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March 14, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:56
1612 God, the State and the Family - Sibling Abuse Part One

A family and political analysis of sibling abuse.

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Hey, how's it going? And so, my friends, we do approach the final frontier of knowledge that I am at.
Oh, these years have been very exciting.
And the final frontier of knowledge that I have is the introduction of the last element of the family-state-God connection, which you can't understand why society is the way it is without understanding that it is An echoed, exaggerated, distorted, and abusive reflection of the original family system.
And the one thing which we've only touched on tangentially and briefly, but which forms the core of a democratic statist mindset, is the question, or rather the problem, of siblings.
So this is going to be a theory section.
The facts will come afterwards.
Sibling relationships are incredibly formative, in many ways more formative than parental relations, because they last your whole lifetime.
Plus, if you come from an abusive family, you were both victims once, right?
If you were the youngest sibling, you may not remember seeing too, too much of the elder sibling's original victimization.
In fact, of course, you wouldn't have been there for any of it.
But it is not a simple relationship to unravel if you have problems with your siblings.
I can tell you that. It's much more complicated for me with my sibling than with my mother or either of my parents.
Because with parents, it's pretty clear.
They're the adults. They're the responsible ones.
They're in charge. They're in control. But with siblings, it's much more complicated because while it's hard to make the argument that a child is innately immoral or anything like that, in fact, I'd say it's impossible to make the argument, children do still do things that by their own standards are wrong or bad.
In other words, they don't do them in public.
They hide them and kick under the table and so on.
And so, for me, morality is...
Not defined particularly by age, although there is a transition point where people just are morally responsible with a minimum of cognitive faculties.
They just are morally responsible whether they like it or not.
But siblings, elder siblings in particular, can do immoral things given the size and power disparity.
And they themselves know that it's immoral because they hide it.
And they also know that it's immoral because if you do it back to them, they're appalled and upset and get even angrier, right?
So if you tease them back or if you hit them back or whatever, then they get upset or whatever, right?
So there's an immorality in there.
Of course, the dysfunction flows from the parents to the siblings, down through the siblings, but we can't understand how the state is in effect of the family, and how society is in effect of the family.
We can't understand that without taking into account sibling relationships.
So, the facts are pretty staggering and fairly appalling.
More than half of sibling relationships are classified as abusive.
More than half of sibling relationships are classified as abusive, and we're not imagining that that butterfly net catches all the evil butterflies in the field, right?
So, it's probably much more than that, but sibling abuse is more common than parent-child abuse, according to these statistics.
And its effects can be really long-lasting.
So if you are a younger sibling who has had trouble competing or has never been able to successfully compete with an older sibling, it has lifelong effects sans intervention on your self-esteem.
And you can, in fact, have a markedly lower ability to, for instance, go for a promotion if you grew up in this sort of environment.
There are some markers or predictors for sibling abuse, and we'll get into more detail on this in the next class, but there are some markers or predictors of sibling abuse.
Of course, if the other sibling was himself or herself abused, if the sibling witnesses abuse.
If the sibling is given excessive parenting duties or caretaking duties to a younger sibling, if that younger sibling is perceived as A favourite?
If there is a lot of unexpressed or unexpressible anger towards the mother, it is very often taken out on the younger sibling.
And if the elder sibling usually has recently lost a father through divorce or death or whatever, and these other things are present, then it's fairly certain that some form of abuse is going to occur.
So there are some predictors and markers, which does not mean that the child who is abusing is not responsible in any way, shape or form.
It just means that there are factors that are there.
I'm not going to talk about sibling sexual abuse.
It's, you know, shockingly common, which means that it's not prevalent, but it's more common than most people would imagine.
I didn't suffer from that, and if you did and you'd like to talk about it, I'm certainly happy to listen if you think it would be of help, but I'm not going to talk about that.
that it's not something that I have any expertise or knowledge of.
