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Nov. 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:37
524 Stealing From the Commie Bunny (video available)

Empathy, siblings and the state

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's time to read a user post, which is quite fascinating.
I'll keep it anonymous, and I think it is.
But it's entitled, My Sister the Communist Easter Bunny.
We like as many times as possible to unite socialism and religion.
And blasphemy to both Marx and Jesus together.
He writes, All too many people today expect to be treated fairly.
They also expect that some central power or authority figure should oversee and implement this fairness or, quote, justice.
For some of us this may be an occasional passing thought.
We may feel slighted over some situation and, quote, wish we were treated more fairly in certain situations.
But for others it is an all-encompassing obsession.
What drives people to not only expect fairness, but to expect a power or authority to administer fairness across the board on a variety of issues?
And what can be said about ramifications of this mindset on others when people who hold these beliefs act in society?
It is my contention that oftentimes people who expect fairness, quote, were raised in situations where they were not treated, quote, fairly in childhood.
There's no shortage of quotes here.
Some of us grow out of this expectation of deserving fairness and others of us do not.
Some of us have a perverse psychological need to extrapolate this feeling that everyone needs to be treated fairly into the realm of politics.
My younger sister is one such person.
You see, my parents were not the most responsible or well-balanced and did not have a good system set up to parent us when we were children.
We all suffered in our own ways because of this, but one such example of how my sisters, quote, scarring for being unfairly treated, evidence itself each Easter.
I'm the oldest of three children and male.
I have two younger sisters, three and five years younger, respectively.
My Easter's as a child were quite fun.
We had Easter egg hunts where my parents hid copious amounts of candy eggs and other sugary treats.
We would all gather around, in a room or two, where my parents hid a bunch of candy and have our annual Easter egg hunt.
The rules were pretty simple.
If you find it, you keep it.
Those were the rules laid down by my parents, and they were fine by me, especially since I was the oldest and fastest I had the advantage in this, quote, hunt.
I was also a bit sharper than at least my younger sister, as I had five years on her.
When I was ten, she was only five.
Not much, quote, competition.
LOL. Lots of laugh for those over forty.
My game plan was simple.
Get as much candy as humanly possible so I could enjoy it.
This was the same plan my sisters had, but I clearly had the advantage.
That was then and this is now.
Listening to my youngest sister recount her childhood Easter experiences, it is clear she carries resentments to this day.
She tells the same story to her husband in my presence every family Easter, how I would get all the candy, how my mother would try to help her by trying to coach her since she was the youngest, pointing out places where there was candy hiding in efforts to help her find a closer to equal share, and how I still got more than her.
You see, it did not take me long to realize my mother was coaching my sister like this.
So while frantically looking for eggs myself, I would keep an eye peeled on my mother's face, watching as she would try to discreetly give my sister hints as to where the eggs were hidden by directing her eyes to a certain location or by pointing.
thing.
So while I was scouring the room for my candy, I would watch my mom, and as soon as she would signal my sister, it would be a race between me and her to get the candy my mom was signaling to her.
This apparently has scarred my sister for life.
Now it is the same thing every Easter.
She is in charge of the Easter egg hunts held at my mother's house every year for her and my sister's children.
She has appointed herself...
To this role and exerts considerable effort to oversee the process.
She gets plastic eggs of four different colors and each of the four children get the same exact amount of plastic eggs.
Each color group gets the exact same amount of candy put in them and the exact same amount of change put in them.
No one is allowed to quote find any egg except their color.
The first year my sister did this and told the story of her horror as a child being cheated of her, quote, fair share of candy and having a disappointing and frustrating experience, I thought she was joking.
I honestly did not remember any of this, but she clearly did.
I was kidding with her, telling her husband, yes, she would find candy and I would grab it out of her hand, exclaiming, quote, it doesn't count as being found until you put it in your Easter basket, as I swiftly grabbed it out of her hand and claimed it as my own.
But you see, this was not amusing and funny to her, strangely.
None, that was my strangely. Not in the least.
She remains obsessed with administering and overseeing justice for the children in a communist fashion.
This is one personal situation I am aware of that drives my sister to be hell-bent on doing everything she can possibly do to, quote, administer fairness.
It is not about the children's needs.
It is about her needs.
Her need to, quote, administer the justice that she was denied in her childhood.
But something is lost as well.
It's not fun for the children.
They don't rush around anxiously trying to find the eggs.
Yeah, because it was fun for your sister.
It is not a race.
They all know that they have as long as they would like to take, because my sister has laid down the rules and watches over the whole process.
