1293 The Rise of Corruption Part 1
The genesis of goo part 1.
March 12, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:00
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| Good afternoon everybody. | |
| Steph, hope you're doing well. It's 11.20 on February the 21st, 2008. | |
| And I wanted to, I heard a conversation with Christina two days ago about this development of corruption in people and how it occurs and what goes on. | |
| And again, this all just Theorizing, but I think there was some value in the conversation, so here's the gist of what we talked about. | |
| So, for all but the insane, corruption or evil must be a kind of a habit, a bad habit. | |
| And in my view, Evil is violence and so on, and this does not need to be physical violence when it comes to parent-child relationship because the greater the power disparity, the less you need actual violence, the threat. | |
| For instance, if I imprison someone, that obviously is a great power disparity, And therefore, if I don't provide him food, that is violence. | |
| Whereas if some guy in Dubai is starving and I don't provide him food, that's not the initiation of force because he's not dependent upon me and I am not withholding food from him and he has other sources or his own initiative or charities or churches or whatever to get the food. | |
| Whereas if I imprison someone, then the power relationship is such that The moral rules change when people are dependent upon you. | |
| And this, of course, is why I put such a focus on the family. | |
| Because that's where the power disparity is always at its greatest in life. | |
| So, evil is violations of UPB that involve physical harm and this is another reason why sorry about the running order this is another reason why a verbal abuse is different for families than it is for other situations because the child's brain when it is developing is altered, | |
| physically, by emotional stress. | |
| So, when a child hears a verbal abuse directed at him, or even just hears traumatic arguments from his parents, his brain changes, and his physical, his neurology changes, because it's developing, right? | |
| So, I mean, this is... | |
| Right, this is just... | |
| This is sort of the importance of why, at least why I focus on the family. | |
| So when my mother would scream, that was something because I had no chance of escaping and no chance of really managing the stimuli with Rational understanding and appeal to perspective and knowledge of psychology and the ability to not personalize the stress, right? Because children will personalize everything. | |
| That's part of our developmental imperative. | |
| We can sort of get into that another why another time. | |
| But children personally, if mom's mad, it's because I'm mad, you know, that kind of stuff. | |
| So children automatically do that, can't escape, and can't manage the stimuli. | |
| And it physically affects their bodies, right? | |
| So if someone sends me an all-caps email or yells at me in a call-in show or whatever, I'm not dependent upon that person. | |
| My brain finished developing at around the age of 25 and doesn't mean that I don't have to process and deal with new stimuli, but the fundamental apparatus is there. | |
| And so if somebody is verbally abusive towards me now, which happens on a dispiritingly regular basis sometimes, Then it does not alter my brain. | |
| It does not alter my developmental capacities or abilities or skills or whatever. | |
| And they are dealing with an adult brain that I can manage perspectives and not take it personally and so on, right? | |
| Whereas with a child, you don't have that choice. | |
| The stimulus is overwhelming. | |
| You can't manage it. It actually has a physical, deleteriously developmental effect upon your mind and your nervous system. | |
| You are a different person after verbal abuse as a child than you were before. | |
| If there is even a before, we don't know. | |
| And so there is... | |
| For children, verbal abuse is an overwhelming physical sensation that leaves permanent... | |
| I mean, if it's repeated, right? | |
| It leaves permanent developmental scars on the child, right? | |
| So it's like a form of tasering or a form of electric... | |
| the application of an electric current that leaves a kind of minor epilepsy, like it leaves a permanent Disability, right? | |
| Repeated and traumatic verbal abuse for children in a way that doesn't happen with adults or at least not nearly to the same degree and of course adults are usually only susceptible to verbal abuse if they have experienced it as children because parents, I mean I'm conscious of this, so conscious of this as a parent parents don't understand the degree to which their children are obsessed with them and And wired in, right? | |
| I mean, when I raise my eyebrows now, Isabella raises her eyebrows. | |
| When I widen my eyes, she widened my eyes. | |
| I mean, we're not quite back and forth with cooing yet, because she's still figuring out how to use her voice. | |
| But she's, you know, really wired into what it is that I'm doing. | |
| And, you know, that makes perfect sense. | |
| I mean, Christina and I are the world to her at the moment, and she definitely explores the household world and when we go to a wall or whatever but we are her world and she's fascinated by us and and our you know the fact that we take such great pleasure in her and play with her and so on gives her a positive sense of herself that she's a valuable and pleasant addition to her environment and the parents who I mean the parents who scream parents who yell parents who call names I mean it's so sad because they just don't realize how much their children want their good opinion are interested in pleasing them and so on I mean it's a real shame yeah it's such a shame the tragedy of course right but these kinds of habits that people develop which which result in this kind of stuff right and just to reiterate the point sorry for the repetition I'm sure you're used to it by now but parents have a different relationship to the NAP than other people right other than Again, | |
| it's not to put them in the same moral category as a moral situation. | |
