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Oct. 26, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:52
1187 Sympathy versus Anger
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Good evening, everybody. Hope you're doing well, the staff.
I'd like to put out this as a rawcast, as a pre-podcast ramble tangent fest, in the hopes of trying to make some sense out of some thoughts I've been having over the last week or maybe ten days.
I know that I'm not alone in this issue, so I hope that I can...
I hope that what I'm talking about will bring some clarity or some help, some interest.
So, since I'm on the Brink Dad Fellow, I've been...
You know, as you say, I've been thinking, but the thoughts have been having me.
The thoughts have been having me lately about my history, about when I was a child.
And what is happening, or what's been happening, is this, that I think about...
This bond, this amazing caring that I have for this baby to come.
And I know that my parents didn't have that, because you can't have that and then strike or terrorize a child.
You just can't, right? And so the difference between Myself as a parent and my parents as parents is really clear to me in a visceral way that's never occurred before, so it's bringing up some stuff for me.
I've talked about it a little bit before in a previous podcast.
And this is not...
I mean, I'm not going to be a perfect dad.
I'm sure I'll lose my temper. I'm sure I'll be snappy.
happy and I'm sure that I will, I hope that I will, I'm sure that I will take responsibility and apologize where necessary and where appropriate and so.
But it's a fundamental difference.
I can feel that in my very bones.
It's a very fundamental difference between bonding and not bonding with a child, and you can't Attack a child you bonded with.
It just doesn't happen.
And... So, I've been going around this roundabout over and over and over again.
This roundabout. I think we all do.
I feel we all do.
And this roundabout is, I think of myself as this baby, and I feel hurt or angry or upset about what my parents did to me when I was a kid.
Which is...
It's new for me to feel this.
I haven't thought about that stuff much in quite a while, but it's coming back, you know, for obvious reasons.
And so, I think of myself as a kid in this situation, and I get mad.
Like, dear God, what the hell was wrong with these freaks of nature, with these people?
That they became...
Like this?
That became that they were like this?
To me, a cruel, sadistic, indifferent, callous, violent, destructive.
I was like, what the hell is wrong with these people that this occurred?
And so I get those feelings, the outrage, the anger.
And then, almost like a switch...
I go, another generation.
And then I think not about myself as this baby, but I think of my mother and my father as this baby.
And... it fucks me up!
It's disorienting, and it feels like...
it feels like a kind of self-attack, a kind of self-abuse.
And I was talking about it with Christina and I wanted to get these ideas down so I don't forget them, because I think it could be worthwhile to have a more in-depth presentation.
You can let me know what you think.
Because when I go that much further and I think about, you know, my mom as a baby, obviously she didn't want to be born, you know, where she was born or anything like that, right?
I think about my mom as this baby...
And then I start to sympathize and say, well, they had terrible childhoods and then acted out and obviously I didn't have as terrible a childhood as my mother and I fully accept that.
So then I end up with this kind of sympathy, right?
For my parents.
For what they endured, or weren't able to endure, and who they ended up being, and how they ended up being, and so on, right?
And... But then I get fucked up even more.
It's just round and round and round.
Because I sit there and I say, okay, well...
They had these...
Terrible childhoods, and therefore they ended up doing what they're doing, and they were innocent, helpless children born into difficult circumstances, if not horrific circumstances.
And who knows what happened, and this and that, my mother during the war, and so on.
But then, what happens is, by having sympathy for myself, outrage towards my parents, sympathy for my parents, outrage towards the world that they were born into...
Well, everyone who harmed them was also born into a world, right?
So the people who started the war were born into bad families, and as you may have read in DeMoss' work.
So, this whole thing just goes round and round and round.
It's turtles all the way down.
It's infinite regression, right?
I shouldn't be as upset with my parents because they had bad childhoods.
Then their parents had bad childhoods.
It goes all the way back until we're absolving a protozoa or something.
