All Episodes
Previous Next
April 12, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:31
706 Stef, Society and M and Ms (audio slightly choppy)

A turning point in my life...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
This is the audio-only podcast.
I've had a problem with my notebook.
The screen has gone all flickery, so I've dropped it in for repair.
I'm using a backup notebook, which has no attachment for the video.
So, no problem.
We are back to our roots, baby.
Now, forewarned is forearmed, and this podcast may not be for everyone.
And the reason for that is that this was something that I learned about Welcome to my show!
But it's about a distant history, and I'm not intending to make it a tale of woe or anything like that, but I think that you forewarned is forearmed.
I mean, I'm going to complain and be bitter.
So if this is not to your taste, then don't listen, of course.
Forewarned is forearmed. So when I was on vacation and walking along the beach for reasons that I cannot recall, I talked with Christina about what I would consider the darkest phase in my life, which was shortly after my family moved to Canada,
my mother went to Germany for, I don't know, another one of her recreational surgeries, and my brother was sent to England, where he ended up staying for over two years, to stay with relatives.
Relatives who had a dog Cousins to play with, a big house, money, food, and pop, and all of these great things.
I was sent to stay with a friend of mine's grandparents, said friend, later died oddly young, at the age of 15 or so, of a heart defect.
And I didn't know these grandparents at all.
I was just sort of stuck there for the summer.
And one of the fundamental questions that began me on this quest, which I've mentioned before, is why, oh why, would we have been...
Aunts and uncles in England to a very nice house with not perfect people, but it sure was better than the place I was sent to, where I spent a couple of months.
Basically, the grandmother was dying, and it was a rather grim environment in a little apartment, and that's where I spent a couple of months not really doing anything or having contact with anyone or having any money, even for a bus fare, and it really was a rather...
A rather unpleasant time.
And what came out of that when my mother came back from Germany, as I've mentioned before, she just sort of ceased to function.
She ceased to get out of bed.
She just hit a catastrophically depressive episode from which she never recovered.
You can, you know, it's the straw that breaks the camel's back.
And what happened was my brother was in England.
None of my relatives ever phoned to find out how I was doing.
Nobody seemed to lift a finger or maybe they cared.
But, you know, what's the difference between caring and not caring?
Well, it's no difference at all, really.
It's all just talk.
So... My mother sort of just completely ceased to function, and I would just sort of bring her tea in the morning before I would go to school, and then I would come home and make her another tea at lunch and try and get her to eat something, but she just sort of turned her head away and wouldn't get out of bed.
This went on for quite some time, and eventually she did sort of manage to stagger out of bed for a little while, but then after that she was institutionalized.
And I don't believe it was voluntarily.
I don't know the details of it, of course.
And I would go and visit her in the institution.
So it wasn't that social services and her doctor and so on.
It's not that they didn't know that she had children or anything like that.
But basically, I was absolutely, completely and totally left to fend for myself.
My brother was back at this point.
But it was a very sort of dark time.
I was continually stressed because we kept getting eviction notices.
I was working a whole bunch of jobs.
I was trying to do school.
It was just a mess and not pleasant, not fun in any way, shape, or form.
And I had some friends back then who my brother called them yobbos, which is sort of like low-rent sort of people.
And they were.
I mean, no question, right? I had one guy who was verbally abusive towards his mom.
He also ended up dying in his teens.
Actually, I think just after his teens of a motorcycle accident.
He was very comfortable with risk in a way that I just wasn't.
So I fell in with a crew where if we needed a bike, we would just go and steal the parts from people's backyards, a wheel here, a chain there, and so on, sort of build a bike because we had no money and no way to access it.
And we wanted stuff.
And we really felt, I mean, this really was a Lord of the Flies situation.
I felt very much in a state of nature.
And this puzzled me for many years because I'm a pretty...
I mean, as an adult at least, I feel sort of trying to focus pretty heavily on morality and all that.
I went in the amoral phase in my very early teens, and when I wanted a computer, I went to the local fence in school and said, here's what I want.
If you get it from me, I'll pay you X, because I couldn't afford to buy a computer, but I really wanted a computer.
So basically, I was more than happy to take a stolen computer.
This never occurred, of course, but it's sort of interesting to me that...
I had no external standards of reference for morality during this time period.
And I think I sort of tripped over something that is of value or of use.
And I knew that I had done so because of the aforementioned reservoir of bitterness, which I'd like to dump on you, if that would be all right.
Get an umbrella! I think it's useful.
