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Sept. 19, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:48
1460 Statism and Early Education
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Hi everybody, it's Steph. It is the 16th of September 2009.
I'm out for a stroll.
It is 10.40 p.m.
The wife, she has passed it out.
I mean, really, you get up at six o'clock in the morning for a couple of months and suddenly you're all tired at 10 p.m.
Well, who can blame her?
Not I. In fact, I worship her early rising personhood.
This is take two.
I might post a take one in the premium section just for those who are curious about various The incarnations of these chats.
But it was an important enough podcast that I wanted to throw a few more thoughts into the mix.
Shocking, I know. And to make sure that I covered everything in a way that was satisfactory.
And I also did some of it at the gym, where people appeared to be punching weights with other weights.
And I figured, it's going to be too much hassle to edit out the noise.
I have more thoughts to add.
So let's do it again with that preamble.
Let's get going. Now, what is it that is in many ways the most troubling aspect of statism from a self-knowledge standpoint?
Well, I would submit to you that it is this.
When we teach our children We give them what I would call kindergarten ethics.
And that does not mean dumb, but it means universal, UPB, consistent, easy to understand, reciprocal, and so on.
Right? Don't steal. Don't punch, don't grab, don't invade people's space, don't hold up kids for lunch money and so on.
These are all the kindergarten ethics, and I think they're a fine set of ethics.
And it's exactly how ethics should be.
You see, ethics really do have to be simple, otherwise we're not responsible for them.
I mean, if ethics are so complicated, This is part of postmodernism and relativism that has never made a shred of sense to me, which is if ethics is that complicated that you can still continue to study it up at the graduate and postgraduate level of college, then how can we expect people to follow it?
If ethics, if a true knowledge of ethics is like a true understanding of The theory of relativity and the math and all, then clearly we can't hold people morally responsible because ethics is too complicated.
And that's really what UPB is about, is to try and simplify and clarify and cut through the murk of ethics so that we have ethical responsibility.
We can't continue to paddy-fog all the way to a self-indulgent and destructive future.
And so we teach our children Don't be mean.
Don't say bad words.
Don't insult people.
Don't hurt.
Basic. Easy to understand things.
And they are easy to understand.
There are some pretty good studies out there that show pretty conclusively that children as young as two, three years old can distinguish the difference between a rule like don't hit and a rule like hang your coat on this colored peg.
I understand the difference between universally preferable behavior, ethics, don't hit, and aesthetically preferable actions.
Hang your coat on this.
Ooh, I see a skunk.
That is cool. I've never seen a skunk in this neighborhood before.
Oh, we've smelt them from time to time, but we just haven't seen them.
Let me just slither and slide all over this way.
Skunks shouldn't show up until later when we're talking about the stain.
Right, so children as young as two years, three years, can understand the difference between ethics and politeness, or ethics and efficiency.
It takes a lot to pound basic reason out of children.
It takes a lot to pound basic ethics out of children and turn it into this This crippling fog that so enshrouds and entombs the world.
So this is my fundamental problem with statism from this standpoint.
So we teach children these basic rules.
No stealing, no hitting, no blah blah blah.
And I think that we accept that self-defense is valid, right?
Because what is it when you find two kids fighting?
What are the first things they're going to do?
They point each other and say, he started it.
And if we do see a kid hitting another kid and the other kid pushing him back, we're not going to punish the kid for pushing him back, right?
We recognize and accept that the initiation of force is wrong, and children accept and understand that intuitively, which is why they always say, he initiated it.
I was merely defending myself.
He started it. They understand UPP. It's wired into us.
Like object constancy, because that's really what it is.
It's object constancy. So, we have these basic rules that we teach children.
This is right. This is good.
This is the way that righteousness operates.
And that's a real problem for us, right?
That is a real, real, real problem for us.
Hey, you've missed the planes, haven't you?
The reason it's such a problem for us, my friends, is because that's not how we operate in a state of society.
In a society with a state.
That's not how we run things.
Violence is bad.
Unambiguously, unambivalently, 100% pure white-driven snow, black sky, bad.
Black and white.
But we're not telling the truth.
And it's a fundamental lie to children that is what is common between The two corrupting and hypocritical superstitions of statism and religion.
Don't hit, don't steal, right?
Violence is bad. Just plain wrong.