So, the short message of this podcast is that our feelings towards siblings get translated, like our feelings towards our the short message of this podcast is that our feelings towards siblings get translated, like our feelings towards our But our feelings towards our siblings get translated into our feelings towards corporations.
For reasons that I will get into.
Now, the challenge of siblings is that most sibling abuse occurs within close proximity to the parent.
And I think that's an important thing to understand.
That it's not just...
Like, parents may say that they wish to control the behavior of other siblings, of the siblings, and the parents may say that they wish For a peaceful resolution, but 70% of, sort of quote, conflict resolutions in families is violent.
70% of conflict resolutions in families are violent, and 30% of the conflicts between parents are resolved violently, are in 30% of the families.
And that is something that is very, very important to understand.
If we want to understand why people have a knee-jerk reaction to use force to resolve conflicts in the form of the state, we have to understand that the majority of families use force to resolve conflicts, violence, threats, intimidation, control.
The vast majority of families use threats and violence to resolve disputes.
So, of course, when we're looking at society and we say how should disputes be resolved, of course we're looking for violence to resolve the disputes because that's what we're seeing.
And, of course, that's what we see in schools and in terms of emotional abuse, that's what we see.
And, of course, sometimes physical or sexual abuse, we see that in churches.
So people grow up, 70% of families, and again, I'm guessing it's a hell of a lot higher than that.
This is just what's admitted. But 70% of families regularly use violence to resolve disputes.
And people grow up with a lot of violence from siblings.
35% of siblings are assaulted by other siblings every year.
Every year, 35% of siblings are assaulted.
Not just teased or attacked or verbally abused or whatever, but physically assaulted.
If it wasn't a sibling, it would be called physical assault.
By other siblings every year.
That's not 35% of a total.
That's 35% every year.
So, it's a pretty wide range.
So, children grow up in violent systems, in violence-based systems within the family.
And this is not explicit and overt abuse.
This is just how families resolve disputes using violence.
70% parent to child, 30% parent to parent.
So, we grow up in these violent systems.
That is the reality of the life that we lead when we're children.
So, when we grow up and look at society and we try to figure out, we're faced with the challenges of resolving disputes within society.
Empirically, it's unimaginable that we wouldn't use violence to resolve these disputes, that we would not have a central and coercive authority figure who would inflict violence in order to resolve disputes.
It's unimaginable.
It wouldn't make any sense whatsoever.
A saying for most people who grow up In these violence-based family systems, saying to them we should have a violence-free society is like saying human beings should breathe water and drink gravel.
It's just like, what? It's completely outside the realm of their experience.
And so the prevalence and use of violence within family systems to resolve disputes directly translates into a complete inability to think of anything other than violence as the way of resolving disputes.
I mean, think of how much gets shattered and broken in a family system and for a child when violence is used to resolve disputes.
Just think of it. It's staggering.
Because it's not just the presence of violence that is so bad and the inevitable mental and sometimes physical scar tissue that...
Results from that. It's not just the presence of violence.
In economics, remember, we're always taught to look for the hidden losses.
Not the visible gains, but the hidden losses.
So, when children grow up in these overwhelmingly prevalent systems of violence, what is What is cost?
What does it cost them to have the vast majority of their disputes resolved through violence or aggression or force?
Well, we've seen the physical effects on the brain of this kind of stuff.
And this is why I say parenting is really bad.
It's better than it was 100 years ago, but it's really bad, right?
And we're just talking about North America across the world.
That would be much, much, much, much different.
It would be even worse, right?
And what is the cost?
Well, children, when their disputes are resolved through violence, they don't learn how to negotiate.
They don't learn how to assert themselves.
They don't learn how to reason with others.
They don't learn how to negotiate differences of opinion and desire.
This is why we can't have a free society right now.
Human beings aren't remotely ready for it.
I mean, the people who say, well, if you have a free society, you will immediately get dissolution into chaos and violence.
Logically, they're not right in terms of how a free society will function.
But I'm not going to tell you that they're far off the market as it stands, because human beings are raised in these violent systems called families.
