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Feb. 9, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

12:41

1579 The Catcher in the Rye - The Freedomain Radio Review

What JD Salinger was trying to tell us, and why he became a recluse when we did not listen. Oh, and why the book is so popular among assassins.

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope you're doing well. This is a brief overview of A Catcher in the Rye.
	And JD Salinger died quite recently.
	And I think that the book is very, very important.
	And I think the book is very clear.
	And lots of people have written quite a lot about the themes in the novel.
	But I will tell you the evidence that I think is abundantly clear.
	in the book and what the book is really about and also why it is featured so prominently in assassinations such as the assassination of John Lennon and the assassination of Ronald Reagan and others.
	So to me, and I think with good reason, the book is very simply about the aftereffects of sexual abuse on a child, the aftereffects going into adolescence.
	And this is not an interpretation.
	This is very clearly stated in the book by Holton Caulfield, the protagonist.
	And I will just give you a few reasons as to why I think that is the case.
	So he has a teacher he goes to visit in the book called Mr.
	Antolini. And Mr.
	Antolini, his wife, is much older than he is, unattractive, and has a lot of money.
	The two do kiss in public, Mr.
	Antolini and his wife, but they're never in the same room together.
	And although married to a woman, Mr.
	Antolini is...
	There are indications that he's gay.
	Now, Miss Antolini calls Holden Caulfield handsome before he heads off to bed and then sits next to him in the dark while Holden is sleeping and pets his head.
	And when Holden Caulfield wakes up very suddenly, he pretends that things are casual, but he lets slip that he says, I'm simply sitting here admiring, right?
	Admiring Holden Caulfield.
	That is a creepy thing to do to a student who's sleeping in your house.
	Sounds like he's attracted.
	And when he's caught and accused by Holden of some creepy stuff in the night, Mr.
	Antolini tries to shift the focus to Holden, accusing him of being a very, very strange boy, which of course is the classic defense of creeps like this.
	And Mr.
	Mr. Antolini hangs with Holden's parents, and that gives you some indication of the moral qualities of Holden's parents, which are not discussed much in the book.
	And what Holden Caulfield says after he's woken up with Mr. Antolini, Antolini stroking his forehead and admiring his physical beauty...
	He says, when something perverty like that happens, I start sweating like a bastard.
	That kind of stuff's happened to me about 20 times since I was a kid.
	All right? So, he goes to a mentor for help and for comfort.
	He gets some fairly interesting, not-too-bad advice.
	He goes to sleep and he wakes up with the guy creepily stroking his forehead and admiring him after calling him handsome and appearing to be in a marriage of convenience.
	And when he calls out Mr.
	Antolini on this creepy behavior, Mr.
	Antolini does not say, I'm really sorry, that must have been very frightening for you, but instead attacks him, calling him a very, very strange boy.
	It's a fundamental betrayal, which completely destroys his credibility as a mentor earlier on.
	Holden Caulfield says, I'm going to repeat it because I don't know why people have a tough time.
	Well, I guess I do know why they have a tough time not seeing this.
	I have a tough time seeing this. Mr.
	Holden Caulfield says, when something perverted like that happens, I start sweating like a bastard.
	That kind of stuff has happened to me about 20 times since I was a kid.
	Sweating like a bastard.
	This is a low-level physiological response.
	The body doesn't lie, right?
	So his body goes into fight-or-flight mechanism when he is being fondled, the head is being fondled at night.
	And then there's his friend Jane, who doesn't appear in the novel, but he reminisces about.
	He was playing checkers with Jane, he reminisces about this.
	Jane's stepfather comes and asks if there are any cigarettes, and Jane refuses to answer him or look him in the face.
	And after her stepfather left, Jane started crying.
	Holden, trying to comfort her, kissed her everywhere on the face, but Jane would not Let him kiss her on the mouth.
	And Holden also reminisces later that Jane's booze hound stepfather used to run around the house naked.
	He also tries to protect his young sister from the word fuck.
	So we could go into the symbology quite a bit of the book, but it's very clear in the text itself that Holden Caulfield is suffering from the physiological effects, after effects of sexual abuse.
	It's in his body.
	It's not just a memory in his head.
	It's in his body. He starts sweating profusely.
	It is an involuntary neurological response to a nighttime fondling by a man.
	And he gets into a fight with Stradlater, I think his name is, at the beginning of the book because Stradlater has been on a date with Jane and Caulfield remembers that her creepy stepfather used to run around drunken and naked in the house and that his daughter was clearly terrified of him and burst into tears after he left the room and wouldn't even look him in the face and Holden then kisses her everywhere but on the lips.
	Holden Caulfield has a creepy run-in with a prostitute and her pimp And the relationship between prostitution and childhood sexual abuse, both for the prostitutes and for those who visit them, is well documented, extensive, and very, very clear.
	And again, you could go more and more into the book to see how these themes are playing out.
	And it takes a lot of work to me to miss what the author is very clearly stating.
	It's not even hinted. It's very clearly stated, both physiologically and verbally, that Halton Caulfield has been the victim of childhood sexual abuse.
	And yet people want to talk about alienation and a refusal to grow up.
	In other words, they want to do what Mr.
	Antolini does, which is to blame Halton Caulfield for the abuse that he suffered.
	Recast his violations by his caregivers or someone, recast those as personal failings, you know, that he's immature, that he doesn't want to grow up, that he's lost in the past, which is to blame the victim of abuse for the results of that victimization.
