew that I had a number of pounds, British currency for those not in the know.
A number of pounds that had been set aside that you kind of had to deposit when you put your kid in boarding school.
So it was like 20 or 30 pounds.
It was a lot of money back then.
And I wanted five pennies to throw a ball at a coconut to see if I could win a prize.
Because I guess I had three or four tickets that they would buy for you.
And I wanted five pennies.
And I said, well, I'd like to take...
I was like seven or eight at this point.
I said, I'd like to make a withdrawal.
I'd like my five pennies so that I can throw the ball at the coconut and try and win a prize.
I can't remember what the prize was, but maybe I thought I won the coconut.
I don't know, but a coconut would have been fun too.
And, of course, I got, you know, there was the arched eyebrows, the pursed lips, the massive disapproval.
Well, that's rather frivolous, Mr.
Molyneux. And it's like, you stupid bastard.
It's supposed to be my money that I have access to.
And I had to, like, wheedle and cajole for, like, ten minutes before getting a princely five-penny piece.
Because, God knows, if they gave me money, I would just, I don't know, invest in hookers and cocaine or something like that.
So there were all of these just crazy, stupid rules.
Like if you kicked the ball beyond a certain area, then you just weren't allowed to get it.
You had to go and get a headmaster.
You weren't allowed to climb a low wall into the sanatorium to pick up a ball if you'd knocked it over or anything like that.
And I remember things would go missing, these sort of Captain Queeg moments on the sort of Mutiny and the Bounty, these Captain Queeg moments where it's like, every schoolboy will now comb the grounds!
Of course, these massive school grounds, right?
And you literally would walk up and down, sort of arm's length from another boy, looking for something in the grass because someone had lost something, some headmaster or some teacher had lost something, something had gone missing or whatever.
And there were all these lectures about thieving boys and so on.
Never about bullying boys.
It was never about bullies.
Because, of course, bullies were highly, if not openly, encouraged.
Bullies... Bullies traumatized the younger boys who came along, and in return, the younger boys who grew up would get to bully the next round.
This is how you train people to hate their own vulnerability, which is what turns them into a ruling class, right?
You become a ruling class person.
You get to project all of your vulnerability onto the poor damn peasants and then be as cruel to them as you were cruelly treated when you yourself were vulnerable.
That's the cycle, right?
And then in public schools as well.
You know, the public schools, it was always like, you don't do your homework.
You don't work hard.
What are you doing in the hall without...
I mean, they're little fucking jails, frankly.
What are you doing in the hall without a pass?
You know, what are you doing? You need to report to the principal's office.
You have to do these lines.
I mean, I got canings in boarding school for going over the ball.
Sorry, going over the fence a little low wall to get a ball back that we were playing with.
And, you know, you get caught and you get found out and you get dragged off to the headmasters and you're beaten.
I mean, I know that that's probably a lot more than most people went through in their schooling, but certainly Christina remembers seeing kids getting hit on the hand with a ruler.
It's excruciatingly painful when you're a kid.
And, you know, this was only ditched in the late 70s or early 80s, I think, as far as that punishment went.
So corporal punishment up until very recently, you know, the state would beat children, right?
Would inflict some pretty extraordinary levels of physical pain upon children.
And nobody really kind of...
Noticed it as a bad thing, right?
And now they just do it with homework, right?
There's no correlation between the amount of homework and student activity, but that's what people...
That's what they do to kids now.
They just punish them with ridiculous...
I remember my nieces bursting into tears over the amount of homework that they got from their schools.
Ah, the light, the dawn, and...
So, yeah, it's incredibly cruel, what they sort of do to kids.
And it really is, of course, this cruelty, you know, the kids are cruel, right?
Kids are not cruel. Kids are not innately cruel.
I've never met a kid who did not come from a particularly rough history who was not, like, who just was innately cruel, just for funsies.
And, of course, if you want to look at cruelty, you look at how the adults treat the children in society.
Now, that's changed a little bit lately, and I'm not even going to hazard much more than a random guess at this, but there seems to be quite a bit of permissiveness, which is also not very helpful to kids, so it's sort of the one pole to the other.