She knows exactly how many eggs there are.
She tries to, quote, make it fun for the youngest by putting excited exclamations into her, I think there's one over there, quick!
to the young one in efforts to get her to run excitedly towards the egg, but it doesn't work.
There is no excitement and no fun in the hunt.
It dawned on me recently that if my sister were a government official, this attitude could become pervasive in her, quote, administration of justice.
Do you know any communist Easter bunnies?
Well, that's a very, very fascinating post.
There's a lot to be said about it.
And I would like to thank this gentleman for posting.
I hugely appreciate it.
That's the kind of stuff that can teach an enormous amount to an enormous number of people.
Just our settings, we're all set.
So... Thank you.
Now, let me start off with the politics, because it is, of course, this gentleman's quite right.
It is quite fascinating to see the degree to which, as I've always sort of maintained, the state is a superset or a causal result of the family.
And if you want to look at why societies are the way they are, then you need to look at family situations, and from there, you can figure out Where it is that the sort of impetus and the emotional resonance of certain state edicts come from.
Now, in this role, there's also a very interesting thing as well, of course.
So early memories of injustice provoke a claustrophobic need for creating exact equality later on.
And, of course, that's scar tissue.
And the gentleman, of course, as we all are, I mean, I'm not pointing any fingers.
We're all this way. The gentleman can so easily see the scar tissue in...
In his sister, right?
And he can see all of the foolishness that results from his sister's scar tissue and, more precisely, her lack of processing of her scar tissue.
But, again, like all of us, he has a great deal of difficulty seeing how his own scar tissue causes the result of his own scar tissue that he's blind to, which is revealed in a number of ways in the letter.
So, the other thing that's quite fascinating from a political standpoint, and we've talked about this in this show before, is that whenever you set up a regulatory agency designed to...
Correct the injustices of an unequal situation.
So when this boy was 10 and his sister was 5, he would get all the candy, and sometimes he would snatch the candy out of her hand.
I don't think he was kidding there, because he had a pretty detailed explanation.
Oh, and the rules that the elder siblings make up.
Well, it doesn't count until this, and it doesn't count until that, and all the arbitrary self-serving rules.
You know, the funny thing is that...
Well, we'll get into that in a second.
But the regulatory agency that is set up when he's a kid to help his sister to get more candy, which is the mom pointing out where the candy is, is very swiftly, and if a 10-year-old can do it, then for sure advanced capitalist meatballs can do it,
then all he does is he watches his mom to find out Where the mom is pointing so that in the mom's effort to help his daughter, she actually helps him more, right?
And this, of course, is everything that happens with state redistribution programs, even well-meaning ones, is that they end up providing many more signals to those that they're trying to level the competition with regards to than the people with whom...
Oh, my God, what a horrible sentence.
Let me start that again, if you don't mind.
They get co-opted, right?
The state regulatory agencies get co-opted by those with the most power.
And so even well-meaning ones end up helping those with the most power a lot more than those with the less power.
So if a 10-year-old kid can very easily and quickly figure out that his mom is pointing out where the candy is with the hopes of equalizing the balance of candy between himself and his sister, he can, if a 10-year-old can figure that out and use it to his advantage and end up getting if a 10-year-old can figure that out and use it to his
because of the intervention of the authority figure, imagine what capitalists do when governments get powers to shift around money, billions of dollars in the economy and force people to do X, Y, and Z.
Who do you think is going to end up with the more power?
The people that the government is sort of, quote, trying to help or the people that they're trying to not help or to diminish the power of?
So there's a lot of wonderfully instructive things in this post.
The other thing that is quite fascinating, of course, is that there is a very, very complicated set of emotions going on with this gentleman with regards to his past behavior, which we can talk about in a second.
But one of the things that is definitely occurring in this area is that there is A sort of clever kind of cunning in the way that he portrays.
And again, there's no disrespect meant, right?
We all have these habits. But when he talks about his sister's statist tendencies, He doesn't view his own status tendencies, right? So he says, well, she's communist, you see, so she's now dictatorial, and it all comes out of her childhood.
But he doesn't realize, of course, that by...
Not having a level playing field, he's not exactly a capitalist, right?
I mean, he says, well, she's a communist because, you know, she experienced this, quote, injustice.
He always has to use the quotes, right?
He can't recognize it as a real injustice, which of course it was, though not primarily his, but the parents'.
He says, well, she's then become this socialist, communist chick because blah, blah, blah, blah, whereas I assume because he's on Freedom Aid Radio, he considers himself a capitalist.
