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March 14, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:25
1613 God, the State and the Family - Sibling Abuse Part Two
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Alright, so we have talked about the confluence of three basic aspects of social life, which has been the family, the state, and religion.
So, we've talked about sibling abuse within the family, and we have talked about its correlation to the state, right?
So, in family, we have parent, younger sibling, elder siblings, In the state, we have government, citizens, and corporations.
So, how does this model fit with religion?
Now, if it doesn't fit with religion, then the model is problematic, to say the least.
Now, if it does fit with religion, it doesn't mean that the model is incontrovertibly proved, but it is problematic.
The third leg of the stool.
It means a stool can stand.
It doesn't mean it will stand forever or under any weight, but it means it can stand.
And that, I think, is magnificent progress in examining these structures.
Alright, so let's dive in.
So clearly, with religion, I mean, it's embarrassing to even mention it because it's such an obvious thing, but God is the parent, and in particular, the father.
Now, monotheism can never particularly stand very well because it doesn't have the complexities of To take into account the mother and the father.
Now, I've heard some arguments that God is, in fact, the mother.
I've never particularly warmed to those arguments, which doesn't mean anything other than I have a problem with them.
It doesn't mean they're false. It just means I don't particularly get them.
Just because I think you don't want to get too clever in your analysis of psychological phenomenon.
Like, you don't want to get, well, although God is referred to as the father and is always portrayed as male, it is, in fact, the mother...
I think that you don't want to go that way.
I think you want to try and keep things as simple as possible in this highly complex realm.
And so to me, since God is referred to as the Father, and Jesus was a man, and all of the apostles were men, and most of the saints are men, that it is...
It's the father that is being talked about.
And also, of course, because the priest was almost exclusively male throughout history, and particularly in the past, past the last hundred years or so, was exclusively male and is referred to as padre or father.
Well, I think that we don't want to get overly complex and say that all of these masculine references are, in fact, referring to women.
Well, no. I think we might as well stay with a simple explanation as possible, using Occam's razor, that all of these dicks are in fact referring to dicks.
So, obviously we can put God as the Father.
You need maternal influence for religion to have any particular hold over the human psyche.
You need maternal influences.
And, of course, this is why you end up with Female saints, and you also end up with the Virgin Mary.
Now, the Virgin Mary, of course, is a child's conception of a mother, right?
Because children don't know anything about sex, and children, even when they learn about sex, they can't imagine their sainted mother making the beast with two backs, right?
That was a funny bit in a recent...
Oh, let's get culturally relevant and destroy future relevance.
But in a...
Big Bang Theory. Sheldon, the tall, skinny, neurotic, or virtually Asperger's, it would seem, he has a complete female idealization of his grandma.
I can't remember the name he uses.
So they threaten to make fun of his mom recently, his friends, and he's like, oh, I'm under no illusions about my mother, blah, blah, blah.
And then they bring up his nanny, I think it is, or his grandmother.
And he instantly freezes because that's where his feminine idealization is.
And they start talking about how his grandmother enjoyed sex because she had to have had sex to produce his mother and blah blah blah.
And he, you know, gets enormously offended and upset.
And of course that is a child's perception of a mother.
And to every child, particularly in an immature culture, any child, they can't really So to speak.
To brutalize even the word pun.
They cannot conceive of their mother having sex because it's just outside the bounds of their model.
And I don't think that's a bad thing at all.
I'm just saying it is a thing. So to have a virgin mother has a great deal of power because it appeals to Everybody's idea that their mother did not have sex in order to produce them.
Particularly when you have such a strong mind-body split as you do have within traditional Catholicism, where sex is base and dirty and non-sex is wonderful.
And, by the by, I mean, I was thinking this the other day, and I don't have any particular good place to pop it in, so I might as well pop it in here.
But, I think it's impossible to understand monasteries without understanding that there have been a number of, like the number of gay people born into society is pretty constant throughout history.
And they had to have some place to go, and so they wanted to congregate away from women, and of course they wanted to give up marriage, because that meant that, you know, if you were gay, you weren't giving up that much, right?
