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July 24, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:44
1111 Families, Abuse and History

The history of the world is the history of childhood.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope that you're doing well. This is a grim but essential topic.
I'm just going to read some sections from an article by Lloyd DeMaus, who runs the Journal of Psychohistory.
This is from a speech at the National Parenting Conference in Boulder, Colorado.
On September the 25th, 1997.
It's a little old, but the material that he's dealing with.
Now, I can't verify all of this stuff, obviously, but it appears to be valid, but you can get this from psychohistory.com forward slash htm forward slash o5 under by history dot html if you want to look at all the source materials.
But This, I think, is a very important topic for those who are interested in helping the world progress from an ethical standpoint.
And it came out of a chat in the Free Domain Radio chat window, where a fellow, well, the sort of debate was that, and this is a humanistic debate that says that ethics have evolved in human society to help or fulfill certain functions within society, that if you attack someone, they're going to attack you back, and so on.
And that's where we develop these prohibitions against murder and rape and incest and so on.
And my argument, of course, was in the case that if you look at something like murder or theft, we have no taboos against these things whatsoever.
I mean, certainly, horizontal killing among citizens is punished.
But that is scarcely the risk that citizens face is not from each other, but from the state.
And if you look at almost 300 million people murdered by states in the 20th century, not even counting wars, then we can understand that murder is scarcely prohibited in human society.
In fact, it is wildly encouraged.
If we look at the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis murdered, the thousands of American soldiers murdered, the 40 million people murdered in the Second World War, the 10 million in the First World War, the Millions of people who are murdered around the world in ethnic cleansing conflicts and genocides at the moment.
Murder is scarcely, at all, condemned within human society.
Theft, of course, we have around half of our income is taken through force by the state for its own purposes, so theft is scarcely prohibited in human society.
This we can all understand, but as I've always argued at Freedom and Radio and in my articles and videos and podcasts and books, The problem with the world is parenting.
The problem with the world, and it doesn't mean that parents are the problem.
I think that the family can be a wonderful and beautiful institution, and it is the source of all that is wonderful within human life, the most wonderful.
And so it's not that parenting itself, or parents themselves, are the problem, but the way that people are parented is why we have Murders and genocides and wars in the United States.
So this is some factual information which I hope will put rest to the idea that incest is somehow a taboo within human society, because if we understand that there are no particular moral instructions that hold back the bloody tide of human corruption and exploitation,
particularly of children, Then we can more easily understand why the world is the way that it is, and that it's all going to start with reforming the family, and that mewling about the state and the Fed and the Constitution and the gun rights is all a complete distraction from the core issue, which is how children are raised.
That is going to be what is going to build a free society, is the better.
So, let's look at some of the cultures.
This is, again, I'm reading from this article.
You can look at it and you can check the source materials.
I think this guy has credibility, but some of the stuff may be surprising for you.
This is the start of the article.
He says, during the past three decades, I've spent much of my scholarly life.
Examining primary sources such as diaries, autobiographies, doctor's reports, ethnographic reports, and other documents to document what it must have felt like to have been a child yesterday and today in the East and the West in literate and preliterate cultures.
In several hundred studies published by myself and my associates in the Journal of Psychohistory, we have provided extensive evidence that the history of childhood has been A nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken.
The further back in history one goes, and the further away from the West one gets, the more massive the neglect and cruelty one finds, and the more likely children are, to have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused by their caregivers.
Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of psycho-historical study of childhood and society is that the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children.
Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional problems, so too the routine assault of children has been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective emotional homeostasis.
Most historical families once practiced infanticide, erotic beatings, and incest.
Most states sacrificed and mutilated their children to relieve the guilt of adults.
Even today we continue to arrange the daily killing, maiming, molestation and starvation of children through our social, military and economic activities.
I would like to summarize here some of the evidence I have found as to why child abuse has been humanity's most powerful and most successful ritual, why it has been the cause of war and social violence and why the eradication of child abuse and neglect is the most important social task we face today.
The child as poison container.
The main psychological mechanism that operates in all child abuse involves using children as what I have termed poison containers, receptacles into which adults project disowned parts of their psyches so that they can control these feelings in another body without danger to themselves.
