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Nov. 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:08
509 Assaulting Children

Try spanking a strange woman and see if it's called 'loving correction'

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Good evening, brothers and sisters.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well. It is 6 o'clock on the 14th, some damn Tuesday-ish, of November 2006.
And I am going to have a little chat with you this evening.
Because there seems to be a quite exciting debate going on on the boards.
Welcome once more to all the new listeners.
Thank you so much, and sorry about the eight podcasts I posted today.
We got just a little bit busy with Podcast 500.
I logged, jammed things up for a little while.
But there's quite a debate going on on the boards about spanking.
And, as you know, it's important when you're a philosopher to have a fine nose For the sanctifying odor of euphemisms, so we're not going to really use the term spanking other than to simply point out that it is a euphemism for assaulting children.
And if you doubt that, just go up to a bouncer and slap him hard across the rear end or go up to a woman at a woman's studies group.
and slap her hard across her backside and see what happens, whether it is considered to be an innocuous act of gentle reproof and correction or whether it is considered to be a violent act of assault and so on.
So let's not mince words when it comes to that and also let's not forget that a spanking As a practice is not something that can be logically and legitimately sliced and diced into benevolent and reproving and correcting and violent and sadistic and insane because it's a gray area,
right? So if I walk up to my wife and I pat her on the bum, I don't think she's going to file charges, at least not again.
But if I go up and slap her hard, then that is going to be considered an assault and would fundamentally change the nature of our relationship to it not existing.
It's a pretty fundamental change that would occur.
And so given that there's this huge gray area, You know, in the realm, like, it's like play fighting versus fighting.
There's a lot of problems with the gray areas, which is why you generally don't have, if you go up and punch a bouncer, you generally don't have as a reasonable defense, I thought we were playing, right?
So there's all these gray areas.
It's another one of the reasons why it can be very complicated in the case of rape, because, or, you know, an accusation of sexual assault.
Because, of course, there are men who rape and there are women who falsely accuse or who accuse in the gray area of, I got drunk, I had seamy sex, and I regretted it the next day.
And that is a gray area that is very difficult and challenging to work with, so that's why it's generally wise to avoid these kinds of situations, period, and not deal with them at all.
So, in the realm of spanking, yes, there are playful paths which then escalate to something quite different, and there's no objective and clear way to know which is which, which is why, you know, hitting children in general is, well... We'll talk about that as we chug along through this podcast on assaulting children.
And to me, there's some really amazing things.
It's not hugely amazing because we don't see children as human beings.
Most of us don't see children as human beings.
We view them as broken adults or intelligent pets or providers of emotional sustenance to mommy and daddy who are needy.
And things like that, and to disobedient rascals who simply won't do what they're told.
We don't view them as brilliant and creative and wonderful and intelligent and perceptive and deep spiritual beings, which of course they are in the absence of coercion and assault.
As we all are in the absence of coercion and assault.
And if you want to see the difference for this writ large, look at the economy of the Middle Ages when violence was omnipresent versus the economy of the 20th century and to a smaller degree the 21st where violence in the West is not omnipresent and you can see the flourishing that occurs when assault and violence and brutality is taken down.
Now, most libertarians really do deal with, in a positive way, do accept the proposition of the non-aggression principle.
This is not something that most libertarians have a problem with because, you see, if you really do have a problem with the non-aggression principle, I think it's fairly safe to say that You're not a libertarian, right?
It's like saying, I'm a communist and I believe in the universality of private property.
Well, kind of not a communist, right?
And if you believe that certain people have the right to violate the non-aggression principle, then you're not a libertarian.
It's one of the fundamental defining characteristics.
Now, it's interesting to me that the non-aggression principle, of course, is...
A universal principle. I have no problem with it.
Of course, it's the foundation of most of what it is that I talk about, except the tangents.
So I guess it's not that much of a...
Okay, fight the tangent.
Fight the tangent! Fight the tangent!
