All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 5, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:54
1476 The Freedomain Radio Interview: Lloyd deMause
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Oh, hi. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I've been reading your audiobooks, and you said that you might grace me with a short interview.
I just finished your chapter on Christianity and the Holy Wars, and I was just wondering if we could...
You just threw up. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God. It's very, very, very intense stuff.
I was brought up a Christian.
I was a Protestant.
I went to church. I liked singing.
I heard that Christ was nice to people, and that...
Everybody said, send the children to them, to him.
When I did the original research, I looked, I said, what are these idiot historians doing telling all these lies?
I mean, my God, that's awful stuff.
Yeah, and so is now a good time to chat?
Yeah. I appreciate that.
Well, first of all, I would just like to say that I am an enormous fan and I obviously have a huge amount of respect for the work that you've done, not just for the emotional difficulty of the content of the work, which is a strain and is overwhelming in the emotional content, but also for the emotional and moral courage that it takes.
To bring these very difficult facts or these very difficult histories to light.
I mean, it seems very obvious to each of us when we meet an individual that that individual has been highly influenced by his or her early childhood history.
But when we extrapolate that to nations or cultures as a whole, suddenly we seem to lose that thread and we no longer think that the culture is influenced by early childhood experiences.
We should blame mothers for anything, you know.
The fact that the mothers are beaten up and raped and stuff, that doesn't matter if they should be superhuman.
I give speeches at colleges and at psychoanalytic things and so on, and they are silent at the end of my speech.
Then one person tentatively sticks his finger up and says, Do you mean, Dr.
DeMoss, that if you treat children with love, that we won't have any more wars?
I said, yeah, you got my point.
Yeah, that's it. Oh, that's too simple.
Yeah, everybody wants you to break into the Beatles song, all you need is love.
It doesn't make any sense.
All you need is love. I said, do you think that making sure that love and care is given to every single one of the billions of people on the face of the earth, that's going to be easy?
Yeah. I wanted to ask you if you don't mind.
I mean, obviously I have my own theories, but you're the expert, so let's turn it over to you.
There seems to be, because I mean, I studied history up to the graduate school level as well, and you would get continually these explanations of historical events which would have to do with economics.
You know, the Marxists are very big on economics, or it would have to do with particular politics, or who happened to be king at the time, or a particular theological or philosophical innovation, or maybe even...
An economic innovation and they always left me quite unsatisfied.
I always felt that our greatest social institutions come out of our very earliest childhood experiences.
Did you go through... Particularly when you look at the statistics of the people who looked at wars and found that wars are after periods of prosperity.
Nine chances out of ten.
Wars are something like fifteen times as violent After periods of prosperity, so the wars are there to be self-destructive.
They're suicides. Right.
I think I saw a video of you where you were talking about that you really can't understand Hitler's – like people talk about Lebensraum and things like that, but it had nothing to do with any geopolitical or military, that Hitler was simply suicidal and there were enough disturbed personalities in the German Reich that everybody followed him off the cliff.
They should have guessed. Anybody should guess that if you go out and you kill all those Jews because they're poisoning your blood, And Hitler is seen sitting there looking for hours at his blood as the beast, as little, what do they call it, they used to get the blood out of you.
And he looks at it and he says, those are Jews, those are lice, those are, you know, this isn't blood.
Now, did you, when you were studying, I guess, history and in your earlier parts of your education, did you go through a sort of more materialistic phase before looking at this kind of stuff?
I mean, I'm really curious and fascinated to know how it was that you began to work in this particular area.
No, as a matter of fact, I came from fighting in Korea and saying, you know, this is the craziest thing I ever saw because nobody in Korea, including my general who I worked in his 8th Army headquarters, Maxwell Taylor, he just didn't want to lose.
In fact, his assistants told me that when I played tennis with him, I had to lose.
He was just the kind of guy, him and MacArthur and some of the other guys over there, they just never want to lose.
It's what I call a masculinity mask.