And so I think that the homosexuality of the priesthood is almost synonymous, particularly monks, right?
All monks sleeping together in dorm rooms and so on, and this renunciation of women and so on.
It's not... It's not a great life, but it's not the end of the world if you're gay to live that kind of life in the Middle Ages.
And given that a lot of the molestation cases occur in a time where, at least biologically, there is some level of physical sexual maturity, Among the boys slash young men in question, and that this would have been a very common practice to give attractive boys over to the gay monks, so to speak.
Not that the gay monks were any more sexually problematic than anybody else in society, but that would be pretty common, and I think it's impossible to understand the modern traumas that are being inflicted on children slash young men without understanding that sort of history.
And again, I'm no expert on it. It just sort of struck me as an interesting thing that If you were gay, you went to the monastery if you could.
And, of course, to some degree to the army, right, where you would be stationed with other men and would have to sort of pretty much renounce marriage, at least while you were on the road and so on.
So, gays finding places to be less dangerously gay in history, I think, explains a fair amount of the monk-slash-soldier lifestyle.
Anyway, not hugely relevant, but I just thought I'd toss it in here because...
So, we have this analysis where the gods, and all religions have more than one, right?
That the gods are mother and father.
And this, of course, raises the question that if we have this tripartite analysis of parents, elder siblings, slash younger siblings, or parents, siblings and children, Sorry, that's a bad way of putting it.
I need to come up with a better way of putting it.
Let's just say parents, elders, children, younger children.
If we have this tripod analysis that works really well with the state, how does it work with religion?
Well, who are the sibling abusers in religion?
And this is a better... and deeper and richer metaphor for sibling abuse than is modern democracy because of course it's had thousands of years to refine itself and through the evolution of the memes which stick most tenaciously to the unconscious it's had a lot of time to work out the kinks and get to the pure essence of the metaphor so I did religion second because religion is a better metaphor for sibling abuse than the state and corporations so Gods are the parents.
Humanity are the younger siblings.
So who, oh who, is the elder sibling?
Since sibling abuse is so common and must show up in any psychological model of human systems.
Well, I'm going to make the case that the abusive sibling in religion is the devil.
Ooh, give me goosebumps.
How about you? Well, let's make the case.
So, for the sibling metaphor to work with the devil, since elder siblings...
I'm just going to refer to them as brothers.
I'm sorry to be gender-specific.
It could be sisters, but we're just right.
Since brothers, from the perspective of younger siblings, since brothers are produced by the parents...
If the devil were to fit this metaphor, the devil would have to be produced by the God slash parents.
Well, that of course is the case that in the history of, I guess, the Old Testament, so the founding three religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
God, and I'm really just going to focus on Christianity because my knowledge of those other two religions is only slightly less spotty than my knowledge of Christianity.
So, Lucifer...
The child of light was the rational angel, and Lucifer was created by God as a lesser and dependent being.
So, of course, this is a perfect metaphor for the creation of siblings, and so that works very well, just at its basis.
Now, the other thing that is true, at least according to current psychological theory, current psychological theory, is that abuse against younger siblings is an expression of unexpressed rage towards the parent, or unactionable rage towards the parent, right?
So you feel humiliated by the parent, you cannot act against the parent because the parent is too strong, and therefore you take it out on the innocent younger siblings.
So, for that to be the case, then Lucifer would have to be angry at God, but unable to vent his anger on God, and therefore must take it out against the stand-in for the younger siblings in the religious model, who is humanity.
Well, this, of course, fits perfectly.
Not even a crack or a seam on the outline where it fits in, because, of course, Satan was angry at God and God cast Satan down into hell and Satan knew that he could not fight against God because God was all-powerful which of course is exactly how a parent looks particularly in primitive culture to even an elder sibling and so God cannot be punished And therefore the children of God,
i.e. the younger siblings, the children of God must be punished, must be tempted, must be teased, must be tortured, must be thwarted, must be brutalized, must be...
In the end, they must become or be brought into the hell of Satan.
And as Milton writes in Paradise Lost...