And then I say, okay, well, if I accept that...
Then, unfortunately, the consequences of accepting that are that free will goes out the window, right?
Because if who we are is determined by genetics and childhood, let's say, for whatever, then there's no choice, right?
And then I go right back to where I started and say, well, if I'm feeling outraged and upset about how I was treated as a child, and no one has any choice because who we are as genetics in childhood, then it's totally fine for me to be upset, right? Because it's determined, right, in a sense.
My environment led me to being upset in this moment, my genetics plus my environment, so...
So then I say, well, okay, then I don't need to change feeling upset about my history because nobody's guilty, right?
It's genetics and childhood.
But then I sit there, it's crazy, right?
And then I sit there and I say, okay, but if everything is genetics and history, there's no real choice.
Then, it should be totally fine for me to be outraged at how I was treated.
But, if being outraged at how I was cheated rests upon the belief that there was a moral choice, or a whole series of immoral choices, let's say, Then, I'm fucked up again, right?
Let me just, I just want to take you around this roundabout one more time, right?
Because my kid's coming, I feel the difference between my feelings, my parents' feelings, or coldness.
So then, I get mad at them, because I picture me as this baby, but then I picture them as this baby being born into this terrible world, with their parents, and then their parents' babies, and their parents' babies is this causal chain of Endless non-responsibility.
So, they didn't want to end up who they ended up, it's just the choices that they made, right?
Sorry, it wasn't choices, it's the environment they were born into, the genetics or whatever.
So, then we just have these dominoes, right?
Dominoes fall down, and my domino is the last one, and the next domino is going to fall down, and there's no responsibility for anyone.
And then I say, okay, well, if it's not a responsibility for anyone, then it's okay for me to be mad about my childhood.
But if me being mad about my childhood rests on the premise that there is responsibility, then it's, again, wrong for me to feel bad about my childhood.
It's incorrect. It's illogical, right?
It's like getting angry at the sun for giving you a sunburn.
It's just physics, right?
Okay, so then I say, okay, well, I shouldn't be that upset.
About my childhood.
Because it's inevitable, right?
Ah, yes, but then I say, okay, well, if I can make the moral decision to change how I feel and approach a subject, then we do have choice again, right?
So it can't all be genetics and history.
There has to be a choice element involved somewhere, right?
Do you see the all-too-terrifying roundabout?
Well, it's been driving me a tad baddy, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, right?
Isn't this the roundabout that all sensitive and ethical souls go through when evaluating the complex ecosystem that is genetics history and choice, right?
I mean, I am positive that I am not alone in this examination.
I think we all go round and round this roundabout pretty consistently, would you not say?
So, this is the way that I think I've been able to get out of it.
Hopefully you can let me know if it makes any sense.
And it comes down to, as so many of these things always seem to, to this question of the self-contained argument.
To the self-contained argument.
And let me sort of run through it, and hopefully it will make some sense.
So, I think that, and fortunately for the project that I've been embarked on for the last quarter century, we do come back productively.
To choice. Good.
We like keeping the choice.
And the choice is more or less something like this.
What messes up the equation?
If we say, well, it's pure free choice, then History shouldn't matter, but histories do matter, right?
I mean, the majority of people who end up in prison were abused, right, as children.
In fact, I would say pretty much everyone.
So choice does matter, but environment and certainties to some degree genetics does matter.
Intelligence has a very large genetic component, and intelligence is required in many ways to Foresee the results, or forecast the results of actions, right?
Impulse control has something to do with intelligence, which has something to do with genetics.
So, it does matter, genetics, and history matters.
But, the way out that I have been trying, that I have Figured out for myself, at least the way out of this roundabout, right, this constant circle, is this, which is that the reason that we know it's not physics,
right, the reason that we know that we can judge our parents according to some fairly objective metrics, I think.
In other words, the way that we can Look at them in a different way than we would look at a shark or a lion who ate us and mauled us just because of its own genetics and history and instincts and so on.