Perhaps you went through something similar, or if not, it might at least help you understand certain aspects of the tendency towards criminality, which I definitely possessed at the time.
First of all, the reason that my brother and I were separated, as I've sort of come to understand later in life, was my mother had been very abusive towards us, and I was the guy who had nothing to lose.
I was the person, I was the kid who had nothing to lose because I've never abused anyone in my life and I was abused, I mean, fairly continually through my childhood by both my mother and my brother.
So naturally... The reward for me being the truth teller was to be isolated from anyone who could do anything about the abuse.
So my brother got sent to a much better place than I did to stay for a couple of years and missed a lot of the hellish misery that went on where we just had no money whatsoever and were constantly wheedling and bargaining about rent and I couldn't answer the doorbell or the phone.
Just a horrendous time. But it was safe to send my brother away to...
These relatives in England, because he wasn't going to tell anyone, because he was a participator, and I must say a rather enthusiastic participator in the abuse.
So he's not going to talk about the abuse because it would implicate himself.
I, on the other hand, would probably have talked about it if I'd established any kind of connection with anyone outside the family.
And this is a pretty key thing.
I mean, if you've gone through this kind of stuff, isolation from outsiders is very, very important.
And you're only allowed really to have Relationships with those who are abusive or corrupt or anything like that.
And you can't form attachments with outsiders who might be able to help in any sort of way.
So this is one of the reasons why shortly before I hit puberty...
We were moved to a new country.
Why? Why were we moved to a new country?
Well, because, fundamentally, my mother was afraid that we were going to tell people about the abuse.
We had relatives in England.
We were close to more relatives in Ireland.
So why were we moved to Canada?
Why move to Canada from England?
It didn't make any sense. Other than this continual need to hide.
And if you have experienced this kind of abuse in your family, when you look back over it, I think you can find an enormous amount of indicators or hints or more than hints about the frenetic energy which is expended in a silent subterranean way to keep you from telling anyone about what's going on. I think you can find an enormous amount of indicators And this is why I say that parents are racist.
They know that it's wrong and they know that you can talk and the amount of effort that is put into avoiding this, including the circles of people that you move in and the implicit or explicit pressure on you not to talk, moving you around, keeping you disoriented, keeping your self-esteem low, all of this kind of stuff.
This is all focused on making the victim silent.
keeping the victim silent. The two major events that occurred around this time ripped up and moved to Canada for no real reason.
It wasn't like there was a big job here.
We had one relative out here who was completely deranged, a German guy, half-brother of my mother's.
But what was the point?
Well, the point was to keep the abuse in hand, to keep the abuse able to continue.
Unfortunately, though, I think my mother, and she once said, you know, we moved to Canada for a new life, to get a new start.
I was like, new start from what?
I had friends at school.
I was doing okay, other than at home.
A new start? Well, the new start was for my mother, and she wanted to go and have a new start, and who knows what vows she had made to herself with regards to her children in the depths of the night.
But the doubt, no matter where you go, well, there you are, and you don't get to flee your internals by shifting your externals.
So, what happened was I was exhibiting, and this is certainly the case through my childhood as a whole, I was exhibiting signs which were not hugely subtle.
I was exhibiting signs of being abused, right?
I mean, I was a fairly good cover in that I was a fairly peppy kid, but I never did any homework.
I almost never listened in class.
I just sort of scraped by until I got to university where I applied my...
because I had the freedom then to sort of focus on what I wanted to do and then I began to really churn my way through in a very pleasant way the stuff that I really wanted to learn about which was ironically philosophy and ethics.
But... I came to school with clothing.
I had body odor.
When I hit puberty, as before, a friend of mine's father took me aside and said, you know, it's time for you to wear deodorant because you're beginning to really smell.
I mean, I'm certainly grateful that he did it, but the question, of course, then, which would be logical for this guy who was a doctor and knew probably something, a little bit of something about families, children of his own, The question, of course, for him would have been, well, A, why are you over here every day hiding out?
Who are you hiding from? And B, why is it nobody in your family is telling you anything about personal hygiene?
And it's you, because you don't smell yourself.
It's not something that I've noticed myself, but it was something that was quite important, I think.
There were other times when, I remember this when we were quite young, That my mother would leave to go places, to go sort of foreign cities and so on, because she had a dating ad in, oh, I'm sure it was some crappy place like the National Enquirer, if memory serves me right.
And she would go to, I remember one time she went to Houston for two weeks and left Prince $40 on which to survive.