Satan says, in a ringing endorsement of the model theory, or the theory that religion is a model for the unconscious, he says, any way I fly is hell.
I am myself.
Hell. Hell is a state of mind.
So, the elder sibling has raged against the parent, cannot express or act upon that rage, and therefore takes out that rage against the younger siblings.
Works perfectly in the model. Satan is enraged at God.
Satan cannot harm God because God is omnipotent.
And therefore, Satan takes out his rage on God's children, on the younger siblings, on humanity.
Now, another predicate or predictor of sibling abuse is the loss of a father figure shortly before the abuse begins.
And yes, we have a winner.
That fits perfectly with the model of Lucifer slash Satan, because Lucifer, the angel of light, is rejected by God prior to attacking humanity slash the younger sibling.
Because he rebels against God, he is rejected by God, God hurls him down into hell, and so on, right?
And that is the rejection or loss of a father figure, which then results in the attack upon the younger siblings slash humanity.
So that, again, fits perfectly within the model.
It's not eerie, it's just the way the mind works.
Now, another aspect that would have to fit is that verbal abuse would be more common than physical abuse.
And a lot of modern advertising is a form of verbal abuse, the creation of bodily perfection, like, of types of physical perfection, washboard abs and perfect hair and all of that, that is simply abusive because it creates a standard that people cannot reach and all of that.
So we can sort of talk about that perhaps another time, but let's focus more on Buddy S, unfriendly L, Lucifer, for...
Sibling abuse, one of the reasons why sibling abuse is so toxic when it occurs is because the violence is certainly there at times.
Three percent of children are at indirect risk of violence from their elder siblings, physical violence, disfiguring violence.
But what makes abusive sibling relationships so problematic is the verbal abuse.
It's the verbal abuse and this is again borne out by the literature which we will get to shortly but verbal abuse is a huge problem and it's what sticks with you in a way that physical blows doesn't and this is fairly well accepted within communities specializing in these sorts of studies and for the metaphor of Satan as sibling to work then Satan would be much more likely to use verbal abuse rather than physical assault.
Now, of course, siblings have a tougher time with physical assault because physical assault, when you're an abusive elder sibling, physical assault will result in being beaten up by the parents or physically attacked by the parents because it leaves marks, because there's a black eye,
because, right, so... If you are a cruel elder sibling, what you want to do is to use verbal abuse to break down and destroy the personality and self-esteem and security and happiness and sense of self-efficacy and competence of your younger sibling.
Verbal abuse is the gold star of elder sibling abuse.
And so for Satan to work In this model, Satan would have to prefer verbal abuse to physical abuse.
And verbal abuse relies upon the sanction of the victim.
And I'm not blaming the victim for this, I'm just saying that if somebody abuses you, or uses the term of verbal abuse, Then you have to accept that in order for it to work.
You don't have to believe that there's a fist landing on your face in order to get a black eye.
But if somebody calls you fat or retarded or selfish, you have to accept the term in order for the abuse to stick.
And that is really, really essential.
I'm sure I don't need to elucidate this much, but just to give a minor example.
I posted a video.
It was a brief excerpt from a Sunday show, March 14th.
And in the video, what I did was I was having a discussion with a guy about proofs for God, and he was talking about his grandfather, and I was giving alternate proofs, rebuttals to his grandfather's statements about God.
Most of the comments, it's general, most of the comments were positive and helpful and so on.
But one guy was like, whoa, Steph, I'm a big fan.
But your lack of logic in this video is astounding to me.
And, of course, I mean, when I do get this stuff...
I don't know how obvious people think they're not being, but it really is completely obvious.
When someone tells me that I'm wrong and doesn't provide any evidence, I just know that they're feeling anxious and they want to shift that anxiety to me by creating some unnamed sin or error of logic that they refuse to go into any details about in the hopes that I will start attacking myself and say, well, I guess I must have been really illogical.
Gosh, this person saw it.
Right? All that kind of stuff.
So, of course, I wrote back and I said...
Well, I'm even more disappointed that you have not seen fit to explain my grievous errors in logic to me.
