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Jan. 8, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:09
589 Examining the Family...
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Good evening, everybody. Steph?
Well, you know who it is. Who am I fooling?
It is January the 8th, 2007, 777, 2007.
I shall remember that. And we are going to chat about a sad topic.
At least I feel sad about it.
I'm not sure if it is a sad topic.
I think it is. I feel sad about it.
And the topic is a very good question that Greg, a long-time and very wise listener, has asked about children.
Where can he get some?
And so this is really going to be more of a demonstration.
No, wait, the video camera's not running.
Okay, we'll just go with the original topic I was thinking of.
And the question is really...
The question as it was posed was sort of along the lines of parental obligations and this and that and the other.
And I think that libertarianism and I can certainly understand why anarcho-capitalism does have challenging questions around the areas of parental obligations.
But I'm going to throw philosophy aside just for the moment and just talk about what's in my heart and really the fundamental reason as to why I do take the approach that I take in terms of talking to people about their families, their parents, their own children, their siblings and so on.
Now, I racked my mind for many a moon To try and figure out the best way to talk about freedom and to bring about freedom in the real world.
I know that's a bit of a mealy-mouthed way to put it, in the real world, like other people aren't fighting for freedom in the real world, but I really do believe that if you want a different result, you have to do a different action.
I am not going to write better books than Murray Rothbard.
I'm not going to be I'm a better public speaker than many of the other great libertarians that are out there.
I'm not sure I put myself at that number quite yet.
But I really did rack my mind about How to approach this question of freeing the world because that's what I wanted to spend my time doing.
That's what means the most to me.
I have experienced both the depths of enslavement within my family and the heights, yay, almost the giddy heights of freedom that I currently enjoy and really feeling the difference between the two and feeling just what a tiny person I was when I was enslaved.
Just what a tiny, tiny, tiny person I was when I was enslaved and how sad that is for all of us, all of our potential and our intelligence and our creativity and our wonder and the beauty of the world, the curiosity, the joy, all of it pounded into a tiny little nugget of a black hole of nothing stored in this invisible core at the heart of emptiness.
And having felt really the difference between the two, it's just a joy I wanted to share.
And I racked my mind for the longest time.
And the argument for morality and all these other things that I have worked on were great steps for me.
But even before I began writing articles, even before I began podcasting, there was a racking of the mind, and Christina, of course, was key in this, about...
How can the world be free?
Because I don't want to write another book on philosophy.
I don't want to write another book on economics.
I don't want to passionately declaim about this, that, or the other and talk about the glories of the free market.
I mean, yes, okay, I want to do those things to some degree.
But I wonder...
I was thinking about this last night.
It did make me kind of sad.
I wonder... I was thinking about Harry Brown.
And I was thinking about...
His death, you know, the time between his last show and his death, which was quite a bit of time, if I remember rightly.
Enough time for a man to reflect.
He's not got hit by a bus or a helicopter dipped too low.
Enough time to reflect upon his life and his achievements and look at the world that he had thrown his Commitment and considerable charm, warmth, intellect, and so on, and speaking abilities, into making the world a freer place, which is what we all very much want.
I would almost say desperately want, except that that desperate desire for freedom is a kind of enslavement as well, and it's a good thing to balance.
But thinking about Harry Brown and How his life ended and Lou Gehrig's, I think it was.
And looking back, the last thing that I've always had a kind of telescopic view, at least into the future, since I was in my sort of mid-teens, and I'm sort of like a bat.
I'll send out an echo of an idea into the future, and in a sense, I can feel it moving forward in time, and then it hits my last day, whatever that is going to be, hopefully not for quite some time.
It hits my last day, and then it bounces back to me.
And this is a way in which I try to avoid regret.
And I do suspect that based on my desire to avoid regret, that I'm highly prone to regret.
And fortunately, I have not regretted much in my life so far, but that's been because I've been chirping out the bat-like frequencies to the future so that I can look back at the end of my days, on my days, and say that I may or may not have succeeded in achieving what I wanted to achieve, but that's not up to me.
It's not like my goal is a six-pack ab.
It's actually a 7.2-pack ab, and I'm actually working on the first one right now.
It's coming along nicely, actually.
Nice and rotund. But...
The goals that I wish to achieve are not dependent upon me in the execution.
Sorry, in the effect.
The execution, sure, I can try and do as many good podcasts as I can and hit the word freedom from every angle.
But it's not up to me.
And I don't mind failure as long as I've tried my best.
It's a cliche, but it's true.
And I didn't talk...
And podcast and write articles for many years.
I guess, boy, the biggest gap really was, I mean, I wrote quite a bit of my master's, but that was for school, although it was certainly libertarian and philosophical in content.