So two young teenage boys, I think I was 12 and my brother was 14 or something like that.
Again, the chronology gets a little hazy after so many years.
Of course, we spent it in the first couple of days, and then we had no choice but to hang around friends' places around dinner time, hoping for an invitation.
And where we would get one, it would be great, and where we wouldn't get one, we'd just go hungry.
But this, of course, would be another interesting question.
Again, these are not wildly subtle signs that something is awry.
Certainly our friends all knew, and our friends, I guess, didn't tell our parents.
And this kind of stuff as a whole is just kind of interesting.
I remember one time my mother had a fetish for nakedness.
This was just creepy all around, which I'm not going to get into much detail, but friends were over one night and my mother sort of strolled down the hallway outside the door buck naked.
And this, of course, put a bit of a crush on the conversation, but nobody talked about anything.
Again, here's an indication that something's kind of awry in the household.
So just running through a brief list of people who had knowledge of problems in Casa de Molyneux, teachers, friends, parents, my doctor, my mother's doctor, social workers who handled my mother's institutionalization, all of the psychiatrists and psychologists and staff at the institution, And, of course, the people I signed in, I signed out.
They were perfectly aware that I was there.
It wasn't a mystery. And my friends, of course, and extended relationships, sorry, the extended family, everybody who was in England, who knew that the kids had been separated and never once inquired as to where I'd been shipped off to and why the brothers would be separated, or at least not to my knowledge, certainly never communicated to me about it.
My father, my father's new wife, everybody knew that this was a family, let's just say, beyond crisis.
A family where things are not functioning.
The superintendent who I would be sent to answer the door and explain that the check would be coming in a day or two.
And he, of course, that something was desperately awry in the house.
Anyway, he said coaches when I was on sports teams, all this kind of stuff.
There was an enormous plethora of people who were perfectly aware That something very awry was occurring in my life.
And this is something that I think is relatively important to understand.
Society as a whole doesn't be shit about children.
Now, it wasn't that I was like a difficult, angry child.
I really wasn't. My nature has always been relatively sunny, though, with a slightly ferocious edge, which surprises some people.
Not ferocious in terms of like abusive, but firm.
Which surprises people who get a little confused by jokey happy stuff and then come across firm and resolute stuff and are a little surprised, as am I sometimes.
But it became very clear to me that it certainly did shape my values and it certainly did shape my perception of society.
My perception of society.
Because anybody can say anything.
But your direct experience of what it's like in society is something that's quite important.
So, I began to shoplift.
Now, in hindsight, yeah, I wanted the stuff, and they say you don't take pleasure in things that are stolen.
That, for me, was not true, right?
I stole an electric train, I stole a remote-controlled car set, and enjoyed them.
I didn't really feel that it was a big problem.
I also did the practice, which younger people wouldn't understand, is switching the price tags on things and getting them for cheaper, and all of these kinds of things.
So, I mean, you can't do that with barcodes now, but this was possible in the past before this sort of stuff existed.
To those who used to own Mr.
Gameway's Ark, I'm sorry. I really am.
So... Of course, my mother would see me with this new stuff and wouldn't have any questions, wouldn't have any comments.
My friends would come over and play with it, wouldn't have any questions, wouldn't have any comments.
And this was all, I think, very significant.
So I really kind of got at a fundamental level that people aren't good.
Now, surely if a child is in distress, and nobody does anything, and a child is in obvious distress, and hundreds of people know about it, And nobody does anything, like not even makes a phone call, doesn't do anything.
Then it was very clear to me that coming to any kind of aid, even when that aid is as simple as making a phone call saying, I think there's a family in distress here, I think somebody needs to do something about it, whether it's to the United Way or some other charity or even to the government.
I mean, because this was before I was obviously an anarcho-capitalist, before I even understood anything in depth about philosophy, so...
That would have meant something, that somebody cared enough to do something, as simple as a phone call, to get some help towards this sort of situation, but nobody did anything.
Nobody lifted a finger. Now, our vaunted social security system basically saw a child, 13 or so, who was coming to visit his insights course.
They knew for a fact that there was no father, because they do extensive interviews when you get into these sorts of situations, as I've learned about from Christina later on.
Not through my own experience, at least not yet.
So they knew that there was no father.
They knew that there was no other provider.
They knew that there was no extended family.
And here's a child coming in and nobody does anything.
Nobody says, what's going on for you?
How's it hanging, dude?