But it's not, is it?
Not in a statist society, because in a statist society, oh, we love the gun.
We worship the gun.
We can't think of a problem without thinking of laws and cops and guns and jails and fines and threats.
We can't conceive of running a society without giving a bunch of thugs a monopoly of force, of violence.
We can't think of solving problems like Pollution, poverty, illiteracy, drug use.
We can't think of ways in which the old who are poor can be helped.
We can't think of ways in which those who can't afford medical care can be helped out.
We can't imagine any more such a thing without guns.
I mean, we heard the herd To every conceivable moral goal in the universe at bayonet point!
Global warming?
That's past laws!
Right? We...
We can't imagine problems in a state of society, the majority.
We can't even conceive of not using violence.
In fact, we consider it immoral to avoid the initiation of force to solve all of these problems.
We consider it wrong and bad and unsustainable and destructive to not initiate violence.
We love violence in a state of society.
We are addicted to violence in a state of society.
And we have the nerve, the nerve, To turn to children and say, oh, violence is just wrong.
Violence is bad. It's just wrong.
No ifs, ands, or buts. No two ways about it.
We don't confess the truth to children who we are attempting to instruct morally.
We don't tell them the truth.
The truth, in a state of society, goes a little something like this.
Well, yeah, it's complicated.
It's really complicated, you see, Johnny.
Because, you see, we don't like violence from you.
We don't like violence from the other kids.
We don't like violence from, you know, private individuals, people who aren't part of this club, this gang, this group called the government.
We really, really hate violence.
On this side of the fence, right?
The non-state, non-government, non-boss gang side of the fence.
But, oh my heavens, oh my heavens, do we just think of the violence on the other side of the fence with the boss gang government folks?
That violence! We love it.
We love it.
We love it. We need it.
We'll fight to keep it. We'll attack and oppose anybody who questions the need for such violence.
So, Johnny, should you hit someone to take a toy?
Should you grab something from someone?
Well, it's hard to say.
We love violence.
We desperately need violence.
We can't imagine life without organized violence.
And we hate and we fear violence at the same time.
So I can't give you an easy answer about whether you should grab and snatch, whether you should push and shove, whether you should hit and sit.
I don't know. It's complicated.
I won't have any good answers for you.
I can't understand why people come down to the park at this time of night.
Sorry, just by the way.
The car's driving down to the park.
Coming on for 11. We can't say these basic things to children.
And maybe you'll say, well, but children are too young to understand complexities of ambivalence and so on.
And so we tell children that violence is just plain bad, while at the same time we're addicted to it and think it desperately necessary and ever-expanding at a social level, and we can't imagine solving problems anymore without violence, almost.
So we tell children these fairy tales of moral simplicities because they're just too young and tender to handle the complexities of complicated rules.
Well, they're not. First and foremost, children understand the difference between ethics and utilitarianism.
This has been pretty well proven in a number of studies.
You can look up The Philosophical Baby by Gopnik, I think, if you'd like to.
So no, kids can handle it.
Of course, we can't explain it to children, which is why we think they're too dumb to understand it.
This is a fundamental defense that people with contradictory ideas, as they just present simplistic views to children, saying, well, you see, children are too young.
They can't understand it. But that's not true.
Children understand hypocrisy, oh, very well.
And we don't like to talk to them about our ambivalence about violence, not because we think they're too dumb to understand it, but because we know that they're intelligent enough to understand it.
We're not avoiding confusing children, but illuminating ourselves, as is so often the case, our own hypocrisies and the lies we were told when we were younger.
You could say, well, it's inappropriate for children to know the ambivalence that we have about violence, the love and hate relationship we have with violence, the love of it institutionally, and the hate and fear of it privately.
So we tell them these simplistic tales, and then when they're older they get that it's complex.
Well, that doesn't work either, saying, well, it's like sex.
You don't talk about Sex with children, you may give them a fairy tale.
I'm not saying it's wise, but a lot of people do.
You may give them a fairy tale called a stork dung brunga or something like that, right?
You may do that. But that is not something that we expect, like Santa Claus, a child to continue to believe for the rest of his life.
In fact, it would be ridiculous to meet a 30-year-old man who says, a stork brought me.
I mean, who was not functionally retarded.
Or, Santa Claus did bring my presents and does.
