1350 Fatherhood and Generations
Some of the problems of abusive generations.
May 12, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:23
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| Good evening, everybody. It's Steph Post, Mother's Day Plus One, and this is just a little cast to talk about something that I thought of with regards to my own mother, who is still with the living, and not far from where I live now, though I have not seen her nigh these eight or nine years. | |
| And this is sort of starting from the end and working its way back. | |
| Hopefully that will be of use to you. | |
| If not, just listen to this podcast backwards. | |
| No, no, no, not yet. | |
| Not yet, in a bit. And thinking about Isabella, who is, of course, so preternaturally helpless and can barely lift her head, let alone do anything else, and how susceptible she is to being startled or frightened, which is exactly what you'd want, In a baby, so she could let you know if anything is amiss. | |
| Like the other night, I was just taking her up to bed. | |
| She was dozy in my arms, and I was struck by a sudden sneeze, and she really, like, her body startled, right? | |
| I mean, it's alarming to be a baby in some ways. | |
| I was thinking about my mother, and that even if I chose to have my mother in my life, that would be my decision, right? | |
| Based on an adult's perception of things. | |
| But by what right could I really make that decision to have my mother in Isabella's life, right? | |
| That's a different category of decisions, right? | |
| Because I can choose... | |
| To manage the negative effects of a difficult person in my life, but Isabella doesn't have that choice, right? | |
| She's not free to make that choice, so I don't really think that I can make that decision on Isabella's behalf. | |
| Now, of course, I can make decisions for beneficial people like my lovely wife to be in I can't make decisions about difficult people because I know what I can handle in terms of stresses to some degree, but I mean, it's not fair to put it on her. | |
| Yet, how could I have my mother in my life without my mother being in Isabella's life? | |
| You see sort of a domino effect. | |
| Now, if I did want my mother in my life, and my mother was abusive, let's say she hit, right? | |
| So she hit children. | |
| And my mother has an opinion about hitting children, right? | |
| Everybody who's not crazy has a justification or an opinion or a universal of some kind about what it is that they've done, particularly in the ethical sphere, right? | |
| So my mother has an opinion about About hitting children. | |
| I don't know exactly what that opinion is at the moment. | |
| I mean, I could guess or have some information about what it was in the past, which is, you know, you don't know how exasperating children can be. | |
| It can be very difficult. And I was sick, and the doctors did X, Y, and Z to me, and so on, right? | |
| So she has certain opinions about hitting children, but they're not what you would consider to be the two things that you need for any kind of substantive or permanent reformation in this life. | |
| There's two ingredients, right? | |
| One is moral clarity, and the second is responsibility, right? | |
| So you have to be clear about the good and ill that you have done, and you have to take responsibility for that and not Not blame others, right? | |
| And for those who've separated from their families, those few, those tragic few, you know what I mean when I say that the defoo is about not blaming your parents anymore, right? | |
| And accepting that it's not their fault or that you're unhappy as an adult, right? | |
| Fundamentally in the future. | |
| So... When you go through this process of understanding what happened to your past and questioning your parents, right, they're going to have, if your parents were abusive, or my mother was a hitter, I would have questions, say, well, is it wrong? Or is it right to hit children? | |
| And you get all this Waffelberger nonsense that basically people don't like to say, yes, it's right to hit children because that's really hard to sustain. | |
| And people will sort of say, well, it's not ideal, but under the circumstances we did the best we could. | |
| All this kind of stuff, right? Thus making excuses. | |
| And so what they're saying is, under the right circumstances, it's okay. | |
| It's understandable. It's acceptable. | |
| It's inevitable that children will be hit. | |
| Now, that's not my philosophy at all, right? | |
| In my philosophy, you don't hit children. | |
| Anymore than you go around punching people in wheelchairs or, you know, taking baseball bats to the knees of blind people. | |
| You just don't do it. | |
| It's just not on the table. | |
| It's not an option anymore than you would punch a guy in a coma. | |
| You just don't hit children. | |
| Would it be responsible for me as a parent to expose Isabella to someone who believed that under the right circumstances, and those circumstances can never really be predicted in advance, otherwise they'd be UPBE, under particular circumstances, hating children is not only acceptable but understandable and inevitable and so on. | |
| Could I really put Isabella into that situation? | |
| No, of course not. It would be incredibly irresponsible. | |
| It would be like hiring a known drunk as a babysitter, right? | |
| It would be, you know, close on criminally irresponsible. | |
| So either there is a parent who justifies prior abuse or excuses prior abuse, in which case they get off the hook for what they did in the past, but they are, of course, almost for certain going to... | |
| Like that which we justify, we repeat, right? | |
| That is almost inevitable. | |
| And on the other hand, though, there is the possibility that The parent of my mother is going to say, it was always and forever totally wrong for me to hit you as a child. | |