Dude, little dude. I mean, your primary caregiver has been institutionalized.
What's going on? And this, of course, is a situation where had I been less resourceful and less active and had I not taken on three jobs and had my brother not worked and had we not taken in roommates and had we not done all of these highly resourceful things, then, I mean, we literally could have ended up homeless.
I mean, this was sort of the risk that was occurring.
This is how this kind of stuff occurs.
And what would that have meant, right?
Because people didn't know. I mean, I don't think they knew that we had these resourceful capacities and were willing and able to do these kinds of things to survive.
So if we had ended up homeless, what would that have meant to people?
Would that have meant their own virtue?
And of course, it helped me in a really brutal kind of way, but it really helped me to understand that people just talk about being good.
People just talk about being good and caring and responsible, and it also gave me, I think, fairly solid emotional ammunition to be skeptical of people who talk about the virtue of the government.
I mean, I could have some sympathy for...
People who, I don't know, it's just easier to ignore an imploding, destructive family in your son's orbit through a friend.
It's sort of easy to ignore that.
The people who are actually paid to help people, the people in the social services, the people who are around when I was institutionalized, the doctors, the social workers, and so on.
I mean, it's sort of paid for this, right?
And none of them gave a shit.
None of them gave a shit about it.
Nobody even asked or phoned or anything like that.
When I was away from school, I got one phone call because, of course, sometimes I was just exhausted from working and so on.
But no caring, no concern.
I had a swim, as I mentioned before, I was on a swim team and I needed seven bucks and I just kept lying about it, not having any money.
I even remember looking under the sofa cushions and so on to try and find some money.
We couldn't come up with seven bucks.
There's not even a hope in hell of being able to do that.
And nobody said, gee, that seems pretty rough, kid.
What happened was I kind of got eye-rolling and, oh, well, try and remember next time and so on.
And this, I mean, I don't mean to laugh, but certainly enough years have passed by now that I can look at it with a sort of grim humor, which is that everybody talks about being good in the abstract, but then their child, who's genuinely suffering and going through an extraordinarily difficult time, and is facing the prospect of losing his home and so on, of really falling off the cliff as far as society goes, And nobody lifts a finger.
And there were rich parents around.
I sort of moved through a bunch of different social circles.
It wasn't just I was sort of in the dregs of the welfare people.
I had friends whose fathers were professors.
I had doctors. I had friends whose fathers were lawyers.
I ran the Toronto Stock Exchange and had a huge hand.
So it wasn't that I was around other really broke people who couldn't sympathize because they were in the same boat.
I mean, I moved through the social circles pretty adroitly because, of course, I had verbal skills and intelligence, so could have reasonable debates even with friends' parents.
And nobody did anything.
Nobody did anything.
Nobody asked a question.
Nobody lifted a finger. Nobody made a phone call.
And this was true among those who were in the social circle And friends of my parents and so on, and extended relatives and not so extended relatives, my father, everyone, my mother's doctor who institutionalized her, never sort of called the kids in and said, okay, well, now that I put your mom in an institution, what do you guys feel like is a good way to proceed?
Because, you know, food and shelter are relatively important in Canada, particularly when it's minus fucking 30.
But none of this occurred, of course.
This gave me a very skeptical, but sorry, even the more fundamentally focused people whose job it was to do this, the psychologists, did nothing.
So what it gave me was an incredible sense of people's just myopic self-interest.
And a desire to avoid any kind of conflict, desire to avoid looking at anything negative.
And this was as true of government workers as it was of private people, as it was of parents, of relatives, of friends, of teachers, of coaches, of people I came in contact with, of employers who didn't sort of ask why I was there at 3 o'clock on a school day because I had to actually leave school early to get to one of my jobs.
So I negotiated with my teachers to leave early whenever the class fell at the end of the day because I had to get to a job by...
I think 3.15 or whatever.
The school ended at 3.25, and so I had to leave at 2.30, whatever.
So I negotiated all of that.
And, well, I didn't negotiate it.
I just said, this is what I have to do.
And nobody said, well, why? Nobody said, well, why is it that you have to do this?
And teachers, of course, this was not the worst aspect of it.
And this is where the bitterness comes.
The worst aspect of it was that people blamed me.
This was the worst aspect of it.
Not that they didn't give a shit, but they blamed me for it.
And this was a consistent and universal phenomenon.
So I'm 13 years old and I can't come up with seven bucks.
And of course, the people who run the swim team just roll their eyes and assume that I'm cheap or lazy or forgetful or whatever.
