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April 25, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:55
729 Your Children Do NOT Love You...

...but they will hate you if you think they do!

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Good morning! Everybody, it's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It's 20 to 9.
I got up savagely late this morning.
Just had a little trouble getting the old noggin rolling out of bed this morning.
So eventually Christina came by with a cattle prod and hey, suddenly I was up.
Anyway, I wanted to chat this morning, given that we're on the theme of the joyful and happy theme, for which, unsadly, there are no Hallmark cards as yet, although they will come in time, when the understanding spreads, that we're talking about murderous parents.
And, again, I do visualize these cards.
So, your parents are murderous.
And inside, sperm and an egg and a dagger.
I don't know. But I'd like to talk a little bit about how this sort of comes about.
At least, these are all so ridiculously just my theories that I'm not going to stand by them should they fall, but I think that they're interesting discussion points, and hopefully you find them interesting as well.
When I was on vacation, I listened to an audiobook called 19 Minutes.
I can't remember the name of the writer.
And it was about a school shooting because vacation is the time, apparently.
But I hadn't listened to fiction in so long that it just seemed like an interesting book.
I listened to it previewed and it seemed like the writer was competent without being flashy and accurate without being negative.
And so I listened to the book and Christina listened to parts of it as well.
And It was...
I mean, I don't want to make this a review of the book, because it's not exactly worth reviewing, but it was well-written in a lot of ways, but just unbearably sentimental.
This guy just becomes a shooter.
Because he's teased and his parents, it's a mystery.
And his father, this homo irony layered on like lacquer, right?
That his father is a professor who studies happiness and can't make his own children happy, you know?
Of course, there's the natural woman's reaction to philosophy.
Women always mock philosophy.
Anything that is written by women, the philosopher or the thinker is always a fool, a fundamental fool.
So, I don't want to sort of go into a review of the book, but there was one sentence, and of course because it's an audiobook, I'm never going to find it again.
It's partly where I hide out in terms of my theories in the mysterious Amazon jungle of endless WAV files, so I'm not going to complain too much, but I remember the sentence fairly well, and it really sparked a lot of the stuff that we're talking about in terms of clarifying this position that I have and how I think that parents end up.
Hating their children. The sentence in the book was, this guy, the shooter's mom, was, and it was real tear-jerky stuff, right?
I mean, I didn't find it particularly moving because it just seemed so treacly to me, but the killer's mom remembered him as a baby and Falling asleep on her chest, or as a toddler, falling asleep on her chest with her hair clutched in his little fist.
With a lock of her hair clutched in his little fist.
That is a very, very powerful statement.
About the fundamental illusions of motherhood.
And we'll talk about dads maybe intermittently in here, but I'm really, really focusing on the moms.
that the mother remembers in a sentimental, touching and moving way her son as a toddler falling asleep on her chest with a lock of her hair clutched in his little fist.
The fact that she remembers this as if this were love is foundational to many, many, many, if not most of the world's problems.
and I stopped and re-round this sentence like a dozen times, just letting it sink in and letting myself sort of work at it from different angles.
The woman remembers with great and moving sentimentality her child having fallen asleep on her chest with a lock of her hair clutched in his palm.
And she thinks that that is love.
And it is the mother's greed for the love of the child that turns her into a raging enemy.
I shouldn't say raging, sometimes it's passive, but turns her into the enemy of the child.
As Lear says, how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have an ungrateful child.
Actually, I think that's from the Bible, but Lear says something similar.
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have an ungrateful child.
I give, and I give, and I give, and what do I get?
You treat this house like a hotel.
You don't give me the respect and the love, O child of mine, that I deserve.
These kinds of statements are fundamental to the endless generational war that flares up around puberty, where the corrosive skepticism of the teenager provokes all of the hostilities of the parent.
Let me tell parents something interesting.
If you are listening to this and you have young children or you are pregnant or you are thinking of reproducing, let me tell something to you.
Let me tell you something that is the most important thing in terms of philosophy that you will ever, ever, ever hear.