Well, let me tell you something a little bit about capitalism that might help you understand how you and your sister are not exactly playing two opposite sides of the statist fence.
Capitalism requires the equal use of law.
Sorry, capitalism requires...
Absolute property rights.
And also, generally, capitalism would be highly unlikely to enter, say, a ten-year-old boy into the world heavyweight fighting championships of the planet, because Mike Tyson would turn a ten-year-old boy into a fine kind of minced pate.
The level playing field is fairly important, right?
I mean, in the Olympics, you don't have as a downhill skier a whole bunch of people who are really great and have practiced for 10 or 15 or 20 years, and then some guy you just blindfolded and, you know, tied, strapped to some skis and threw down the slope.
So competition requires at least equality of opportunity so that when you compete with someone, they're not crippled.
A whole load of us don't necessarily judge our own intelligence relative to somebody with an IQ of, say, 70.
Or we don't judge our own sort of athleticism necessarily relative to a guy in a coma.
So when it comes to capitalism, The sort of universal rules, which DROs would work out sort of as a minimum, the universality of property rights and so on, give people sort of an equal opportunity to compete.
Where competition doesn't occur is when somebody has a vastly disproportionate level of force or power or capacity relative to everybody else.
And I don't count an enormous amount of inherited capital in this realm.
Inherited capital doesn't make you smarter.
And it's, of course, if you're not that smart and you try and be a businessman, if you've got a lot of inherited capital, much like the Eaton boys up here in Canada, E-A-T-O-N, you will end up dispersing all of that lovely capital to people who can do a whole lot more good with it than you can, so that doesn't really usually last as long as you might think.
What do they say? Rags to riches to rags in three generations.
That's quite often the case.
So he's complaining, of course, about his sister's desire for justice and then her reaction formation to it being a kind of claustrophobic communism or socialism, but he doesn't recognize that in the realm of their childhood he was an arbitrary and dictatorial state.
Right? Because he had a disproportionate amount of speed and smarts and strength And so could snatch the candy from her hand in, obviously, a brute force kind of manner.
And let's not kid ourselves about a 10-year-old boy with a 5-year-old girl.
It is a brute force situation.
And the 5-year-old girl has absolutely no capacity to pry open the 10-year-old boy's hands to get the stuff back or to do anything else to physically retaliate against such a kind of snatching.
So, obviously, he's making up rules.
He's grabbing whatever he can.
He's refusing to share.
He's refusing to be generous and kind and benevolent.
He's teaching his youngest daughter, his youngest sister, That the world is full of predatory jerks who will just grab everything they can and dance around you in triumph and snatch things from your hand, which is really a heartbreaking lesson for a little girl or a little boy to learn, right?
That's a pretty heartbreaking lesson, especially when it's your own brother who, you know, one could say that a situation that would give him a whole lot more pleasure than a fistful of candy would be to take his sister by the hand And to lead her around and to share in her joy of finding the candy,
And also to receive the love and the trust and the joy and the gratitude and the empathy and the warmth and the sympathy and all of that that comes from helping somebody who is almost infinitely less powerful than yourself.
To reach down and help those who are helpless is a wonderful and beautiful feeling.
And it could be argued, I would certainly argue it, that That the pleasure and sugar high and dizziness and crash and potential for diabetes that occurs with a big bag of candy for a 10-year-old It's a certain kind of pleasure and that the pleasure of taking a cooperative state in a situation where you are vastly disparate in strength,
taking a cooperative standpoint and using your strength in a benevolent and helpful manner Would be far more satisfying, right?
I mean, the joys of the candy are many years past.
The harm to the relationship remain for the rest of your life, right?
So it's not beyond the capacity of a 10-year-old who is smart and perceptive, as we can see, that this gentleman was when he was 10, because he's able to see his mom and figure out that his mom is trying to help his sister by pointing out where the candy is, which allows him to go and snatch the candy and so on, right? So he's obviously a cunning and smart fellow.
But he prefers, at a very surface level, we would say that he prefers the instant sugar high of the candy rather than the deep, rich, and soulful pleasures of helping and supporting and inculcating trust in somebody who's young of years, tender of heart, sensitive of nature, and helpless in body.
So this really is...
Like, if you can imagine how this looks to somebody on the outside, and this is for this gentleman in particular, who's obviously having a certain amount of difficulty finding empathy for either himself or his sister in this situation.
Primarily, you need to find empathy for yourself.
But this is kind of how it looks for me.