Not asking a single fucking question about why somebody who's dedicated and hard-working enough to join a swim team and attempt to win seems to magically forget every day seven bucks.
It's not brain surgery, people.
Teachers consistently blamed me and rolled their eyes when I came in without having done my homework.
Mine called the police on me twice, if I remember right.
Because, hey, believe it or not, I had a bit of a temper at this point in my life.
I had the normal hormones of teenagers, the complete break with any belief in the virtue of my society, which was occurring more at an unconscious true self level, and heavy abuse from mother and brother, and more subtle abuse from a new situation who simply said to me as the report, basically, you're lazy. If effort matched ability, as one teacher said, you'd be A+. It's like, yeah, dude.
Any thoughts as to why that might be occurring?
Well, no. Everybody just gave me this infinite plethora of free will and said, well, he can do whatever he wants.
The fact that his mother's been institutionalized, he's working a couple of jobs, stressed out about having a place to live and having enough to eat, that's nothing to do with it.
It's nothing to do with it.
He's just lazy. Lazy and unfocused.
Doesn't seem to want to work. Just a bad kid.
Actually, I didn't say that. To be fair, it wasn't that anyone said, you're a bad kid.
I was just considered to be a goofy, irresponsible, and lazy kid.
So, some guy with great sneakers, some kid with great sneakers...
Is sprinting down the field.
Father's a professor, has all the access to books, and has a future, and no stress about money, and doesn't have to work extra jobs.
It doesn't have to work any jobs, damn it.
Some kid in great sneakers running down the field, and they're like, look at that kid fly!
A kid in concrete carrying an anvil is struggling to step past the starting line, and people are saying, stop being so lazy, damn it, just run!
Look at that other kid!
The abuse was inevitable, of course, from those who weren't directly physically or verbally abusing me.
The abuse was inevitable because that is what people do to cover up their own guilt.
They have to blame me for not doing the socially acceptable or required things in school or in other sorts of areas of my life.
They have to blame me, because otherwise they actually start to feel some empathy and sympathy, which might propel them, might propel them to actually think that something needs to be done.
Might propel them into action.
People blame others and fantasize that someone's doing something because they feel enormously guilty for their inaction.
To deal with that guilt, they project that guilt onto me.
So they try to make me feel guilty for being lazy or irresponsible or goofy or forgetful or whatever.
They want me to feel guilty for my circumstances in order to assuage their own guilt and in order to say that they're applying tough love to this situation.
Well, he's got to learn responsibility somehow.
God damn it. You try negotiating your way out of homelessness in Canada where homelessness can kill you and tell me then a little bit something about responsibility and taking initiative and not being forgetful.
But, to be more pointed about a particular incident, I did shoplift from time to time.
It wasn't a lot, but at one point, a friend of mine and I were downtown.
This is a guy who liked to go window shopping, and just oddly enough, I sort of remember that we'd have debates about window shopping, because I'd said, well, we don't have any money, so what's the point of going window shopping?
It's like, oh, just to see what we could have if we are going to ever have money.
It's like, we don't have any money, we're not about to get any, so what's the point?
It's torturing. But, We went downtown, and we were hungry, and we had no money.
This was back when it was like 20 cents for bus fare, so we could get downtown, but we didn't have any money to eat.
So we went into a grocery store.
He stole a bag of M&M's so we could have something to eat, because, of course, we were all about the nutrition, as every teenager is, young teenager.
I think I was guessing 13 at this point.
And what happened was he was nabbed by the store owner, and like the solid bro that he was, he fingered me immediately, and we were both hauled into the manager's office.
And the manager, of course, was livid.
And, yeah, I mean, because shrinkage is an issue in retail, and I guess in a grocery store, so he called the cops and had us arrested for shoplifting, for stealing the bag of M&M's.
And the cop came in, And we were dragged off down to the police station where we were fingerprinted and booked, and there was a stern lecture and so on, and then my mother was called, and anyway, there was just a whole mess around it.
And oddly enough, my mother was livid on the phone, but then we never mentioned the incident again, which, I mean, who knows why?
We can sort of figure that one out when we have a free month or so.
But... Here's what I kind of got when I was on vacation, and here's how amazingly insistent these emotional experiences are until you kind of get them, and here's how just amazingly inviolable these emotional energies are until you sort of understand them and release them.
So I thought I would share them with you.
This is not something to inflict.
This is something which I think might help you understand.