And so they really haven't developed the skill set that would be necessary to function in a free society.
Do you see? Do you understand? They can't function in a free society as yet because they've been raised in these violent systems.
Only when human beings have not been raised in these violent systems will there be.
Any real possibility of a free society?
And will there be any possibility of a sustainable free society?
If we snapped our fingers and made the world free tomorrow, people's growth anxiety would kick in and they would just become, I think, pretty hysterical and dysfunctional.
It just wouldn't work.
Sorry to continue. In the gym.
Oh, look at that background music.
And... Yeah, so people need to be raised in non-violent systems to even really emotionally conceive of the value of non-violence.
And people can believe That non-violence can be used to solve problems because they very rarely see non-violence being used to solve problems.
I don't just mean sort of punching and hitting and this and that.
I mean non-violence like the non-aggressive use of authority, non-abusive warning stares from teachers and priests, right?
Reasoning, curiosity, empathy, respect for children's thoughts and wishes.
How often do you see that when you're growing up?
How often did you see that when you were growing up?
A child's thoughts, perspectives and beliefs being taken seriously.
A child not being disrespected or diminished or controlled with explicit or implicit threats.
I mean, in my view, you know, just threatening a child with failing without any attempt to understand, like in school, is abusive.
It's just a threat of, we're going to fail you, you're going to hold you back a year, you're not going to get to see your friends, you're going to stay in school forever.
It's all just abusive. It's not how a free society would work in terms of educating children.
There would be curiosity as to why the child was not failing with the recognition that children are born wanting to succeed and wanting to do well in the world and in their lives.
My daughter struggles to master everything.
She loves it. When she gets something right, she's thrilled.
First thing she does in the morning is list off all the words she knows.
Last thing she does at night is list off all the words she knows.
So... How often did you see non-aggressive, positive, empathetic, virtuous treatment of children when you were growing up?
I can remember, up until my 20s, a handful of incidents.
And the people who did those handful of incidents, I think, were to be eternally praised, but it was incredibly rare.
For most people, to say we should have a non-violent society is to say we don't need blinds because every now and then there are eclipses.
Yeah, they happen, but it's not often enough to turn the lights down when you need.
So, the prevalence of control, of aggression, of manipulation, of the exercise of brute power The amount that children experience is the vast majority of what children experience is the resolution of conflicts, of problems, of difficulties, of challenges through the imposition of force, aggression, and power.
Violence and abuse is the essence of problem solving for children.
This is what we experience.
This is our lives. And so when people say, you can't possibly have a free society, you can't possibly have a non-violent society, well, in a way, they're kind of right, because they've never seen anything else.
And so I think it's really, really important to understand that.
You're talking to people...
Who just have not experienced peaceful and voluntaristic interactions as a way of solving problems.
Or if they have, it's very, very rare.
Or they've seen it on TV, but, you know, you also see Klingons on TV. That doesn't mean that you're looking for one as a best friend, right?
So, I just sort of wanted to point that out, that, you know, sibling violence, parental violence, violence between parents, violence in schools, from the exercise of power and control and bullying and so on, I mean, this is all that people really know.
And so, when it comes to how should we deal with global warming, how should we deal with problems of crime, how should we deal with educating the poor or healing the sick or taking care of the old, well, they don't have a language other than violence that they speak.
You're breaking into fluent Mandarin when you start talking about freedom.
It's just gibberish. It doesn't make any sense.
Now, that's at one level.
At another level, they totally get it.
Because we all deep down remember that we should have been treated with respect and curiosity and empathy, not with aggression control and violence and brutality.
And so, it's very threatening, right, when you say...
Because when people talk about society, they're just talking about their own families, right?
So when you're saying we should have a society not founded on violence because violence is immoral, what people hear is, my parents were immoral.
My parents and my teachers, my society, my extended family, my church, my community, my group, my tribe, my culture, everyone is immoral.
And they're pretty right in many ways.
