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Nov. 19, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:41
1214 Remembering the Victim...

The Guardian article is not about the present, but the past...

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is November the 21st, 2008, and I thought I'm going to do some chores here, and I thought it would be interesting and worthwhile to talk about some,
I suppose, of what has happened with this article and some surrounding, I guess, some of the Minor surrounding furor that has erupted in various media segments as well as in my inbox and to a lesser degree on the board and so on.
So it's always difficult though it is.
It is always an opportunity to learn.
At least that's the way that I Try and see it.
So I thought that I would share with you some of the thoughts about some of the lessons that I've had, or that I've tried to absorb through this process.
And you can tell me, of course, what yours are, or if mine make no sense at all, and we can attempt to gain what we can out of this situation.
Now, the first thing that has struck me, and perhaps it's struck you as well, is the truly astonishing amount or lack of empathy that has been expressed about Tom's situation.
It's not shocking insofar as it's not predictable, but it's shocking to see it so Openly expressed, if this makes any sense, or openly unexpressed, that there's outrage with me, with the guy showing some definitely assertive, let's say, sympathy to an abused child.
So there definitely is moral outrage in this situation.
But I swear, not one This communication with me has been about Tom's pain.
I mean, of the people who...
I mean, this is true of even the people who posted on the board.
And this, interestingly enough, is also true of the emails that I have received that have been supportive of me.
People have said, oh, this is tough, but I understand what you're doing.
Good work. Keep it up.
You must be, you know, finding it tough and so on.
And, of course, that's very nice.
But that also is, to me, missing the real issue.
And, I mean, it sounds, of course, completely churlish and ungrateful, and I don't mean it that way.
I do appreciate the letters of support and the pulse of support that I get.
I really do. And I think it's very nice that people have been kind enough to take time to do that.
But, you know, that having been said, to return to perhaps churlish, ungrateful guy, I wonder.
I mean, maybe it's occurring outside of my knowledge, of course.
People are, I don't know, finding some way to contact Tom.
Posting stuff about Tom on their blogs with sympathy towards him.
But expressing sympathy for me, while I certainly appreciate it, is not the point.
I would submit, of course, is that Tom suffered through 18 years of terrifying exposure to toxic, brutalizing rage of this whole story.
It doesn't have anything to do with an aggrieved mother coming after me, fundamentally, in terms of...
I mean, I'm a 42-year-old guy who lives in another continent, right?
And I appreciate the sympathy for me.
And again, there's no reason why people would send this to me, so I'm simply talking about my experience of what has occurred, nothing to do with what is occurring objectively or to other people or through others, but just in terms of me, is that the focus that I think is most appropriate is the focus on Tom's suffering as a child.
Not even so much his suffering through this.
Because in a strange kind of way, it's a gift.
To get such an honest view of his family is a challenging but horribly efficient way to get closure of that situation.
But That is what is really staggeringly missing.
So people are...
And again, this may sound horribly exploitive.
I don't mean it to be.
I mean it as all sympathy. But that is predicted.
I'm trying to figure out, again, what positive stuff can be gained out of this difficult situation.
And given that I can't control the behavior of other people, of course, I think that it's worth looking at How it has played out relative to the theories that we've talked about here.
So, one of the general theories, of course, that we've talked about here for years now is the belief, or the proposition, that why is it that people cannot understand The argument that has been made for hundreds if not thousands of years, which is not a difficult argument.
I'm just listening to Frédéric Bastiat's The Law for the first time and of course he makes the argument in a beautiful and elegant way that I could only dream of approaching that taxation equals force.
This is early to mid-19th century.
So The question that is so challenging, which is what I really talk about a lot in How Not to Achieve Freedom, is how is it possible that people simply cannot process this argument that taxation equals force?
And I would submit it's because there is a problem processing Violence within the family, right?
That which we find very hard to see in the world is that which we were punished, I mean it's obvious, that is that which we were punished for seeing in the family, right?