Yeah, you mentioned this with armor.
And so I came over from Korea thinking, I've got to find out what these crazy things called wars are for.
And I went to Columbia, I went to undergraduate, and I went to graduate school, and I finally ended up...
And then I went to Psychoanalytic Institute to be able to learn a series of crazy people, because they're crazy, you know?
These people are crazy.
There's no lice that are going to poison your blood.
And so I ended up and I said, all right, I'm ready to go through all my courses and awards and so on.
And so I said, okay, now I'm about ready to finish up my doctorate and have a doctoral thesis.
I want to do what kind of childhood the Germans had at that time because nobody had written about it.
And my supervisor said, no, no, we don't know Freud here.
You do what we tell you.
I said, you mean if I get a doctorate and I go to work for a university, every single word I write, I have to be afraid that I can't feed my family for the next meal because I'm going to get fired?
He said, yes, that's right.
He said, you teach what you have in your courses, what we say.
Not what you want.
And I said, well, fuck you.
And I left. I never went back.
I never finished the doctorate, in fact.
Right, right. There is a lot of hostility to looking at motivations for history that also may include our own motivations as human beings.
History is something that people like to keep at a relatively safe distance.
But when you begin to talk about childhood experiences that are negative, that you or I or other people may have gone through ourselves, suddenly it becomes a lot more personal and I think people get uncomfortable.
I don't know if that's been your experience, but that's certainly what I've seen.
Oh, fantastic. It's terrible. I have read at least 200 books on childhood history, one kind of another, whether it's a religious historian or a French historian or whatever, and every one of them does quote me someplace in some footnote and says, this guy is absolutely crazy.
None of my books are used in any of the courses around the world anymore.
They weren't very, very beginning, but once they saw that I was really serious about it, they just threw it out.
I've dropped from 6,000 to 800 subscribers on my journal.
I had a 50-person publishing company that I had so that it could give me the million dollars it cost to start the first years of the journal and so on.
Absolutely been uphill and it continues to be uphill.
And the amazing thing about that, and again, this is part of what I wanted to, I know that it can be a lonely voice in the wilderness being the voice of reason, but I just wanted to applaud you for sticking with it because I think that the material that you produce is really incredibly thought-provoking.
It is unbelievably challenging to large numbers of people, to the vast majority of people.
And it's interesting because we actually have as a society continually talked about how children are precious and wonderful and should be loved.
But we resolutely, it seems, continually turn away from when we see children being mistreated.
Then we say that they're these precious creatures that we should love and respect and they're all portrayed as wonderful parents in the media.
But then when we see children being mistreated, very often people will just completely avoid it and make it a non-thing that they just won't talk about.
And I think that's part of where your work falls in.
Yeah, well, and it certainly is now fairly popular to publish the fact that 80 or 90% of the American and British and other, not so much some of the European countries, though, but the children are beaten regularly.
You know, they asked Tony Blair, you know, shouldn't you have something about not beating children?
Oh, no. He says, I hit my little one-year-old.
He says, how can you make him disciplined otherwise?
He doesn't talk yet.
So I walk down the street when I visit and give lectures at the institutes and so on in London, and I watch the streets, one city after another, different cities, and then I go to Austria and Vienna, I look at and so on.
And in Vienna, all the mothers, like in New York City, because we're kind of a part of Europe, The mothers and the fathers talk to the kids and kid around with them and laugh and, you know, what you see for your neighbors.
Perhaps where you live is the same.
And in London, they're all straight up and down.
Nobody smiles at their children.
The kids are so disciplined that walking down the street and through the shops, they're all totally straight up and down.
And I look at those kinds of things and it's revealing.
It really is. And the figures are still 80-90% of the kids in America and the United Kingdom are beaten regularly.
My father used to whack me with a razor strap, Shirley, and all my friends in Detroit, Michigan, where I grew up.
Well, when I was six, I was sent to a British boarding school where you were caned if you did things that were inappropriate.