In the same way that the permissiveness, quote permissiveness, which was just moral slackness, of the Weimar Republic.
You had the Bismarckian Germany in the 1870s, and then you had the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, which was the loose skepticism and dissolution of all logic and sensibility.
And then, of course, you end up with totalitarianism.
So we're in that kind of hyper-permissive phase, not so much in America, but in other places.
And anyway, we'll talk about that perhaps another time.
But basically, it seems to be a very strong belief, a very strong phenomenon in society that children, you know, give them an inch, they'll take a mile.
And that they're constantly trying to manipulate you and wheedle you and cajole and bully and throw tantrums and then whine and then complain and then this and that and the other.
And people don't see this as learned behavior.
I remember watching a Dr.
Phil where the daughter was acting out in a horrible kind of way, like four years old, beating her head against the table and throwing things and having massive tantrums where she couldn't even breathe and so on.
And one of the things that you see, of course, is that the parents are incredibly violent and that they start screaming at each other.
And so Dr. Phil points it out, and I thought it was a very smart thing to say.
You ever notice that she does this when you guys are fighting?
Like you start fighting and then she starts holding a tantrum or having a tantrum or acting out in some manner?
And they're like, yeah, that's true.
And he's like, well, do you have any idea why she might be doing that?
Of course, they had no clue. And he said, well, because it brings you guys together, right?
It stops you from fighting.
And that's, of course, very important to a child.
The possibility that parents are going to abandon the child is a death sentence, so children are expert manipulators, if they have to be, at keeping parental conflict to a minimum, or at least if it's looking like it's going bad, siding with one parent against the other, and so on.
There's just no choice, right?
I mean, if you've got to befriend the God, if the God has no real reason to bring you food, then you've got to be nice to the God.
It doesn't have anything to do with friendliness, it just has to do with survival.
So, to discuss sort of the micro-view, and we could go on and on about that, but children are treated abysmally badly in our society.
I think that there was a step forward, right?
As I mentioned in a podcast many moons ago, the Freudian issue that occurred when the sexual exploitation of children became front and center in Freud's analysis of hysterical women and hysterical men, that it was premature sexual experience or, frankly, childhood rape, That occurred for the vast majority of these people.
In fact, I think it was almost all of them.
Who became sort of hysterical and neurasthenic and suicidal and so on.
And so when he began to sort of get a sense of the prevalence of what was going on in largely upper-class or upper-class Viennese society in the late 19th century, he became appalled.
And he started to publish these.
And he said, well, the ideology of hysteria is sexual rape, rape of children.
And, of course, this was the great unspoken.
It is one of the great unspoken things within society, the rape of children.
And he started to publish his findings, and society went apeshit.
Society went apeshit.
And he was excluded, he was harassed, he was berated, people screamed at him.
And so basically he chickened out.
And he said, okay, well, these women are all telling me that their father raped them...
In order to keep my license, to keep my friends, to keep my community, to keep my standing in the Jewish community, I'm going to say that they made it up.
But he couldn't say, well, they just made it up, because that sounds not too sensible, not too scientific.
So he said, well, no. They...
The fact that they're reporting to me that their fathers raped them when they were children is not true, because it's just far too common, I can't comprehend it, and so on.
He was the tip of the sword of a new moral world, as I guess we're trying to be as well.
And he chickened out, and he said, well, it can't be that these children, these boys and girls, are actually being sexually molested by their fathers and mothers.
What is actually occurring is a form of fantasy And what is actually occurring is that they want to be raped by their mothers and their fathers or sexually molested by their mothers and raped by their fathers.
And so we're going to call this the Oedipal Complex and the Electra Complex, the desire to have sexual relations with the opposite sex parent.
And this really was the found, this of course destroyed the social recognition of child abuse For two or three generations, an enormous betrayal of the people who were courageous enough to tell him their story.
Of course, he himself was a victim of sexual abuse, Freud, which of course meant that he would have to deal with his own issues and those of course within his own community, right?
Of course, it's the master race of the Jewish.
You can't really imagine that there's a lot of child rape going on in the Jewish community.
That might put a slight dent into the idea of the master race.
And again, I'm not picking on the Jewish community.
I think it's common in all communities.