Right? Yet, that's not what we do with moral rules.
We say to Johnny the 4-year-old, don't hit.
We say to Johnny the 40-year-old, don't hit.
We say to Johnny the 80-year-old, don't hit.
You see? The moral black and white, the absolutes, are not outgrown in the way that fairy tales and Easter bunnies and Santa clauses are, but the same moral absolutes follow Johnny all the way through this veil of tears.
So, it's not that we wish to hide complexity from children because their tender minds can't handle it.
You know, nonsense.
Children can have immensely elaborate and complicated imaginary games, highly sophisticated rules made up on the fly, rigorously enforced.
Children can handle complexity and ambivalence.
We can't.
Right? I believe that's called projection by psychologists.
So we have to lie.
And when we create a huge lie like this, it squats like a tumor.
At the very heart of society we create a huge lie like this.
Violence is bad.
But we're going to use it to try and solve every proactive problem under the sun and moon.
Violence is wrong.
Well, we should stop using the government to do things.
Well, that would be wrong, right?
Violence is wrong, and refining from using violence is wrong.
Double think, of course.
What do we do when we create this massive, core, destructive evasion right at the heart of our social discourse?
When we rule credulous, independent children with the lazy absolutes of unthinking ethics, bigotries?
And then when they get older, what do we do?
Oh, it's so sad.
It's so sad.
We'll get to that.
Well, we have to create that which cannot be spoken.
The Voldemort of violence, he whose name cannot be spoken.
We can't talk about our complex relationship with violence as a society.
We see a poor kid taking a dollar out of the pocket of a rich kid, and we say, ha, that's wrong, that's theft, that's stealing, right?
When he gets older and learns about the welfare state, what's he to think?
Well, that's poor people using the state, but isn't that even worse?
I mean, if a kid just grabs a dollar out of a rich kid's pocket, that's bad, I suppose, but what if that kid has a whole gang where the strong guys go and take it and they split the money?
Wouldn't that even more sinister?
The welfare state is worse than simple theft, which is why it escalates and produces more evils.
What we say to the kid that's wrong, to the poor kid, we say it's wrong.
We don't say, you know, it's complicated.
I mean, I totally understand the impulse.
We've got a whole social system That is designed to do exactly what you're doing over and over and over again on a scale that dwarfs you like Jupiter dwarfs a dust particle.
So, I can't condemn what you're doing because we've got whole social institutions that do this very thing that are considered immoral.
Sorry, that are considered completely immoral.
I can't condemn you and say you shouldn't do it, because I just told someone who was a damn libertarian, who said we should not have a welfare state, that it was immoral to not have a welfare state.
Do you see my predicament, as I am a teacher who is trying to tell you, that if you are poor, redistributing income from the rich is wrong, because I support it in society And I have just argued that it is wrong to even consider not doing it.
So how am I going to condemn you in my classroom?
See the challenge?
It's so hard to see this because it's so evaded at all times.
It's so repressed.
It's so crushed and so omnipresent.
Right, this is the huge elephant in the room, our ambivalent relationship to violence.
We fear it and we are addicted to it.
We hate it and we love it like a stalker.
So we can't tell the truth to children about virtue in society.
Okay.
How is the teacher going to keep order in the classroom If the principles of statism are applied to solving conflicts in the classroom, right?
Because the teacher to have conflict solved in the classroom says, sit down and talk about it.
Use your words, not your fists, right?
Use your thoughts, use your reason, use your communication rather than violence to solve these problems.
But that's not how statism works.
That's not how the whole society works.
That the teacher lives in and directly profits from.
Violence at the state. Right?
Not how it works at all.
Quite the opposite. As the teacher would have to say to the kids who are fighting, listen, listen, listen.
First of all, get other people to do your fighting for you, and steal from people, and then pay the people who are enforcing the stealing some portion of your profits, and anybody who doesn't give you money, you can lock in your basement and make things really ugly for them, and all these kinds of things.
What you need is a majority, and the majority can then steal from the minority, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
To apply status solutions for adult problems to interpersonal conflicts within children, you would quickly end up in a complete state of nature, a lord of the flies that would be closer to the Gulag Apicalago.
See, so teachers have to say to children, for God's sake, for Christ's sake, don't even think about trying to solve your problems the way adults do.