And so the fact that people, even those who are sympathetic to me, and I'm sure even sympathetic to Tom, do not seem to be expressing or processing The fact that all of this has come about because Tom was brutally abused and terrified for 18 years, right? That, of course, is the real tragedy.
It doesn't have anything to do with me.
It doesn't have anything to do with FDR of this conversation.
The real tragedy at the core of all of this is The brutalization and traumatization of a helpless and innocent child for many, many, many years.
And it's easier, of course, to focus our moral outrage on this conversation.
Whether it's pro or anti, it's easier to focus our moral outrage on this conversation.
And maybe me and maybe the mom and what she's doing now, but of course what she's doing now It's fairly immaterial, relative to what happened in the past within her family.
The fact that she's getting mad at some podcaster on another continent is not where the malevolence really lies.
It's not where the moral problems of the entire situation really lie.
It is the exposure to and failure to protect a tender and innocent young child.
To this kind of brutality, right?
To the brutality of this husband.
And that's something that's really, really, really, really hard for people to process.
I've not seen a lot of examination of it.
I mean, if you imagine this poor child in this house where A man can blow up at will in an absolutely terrifying, and to a child, murderous rage.
It's the only approximation that I can come to in my imagination of what it was like to be in the path of these kinds of rages, you know, where windows are getting smashed and kicked in, and cats are being kicked.
Screamed at, and as Tom says, the room is being trashed within 15 seconds.
I mean, that is an explosive, a murderous rage.
The only way that I can approximate the terror of that in my imagination is to imagine what it's like in a bombing raid for an adult, right?
Where you feel helpless, where you feel that you could be injured or even possibly killed at any time, right?
I mean, when someone is in that kind of rage, Hurling things and smashing things.
You know, if the child puts a foot wrong, stands up when he should have sat down, ducks the wrong way, can be hit with a flying object.
A flying object can bounce off something else, bounce into an eye, chest, leg, back, and damage, or even possibly death, can result.
And that would be approximated by Being in a bombing raid.
And that, of course, is the real core tragedy of the entire situation.
Not FDR, not The Guardian, not BBC Radio, not the interview that I had recently with The Globe and Mail, and we'll see how that goes.
But the real tragedy, which seems to be eclipsed.
Here's the suffering and the fear that Tom experienced as a child.
That is the true horror of the situation, and that's very hard for people to process.
It's actually quite agonizing for people to process to think of this.
And so we are tempted to fall into outrage about how a journalist and a mother are treating an independent, distant, 42-year-old man, which is not, I mean, that's not really very material, right, in terms of where the real suffering has occurred.
I mean, when we think of, if you listened to the podcast, I guess the radio bit, you know, where I was, quote, interviewed or rather harangued by the radio show host, People were very stressed about that.
And I understand it.
I mean, I do. But remember that if we feel that anxious about a hostile radio show host thousands of miles away for nine minutes or whatever it was, imagine how Tom felt when his father was kicking in windows and destroying rooms Screaming.
And he was helpless and unprotected, counter-protected, fundamentally.
And I think that's the important thing to remember about all of this.
And that is something that we have talked about and predicted, right?
That people cannot see the coercion of the society because We all shy away from the brutalization of children.
We cannot see the violence that our society is rooted on because we have such difficulty empathizing with the suffering of children.
I mean, people have expressed, at least in my inbox and in other places, extraordinary outrage at my condemnation of these parental Attacks upon the child, upon time.
Whereas I clearly say in that podcast, for those who have trouble to listen, that the evils of the world arise from the maltreatment of children.
So the fact that if I say that the root of all evils is attacks and assaults upon children, it should not be shocking when I morally condemn those who attack children, because that is the root of the evils.
And again, that's not just my theory, that's a fairly common psychological theory.
Widely accepted, but common when in certain circles, for sure.
So, I think that's important.
I'm sorry to keep pestering, but that aspect where we put ourselves in Tom's little shoes, not now, but in the past, and try to picture what it was like for him day after day, living in this eruptive, explosive, murderous, terrifying, physically destroyed house.
And, and, which I think is even more significant in some ways, and what Tom thought or felt about his society.
Because it wasn't just his mother who didn't intervene.