It's because...
I hope this is as smart and useful as it feels, because otherwise it would be a bit of a bummer.
But let's give it a shot.
Because... What I fundamentally object to, of course, was being abused as a child.
That's what makes me angry.
And that's where my judgment lies, right?
And the reason that I know that it was not like a tree falling on me or a shark gnawing at my leg was because...
I was only abused, and in fact, the very core of the abuse was entirely predicated on my mother's perception, my father's perception, my teachers, my priests, my schoolmasters, the guy who caned me, right?
All of the abuse that was rained down upon me was inflicted on me Because the abusers accepted the reality of moral choice.
I was abused not by nature, not by blind forces of nature, but according to a central tenet of moral instruction that implied That I was having, or that I possessed, moral choice.
So, I'll give you an example, right?
So, I jumped a sanatorium wall to get a football, I was caught, I was marched off to the headmaster's office, and I was caned when I was six or seven years old.
Now, I could, of course, say, well, he'd been to boarding school, he was caned, and there's history, genetics, and all that, but that doesn't fit with why he told me I was being caned.
I was being caned, he said, because I knew the rules, I knew that disobeying the rules was wrong, morally wrong.
I was old enough to know better, and therefore I must take my punishment.
You see, the abuser does not call what he does, of course, abuse.
What he does is he calls it instruction, or he calls it punishment.
And, naturally, he believes, to whatever level he can, that it is just punishment.
Right? You know the rules, you know the consequences for disobeying the rules.
you know that the rules are morally good and that disobeying them is morally evil you choose the action you choose the consequences right That's what we're told, right?
And so, we are punished.
The things that I found so egregious were these violences towards me.
And the violence is—and I can't think of a single exception.
I can't think of a single exception.
Maybe you can, and please, share.
I can't think of a single exception to the rule, to the principle, that it always seemed to be the same, that whenever I was assaulted, whether verbally or physically, it was because The story was that it was because I'd made a bad moral choice,
right? I was very, very keen on looking at these self-contained arguments where you don't need to go outside the immediate circumstances to find the illogic, right?
So... Clearly, if I, at the age of six or seven, I'm old enough to know better, and old enough to make moral choices, and blah blah blah blah blah, then the headmaster who was in his late 40s, if I remember rightly, clearly also had the ability to recognize and understand moral choices, right?
I'll give you another example.
When I was probably about eight, I left a cup on a table.
And the cup, it was a wet cup, and it left a ring on the table.
And my mother went completely apeshit and, you know, thrashed me till I bled.
And... Of course, she...
The abuse was only possible because of the moral justifications, right?
I mean, nobody ever hit me when I was a kid and said, it is because I enjoy inflicting pain and you are a handy target, right?
It's never portrayed that way.
So for my mother it was like, she didn't say, well, I'm just boiling over with frustration about my life and I wanted to take it out on you because you're small and can't fight back, right?
Or... You know, well, I don't care whether it's right or wrong, but all I know is that I was beaten for it when I was a kid, and damn it, I'm going to beat you too.
It's not about ethics, right?
It's not about virtue, right?
It's just like, hey, I got fucked up for it, and I'm going to fuck you up for it too, right?
But it was always and forever morally justified, right?
So, it was that I don't listen.
It was that I don't respect her property.
I don't know how to take care of things.
I'm selfish. I don't care about anything about myself.
I think it all just escalated to these moral assaults.
And frankly, it's the moral assaults that I recall, not the blows.
It's the moral condemnations that is the real core of the abuse, right?
And so, abuse...
The abusers must be responsible for their choices because they only make their choices because they believe in the free will of the child, right?
The abusers must be morally responsible for beating the child, because they're only beating the child based on the premise that the child is morally responsible.
So, fundamentally, or foundationally, I guess you could say, abuse only exists because of a belief abuse only exists because of a belief in moral choice.