And he's like, oh, my joy, he wrote back, my joy is still dropped with astonishment.
I'll let you review your video and figure out all the errors you made.
I mean, I shouldn't laugh because, I mean, poor guy, right?
I mean, this is the best that he can do to deal with this situation of anxiety and stress, right?
But that relies on, of course, me having stress and anxiety about my own capacities to reason.
And you are namelessly wrong.
I'm not going to tell you how.
You just sit in a corner and you look at your video and you think about what you've done.
I should laugh again because, you know, poor guy, right?
This is all just family reproductions of whatever he had growing up.
But it relies upon me...
Being insecure and self-attacking because he won't name the sin and therefore I have to invent the sin and this only works on people with a guilty conscience and of course the number of people who criticize me it's got nothing to do with me whatsoever they all rely on me having a guilty conscience which I don't I have a very proud and positive and happy and satisfied conscience which is not the easiest thing in the world to come by you have to take a few bullets to get it But I guess they're not used to people with a happy conscience,
or a contented conscience, or a proud conscience, and they realize that none of this stuff works, and it's so transparently obvious what they're trying to do.
So that is a sort of a minor example of a verbal attack that, you know, basically is somebody laying a club on the table and saying, I really want you to hit yourself with this, because it feels like you're hitting me with this, and I can't figure out why.
And so you need to do it to yourself to even things up.
It's all nonsense, right?
And it's all very sad and tragic and silly and pitiful.
But that is the kind of stuff that we would expect from Satan if the sibling model of verbal over physical abuse were to work.
And I'm really trying not to rig the game, but it fits with atomic quantum physics laser-like precision.
Why? Because Satan is, in essence, a verbal abuser.
Satan is, in essence, a verbal abuser.
Like vampires, he has to be invited in in order to do any evil.
Right? So, that's really important to understand.
There's lots of metaphors of beasts or monsters that cannot do you any harm unless you invite them in, that can only tempt you But cannot do you harm unless you succumb to that temptation.
Well, these are all metaphors for verbal abuse.
Verbal abuse is...
What people are doing is that they're just casting nets into your soul.
They're casting, sorry, they're casting fish hooks on a line into your hole, jerking it around and seeing if they catch any fish.
They're just trying various things in order to get you to self-attack so that they feel better about their own sad selves.
And it's all silly.
If you don't self-attack, they think they're pissing on you, but they're just pissing into the wind.
It's all landing back on them.
Which, you know, is why it's pretty frustrating and upsetting for some people.
So, if you don't self-attack, it's all nonsense, right?
It's all just an embarrassing show of attempted manipulation.
Because, I mean, people basically know someone's going to pick up that club, and if it ain't going to be you, it's going to end up being them.
But they're the ones who brought the club to the table.
So, we would expect for this metaphor to work, as I said, that Satan would be a verbal abuser, not a physical abuser.
And this, we generally find...
To be the case. The metaphor for physical abuse are demons, right?
They pop out of the ground and rend you limb from limb and werewolves and, you know, the rage metaphor.
Animals, right? I mean, once we've seen these brain scans of how brains end up differently, differently configured based on early childhood experiences, we understand that we're dealing with a bunch of different species here in the world.
A bunch of different species of humanity.
Predator, prey... A whole ecosystem of a variety of people, parasites, symbiotic relationships, and enablers and abusers and avoiders and victims.
And we've got a whole ecosystem composed of fundamentally different animals in terms of brain configuration.
Now, of course, we look at people, we look at a crowd, and we can only see people.
Two legs, two arms, one head, hopefully for the most part.
And so, we can't see into the brains.
We can't see the different configurations within the human mind.
So, what can we do?
Well, we create mythological beasts to make these different brain configurations come to life, right?
So, we have the sociopath is the vampire.
Rage-aholic is the werewolf and the hulk and all of this.
I mean, you could go on and on, right?
But the bestiary of human imagination is, to me, nothing more or less than a very precise categorization of the different configurations of the human brain based on early childhood experiences.
And we'll go into the...