I mean, not so much for the exercise of power, but for the claim of virtue for the exercise of power.
That is what it is.
And even the cutting edge of parenting.
Time-outs are still the exercise of power, and they are an attempt to manage an effect, not manage a cause.
So the effect is that the child is aggressive, and you manage that effect with a time-out.
Time-outs are much, much better than hitting, in the same way that incarceration is better than torture for the same time period.
But I'm less of a fan of this as a solution.
I haven't hit the defiant phase of Isabella, so I'm putting this forward as a conclusion.
I believe that I would be able to parent without time-outs and without the use of force and power in anything other than situations of physical threat.
So we shall see how that goes.
But even the cutting edge of parenting is really around the exercise of power and authority, not curiosity and empathy.
So, given that people don't have an experience of a non-violent society, when you say society should be Society should be run on a non-violent basis.
I mean, people generally and genuinely have no idea what the hell you're talking about.
Because we generally assume, sorry to use the word generally so much, but we assume that more serious problems need stricter measures, right?
Need more serious measures, right?
So if your toenail is too long, you clip off your toenail, right?
If your toe becomes necrotic, if it becomes gangrenous, then you cut off your toe.
And if your leg becomes It gets attacked by that fleshing disease and becomes gangrenous, then you cut off your leg, right?
So the more extreme the threat, the escalation of cutting is proportional, right?
So if...
And this is what's so counterintuitive about a free society, right?
So if aggression and violence is used to manage and control the behavior of children when it comes to things like, you know, throwing toys or pushing or those kinds of things, if we use aggression and violence against children for these minor small things, then how could it conceivably be possible that we wouldn't use even more violence and aggression against criminals?
Right? Against people who don't pay their taxes, against people who are, you know, robbing the poor of an education and the old of sustenance and the sick of health care and so on, right?
How could that be?
Like, how could you use violence and aggression against children for these relatively minor things and then not use it for far more serious and egregious violations of morality such as occur from a criminal?
I mean, that makes no sense to people at all.
There's something saying you should push harder when you're going up a slight hill, and then you should hit the gas in reverse when you're going up a very steep hill.
What are you talking about?
If you have to hit the gas to go up a small hill, then you have to hit the gas even harder to go up a big hill.
How could it be otherwise? So I just wanted to...
I just wanted to point that out.
This is where people are coming from, and unless you understand the degree to which aggression is used to control children, then you really can't understand Why it is that people simply look to the state, look to violence, look to aggression, to solve every problem that they can think of.
There's no other language that they can talk about at all.
They have no other context.
They have no other reference points.
Anyway, sorry, I think he understands.
I'm going to plug the dead horse into atoms.
So I think that's really, really important to understand.
We've talked a lot about parents, and we need to talk about siblings.
Again, this is all just my thoughts and opinions, right?
So, this is nothing to take to the bank, right?
This is just my perspectives and thoughts and opinions on processing this stuff over the past 25 years.
A sibling abuse cannot occur without the explicit or implicit approval of the parent.
The cycle of violence is the parent pounds on the elder sibling, the elder sibling pounds on the younger sibling.
The younger sibling goes for help to the parent, who then pounds on the older sibling, who then pounds on the younger sibling.
Parents simply cannot My parents cannot protect a younger sibling from an older sibling.
It's just not possible any more than governments can keep drugs out of prisons, right?
So, I certainly know that for myself, when I would have a miserable time because of my brother, and my mother would come home and say, you know, why are you crying?
What could I say? Could I say it was because my brother, blah, blah, blah, because then she would just get angry and beat on my brother, and then that would just come back to me double whenever we were alone again, right?
So, that doesn't work, right?
And a parent who doesn't ask questions is avoiding the knowledge that it is their aggression that is triggering the trickle-down aggression towards the younger sibling.
I mean, you have to work really hard to avoid that fact, right?
Right, because if the parent asks the youngest sibling How could this best be dealt with?
You know, what would you like to see the most?
Well, I would like to see you not yelling at anybody.