You do not have children so they will love you.
You do not give birth to children to feel loved.
Children do not love you.
Children, your children do not love you.
Where there is such a disparity of power, there is no possibility Not even the slightest shred of possibility that you can be loved.
Where there is such a disparity of power and dependence, there cannot be love.
And that is fine.
And that is good.
And that is right, and that is exactly as it should be.
God cannot love humanity except in a pitying, superior kind of way.
God cannot love humanity.
The idea that a god creates humanity in order to be worshipped is the foundational mythology of parenting, that we have children in order to be worshipped, that we have children in order to be loved.
This is so basic to parenting, This is parenting and always has been and must not be in the future.
It must not be in the future.
Your children may grow to love you as they grow to adulthood.
But children are not there for you.
You are there for them.
If I set myself up as a teacher of sorts, my students are not here for me.
I am here for them.
The measure of success in the interaction between you and I is your happiness in the long run.
It is not my ego gratification.
It is not my veneration.
I don't care if you love me.
I care that you're happy.
I care that I do the best that I can to communicate the most truth that I've been able to accumulate, believe it or not, in the shortest possible time.
Where there is hierarchy, there is not love.
And there's nothing wrong with that at all.
I am not equal in medical knowledge to my doctor.
I can barely appreciate his medical skill.
If somebody operates on me, I'm out the whole time.
I can't appreciate his values because I'm knocked out.
Where there is hierarchy, there cannot be love.
And the purpose of hierarchy is to eliminate itself.
The purpose of a disparity in power is to eliminate a disparity in power.
Just as people I read when I was a teenager had far more knowledge and wisdom than I did, and I now have some more than other people, and there may be still people out there who have more than me.
There certainly are in certain areas.
There may be in every area.
The purpose of greater knowledge is to dissipate itself through the spread of that knowledge.
Hierarchy is like a big column of water that mysteriously appears for a moment in a lake.
The purpose is to lower itself, to raise the lake, and to rejoin in terms of equality.
Einstein figures out the theory of relativity.
The purpose of Einstein as a thinker and as a teacher is to communicate that knowledge so that everybody has it.
Who wants it?
When he was the only person who knew the theory of relativity, he was like a big column of water in a lake, and his purpose was to dissipate his hierarchy of knowledge and spread it to everyone.
What occurs when a child falls asleep on your chest?
Thank you.
Thank you.
With a lock of your hair clutched in his tiny little hand, what occurs, my friend, is attachment.
It is attachment.
It is not attachment.
It is not love.
And to mistake it for love is to set yourself up as the enemy of the child.
When you have a child, the child is dependent upon you completely and totally and utterly in a way that no human being will ever, ever, ever be again.
That dependence, nature, has programmed into children to bond themselves with their parents, to be cute to some degree, to be affectionate to some degree.
But a child's attachment to a parent does not arise out of an independent evaluation of that parent's virtue.
They can't choose.
They don't know.
And they are dependent.
Your children attach to you the way a little duck imprints upon a mother duck.
The way that a rock falls to the earth.
The rock does not fall to the earth because it loves the earth and can't bear to be away from it and kisses it when it lands.
The rock falls to the earth because that's what rocks do in the presence of gravity.
Children bond with their parents as best as they can because that's what children do.
Based on attachment theory.
Children will attach to their parents by any means whatsoever.
And people and parents throughout history, the world over, and not for long, I hope, mistake this attachment for love.
for love.
If I won the lottery, I would not call myself a brilliant financial manager.
If somebody dies and donates a million dollars to Freedom Aid Radio, and don't use PayPal for that, you know, just drop me a line.
Just email me. I'll send you my address.
I would not call myself somebody who had magically come up with a million dollars.
When children attach to parents because of the dependents, Because they die if they don't.
When children attach to parents, parents feel that after a life in a desert, they finally have been given all they want to drink, and they greedily drain their children dry.
Because attachment from children is like reward without effort.
It is like love.
Without the need to be virtue, it is the most dangerous drug in the world.