I mean, if you're interested, I've got a bunch of notes on this.
We can go into the... etymology of these mythological creatures and how they relate to various pathological human states, but I'll await your expression of interest before we dive into that.
But if you really want to understand mythology, Then you have to understand that it is the physical representation of differently configured human brains so that people can, at least, so that their mental life can match what is going on physically that they can't see.
And mythology is an attempt to describe a mental state that does not show up in the real world or is unacknowledged in the real world.
And it's important to remember that The examination and exploration of child abuse is really less than 50 years old.
It was 1962 that the battered child syndrome was first introduced in a paper, and it takes a long time.
It takes a hell of a long time to bring this stuff to light, even with the accelerations of what we're talking about here through the internet and so on.
But the exploration of child abuse is a moral issue That's really new in the world.
And if you look at where feminism was 50 years after the ideas first popped into people's heads, that was a long way from fruition, a hell of a long way from fruition.
I mean, you could talk about the beginning of feminism In the early 19th century, it took over 100 years for most women to get the vote.
And we're 50 years into it, right?
So of course it's early days. Look at the very beginnings of the anti-slavery movement, the abolitionist movement, 50 years after it was first mentioned.
Of course it wasn't complete.
Of course it takes a long time for these things to come to bear, to come to fruition.
And they don't come to fruition in any way, shape, automatically.
Nothing gives way of its own accord in the world in terms of hierarchy and structure and immorality.
Nothing gives way of its own accord.
Everything must be hacked and pushed down and stabbed through and pushed through.
And I don't mean aggressively, I mean assertively and empathetically, but everything has to be hacked aside in order to carve a place of peace and security for the children, of course.
So, Satan is a verbal abuser.
Satan does not have the power to attack humanity unprovoked.
And this is aptly told, of course, in the story of Satan appearing to Jesus in the desert.
Satan doesn't attack Jesus when Jesus spends his 40 days in the desert.
He appears and tempts him, takes him to the roof of the world and offers him all the physical things in the world in exchange for allegiance.
And since elder siblings in general control more resources, bribery is very common.
And that's what you see in this realm.
You see this continually played out in almost all the depictions of Satan.
Satan in the Garden of Eden does not physically attack Adam and Eve.
He tempts Eve with knowledge, knowledge of good and evil, and Eve eats of the fruit and sells it off to Adam and so on, and this is entirely in accordance with the sibling theory,
right, because the sibling, the elder sibling is often very charming towards the mother, which is how the elder sibling will tempt the mother with eating this sort of, the fruit of Of knowledge.
And this metaphor, again, I've talked about this in a very early podcast, so we won't sort of try and cross-reference this metaphor too much, but these metaphors have a number of different ways that they work.
But it's not too surprising that Satan uses language and not force to tempt and corrupt people.
And it is Satan who comes up with Hell, right?
And Jesus, in fact, was the one who first described and inflicted hell.
In the Old Testament, when you died, God was done with you.
But in the New Testament, you get to live in hell forever.
And that, to me, works very well as well, because what we have seen in the literature and the research is that the effects of childhood verbal abuse by elder siblings in particular Tends to be very, very long-lasting.
It's very long-lasting. Your parents will go old.
Your parents will die.
And you will, you know, most likely continue.
So there's a... You get to see your parents diminish, particularly in the ancient world where life expectancy was much shorter.
You would see your parents diminish, get sick, get old, get die.
But your sibling would be riding strong, right beside you, or in most cases slightly ahead of you.
So in that situation...
The verbal abuse that is inflicted upon you by your elder sibling, if that's what happened, is something that will last your lifetime, will last for eternity.
It does not diminish in the way that parental power and abuse does.
And your brother or sister who's older will always be slightly older, will always be slightly more experienced, will always be slightly ahead in career or in love or in all of these sorts of things.
And so there is an eternity to the verbal abuse of a sibling that there isn't with the verbal abuse or physical abuse of a parent.
And so that's why you have this concept of hell associated with the verbal abuse, the eternity of punishment associated with the verbal abuse of the elder sibling slash Satan.