	And I think that is very tragic and that is very sad.
	And so why is it that a lot of people who've turned to murder find this book so compelling?
	Well, to me, the book is a very clear statement that sexual abuse is widespread within society, the sexual abuse of children.
	And if you look up the statistics, you can look at them in my Bomb and the Brain series.
	If you look up the statistics, it is really chilling how widespread the sexual abuse of children is.
	And the reason that Holden Caulfield finds the world so phony...
	It's because everybody is acting like this is not occurring and everybody is blaming the victim, right?
	So he's constantly told by figures of authority that he's very strange, that he's lazy, that he won't concentrate, that he's lacking focus.
	So they're all blaming him.
	For the physiological results.
	And the self-medication, including the alcoholism or the drinking that he goes through throughout the book, is very clearly correlated with childhood sexual abuse.
	It's not saying everyone who's an alcoholic was abused as a child, but many of those, most of those who are sexually abused as children turn to various forms of self-medication, of which alcoholism is one.
	And I will refer you to the Bomb and the Brain series.
	And so why does he find the world so phony?
	He finds the world so phony because the sexual abuse is going on in society.
	It's all around within society.
	And nobody talks about it.
	And everybody blames the victim.
	And in blaming the victim, they are indirectly acknowledging that the abuse is occurring.
	And that is absolutely awful.
	That is absolutely terrible.
	I have a general theory.
	I'm not saying there's any proof for it, but I have a general theory.
	Of the three major kinds of abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse, it is the verbal abusers who become political leaders, right?
	Because politics is fundamentally verbal abuse, just as the mainstream media is verbal abuse.
	And business leaders rely on verbal intimidation and abuse.
	A lot, not all, but quite a lot.
	And those who are physically abused become the workers, right?
	They become the drones because they're terrified of authority, their spirits have been broken, and they become good cubicle dwelling or factory lined up employees.
	While those who are sexually abused will often become the criminal class, which is used by the ruling class to frighten those who've been physically abused into surrendering their power to the ruling class, right?
	So the verbal abusers employ The physically abused and use the sexual abuse victims as criminals.
	The whole structure of society, in many ways, the hierarchy of society, the statism of society, is predicated both on the existence of and the denial of childhood abuse.
	That children are abused is foundational to having a hierarchy.
	If you don't abuse children, they won't grow up to feel that they need protectors, they won't grow up to be terrified of others and of themselves, and to be uncertain in the face of authority and deferential and meek and all of the proletariat Slave, self-medicating, dissociative tendencies that we see in any hierarchical society, which is to say almost all societies.
	So the prevalence of childhood abuse and the constant blaming of the victim for childhood abuse is how the hierarchies within our societies actually function.
	If you don't harm children, if you don't frighten and bully and rape children, then they will not grow up to fit neatly into a hierarchy.
	This is how hierarchies replicate themselves.
	And we understand this very clearly in terms of religion, right?
	That you have to get children early to get them to believe in your particular local superstitious gods.
	And if you don't get them early, then it just will never take.
	And the same thing is true in society.
	If you want to look at why society is the way it is, you have to look at how society treats children.
	And so the antidote that I have been applying whenever this topic comes up in my show, the antidote that I have been applying, and it's a very simple, very powerful, and somewhat unsettling antidote, is that there are two things that are required to help people begin the process of healing themselves from being traumatized as children.
	The first is that they need moral clarity about the immorality of having been abused.
	So the moral responsibility needs to be placed directly on the caregivers or the parents or whoever it was who abused them, that the moral responsibility and the evil and immorality of the abuse needs to be very, very clearly defined to avoid blaming the victim, to avoid blaming the victims of child abuse.
	for the inevitable results that accrue physiologically and mentally from that abuse.
	You don't want to blame the victims and therefore you have to put the moral responsibility on the parents.
	So a clear delineation of moral responsibility is fundamentally required to help people begin the process of healing.
	And the process of healing has nothing to do with just these two things that I'm talking about fundamentally, but hopefully we'll get people into the office of a competent therapist who will help them work further Down this path, but at least to get them to understand that it's a problem that needs fixing.
	Moral clarity and deep sympathy.
	So what happened to you was utterly immoral and evil, and I have enormous, enormous and deep sympathy for what occurred for you.
	These two things in combination, to me, have been very powerful.
	in helping people to understand and overcome the victimization that they have experienced and that is the only way to undo hierarchies fundamentally is to build the confidence and self-esteem of people who've been victimized so that when they look at things like the state or things like the church or any number of churches really That they will look at that and they will say, I do not need to fit myself into a hierarchy because I have overcome the traumas and terrors of my history.
	And therefore I'm not going to be frightened by the ghosts and gremlins of a predatory class.
	I'm not going to run into the arms of a ruling class for protection.
	I'm not going to be terrified in the face of authority or attack or criticism.
	I am going to stand.

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