It is the most dangerous drug in the world to imagine that your children love you when they are young.
young.
They don't.
They can't.
Now, it is true that if you are a less brutal and more kind parent, then the attachment will be easier.
I'm going to go.
But your children don't know values.
They can't compare, and they have no choice.
And where there is no choice, there cannot be love.
Where there is no choice, there cannot be love.
And children have no choice about you as their parent.
They didn't ask to be born.
They didn't choose you.
They're stuck with you. Now, if you're a good person, then they may grow to love you over time.
It's like an arranged marriage times about a billion.
Or it's like a harem.
Some woman gets drafted into your harem when you're a sultan or something.
And if you're kind and gentle, she may grow to love you over the years.
But... But fundamentally, she's still in a harem.
So we don't know what she would have chosen if she hadn't been stuck in a harem.
And there may be some affection that grows over time.
But we know for sure that it's pretty unlikely that she would have chosen you as a husband if she hadn't been forced into a hero.
So, with children it's much, much, much worse.
Now, a woman who's in a harem may be affectionate towards the sultan.
And the sultan may feel that that is love, but only if he forgets that she's there by force.
And children are there by force.
They can't defend themselves. They can't protect themselves.
They can't provide for themselves.
They're completely and totally dependent upon the parent.
In a way that even a woman in a harem is not.
Because a woman in a harem at least is an adult.
These aren't her first impressions of the universe.
It would be like if she was born in a harem or something.
Now, it could be that you are such a great parent, and I don't mean this sarcastically, I mean, it could well be that you are such a great parent, that if your children had the choice between you and all the parents in the known universe, they would choose you.
In which case, like, fantastic.
Great for you. Like, honestly and totally, and you are doing far more than I am to make the world a better place, and good for you.
But... If you think, if you imagine that your children were omniscient before they were born and could scan all the parents in the world, if they would choose you as the very best conceivable possible parent for them, then yes, you can accept your children's attachment as a close precursor and approximation of love.
Like infatuation or sexual attraction.
If you are infatuated and sexually attracted to someone and that person is also very virtuous and good, then it can turn into love over time.
But it sure ain't love to begin with.
It's the appearance of.
It's the simulacrum of.
It's the silhouette of love.
But it's not love yet.
So many times that infatuation and sexual attraction turns into hatred.
Everybody makes this mistake.
If you're really good looking and people are attracted to you because of your looks, then you think you are a good person, but it's not.
Love is only achievable through virtue.
Love is only achievable through virtue.
You can't get love any other way, but everybody spends their whole goddamn life trying to.
Ooh, I'll be attractive.
Ooh, I'll lose 10 pounds.
Ooh, I'll get money.
Ooh, I'll be successful. Ooh, I'll be rich.
Ooh, I'll be famous. Ooh, I'm going to work on my talent because people will then love me for my talent.
Fuck that. Nobody can love you for anything but virtue.
Nobody can love you for anything but virtue and you can't love anybody else except for virtue.
This is something that is not my invention.
It's something as old as philosophy.
And most fundamentally, people say, ooh, I'll have children.
I'll have children. Ah, the cult of fertility.
We'll get to that in a later podcast.
I have no issue or negative opinions about having children, but the most fecund population, the most fertile population in the world is the Muslims.
And if they think that procreation is important, then I think it could well be said that we may have some serious questions about the ethics of procreation.
If you're not a virtuous parent, then clearly you're just inventing someone to abuse.
In which case, it's evil.
You're kid creating, not kidnapping, but it's the same thing.
I wonder if kidnapping is the word just by the by, if the word comes about because kids were snatched at some point while they were asleep. - Yeah.
Who knows? So when you imagine that your child loves you, Your work ethic in the realm of virtue evaporates and you become worse.
Fantasy always makes everybody worse.
What happens to your work ethic if somebody says, I'm going to give you $10,000 tax-free a month?
Unless you're already a virtuous person...
You're not going to go to work. And I'm not saying that going to work is virtuous.