But really, I wrote a...
What I called the Rationalist Manifesto when I was about 22 or so and tried to start a political party and then realized that wasn't going to work too well.
And basically from there until the age of 38 or so, almost 20 years really, I didn't write that much.
And the reason, I think, sort of looking back at it was that I didn't have that much to say that wasn't already being said as well, if not better, by other people.
It wasn't until I started working on the argument for morality and became an anarcho-capitalist that I felt that I had something to say that wasn't the same as everything else that was being said, although there were certainly other people out there in that field who were doing fantastic things far ahead of me.
But it was through the suggestions of my wife that I really began to feel that I had something new and unique to offer.
And believe it or not, this is all related to this initial question of children and parental obligations and fundamentally the great challenge of how to reach the kiddies, how to reach the children, and the challenges of all of this.
This is something that I have tried to contribute that I think is new, at least certainly new in terms of the stuff that I've read.
Not just about personal freedom, but I'm trying to...
Slip a javelin into the black obsidian biosphere of the family.
And that is a very, very hard thing to do.
That is a real jailbreak.
That is a real Houdini trick.
The incredible thing about the family is it is this absolute obsidian, perfect, diamond-hard biosphere through which almost nothing, almost no idea, almost nothing can pierce.
And that's really the great challenge, I think, in philosophy.
When there's a movement that is already accepted, like Christianity, and then you go further and you get the Jesus camp, but the parents have to bring the kids.
The kids can't come alone.
And parents don't let their children wander very far from the feeding grounds of usually the anti-intellectual fields of the family.
And it certainly was my own experience with some fairly well-beloved nieces of mine that I have not been able to see for the last few years.
That you simply can't speak the truth into a family.
I stopped seeing my mom before I stopped seeing my brother's family, and my nieces would ask me, well, why don't you see your mom?
And then I'd say something, and then my brother would get all up in arms and say I should stop telling them my side of things and let them come to their own conclusions and so on.
And after a certain amount of this, it became clear to me that they were starting to ask what happened with you and dad, right?
What happened with me and my brother?
Because they knew that I hadn't seen them for over a year after the first time I broke with my brother.
And it became very clear to me that you cannot slip truth under the door of a family home.
And have it reach the kids.
The parents will always intercept it.
The parents will always attack it.
The parents will always reject it.
And as you can see, if you watch something like Bible Camp, the children have no hope.
The children have no hope whatsoever.
And this, to me, is the filthiest betrayal of human potential and virtue that parents commit, which is to stand over the children and to continue to repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and the children know that they have to not because children can very much scent they can very much smell the sulfur the devil behind the repetition that if you oppose or you question rage will follow immediately and inexorably and you as a child knowing that you have to submit to your parents you tend not to fight with them too much at least until you get into your until you get a little older especially for boys but girls not so much Because if you can't win,
you don't fight. If I'm going to get into Mike Tyson, I'm going to curl into a ball and sob that I've lost and don't hit me please, Mr.
T. If you can't win, it's better not to fight.
So for children, they can't win against their parents, so they don't fight.
They resent. They feel irritation.
Especially, again, especially in the teenage years.
But they don't really fight with their parents.
Why would you? How could you do that?
Parents rule everything.
And there is this incredible...
There's this lawlessness about families.
There's this incredible lawlessness about being a child.
I just remember this so clearly.
And of course, my situation was more extreme than some, though less extreme than others.
But I just remember thinking it was a total state of nature.
I couldn't call the cops on my parents.
I couldn't appeal to my teachers.
No teachers, no other friends' parents, no friends, no relatives, no one ever intervened.
The family is the absolute worst kind of anarchy.
The family is the absolute worst kind of anarchy.
I mean, yes, if you beat the crap out of your kids, you will probably end up with the kids being taken away from you, but there's very many documented cases here of one of a child being handed back to her schizophrenic parents.
The child had come into a situation where the government agencies had gotten a hold of her, and she was caked in filth, and her diaper was sticking to her with her own feces, and They actually had to sort of clean her.
And they're not supposed to. They're not supposed to touch the children.
The woman just had to clean her.
And they handed her back to her schizophrenic parents.
And she was doomed. She was three years old and couldn't speak a word because she was just left in the corner, fed from time to time, like a plant.
So the sword of any kind of reason or justice shatters harmlessly off the infinite shield This is something so important to get into your moral understanding.
I really do hate to lecture, and I really do apologize for this, but this idea that there's this absolutely diamond-hard obsidian biosphere around the family.
That laws are for adults to adults and, I mean, let's just drop the occasional things about emancipation and children.