There's no way that other people didn't know.
When you're screaming and smashing windows and destroying rooms, That's known.
I don't care if you live in a house on a hill, which I don't think you did, but people know, right?
Neighbors know, all their friends and people know, people visiting know, right?
Dozens if not more people were aware of the rages, of the rage that Tom was experiencing within his household.
And no one did anything.
And no one did anything.
No one lifted a finger.
No one confronted the mother.
Nobody, as far as we know, nobody did anything.
Nobody validated or supported or said that it was beyond wrong to brutalize a child in this way.
No one! Until Some guy thousands of miles away came down squarely on his side and said he was free to stay or to leave.
No one. I mean, that's the hardest aspect in many ways.
This is based, again, I'm not saying this is objectively true, of course.
It was my experience and the experience of a large number of people that I've talked to over these years.
The worst aspect of Of child abuse is the degree to which society does nothing.
You know, because child abuse for a child obviously is directly inflicted in the context of the immediate family, but we all move as children in a larger world, right?
We're not on the mere space station.
We go to school, we go to friends' houses, we go to movies, we go to playgrounds, we go on vacations, we go all over the place, right?
Lots and lots and lots of places.
And everywhere we go, we carry with us the signs of the abuse that we are experiencing.
So people hear the rages, they hear the screamings, they hear the physical destruction of our environment.
They see the window keeping to get replaced, keeping getting replaced.
And teachers saw, of course, in Tom, a brutalized and terrified child who, as his own mother says, never needed any discipline.
It's not a good sign, right?
That is a child whose spirit remains broken, hopefully awaiting resurrection.
And so this, it is the society, right, as a whole, that he moves through with the clear evidence of having been brutalized.
And of course everyone says, well, I didn't see it, I didn't know.
Of course they do, right? It's a bad conscience, right?
And a bad conscience, of course, has a lot to do with all of this.
We don't really have to talk about that just now, but I just wanted to sort of point it out.
And so the fact that poor Tom moved through a society that did not lift a finger to help him or protect him, though dozens or scores or perhaps even hundreds of people We're either directly or indirectly aware of what he was suffering.
The fact that society as a whole, people as a whole, did nothing to shield or protect him from this kind of abuse is shocking.
It's fundamentally shocking, right?
And this is where I believe nihilists come from and other kinds of things.
It doesn't really matter that aspect of things, but you know, when people rail against moral pronouncements, I think it's because deep down, again, all nonsense theory, but I think it's because deep down they've experienced this hypocrisy, right? So that's the first thing.
We say, well, people can't see that taxation equals force because they can't or won't see the violence in the family.
And I think this episode amply confirms that thesis because of the lack of sympathy for Tom and what he went through as a child.
In all circles, not just those who were hostile, but even those who were neutral, and even those who were supportive of FDR, right?
And, you know, I'm not trying to say that no one had any kindness or time, but it should be front and center, right?
And so that's sort of one thing that we would predict.
You know, the theory that the foundation of the state, the state is an effect of the family, would lead us to expect a situation because people were able to easily see and empathize with the violence within the family in this example and feel wrenching,
deep sympathy for this brutalized child and focus on that and then that being the core and really the only relevant moral crime In the whole interaction.
Not the 50-minute phone call or the 50-minute Skype call.
Not the little article in the paper.
Not any of that stuff.
Nothing to do with that, really.
But the core moral issue being the abuse that he suffered as a child.
If people could easily empathize and see that, but could not see that taxation equals force, Then FDR's theories would take a deep blow.
And again, this is not an exercise in proving our theories, but I'm simply trying to learn the lessons that we can.
So the fact that people seem to have near-bottomless difficulty in really empathizing with the core moral crime, which is the 18 years of brutal terrorizing of a child, and that people as a whole in society I find it an almost impossible task to process that taxation equals force.
Now, maybe, right, maybe it's that they can't process taxation equals force and therefore they can't, I mean, this is not causal, right?
It's definitely correlational, right?
That these two aspects of violence remain emotionally unprocessable and intellectually unprocessable for most people.