I would like to see you not pounding or beating up on anybody.
That would be the best thing for me.
So if we could arrange that, hunky-dory, yay, okay, okie-dokie, happy-dappy, right?
But the parent doesn't want to give up that discharge, that poison vomiting in the DeMoss model, right?
Using the children as a poison container for the hatred and terror and anxiety of the parents, the rage.
So, from the younger sibling perspective, and I'm certainly, you know, if you're an elder sibling, I'm happy to hear more of this from your perspective, because I can really only speak about the younger sibling perspective.
But from the younger sibling perspective, there is a kind of collusion between the elder sibling and the parent.
Although, the parent is ostensibly committed to controlling and managing The parent is under the table encouraging and rewarding the elder sibling's abuse.
Because it can't continue otherwise.
We'll get to the parallels with corporatism as we move through this conversation.
But I think that's really, really important to understand.
The parent is vocally committed to controlling the behavior of the elder sibling, but the reality is that the parent is under the table, or sometimes not so under the table, is provoking and sanctioning.
The abuse of the elder sibling.
Because that abuse can't continue without the, quote, permission.
And the modeling, really, of the parent, right?
I mean, how could my mother conceivably tell my brother not to pound on me?
I mean, it would be...
It would be to expose her own hypocrisy, right?
Once you violate these moral rules, you can't claim them as your standard, right?
I mean, it would be insane. Don't hit your brother.
I mean, it would just be crazy for her to say.
And so, because she's paralyzed in don't hit your brother because of her own violence, She can't hold that up as a standard because she knows exactly what my brother would say.
My mother would know exactly what my brother would say if she were to say, don't hit your brother.
Well, he would say, well, who the hell are you to talk about not hitting, right?
And that would cause her to feel bad, right?
And that would cause her to feel anger, and that would cause her to lash out, right?
And so she would go from don't hit to hitting in about a tenth of a second, right?
And that, I think, is really important, that the parent who uses aggression or violence to, quote, manage and control children, the parent who uses that violence is automatically barred from prohibiting violence, right?
Fundamentally, you can't establish that moral rule.
And that is where the permission occurs, right?
The permission occurs explicitly in that, well, parent is hitting, therefore child can hit, but it's also implicit in that because parent hits, elder child cannot justly be restrained from hitting.
That's what I mean by the explicit and the implicit approval of the action.
There is an avoidance of the moral prescription on violence because there is, from the parent, the parent doesn't want to give up, right?
Now, some parents do, right?
And I'm just talking about the general trend.
Some parents have, even through this show, given up their use of violence in controlling their children.
And fantastic, that is a huge step forward.
But most parents...
Who are violent, they don't want to give up that violence.
They don't want to give up that option.
And you could say, well, it's because they don't have any other options, but the question is, why don't they have any other options?
Well, that's why we don't have private roads for the most part, because the government controls and monopolizes them.
It's the decisions of the past.
That have created an addiction to the use of violence.
People are not addicted to violence because they can't think of any other options.
They can't think of any other options because they're addicted to violence.
Right? So, I think from that standpoint it's important to understand that, at least from the younger sibling's perspective, the seeming opposition and underhanded collusion is pretty clear between parent and elder siblings.
And if you really want to understand why people have such an emotional problem with corporations, you just can't understand that without understanding the effects of sibling abuse in society.
So, what I mean by that is, there are some characteristics that I think are pretty clear when it comes to people's fear of and opposition to and hatred of corporations.
Well, the first thing is that, since sibling abuse is more common than parental abuse, the abuse that people experience directly It's from siblings.
And the abuse from authority that people as adults experience more closely is from corporations.
Because people work for corporations.
They do business with corporations.
They see corporations in the news.
Corporations are like the front of dysfunctional authority.
In the same way that people experience more sibling abuse than parental abuse, they experience more abuse and control from corporations than they do from the government.
Of course, the true source of sibling abuse is the abuse of the parents.
