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April 6, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:21
1633 How Many Children Are Abused?

A rough approach to an essential question.

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So, a question that was rolling around in my mind last night was, I think, a pretty fundamental question and very important to our analysis of society and its possibilities.
And that question is, how many children are abused?
How many children are abused?
Well, of course, to some degree, it depends on how you define abuse.
And I've never been particularly out of the ballpark as far as definitions of abuse go because I sort of go with the legal definition, right?
And violence against children and continued verbal abuse against children, which is physically destructive, as we saw in the Bomb and the Brain series.
Anything which harms a child's mind permanently is abusive, of course.
But I think there's a good case to go further than that.
And people are sort of surprised at my criticisms of parenting sometimes, because they look at parenting relative to the norm.
And, of course, as a philosopher, you don't look at things relative to the norm.
You look at things relative to the truth.
A physicist doesn't, you know, when he's trying to argue in early days for Egyptians, I think, ancient Greeks certainly, when a physicist is trying to argue or a scientist is trying to argue that the world is round, he doesn't compare the roundness of the earth to the general opinion of the day that it's fine.
I mean, he could, but what would the point be?
He compares it to whether the world is actually round, whether the Earth goes around its sun, and so on.
I guess both ways. And so, as philosophers, we are comparing what occurs in society, not to society's general opinions.
I'm not saying that it's useless, but it's certainly not philosophical.
I guess it's more anthropological, cultural studies.
But we're comparing it to the truth.
Another way to look at it is we can say, what will people say in 100 years or 200 years if reason and evidence wins out?
What are they going to say about the childhoods of the 20th or early 21st century?
Well, they will say the following.
They will say that parents, partly due to their own immorality and partly due to the immorality on the part of philosophers who did not move heaven and earth to come up with the rational system of ethics to teach children, We've used aggression and power to discipline children.
And that is abusive.
It is abusive to use size, strength, and power to control and bully the behavior of another.
And I include by that the withdrawal of affection.
The withdrawal of affection is one of the most powerful and abusive weapons in the parental arsenal.
And that's not just my opinion.
Neglect has been proven to be more harmful than physical abuse for the welfare and happiness of children.
And, of course, that's entirely to be expected.
And we know that because children will often act out, if the parents are ignoring them, in order to get even negative attention.
Because that's quite important.
It's essential for a child's survival.
To be neglected is to be abandoned, is to die.
Whereas at least to be beaten is to have some utility...
To the parent as a poison container, and therefore to be kept around, even as a victim.
It's the same thing, like, if you're a prisoner in a dungeon, the last thing you want is for people to forget about you, because then you'll die for sure.
Even if they come down and beat you, they at least have to feed you to keep you alive, because they like to beat you, and that's the survival imperative, right?
So the withdrawal of parental affection is even worse than abuse, like direct abuse, in terms of long-term mental health.
So, they will look back and they will say, well, parents as a whole, I mean, there was obviously there's the sexual abuse, physical abuse, the emotional abuse, and so on.
But they will also look at the degree to which parents use power to control their child's behavior.
And, I mean, once you see it, it's omnipresent, right?
So, I was at the library yesterday with dear Izzy at a reading group, and...
Izzy went to go over and play with another kid who was playing with a toy, and the kid didn't want to play with the toy, and his mother was like, oh, you have to learn to share.
He's such a bad boy. And I said, he's not a bad boy.
He's two. He's not a bad boy.
He just doesn't want to share at the moment, which is perfectly fine.
There are lots of toys here, and that's no problem.
And she said it on the way out again.
Oh, sorry, he was such a bad boy.
No, he's not a bad... I mean, that's just bad.
Just bad, bad parenting.
And you see this a lot...
I saw one boy playing with a girl at the playground the other day and I think he pushed her off a toy and she fell.
She didn't really hurt herself. She fell in sand.
She was fine. But the parent was just aggressive and bullying.
Why did you do that? What's wrong with you?
Why are you so aggressive? Of course, the answer is in the question, right?
And you see this all the time, just the constant breaking of rules in order to enforce rules, right?
Aggression is bad! What's wrong with you?
Why are you being so aggressive? Blah, blah, blah.
And they will view that, I think, as it's not appealing to a child's reason, it's not loving, it's not empathetic, it's not curious, or any of these things, and therefore I think it will be viewed as, again, I'm sure every parent will snap once or twice at their kids, but, you know, it becomes a habit.
