1765 The Philosophy of Childhood (audio to a video)
Philosophy dictates how children are raised...
Oct. 8, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:20
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. So I'm often asked why I focus on childhood and child raising so much as a philosopher. | |
| I'm going to give you a short and for once helpfully succinct answer. | |
| Childhood is very intimately associated with and bound up with philosophy. | |
| A society which believes things that are true, which believes things that are empirical, which believes things that are rational, can be very kind and gentle in the raising of its children. | |
| Societies which believe things that are false, that are bigoted, that are superstitious, must inevitably turn to the argument from authority when raising its children. | |
| It must substitute emotional, aggression, mockery, abuse, or ridicule, or physical, For proof, because proof runs counter to the fantasies of society. | |
| So, to take a simple example, when I was a kid, oh boy, I was probably not more than five years old. | |
| Oh, what a precocious lad I was. | |
| I lived in a section of London. | |
| I lived on Hermitage Road. | |
| And the football team, or soccer team, which represented our district, was called Crystal Palace, which was always doing pretty poorly. | |
| And I came across a kid who said, I'm a West Ham United supporter, and his team was doing better. | |
| And he was very proud, and he was like, in your face, Crystal Palace! | |
| And I said, but you just happen to be born there, and I just happen to be born here. | |
| What do these teams have to do with anything? | |
| I couldn't really explain it that well, but it was something that I noticed pretty obviously, which was that to take pride in the accidental geographical proximity of your team is, I mean, it's sad, pitiful, and ridiculous, and kind of embarrassing, particularly, of course, as I found out when I got older, when the sports teams regularly pillage you for tax money, for subsidies, particularly in the construction of stadiums. | |
| I mean, it's like bend over and cheer is more appropriate for prison than it is for a sports team. | |
| So that's an example. | |
| If you bring that up, of course, as a kid, Like, why is my team better than your team? | |
| I mean, it always struck me. I would go to the movies with my brother Saturday mornings. | |
| There was like a whole series of cartoons and movies. | |
| And one of the first movies I remember seeing, I was really young, was a sports movie about, you know, the down and out misfits who band together, you know, You've never seen this story before. | |
| The down-and-up misfits who band together, put on a team, become a team, and then go on to win the championship. | |
| And it just sort of struck me that if you just turned the camera to the other side of the field and followed the other team, then you'd be cheering for them, other than this team. | |
| It had nothing to do with virtue, or it's always portrayed that way, and the courage to pull together, and so on. | |
| But it's all complete nonsense. | |
| And if you start talking about this stuff in your society, Then people get pretty scornful. | |
| They'll make fun of you, they'll get aggressive, they'll roll their eyes, they'll attempt to use emotionally bullying tactics to support the unsupportable, which is why support one team rather than another. | |
| It's completely ridiculous. If you believe that your god is real, and somebody points out that 9,999 gods that are believed in elsewhere around the world you consider perfectly ridiculous, whereas your one god you consider perfectly reasonable, whereas everybody else's god seems to them perfectly reasonable, and your god seems perfectly ridiculous. | |
| If you point this out, like if you say to your average Christian, listen, if you'd been born in the mountains of Afghanistan, do you think you would be a Christian? | |
| If you'd been born deep in a Muslim family, would you be a Christian? | |
| And of course he would have to say, no, I wouldn't, I would be a Muslim. | |
| So it's like completely accidental. | |
| That you happen to believe in one God versus another. | |
| And you start to point this out. People get pretty tense. | |
| People get pretty stressed. | |
| If you start to point out, you know, when a teacher says... | |
| That you shouldn't use force to get what you want in society, a public school teacher. | |
| And you point out that her public sector union regularly uses force through the extraction of property taxes to get her job. | |
| So how is it okay for her to get, through the union and through the laws, her pay through force, whereas you're not allowed to snatch a toy from another kid? | |
| These are just like the number of things that people believe in society, particularly people in authority, politicians, parents, priests in particular. | |
| The number of ridiculous, embarrassing, stupid things that people believe in society is directly proportional to the amount of aggression they need to show against the young in order to frighten and bully and mock the young into photocopying the same cultural prejudices that came eternally beforehand. | |
| The goal of a thinker is to look at reason and evidence, to The fog bank of culture, and blow all of that aside, and look directly at the world, and forget about the length of traditions, and forget about the meme replicants of nonsense that pass for human culture, and look at things as far as what they are. | |
| Now, the causal chain for me is very clear, and you can look at my Balm and the Brain series. | |