| One listener's mother withheld food from her, did not provide her food. | |
| I also did not provide this listener food, but I'm obviously not in the same moral category for clear reasons as her mother. | |
| So there are different moral rules, not different moral rules, but the application of the non-aggression principle. | |
| For parents than it is for, you know, the old average person in the world. | |
| As I've talked about before, not to compare children to pets, but if you buy a pet, you're then responsible for feeding it. | |
| You then transfer the ownership of its maintenance to you, the moral responsibility. | |
| So I'm not responsible for feeding a stray, but if I take that stray and lock it in the basement, then I am. | |
| It's a choice you make when you... | |
| That's a chosen obligation, right? | |
| It's fallen and having children. | |
| It's a chosen obligation, of course. | |
| So, in this way, what can we call these kinds of habits? | |
| Where parents speak in a harsh way, or in a negative, or a hostile way, in an abusive way, or assault their children, or whatever. | |
| We're not just talking about parents here, but this is the clearest example that we're working with these days. | |
| well it must be again for people who don't have schizophrenia or some sort of biological brain disorder it must be the development of bad habits because the question really fundamentally to any ethical system or anyone who takes an ethical approach to the world is did they have a choice? | |
| and My response to that has always been, well, you have a choice about ethics if you justify your actions with regard to ethics. | |
| That's my basic intention, right? | |
| You're not responsible if you don't use morality to defend your actions, and you're not morally responsible. | |
| And that's why I focus on having people that's why the very first book was all about talk to your parents about virtue and if your parents say well I don't believe in virtue I think that virtue is nonsense I think that whoever has the most power should do whatever the hell they want I think virtue is a lie I think it's all crap and if they communicated that nihilistic power-based will-to-power philosophy to you when you were a child and said well You must obey me because I'm bigger and stronger and can punch you or scream at you or whatever then that's fine. | |
| They're not using ethics to manage and control their children but really are providing the naked power relationship that is the root of their dominance. | |
| It's mere physical dominance. | |
| It has nothing to do with ethics or virtue. | |
| They never use the terms good or bad, right or wrong. | |
| Moral or immoral. Or responsibility, right? | |
| So even if they say, well, I had to yell at you or hit you because if I don't do that, you won't be a good member of society, well, then they're using the term good, right? | |
| Or productive member of society, then they're using the phrase productive. | |
| Productive equals preferable, universally preferable, to the point where violence is allowable. | |
| or abuse is allowable so if parents never pass a universal value judgment on their children then they're not morally responsible but of course the moment you use ethics you're responsible for ethics at the moment that you use ethics to manage or control your children then you know what ethics are you know what universal values are You claim to respect the good and the virtuous and the noble and the true and the honorable and all that kind of stuff, | |
| right? And then you are responsible for ethics because you've used them, right? | |
| So they can't claim to be... | |
| Well, I don't understand ethics. | |
| I don't have any interest in ethics. | |
| I don't think that virtue is... | |
| And the reason that parents don't do that is that parents recognize the amazing efficacy of ethics when it comes to managing their children, right? | |
| I mean, if they say, basically, oh yeah, if I catch you, I'm going to give you hell because I just don't happen to like that, but if you get away with it, more power to you because there's no such thing as good, right? | |
| Then that's a criticism. | |
| It does not internalize for the children. | |
| They don't become self-attackers. | |
| It takes ethics to self-attack. | |
| You can't self-attack without ethics. | |
| And so because it's so powerful for managing children, parents use it all the time. | |
| and then when you question them about ethics it's revealed as a power management system rather than as a true dedication to virtue and truth and goodness oops, sorry, one sec Isabella, give me a little cry. | |
| Sorry about that. I think it's important to not talk about the quality of parenting while not being a good parent myself. | |
| So, yeah, so evil in this sense is the result of corruption in practice. | |
| And corruption in practice is the recognition use And repeated violation of UPB and not in the APA realm but in the actual good and evil realm. | |
| This is a very quick summation, but I hope that it makes some sense, and this is all stuff we've mentioned before, but I just wanted to tidy that up before we continue. | |
| So, and I view, and this of course is not my metaphor, and just about every moralist has used this at one time or another, virtue is not an absolute, virtue is not an absolute, and virtue also is not the result of a single absolute. | |
| it's rarely the result of a single thing. | |
| It is a habit that is developed and maintained Like health, right? | |
| Like eating while exercising. | |
| I mean, if you behead yourself, then yes, you are going to negatively affect your health, but people don't go around beheading themselves very often. | |
| And if you go out and strangle a guy, then you have done an irredeemably evil action, but people just don't randomly go around strangling guys. | |
| That is the result of a long series of bad things. | |
| Bad decisions or wrong decisions. | |
| And so that's sort of where we're going to start from, this exploration of how it develops, or at least a possible way of how it develops. | |
| So thank you so much for listening. |
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