I mean, if Tom had been...
Imprisoned and tortured, terrorized in this kind of way for 18 years, completely unjustly, nobody would have any problem with me roundly, morally condemning his torturers, right?
Who kidnapped him and did this to him and so on, right?
Nobody would rush to their defense.
But in another context, it's impossible.
So the thesis that I have, of course, is that the status and effects of the family and taxation equals force remains invisible to people because Of the difficulty they have empathizing with children, because of the lack of empathy they received as children, and so on.
That that leads to the support for statism, which is based on the amazing and consistent blanket refusal to see that taxation equals false.
So anyway, that's... And of course, the family experiences come first, and when we're looking for a sequence, it generally is the most rational thing to do to say, you know, that...
The simpler comes before the more complex, and the earlier experiences tend to be more important than the later experiences, and so family before theory of statism would make sense.
Again, I'm not saying it proves everything, but that's where we would logically start.
So that's one aspect of things.
Now, the second, I guess, the third aspect of things is that in real-time relationships, of course, I talk at some length about the fact that the state Does not need to lift a finger in many ways to keep us down, right? That we will do a fabulous job of attacking each other, right?
That the person who steps out of line, who questions the ethical basis of society, that it is our fellow slaves that are fundamentally our slave owners, right?
That this massive efficiency of horizontal It's a horizontal dictatorship of social ostracism and attack.
That, I think, has been more than amply confirmed by this situation.
It's not the state that is attacking me for this situation.
It is everyone else, right?
Media, radio show hosts, people in my inbox.
I'm not getting any... They don't need to.
They don't need to lift a finger.
They just watch us savage each other and reap the benefits themselves.
So that is another aspect of things that I think is important.
And of course, I've always said that the first attack would come from, not from the state, but from others.
Because that's the theory and that part I was very confident about and that is what has come to pass.
We don't ever want this situation to occur, but we try and get as much valid knowledge or support for important theories as we can.
It's the best, I think, that we can do in the current situation, current circumstances.
So that, I think, is another aspect of things that I think is very important.
Now, the fourth thing I think that's important to look at, and this This comes down to some of the arguments that are written on truth and other arguments that I started from very early on, late 2005, I think, around the argument for morality, where I say that morality, moral arguments, are the most powerful arguments, right?
And they're used not according to any kind of objective methodology, but they're used as tools of humiliation and domination, right?
The argument for morality because of its astounding power to make people feel bad that we are fundamentally moral beings.
And that's why people use these moral arguments.
And of course that, I think, lends a good deal of reinforcement to why UPB is such a powerful methodology.
Because if we can dismantle the moral arguments, we dismantle the social institutions.
That's the basic argument.
Behind the value, the practical value, the argument from effect to do with UPB. Because moral arguments are so powerful and effective that if we can discredit and dismantle them intellectually, prove that they're false, the institutions they rest on will inevitably fall away.
And so we would expect that the fundamental argument against me would be moral, right?
And, of course, that is what has occurred, right?
That I am considered to be a despicable, power-hungry or money-hungry, irresponsible, impulsive, damaging, overstepping my bounds amateur who is heedlessly and thoughtlessly wrecking families for fun and profit and possibly for some nefarious internal buried psychological motives of my own.
And that what I'm doing is immoral.
And that is entirely predicted by the theories that we work with here.
It is like clockwork.
These arguments come trotting out.
They come out like the cuckoo in the clock.
The clock strikes condemnation and out comes moral outrage and moral attack.
That is as predictable as sunrise.
It will also be the case that these moral arguments that are abusive, and to me there's no fundamental argument as abusive as a moral argument that is irrational and used for a tool of power.
People use ethics as a way of controlling and humiliating people.
In other words, because people want to be good, people are led to doing bad, because they're attacked morally for the sake of serving the power and control and corruption of others.
In this way, people say, Steph, what you did was very wrong, right?
It was very bad, right?
To influence this young man, to call his parents bad and wrong and so on, to call his father a kind of devil and so on, right?
That that's very bad, right?