But the non-aggression principle is sort of important to note.
If you are a 6'8", 300-pound muscle man at, I don't know, Macworld Expo or something like that, the non-aggression principle doesn't really...
Apply to you. I mean, it does, of course, but given the disparity in your size and, you know, you've got a neck as wide as a redwood and two legs like stone pillars and a barrel chest and so on,
one of those shaven head flat top hairdos, Then you're not really going to get a whole bunch of people who are looking into whether or not the new Microsoft product beats the iPod or whatever who are out there writing for Macworld and things.
They're not really going to be beating up on you like a whole lot.
So the non-aggression principle Is sort of like really most important for those who are not 300-pound muscle men or those who currently have.
If you see someone being held up, you're a good libertarian and you're out there chugging around and viewing the world through the lens of the non-aggression principle, And you see a mugger jamming a knife into somebody's ribs, or jamming a pistol into somebody's ribs.
Of course, the non-aggression principle works both ways, but I doubt very much that your primary concern would be that...
The victim is going to suddenly turn around and initiate violence against the mugger, right?
Because the mugger has already initiated violence, so it would be self-defense and so on.
But if you see a 98-pound guy being picked on or in a sort of rising aggressive yelling match with a 300-pound muscle man, I don't think that you are too worried that The muscle man is going to get really badly hurt.
I mean, there's no superheroes and we don't have any sort of hidden jujitsu abilities.
That the non-aggression principle really is designed to shield and protect the most vulnerable in society.
Right? I am a, you know, a 215 pound, almost 6 foot tall guy who's been working out for, I don't know, gosh, 25 years.
And I don't really face a lot of challenges or problems with physical violence.
My wife, on the other hand, is 110 pounds and has only been working out because I've dragged her to the gym for two and a half years.
She's worked out before that, but in a sort of systematic way.
But no matter how much she works out, she's never going to be a physical match for any sort of reasonably sized man.
And so, when you think about the non-aggression principle and you look at the differences between myself and my wife, it would seem unlikely that you would focus on protecting me from an assault by my wife.
It would seem quite likely that you would focus on the opposite.
In the same way that you don't design hospitals for healthy people, right?
I mean, it's just the basic, you design these kinds of things, right?
You design hospitals for sick people, and you design societies, or you understand societies, or the application of the non-aggression principle to those who are the most vulnerable.
And it always is rather amazing to me, just in terms of logic, and in terms of the absolute...
Blind spots of human nature that there's any debate about assaulting children.
I mean, to me, it's absolutely shocking at a very fundamental level that there's any debate whatsoever about assaulting children.
That libertarians who loathe and fear and hate the state for its violence, which they can simply eliminate by complying almost always to the government's requests, And that this violence occurs in a deduction from paycheck, abstract kind of way, for the most part.
That there's this great fear and horror and loathing of the principle of the initiation of force that is at the root of government institutions like taxation, the military and so on.
Prisons and the war on drugs and boy oh boy, you just can't get libertarians to stop talking about the gun in the room and those situations.
But, you know, kids hove interview and suddenly everybody gets all O'Reilly on everybody's ass, right?
You're in the O'Reilly zone or factor or whatever the hell it is.
And suddenly everyone's a tough talk and, you know, kids got to know their place and it doesn't do any harm.
And as long as the parents are loving, what does a few swats matter?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Suddenly, the non-aggression principle, and I don't think that we can legitimately say that, say, spanking a three-year-old is done in an act of self-defense, unless you find the stench of poo to be overpowering, but I think it would be hard to put that forward as an act of self-defense.
But, boy, you know, the principle's just...
Bye-bye. They go out the window.
They're leaving on a jet plane, never to be seen again.
And that really is something to give pause, I would say, to people who are in this debate about violence and who are all fired up about the evils and predations and the violations of the non-aggression principle that is represented by the state.
And yet... Somehow, magically, when they confront the greatest power disparity in any society, the greatest power disparity, In any society is the parent-child relationship.