And again, to me, it's completely shocking to look at it from, I mean, being a father myself now.
I mean, it's completely incomprehensible.
Can you imagine caning your beautiful little kid?
They're so helpless and they're so sweet.
Oh, brother.
Anyway, the message is across that there's a bunch of people out, and we have a couple hundred people who belong to our International Psycho-Historical Association, which you've got to come and see our next June convention.
I'll send you all stuff, right? And we have maybe 40 or 50 or 60 people giving papers of how it's still like in Eastern Europe where they're still swaddling.
Are you kidding? In Russia? They still swaddle!
I was struck by the conversation that you have or the chapter that you have, the chapter 9 on Christianity and its effect upon the bipolar aspects of the personality.
Of course, I'm not a psychologist. I'm just using these terms in an amateur sense and the degree to which that provokes the suicidality of wars.
And I was wondering if you'd had any thoughts, I'm sure you have, on the degree to which the more Christianized South, which tends to produce the majority of soldiers in America and also where hitting children seems to be more common than in other periods of the country, the degree to which some of the heavy Christianity slash child abuse culture that occurs in certain places in the United States may have had some effects on the prosecution of this war that nobody can understand, which is the Iraq invasion.
Oh, sure. One third of America is now fundamentalist Christian.
And I don't have to have my opinion on it.
They've got statistics that shows when you go out and you ask them, you know, what kind of childhood did you have?
How many times did your father hit you?
What kind of punishment did you have if you did this or that, the other thing, and so on?
And they're all beaten up like crazy still, and they believe in it.
And, of course, the fundamentalist Christians are the ones that are ready for war all the time.
America puts one half of all of the money around the world into military.
We've got one half of everybody's military.
That's pretty good. Right, and I think that it's, in America, it's sort of divided between those who are on the more secular side, whether they're agnostics or even mild believers, who simply can't understand the war and keep making up these reasons.
It's oil, it's, you know, Bin Laden or all this kind of...
It must be oil, because we were buying oil from Saad Alba at about $12 a barrel instead of $70.
Right, and of course they've produced barely any oil since the invasion five or six years ago.
It's obviously not oil.
Yeah, the people who are on the more religious side accept it as part of a sort of eschatological view of the world or the end times prophecy that is required.
They take it for granted and everybody else, like the First World War, which wiped out all of 19th century wealth, people simply can't understand it.
They try to come up with all these explanations that are like trying to fit these round pegs into square holes.
Geopolitical this or economics that or control of resources the other.
And it's all nonsense.
And this is what I've sort of found to be so fruitful in the work of the psychohistorians, yourself and of course others, is a way of looking at it that makes sense from a non-external materialistic standpoint but looks at it from sort of a depth psychology of where people are coming from and why they're doing these things that make no sense.
You get much more wealth from another country by trading with that country than by invading it.
So the argument from economics just never made any sense to me.
But I think the work that you guys are doing is really...
Challenging though it is, it is really opening up this way.
For the first time, academics are told to ask why.
Why means that you go to a motive.
We're the study of historical motivations.
They don't ask motives.
They say, why did Hitler, was he so popular?
Well, you know, if he'd have been shot before the war, we never would have had the war.
Just that one guy happened to, you know, there weren't dozens of them, hundreds of them, ready to do the same thing.
And anyway, you can't say why they're trying to imitate somebody else.
I have a little Thought experiment on that.
I'm walking down the street and I see a round racing track.
Cars are going at it, bumper to bumper, clockwise, okay?
And they're going around at 50 miles an hour.
And I'm looking and I say, wow, that's great.
All of a sudden they stop and go counterclockwise 50 miles an hour.
And I run up to the first guy in the first car and I say, what made you decide to turn it around the other direction?
And he says, oh, I don't have an engine in my car.
None of us do.
We're all being pushed.
So the answer, everybody else...
It's not an answer, is it?
Right. Well, and the fact that the most dictatorial regimes in the 20th century tended to arise from those countries that were the most heavily Christianized in Europe, which would be Russia and Germany and some of the other countries in Eastern Europe.