And the true source of the abuses committed by corporations is the power of the state.
I think that's fairly clear.
Sorry about the disco background. But I think that's fairly clear to understand.
Now, another thing that is, I think, very important to understand is that Younger siblings will look to the parents to control the abuses of the elder siblings, and that is the parents' open and clear commitment.
They say, well, we don't want you to hit your younger brother, and they will give them lectures, and they will punish them, and they will hit them, and they will yell at them for breaking these rules.
So the parents consciously expressed An oft-repeated commitment and desire is for the elder sibling abuse to not occur.
Yet, as we've seen, it is the abuse of the parents that enables and gives explicit and implicit permission for the sibling abuse to continue.
And I think that's a parallel that's so striking that it simply cannot be coincidence.
Yeah, it can't be.
It can't be coincidence.
Right, so...
Let's take an example.
These sort of recent financial scandals and destructions that have occurred within America.
Now, it really is the case, I think pretty obviously, that People are suffering more from the financial destruction wreaked by financial corporations than by the government, because the government is able to borrow much more.
So, if your savings get wiped out by some corporation, by some collapse, if your stocks get halved in value, you feel that much more viscerally than you feel the national debt, because the national debt is really hidden and it is predatory in that people are barely paying the interest level and the principal on that debt.
So, it doesn't really show up in your calculations as much.
And so, when a cooperation acts up, you know, this is like your elder brother hitting you, and when the cooperation acts up, you run to the state to control it.
We need more financial regulation.
We need more financial controls.
We need more Sarbanes-Oxley.
We need more of everything to control these, you know, random, rat-bastard, bat-faced corporations, right?
This is exactly the same as getting hit by a brother and running to your mom and dad for help.
First of all, the reality is that to run to the government, to the US government, for anything to do with financial fraud and mismanagement is completely insane.
It's completely insane.
It's like running to Jack the Ripper for help with your painful appendix, right?
I mean, it's a mad thing to do.
But it doesn't seem mad, right?
So why don't people see that it's mad?
How on earth could you go to the US government for moral responsibility when it comes to financial management?
It's the most irresponsible house of cards that the world has ever seen in terms of financial management.
Corruption, theft, bribery, massive national debts, printing of money, legal counterfeiting.
I mean, the idea that you could go to the government is mad, right?
And so, when we see people do things that are patently insane, Well, I mean, we can just give the easy answer, oh, they're crazy, they're dumb or whatever, but that doesn't help us.
Saying that people are crazy to explain their behavior is like saying God did it to explain where we came from.
It's just a pseudo-answer.
It doesn't have any truth value.
You can't change anything based upon that answer.
So if people are doing things that are crazy, it's because they're working from a template that is not immediately evident or apparent, but which is powerfully controlling their behavior, right?
Clearly, people understand that corporations have less power than the governments.
Corporations don't have nukes.
Corporations don't have prisons.
Everybody with any even remote sense, if they think about it for a moment, will say, corporations have less power than governments, but corporations affect me more negatively directly.
But this, of course, is siblings, right?
Elder siblings have less power than parents, but their negative behavior affects you more immediately and more consistently than parents, right?
And people won't process the degree to which the parents are complicit in sibling abuse, but instead they listen to the verbal propaganda rather than looking at the actual actions.
We don't want you kids to fight, or don't fight, or stop fighting, or whatever.
Come to me if there's a problem.
That is the verbal commitment to ideals.
But rather than break through to empiricism, people live in a world of language.
They're embedded in language.
They say, I live in America, but America is just a word, it's not a thing.
People physically live in language.
They are characters in a novel, like that old Woody Allen short story where he pops into Ana Karenina and I think a Spanish book of verbs at the end.
People live in language.
I'm an American.
Well, America doesn't exist, and American is a fantasy category.
So I think that's really important to understand.
People live in language, and to break through to empiricism is to accept the possibility of hypocrisy in those who have power over them.
So empiricism says, well, I don't care what you say.
I don't care what you say.