And, of course, it's easy to put that into your head or for that to seep into your veins without context and to say, oh my heavens, that's right, I did overstep, I did go too far, I did not, you know, I should have been more like a therapist, I should have, although I'm not a therapist, I should have been more like a therapist and I should have just listened to him and I should not have stoked the fires of his outrage and so on, right, all of that kind of stuff.
So I understand, right, the reason that those arguments are used is because they're so amazingly effective.
And because they're so amazingly effective, we don't need a government, right?
Because social ostracism and moral attacks, however irrational and unfounded they are, are so amazingly effective.
That's the first sword in everyone's scabbard, so to speak.
Bad metaphor. There's only one, but I think you know what I mean.
It's the first weapon everyone picks up, right?
That's the WMD, right?
Weapons of moral destruction.
So, just to give you a sense of how irrational these moral arguments really are, we can just take them for a spin, right?
And to see what UPB does to these propositions, right?
Now clearly, if we are going to have any kind of ethical understanding of moral condemnation, then we really need to Understand some basic principles.
A wrong which continues for longer is a worse wrong than a wrong that continues for shorter.
That's a basic one.
If you torture a man for an hour, that is worse than torturing him for a minute.
That's a basic one.
That's kind of hard to bypass.
And, of course, involuntary, quote, wrongs are bad, and voluntary situations are less clearly bad, right?
I mean, even if we say, oh, manipulation and so on, right?
Like, torture is bad.
Advertising, eh, you know, I guess you could say maybe sometimes it's too manipulative or whatever, right?
But when choosing moral judgments around two situations, one is where you voluntarily go to pursue particular kinds of knowledge, and the other is where a particular situation is involuntarily inflicted upon you, right? So torture is worse than torture.
A voluntary conversation, right?
I mean, no sane human being would maintain anything else, right?
I mean, we can all understand that, right?
And when we understand that, of course, we can put the real essence of my conversation with Tom was about maybe 40 minutes, maybe 35 minutes, maybe 40 minutes, right?
So if And even if we say that, even if we fully accept that what I did was, you know, manipulative and self-serving and so on, right?
Well, clearly it was a voluntary interaction, adult to adult, right?
He was 18, and I guess I was 41, and so it was a voluntary interaction, right?
And if people feel that I was manipulative, right, clearly abuse It's worse than manipulation.
Clearly, we can't...
Abuse of a child is worse than manipulation of an adult.
You don't even have to be an ethicist to understand that.
And if you oppose that basic proposition, you have just vaulted yourself out of any sane discussion of ethics.
If you're going to really, really maintain the position that manipulation is worse than abuse, is worse than physically terrorizing someone, then...
That's one of these things. If you hold that, and I'm not saying anyone here would, right?
If you hold that position, then you're so wrong that there's not even any point debating.
I mean, anybody who would logically hold that position is just nuts.
It just would be ridiculous to hold it.
And you could go through all the UPB arguments, but if somebody lacks the empathy to understand that basic thing, then they're saying that, I mean, they're just a radical skeptic and nothing is true, right?
So, anyway, we'll get back to that.
So, if We kind of accept these basic things, right?
The longer a wrong occurs, the worse it is.
That voluntary pursuit of knowledge is not innately evil.
Child abuse and terrorizing is.
You know, all of these. And we could go on and on.
I don't want to bore you completely to tears, but I just wanted to go over this basic, right?
So, if we accept all of these as reasonable things to say in terms of ethics, right?
Then, clearly, even if we were to accept that I did something not optimal, right?
Clearly, I wasn't initiating force or fraud.
But if we say that I did something less than optimal in this conversation with Tom, then people can make moral judgments about that, of course, right?
Make the arguments and so on.
But... It's a little hard to understand, even if this were the case, why a 40-minute voluntary adult-to-adult conversation that Tom has openly expressed as extremely helpful,
as actually quite life-saving, where he says that the quality of his life has improved enormously since It's really hard, even if we accept that I did something wrong, it's really hard to understand why any sane or really moral human being would focus on a 40-50 minute voluntary interaction as opposed to 18 years of involuntary abuse and terrorizing.