That you are an excellent sprinter, and there's a guy on crutches.
And you are trying to...
Every single time there's a guy...
You have a race, right?
So you keep having these races. And every single time, not only do you sprint like crazy and dance around in the end zone thinking you're the fastest runner in the world and what a great athlete you are, but you also trip up your competitor, the guy in crutches, and you half-saw through his crutches so they break halfway through, and then you taunt him.
For being a weakling, right?
So this is sort of how it looks from the outside, which leads me to believe, and this is not a pleasant thing to say, so I do apologize for it in advance, and of course it may not be true, it's just my thought, That the primary pleasure that you had in this interaction with your sister was not in the candy,
but was rather in the destruction of her trust and joy and capacity for feeling efficacious, powerful, confident, competent, and so on.
So your particular desire was a little bit more on the sadistic side and that you didn't enjoy so much getting the candy or even taking the candy from your sister but you enjoyed and relished in a fairly unholy kind of way the resulting tears of frustration and rage that your sister experienced when this occurred and there's many many reasons for which I have an enormous amount of sympathy there are many many reasons For which you would want that ugly exercise of power over a helpless human being,
a helpless child. Now, you were a child too, and again, this is like all with due sympathy, and we'll get to your parents in a moment, which we know almost nothing about other than the effects on their children of their parenting, which we can see not only as children in your, excuse me, In your discussions of yourself as children, but with your interactions as adults as well.
So the reasons that you would need or would be addicted to the kind of Pathetic and destructive rush that comes from literally snatching candy from the hands of babes.
The reason that you would need this is that you have learned from somewhere that power is composed of two things.
And this of course is very relevant to the issue of the state which we all face as adults.
Power is composed of two things and power is almost generally composed of these two things.
So the first thing that power is composed of Is an ugly grab.
And you can sort of term this whatever. I just call it an ugly grab.
An ugly grab is, you know, stuff like taxation or snatching the money from a kid.
Or it's the bully who takes your lunch money.
Or you who's taking your, you know, it's the big strong boy who's taking your tiny sister's Candy.
So that's sort of the one aspect of power.
It's the ugly grab. It's a naked brute force.
There's the implication of violence always and forever in this kind of situation.
And then there's the triumphant moralizing.
So there's the ugly grab followed by the triumphant moralizing.
So what happens is you obviously know that it's a completely unfair contest and you're a grown man beating up on a 10-year-old boy and calling yourself a tough fighter, right?
So you know that it's a completely unfair contest for you and your sister to both be hunting for Easter eggs.
And... So you use your size and power to grab the candy from your helpless little sister or sisters, perhaps.
It was both. I think they were three and five years younger than you.
And then you have the problem of how do you obscure from yourself and from others The fact that you have simply done a brute grab, right?
That you have simply used your size and strength and power to steal from somebody who's helpless.
And you have the problem of justifying that for yourself.
And if there's a way that you can create both a justification for yourself which gets you off the hook of just having brutalized a child and again that's a strong use of the term but obviously she experienced it and I bet you there was many more aspects to this than a mere Easter egg hunt so you have to find a way to justify yourself and if you can find a way to both justify yourself and also to further humiliate and frustrate your victim Then you really have hit the trifecta of power.
So you humiliate your victim with a brute grab and then you You get to bypass your own humiliation by the triumphant moralizing or the justification.
And if that justification can further then humiliate and frustrate your victim, that's the trifecta of power.
It doesn't get any better than that for people who have a mild or not so mild sadistic streak.
And so what occurs is you snatch the candy and then you make up a rule That makes her, not only has she lost the candy, but she's also lost the game, right?
So you make up this rule which says, well, it doesn't count until it's in your bag.
Well, you know, how do you get to make up that rule?
Why do you get to make up the rule?
And I bet, you know, I bet since you're probably on the free market side of things, that you probably get quite frustrated when the government just makes up rules, right?
You probably get quite frustrated.
And you certainly would if you were, say, an importer...
And then the government would just sort of slap a 20% duty on your imports.
You would probably get really frustrated and feel really hard done by and probably feel that, you know, this was a horrible injustice and feel perfectly self-righteous in the feeling of that and never connect it to the kind of arbitrary power that you also exercise and never feel like, well, you know, I can certainly understand what's motivating the government.
They get my candy and also they get to tell me that I need to obey the law because the law is just and right and so on and so on.
So you grab the candy, which humiliates your sister, and then you tell her that, well, it doesn't count because it wasn't in your basket, right?
The fact that you simply, right?