In fact, I'm made wary of your actions by what you say.
Empiricism says, I don't care what you say.
The only important thing is what you do.
Actions speak louder than words.
In fact, actions speak utterly, and words are almost always a smokescreen.
Words are the little kid who jostles into you so that the bigger kid can steal your wallet.
And so, people accept the parents' protests, that the parents are entirely committed to controlling the abusive behavior of siblings, and then they ignore the fact that despite the parents' protests, the problem is never solved, right? Parents say, well, I'm committed to it, but then what do they actually do to ensure that the abuse doesn't happen?
Well, nothing that is particularly long-lasting.
Or they pound on the elder sibling, which simply is going to reinforce and, in a sense, reinvigorate the cycle of violence.
So why would people go to the government to protect them from corporations?
Because the government says that its sole purpose is to protect them from corporations.
Just as their parents say that their sole purpose, or main purpose, is to protect them from their siblings.
To make sure that their siblings treat each other well.
Right? You understand?
It only makes sense how people behave in society.
It only makes sense When you understand the template that they're working off, and the template that they're working off is the violence-addicted family, where the parents claim to wish to prevent sibling abuse, but who are actually enabling it under the table, explicitly and implicitly.
And we all understand this, that corporations, the government says, well, they really want to control these predatory Wall Street financial corporations, but the predatory financial Wall Street corporations are only able to do what they do because of the government's control of the money supply, because of the government's lack of regulations, because the government profits from their donations, because the government likes to shower money upon the rich in order to ensure its continued survival.
And profitability in the realm of livestock farming.
In other words, the owning of tax livestock.
Right? So, the government says, well, I'm going to control these guys, right?
But of course, the government is also, these days, composed mostly of people who used to run these predatory Wall Street organizations, right?
But people, they can't move to empiricism here.
They can't move to facts because they're running off a mythological template.
Right? Of the words of the parents versus the actions of the parents.
Right? I mean...
It's so basic that you either have to dismiss the entire human race as completely functionally retarded, or you have to say psychological avoidance is a very powerful mechanism.
I go with the latter, and I think we can see empirically from these recent interviews in the Bomb and the Brain series that it in fact is.
The basic thing that people are studiously avoiding and missing is this.
If I say... I'm hungry and I want to go to a restaurant and I open the door and it's a hardware store, I don't sit down and order a meal because it's not a store.
It's not a restaurant, right?
But if I sit down and order a meal and get progressively angrier when I don't get any food, we would understand that that would be kind of mental, right?
And if... The government says, well, I really want to make sure that the poor are educated.
Then, if the goal is to educate the poor, then clearly the government would track the goal and would change whatever it needed to change to ensure that the poor were educated.
But, of course, that's not what happens, right?
If the government is supposed to end poverty, Then it would look and see if it is ending poverty and it would change what it wanted to do if that was its goal.
In the same way, if the parents were really interested in doing whatever it took to end sibling abuses, then they would look at their own behavior.
They would take the family to family counseling.
They would read books on better parenting practices.
They would take parenting courses.
They would move heaven and earth and do whatever it took and try every single approach that they could think of and consult with the experts If their goal was to stop sibling abuse.
But if they just say it and don't do anything specific or repeated or effective to stop sibling abuse, then clearly they're not interested in stopping sibling abuse.
They're interested in saying it, they're holding it up as a value, but they're not interested in actually stopping it, right?
And I mean, the financial corruptions that have gone on since the government took over the money supply are legion.
We just go back to the savings loan crisis, all of the booms and busts that have happened since, this latest round, the round that's to come.
And, I mean, just listen to the guy.
You can see his interview. I can't remember his name, but somebody posted on the board, I'm sure.
You can see his interview online.
Some guy who figured out that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme with about five minutes of sitting down and doing the math, right?
And he sent repeated letters to the SEC saying, you've got to deal with this, right?
Because this is a complete Ponzi scheme, and here's the proof.