Again, that is something that people just kind of miss.
They just – they look for all of these other explanations other than the most obvious, which is that religiosity – I mean, as an atheist myself, religiosity is a false doctrine and therefore it has to be forcibly inflicted on children because children are very skeptical.
I mean, if I give my daughter a box with nothing in it and tell her there's a God in it, she doesn't believe me.
She's like, well, where's my present? Right?
So you have to be quite brutal with children to get them to believe things that aren't true.
Yes, indeed.
And that has an effect on the children's capacity to reason independently throughout the rest of their lives.
Anyway, there are people around doing it and we have them coming to our convention and we have them writing up the journal for now 37 years.
It's a new field, brand new way of looking at history and political science and so on.
There is actually a competitive group called the political science psychology group and they've got much more people and they're very successful and they get thousands of people coming to their conventions and they And so on.
But they never go into child-rearing.
They just assume that Germans, for instance, at a certain point, for no particular reason, were born hating Jews.
And it's in the genes. It must be in the genes, right?
Right. Beautiful little babies.
They don't hate Jews.
They don't want to kill people.
Oh, brother. Anyway.
I wanted to ask, if you don't mind, there is this thing in the physical sciences where people say that in order for a radical or unusual or challenging new theory to be adopted, the believers in the old theory kind of have to retire or die off or something like that, that there's a cycle that's more generational because it's very hard to teach old dogs new tricks, so to speak.
Do you think that it's sort of a generational thing that as a younger group of people – and it seems to me that younger people are much more psychologically sophisticated.
We know genetically that each generation gets more intelligent and they seem to be more sophisticated.
Yeah, I think so. Well, they've had better child rearing.
The progress comes essentially when you have a new group of mothers who are able to do better than their mother did with them.
Take a look.
My next chapter will do this.
I'll finish in probably six months or so.
I'll show that all through the Christian period, there was no increase in gross national product at all.
They had the same farms and the same No single horses pulling the plow and the same houses without any floors in them.
They didn't put any floors in them.
They didn't think they'd chop down a tree and put a floor in, so it'd be kind of clean.
No, they lived in the dirt for 1,500 years.
Then all of a sudden, somebody said, you know, girls should be given a little bit of education.
What? And that means the next generation of mothers had a little bit of self-respect, you know?
And maybe you shouldn't rape all the girls.
And maybe you shouldn't send them out to Wethersen and so on.
So immediately you look at the chart of the gross national product and it jumps!
It jumped straight up. The biggest jump took place in 1860 to 1880, before the World War.
The gross national product of the whole earth suddenly just blossomed.
But mainly what? In the 1820s and 10s and so on, there were women's movements.
That said, we deserve some respect.
And that's what we...
That's what we do out in Boulder, Colorado at the Community Parenting Center that was started by Bob McFarland because he read my work and said, I want to do away with war, so I better have a parenting center.
And he started the center there, and he taught the mothers how to mother and how they deserve respect and how the fathers should help them and not just leave them to that plus all the rest of the crap that they had to do in the place.
And within a decade or so, The number of people being thrown into jail went down.
And, of course, they are anti-war in that area.
So he's gone around.
He just died recently, but he has started some parenting centers in Eastern Europe and other places.
He wanted to start one in Palestine.
He didn't get to it yet, though.
If you want to change Palestine-Jewish relations, go help the parents and the kids.
I thought that your analysis of the martyr, the Palestinian martyr, was fantastic.
You have a cutoff.
I mean, it's not a cutoff, of course, but it's a sort of way you consider a significant change.
If I remember rightly, it's that you could not find any parents before the 17th century who would not currently be thrown in jail for child abuse in a moment.
Yeah, I said 18th century. 18th century, sorry.
But yeah, sure, there's not a one of them that wasn't at least beating the hell out of them with a stick.
The stick was hanging on the wall, and she could grab it at any time.