99.9999% of the time, the children live in a truly anarchic society, in a truly lawless society.
The parents' whim is law.
And parents can make your life intolerable as a child without lifting a finger, right?
They can withhold food and treats.
They can lock you in your room.
They can do lots of things that aren't violent.
But make life intolerable and unbearable.
And children, at least I think most children, when they're faced with this problem of parental hostility or hatred, you have to give way.
You have to cave. You have to cave.
You have to cave. It's written in our genetics.
The no caving against parental irrationality genes are weeded out like after a 0.01 generation, I think.
So this challenge or this problem, the endless submission that occurs, With families is significant and reason and ethics and virtue and philosophy and truth and objectivity and science.
You might as well be throwing Leaves of grass at a tank as far as any of the possibility of cracking or finding a way into the armor of the family.
It's just ironclad.
And you put that to the extended community and it's bulletproof.
It's bombproof.
It's nuclearproof. The family is the ultimate WMD, right?
Because it's what trains everyone who wants to push the buttons of WMDs.
And so I felt when I was working out the approach to Free Domain Radio, I felt that I could not speak to the children directly.
It's possible to speak to teenagers, I think.
And I certainly have had some success, some emails from teenagers who found this conversation to be helpful.
But I certainly...
I don't think I can do a podcast for a six-year-old.
I could do it, but how would they get it?
They're not going to learn how to podcast when you're six, maybe eight, maybe ten, I don't know.
And the idea of children, but the parents would simply ban it.
And what would happen is the parents would find out about it, and the parents would come down like a ton of bricks on the children.
And yes, for certain boys particularly, it would be something that would make it more enticing and so on.
But I don't know that I want the first...
I mean, that's like asking someone to go to jail for libertarianism, right?
Provoking the hostility or hatred of the parents against the children, asking a child to do that.
I don't know that that's right.
I'm certainly open to arguments, but my gut tells me it's not.
It doesn't mean it's true, but it doesn't mean it's not.
It's just what I feel. And so, how do you do it?
How do you do it? How do you break the habits of 100,000 years?
How do you break the oldest dictatorship?
And really that's why there's been this defooing theme.
And this is why, although the hardest thing other than defooing is talking to people about defooing, I think it's something that it's important to do because people don't even know that they can.
They don't even know that it's an option.
And it's going to be a slow, at least one generation.
But people who've defooed or at least have heard about defooing They can at least know that their authority as parents is not an absolute.
I think the parents of those who've defood are keeping it even more a guilty secret than those who've defood.
It's a very hard thing to talk about it.
You might as well say, hey, here's my porn collection.
Let me spread it out over the dinner table while we're at this fine restaurant.
It feels sometimes like that to talk about defooing with people.
But the moment that we do talk about defooing with people, yes, of course, there will be lots of horrified looks and people simply won't want to talk to us a lot of times, but there is something out there which is that it can happen.
And if it can happen, that's a crack in the family.
That's the only crack in the biosphere that I've been able to think of.
Maybe there are others I've never been able to consider, but this defooing is the only way that I know to get a crack in the biosphere, widen this horrible cyst-like abscess of history, of family, and get some air into the biodome, get some Some leverage, right?
Wedge a couple of crowbars through the cracks and see what can't be worked out from inside.
That dictatorship of parenting, everything, as we've said before, is an effect of the family, is an effect of the primary relationships, thoughts about the state and all these other sorts of things.
And so defooing is a very core part of achieving freedom.
It is the ultimate secession.
It's the ultimate emancipation.
For bad parents, I mean, everyone knows that, right?
And if achieved and talked about, and not immediately, it takes a long time, but if achieved and talked about, It is, I think, the most powerful way to begin to crack this biosphere, this diamond-hard biosphere of the family.
This inverted bowl, impenetrable and black as night, that surrounds the family.
And society is just merely a...
it's like a song down a distant hallway.
A family is like headphones turned to 20 volume.
And that's, I think, when people talk, as Greg did ask, about obligations to children, and implicit in that is this despair, I felt, I mean, I could be wrong, this despair about how we help the kids.
And I think that the answer is you can't help the kids because Unless the parents want you to help the kids, right?
I mean, the parents have to bring their kids to Bible camp.
I think you can help the teenagers, and I certainly am interested in doing a series for teenagers on libertarianism, on this sort of stuff.
But I do feel, and it may be oversensitive to me, I do feel that there's a kind of cruelty.
In pointing out to people who don't know they're in prison that they're in prison years before they get to break out.
You say to some kid who's 12, you're enslaved and your parents are corrupt.
They got, what, six years to go before they leave high school and if they want any parental help from university, then it's ten years.
It's a tough thing.