In good parenting, the child uses the caretaker as a poison container, much as it earlier used the mother's placenta as a poison container for cleansing its polluted blood.
A good mother reacts with calming actions to the cries of a baby and helps it detoxify its dangerous emotions.
But when an immature mother's baby cries, she cannot stand the screaming and strikes out at the child.
As one battering mother put it, I have never felt loved all my life.
When the baby was born, I thought he would love me.
When he cried, it meant he didn't love me.
So I hit him. Rather than the child being able to use the parent to detoxify its fears and anger, the parent instead injects his or her bad feelings into the child and uses it to cleanse his or herself of depression and anger.
Consider a typical infanticidal incestuous culture, the Bimincuscusmin of New Guinea, as is so often true in pre-literate cultures.
The mothers have long postpartum taboos against sex with their husbands, Sleep naked against their children until they are about four years old, have orgasms while nursing them, and regularly masturbate them.
Maternal incest and pederasty by men are quite common in preliterate groups and were common in earlier historical times.
Boys in many New Guinea groups today, for instance, are so traumatized by the early erotic experiences, neglect, and assaults on their bodies that they need to prove their masculinity when they grow up and become fierce warriors and cannibals, with a third of them dying in raids and wars.
In fact, I have found that rather than the incest taboo being universal, as anthropologists claim, it is incest itself that has been universal for most children in most cultures, in most times.
A childhood more or less free from adult sexual use is in fact a very late historical development limited to a few fortunate children in a few modern nations.
To give you some idea of the extensive evidence I have gathered for such an unlikely conclusion, I would like to begin by summarizing the evidence which exists for the sexual abuse of children around the world today.
In America, the most accurate scientific studies based on lengthy interviews report That 30% of men and 40% of women remember having been sexually molested during childhood, defining molestation as actual genital contact and not just exposure.
About half of these are directly incestuous with the family members, the other half usually being with others, but with the complicity of caretakers in at least 80% of the cases.
These experiences of seduction are not just pieced together from fragmentary memories, but are remembered in detail, are usually for an extended period of time, and have been confirmed by follow-up in reliability studies in 83% of the cases, so they are unlikely to have been fantasies.
This is not in the article, but this of course was Freud's Massive backdown, and one could say betrayal of the children, that when the Freudian theory of sexual development, oh, sorry, when Freud first examined the erotic lives of children and found the prevalence of incest to be extraordinarily high, society in Vienna at the time revolted, and he backed down by then developing the Oedipal and Electra complex theories that the child fantasized about sexual activity with other family members, particularly parents.
But this was, of course, a backdown from the prevalence of incest in his culture at the time.
So that's why he has to say they're unlikely to have been fantasies, because that's the Freudian interpretation, that incest is a fantasy, to some degree.
The seductions, to continue with the article, the seductions occurred at much earlier ages than had been previously assumed, with 81% occurring before puberty, and an astonishing 42% under age seven.
As high as these molestation rates seem, however, they represent only a portion Of the true rates, not only because those interviewed do not include populations that have been showed to have extremely high rates, such as criminals, prostitutes, juveniles, in shelters, psychotics, etc., but also because only conscious memories were counted, and the earliest seductions of children are almost never remembered except during psychotherapy.
Adjusting statistically for what is known about these additional factors, I have concluded that the real sexual abuse rate for America is 60% for girls and 45% for boys, about half of these directly incestuous.
Other Western nations have made fewer careful studies.
A recent Canadian study by Gallup of 2,000 adults has produced incidence rates Almost exactly the same as those found in the United States.
Latin American family sexual activity, particularly widespread pederasty as part of macho sexuality, is considered even more widespread.
In England, a recent BBC child watch program asked its female listeners, a large though admittedly biased sample, if they remembered sexual molestations.
And of the 2,530 replies analyzed, 83% remembered someone touching their genitals, 62% recalling actual intercourse.
In Germany, the Institut für Küntheit has recently concluded a survey asking West Berlin school children about their sexual experiences and 80% reported having been molested.