I think that will be viewed as abusive.
Religious instruction will, without a doubt, without a shred of a doubt, be viewed as child abuse.
And I don't even need to go into why I've done it a number of times before, but there's no meaning of all the things, right?
Now, what about public schools?
It's hard to imagine that public schools would not be viewed as abusive in the future.
I mean, it's just impossible to imagine.
Even if we take out the more extreme things like constant drugging of children to get them to conform to an entirely unnatural life, where they get a great deal of stimulation and entertainment outside of school.
Right? When they have video games and TV shows catered to their needs and great toys and all that.
So, that compared to what is actually occurring in the public schools, which is just grindingly dull and repetitive and boring and punitive and aggressive and scary and all that cliquey and all that kind of crap.
So, it's hard to imagine that.
It's impossible to imagine, for me at least, that in the future.
People will not look at public schools as institutions of abuse.
In the same way that we look back at, say, the boarding schools of the 1900s, with canings and whippings and beatings and starvings and locking up and so on, we look at those institutions as fundamentally abusive.
I mean, there's no question, right?
And in the hundred years now, and it's not to say that there have not been improvements in schools, obviously, over the past hundred years.
There have been in many ways. Although in some ways things have gotten worse in terms of the actual education that people get out of this system.
But in a hundred years they will look back with horror at what we're doing to our kids.
The obesity, the drugging, the sitting in front of the TV hour after hour, the two parents working, the abandonment of the children to institutionalized daycare.
And I mean I've worked in a daycare.
It is absolutely zero substitute for parental attention.
It is zero substitute for parental attention.
I worked in a daycare for years. There were two of us with the 30 kids, 25 to 30 kids aged 5 to 12, 5 to 13.
Actually, I think there was a 14-year-old in there as well.
And it was just keep them from injuring each other.
I mean, it was just pack animal rankling.
That's all we could manage for the most part.
I mean, I did get some more positive interactions out of things.
But it was no substitute.
I mean, as a parent, there's just no substitute for that kind of interaction, that kind of one-on-one time, that kind of affection.
Daycares are just brutal on kids.
And so they'll look back and say, well, you know, these people dumped their kids in these...
Boring and aggressive and dangerous.
Public schools run by the government, which is an immoral institution, where the kids didn't get educated, they just got cooped up and bored and scared and filled with petty praise and all that kind of stuff.
I think we're good to go.
In the 18th century or 19th century and say, my God, what the hell was wrong with people that they would subject their kids to such a thing?
Or if we look further back to the practice of wet nursing babies, we used to have a baby and dump them with some abusive peasant who was a professional breastfeeder, and then the kid would come back a couple of years later not even knowing who the hell you were, and we'd look back and say, what the hell was wrong with people?
That they would do such terrible things to their children.
Well, I mean, the same thing will occur in a hundred years or so when they look back at what we have done and are doing to our children.
Universities, I think, will also be considered pretty abusive in the same way that we would view some of the training that Louis XVIII, the court system had trained people to become flatterers and toadies and all that.
They will look back at all that kind of stuff.
And they will look back at the media as being, you know, lick-spittle-toady, violent, sycophantic horror, which just does monstrous things to people's sensibilities in order to retain...
It's the allegiance of those in power and the favor of those in power.
And all of this stuff, we'll just look back.
And so the question then becomes, well, how many children are abused?
Well, if you stack up those whose parents use aggression and control and the threats of withdrawal of affection, let alone physical violence like spankings or beatings or sexual violence or whatever...
Threats of abandonment and so on.
When we look at the parents who do that, well, it's the majority of parents.
It's the vast majority of parents. Is it because parents are innately evil?
No, of course not. I mean, they are lazy a little bit, or quite a lot, and they are not given the tools by those who should be working very hard to give them the tools, but who aren't.
Academics should be working to give objective morality to everyone, and that should be all they're really focused on.
But, of course, that's not what they're doing, because they're very interested in trying to figure out the meaning of Lost.
They're actually academic papers that are focused almost entirely on trying to figure out the meaning of the TV show Lost.
There are even books about it, because that's what they're about.
That's what their real focus is.
And add into those children who have received religious indoctrination, superstitious indoctrination.
Add into those who are put in public schools.
And, I mean, the list could go on and on.
But they will be as horrified in a hundred years.
They will be as horrified.
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