It's a tough thing. Now, I was...
I mean, I sort of fundamentally defood when I was 14 or 15 in terms of getting rid of my mom, having no parents around.
So, it was easier for me to be a libertarian at the age of 16 because I had no parents.
So, I was like the wolf chap.
So, it was easier.
But, I don't know, for other people...
Plus, they're going to get these ideas...
And the other thing I think that's dangerous in terms of timing, the kids are going to get these ideas, say you're 12 and you hear this sort of stuff and it's like, yeah, that makes sense.
Then you're going to start talking about it with your family and your family are just going to squash them and humiliate you and you'll still have 6 or 8 or 10 years to go.
And so I generally think that it's better to try and talk to people who are parents, who are about to have kids, who are prior to having kids, talk to them about the family, and that way it lowers.
And that's the only thing I've been able to think of fundamentally.
That's why I don't write letters to the editor.
There is an implicit freedom when you break a monopoly.
And it can take time and all this, but when people have listened to these podcasts who have not had children yet or whose children are not yet grown, they get the fundamental fact that family is optional.
Family is a virtue-based, optional relationship.
Freedom of association. Yeah, it's not about joining a club.
It's about your family. Freedom of association.
It's about your family.
It's not about anything else except incidentally or tertiary.
And so, when you have children, if you understand that they don't have to stay with you, that they don't have to come back and take care of you when you're older, I think, I really, really think that's going to have a subtle effect on On the parenting.
Maybe not that subtle.
Of course, at some point, the parent may mention or there may be some knowledge of Freedom Aid Radio, the kids will listen to it, and then, of course, the kids will have the same intellectual perspective as the parents about the lack of innate virtue within any sort of familial situation.
So, it is a little bit like...
Rain on a watercolor painting, or actually maybe it's more like a fine mist on a watercolor painting in the water-wears-away stone kind of situation, but this is the best that I've been able to come up with in terms of breaking the fundamental monopoly and the fundamental hegemony of the family.
And it is to Take a swing with an axe at the base of the tree of the innate virtue of family.
Because when you can begin to loosen some of these incredibly squeaky and ancient boards that are nailed together...
Oh, I hate that sound.
Even when I'm thinking about it, it makes me feel a little squeezy.
You know, squeaking wood.
But when you can begin to Loosen this incredibly squeaky, welded hinge a little bit.
I think that's going to have an effect.
I think that's something that hasn't been tried before.
Not to my knowledge, not in a fundamental way.
Not tied into philosophy and tied into politics and economics and even art and all the other stuff we talk about.
But I think that taking a blow at the root of this idea of family and making a voluntary relationship out of an absolute obligation to whatever degree that it can occur.
I think that is how it's going to happen.
I mean outside of all the political economic stuff.
I think fundamentally that's how it's going to happen.
I think one of the problems with libertarianism is it's always dealt with the secondary relationships without going for the root of it.
But the root of obligation, obligation to the state, is a mere shadow of obligation to the parents.
You can take away obligation to the state in a conceptual way, but it's always going to come back if you're obligated to your parents.
Because your parents did a lot more for you than the state did, even mine.
And if you get rid of the obligation to the parents, who is going to take an obligation to a state seriously?
Or to a God? But if you don't take away the obligation to the parents, those other things, though you may push them back, are going to roll back in like a fog down a hill.
Inexorably. Inevitably.
And that's the only way that I know To inject some air to widen these cracks to take a hack at the root of the virtue of parents.
That's the only way that I know that hasn't been tried that I think is the fundamental.
It is the fundamental underpinning of hierarchical or hegemonic top-down power.
Certainly opposing the state doesn't matter.
And opposing the state, if we're still obligated to our parents, doesn't make us a whole lot more free.
Our parents are older. People in the state are usually older.
Parents is not a chosen relationship.
The state is not a chosen relationship.
Parents do a whole bunch of stuff for you.
The state does a whole bunch of stuff for you.
You can equate this to religion as well.
It's all the same nonsense. But it really fundamentally is all wrapped up.
In the assumed virtue of the parents, and we all know how frightening this is and how horrifying it is and how painful it is to question and to act against that assumed virtue.
Those who are doing it are magnificent, are magnificent in their courage and in what they're doing, what they're actually doing, what they're actually doing to make the world a more free place.
Ranting about a prison planet is fun, doesn't do a damn thing.
Writing articles on muses.org, fun, interesting, stimulating, won't do a damn thing.
It hasn't done a damn thing for the last 80 years since Muses first wrote.
But I think, I really do think, that working at the root of the family absolutes, the family corruption, that is the keystone to the archway.
That is the linchpin that will set us free.
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