Outside the West, the sexual molestation of children is a routine practice in most families. .
Childhood in India begins, according to observers, with the child being regularly masturbated by the mother, the girl to make her sleep well, the boy to make him manly.
The child sleeps in the family bed, witnesses and most likely takes part in sexual intercourse between the parents.
The child is often, quote, borrowed to sleep with other members of the extended household, leading to the Indian proverb that, for a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousins nor father.
Childhood is so eroticized that, as one Western observer put it, the little Hindu girls are deflowered by the little boys with whom they play, and repeat together the erotic lessons which their parents have unwittingly taught them on account of the general promiscuity of family life.
Throughout India, in all, the little girls of less than 10 years of age, the complete hymen is wanting.
Incest is often the rule rather than the exception.
Child marriage was, of course, a long-standing Indian practice.
When laws were passed in 1929 trying to outlaw it, the government was overwhelmed by men insisting that early marriage was an absolute necessity since little girls were naturally very sexual and must be married early If they are to be restrained from seducing adults.
Cupid overtakes the hearts of girls at an early age, they said.
A girl's desire for sexual intercourse is eight times greater than that of males.
Indian mothers also often supported early marriage, frankly admitting that it was necessary.
In order to protect their little girls against rape in the family, Saying that they were afraid to leave their daughters at home, even for one afternoon, without a mother's eye, and accessible to the men of the family.
The Indian subcontinent, in fact, still has many groups, such as the Baigah, where actual incestuous marriage is practiced between fathers and daughters, between mothers and sons, between siblings, and even between grandparents and their grandchildren, thus disproving the oft-repeated anthropological truism that no known tribe has ever permitted incest.
Because if it were allowed, society would surely cease functioning.
In many of these villages, the children move at the age of five or six from the incestuous activities of the family bed to spend the rest of their childhood in sex dormitories, where they are initiated by older youths and men into intercourse with a succession of other children, none for longer than three days at a time, under threat of gang rape.
Childhood in China has historically had the same institutionalized rape rituals as in India, including the pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of boys to be used sexually as eunuchs, marriage of young girls to a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution, and the regular sexual use of child servants and slaves.
So prevalent was the rape of little girls that Western doctors found that As in India, this is China.
Few girls entering puberty had intact hymens.
Childhood in contemporary Japan, although somewhat more Western than that of other Eastern nations, still includes masturbation by mothers to put them to sleep, the children.
Parents often have intercourse with their children in bed with them and co-sleeping, with parents physically embracing the child, often continues until the child is 10 or 15 years old.
One recent Japanese study found daughters sleeping with their fathers over 20% of the time after age 16.
Recent sex surveys report memories of sexual abuse even higher than comparable American studies, and hotlines of sexual abuse report mother-son incest in almost a third of the course.
The mother is saying to her teenage son, it's not good to do it alone, your IQ becomes lower, I will help you, or you cannot study if you Cannot have sex.
You may use my body. Or, I don't want you to get into trouble with a girl.
Have sex with me instead.
Historically, Japan has been one of the most endogenous societies in the world, with incestuous marriages in court circles being approved, even in historical times, and preferred sibling-cousin, uncle-niece, and aunt-nephew marriages having been so extensive that genetics experts have discovered that incestuous inbreeding has affected the size and health of the Japanese.
Even today there are rural areas in Japan where fathers marry their daughters when the mother has died or incapacitated in accordance with feudal family traditions.
The sexual use of children in the Near East is as widespread as in the Far East.
Historically, all the institutionalized forms of pedophilia which were customary in the Far East are documented extensively for the Near East, including child marriage, child concubinage, temper prostitution of both boys and girls, parent-child marriage among the Zoroastrians, sibling marriage, quite common among Egyptians, sex slavery, ritualized pederasty, and child prostitution.
Masturbation in infancy is said to be necessary to increase the size of the penis.
And older siblings are reported to play with the genitals of babies for hours at a time.
Mutual masturbation, fellatio and anal intercourse are also said to be common among children, particularly with the older boys, using younger children as sex objects.
The nude public baths, hammam, are particularly eroticized in many areas, being especially notorious as a place of homosexual acts, both male and female.