I think that's one of the things that he was dealing with.
And then of course Jung himself was raped by a friend of his father's when he was in his teens.
And of course this tells you everything that you need to know about the kind of circle that Jung grew up in so it wasn't like he was going to be able...
To deal with this problem of the rape of children.
Anyway, a lot of the things that happened was that this began to become more...
The fate of children and the fate of women have sort of bound up together in many ways, right?
Because they're sort of the underclass, right?
And so women struggled for freedom.
You know, fantastic.
I think that's wonderful. Sadly, they then voted in the welfare state, but we won't pick on them for that.
But the women sort of struggled for freedom, and they did so, unfortunately, in opposition to men and not in opposition to the state, which is a bit of a shame, really.
But that's okay.
It just gives me a good reason to podcast.
So women struggled for freedom and they began to expose the crimes of men.
And they exposed the crimes of men against women and also against children, right?
So you began to see the unspoken occurrences, the unspoken things that happened before.
Was the sexual exploitation.
You began to see the drunken dad and the abusive dad and the mean and violent dad and the ex-army aggressive dad and the brutal dad.
You're getting to see all this sort of stuff in fiction, largely.
Not that it was fiction, but what happened was that the feminists did not focus their moral candor on the women.
So the idea of female crimes against children, which are legion, legion, The idea of female crimes against children waned away, right?
So as soon as you sort of had the outing of the abusive male, then everything kind of vanished and children were kind of left still in this vacuum of abuse by women, right?
And it's not that hard to see that there's quite a strong correlation.
It's not that hard to see unless, again, you've been very educated not to, that there's a very strong correlation between young male violence and being raised by a mother.
And that's an important thing to understand, that if women were so innately great and peaceful as parents, then surely you would see less male violence among men who'd been brought up by women.
They would have been feminized and turned into gentle, nice creatures, but of course that's not true.
Men and women have exactly the same capacity for evil.
Unfortunately, we have ceased to be able to see the evil of women, which means that children are left largely unprotected in this context.
Child abuse is still continuing.
It's just not quite as florid and vivid as it used to be because there aren't as many Portrayals of abusive men around, and there's some diminishment in that area, but there's still almost no visibility of female evil, right? Just sort of look it up.
Here in Canada, a woman just choked two of her kids to death.
And everybody referred to it as a tragedy.
It's a tragedy. She was stressed.
She was new to this country. She was going through a difficult divorce.
Those children were angels.
She loved them very much. She was hormonal.
Make up anything that they can make up with rather than just, you know, She murdered her children.
This woman is evil. She strangled her two little girls, left them lying on the floor, and that's pretty evil, right?
You don't get that kind of thing when a man rapes a woman.
You don't say, well, this is tragic.
He was really stressed, and he couldn't get a date.
Can you imagine what would happen if you wrote a newspaper article like that?
And, of course, a woman has infinitely greater capacity to defend herself against a potential rapist than a child does against a homicidal and violent and evil mother.
So it's just, you know, we can't see this.
It's one of the things you just can't talk about.
We just can't see it. It's one of these explosive topics, like a whole number of them that we've talked about.
But at the sort of macro level, when you look at this in a political context...
What happens is that if you've ever had the conversation around freedom, where you say, we should get rid of the welfare state, or we should get rid of the government, or we should whatever, we should minimize the government's role, whatever you want to say.
And then people immediately say, well, what would happen to the poor?
What would happen to the sick? What would happen to the old?
What would happen to the handicapped?
This is exactly what I'm talking about, right?
This written large is exactly what occurs in the ideology of childhood morality.
And what I mean by that is that if you sort of break down that statement where people say, I say, let's get rid of the welfare state, and people say, well, people are just starving in the streets.
Nobody would help them. Nobody would care.
What that statement says is that people are innately selfish.
See the pattern here?
people are innately selfish and people are innately greedy and people innately don't care about other people that a human being in a state of non-coercion is evil.
Or at best, merely selfish, if not actively evil, merely uncaring, cold and selfish.
Now, that is a very fascinating thing.
That does not arise in people's minds out of nowhere.
It doesn't sort of pop into their head out of nowhere that they have this very strong impression that if you take away the guns of the government, that everybody will be evil.
