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April 7, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:29
1634 Philosophy and the Protection of Youth

How reason and evidence protect the innocent.

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Now, the relationship between philosophy and child abuse is, to me, very clear.
And the general sequence works something like this.
When people believe false things, when a culture, a society as a whole, believes things that are not true, then it faces a problem, like a sandcastle.
Facing the problem of incessant waves.
And the problem is this, that continually within society are being born empirical skeptical philosophers, i.e.
the children, you see.
Empirical skeptical philosophers are continually being born into a society that is constructed, largely, on lies.
And that's a big problem, right?
So you have The round peg of children constantly going like bullets against the square hole of culture, of superstition, of lies, of statism, of the matrix, whatever you want to call it.
General nonsense. Falsities that infest and enswamp, encircle and ensnare the planet.
So this is a big problem.
Now, the degree to which society believes false things is the degree to which Children represent a threat to that society, and you will notice that a society that believes many, many false things is proportionally hostile to the nature of children.
So, in the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages, when the amount of false things believed by society was at perhaps historical all-time high since the invention of language and certainly writing, Then children were considered naturally evil and naturally sinful, because children don't believe lies.
Children don't believe lies.
As I said before, and I'll probably say again, if you wonder whether children are empirical, try giving them an invisible iPod.
And give them a box that's empty and say, no, no, no, it's an invisible iPod, and see how they react.
They will react with shock, horror, anger, upset, confusion, hostility, because they know there's no iPod there.
It's just nonsense. And so, the more irrational nonsense a culture believes, the more it is hostile towards children.
It has to be. For two reasons.
One, because the adults Have invested their authority in lies, and therefore, if they lose the lies, they feel that they lose the authority, which is quite the opposite of what is true.
It's like you feel if you are humble, you lose respect, which is quite the opposite is true.
If you cling to your position regardless of the evidence, then you are not humble, and no reasonable person will respect you.
And the second reason, of course, is that children must be aggressed against in order to get them to believe lies.
It's a fundamental reality of the cycle of violence within society.
Not just within families, but within societies and between societies.
In order to get children to believe lies, they must be aggressed against.
The classic extrapolation of this is a scene right out of George Orwell's childhood in 1984.
When O'Brien is torturing Winston Smith into believing things that aren't true.
How many fingers am I holding up?
Two plus two make five. And four at the same time.
Aggression, torture, brutality, abuse is required, is necessary, to get children to believe lies.
And so the more lies in society, the more hatred and fear of children for their capacity to expose those lies.
The moral hypocrisy of the pious, self-aggrandizing, self-serving, and fundamentally broken and pathetic lies that society uses to control itself and its members.
The more of those lies there are, the more aggression and fear there is around children.
And this is why philosophy and child abuse are so fundamentally...
Correlated. Inversely correlated.
The rise of philosophy is the lowering of child abuse.
Now that we believe far fewer false things than we did in, say, the 12th century, we can be, accordingly, less fearful of and less hostile towards children.
Because if, for instance, you believe that there are things that are true, there is no God, and And violence is a bad way to solve problems, and you apply those things consistently, then you do not fear the curiosity of children.
I certainly don't fear the curiosity of my daughter.
She can ask me all the questions that she wants.
I mean, uh...
I can say to her, violence is a bad way to solve social problems, a bad way to solve your conflicts, a bad way is the wrong thing to do.
I can give her good reasons through UPB, and I have a podcast on UPB for Kids, the ABC, easy as UPB. And I don't fear her questions.
I don't have to start making up bullshit when she begins to pinpoint my contradictions, because I don't think I have any contradictions that are major.
And if I do, of course, I will say, hey, that's a contradiction.
I don't have a good answer for that.
Let me think about it.
Let's talk about it.
So I will say to her, violence is a bad way to solve problems.
And then she will come and say, well, what about taxation?
I will say, well, yeah, violence is a bad way to solve problems.
This is the world that we live in.
It's a problem.
People don't believe this consistently.
I should go to other people, and they'll start making up stuff about the social contract and the responsibilities of citizens, and it's not violence, and you get to vote, and all this sort of stuff.
Befog, bewilder, confuse, frustrate, annoy, and break.
The rational consistency that is natural to children's minds.
So, imagine, imagine, imagine a society, right?
Imagine a society where if there were conflict...
Between the empiricism of children and the beliefs of culture, children won every time.
What if children were considered to be pure oracles of rational integrity?
Certainly, in my experience, they are.
What if that were the case? What if in any conflict between culture and the skepticism of children, the skepticism of children won, and people said, hey, you know what?
I think you're right. That is a problem.
I hadn't really thought about it that way before.
Thank you for bringing fresh eyes, an unbiased, uncluttered, unpropagandized perspective to the issue.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
What if we said somebody who was childish, not as an insult, but as a compliment?
What if we did not consider children to be bad or immature or broken or aggressive or any of those things?
But what if we considered them to be right?
God is in the sky. I don't see him.
Huh. That's interesting.
I guess that's true. We don't see him.
God is in your heart. Where in my heart?
Well, that's a good point. I don't know.
Let's think about it. What does it mean for something to be or not to be?
What if when children looked at a map or a globe, they said, what's the difference between countries?
This is where one group of people takes people's money, and this is where another group of people takes people's money by force.
What if we said the truth?
Why do I have to obey the government?
Because they'll shoot you if you don't.
That's what we have to do. We are livestock.
That is the electric fence. You don't put your head into the electric fence unless you want to get yourself killed.
I'm not saying we would say it that bluntly to children until they were in their teenage years and probably their later teenage years.
But yeah, why do you have to obey the teacher?
Because the teacher can get you kicked out of school.
Why do we have to do these things?
Because we're forced to. What if we just gave honest answers to the questions and criticisms that children have?
What if we said, I don't know. I've been told there's a social contract, but I never signed anything.
I've been told, well, you get to vote and therefore you have to obey, but that's not the case with anything else.
It's not the case at my work. It's not the case in my marriage.
It's not the case with my friends.
It's not the case with my doctor.
I don't know why.
It's different here. I don't know why.
It doesn't make much sense to me.
Why is someone given a medal for killing someone in a war and given a jail sentence for killing someone when it's not a war?
Well, that's a good question.
I don't really have a good answer for that.
It doesn't make a lot of sense when you think about it.
And that's why philosophy is an assault upon child abuse.
Because philosophy will give people answers that withstand and encourage the critical scrutiny of children.
You understand? Philosophy gives us rational and consistent frameworks and contents of knowledge, morality, virtue.
And so when children scour our ideas with their penetrating intellects, we are not afraid.
We don't feel like we're being unraveled.
We don't feel like we're being x-rayed for evil or inconsistency or hypocrisy or immorality.
So we do not fear children.
Because we do not fear children, we will not need to aggress against them.
Because we do not aggress against them, they will continue to be curious and respectful.
And all of these sequences are foundational and this is why philosophy and the protection of children are fundamentally one and the same thing.
Teach people the truth and they won't fear the curiosity of children if you let people linger in lies.
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