So, I mean, if you had somebody grab your wallet, so you're at an ATM, and you're about to deposit, you know, $10,000 of sweetheart cash...
And somebody grabs your wallet and runs off.
Obviously you're shocked and appalled.
And also they then say, hey, it doesn't count because it wasn't actually in the bank account yet.
It doesn't count because it wasn't in the bank yet.
It wasn't in the ATM. Well, you'd obviously say, well, what the hell does that matter?
It was in my hand, right?
I earned the money, I grabbed it, and it's in my hand.
So I own it, right?
And, of course, this is exactly the case.
And, of course, this guy is very hostile towards communism and socialism, I guess, because he feels that it's an arbitrary removal of property.
And I'm not sure that he necessarily makes the connection to his own prior behavior that he should be able to understand the desires of the state and the politicians.
And, of course, he's going to say, well, I was only 10 and blah, blah, blah.
And that's perfectly valid. That's perfectly fine.
We'll get to that a little bit later.
So then, and I bet you when he's got all the candy and he's got this smug grin on his face, or whatever, maybe he was more sophisticated, maybe he was less sophisticated, I don't know, but when he's got the triumph of having had all the candy and his sisters are in tears and he's got all the candy and he's climbed up a tree where they can't get to him and he's saying, mmm, mmm, my God, this is the best candy.
I ever tasted. Boy, if only you guys had worked a little bit harder to get the candy, you'd be enjoying it like I would, right?
And then he'd say, okay, I'm going to give you guys some candy.
And then he'd throw down some empty wrappers and he'd laugh.
I mean, maybe this is too far.
Maybe he's not that sadistic, but it certainly wouldn't shock me.
And again, this is with all sympathy.
We'll get to your parents, right, who are the primary instigators of this kind of problem in a few minutes.
So, not only has he snatched their property, but he has made up a justification.
Hey, you had every opportunity to get the candy.
You had all the same opportunities to get the candy that I did.
I just happen to get more because I'm smarter, better, stronger, whatever, right?
Because, of course, if the gentleman realized that the only reason he got extra candy was because he was older, then he would realize that it's not really his candy, right?
Because if strength gives you more property, he has no right to object to the state, which I bet he does, right?
If somebody came along and snatched his property and said, well, I have a gun and you don't, and therefore I get the property because I'm more virtuous and better, And, hey, it was an open fight.
Well, it's like, but you had a gun, right?
So, of course, if he says or believes that it was an open fight or an open contest to get the candy, despite the fact that he was...
And, you know, the difference between 5 and 10 when you're a kid is pretty considerable.
And also the difference between male and female in the realm of competition and so on is pretty considerable.
And of course the funny thing is that this guy then probably is going to spend his life railing against socialism and railing against the injustices of the state without realizing that his behavior as a child has a pretty direct causality Towards creating a social environment where a state is fast becoming all-powerful,
right? So he doesn't recognize that his own actions as a child contribute to that which he hates and fears as an adult, which is a desire for income redistribution, because he was an arbitrary and dictatorial state when he was a child to his siblings.
And therefore, they now have the desire for an intervention to equalize things out because they believe that in a state of nature or in a state of competition that the weak gets screwed and stolen from and the strong are all-powerful and that the parents try and come in.
If this guy, and this is a lot to ask from a 10-year-old, though certainly very many 10-year-olds are capable of it, If this guy wants a free society, then he has to address the issues with his sister.
If this guy wants a stateless society or wants even a minarchist or diminishment of state power kind of society, then he needs to address the factors which he sowed into the world around him, which only contribute to his enslavement as an adult.
This is an important thing to understand.
So, as a child, he had all the power and his sisters were frustrated at their lack of power.
And now his sister, just in a political sense, his sister is perfectly comfortable and desirous of state intervention, which endlessly frustrates him and annoys him.
So now she has all the power, and it's all completely reversed.
Now he's getting frustrated by her, and of course she also has the power over him because obviously it tweaks him to hear this Easter Egg Hunt story.
So, you know, that which we sow, we reap, right?
So, it is a shame that he made this choice to be who he was when he was a child, and although his parents are primarily to blame, he still has...
At the age of 10, you can make a choice to defend, protect, and give aid to the helpless, rather than to rip them off, dance around, and call them weak for not competing.
So... The interesting thing that occurs is that as an adult, he is continuing to humiliate her.
So this is a very hard addiction.
The desire to humiliate people is a very, very hard addiction to get rid of.
It's a very, very hard addiction.
Sadism is one of the most difficult things to uproot.