This is a hard point to get, for many, many reasons.
It's a hard point to really understand.
Because it opens up a pretty sick cavern of human understanding, right?
Of understanding of people. So I'm just going to apologize.
Let me just go through it once more.
I really want you to be able to get this.
Not for me, but for you, right?
Because you may face the same situation.
In fact, I kind of hope you will, right?
Because that means that we're making a progress in spreading virtue and reason in the world.
So everyone's mad at me.
No one's mad at Tom's dad, right?
Everyone's mad at me. Few people are mad at Tom's mom.
And in the media, no one is, right?
Everyone's mad at me. So what they're saying is that a voluntary conversation which someone finds enormously helpful Which was pursued voluntarily.
I was asked for my advice on why he had this particular obsession, or my thoughts on it.
So a voluntary conversation, which was freely entered into, no coercion, and that, of course, he says was incredibly helpful, is considered to be very bad.
But the involuntary abuse of a child over many, many years is not mentioned.
Do you see Just how nutty it is, of course.
And then, of course, what's happened is that I'm accused of manipulation.
I mean, that's standard, right?
That's just standard projection, right?
It'd be like...
That's too extreme a metaphor. Never mind.
But this is, of course, what...
Philosophy, I think a rational philosophy, certainly what we talk about here, would entirely predict, right?
Would entirely predict that I would be accused of a moral malfeasance and it would be hoped that my guilt or some sort of insecurity or self-doubt on my part would trigger a self-attack in me.
Oh my heavens, I did wrong.
I went too far.
I treated these people badly.
I said nasty things or whatever, right?
And, of course, I would be open...
I mean, I'm always open to these kinds of self-criticisms, and they're always worth examining.
But when it comes, and this is, again, I'm trying to make this as sort of helpful and useful to you as possible.
If you are in this kind of situation, right, where people are thundering from their high holy pulpits about your badness, right, I think it's important to put it in perspective.
Compared to what? Compared to what?
Even if we say, oh, Steph was manipulative in this conversation, then the crime that I'm charged with is manipulating somebody who voluntarily wanted to talk to me.
Okay, let's say that that's aesthetically negative behavior.
Sure! But if that's the only crime that people see in this situation where a child was terrorized and abused for years, they're morally insane.
And corrupt, I would say, because they're using ethics to aid and abet an abuser.
And so if someone were to sort of talk to me and to say, oh, my heavens, you know, that I can't believe what Tom suffered, that was so bad and that was so wrong, and, you know, the abuse that was inflicted upon him for so many years was inhuman and evil and so on, right? And if somebody were to, you know, Come and say that to me and, you know, support the basic moral reality of the situation, I would be happy.
Now, if at some point, after acknowledging the moral evils that Tom suffered as the primary issue in the interaction, in the whole situation, if they were to say, but I think it might be more helpful if you took another approach, right?
And they could point to their own successes in this highly difficult area, right?
This is highly new, right?
Exhuming the corpses of the family, right?
Over the internet, right?
If they could point to their successes in this area and show me better ways to do it, and so on, fantastic.
But if they just launch into, Steph, you're a bad guy, and you're manipulative, and you're tearing apart families, and so on, then, of course, they're skipping right over the moral crime of abusing a child for 18 years and focusing on a sub-optimal voluntary conversation.
Well, that's just ridiculously corrupt and morally insane.
Looking at this whole tableau, we have four actors.
The drama, so to speak, is that we have Tom's mom, we have Tom's dad, we have Tom, and we have me.
Tom experiences 18 years of horrendous abuse.
reaches out to someone on the internet who shows him vehement support and validation.
And if people think that the only moral crime or the only moral problem in this entire interaction is the line between myself and Tom and not between his parents and himself, the abuse he suffered for 18 years, this is embarrassing.
I mean, to look at clearly, right?
It's an embarrassing spectacle to see, right?
It's embarrassing for people to try this stuff on me.
It's ridiculous, it's pathetic, it's shameful.
It is humiliating to watch, not for me, it's ridiculous and shameful, this behavior.