And he sent letters for years and years and tried to get the SEC interested in dealing with this issue, right?
And The SEC didn't do anything about it, right?
Of course not. The SEC is not there to protect you from financial fraud.
The SEC is there to expose you to financial fraud.
The SEC is there to give you a false sense of confidence so that you can be further preyed on.
The SEC is the security company that only puts a sticker on your window, not an actual alarm in your house, so that you feel less worried about locking your doors and windows.
And it's the same company that steals from you, right?
And they want to make sure that you don't actually have an alarm.
You just have the sticker, which gives you peace of mind.
The SEC is there to make you not worry about being financially exploited.
It's not there to actually prevent you from it.
It's there to give you the illusion that it's not a problem so that you can be further exploited, which is exactly consistent with its behavior.
And again, it sort of takes a lot of work to not understand this, but people manage to do it because people have a lot invested in avoiding their own family histories, right?
So... Running to the government to protect you from corporations is just like running to mommy and daddy to protect you from your siblings.
It's mad! Mommy and daddy are the cause of your sibling problems.
Now the other thing I think that's important is that I was really struck by the finding that It is displaged rage against the parent that is taken out on the younger sibling, right? Because I think that corporations represent siblings for both the older and the younger siblings.
So, you know, my brother was mad at my mom, couldn't take it out against my mom because she was bigger and stronger and meaner.
I wasn't mean at all as a kid.
And so he took out his rage against mom on me.
And in the same way, people are really angry at governments, and they're really frightened of governments, and they feel really bullied and controlled, and sold down the river, sold into slavery by their governments.
And they feel terrified, fundamentally, that governments have created this crazy, unsustainable, debt-ridden system that is going to cause the destruction of many of the things which we hold dear, most notably our standard of living.
And so people feel really enraged and helpless and bullied and frightened of the government.
But they can't actually express that against the government because the government has real power.
And so what they do is they'll find a less powerful entity to bully in order to master their own feelings of being bullied, right?
So people are really angry at the government but they can't get angry at the government any more than they can get angry at their own parents.
So instead they get angry at corporations in the same way.
That an elder sibling bullies a younger sibling because the younger sibling is powerless or has far less power relative to the parent.
And so people like to bully corporations and get mad at corporations because corporations fundamentally can't fight back because corporations aren't the government.
They don't have police, military, law courts, prison cells, extraordinary rendition, torture, and so on.
And that is another aspect, right?
So what happens is the elder sibling subs corporations for the younger sibling and the state for the parent, and because of the feeling of being bullied by the parent, attacks the corporation slash younger sibling, which causes the younger sibling to rush to the state slash parent to protect them from the elder sibling slash corporations and so on, right? Which is, I think, a really, really important cycle to understand.
So I hope that this gives you some sense of why I think it's so important to understand sibling relationships when it comes to understanding how people look at freedom and what they perceive when you talk about getting rid of the state.
When you say, I want to get rid of the state, most people will hear you are going to be left at the mercy of your elder sibling, and mom and dad will not do anything to control his or her behavior.
And it's like, well, holy crap!
People have the solution that the parents are, in fact, like, you know, my elder sibling beats on me, but if it wasn't for my mom and dad, he'd kill me.
Well, no. If it wasn't for your mom and dad, he wouldn't even beat on you, right?
But people don't understand that, because they don't want to look at the roots of their family The history of family violence in their genealogy.
Now look at the parental behavior, right?
So they view the parents as making a murderous evil only, you know, only making a murderous evil less violent.
And so when you're talking about a stateless society, you're saying, let the corporations run everything.
You're saying, let your elder sibling run the household with no parental control or involvement.
Well, the feeling is that that would be incredibly destructive and society would collapse and so on.
But that's all the people are processing is their family history.
It doesn't have anything to do with the rational empirical adult proofs that you're putting forward.
And so I hope that that makes some sense.
And next cast we will get into some of the empirical stuff behind this so that you can look at the facts behind these theories.
Thank you again for listening so much.
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