Sadism and narcissism entitlement is one of the hardest things to uproot.
I'm not saying he's entitled. I'm just talking about And I'm not saying he's the Marquis de Sade, or please understand me.
I'm talking about a fairly mild streak of sadism, but one that if you want to free society, you definitely need to address and undo.
Because whenever you are cruel within society, to those around you, you raise the need for a state in their mind, especially when they're helpless.
They look for a third-party, all-powerful protector to save them from.
So whenever you're cruel to people, especially as children, as you grow up, You get to play the role of capitalist running dog, evil capitalist guy, and they get to play the role of the proletariat, and the parents get to play the role of the state.
Everyone's always talking about their family when they're talking about politics when they're young, for sure.
So whenever you're cruel to people, all you do, especially when it's a sibling situation, whenever you're cruel to people, what you do is You stimulate their hostility towards capitalism, right?
Because in the world, right, capitalists are considered to be siblings or schoolmates or whatever, and the government is the parents or the teachers or whoever prevents the middle power from exploiting the weaker power, right?
Because in families, there's the greatest power or the greater power, the parents, there's the middle power, the siblings, the older siblings, and then there's the lesser power, the least power, which is the younger or younger siblings.
And so this sort of three layer shortcake of descending power bases is very powerful for people in sort of their constellation of the world of politics, right?
As people get older, the way that they translate this political stuff into their family stuff is, of course, the greatest power, the parents, becomes the state, the middle power, the elder siblings or the elder classmates or whoever, the other children who are older than you but not adults yet, they become the bosses, the capitalists, and so on and so on, not with the same direct power as the state, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And of course, the employees, the proletariats, the waiters, the students, whoever, they all become the younger siblings, right?
So this is how it all works.
If you really want to change people's minds about the state, you first have to understand how power structures were constellated in their minds from their experiences with their family.
This is sort of 101 of libertarianism, 101 of the Freedom Aid Radio approach, for sure, of inculcating freedom in people's minds.
You have to understand how their view of the family, how their experience of their family has constellated their view of the state.
So... Of course, now we're going to talk very briefly, because there's not really a lot of information, and if you'd like to post more information, I certainly would be happy to talk about it some more, if you don't mind the conversation.
I think it could be very helpful for you, and I certainly appreciate that it's not the easiest thing in the world, and certainly appreciate the fact that you've gotten this far.
I think you have.
So, good for you, right?
Good for you. But the parents, of course, we know that there's some comments about the arbitrariness, capriciousness, the bad and bizarre parenting that occurred.
And so how did this person learn that what happens in a disparate power situation, right?
Somebody has more power, somebody has less power.
How did this gentleman learn that what occurs then?
It's the grab and then the moralizing justification.
It's the ugly grab followed by the moralizing justification which justifies power and further humiliates the weaker person.
Well, he learned that from his parents, right?
And of course he learned it from the school and so on too, but he learned it from his parents.
So I absolutely guarantee you that at least one of the parents has a cruel streak.
And that cruel streak is probably more to do with indifference than it is to do with anything else.
There is a kind of setup here too, right?
The mom in the story here who's trying to sort of help the daughter could very easily help the daughter, right?
I mean, that would be so simple.
I mean, if somehow magically these children were transported at this age to my care, it would be a relatively simple matter to solve this issue, right?
All you would do is you would segregate the children by age for the Easter hunt, right?
So for the 10-year-old boy and his friends, you would make it an even competition, and you would then ensure that only 9-year-olds to 12-year-olds or whatever were in the Easter hunt for the elder children, right?
And then you would have an Easter hunt for the younger children.
This is not brain surgery, folks.
This is not figuring out the metaphysics of Leibniz.
This is all pretty simple stuff.
Everyone can figure this out relatively easily.
And, of course, the mom didn't do that, right?
So the mom obviously had a stake in humiliating the children, right?
The mom had a stake in humiliating the youngest daughter because coaching her and pointing out all of the candy when she damn well knows that the son...
If the son can figure it out, the mom can figure it out, right?
I don't think that the mom's sort of retarded here and the son is brilliant.
I think the son is brilliant and the mom is brilliant, too, because he's obviously an excellent writer, but...
So obviously the mom is replaying some sort of horrible role wherein the youngest gets screwed.
Because this is really what a lot of families are all about.
It's a mere brutal dictatorial power grab situation followed by pompous moralizing.
That's families. It's almost in the DNA of the species by now.
It's not something that can't be undone, but it's definitely rooted in our experiences.