This sort of Hobbesian nightmare of nature, red in tooth and claw, some word that indicates talons.
This Hobbesian view that if you take away the Leviathan, if you take away the gun from someone's head, that the society will be incredibly violent.
This is sort of how people who are untutored and arrogant in their thinking look at what's happening in Iraq.
They see, we got rid of Saddam Hussein, and there's all this violence and civil war because in the lack of a central authority, people are evil or at best uncaring and selfish.
Well, where do they get this idea from?
And why is it so instantly on everyone's lips?
Why is it that the first thing you can...
Everyone thinks they're such an individual, but in the fundamentals, everybody's just programmed by culture.
And everybody runs around saying, Ooh, I'm so different.
Ooh, I'm so different. And they're not.
They're not. They're just a whole bunch of heavily programmed emptinesses that collide against each other with the vague impression that there's a personality and an active, lively soul going on.
And they could come alive, but they would have to give up the impression or the idea that they were alive, and most people don't really want to deal with that stuff.
Where do they get this idea that if you got rid of the government, there would be this massive boiling over of rage and destruction and rape and so on, right?
Like they say, well, look what happens when there's race riots in L.A. and the police don't do anything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, this idea that a thin blue line, the sort of Hill Street Cop, Hill Street Blues scenario where there's this boiling underworld of massive, raging, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, emotions and passions and hateful, destructive feelings.
And, you know, you need the guns pointed and trained and the lasers on everyone's forehead just so that they'll march in line and won't kill and rape and eat each other's feces and stuff like that.
And of course, we're right back to the Freudian model as well, right?
The Freud has this sort of seething id, and then a relatively powerless ego, and then an incredibly savage superego that restrains.
And I know he's all about finding the balance, but that whole formulation is very interesting, right?
There's no question about what provokes the anger.
Human beings are just angry.
We're animals. Angry by nature and in the absence of centralized authority.
This is the anarchistic view.
The popular cultural view of anarchy.
Bunch of shaven-headed guys sniffing glue and driving cars off cliffs with old ladies in them or whatever.
Pushing cars off cliffs.
Where do people get this idea from?
Well, it has to come from their childhoods.
It has to come from their childhoods.
It absolutely cannot conceivably come from empirical evidence in the real world.
It can't. It simply can't come from empirical evidence in the real world.
And the idea that in the absence of a centralized authority, people are just savage animals and you need this sort of judge-dread world of hyper-moral, dedicated, sociopathic but pure goodness, a kind of master race philosopher kings to keep us all in line, It's the fantasy of the family, right?
It's the fantasy of the family that your parents are always going to tell you that you have to obey them because they're good, and they know what's good for you, and they know what's best for you, but they can't explain it in a way that you would understand.
Trust me, you'll understand when you get older.
Oh, we've all heard that speech about a bajillion times.
But the thing that is irresistible about children and the reason why people get so violent towards children is that children have two traits that are just incredible.
Children have two traits that are just incredible.
And two traits that simply cannot be allowed to survive if the state and the predation of the weak by the powerful and the hegemonic kind of structural hierarchical societies that we are all lumped with.
If those are to continue, these two traits have to be erased and destroyed in children.
And these two traits are sort of two sides of one trait.
Children are skeptical but not cynical.
Children are skeptical but not cynical.
And that is an irresistible force in the world.
Skepticism without cynicism.
I like to think that I bring a few drams of that to the table, let's say.
But you can be gullible, right, and optimistic, like the idiots, everything's going to work out fine, no matter what the national debt is, USA number one.
Idiot patriots of one kind or another.
Those are people who are optimistic because they're gullible, credible, they're credulous.
And then you can be nihilistic and believe in nothing.
And have no standards of truth whatsoever.
And that's called being skeptical, but you're skeptical of everything.
Truth, virtue, goodness, evil.
Everything's manipulation. Everything's control.
You're postmodern. But to be skeptical without being cynical, in other words, this is another way of saying to be rational, that is the very definition of childhood.
When children enter the world and start asking questions about it, they genuinely and openly and optimistically believe that they're being told what to do because People have the right idea about what to do, and of course they want to know, and they ask, oh, why should I do this, or why should I do that, or what's the benefit of this or what's the benefit of that.