And that's why the motherland that goes to war, La Nation, Lady Liberty, and so on, each one of the nations have women goddesses that take you to war.
Every one of those goddesses, Marianne in France carries a stick, you know?
And even the Statue of Liberty, she's carrying something in her hand too, ready to whack you with it.
When it comes to this amazing transition in the 18th century, which, I mean, as part of the Enlightenment, produced this immense flowering of science and art and new forms of government that were much more benevolent, do you see, I mean, why do you think it was...
The 18th and not the 17th or the 19th century.
Do you think that there was any external force or was it just people with the exposure to greater access of printing presses and so on?
Did more benevolent people just start to speak out or was there some other influence that began to really change things around that century?
I think it just takes that long.
It took 15 centuries for Christianity to make some progress.
Away from the notion that God just is there to send you to hell.
And before the real scientific part and everything, you get to the Protestant Revolution that says, no, God really would like you to be nice to your kids.
And Luther would say, you know, I enjoy my son, and I help him a little bit, and I teach him a little bit.
On the other hand, it's not as good as they say because Luther is supposed to be, oh, really, nice to children.
Yeah, sure, he takes care of his son.
That means he beats him. And he's absolutely certain that God is up there trying to send his son and himself to hell.
My favorite thing about Luther is he sits down one day and he makes a list for six hours of all his sins that he ought to be tortured for in hell.
And he makes the whole list in his diary, and he puts it on his table, and he says, finally, God is accepting of me, because I've literally made a list of everything I've done wrong in my life.
And he walks away, and he goes down the street, and he says, I forgot one!
Right. I guess we can add OCD to the amateur psychology of remote Christian forefathers as well as manic depression.
Oh, yeah. No, and he was very much, you know, region must be crushed in order to bring you closer to God.
So there was some emotional affection towards children and I have an ancestor who was a philosopher and who also wrote quite affectionately towards his child but still had a great deal of trouble with non-martial forms of discipline.
That just seems to be the way that people think.
Well, you can't reason with a child and therefore you should hit one.
And the amazing thing is we never think about that with people who have dementia or people who are retarded or old people who forget where they have their keys or whatever it is.
We never beat those people up, even though we may not be able to reason with them.
But with children, it's somehow different.
And that, I think, the work that you do provides great insight as to why we have these different standards for people whose brains are not mature or whose brains are deficient in some manner.
You know, we don't do it to old people.
We have an inner alternate personality called a bad self, if you want to say it that way.
We've internalized this bad self and it's walking around with us in our head.
My favorite psychotherapist is out in California who has something called voice therapy.
And he says, here's how you do voice therapy.
You sit down and you say to the people, and he says, this isn't just your patients, this is your next door neighbor and your fellow therapist and so on.
You say, what do you think about when you go to bed at night?
And they say, well, you know, I think, oh, Jesus, God, I didn't do anything right today.
Absolutely. You know, I should have helped my wife on this, but I'm so selfish.
I didn't finish everything in my work and so on.
And they say, okay, now, wait a minute.
Take the I, the first person, and put it into a second person and re-say exactly what you just said.
And they say, Oh, well, you are very selfish.
You haven't done this.
You haven't done that. And immediately they see themselves, feel themselves to be back in their bedroom with their mother saying, you are so selfish.
How come you don't help me?
You never think of anything but yourself.
Right. And that, he says, it's astonishing.
It's called voice therapy.
And he started out voice therapy by working mainly with suicidal patients.
And we've got this alternate personality in our head that keeps yelling at ourselves, our own bad self.
And eventually, if we get too much of that, we say, oh, look, we've got to find a bad self abroad to punish.
I can't just keep yelling at myself.
I've got to yell at Jews or I've got to yell at Iraqis or I've got to yell at somebody else, anything else.
Yeah, there is that feeling that some people have that I will gain power over the anxiety of having been abused by becoming an abuser, by inhabiting the skin of the person who had the most power.