This is the foundation of all corruptions and evils within human society.
The state, the church, these are all mere echoes and pale shadowy platonic reflections of the fundamental power disparity and abuses of power that occurs almost inevitably in the absence of a rational system of ethics, and that is between the parent and the child.
So people will say, well, you know, the war in Iraq is really bad.
You see, the war in Iraq is really bad because it was the initiation of the use of force against Iraqis and paying for the war is really bad, you see, because it is the initiation of the use of force against taxpayers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they get all hot and bothered and fired up and, you know, there's no law that says we have to pay the income tax and all these, right?
And then when it comes to assaults on children, you know, the little Iraqs of the foreign policy of parenting, well, that's a blank out, right?
That doesn't fit.
That doesn't work. The non-aggression principle doesn't cover children.
Good heavens! How could you conceivably imagine that the non-aggression principle would be ever designed to actually protect the vulnerable?
The non-aggression principle is to protect the parents from other adults like the state and so on.
But it's not, oh heavens no, it's not to protect children, the absolutely vulnerable and dependent children, from the predations of parents.
My heavens no, that would be It would be unthinkable.
Why would you ever apply the non-aggression principle to those who can't defend themselves?
So, there's a number of defenses that have been put forward to the question of violence against children.
And one of those, of course, is that, well, it didn't do me any harm to get assaulted by my parents.
And I just, I mean, that's just nonsense.
I mean, this is extraordinary lack of empathy for the self, which, of course, is natural in people who've experienced this kind of assault from their parents.
But, you know, people say, well, it didn't harm me.
And there's no, you can't prove objective harm in the assault on people.
On children, spanking or beating children, hitting children, you can't prove objective harm and therefore it's not a bad thing.
And boy, that's just a wonderful drift in argument.
I mean, it really is quite an astounding flip of methodologies to say that suddenly the way that you know something is wrong is because it causes objective harm.
That's how you know that something is wrong, right?
So, of course, as libertarians, we've never been in the situation where somebody says, well, I'm happy to pay taxes, and I enjoy the government, and I'm very pleased with the services.
And then we say, well, okay, if there's no harm for you, then, of course, taxation isn't wrong.
I mean, we've all been in that situation where we've talked to people who are happy to pay taxes and who say basically with the implicit statement that we ourselves are selfish for not wanting all of this joyful stripping of our income.
And do we then say, well, okay, no problem.
You enjoy paying your taxes, so I guess there's nothing wrong with taxation.
Because I really have no idea why a liberty, other than this sort of blind spot of lack of compassion for children, Why libertarians would suddenly switch to this idea that now objective harm must be proven in order for something to be considered immoral.
So now it's no longer the non-aggression principle.
Now it's some other bizarre utilitarian prove the harm kind of argument.
Prove the objective harm independent of self-reporting and that is how you know that something bad has occurred.
Well, of course, we do know that assaults upon children do cause lasting psychological harm.
And this is, of course, to differing degrees based on the nature of the children.
Of course, the idea that there is...
Well, I'll get back to that. Loving parents with the spanking thing.
But certainly we know that the objective harm is created by certain kinds of assaults.
Well, all assaults upon children.
And this doesn't mean just physical assaults, but verbal assaults.
And the very danger of untrammeled and unlimited parental power, which is...
brought to bear upon children and the power that the parents have is not limited by any rational philosophy or because of the addiction to family and the virtue of family that everybody has, not only are the parents not afraid of immediate consequences, they're not even afraid of long-term consequences, right?
So one of the reasons I tell people to break with corrupt families or suggest that that's a virtuous thing to do is because this is how slowly you erode the power of the family and you make parents better.
Actions without consequences, as we all know from those who work in the public sector, actions without consequences, people who live without consequences become more and more corrupt.
So when we ditch our parents, because they're not good people, that goes around the world in whispers and secrets and possibilities and makes parents better, because then they at least, even if they're not virtuous, they're afraid.