Because of the belief that the child is capable of choosing virtue, but instead is choosing vice or irresponsibility or something like that.
Without being able to justify those actions according to moral premises, according to the moral model, let's say, abuse would be impossible.
If, for instance, a child could...
Never be perceived to be acting in an immoral manner, or a bad manner, or an incorrect manner, then there would be no such thing as punishment.
Moral punishment. I mean, you could say, well, then people would strike their children in the way that people swat dogs with newspapers to toilet drain them or whatever, break them in.
But we recognize that we're simply attempting to create a convenient behavior, right?
We don't call the dog immoral.
I mean, I guess crazy people do get exasperated through dogs.
Call them bad.
Bad dog, right?
And we could say that this is the same principle that is applied to children, except it never is.
It never is.
It is never portrayed that way, right?
I mean, when you were punished as a child, it was always because you were bad, right?
You were bad, you knew better, you knew the rules, you chose to disobey, you chose the consequences, you're selfish, you're bad, whatever it was.
It is this perception of moral choice in children That makes abuse possible.
You take that away, and you can't abuse your children, because you have no excuse.
You can't claim that it's virtuous to abuse your children, which is of course what everybody claims, right?
Now, to be fair to my mother, which is always important, to be fair to my mother, my mother No longer says, or at least, as of when I last saw her eight or nine years ago, she did not say, I beat you because you were bad.
She says, I beat you because the doctors had poisoned me.
Right? I mean, it's the crazy hypochondriacal answer, right?
So, she, you know, to give her credit where credit is due, right, or to give her paranoia credit where credit paranoia is due, she doesn't, did not say, you were just a bad kid.
Now, my brother was much more along those lines, right, that I'm selfish, that I'm everything, right, okay...
It's so common, you know.
It even happens in FDR. I saw someone in the chatroom yesterday saying to someone else, wow, you're here a lot, aren't you?
You know, with, of course, this implication that it's bad or, you know, obsessed or nowhere else to go, loser or whatever, right?
And, naturally, the fellow responded defensively.
Oh, yeah, I'm doing other stuff, you know, I just keep this window open, because sometimes there's good conversations, but I'm working, I'm working on a resume, whatever.
He didn't say, man, this place is like an oasis in a desert.
This is the best place on the web for me, best place in the world for me, right?
That's why I'm here, there's no place like it, whatever, right?
But he's, like, instantly, oh, no, no, I'm just, I'm doing other things.
This is the way it works so often, right?
It's sad, but true. So, this, of course, does not establish any kind of existential proof of free will,
but—and I don't think I need to, I think I've already done that elsewhere, or at least a logical proof of it—but what it does do is we may not know The exact justice, and we probably never will know, the exact justice of every choice in every situation.
Of course, we'll never know that. But we can at least say that it is not entirely unjust to judge those by the standards they inflict on others, right?
It's just, it's not entirely unjust.
To judge people by the standards that they have inflicted upon others, because clearly, when they inflicted those standards upon others, they accepted that those standards were valid and valuable and moral and logical, and even if they were wrong, we still...
Well, of course they're wrong, if it's about child abuse, but it's not unjust to judge them by those standards, right?
And since every abuser on the planet...
It says, it is not abuse, it is punishment.
It is not abuse, it is moral correction.
It is not abuse, I don't enjoy it.
It is something that the child has brought on himself by being willful, or disobedient, or selfish, or careless, or not listening, or not obeying, or whatever it is they say, right?
The child knows better.
The child made a moral choice.
The child made an immoral choice.
With knowledge of the consequences, the child has been disobedient or willful or whatever, and therefore the assault upon the child is a just punishment.
And really, of course, the causal agency in this case is always considered to be the child.
You can't abuse a child unless you believe the child asked for it, in a sense.
The proximate cause of the abuse is the child's decisions, not the parents' decisions, right?