People don't know how to anybody with any clear eyes they just look so viciously corrupt and in alignment with child abusers by focusing on me rather than on the abuse that Tom suffered that's where the crime is right now to move on to I think number five or six when people talk about that I have broken up a family or whatever well I think,
and again, because the conversation is public, it's, again, shameful for people to say this, which is that, yeah, I said that child abuse was evil, and people who abuse children, and people who had children with abusers and then gave children to abusers and did not protect them, yeah, that's evil.
I have no question.
I mean, if that's not evil, there's no evil, right?
If that's not evil, then there's no such thing as evil, right?
If 18 years of child abuse and terrorizing children, a helpless and innocent child, Who was simply trying to survive in a situation he did not ask for.
If that's not evil, that's fine.
People can make that judgment if they want.
I think it's not good, to say the least, right?
Well, people can say that there's no such thing as cancer.
It's just cells, right?
It's only our prejudice that makes us think that cancer is negative, right?
That cancer has a right to live, right?
People can say that if they want.
People can say that That there's no wrong in what happened to Tom.
That's fine. But then of course they can't criticize me.
Why? Because there's no wrong!
Right? You can't say there's no such thing as wrong and so I'm going to criticize Steph as being wrong.
If you do say that there is such a thing as wrong then clearly the person you need to focus on if you're going to focus on your moral judgment and your moral outrage It's the people who abused Tom for many years.
If we're going to say that I should not morally condemn Tom's parents for abuse and failure to protect an innocent child after creating an innocent child, if people are going to say, well, Steph, you can't, you know, you can't say that Tom's dad is bad because, you know, he had a bad childhood, he's not responsible for his actions, he was blah blah blah, although, of course, it was clearly...
Established within the conversation that he is.
He never lost his temper in front of a cop, right?
So he was not ill in that way, right?
It wasn't like a schizophrenia.
It's the million dollar proposition, which we talked about very early on.
So if people are going to say, well, Steph, You don't know all the circumstances.
You know, maybe he had no control over his behavior and you should not come to any moral judgment.
Well, what does UPB do to that?
Well, it does like it does to everything, right?
Which is that whatever you say about Tom's dad, you say about me.
Right? If Tom's dad is not responsible for his behavior, how am I responsible for mine?
If Tom's dad is not responsible for the behavior that he, you know, in the family that he created, he initiated, he chose to get married, chose to have children, chose to, right?
But if we say, well, he's not responsible for anything, then there's no such thing as choice.
That's fine. Everything's determined by your childhood, right?
But then Tom calling me up and me saying what I said falls in a beautiful UPB way into exactly the same category, right?
If I'm not supposed to judge Tom, Tom's dad, because what he did was inevitable, then my judgment is also inevitable, right?
And people can't then say that there's anything moral about their judgment of me.
It's just like rock falling down a hill.
They land where they land. There's no morality.
There's no preferred behavior.
How is it that I'm subject to moral responsibility for a short, helpful conversation and Tom's dad is not responsible For his moral actions over 18 years.
So the degree to which people let Tom's dad off the hook, logically, of course, which they don't do, but logically, they are also letting me off the hook.
But that's not what happens, of course.
So that's number five or number six.
Sorry, I'm losing care. But let's move on to the next one.
Now, I don't believe that the majority of people who are in this interaction it to me it's it's like a it's like a bell curve and what I mean by that is that the majority of people don't really want to know don't really want to get involved don't have you know well actually no I guess they would have to have strong opinions about this I mean the abuse of a child and the outrage of a mother these are not small topics Right?
And so, but I think, I think, I genuinely believe the majority of people don't actually want to come to a, don't want to take a stand, right?
And that means it's just a statistical thing.
The number of people who've gotten contact with me is certainly far smaller than the number of people who would have been exposed to this story.
So, I think, I mean, I don't think that the majority of people don't feel sympathy for Tom's suffering deep down.
I don't think that's the case.
I really don't. I don't think that humanity is in such a debased state that that is the reality of the situation.
In the same way that I don't really believe that the majority of people actually don't get that taxation equals force.