That their kids are going to dump them if they're not good to them.
It will make some parenting decisions slightly nicer.
Even if it doesn't make the parents a whole lot more moral, at least their behavior will be slightly nicer.
Once people get the hang that they can ditch their parents for being bad people, then the behavior of parents will...
It's like privatizing parenting, right?
It's like it's no longer a state situation.
It's no longer the communist fascistic overlord of perpetual obligation But it becomes a free market institution.
That's all I'm really talking about with parenting.
Make it a free market institution.
Go with what works, which is that voluntary interactions based on mutual value are the ideal way to structure your relationships.
Just privatize parenthood.
That's all I'm really talking about.
But people, when they look into this sort of realm of, did it harm me?
They get very confused, right?
And then they say, well, it's not bad because it didn't harm me, right?
Well, I fail to sort of understand how that's even remotely logical.
If I pull out a gun and point it at you, And then, you know, just before I pull the trigger, a bird flies into my face and causes me to jerk my arm.
And so the bullet, you know, whizzes past you and just barely parts your hair, burying itself in the wall behind you.
Of course, I haven't done you any physical harm, right?
I mean, I haven't even done the kind of harm that is done to a child when the child is assaulted.
I have done no physical harm to you whatsoever.
But would you say that I have done nothing wrong?
Obviously, it was kind of an accident that I didn't do you any harm.
But even if I simply pointed the gun at you and told you that I was going to shoot you if you didn't give me your wallet, but I had absolutely zero intention of following through with it, and then you gave me your wallet, well, obviously, I've done you no physical harm.
I've done you no physical harm.
It's like saying that if I give you $100, then I'm a generous guy.
And if you stick a gun in my back, march me to an ATM, force me to put in my numbers, and then take the $100, that's exactly the same situation.
Most violence is enacted upon people because...
They will comply and no objective harm accrues.
As people say, well, how can taxation be violent?
Nobody's actually pointed a gun at you, Steph, or at you, Bob, or at you, Jane.
So it's not violent because there's no actual gun.
The government has not harmed me in any way.
There's merely the oppressive and omnip...
Omni, omni, omni, omni, omni...
There's merely the oppressive and omnipresent cloud of jail time and going down into the slow, sucking, oily, acidic more of the state if I don't pay my taxes.
But the state has done nothing to harm me directly.
There's no objective harm that has accrued to me because the state wants half my money and more than half my time.
But it's not something that libertarians would accept, right?
So isn't it amazing that the libertarians will accept the violation of the non-aggression principle, will accept the right of parents to assault, and will suddenly start judging a corrupt or evil behavior based upon its tangible immediate effects of harm.
It's just astounding.
And this is something really important to meditate on.
I mean, I'm not going to sort of kill your ear, at least not more than usual.
But it's something really worth sitting and meditating on.
Just meditate on it.
That there is this enormous and evil black hole within our consciousness wherein we are totally focused.
On the rights of adult citizens.
And we are outraged when those adult citizens have their rights violated through the violation of the non-aggression principle at the hands of the state.
And we are so, so aware of how bad the wiretap legalization that occurs within the Patriot Act is.
We know how bad that is, even though it's not going to do any harm to us.
If we were to argue about the Patriot Act and say, well, this wiretapping is an invasion of privacy, and someone were to say, well, what objective harm does it do to you?
You don't even know it's happening. Would we then say, oh, no, you're right, there is no objective harm.
I'm not going to judge this thing based on principle.
I'm going to judge it based on objective harm that I can measure in the moment.
And of course, parents don't know the sensitivity level of their own children when they're hitting them.
So when you're assaulting your child, your child might be some, I don't know, rough and tumble, robust person who is going to shrug it off and only be a mild sociopath.
Or your child might be an exquisitely sensitive artistic soul to whom violence is just anathema and appalling and so on.