Don't even dream about it.
You're going to be in so much trouble.
Don't you dare try to solve your problems the way that society, adult society, a state of society solves its problems with guns and prisons and rapes.
Don't you dare try to solve problems in the way that people ten times your age solve their problems.
No, no, no.
You must reason with each other.
You must not use your fists.
But we, to solve every problem under sun and moon, must use carts and guns and prisons and courts and chains and bars and locks and bullets.
Do you see the problem, my friends?
Do you see the problem?
Poor kid steals from a rich kid.
Teacher has to say, don't you dare try to solve poverty the way that your leaders do.
Don't you dare try to solve poverty the way your society does, the way all of the adults do.
That's bad.
That's wrong. And cannot be allowed.
How can we explain this madness to the future?
Now look back on us and they will not understand how we tied our fucking shoelaces given how lower intestine brain pretzels our minds are in this area and how much confusion and fog and avoidance and contradiction and moral terror We live with.
What a Nobelian nightmare of social and ethical contradictions we live with constantly.
It's not the contradictions aren't the problem.
It's the avoidance of the contradictions that's the problem.
Being lost is not the fundamental problem.
Thinking we are not lost is the fundamental problem.
If you're lost you can Pull out your handy-dandy philosophical compass and a map and plot your way to safety and home.
But plunging on and thinking we are lost when we...
not lost when we are, in fact, lost is the real problem.
Society thinks it still has so little need for us that it can scorn and malign us.
Society still thinks That it has scant need for philosophers.
Why? Because it does not imagine.
Well, deep down it knows, but it does not consciously think that it is lust.
But that's all right.
We can be patient.
So, what happens then?
Right? Because that state of things can't go on forever.
We get that. State of things can't go on forever.
What happens to our little John, our little Johnny, who grows up and he has had wrapped around him tight as a mummy's bandages the taut absolutes of kindergarten morality.
Don't steal. Don't hit.
Don't push. Don't grab.
Don't sit on people.
Don't invade their space. And he grows up and He looks at his society, his whole brain, not just the part of him that is allowed to speak in society, but his whole brain looks and says, you know what, I see a lot of courts, I see a lot of prisons, and I see a lot of people in those prisons for pretty innocuous things, smoking some marijuana.
I myself, this is Johnny, this is me, Steph, I myself, I got my first pay When I was eight years old, I was painting these little figurines, and I got my first paycheck when I was 11, and I got taxed.
What the hell is this?
At least they don't steal.
And it's not even stolen, it's deducted from source, taken out of my wallet while I was showering.
And there's war, there's riots, there's a suppressed tremor and shiver of spinal, squeaky, addicted violence within society.
And everybody's calling for a law will solve every problem.
A law will solve every problem.
The gun will solve every problem.
The prisons will solve every problem.
The fines and the regulations will solve Every problem.
Let's have more laws, he hears all the time.
Laws, laws, laws will save us.
And he understands that laws are violence.
And he internalizes if he is sensitive and he understands the squeaky shivery dread of the addiction to violence that lies at the root of statism that runs through his Society.
If he has brains and sensitivity, he will feel it, and if he doesn't, he will simply act it out.
and the smartest who begin to wonder why these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are coated in blood.
Why none of this puzzle fits together?
Why this makes no sense?
Why the kindergarten ethics that are inflicted upon children are never followed in status solutions?
You know, children are told not to join into a fight.
Just because those two are fighting doesn't mean you have to jump into, right?
And then he wonders why Canada has sent troops to Afghanistan.
Nothing fits together.
And there's an uneasiness and there's a curiosity and there's a fear of having been lied to.
Maybe consciously, maybe not.
But to me, the conscious and unconscious thing, just by the by, It just means less as you get older.
I mean, it just means less. To me, remaining in an unconscious state, in an acting out state, in a lack of self-knowledge state into your 20s and 30s, you get no excuse for it.
Ah, there's enough material, there's self-help books out there about the yin-yang, you can get free therapy in schools.
There's no reason why you would remain blind to yourself in the modern world, or why you should.
You get these things in the books in libraries, work, anything.
To me, you know, remaining unconscious into your mid to late 20s and 30s and beyond, it's like being drunk.
Yeah, it's okay, maybe you're not responsible directly for what you do when you're drunk, but you are responsible for being drunk.