Girls are used incestuously even more often than boys, since females are valued so little. .
One report found 80% of Near Eastern women surveyed recalled having been forced into fellatio between the ages of three and six by older brothers, cousins, uncles, and teachers.
The girls rarely complained since, quote, if there is any punishment to be meted out, her balobos end up by being inflicted on her.
Arab women know that their spouses are pedophiles and prefer having sex with children to having sex with them.
Their retribution comes as follows.
When the girl is about six years old, the women of the house grab her, pull her thighs apart and cut off her clitoris and often also her labia with a razor, thus usually ending her ability to feel sexual pleasure forever.
I'm not going to read this story about a girl describing her sexual mutilation.
It's the equivalent of cutting the tip of the penis off below the head in terms of sexual pleasure and pain.
You can read it if you want.
It's unbelievable. It's completely hideous and I'm not going to read it here.
A recent survey of Egyptian girls and women showed 97% of uneducated families and 66% of educated families still practiced clitorectomy.
Nor is the practice decreasing.
UN reports estimate that more than 74 million females have been mutilated, with more female children mutilated today than throughout history.
Child infanticide commonly practiced throughout history.
Thank you.
And you can read more about that if you want.
We'll just touch here on the mother-daughter relationship.
The crucial relationship in this evolution is the mother-daughter relationship.
If little girls are treated particularly badly, they grow up to be mothers who cannot rework their traumas and history is frozen.
For instance, although China was ahead of the West in most ways during the pre-Christian era, it became, quote, frozen and fell far behind the West in evolutionary social and technological change after it adopted the practice of foot-binding girls, for which there is some evidence that it was a sexual fetish.
Similarly, the clitorectomy of girls in Muslim societies has inhibited their social development for centuries.
Since it likewise puts a break on the ability of the next generation of mothers to make progress in caring for their children.
Clearly different groups have moved different distances up the ladder of psychological evolution since some contemporary groups still practice brain-eating as our Paleolithic ancestors did.
And different subgroups of our more advanced nations still terrorize and abuse their children in ways Identical to those that were commonplace centuries ago, producing the historical fossils, early psycho classes we now call borderline personalities and other more severe character disorders.
Your neighbor is as likely to be a result of medieval parenting as of modern parenting, so modern societies contain a full range of childbearing modes and psycho classes.
The generational pressure for psychological change is not only an independent historical force originating in inborn adult child striving for relationship.
It occurs independent of social and technological change.
It can be found even in periods of economic stagnation.
My psychogenic theory of history posits that a society's child-rearing practices are just one item And not just one item in a list of cultural traits, but because all other traits must be passed down from generation to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood, instead makes child rearing the very basis for the transmission and development of all other cultural traits, placing definite limits on what can be achieved in the material spheres of history.
The main source of childhood evolution is, I believe, the process I call psychogenesis, by which parents, mainly the mother through most of history, Revisit a second time around the stages of childhood and undo to some extent the traumas they themselves endured.
It is in this sense that history is like a psychotherapy of the generations, undoing trauma and giving historical personality a chance at a new start with every baby born.
Only humans have the brain networks that allow this miracle to take place.
Regardless of the changes in the environment, it is only when changes in childhood occur That epigenetic changes in the brain can occur and societies can begin to progress and move in unpredictable new directions that are more adaptive.
The more individuated and loving individuals are, sorry, that more individual and loving individuals, that more individuated and loving individuals are ultimately more adaptive is understandable because they are less under the pressure of infantile traumas and therefore are more rational in reaching their goals.
But that this childhood evolution and therefore all social evolution Is terribly uneven.
Is also understandable given the varying conditions under which parents all over the world have to conduct their child-rearing tasks.
I'll just read it.
I know this is just horrible stuff, but we'll finish up.
By the time historical records begin, the widespread sexual use of children is well documented.
The Greek and Roman child lived his or her earliest years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse.
Girls were communally raped, as reflected in the many comedies that have scenes that were considered funny of little girls being raped.
Both Greek and Roman doctors report that female children rarely have hymens just like the Indian and Chinese girls described above.