You don't know the effects of hitting your children when you're a parent.
Come on, people. You don't know the effects.
In the same way that libertarians don't know any specific effects of, you know, what happens when you raise the minimum wage.
Yes, in general, more people will be out of work and those people will tend to be the most vulnerable and poor in society, for sure.
But you can't say what happens to this person, right?
This person might actually benefit from it, you know, in a purely material way.
But you don't sort of look at each individual person and say, well, this person is harmed by the minimum wage, and this person is not harmed by the minimum wage.
No, you go on principle and you say that forcing people to pay X amount of dollars is a violation of their rights of freedom of association and of their property rights and their rights of contract.
And initiating the use of force against people who are freely contracting with each other for a sum that you just don't happen to like is not a moral thing to do.
And that's why it's wrong, as people are using violence and putting guns to people's temples for the free exercise of their contract and property rights and freedom of association.
It's a violation of those fundamental rights, and that's why it's evil.
You don't look and say, well, this poor person does well, but these three poor people do badly.
So it all gets fragmented into a pure amount of nonsense then, right?
Things are right and wrong based on the universality of it, the universality of the proposition, the reversibility of the proposition.
And then people will say, well, it is universal.
It's parent to children, and children aren't competent to run their own lives, so parents have to run it for them, and sometimes parents know best, and what are you going to do?
Are you not going to restrain your kid from walking into traffic?
And of course, that's all nonsense, right?
That's all nonsense, right?
If my wife was blind, of course I would restrain her from walking into traffic, but that doesn't mean I have the right to assault her.
I mean, people, come on.
Have some sympathy for the poor hordes of oppressed children that this world's agonies are all built on the shadows of and on the bloodstains of and on the bruises of and on the fear-stretched eyes of.
Have some sympathy for the agonies of the world that occurs below the level of the table.
There's also a proposition out there floating around that...
The parents who are wise and kind and loving, it doesn't matter if they assault their children.
I mean, please, people, what on earth do the parents' supposed intentions and abstract morality mean?
What on earth could that conceivably mean?
Am I a loving husband if I assault my wife?
Well, I'm a loving husband.
I just assault my wife when she disagrees with me.
Well, I would say that if I'm assaulting my wife, that could be conceived to have a fairly strong Effect on, you know, your judgment of my moral nature.
Say that it would be very tough for me, I think, to logically defend that I both love my wife and assault her.
And that I'm a good husband and a wise and benevolent, kind and caring husband who simply assaults my wife.
And you're going to say, well, but children are incompetent to make their own decisions and therefore we're allowed to assault them.
Well, that's fine. If you're going to take that argument, I have no problem with that.
So then what you're saying is that those who are more competent have the right to assault those who are less competent.
Well, the challenge, of course, is that we're all completely incompetent relative to each other, as I've talked about before in Podcast 501.
We are all completely incompetent.
My doctor is far more competent than me about my health.
Does that mean he gets to force me to take operations even if I don't want them?
Does that mean he gets to lock me in a cell if I continue to smoke or drink?
Or drive over the speed limit?
There are so many more people who are much more competent.
My nutritionist is far more competent at what I should eat than I am.
Does that mean that he or she gets to throw me in jail and shoot me if I resist, if I eat a Big Mac?
What on earth does competence have to do with anything?
There are far many more people out there who are more competent than us in just about every single area.
Does that mean that they then have the right to force us to do stuff?
Well, of course not. And In this realm as well, even if you were to sort of not care about that argument, well, you know, we're all going to get old and feeble-headed, right?
We're all going to get old and addle-minded, especially now that science can keep our bodies a lot healthier than nature can keep our minds healthy.
So, you know, we're all going to get old and addle-brained, and our kids who are grown up are then going to take care of us, right?
And so we are going to be in this situation where we're not going to be able to competently take care of our own affairs and we're going to have to rely on our children and they are going to be more competent than we are about our own lives and our own selves.