Well, it's like being overweight, other than for specific medical reasons.
Thank you.
I mean, you're not responsible for diabetes, you're responsible for being overweight.
Because you can get diabetes without being overweight, of course.
Anyway, to continue.
So what happens? Well, the problem is that kindergarten ethics, true ethics, UPB, the way it's presented to children, is just culture.
It's just control. It's just a way to control children.
If it were truly believed in society, we would use our words and not our guns to solve our problems.
And we would have no government.
We don't believe it. We don't believe it at all.
We do the exact opposite of what we claim is moral for children, to solve most of our problems.
How are you going to say to a child, "Don't use violence to solve your problems"?
And by the way, you're only here in this school because your parents are forced at gunpoint to pay for this school, whether you attend or not.
Whether they have children or not.
And I get two months off in the summer, or more, than professional development days.
Because I have a powerful gang union, Who gets a hold of this money that's taken from your parents at gunpoint and gives me benefits and goodies.
So I have used violence and my friends have used violence to solve all of our problems and to solve the problem of why you should be educated at all.
But what we're going to teach you is the content of that education is never use violence to solve problems.
It's mad!
And they will wonder how we functioned in the future.
They will wonder how we got through the day.
with our brains in such n-dimensional mobius strip folds and the children they grow and they become teenagers and when they become teenagers they become curious and quite quickly cynical because everyone says think for yourself if everybody was jumping off the London Bridge would you Think for yourself.
Oh my god, he's actually thinking for himself.
Run, attack, scorn, mock, ignore, withdraw.
Not everyone.
A lot of people.
So we have taught culture as fact.
Thank you.
And it's not even our culture.
Do not use violence to solve problems.
It is our culture to use violence to solve problems, as it is every culture, because culture is a lie.
It can only be enforced through intimidation and aggression.
All lies can only ever be enforced and inflicted through intimidation, which is why you have guilt and hell and religion.
And the children get the control.
They get the hypocrisy. They understand.
I know they can't speak about it.
Many of them can't even think about it.
But they get it.
When they get older, see, they have been taught that culture is a fact.
But when they get older, and they become curious, and they become cynical, the whole thing has to be reversed.
They then have to be taught not that culture is a fact.
but that facts are culture which is postmodernism relativism and all that other brain dissolving goo that goes on in college and beyond originally they were taught that culture is a fact That, of course, is religion as well.
A child says to his mother or his father, why am I a Christian?
Why are we Christians? What's the correct answer?
Because we're born in a Christian culture.
Because if we were born in Syria, we'd be Muslim.
Right? And if we were born in China, we'd be communist.
And if we were born in North Korea, we'd be starving.
Right? Nope.
Culture is taught as a fact.
The culture of religion is taught as a fact.
In fact, we are Christians because Jesus died for our sins and God loves us and we want to get to heaven and all these facts which are in fact only cultural bigotries.
And the child understands the difference because the child goes to a Muslim child, the Christian child goes to a Muslim child and says, "The earth is round." The Muslim child says, of course it is.
They both understand the difference between bigotry and fact.
Two plus two is four.
Yes, two plus two is four.
You can have a Muslim teacher teach math to a Christian child.
It's just in the realm of culture and religious bigotry.
but I repeat myself that none of this stuff works.
So when the teenager gets older and begins to examine in his own mind or out loud his culture and says, well, wait a second, Wait a second here.
You always told me that stealing was bad.
Forcible removal of property against the person's will.
You didn't say to me when I was a kid, stealing is bad unless you get a majority, right?
You didn't say to me as a kid, Stealing is bad unless someone else does it for you.
Gives you a pittance of the proceeds, right?
This is bad. It's wrong.
And how does society respond to these questing souls?
Well, it snares them and confuses them and baffles them and bribes them.
Like anybody with a guilty conscience who's caught out, like a squid that is gripped by a moray eel, they emit the defense of all hypocrites, the defense of fog.
And that fog is postmodernism.
That fog is relativism.
Modern philosophy, we say.
Spitting out the bad taste.
Right? Alberto Gonzalez, understand.
Can't remember. Bill Clinton.
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
Depends what the definition of is, is.
Right? Fog, fog, fog.
Hillary Clinton! Says she was evading sniper fire.