You know, not that you care that much about how I came to my opinions, but given that People who are this far along in the podcast series probably have similar opinions.
Here's something that may help you in terms of understanding where your feelings came from with regards to your skepticism and social values and so on.
So this basically was my experience.
Society, the structure, the people, did nothing to With regards to helping out a child in obvious, serious, and an extremity of distress.
Not a phone call, not lift a finger, not have a word, not a single shred.
With obvious, obvious, mad dysfunction in the environment.
And it was really, I swear to God, it was hugely, hugely, hugely risky.
What would have happened if I'd ended up on the streets?
What would have happened? What would have happened?
Drugs, prostitution, homeless people freeze to death all the time in Toronto.
I mean, this was no fucking joking matter, what was going on.
Not a finger was lifted, not a shred of sympathy, not a word.
For years, among hundreds of people.
And professionals paid to help from the...
Nobody lifted a finger.
However... What provoked society to leap into action to deal with the problem?
Was it a child facing homelessness, massive distress, institutionalized mother, no resources, no money, eviction in winter?
No, good lord, no.
That doesn't cause society to leap into action to deal with the problem.
What causes society to leap into action?
A bag of fucking M&M's.
A bag of fucking M&M's.
No disrespect to M&Ms, quite tasty.
A child sinking in a whirlpool of financial, emotional, physical and familial destruction.
A clearly regarded decent mind going wanting for any sort of sustenance, emotional, financial, intellectual, any kind.
Nobody will even make a fucking phone call.
But a bag of M&Ms, my friend, that prompts a phone call, the frightening act of being arrested, the more frightening act of having a crazy and violent mother told of the arrest and the fear of the brutal consequences that will result from that, the violence, the beatings.
The bag of M&A took society to leap into action to deal with the problem.
A child is sliding into a life-threatening situation alone.
Well, we don't have to lift a finger about that, do we?
We don't have to make a phone call to anyone about that.
We don't have to get involved in that.
Children can sink into homelessness and nobody's going to lift a finger.
But, oh my friends, There's a bag of M&Ms involved.
Now we must act.
And not only must we act, we must lecture this child about ethics, about responsibility, about property rights, about empathy for the store owner.
And we must give him long and scary lectures about how being a bad kid can land you in jail.
Well, jail would certainly have solved the threat of homelessness.
And that was appalling.
And this was my sort of experience with the states.
When I look back on sort of why it is that I had skepticism with regards to, oh, the state is there to help, the state is there, it's going to solve these problems, it's going to solve those problems.
Well, those are all just words.
Those are all just words. And I... Really, I'm more empirical than that.
I don't try to or tend to base my understanding of things on mere words.
I sort of try to actually work with direct experience.
That's sort of the scientific method.
I think that's a good approach to determining the truth.
People can say all they want. But my own personal experience is across many continents.
I lived in three continents, England and Africa, briefly, and Canada.
Hundreds and hundreds of people knew about my situation to varying degrees and to significant degrees.
If you say anybody, it would be thousands of people.
Nobody lifted a finger in any of the countries that I was in, even relatives who could have done something decent.
Nobody did anything. And the state, which of course is paid and takes tax money and so on to protect, that's why you have children's services, why you have social workers, and even for the charities who are supported by the states, deduction, donations, and so on.
All of these... Groups did nothing.
The state did not act to help a child.
Society did not act to help a child in serious risk of going down into the bottomless depths.
Society, both state-based and society-based, did nothing.
Did nothing. But all of the apparatus of the state leapt into action when a bag of M&Ms was threatened.
A child can sink into nothingness and nobody will lift a finger.
A child can be brought down by the predators of indifference and poverty and nobody will lift a finger.
Nobody will even glance up from the newspapers as the screams and the claws commence.
But when a child pilfers, or is even associated with someone who pilfers a bag of M&Ms, ah, then the stern lectures on morality commence.
And if I was sort of to, in hindsight, these, gosh, almost 30 years ago now, 27 years ago, I would say that it was at that moment that I just kind of gave up on society.
I just kind of gave up.
And I guess the other times would be when my mom called the cops.
I remember one cop sort of leaning over me in a menacing manner, when my mom had called the cops, and saying, you know, well, son, what we have here is a generation gap, and you've got to learn to try and understand your mother, and you've got to respect your mom, you've got to listen to what she says.
We don't want to get called back in here and haul you off.
All kind of stuff. So a cop comes and you have a situation where a child is angry and frightened and so on, and he lectures the child.