So, that would be pretty easy.
Now, if the youngest kid, sorry, if the 10-year-old boy still had problems with empathy, sort of if he was in my care, then it would also be a relatively simple, though not necessarily pleasant thing to do to solve the issue.
So, you know, you talk about it, try and get him to understand the empathy and so on.
But all that would happen if this were the case, right, is that I would simply, you know, get a bunch of 15-year-old kids over and have the 10-year-old kid involved with the 15-year-old kids with an Easter hunt, and I would tell them to just, you know, they could grab the candy from his hand or whatever,
right? I mean, I would impose upon him the same rules that he inflicted upon others as a sort of last-ditch attempt to get the kid to empathize, if all reasoning and all sort of stuff, you know, and I don't think that would be necessary, and Maybe I wouldn't go as far as saying...
No, you know, I wouldn't. I wouldn't go as far as saying you can snatch the candy from his hand because that would be a potentially escalating kind of situation.
But I would definitely say, yeah, you guys can run around and get all the candy you want and I might actually give them some hints as to where the candy was and they would get all the candy and this kid would be in tears.
And, you know, you would say, look, this is exactly what you've been doing and I hated to do this, but it's important so that you understand how your sisters feel.
And then, of course, he would at least have a choice, and the choice would be either to reassert his power by going to bully his sisters or to actually empathize and to apologize, which would be at least a shot that he could have in that situation.
So, now, of course, we get to the problem of adulthood, right?
Wherein the lesson still hasn't been learned about the need to empathize with the helpless, right?
The lesson still has not been heard.
So, what happens now is a more sophisticated and subtle kind of ugly grab that is occurring between this fine gentleman and his sister, right?
So, his sister obviously has a significant amount of emotional scarring, and it's coalescing around this issue, and there are probably many other issues, but it's definitely coalescing around this issue with regards to...
to bullying from the parents and from the elder sibling.
Now, it seems quite likely to me that the sister of this guy is displacing her hostility and fear and anger towards her parents.
She's displacing it to this guy, right?
So the injustice that these children primarily faced was not from, especially the sisters, right?
The injustice that she faced as a child is not something that came from the parents, but rather...
Excuse me. Let me concentrate in just a moment.
I'm just trying to figure out how to get into this lane.
Okay, there we go. Sorry.
The injustice that the sisters faced was from the parents, not primarily from the ten-year-old boy.
The ten-year-old boy is, to a very large degree, an effect of the callousness and cruelty and sadism of one or both family parents, right?
So what's happening is that it's a lot safer to get angry at your elder sibling than it is to get angry emotionally, than it is to get angry at your parents.
So for sure, the sisters are displacing the real hostility that everyone should be feeling, which is towards the parents.
They're displacing it and to some degree wasting that sense of justice and need for that kind of stuff.
They're sort of doing it with regards to the siblings rather than the parents, which to me is a huge waste of energy.
Now, I can also guarantee you that this guy feels enormously guilty for what he did, right?
I guarantee you, deep down, deep down in the core of his very soul, his true self is writhing in a shame of agony, in an agony of shame for what he has done in the past.
I know this for an absolute fact.
I've seen it more than once with people who have this kind of dismissive approach to the scar tissue left over from the people that they hurt when they had all the power.
Absolutely guarantee. No question at all.
You can't torture and steal from the helpless and feel like a good and happy and secure and fine and wonderful human being.
You can't have any self-love.
You can't have any more empathy for yourself than you have to the weakest around you.
You can't have any more empathy and love for yourself than you have for the weakest around you.
This is the grave danger that we face, and I do have a great deal of empathy for the poor and for the helpless in society, which is why I want to get rid of the government.
So you can't have any more love for yourself than you have displayed and currently display in your life to those who are the weakest around you.
Because, of course, we all started off weak ourselves.
We all have that sort of history, that inner child, and so on.
And if we don't have empathy for others who are weak, we can never have empathy for ourselves when we were weak.
And, of course, that's the primary reason for sadism.
It's an attempt to overpower and to master it.
Feelings of intense helplessness and being on the receiving end of brutal treatment in one form or another, verbal or physical or sexual abuse.
So when you have experienced helplessness as a state of agony, then you must then recreate the infliction of that agony if you won't accept those feelings, which of course very few people can.
If you won't accept those feelings of helplessness and agony, And being brutalized by power, then you must normalize the brutalization of that power and also you attempt to overpower.
You project your own helplessness onto other people and then you torture it, right?