I'm just saying that most people, when they inherit money, it's very bad for them.
They end up much less happy.
And it usually is gone, of course, in a year or two.
So... When you think that you are loved by your children...
Then your desire to be a virtuous person, which is a very hard thing to do, given the corruption of our early education, when you believe that you are receiving love in the form of your children's attachment, then you no longer work to be virtuous.
Why would you? Any more than you would go to a job that you don't like after you win the lottery.
You'll quit. You'll quit trying.
And if you are genuinely receiving love, then you stop trying to get love.
I mean, I don't troll the internet looking for dates because I've got a wonderful wife.
A wife who I believe if she could choose any man in the universe to get married to, she would choose me and I would choose her.
So you stop trying to be virtuous when you think that your children's attachment is love.
Because you're getting the effects of virtue, which is love, without all the work of virtue, which is integrity, courage, benevolence, empathy, honesty, rigor.
I mean, those things are all very hard.
But if you can just get infinite love from your children without all the work of being virtuous, just with the work of screwing, Well, why would you bother?
It would be as incomprehensible as somebody who complained about their job for 20 years, won the lottery, and didn't quit their job.
And there are those people and there are those parents, but we're talking about the majority.
The vast majority. So when you believe that your children love you when all they are is attached to you biologically...
Then what happens to mothers?
They begin to resent everyone else.
And they begin to gravitate towards their children as the most satisfying and positive relationships because their children just love them.
My children just love me when they are young.
Oh, it's so wonderful.
They just love me. And now, since I am clearly worthy of being loved, now, oh man, those other people in my life who don't give me this kind of unconditional love, they are just mean.
Mean, mean, mean, mean, mean.
And this is the woman. The woman has the fantasy of unconditional love because of his addiction to the drug of...
Feigned offspring love.
Full! But the woman says, well, my children love me unconditionally.
So why can't you?
I am clearly worthy of being loved unconditionally.
So my husband, my family, my friends, why don't you people do it?
And this is the seed of the resentment, right?
Fantasy always breeds resentment.
Fantasy always breeds resentment.
If I imagine that I'm about to win a million dollars and then I don't, I feel resentment.
Alright.
Which I don't.
Every day that I don't win a million dollars, I don't feel resentment unless I think I'm going to.
So the woman becomes cranky and dissatisfied in every other area of her life.
And she begins to resent those around her.
Because her children love her unconditionally.
Why can't everyone else?
Her children see how wonderful and special and beautiful and noble she is.
Her children give her all of the rewards of virtue.
The dirty secret being that they don't.
And she's not virtuous. And she's parasitical on them.
Because now they're there for her.
She's not there for them. Now they're there for her.
So what happens when the children who love the mother so much Have problems with the mother.
And they will because now the mother feels perfectly virtuous, she's not going to try and be virtuous.
Now that she has all the effects of virtue without any of the struggle, why would she do the struggle?
It would make no sense. So, what happens when the children have a problem with the mother?
Well, they're supposed to love her, right?
Totally and completely and unconditionally.
What happens when that stops?
And as I talked about, there are two major phases for this, right?
Toddlerhood, when the attachment is supposed to be broken.
When... And a child who is strongly attached to a mother in a positive way, right, when the mother is good, can break the attachment, right, can start to wander away from the mother because there's a strong attachment and so on.
But where the attachment is weak because of the narcissistic mother, then the children are frightened and never want to leave the side of the mother because they can't believe she'll be there because emotionally she keeps vanishing in this manipulative nonsense that we're talking about here.
What happens? What happens?
If the mother believes that she is so virtuous that everybody must love her unconditionally the way that her children do, or she believes, what happens when her children say, I hate you, mommy?
And they will. They always do.
There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, as a teacher, I get those emails regularly.
I mean, they're a little bit more sophisticated, but it boils down to the same thing.
But listeners don't owe me anything.
I think that they owe me some integrity.
I think they owe me some donations but they don't owe me any love what happens when the child begins to disagree with the parent?