And this reality changes for me, at least the equation of looking at this situation, Because if the child of two or three or four or five, whatever, children start to get punished.
Unfortunately, it's for some children almost out of the womb, right?
But if the child is morally responsible for his or her choices, knows better, and punishment is just in a form of moral correction, then surely the adult who is 30 or 40 or whatever is much more responsible.
Much more responsible.
They've had decades to get their shit together.
Libraries have books on psychology and child raising.
They're responsible, right?
I mean, if I am morally responsible, as my mother would have it, for putting the glass down on the table at the age of eight or whatever, then clearly that is relatively minor relative to, you know, beating children, Or assaulting, or scaring, yelling, or calling them names, or whatever.
Clearly, not being prepared to have a child is a much more egregious fault, a much more egregious problem, than simply putting a glass down on a table, right?
So, since my mother abused me based upon her belief in moral choices, I mean, this is at the time.
She has trouble going, sorry, just to be more clear, because I said she said it was all nutty stuff.
She didn't consider herself to be mentally ill until we moved to Canada when I was 11 in 1977.
And a year, six months or so later, maybe eight months, I think, after she kind of got that, you know, no matter where you go, there you are, right?
I mean, you can change continents, but...
You can't outrun your history and who you are and what you've done.
That she collapsed, right, and wouldn't come out of bed, and for weeks went by, and we got eviction notices, and it all got very desperate.
And then she would say it was at that point that she was no longer responsible for her choices, because apparently the doctors had poisoned her back then, but...
At that age, we never talked about the abuse further back, because that didn't fit into the story of, I'm a poor innocent victim of the insurance company.
So, there can be no abuse without the belief in the moral choices that very young children are capable of.
Right? When a child misbehaves, the abuser doesn't say, well, you see, it's environment plus genetics.
So, you know, it's like yelling at a plant for failing to grow.
It's just crazy, right?
They don't say that. They say a child's morally responsible.
So, of course, I believe that this moral responsibility exists.
But I think...
That if somebody wields a blade, it's okay to pick up a blade, right?
If somebody wants to fight you and they've got a sword, it's okay to pick up a sword, right?
And so, if the child is attacked and punished based on the premise of moral responsibility, then clearly the moral responsibility is that much greater on the part of the parent.
There is no Infinite regression.
There is no turtles all the way down.
There is no, no one's responsible back to the first pea soup hit by lightning.
It is, well, it's back to what I talk about in our truth, but I think for me at least a little bit more clarified.
And this is why, of course, UPV is so important, because if you take away that moral justification, the abuse stops.
If you take away the moral justification, then the abuse stops, right?
I don't know how.
I don't know how. I'm not even going to try and guess how, but I know that it will.
In the same way that when we finally get people to take away the moral justification for child abuse, then the cult of the family We're free of the cult of the family.
Doesn't mean we're free of the family.
We have good families, right?
Then we're free of the cult of religion, and free of the cult of the state, and all these things will fall away with moral understanding.
And I know this because moral understanding is so persistently used, or moral illusions, moral lies, are so persistently used in the pursuit of evil, that I simply assume, and with good reason, that in the absence of these moral justifications, evil We'll be that much harder to sustain.
It won't ever go away, right?
If we get rid of the state, we get rid of war and the predatory theft of taxation and inflation.
Doesn't mean no one's ever going to steal your wallet, right?
But it turns it from a plague to a cold, right?
Much, much different. So, this is how I step off this merry-go-round that I was attacked.
By people based upon their acceptance of moral choice.
And therefore, I can, with full logical justification, apply the same moral choice to them.
Now, the difference, of course, is that I'm striving for understanding not to use moral choice to abuse others, and the reality of moral choice to abuse others.
But that's been my way off the merry-go-round, and...
Doesn't really matter how badly they were treated as children, because they understood enough about ethics to use it as a tool of abuse, to use it to justify, to create and justify their own abuse, and therefore they return into the conceptual category of assholes,
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