Because the only other possibility is that you actually feel it, which would be very painful and liberating and would result in an enormous amount of kindness and sympathy.
So, you know, this is a typical pattern that goes on with kids, right?
Where one kid We'll abuse another kid and then call that other kid weak for being upset.
This is a very standard kind of situation.
And it's not just in kidhood.
It goes all the way through life. But this is the most obvious sort of examples.
That you taunt and tease or abuse a kid.
Who then gets upset and then you call that kid weak for being upset.
This is 101 of the sadism school of self-destruction.
Because the awful thing about sadism is that the sadist always loses, the masochist always wins.
The person who's on the receiving end is far better to suffer harm than to do harm.
So the person who's on the receiving end of the harm We'll always, always survive emotionally, whereas the person who inflicts the harm, unless they really go back and clear up the mess, does not survive emotionally, spiritually.
Because, of course, the person who's receiving harm is in a closer and more approximately parallel situation to the original source of the problem, which was the harm inflicted on the children by the parents and by other authority figures.
So now, as an adult, he's calling her a communist, which obviously is a great insult.
He might as well call her a Nazi.
He has contempt for her inability to process what happened as children, while of course he, by expressing his contempt, has proven his own inability to process what he did as a child.
So, there's a lot of projection going on here.
There's a lot of continuing humiliation, right?
So, she, I don't even remember it, he says, right?
I can't believe she still remembers it.
But, of course, he remembers every single detail.
And he shows that in his letter.
It's kind of funny, right? Like, I mean, it's a very obvious plea for correction, right?
I wouldn't say cry for help. That's a bit too clichéd.
But it's definitely a plea for correction when he says, well, I don't even remember it, and then goes into exquisite detail about all of his strategies and methodologies for getting the candy, watching the mom, and this kind of stuff.
So obviously he remembers it in enormous detail.
But this is a very common thing that occurs.
When you wish to humiliate someone, is you will say, when they bring up something about the past, you will say, I don't remember that at all.
In other words, it was so insignificant for me, and so significant for you, that you must be obsessed about something, and I've moved on, and I'm past it, and I, you know, I don't even care about it because I'm so, you know, I've integrated it all, and I don't, you know, blah, blah, blah, right?
So it makes the other person feel very, very small when they bring up something that's very upsetting to them, and somebody else doesn't even remember it, right?
Um... I mean, if you had some wonderful date with a woman and then you meet her five years later, or maybe even a short relationship with her, that was the best thing ever, and you meet her five years later, she doesn't even remember the relationship, how would that make you feel, right?
You're kind of crushed and humiliated, right?
So this is another strategy by which people...
Humiliate others. Calling her obsessed with justice, calling her a communist, calling her a little dictator, calling her somebody who's contributing to the statism in the world as if he didn't.
She was the victim, remember, my friend.
If anyone's contributing to statism in the world, frankly, it's not her.
It's you. And even more fundamentally, it's your parents.
So anyway, I hope that this is helpful.
It's a very, very important post.
I really do respect the person for posting it.
I do also think that, you know, I put a lot of, you know, functional responsibility on people.
This guy's obviously listened to my podcast.
He knows that I try to look very deeply into the crystal ball of family.
And he posted this with lots of contradictory information.
He knows that I have great sympathy for the weakest within a family, and that's where I get my anarcho-capitalism from.
So, obviously, he put this in as a plea for correction.
He offered this thing to me so that his true self...
His false self crafted the letter.
His true self made him post it.
The true self put enough stuff in there that my true self could reach in and help.
So, calling out to your basic true self, my friend...
You absolutely want to go back and clean this up and apologize and feel empathy for yourself, for your sisters, the hostility towards your parents.
You need to stop dealing with politics for a while and start dealing with family so that you can clean up your politics and really start to work to make the world a more peaceful place.
And the way to make the world a stateless society is to reduce the fear and frustration of the people around you, right?
Because when people feel a lot of fear and anger and frustration, they inevitably gravitate towards the state as a mechanism by which that can be alleviated or mediated.
And if they feel afraid of people, They'll look to the government to attempt to reduce those fears.
Of course, what happens is they end up with a government that is going to, in the long run, vastly increase their fears, but that's the great temptation that occurs.
So I appreciate the post.
I think I do understand what it was really for, which was not to convince everyone that the sister's a communist, or has those tendencies, but rather to To save yourself from your false self.
Thank you so much for listening. You people with the not-so-much donating, I would really appreciate it if you throw a few shekels my way.
But thank you so much to the gentleman who signed up for the subscriptions.
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