And that is to deny, I guess, what Jung would call the shadow or Freud would call to some degree the id.
Rather than confronting that dark side of ourselves, we instead become the abuser and that gives us relief from that But I don't even think it's instinctual.
You know, I don't see anything in a four-day-old baby that claims himself or has an instinct for violence or for screwing his mother.
No, in fact, the amazing thing about, and I know that you're a parent too, but the amazing thing about seeing my daughter is the degree to which she does not self-criticize at all.
When she tries something and fails, she simply tries again.
She doesn't get upset.
She doesn't get angry. She doesn't hit herself and say, oh, I'm so stupid or whatever.
She just keeps trying again with this completely glorious and unconscious persistence.
And I think that is her natural state.
I think you're right that the shadow, you have to erect a bad, ugly statue to get that kind of shadow.
I don't think it's an To reach it, you have to go through 40 centuries of parent-child evolution.
So what I am is carrying Darwin one step further.
I go beyond the essentially Darwinian notions that Freud and Jung and others had of inheriting bad stuff.
And say, no, you don't inherit it.
You just start out fresh each time.
And you can see that.
You've got people in parts of aborigine Australia who are still eating each other, right?
And beating up the kids and doing all kinds of horrible things.
So there's people from the city who have had an extra 20 centuries of parent-child evolution Go in and they grab the next bunch of 200 babies and take them into their home.
None of them are more violent than the rest of them.
The Aborigines are still collecting heads and eating each other.
It's just simply the childbearing.
Simple as that, but it takes that long to pile on.
Mother after good mother after better mother after mother who tries to innovate.
No, I think you're right.
I mean, the metaphor that has always sprung to my mind is if you looked at the feet of women in the 19th century in China, you'd say, you know, as adults, you'd say, well, they have really weird feet.
They're all curled in under themselves and so on.
And you wouldn't say, well, what did the parents do to them to make that happen?
And if you miss that, then you completely misunderstand the whole culture and what it does.
Do you know, by the way, why they did that?
I think, if I remember rightly, it was something to do with the sexual gratification.
Right! They masturbate themselves inside the foot arch.
I guess because they were that afraid of the vagina.
Is that the idea? Oh, yeah.
Oh, my God. You know, vaginas are like a menstrual fluid that's poisonous.
They have teeth. Vagina dentata.
Absolutely. It's terrifying for men.
I was wondering just – and I wanted to just ask you – I don't want to take up your whole day because I really want you to keep working on these chapters.
You have – you touched on it and I'm sure you've done more than touch on it but all that I've read is the degree to which you talk about – Africa, for instance, obviously, is a great challenge to empathetic people throughout the world because after trillions of dollars and 50 years of Western aid, it's as bad if not worse as it was before.
I'd like if you could expand on it for a few minutes, the degree to which the wars that are fought in Africa are not about economic gain because when they kill people, they will castrate them on things which have no economic purpose and must be some sort of horrible reenactment of early abuse.
I wonder if you could touch a little bit on how the discipline that you work with can work or explain the phenomenon of the continual degradations in Africa.
Yeah, well, the child abuse and neglect, neglect even more than abuse, because if you just don't pay any attention to the child, the front part of their brain, when you put a PET scan on, a CAT scan on, the doctor says it looks like a black hole.
There's nothing there. There's no precortex.
And that's what controls your amygdala fear center and your amygdala violence.
So the front part of your brain… Sorry, just for the listeners who aren't more familiar, if you could just touch on those because I think those are particularly fascinating aspects and I wouldn't assume that people know if you could just touch on those a little bit more.
The front part of the brain being not in control because it's damaged and it's got far too many...
and the amygdalas just goes straight through.
Any of us can get angry at something, but if you haven't got a forebrain to control that anger, then you go out not only and kill people, but rape.
Why are wars full of rape?
Do you ever think of that? You know, people who say that war has something to do with violence.
But rape, you know, virtually every war, the soldiers go around raping one person after another.
That's part of the purpose of them getting drunk and getting into the army.