| If I were to ask her, right? Because I'd have to obviously talk to her about discipline and that before introducing her to my... | |
| I mean, if you and your parents are the same about discipline, then, you know, and that discipline is healthy, you know, verbal and gentle and so on, then fantastic. | |
| You don't have to have this conversation. But if you and your parent have different ideas about disciplining children, right? | |
| If you're new age and they're Old Testament, then you need to have this conversation, right? | |
| Of course, of course you do, right? | |
| I mean, in the same way that you would have a conversation with anyone who wanted to take care of your children about how that care was going to manifest itself, or not. | |
| That's the case, maybe. So if you say to your parents, well, you know, the hitting is wrong, and your parent says, yes, you know what, you're right, the hitting was wrong, I should never have hit you, you know, then there is some good stuff to be said about their capacity to babysit your precious child in the future. | |
| But, of course, that opens up a whole other can of worms, right? | |
| Which is, you didn't seem to think that was wrong. | |
| What changed? Right? | |
| Because admitting that you made a mistake is just the beginning of a long, long, long process of reconciliation, healing, and restitution. | |
| Right? So you say, okay, well, so mom, you said that hitting is wrong, that no circumstances under which hitting a child is acceptable, right? | |
| So why did you hit me? | |
| What changed? What's different? | |
| And how come you have never apologized for these things, right? | |
| Even in the 12-step program, one of them is making amends, right? | |
| Apologizing and making amends. | |
| So why all of a sudden do you say hitting children is wrong when you hit me as a kid and never brought it up again or apologized or gone through therapy or whatever dealt with the demons that drove you to do this? | |
| Right, so even if my mother were to sort of say the quote right things around, oh yes, hitting children is always wrong and so on, that wouldn't exactly solve the problem, right? | |
| That would just be the beginning of another long course of action that you would need to, I would need to obviously very carefully vet. | |
| She would need to go into therapy for quite some time. | |
| In order to deal with this kind of stuff, I would have to have the right to talk to her therapist and figure out her progress. | |
| Because, you know, if my mom's around Isabella, you know, my mom's temper can flare up like a bottle rocket. | |
| And, you know, I gotta pee sometime, right? | |
| At some point, my mom's gonna be alone with Isabella. | |
| And is she gonna hiss at her or scare her or... | |
| I don't know, twist her finger or something. | |
| Who knows, right? She certainly is capable of great cruelty. | |
| Is some other parent going to tell her, Isabella, about God and Jesus died for your sins and you must come to church or you're going to burn in hell forever? | |
| Whispers that to Isabella when I'm draining the lizard. | |
| Well, what do we do then? | |
| What do we do then? Isabella says, what do you mean? | |
| You know, auntie so-and-so, grandmother so-and-so said, I'm going to burn in hell if I don't go to church, and Jesus lost me and died for my sins. | |
| What does that mean? And we say, well, this is just a bunch of nonsense fairy tales. | |
| Don't take it seriously. It's like, well, she believes it, and why did you let her tell me if it's not true? | |
| Anyway, so you start all these other problems, right? | |
| Why do you let people around me who scare me with nasty, vicious fairy tales? | |
| You see, it's a whole set of dominoes. | |
| It's a whole interconnected and interlocked set of... | |
| It's a Minko system, right? | |
| And that is something that I've been really, really conscious of. | |
| Maybe we're talking about it with Christina over Mother's Day and so on, but I've been really conscious of that. | |
| That it is a whole lot of dominoes. | |
| If I'm going to let someone around my kid, right? | |
| If somebody's been a heroin addict and they say, no, no, no, I'm off smack, right? | |
| I'm no longer riding the horse. | |
| Do you then say, great, here's my kid, right? | |
| Or do you say, well, you know, I got to talk to your rehab counselor. | |
| Oh, you've never been to rehab. Well, you know, I got to tell you, I don't really believe you. | |
| I'm sorry to say, but... | |
| Right, so there is a whole host of things that need to go around reconciliation with the past, even if that past is admitted as wrong, as in the case of child abuse before... | |
| Anyone can, I think, reasonably be around your kids. | |
| And you see, this is not my choice, right? | |
| It's not like, oh, I'm doing so. I have to be responsible to protect Isabella from things which could do her harm, right? | |
| I mean, we clean, we wash, we bathe, we get her inoculated, we do all the things that are going to keep her from, you know, we feed her, we change her, we cuddle with her, we play, we sing, we coo, all the things that keep her from harm. | |
| And, you know, they're rather larger biological agents of There's no maladdiction and malfeasance that I need to keep her from because that's my responsibility. | |
| So even if I woke up, I want to see my mom. | |
| Well, I can't see my mom without my mom getting to see Isabella, and I can't guarantee Isabella's safety, security, and happiness around her. | |
| And so it's out of my hands, right? | |
| I mean, it is just the responsibility of a parent to protect the children from harm, right? | |
| And so the risk-reward is, to me, just falls entirely down on the side of keeping those who have harmed children away from her. | |
| That's just... To me, a basic fact. | |
| And it certainly has helped me think about these kinds of things. | |
| Hopefully, it's helped you as well. |
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