Now, the best metaphors work in reversal, in my opinion.
And so there should be, for this to work at its peak, which you would assume with 5,000 years of evolution in the meme, or more, that it would be about as perfect a metaphor as you could get.
But for it to work, We would have to, or it would ideally be applicable, Satan would be applicable to a younger sibling as well as an older sibling.
In other words, Satan could be the younger sibling's view of the elder sibling or the elder sibling's view of the younger sibling as God, right?
So, sorry, let me just rephrase that.
So, Satan, if it were to work optimally, psychologically, The metaphor would work both for the younger sibling looking at the elder sibling as Satan, but also as the elder sibling inhabiting the personhood of God, you're looking at the younger sibling as Satan as well.
So it would work for both siblings.
So how does it work?
Well, we've seen from the literature that another predicator of elder sibling abuse It's the perception that the younger sibling is the favorite, and that causes an attack upon the younger sibling.
Well, this works in the metaphor as well, perfectly, because Lucifer is God's favorite.
God's favorite.
And so, when the elder sibling psyche fuses with the God-slash-parent psyche, there is an attack upon the perceived favorite, and that is what occurs within the Old Testament.
One of the last predicators of elder sibling abuse is the perception, or the reality, that the elder sibling is placed in charge of the younger sibling and is given too many caretaking responsibilities.
Thus there is resentment and rage towards the younger sibling.
Well, this works as well, because in many of the myths associated with Satan, some of the Some of the reports or stories are that Satan's given responsibility for humanity.
And Satan is...
First, some of the stories I've heard are that Satan was given the moral...
He was going to be the moral tester of humanity.
And he regularly did test humanity's morality, found that they failed and got resentful at the task, was put in charge of maintaining the virtue and safety of humanity slash the younger sibling, and thus became very resentful, and this caused the rebellion against God, which then made the job even more vicious and more permanent, right?
And this would correspond with, I am put in charge of my younger brother, I resent it and complain, To the parent who then attacks me for my resistance and things go exceedingly downhill from there.
So that works as well.
Now, one of the things, of course, that is very strong and powerful in the story is the degree to which the responsibility of God for Satan is evaded and avoided.
This is something that's so fundamental.
I mean, it doesn't fit at all together logically, but it does fit together in terms of psychological need, and that we'll spend a few minutes talking about now.
So, the argument for the moral responsibility of God is that God is all-knowing, and God is all-powerful, right?
So, if God is all-knowing and all-powerful, then when God creates Lucifer, God knows that Lucifer is going to rebel.
And so God is punishing Lucifer for something which God not only knows ahead of time is going to happen, but also has full power and responsibility to stop.
Because God can change anything in the future.
Again, let's stay away from the logical inconsistencies of such a formulation.
But God can change anything in the future.
Which means that since God can do anything, past, present, and future, God can create a Lucifer who does not rebel.
But God doesn't do that. God creates Lucifer who rebels.
And God knows ahead of time that this is going to happen, so God is in a sense choosing and creating not just the being of Lucifer, but the morality of Lucifer, not just the physical body, but the psychological profile, the mental state of Lucifer.
And isn't this true with regards to parents and siblings?
Because the parents don't just create the physical body of the child, of the sibling, of the offspring, but they create the mental state of the offspring of the sibling.
They create not the physiology alone, but the psychology complete, or largely complete, of the offspring.
And it is the pathology within the parent that creates the pathology within the child, the unexamined, unacknowledged pathology of the parent.
And this, of course, is the fundamental paradox of abusive parenting, right?
Which is that when a parent is describing himself as a parent to the child, he is all-powerful, right?
Do it because I say so, do as I say, not as I do.
The parent is self-described or described within the family unit or structure, particularly in the ancient world, as the all-powerful patriarch, as all-powerful.
And this, of course, creates significant problems, because, of course, if the parent is all-powerful, then the parent is completely responsible for the abuses of the elder siblings, right?
You understand? If the parents are as powerful as the parents say, they are, then the parents are completely responsible for the abuses of the elder siblings, because the all-power of the parents could prevent that easily.