In order to find out if your young wife was really a virgin, Girls usually married before puberty to older men.
One had to use mystical tests for virginity since intact hymens were so rare.
Boys, too, were regularly handed over by their parents to neighboring men to be raped.
Plutarch had a long essay on what was the best kind of person a father should give his son to for buggering.
The common notion that this occurred only at adolescence is quite mistaken.
It began around age seven, continued for several years, and ended by puberty when the boy's facial and pubic hairs began to appear.
Child brothels, rent-a-boy services, and sex slavery flourished in every city in antiquity.
Children were so subject to sexual abuse by the men around them that schools were by law prohibited from staying open past sundown so their pedagogues, slaves who were assigned to protect them against random attack, could try to see that their teachers didn't assault them.
Petronius especially loved depicting adults feeling the immature little tool of boys, and Tiberius was said by Suetonius to have, quote, taught children of the most tender years, who he called as little fishes, to play between his legs when he was in his bath.
Those which had not yet been weaned but were strong and healthy he set at fellatio.
The erotic beating of children continued in Christian times because of the anxieties of living with a child who was so full of your projections.
Children were experiences always about to turn into changelings.
Those who, as St.
Augustine puts it, suffer from a demon, which usually meant just that they cry too much, since the Malleus Maleficarium says that one can recognize changelings because they always howl most piteously, and since Luther says they are more obnoxious than ten children with their crapping, eating, and screaming. The children with devils in them had to be beaten goes without saying.
A penalty of beating instruments existed for that purpose, from cat and nine tails, to whips, to shovels, canes, iron rods, bundles of sticks, the discipline, a whip made of small chains, the goad, shaped like a cobbler's knife, used to prick the child on the head or hands, and special school instruments like the flapper, which had a pear-shaped end and a round hole to raise blisters.
The beatings described in the source materials were almost always severe involved.
Bruising and bloodying of the body began in infancy and were usually erotically tinged by being inflicted on bare parts of the body near the genitals and were a regular part of the child's daily life.
Just by the by, when I was in boarding school for sure, children were caned on the buttocks, myself as well.
Century after century of battered children grew up to batter their own children in turn.
Public protest was rare.
Even humanists and teachers who had a reputation for gentleness approved of the severe beating of children.
Those who attempted reform did so only to prevent death.
By the 13th century in the West, abandonment via ablation or the giving of young children to monasteries for sexual and other uses was ended.
The first disapproval of pedophilia appeared and the first child's rearing tracts were published and some advanced parents began to practice what I have termed The ambivalent mode of child ringering, where the child was not born completely evil, but was seen as being still full enough of dangerous projections so that the parent whose task it was to mold it must beat it into shape like clay.
Church moralists for the first time began to warn against sexual molestation of children by parents, nurses, and neighbors.
Their mothers had been previously instructed to masturbate their boys so that their yards will grow long.
The length of time of swaddling, which is basically imprisoning the child in tight blankets, was eventually reduced from a year or more to only a few months.
Pediatrics and educational philosophy were born.
Parents of means began suggesting that perhaps rather than sending their infants out to be wet-nursed in some peasant village, thereby condemning over half of them to early death, the mother might herself nurse her infant.
The baby, said some mothers who began to try nursing their own babies, even responds to this care by giving love back to the nursing mother, stroking her breast and face, and cooing.
These childhood reforms immediately preceded and thereby produced the humanistic, religious, and political revolutions we associate with early modern times.
For the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe represented the great watershed of psychogenic change wherein vastly improved childrearing allowed at least some of the schizoid and borderline personalities of antiquity and medieval times who regularly heard voices and hallucinated visions to move on to the more integrated, less splitting modern erotic personality more familiar to modern times.
The 16th century watershed in childrearing allowed people to reduce splitting and feel real depression for the first time As can be seen in the popularity of Renaissance melancholy, Hamlet's admirable depressive guilt, the ability of Protestants to end the good mother-slash-bad mother splitting of Mary and Eve, and the ability to internalize the projective penalty of split Catholic saints and devils into Protestant depressive guilt.
This is not in the article.