Well, the child clearly is bad.
The child clearly is a bad child.
If you work for me...
And I have a contract to pay you $10,000 a month for the work that you do for me, and then you keep coming to work, but then I just stop paying you, am I not wrong?
If I owe you something and I don't pay it, am I not wrong?
Am I not a frauder? Am I not a thief who must be rigorously corrected?
And if you're not allowed to quit my employment and go somewhere else, are you not going to get rather hysterically angry?
and frustrated and enraged well moms can't quit and their children owe them love and when their children don't give them love the children are thieves are bad when the children don't give them respect when the children point out hypocrisies well then the children are very bad indeed very bad indeed When a child,
and this is all stuff that I talk about in The God of Atheists, and I'm just making this stuff up on the spot.
Really, you've got to listen to this book, I'm telling you.
Send me some money, I'll send you this.
I think it's a great book. The mother attempts to reverse cause and effect.
Normally we are loved because we are virtuous.
The mother says, I am virtuous because my children love me.
Or, my children love me, therefore I must be virtuous.
So when children begin to question the mother, And particularly when the children begin to question the mother's virtue.
Oh, my friends, what a Krakatoa of volcanic and often feminine eruption of rage ensues.
Or withdrawal. It's rage either way.
Withdrawal is even colder than anger.
Because now the children are saying, I don't think you're as good a person as you think you are.
And slaves know the masters in a way that the masters don't know the slaves.
The slaves have to study the masters.
The children have to study the parents.
In the same way that the prisoner knows more about the god than the god will ever know about the prisoner, because the god is not dependent on the prisoner.
The god is not subject to the whim of the prisoner, so...
Children study their parents in a way that, I mean, children have radioactive bone marrow penetrating x-ray vision with regards to their parents' personalities, their strengths and their weaknesses, and especially their vanities, because their vanities are very dangerous to the children.
Vanities in the form of the parents are very dangerous for the children.
So, when children question the morality of their parents, A friend of mine, well, not a friend of mine, a guy at work was saying this about his kid.
He says to his kid, don't throw things.
And then he throws something into the garbage, the parent, and the kid says, well, I thought you said not to throw things.
The kids are just, I mean, is it a rule or is it just something you don't want me to do for subjective reasons?
Because parents always say that it's a rule and then they don't follow it.
So when a child says, Mom, I think that what you're doing is bad.
I think that what you're doing is not good.
Then clearly this threatens the whole they love me because I'm virtuous fantasy.
And when that fantasy is threatened, people get murderous.
When bad people's fantasy of virtue are threatened, they become murderous.
And so when I talked about that parents hate their children, and that parents have murderous impulses towards their children, well, sure.
Well, sure. I mean, the most dangerous drug in the world is to imagine your children love you when they're young.
And if you get addicted to that drug, it hollows out your whole being and you become a very bad person.
And if you've been a bad person towards children, I mean, there's nothing worse that I can imagine but...
Suicidality would certainly be a fundamental impulse, which is then projected onto the children in the form of murderousness.
So if you've been addicted to this drug for years, and then somebody yanks away this drug from you, the withdrawal is horrible.
This is the toughest addiction to recover from because, as far as I've seen, nobody recovers.
And so parents, in this particular instance, what are they going to do? what are they going to do?
Are they going to say, well, I guess I'm not a good person, and I guess that my children didn't love me as much as I thought, and I guess it was all just attachment.
And so instead of trying to be somebody who won my children's love, I exploited the biological basis of their attachment and pretended that I was a good person as a result.
I am a really bad person.
I have exploited my children.
And I have now treated not just my children unjustly, but everyone else in the world I have treated unjustly, because I believed that I was worthy of unconditional love because of my children's attachment to me.
And so I have been dissatisfied and resentful towards everyone else, and I have told them that they don't love me enough in word or form or deed.
And I have been totally unjust, and I have been greedily taking what was not mine.
Well, people can't do that.
They can't do that. They can't do that.
Fantasy erodes the self.