So, does that mean that our children then have the right to assault us if we do something wrong, right?
So when I get old and addle-brained, which shouldn't be for another...
Well, hopefully not before the end of the drive, anyway.
When I get old and addle-brained and I put the stove on and I forget to turn it off because I am addle-brained, does that mean then that my adult children have the right to assault me?
And to beat me and to hit me and to smack me because I'm doing something wrong, because I am mentally less competent?
Of course, if they frighten me with physical pain, then yeah, it's going to be something that's going to help me through basic aversion therapy.
It's going to be something that really does end up...
Sort of jolting me into doing something differently, right?
So if I leave the stove on and then, you know, somebody assaults me, then if they do it soon enough, then I'm going to want to not leave the stove on again.
And so, you know, it could be at a practical level be said to be an effective methodology for ensuring that I don't leave the stove on, right?
But I think, you know, I think that we would sort of have...
A fairly strong negative feeling towards, and a feeling that this person would be immoral, and a fairly strong negative feeling towards somebody in this realm or in this light, and we would say that this is not a very good and virtuous person.
But rather that we should not have them do this kind of stuff for us because it would be considered to be a very negative thing for them to have the right to beat up on old people because the old people weren't doing the right things or weren't doing things that pleased them or weren't doing the moral things or the effective things or whatever.
So, I think it's sort of important to understand that, you know, if you're going to have these rules, that's fine, but you really do, I think, have to look at these rules in a situation of reciprocity, so that when you do try to look at something like spanking, that you have to at least fit it into some of the basics of libertarianism.
Around the non-aggression principle, around the universality of the ethics, and around any sort of reasonable definitions of love and devotion and virtue, and also you have to find some principle by which it is okay to be children but not retarded people, children but not people whose minds are starting to go when they get old,
and also if you're going to infer that a disparity of knowledge and wisdom I mean,
if you really want to To the true heart of the world's agony, then you really do need to get to this issue of really understanding that the violence that occurs in the world is all fundamentally a reflection of the violence that occurs within the family.
The violence that occurs within the world is a fundamental Reflection of the violence that occurs within the family.
The agonies of the world, writ large, are the agonies of the child, writ even larger in a smaller circumstance.
The agonies of Nazism is the agonies of the children.
The agonies of Hitler is the agonies of Hitler as a child.
The agonies of the invasion of Iraq are the agonies of George Bush and his own history, the history of violence and coldness within his own family.
The substance abuses, the addictions, the molestations, the pedophilia, the horrifying agonies that occur within the world, the agonies that we claim so much to want to resist and to fight as libertarians, all have their roots in the abuse of children.
The state is the child.
So the state is the parent to we, the abused and compliant children.
And so to not have any understanding of the root cause of violations of the non-aggression principle, which is not abstract philosophy, but very, very concrete childhood experiences where people are not respected and the non-aggression principle is repeatedly violated against them as children, if you don't understand that connection, Then you're really not a libertarian.
I mean, you're just sort of posturing, right?
You're just talking a load of trash that you've picked up from books.
But fundamentally, it's so, so important to understand that everything that occurs within the family that is corrupt and evil, sorry, everything that occurs within the world that is corrupt and evil, has first occurred in the family.
And the worldview of society is shaped by the experiences of children.
And the protection of children is the first goal of libertarianism.
The protection of the bodies of children and the souls of children is the first and foremost and most fundamental duty of anybody who's associated with the freedom movement, of anybody who is interested in making the world a better place and is interested in ethics and is interested in virtue and is interested in improving society.
We will never have a free world as long as the children are enslaved.
We will never have liberty from the state until the children have liberty from the violations of their parents.
And there is no possibility that we will ever achieve any kind of freedom in this life unless we start first and foremost with the protection of children, with the protection of children, because it is out of the virtues or abuses of children that...
The glories or horrors of the resulting society all emanate.
If you want a beautiful garden, first you start with the seeds.
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