He lectures the child.
Why? Because the child can't do fuck all about anything.
If he lectures my mom or calls child services because there's evidence of abuse, my mom can be dangerous.
My mom can screw up your life.
So nobody lectures my mom.
Nobody confronts my mom because my mom is obviously dangerous, angry, aggressive, violent.
Random. Well, not totally random.
The abuse never came out.
My mom can threaten people.
My mom can be dangerous. My mom can make your life a living hell, as she has done for many people in her life.
Myself, her doctors, all the other people in her life who she threatened or abused or undermined or whatever, right?
She's just been a plague throughout her life.
So, my mom understood a lot more about the state than I did, because she called the cops.
My mom understood a lot more about social power and how society works than I did.
Of course, she was older and she'd worked the system for many years, managed to keep the abuse secret and silent.
She knew. She knew she was totally safe to call the cops and frighten the hell out of me and have me lecture two about morality.
Have me lecture two about morality.
So, when an evil abuser calls the cops, they lecture the victim.
In one way, the rapist feels comfortable enough to call the cops when his victim is resisting him and the cops are like, yep, we'll help hold her down.
And we'll lecture to her about how she should obey her rapist.
We'll give her long lectures about responsibility and obedience and morality.
And we'll give her long lectures about morality as we hold her legs apart and pin her down so that she can have at her.
Well, I know that that sounds like an extreme metaphor, but that is actually the situation.
Except this is a long-time repeated rapist.
This is not just a one-time thing.
This abuse had been going on for years.
So I'm lectured to about obedience to my mom, and nobody says anything about or asks me questions about, well, how did you get to this state where you're screaming and crying and throwing things around?
What's going on for you? Nobody's going to ask that.
Of course not. Because that would involve a confrontation with my mother.
And everybody who could avoid the exception of the doctor who institutionalized her, everybody rabidly avoided any kind of confrontation with my mother.
They sniffed Predator from a distance.
And that's fine. I mean, at a certain bitter level of mine, that's fine.
That's fine. But then don't ever fucking lecture me about morality.
If you say, well, we'd like to help these children who are going under, but frankly, we're scared of the mom...
No problem. Then don't lecture me about courage and ethics and morality and responsibility and uprightness and integrity and blah blah blah.
Don't fucking complain when I'm around somebody who steals a bag of M&M's if you're frightened of confronting some crazy woman who's abusing her children.
Because I gotta tell you, I think that a human life, a child's life, is a little bit more important than a bag of fucking M&M's.
And if the only time that society leaps into actions is when the M&Ms are threatened, that's fine.
Then just say, well, it's not that we care about ethics, because we sure as hell don't care about ethics.
Because if we cared about ethics, then we'd do something.
Even the cop would say, would reasonably, I think, say, why is it, son, that you were stealing M&Ms?
And I'd say, because I'm a truth teller, I'd say, hey, you know what?
I'm fucking starving here.
I got no food.
Right? But the cop didn't say that.
And this was consistent through all of my interactions with authority throughout my entire life.
They lecture you on ethics.
They never, of course, ask for causes.
They blame you for your circumstances as a child.
There's nothing wrong with that as an adult, but they blame you for your circumstances and the inevitable result of those circumstances when you're a child.
Nobody ever confronts the parents because the parents can do something negative.
They can sue you. They can get angry.
They can file a complaint. They can talk back.
Everybody just picks on the weakest and calls it ethics.
Oh, the child is the weakest in this situation?
Let's just lecture the child.
When the mom comes to pick up the child, and this is what I remember very clearly, when my mom came to pick me up, the cop didn't say anything to her.
Because she can do some damage to the cop.
He sizes her up immediately.
He goes, ooh, here's a loose cannon.
Here's a dangerous woman. Here's an angry, bitter, scary woman.
Or he's a woman whose child is associated with somebody who's stealing a bag of M&Ms, and so obviously she's not a very good person.
So I'm not going to lecture her, though, because she can do something.
She's an adult. She can complain.
She can get me tied up in court.
She can file a complaint. Whatever, right?
Or she can at least make the next three minutes uncomfortable and unpleasant by screaming at me and embarrassing me in public.
So I'm 13 years old.
I got nothing to eat. I participate in the theft of a bag of M&Ms.
And the only person who gets lectured about ethics...
When, in a society where I've ended up having to steal a bag of M&Ms to get something to eat, the only person who gets lectured to about ethics is not the mother who's violent and abusive and abandoning and not getting any help for a family that's catastrophically imploding.