They don't. They just don't.
Sorry, that's a bad way of putting it, double negative.
The majority of people fully and perfectly and actually very easily understand that taxation equals force.
I have no doubt about that whatsoever because the alternative is that as a species we're conceptually retarded, right, which makes no sense given the enormous intellectual achievements of the species, right, the amazing things that we can do.
So, yeah, people People fully sympathize, maybe not consciously, maybe not all the way through, but deep down, right, in their heart of hearts, they feel sympathy for Tom and maybe even some admiration for the courage that he showed and maybe to a smaller degree the courage that I showed in that conversation, right, where, you know, 40 minutes changes our life.
That's pretty...
You've got to be impressed at the efficiency, if nothing else, right?
And... So then the question is, why are only the crazy people the ones getting a voice?
And I don't mean in terms of the ones who sympathize with me.
Obviously, I don't think they're crazy.
But why is it that the attackers dominate?
Well, because it's a clear warning shot to others.
People fear social ostracism, which is why anarchism works.
Why anarchism will work, because people really have a strong need for social approval.
And the withholding of that will cause people to do the right thing.
You know, certainly far more often than giving people a monopoly of force like a government will.
So what happens, the reason that crazy people dominate the debate is that, and the reason that I don't get sympathetic interviewers, right, that are three out of three so far have been skeptical and hostile and so on, right?
Well, it's because there's a warning shot.
It's a chilling effect, right? You know, this is what we're going to do to someone Who sympathizes with the child, right?
Here's what we're going to do with someone who takes a moral stand against abusive parents, right?
That's, again, entirely predictable, entirely inevitable, and certainly conforms to the theories that we have here, right?
So it's a warning shot to other people, right?
Now, the fact that I'm not following the script is certainly confusing for people and annoying, right?
So the fact that I'm not cowed, the fact that I'm not repentant in the least, the fact that the enmity of these people doesn't scare me, right?
It's like, oh, what are you going to do?
Type. The fact that my sympathies remain resoundingly with the innocent victim of the abuse, that's confusing, right?
Philosophers are not often known for their moral courage in the face of immediate Yes, sometimes, of course, Socrates, Aristotle and others, right?
But it's not, and again, putting myself obviously in ridiculously illustrious company, forgive me for that, but philosophers for a long time, they're pretty cowed, right?
Kind of let the more primitive cycle classes Take over, right?
Psychohistory.com, if you don't know what that means, it's well worth looking into.
But that's something that's very significant, right?
It's that the crazy people who feel the most anxiety and hostility in the face of virtue, right?
What, to my mind, are the bad Ayn Rand characters, and I don't, I mean, bad in both senses of the word, as in Cliched and ridiculous and also not positive influences, to say the least.
But those people, of course, are going to be the ones most reactive and so on.
I sort of put people into two categories, and this is oversimplistic, of course, but just for the purposes of this discussion.
I put people into these two categories, which is those people who...
Who rail up against this and attempt to bully, and attempt to shout down, and attempt to create a chilling atmosphere.
You know, all that kind of stuff, right?
And those who don't want to get involved because of that, right?
And I understand that. It's totally fine.
It's not their job, right? It's my job.
It's my avocation, so to speak.
Now, the last thing that I wanted to mention, and of course there's lots, I mean...
As you well know, I can go on and on.
But the last thing that I wanted to mention was this idea of me breaking up a family, right?
If there's a guy who says I'm in a prison cell and I can't get out, and I mention to him that the door is unlocked, right?
When he says, I have been tortured in this place.
Lo, these many years.
my soul is almost broken I have lived with terror and brutalization and violence since the day I was born but I can't get out because the door is locked and I say your brutalization was evil and the door is not locked which really was the essence of that conversation your brutalization was evil And the door is not locked.
And I am almost flattened by him rushing out the door that he thought was locked and is not.
Can I really be said to have kidnapped him?
I mean really by any reasonable human being when I point out a door is unlocked and he almost flattens me in his haste to get out?
Can it really be said that I am kidnapping him?
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