| I'll put the link below if you want to know more about this. | |
| If we want to live in a free world, we have to live in a world where people can think. | |
| If people are prejudiced, if people are culturally biased or bigoted or superstitious, then you just get artificial divides, artificial hostilities. | |
| My team, your team, my country, your country, my gender, your gender, my race, your race. | |
| All of these artificial divides will forever preclude a free and peaceful society. | |
| So, as long as people are bigoted, culturally or racially or from a class standpoint, then we can't have a free society, we can't have a peaceful world. | |
| As long as children are raised aggressively, in other words, without reasoning, but rather from the argument from authority, do as I say, because I am bigger, it's never really put that way, but I know better, you'll know better when you get older. | |
| If children are raised, From the argument from authority, if they're shattered, if their minds are shattered like tender plants under this monolith of the argument from authority, then the minds can't grow. | |
| Because all you do is you have to obey and conform to the people who have power. | |
| So you teach people that might is right, and then when they grow up, they think using the government to get what they want is perfectly valid. | |
| After all, might makes right. | |
| That's what is taught to children through the argument from authority. | |
| The argument from authority is only necessary Because people believe things that aren't true. | |
| Because they believe things that aren't true, they must substitute the argument from authority and all of its attendant aggression and bullying and withdrawal and mockery. | |
| They must substitute the argument from authority to the argument from reason and evidence. | |
| They must substitute bullying for philosophy. | |
| So, we must get people to believe true things. | |
| Therefore, they can teach these true things to their children without relying on bullying. | |
| You don't need to bully a child to say that rocks fall down when you let go, because they open their hands and rocks fall down. | |
| Way, yay, lovely, right? | |
| You don't need to bully children into believing things that are true. | |
| You only need to bully children into believing things that are false. | |
| So, the job of the philosopher... | |
| is to hopefully bring as many true and verified and valid arguments to society. | |
| Parents and teachers and, well, I guess not priests, kind of wrong by definition, can then instruct children on true virtues, on true knowledge, on true values. | |
| Because those values are true, they will not need to be inflicted through bullying, through the argument from authority. | |
| You can just take the child step by step through the reasoning and evidence at an age-appropriate level so the children can be raised peacefully. | |
| I have had no issues with my daughter in terms of rebellion or conflict. | |
| We have a perfectly charming and wonderful relationship because I'm not telling her anything. | |
| That is false. I'm telling her things that are all true. | |
| When she asks why, as she inevitably will, and continue to do so until her voice gives out, I can give her the reasoning. | |
| And if I can't give her the reasoning for certain things which I don't know enough about, we can go and look it up. | |
| But she's never going to have to rely on me as an authority figure for determining what is true and what is false. | |
| This is going to be the evidence, right? | |
| I'm merely the passageway for reason and evidence for her. | |
| So we must teach people true things. | |
| When we teach people true things and get them to discard the false bigotries of culture and religion and other forms of superstitions, then they can teach their children in a gentle and positive way, because it's not personal. | |
| It's just, here, these are the facts, not my particular prejudices. | |
| When we can teach children things that are true in a non-bullying, non-argument from authority way, then people grow up more peaceful. | |
| They grow up avoiding the use of aggression in resolving conflicts because they just simply haven't experienced it. | |
| They're not going to be criminals. | |
| I mean, if you could get a 99% reduction in crime, you would have a free society because people wouldn't be as afraid of each other as they are now. | |
| The only way you can get that kind of reduction in crime is to raise children in a peaceful and positive manner. | |
| So the key is to disseminate things that are true, to expose, and in some cases even attack and ridicule, things that are false. | |
| And through that, people will then be able to teach true things to their children. | |
| They will not have to use the argument from authority. | |
| Children will grow up thinking for themselves, believing in things that are true without that sickly cultural tension that comes from believing in generally accepted superstitions that all hang by a thread. | |
| I mean, if your mental model of the world is a house of cards that the least philosophical wind can blow right over, then you can go out into the world in a relaxed and comfortable and positive way. | |
| So through raising children well, by letting go of cultural bigotries, we end up. | |
| Inevitably, this is going to be step by step, brick by brick, we end up with a free and peaceful world. | |
| But that's why I focus particularly on ethics. | |
| I mean, it's on ethics that we really need to teach our children well. | |
| That's where I focus on, and I hope that that makes sense to you. |
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