And, of course, if you look at what happened at Abu Ghraib, I mean, this sexual humiliation of the prisoners had nothing to do with oil or anything like that.
Yeah, well, it doesn't.
Look, I have just finished, because I'm writing my chapter on nationalism, I've just finished a whole bunch of stuff on sovereignty and nationalism.
And every one of them tries to figure out, you know, what is this sovereignty business, you know?
Gee whiz. You hate the out-group and you love the in-group and you consider them, you know, part of you and so on.
There must be because of, and then they guess at it, because of the language, because of the religion, because of this or the other, the other, the other.
But then they don't look at the ones nowadays where Nations who live next door to each other, whether it's Yugoslavia or someplace in Africa, where they've been living next door to each other for five centuries, and then all of a sudden they say, oh my gosh, I forgot we were supposed to be an enemy of them because something happened in 1304.
Obviously, they're just looking for an excuse.
And what's happening is that in the brain, there is a particular part of the brain that's called mirror neurons that actually have some empathy, the ability to have empathy.
And the mirror neurons are just turned off, and you have no empathy at all for your next-door neighbor who, you know, you Right.
And you ask them, why did you go to war?
And I swear, some of them say, because the guy across the street wears a different kind of tie or has a different kind of flag or a different kind of something or other.
But it's just an excuse.
Something is happening inside your brain that makes part of your group seem to be an enemy.
Right, so the amygdala and fear network is, if you get a lot of early trauma, you have a very heightened fight-or-flight mechanism and if you don't have the frontal cortex to suppress or control or defer the gratification, you will act out, you have impulse control problems and you won't be able to have the kind of empathy that results in a more peaceful world.
Precisely. Right, okay.
And this is obviously, I think, quite a big tragic set of parenting standards in Africa that produces these, you know, completely ghastly countries and the Rwandan genocides and so on.
I think that's the theory that the parenting is just so...
Sure, but the women there have to take care of the herd of cattle and pick up the corn and whatever it else is that they're eating and cook it and do all the rest of the work.
They haven't got time for kids.
And as you know, Christian children didn't even get brought up by their parents.
They got sent off the wet nurse because the mother's blood was made out of poison.
Right. Yeah, this is the idea that the mother's milk comes from the menstrual blood.
This is a medieval idea, that it was sort of poisonous to the children.
I mean, again, that's a powerful metaphor that probably has some strong unconscious roots, but it would cause the mothers to want to send their kids away, right?
Yep. So they didn't bring them.
By the time they come home at three or four years old, they send them right out to servants.
And apprentices, and they're raked.
Right, right.
And the degree to which the sexual predation upon children is still occurring, I think the statistics were something like a third of men and over half of women report having been sexually molested or abused as children.
That, of course, is a statistic that is really, really tough.
I mean, because if you really absorb that statistic, you know, you walk into a bus and you look around and you think of all of these people with these tragic histories, it is really all around us and it's something that's so hard for people to remember to focus on.
It's like they wish those statistics had never entered their heads because you really- We can do something about it.
And when I was in Austria, I found out that 30 years ago they passed a law that said you can't hit your kids.
And they passed a law that said that every mother has three years worth of paid leave for every child that she has so that she can take care of it for three years decently.
Paid by the government, not paid by the corporation.
So they suddenly have totally changed From being probably one of the most violent nations, the Austria-Hungary nation would start a war every ten years, you know.
But now they don't.
They're part of the European Union.
And I just finished in the journal, you might have read it, a book called Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?
And no one wants to be a soldier in Austria.
Right. When you mentioned this, it just struck me that – I mean I grew up in England and there was a lot of worship of the Second World War.
And my brother and I, we would play with guns and pretend to be fighter pilots and all that.
And it was a very martial culture that was very proud of its murderous genocides in the war.
And my mother was – well, she is German.
And when we would have cousins come over from Germany, they actually would not – they were not allowed to play with guns.
And they didn't even look wistfully.