Turns out there was no such thing.
Oh, well, I say a million things a day, so I got something wrong.
Oh, and I was sleep deprived.
Oh, it doesn't really matter. Blah, blah, blah.
Well, that's what people do when they're caught.
They fog.
They fog.
And when society is caught in these fundamental contradictions, saying that violence is bad to children, and then pursuing the path of violence to solve every social problem conceivable, refusing and then pursuing the path of violence to solve every social problem conceivable, refusing to admit the ambivalence that
the hatred of it privately and the addiction and love of it publicly, when caught in a lie we say, What is truth?
When we have taught bigotry as fact, we are inevitably, when caught, forced to teach fact as bigotry.
That's just Western logic.
That's a very white, male, bourgeois way of thinking.
Facts then become bigotry.
When bigotry has been taught as a fact and that fact is exposed, facts must now be taught as bigotry.
That's fog that swallows hundreds of thousands of the best minds of every generation every year around the world.
The fog. The defense Which seems so hard for people.
I think I understand why.
I've talked about it at length. The defense against postmodernism, against the fog of people caught with a guilty conscience for lying to children, is to say...
Wait a fucking second here.
You're telling me nothing is true?
Everything is relative?
Well, that's not what I was taught as a child.
When I was a child, the moral rules were absolute, non-optional, non-relative, non-cultural.
Nobody said, don't hit that person because I don't like it.
They said, because it's wrong.
Because it's not empathetic. It's not nice.
It's not kind. It's not gentle.
It's not sweet. It's not good.
Bad. And so you would go to these postmodern professors and you would say, you guys are totally putting the cart before the horse.
If nothing is true, there's not a whole lot of point teaching children for 18 years, 14 years in school, 13 years.
There's no point teaching children That right and wrong is absolute and black and white, that truth and falsehood are valid concepts, and then by the time they get to university, it makes no sense to completely reverse everything.
If nothing is true and nothing is right and wrong, we need to teach that to children right up front, right in kindergarten.
Hit, steal, punch, kick, get a gang, get a majority, take whatever you want, do whatever you want, because there's no such thing as right and wrong.
Or good and bad, or true and false.
Right. It is an extreme mark of bad faith and bad conscience in society that this supposed enlightenment of blank fog only descends upon children when their children have grown up, become adults, and are in college.
But can you imagine?
A group of college professors getting together and saying, well, we've really got to redesign the curriculum because we're getting them after they've been brainwashed into thinking that things are true and false and right and wrong.
We need to stop that bigotry early on.
Right? I mean, if there was some school out there teaching racist ideas, every affirmative action clown on the planet would descend upon them with sensitivity training.
Imagine college professors getting together and saying, well, we've got to stop teaching children that there's such a thing as right and wrong and true and false.
And we've got to get them early.
We've got to sit down and redesign this whole curriculum so that teachers never use right and wrong, good and bad, true and false.
School's supposed to start at 8, kid shows up at 10.
There's no such thing as being late, because there's no such thing as being on time.
There's no such thing as true and false, right or wrong.
Kid hands in homework.
Kid doesn't hand in homework.
It's neither good nor bad.
Kid says 2 plus 2 is 4.
Kid says 2 plus 2 is a unicorn.
No right answer, no wrong answer.
But you see...
Do you see why that would never happen?
Because... schools couldn't function.
Right? Schools couldn't function.
If that which was taught to the more intellectually sophisticated young adults was actually accepted as true within society and the educational curriculum all the way through was adapted to that post-modern reality.
Well, everybody would laugh at these people if they tried to do that.
If these professors tried to design a curriculum for primary schools, Everybody would laugh at them.
Why? Because it's like, this shit isn't true.
It's just a foggy defense.
It's just how we blunt the charge of the curious and insightful in society.
It's the spears we lean against their thundering horses of youthful curiosity and indignation.
Philosophy, your passport to the indignation.
It's not true.
We just have to fog people who are getting close to the truth, right?
And this whole dishonesty and evasion and fogging about a state of society's intense love-hate ambivalence to the use of violence to solve problems, our fear and hatred of it among the young and among private citizens, and our desire and lust for it, Among public figures and the power of the state.
We're either going to be honest and fess up to the reality of our ambivalent relationship to violence, or we're going to have to continue To lie to children,
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