That's why you can't fight fantasy if you dig into it deep enough.
Because there's no self left to fight.
It's like you can't fight a naval war from a sunken ship.
That's not a submarine. When the ship goes down, the war is over.
And when you get consumed by fantasy, there's nothing in you with which to fight fantasy anymore.
Because you're all fantasy.
You're all fantasy.
So the parents feel that they are being killed by the children.
The false self is being nailed by the children.
Or as my brother once put it, children root around in this little box called All of Your Issues, and they don't know what they're doing, but they drive you completely nuts.
And that's sort of one way of putting it, but I would go a lot further and say that the false self attaches to the children in an unhealthy way, and the children attach to the parents in a healthy and biologically positive way.
And the false self then uses the attachment of the children to fantasize that it can have love without virtue.
And then it swells and eclipses the entire personality.
And this is why parents become so false and sentimental and boring and empty and petty.
The false self is very petty.
Oh, you kids are fighting. I'm going to snap my newspaper shut and stalk out of the room.
Petty, petty, petty, petty. Petty, boring, minutiae, trivia, soul-killing, all the stuff we talked about yesterday.
Your false self swells and takes over because it is fed by the fantasy that it can finally, finally have love without virtue.
Finally. Oh, thank God.
I don't have to become a good person.
I just have to have children.
It's about time.
And so what happens then?
Well... The false self, which has now become the entire personality, this fantasy that virtue is yours without effort.
The effects of virtue, love, is yours without effort.
When the children threaten to expose the lie that they love you by questioning you, or that you think it's unconditional love, when the love of children, quote love of children, starts to become Rational starts to become conditional, starts to become evaluative.
When they start to have values, and especially, especially, my friends, when they start to question your commitment to the values you've been communicating, well, then the false self erupts in rage because it feels like it's being killed.
And then in self-defense, it attacks the children.
The children must be bad because they owe me unconditional love.
And now they're suddenly applying all these conditions.
And people's true self has eroded to the point where it feels like they're going to die if their children don't give them the love that they deserve, the love that they're owed.
If the children don't return to the blind, dumb, non-evaluative biological attachment, of course the children can't return to that because their children are growing, their brains are growing.
So there's a massive assault upon the children during the toddler phase, which few people remember, and then things kind of calm down for the latency period, and then the rage and the destruction and the evaluation and the hypocrisy and all of the false self-bullying then escalates during puberty and the teenage years.
It's why the teenage years are so tough.
There's no reason for them. It's just that people have been greedily stealing From their children and calling it virtue.
In other words, not only have they expected love for virtue, but they've expected love while actually acting in a very corrupt and destructive manner towards helpless and dependent children.
So what they think they deserve is love, but what they actually deserve is hatred and contempt.
And of course they know this deep down.
You can never kill the true self.
You can only ignore it.
So when I say that parents feel murderous towards their children, I'm really not kidding.
And I put the blame sort of on moms, but moms have this paralyzing attachment to their children as well.
I think that the salvation comes from the dads, right?
From the dads continually fighting this sentimentalization of the attachment of children and the imagining that it has anything to do with love.
I think that dads need to fight this.
I think that dads need to fight this.
I think I say this in The God of Atheists as well, that mothers fall down the well of their own children and it's up to the dads to scale down and bring them back.
I mean, mothers have to merge with their children.
They have to blend with their children because the children are pre-verbal and they need to have their needs taken care of and they're demanding and so on, right?
So mothers need to merge with their babies.
That's perfectly healthy. But then they need to stop merging with their babies and return to the adult world, and that's the job of the dad, in my opinion.
Anyway, I hope that this has been helpful.
I hope that this helps to enlighten where I think a lot of this corruption comes from and why I think families are so dysfunctional.
And please let me know what you think and what your experiences have been like this within your own family.
And I think you're all absolutely wonderful.
I look forward for donations.
It's been a couple of days since my last donation, although somebody did sign up for the subscription, which I hugely, hugely appreciate.
So thank you so much for listening.
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