They're just like, no, we don't play with guns.
Obviously, this was the post-war experience.
And if you look, and again, I'm not saying this is causal, but it's an interesting correlation that if you look down the road, come early 21st century, it is England that goes to war in Iraq and Germany that refuses.
Yep, precisely.
It is those little details that result in these very large wars.
It's fascinating. Yep, and you don't find any German anti-Semitism anymore.
What? My God!
Germany? Right, right.
And they don't let them hit them in the schools.
Right. Yeah, because that was when I was a kid.
That was still going on. That went on, I think, up until the early 80s in Canada.
So it is amazing the degree to which we are willing to extend protection to children while at the same time denying the effects of that lack of protection.
It really is a weird kind of double thing that goes on in society that I think is the great cost of social acceptance of the work that you're doing, which is quite tragic, I think.
Yeah. Again, we take the progress as a species wherever we can get it, and I think we should at least be happy that even if people can't look at the effects of child abuse very directly, that they are still working towards a less abusive future and present for the children, which I think is just fantastic.
Yeah, the abuse statistics are going down, even in America and the United Kingdom, and certainly in Canada.
They're below the United States right now.
But the European Union groups say, you know what?
We don't even need a president of the European community.
We don't need presidents. That means that they're totally in charge of you and they can send you to war.
No, no, we don't do that.
All the doctors in one European Union country cooperate with the doctors in the other one but don't have anybody over them.
That's called networking rather than hierarchy.
Well, sure, and if we remove the hierarchical aggression of parenting, or at least reduce it, I think for sure we will end up with a general flattening of society.
If we raise children to be skeptical of authority, to question authority, and to view themselves as equal though younger participants within society, then it seems hard to imagine that's a sort of house of cards that is a sort of current hierarchical system of control and authority, you know, with prisons and wars.
It's hard to imagine how that can sustain itself.
There's a guy here called Gilligan who's a psychiatrist who's a prison psychiatrist.
He went from one prison to the other and said, do you know, I am yet to meet one single person who was in prison who didn't say that he was beaten up, burned, and all kinds of horrible things in his child rearing, and who said to me, you know, I only feel that I had some respect when I got a gun in my hand.
So he went to the one place that he was mainly in charge of and he said, you know what?
Let me take over this prison.
And they did for a few years.
They gave him some extra money and he said, okay, now everybody is now a student.
You are not going to be locked in humiliating chambers.
You're going to go to college and high school if you haven't gone to high school.
And he went through and he gave them all a profession.
And do you know the 70% repeat rate of offense?
Yeah, the rate of coming back.
What's the word I'm looking for?
You know, it's recidivism or something.
I can't quite pronounce it in my head, but yeah, the rate of repeat offense.
Yeah, the repeat offense went down to zero.
Not one was coming back.
Zero? Wow. Zero. Can you imagine that?
Wow. Can you imagine that we could just empty out all of those expensive – it costs about $100,000 a year to keep a person in jail?
It's easier to put them to college and give them a career.
Since it was confinement and abuse that led them to prison, a continuation of confinement and abuse is just sowing the seeds of repeat offense, right?
That is the great tragedy of those kinds of solutions.
And so we talk of a world without war, but of course, if we can get parents to treat their children with the dignity and respect that all children deserve, we could actually have a world without crime other than some people who have mental illnesses.
And that is something that is very hard for people to understand and to focus upon the parent-child interactions as the source of progress and peace in the world is something that is really, really tough for people to wrap their heads around.
They keep running after these massive economic answers somewhere.
Well, it may be the fates telling us to wrap it up so that you can get back to work on your book.
I really wanted to thank you for taking the time to chat with me today.
It is always a pleasure and an enlightenment to chat with you, and I will be sure to send as many more people as I can to your website.
Okay, I just wanted to say thank you.
I think we'll have to bail because we're having some strange technical difficulties.
All right. Well, listen, I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time to chat.
I wish you the very best with the book.
▲
Export Selection