This is the removal of projection into the world, and this causes the personality to become depressed and to deal with these emotions, its inner states, rather than merely being provoked from Outside.
With this vast improvement in child rearing, in some families at least, the modern world could begin, with the development of science, technology, and democratization now being possible in parts of the West.
By the 17th century, the intrusive mode of child rearing began, particularly in England, America, and France.
Whereby the child was seen as less full of dangerous projections, so it could actually be unswaddled soon after birth, not given regular enemas, which had been until then given daily from birth to remove the bad contents felt to be inside the infant, toilet trained early rather than late, hit but not regularly whipped, and punished for masturbation rather than being masturbated by adults.
It eventually became unacceptable for men to go about with a mistress on one arm and a catamide on the other, although underground seduction of minors continued.
Instrusive parenting, in essence, began to substitute psychological pressure for physical abuse, so that rather than whipping the child to prevent it from sin, it was, for instance, shut up in the dark closets for hours or left without food, sometimes for days.
Although erotic whipping, if children decrease gradually, the intrusive mode required nevertheless a steady pressure on the child to, quote, break its will and discipline it properly.
This breaking of the will began early.
John Wesley's mother said of her babies, when turned a year old and some before, they were taught to fear the rod and to cry softly.
One would never know, she claimed, that children were present in her house.
Rousseau confirmed that in France, babies in their earliest days were often beaten to keep them quiet.
Another mother wrote of her first battle with her four-month-old infant.
I whipped him till he was actually black and blue, and until I could not whip him any more, and he never gave up one single inch.
One can sense in this description of baby battering, the struggle, with the mother's own personal powerful parent, with the baby seen as so obstinate that it won the battle, even after being beaten.
In fact, the double image of the child is both powerful adult and wicked child accounts for the merging of beater and beaten in our myriad historical accounts of child abuse.
I can, I can't.
You can read more of this if you want.
Yeah, I'm, I'm, now you can read more of this if you want.
It goes on and on. The reason that I'm sorry to inflict all of this on you, though it is reality, and I'm sure it is a reality that many of you have suffered as well, that when you're debating with somebody, it's important to remember, when you're trying to teach people about freedom and reason and philosophy,
the Enlightenment fruits, that the historical Abuse that they may have suffered and likely have suffered statistically at the hands of their family are a huge impediment that you may in fact be teaching somebody, talking to somebody or attempting to debate with somebody who was essentially raised with ancient primitive or medieval child-rearing methods which involve assault, sexual exploitation, beatings, verbal humiliations continually.
And terror of sexuality, terror of masturbation, terror of the body.
This is particularly true in cultures that still are essentially medieval such as fundamentalist Christians.
This is just a very important thing to remember that society is a reflection of childhood.
The state is an effect of the family.
The church is an effect of the family.
Everything starts and ends with the family and it is to that dark Root, that shard of history that is washed up on the shore of a shining city, that we have to go, as philosophers, as thinkers, as reasoners, in order to try and help the world.
It is a multi-generational project, just as the Renaissance was, and the Enlightenment was, and the Scientific Revolution were.
To unbreak children requires waves of parents, and the only way that people can become better parents who were traumatized as children Is to explore that trauma, to re-experience it, so that they will not inflict it on their child, or at least they will inflict it far less.
And that is really the root of the psychological aspect of what I talk about at Freedom Main Radio.
So I hope that you will have some understanding of why it is so essential to deal with these family issues, the child-rearing issues, these historical issues, that society cannot be advanced, more advanced in many ways than the least advanced family, And that is why we have to deal with this stuff, and that's why libertarianism, which talks about abstract things like the gold standard and the Fed, simply doesn't touch.
You're dealing with extraordinarily damaged borderline people whose ability to function is very low, and they are volatile, they are reactionary, they don't have a third eye at observing ego, they do not experience Remorse in many ways.
And until this stuff gets dealt with, human progress politically, economically, socially, philosophically is all going to be just talk.
And that's really why we talk about this stuff in certain aspects of this conversation.
You simply can't move the world forward over the bodies of children who are still being assaulted.
So I hope that that makes some sense, and I look forward to your feedback.
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