And parents don't have a freaking clue.
Parents don't have a freaking clue, and they can't admit that to their children because that would be exposing their own bullying to themselves, and it would also mean that they would have no credibility with their children.
And this is how this abuse loop keeps just going, going, going, going, going, going, going, going from here to eternity until someone fucking yanks the tape.
So parents don't want to say to their kids, you know, social conformity, You know, you're going to get made fun of, so you should just do things...
It makes me anxious when you don't do it.
I like to have control.
I want to bully you.
I mean, they have no idea why they're telling their kids to do stuff.
It's just cultural photocopying over and over and over.
And kids get that very quickly, right?
And kids are hurt by that.
Kids are very hurt by their parents being revealed as not only false gods, but oftentimes largely devils.
But devils claiming to be good, right?
And the fear of exposure by children, right?
Because everybody's so stuffed full of lies and cliches and evil little habits that the bright new light of children dawning on this scarred and smoking landscape of every adult soul is...
A merciless glare that hurts the eyes, it pounds the head, it causes migraines and rage.
The merciless light of the curious and optimistic child, the skeptical but not nihilistic child, that irradiates most adult souls.
That combination of curiosity, optimism, questioning, rationality, and trust, it just irradiates the broken, scarred, and smoking and bloody souls of adults.
They feel that the children are regressing against them and they feel that they're perfectly justified in acting in self-defense and controlling the child and bullying the child and refusing to answer questions from the child and getting angry at the curiosity of the child and so on.
And so they sort of have to convince the child that sort of questions are evil, that, you know, you sort of fill your head with nothing and stupid busy work tasks like clean your room and this and that and the other, and there's nothing higher in life, there's nothing greater in life, but you still have to obey the parents because they're moral and this is replicated in society and school and every other arena that you can think of.
And fundamentally, It's because the children see the truth that the parents don't want them to see.
It's like the child who asks all these questions about God.
Let me loom out of the dark into the light here.
The priests don't want to ask those questions.
They just get angry. They just get angry at the children because the children see the truth and people feel irradiated by the sort of Camaro high beam searchlights that are in children's eyes when they look at you and all of your hypocrisies And falsehoods and manipulations become clear, and of course you can't handle that, so you project all of your falsehood and manipulation and corruption onto the child, and you now say, well, I'm good, the child is evil, right?
That's sort of the basis of projection.
And this, of course, then gives people the idea that since children are naturally evil, then the parents must be good.
Because if everyone's evil, there's no hope, right?
So in a natural state, you're evil and corrupt and selfish and lazy.
But if you submit to an authority, you have the potential.
If you submit and really live by what that authority says, you have the potential.
This is the root of original sin and salvation and so on.
You have the potential to not be evil if you submit to an authority, right?
And this, of course, is what occurs in the family, right?
Your questions are evil.
Your innocence is evil. Your curiosity is evil.
Your skepticism is evil.
The truth that you see in your parents' black souls is evil.
And you have to be bullied into conformity, which basically means conformity is just another word for not asking questions, right?
So you have to be bullied into not asking questions of anyone or anything at any time.
And from there you end up with this idea that in the absence, so then what happens is as you become an adult, the state becomes your parent and in some ways the church becomes your parent if you're religious.
But the state in particular is your parent and then just as when people were children they were told that in the absence of obeying despotic parental authority they were evil and if this parental authority were relaxed They would simply become evil again, right?
It's not like they ever became perpetually cured.
The evil that lurks in the heart of men can never be quashed or killed.
And then, this is what translates itself into a worship of state power.
And this instant, boom, taneous response that occurs when you say to someone, we should get rid of the welfare state, boom!
They don't even think about it.
It's not even something that crosses their mind as a thought.
The immediate reaction is, oh, well, without centralized power, we'd all be evil.
And that comes from the way children are treated.
It comes from the way children are treated by their parents, by their priests, by their teachers, by their uncles, by their aunts, by their grandparents.
Everyone is in on this.
And if you really want to look at the root of the power of the state, that's why I keep saying it's the family, it's the family, it's the family, it's the family.
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