The mother doesn't get lectured at all.
Only the child gets lectured to.
Only the child gets lectured to about ethics.
Do you see where I sort of get some of these perspectives?
Now... It certainly could be the case, and I'm willing to hear arguments, of course, as I always am, that, oh, Steph, you can't build an entire philosophy out of bitterness about particular acts that society did or didn't do 30 years ago.
I totally agree.
I totally agree. That's why I try to validate my empirical observations with logic.
It's sort of important, right?
It's why I try to validate what occurred to me with logic.
It's why I don't sort of rant about things that happen to me and say, well, that's it.
Fuck society. Society's evil.
I try to sort of... Okay, but this was my experience.
This is what happened. People talk and talk and talk about ethics.
Nobody does anything to protect children, but they all say that they're good, and whenever that child does something that's sort of, quote, wrong...
And of course it was wrong to steal the M&M's, no question.
It was wrong to steal the electric train, it was wrong to steal.
But nobody asks where the greater sin is.
How is this child ending up in this situation?
I think that's important.
Nobody asks that question.
Nobody asks about the greater sin that produces the totally minor sin.
I mean, the sin of stealing a bag of M&M's versus the sin of abusing, beating, and terrifying children, or the sin of inaction, of doing nothing about it.
And doing nothing about it and then lecturing children about ethics.
That's the hypocrisy.
That's the vileness of it.
That's the horror of it.
Not that people did nothing, but people did nothing and preened and strutted around and were pompous and self-aggrandizing with regards to their own food.
And you would talk to these people and say, yeah, I'm a good person.
They wouldn't say, oh yeah, fuck, I know that there's this kid getting abused, one of my son's friends, but oh man, I'm not doing anything about it.
His mom's really crazy and she might be really dangerous.
So yeah, I'm totally willing to sacrifice this mom out of cowardice because something unpleasant might happen to me.
There's nothing ethical about that.
If you're afraid of something unpleasant happening to you from my mom, what the fuck do you think my life is like at 11 or 12 years old?
Before I'm even big enough to hit her back.
Not that good.
There's no ethics involved in this, right?
But people can do ethics and virtue and responsibility and lecture me on how important it was to be a good fucking person.
So, I really, really, really did fundamentally kind of get this situation, what society was all about.
And I totally got that society had nothing to do with ethics, but society was extraordinarily pompous and self-congratulatory with regards to ethics and how virtuous everyone was.
Oh, we're all so good.
We care about the poor.
So when people say to me, well, the government is all about helping the poor, and without the government, nobody's going to help the poor.
Well, I have some empirical evidence that lasted for years and years and years across three different continents that that just isn't fucking so.
And I'm not alone in that.
I don't think I'm alone in that.
The government's not helping anyone. So, I'm not sure if you've had similar sort of experiences, but it is fascinating to me that this is occurring continually throughout society, within society, and I sure would like to hear from those who've gone through anything similar.
It didn't have to be as dramatic, or maybe it's more dramatic.
But why is it that despite the fact that there are millions of people, billions maybe, throughout the world, Who have directly experienced the hypocrisy and corruption of society.
And I had a pretty large sample size.
Thousands of people, three continents, a bunch of different state agencies, all the charities in the world, all the teachers.
It's a pretty large sample.
And I don't think I just accidentally slipped through the cracks.
It's a pretty large sample of society.
Just watching this kid drown, going, well, nothing's happening.
Everything's fine. Everything's fine.
So, his mum's running around naked.
He's losing weight. Can't seem to focus, seems exhausted all the time.
I'm sure everything's fine. Maybe he's got a virus.
I'm sure everything's good.
Oh, I don't know. I have no idea what story people told to themselves.
It's incomprehensible to me what story people could tell to themselves.
Other than, of course, that they themselves had gone through abuse of some kind and didn't like to think about it and just avoided everything that might conceivably remind them of it, right?
Which is fine. Then just say, well, I'm a coward with regards to my own history and I have no intention whatsoever of helping any other children because it would cause too much pain within me.
That's fine. You know, just be a coward.
Be a shithead. Don't help children.
But then don't lecture your own children on ethics and don't, as the teachers always did, lecture me on responsibility and virtue and integrity and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And respect for other people, respect for their property and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Don't lecture me on all these sorts of things.
And do what you're doing.
Or rather, don't do what you're not doing.
So I hope that this has been helpful. Thank you so much.
▲
Export Selection