Snap of the fingers, right? But of course, it is the very power of the parents that creates the abuses of the elder siblings, because it is the unjust exercise of power over the elder siblings that trickles down to abuse towards the younger siblings.
It's the brutal abuses of the parent, the misuse of such power, because all such power is always misused, that creates that.
And so the metaphor would only work if the omnipotence of the parent was co-joined with the complete free choice of the offspring.
This is an important, subtle, but powerful point.
So, for Lucifer to be considered evil, God must be helpless in the face of Lucifer's choices.
So, Lucifer chooses to rebel.
God can't be responsible for that, because if God is responsible for Lucifer's rebellion, then God You cannot call Lucifer evil, because Lucifer is a product of God, and God knew ahead of time that he was going to rebel, so you can't call someone evil for doing what you know in advance exactly that they're going to do.
Right? So, for instance, you can't say that someone assaulted you if you have just paid them to do it.
You can't call it assault if you've just paid someone to do it.
Because you have full foreknowledge of what's going to happen and control over what happens, because you've paid the person to do it.
It may be unseemly to take money to hit someone, but you can't call it assault in the same way that someone randomly walks up and pops you on in the head.
So since God knows exactly what Lucifer's going to do and creates Lucifer for that very cause, God cannot call Lucifer evil, independent of God's choices, because there is nothing independent of God's choices and power.
And so you have this duality that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, but God did not know ahead of time and is helpless in the face of Lucifer's choice to rebel.
And these contradictions can never meet.
And the story of Lucifer perfectly reflects this reality.
Parents unjustly claim omnipotence of all power.
And they claim that they are in complete control of the family and obedience is owed and deserved and earned and so on.
But then, when children rebel or act badly, the children are blamed completely.
So we take all the power in the world when it suits us, and then we take no power or responsibility when the children act badly.
This is exactly the story of Lucifer.
So I hope that this makes some sense and I'm glad that we're finally getting around to this topic of sibling abuse because you can't understand people's formulations of the state and of religiosity and of other things.
You really can't understand these things without the missing and key component of sibling abuse and I think we can see how well it works for both the state and for the family.
So, thank you so much for listening.
As always, always, always, we'll get to the facts of the matter next, but I wanted to give you the power of the mythological confluence first.
And thank you so much for donating, for supporting, for continuing to listen and share this most powerful of conversations.
Alright, so let's just finish up this.
The... Last thing I've sort of mentioned about the devil and the sibling.
And this is speculation, but I think it works a little bit.
Which is, I mean, the three characteristics that first pop into mind is, I guess, four characteristics, right?
So hairy legs, like goat's legs of the devil.
Red with a pitchfork and a hat.
And elder siblings, remember this is all a highly sun-baked agricultural community, and so the older kids would be out, the elder siblings would be outside working before the younger siblings, and how would they appear to the younger siblings?
Well, they would have hit puberty first, so they would have hairy legs.
They would be sunburned, because obviously no sunscreen, so you'd be out in the sun.
You would have a pitchfork, and I know that would be added later.
Metaphorically, you'd have a pitchfork because you'd be out there doing the family farming business, and you would have a hat on, and that might translate as horns, right?
So you could look at the typical physical characteristics of the devil as being a younger sibling's view of an elder sibling who's gone out to work You know, sort of for the first time.
So I just want to point that out.
It's a possibility. It's not a clinch or anything, but it certainly is an interesting possibility as to why it would be these images and not others, and I think that sort of works.
So, just again, before we get to the facts, I think it's important to conceptualize what it is that we're talking about.
What is it we're talking about when it comes to siblings?
Well, with siblings, There is a difference of degree, but not of kind.
With parents and children, there's a difference of kind, not just degree.
It's not like parents have more power than children.
Parents have all the power when it comes to children.
Ball! That's right, boo-boo!
Whereas siblings have a difference of degree, not of kind, because they have differing levels of power.
But still, no power, fundamentally relative to the parents.
Now, I think that the pathology of this is really in place when the following circumstances occur.
When people fundamentally confuse a difference of degree with a difference of kind...
I think historical sibling abuse distortions are in play.
Let me sort of say that again.
When people mistake a difference of degree for a difference of kind, that is when sibling abuse distortions are in play.
So, for instance, your boss, you know, we're talking about a free market company, or at least a titularly free market company, your boss is a difference of degree, not of kind.
So your boss is more in demand than you are as an employee, which is why he gets paid more, but it's still just a difference of degree, not of kind.
If you compare that to something like the power that an IRS agent has to initiate force and arrest you and throw you in jail, compared to that, your boss has no fundamental difference...
Of kind in the power that is there.
But there is a difference of degree.
He's worth more. He's paid more.
And you have negotiating with him, but he has somewhat of the edge in negotiations.
Because you're more replaceable than he is, right?
Which is why you're paid less.
And so there's a difference of degree, but not of kind.
But with the taxman, or the government bureaucrat, or whoever it is that can make your life hell that way, there is a difference of kind in terms of the power that can be exercised.
And, yes, that's not how people see the world, right?
What they see, and this is the Marxist view, right?
Which is that the corporations, the capitalists, have all the power, and the state is...
You know, kind of helpless or is benevolent, right?
And that's because most people who experience abuse within the family will often experience more abuse from siblings than they will from parents.
I mean, proximity, opportunity, all that kind of stuff, solitude.
Like the solitary nature of the sibling relationship, and that it's just you and the sibling, or a few siblings sometimes, this sort of state of nature that exists.
It just leads there to be more, more proximity, more opportunity.
And so this sibling relationship, while it is just a difference of degree, is experienced as a stand-in for all of the parental abuses.
And the parents are often perceived because they will often portray themselves as helpless in the face of sibling aggression and doing their best to sort of catch up and restrain the unruly and all-powerful siblings.
That's sort of the younger sibling view of an abusive sibling.
And, of course, that's how people view the state when it comes to reining in the corporations.
The state is always trying to play catch-up.
There is no collusion between state and corporations.
Or if there is, the corporations run everything, right?
And you can really see the prevalence of sibling abuse, assuming that this corporate metaphor holds.
You can really see the prevalence of it when you look at the prevalence of evil corporations in the media.
Evil corporations and, you know, the sort of helpless government, so to speak, right?
The corporation in aliens.
I mean, you could pick any movie.
It's always the evil... Land developer, the evil corporations, the corporation.
The corporation and the employee, the boss and the employee, is economically and factually, empirically, it's just a difference in degree, not in kind.
But it's always perceived as a difference in kind, not in degree.
Whereas the parental relationship is very often viewed, for people who are receiving abuse from the siblings, the parental relationship is often viewed as It's not substantially different from the victim-siblings relationship.
Right? So, the younger sibling, being abused by the elder sibling, feels that the elder sibling is all-powerful and the will cannot be thwarted and so on.
And the parents will often...
Gosh, it almost seems like inevitably, but of course I'm just roughly going with gut here and some facts...
But the parents will portray themselves as helpless in the face of elder sibling abuse.
Helpless or irritated by it or, you know, but they're helpless in the face of it.
You know, just stop fighting, you know.
Or as somebody I know who had an abusive sibling, the parents said, what can we do?
You know how this person is.
What can we do? You know how this person is.
And in this way, the initiators of abuse who have their parents are attempting to side with the victims of the abuse and feeling helpless in the face of the all-powerful elder sibling abuse.
And this is what occurs when the citizens feel that the state is like, well, you and me, state and citizens, you and me together are going to find a way to rein in these all-powerful corporations, which of course is pure nonsense, but comes straight out of.
This sense of helplessness that is portrayed to the victim by the original victimizer, who is the parent.
And so when you see a difference of degree and a difference of kind being completely reversed, I would say that you absolutely can be sure that you're on the path towards unraveling or bringing into the light A dysfunctional history of sibling abuse.
That would be certainly the first place that I would look.
And of course, this is all stuff that if you've experienced it, you should take up with a good therapist.
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