Nov. 7, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:23
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| So a big topic these days is childhood bullying. | |
| Children are just turning on each other like a pack of feral rats, tossing piggy off the cliff and messaging each other with vile things and taking surreptitious cell phone photos of shrunken genitalia in the locker room and posting them on Facebook and all sorts of terrible cyberbullying and so on what's going on. | |
| And as usual, the cluster fracks of authority in the world are turning themselves on the children and they're saying oh my goodness how terrible how awful that these children particularly in America are bullying each other how awful how awful how awful where could they be getting this idea from oh you know what must be Video games. | |
| No, no, wait. Maybe, just maybe, it's the media as a whole. | |
| Cartoons! Oh, those cartoons! | |
| Sugar cereals! Yeah, yeah, that's it. | |
| This is the problem that we have with children. | |
| Now, let me lay you out the straight goods about children in society. | |
| Children in society are like sponges and mirrors, I suppose you could say. | |
| They absorb the dominant cultural methodology, the zeitgeist, if you will, and they then reflected back. | |
| Children are straight mirrors of society. | |
| You see, adults, we warp and we distend and we become these funhouse mirrors, these circus mirrors that is called culture. | |
| A true reflection of reality is called science, is called philosophy, is called reason, is called evidence. | |
| Culture is superstition. | |
| Culture is lies. Culture is bending reality back in order to suit our own prejudices. | |
| Children don't do that. | |
| Children give you the straight-on reflection of who you are, both individually and who we are as a culture. | |
| And then people get All kinds of shocked and appalled when children do what adults do. | |
| And we distance ourselves and we say, whoa, whoa, where is Johnny getting the idea that bullying is the way to go? | |
| Madness! How could this be possibly happening? | |
| Well, I'll tell you how this can be possibly happening. | |
| Children are stunning in their restraint with regards to bullying, given all the examples of bullying that occur in the world they live in. | |
| Let's just look at a few. | |
| You could go on and on, and Lord knows I have, but let's just look at a few of the ways in which children are bullied in our society, and bullying is held up as a value in our society. | |
| We'll just talk about the US for the moment. | |
| Six weeks after you give birth, you kind of have to go back to work. | |
| Why do you have to go back to work, assuming you're the mom? | |
| Why do you have to go back to work? | |
| Because your taxes are so fucking high that you can't stay home and raise your own children! | |
| So you have to take this tender, tiny newborn baby and hand him over to government-controlled strangers to be raised. | |
| Does the baby want this? | |
| No. The baby has just spent nine months getting used to the sound, smell and taste of mum and does not want to be handed off to strangers, to be left in a crib like some Romanian goddamn orphan. | |
| No. The child wants his or her mum or his or her dad. | |
| But we have to send the children off because we've got to go to work, because we've got to pay our taxes and because everyone has told us That as good tax cattle, what we need to do is go and focus on our careers rather than our own goddamn flesh and blood. | |
| So that's the first bullying. | |
| Children are sent off so that people can go to work to pay off the masters, because Lord knows the bankers need more of our goddamn money. | |
| Oh, and what happens then? | |
| Well, children end up going to school. | |
| Most likely they're going to a government school, a public school. | |
| How does the public school run? | |
| Well, money is forcibly extracted from parents in order to pay for shitty schools, whether they have children or not, whether they like those schools or not. | |
| And those schools are doing a goddamn piss-poor job of preparing children for anything other than low-rent wage slavery, which is, of course, their entire purpose. | |
| The salary of the teacher is extracted from the parents at gunpoint. | |
| With the threat of a strike of a monopoly service, which would grind the entire society to a halt. | |
| And then we try to tell our children that bullying is wrong? | |
| The whole fucking school structure is based on bullying. | |
| It's all based on bullying. | |
| Oh, and what about the children who don't want to take a particular subject? | |
| They have no particular interest in mathematics. | |
| They want to take some other subject. | |
| How does that work? Oh, no, no, no. | |
| You have to take this subject. | |
| You have to sit in this seat. You have to go to this classroom. | |
| I don't care if you're interested in this topic right now. | |
| Bing! The bell has rung. | |
| You've got to move on to some other topic now. | |
| Too bad. Sucks to be you. | |
| You're going to be shuffled around like the livestock that you are. | |
| Why? Because it's convenient. | |
| For your teachers and for the monopoly-enforced government control of education. | |
| Oh, and by the way, your parents only get out of work at five, but you have to leave school a little bit after three. | |
| How ridiculous is that? | |
| Can you imagine a free-market school system Giving parents the problem of covering two hours worth or three hours worth of children's time after school? | |
| Of course not! Of course not! | |
| If people work 9 to 5, a private school would be open 9 to 5 if it were allowed to. | |
| At least! But no, you have to be shuffled out of school and you have to go to some other daycare. | |
| I worked in one of these daycares for a number of years when I was a teenager. | |
| You do your best, but this is not family. | |
| So they're shuffled around there and they're put in a room with a whole bunch of other kids that they may or may not know that may or may not be nice that they may or may not choose to have as companions or friends but they're all stuffed into the same goddamn room and told here's some old beat-up toys there aren't enough for all of you hey good luck good luck bullied moved shuffled for the convenience of adults oh and let's say that they find government-run Brain cattle feeding, | |
| row upon row, dead air indoctrination in the classroom, just a little bit on the dull side. | |
| What happens then? | |
| Oh, I believe that the child you see has ADHD, or oppositional defiant disorder, which is called being bored, which is called having some fucking brains, which is called having some skepticism about the society that you live in. | |
| Well, then you drop the slow brain-shrinking nuclear bomb of intense biochemicals on the child's brain, causing it to shrink in mass. | |
| Particularly on boys, particularly on fatherless boys, particularly on minority boys. | |
| So if you don't get along with this fucked up system, if you don't bow down and conform To being stuck in the veal-fattening, brain-deadening pens of government schools, you get drugged like a Soviet dissident! | |
| That's what they used to do to people who disagreed with communism, is they'd put them in mental institutions and they would drug them. | |
| Tell me how it's different. | |
| But you see, children you shouldn't bully because bullying is wrong. | |
| See, bullying is for adults, not for children. | |
| Bullying must only be vertical, never horizontal, you see. | |
| Oh, let's have a look at other things that children know when they get to the age of reason 7+. | |
| Do American children know That America is currently pursuing two wars, has 700 plus military bases overseas, and has a military budget larger than all other countries in the world combined? | |
| Of course they know that. | |
| I mean, when I was a kid I knew the entire history of the Second World War by the time I was seven. | |
| Ah, so it's okay for us to roll around the world pointing guns in the faces of anybody who doesn't agree with our policies and preferences and resource acquisition. | |
| It's okay to do it with an army. | |
| You just can't do it with your little fists. | |
| You can bully the world with bunker buster bombs and aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. | |
| You just can't take 50 cents from some other kid using your little fist because you see, bullying is wrong! | |
| What about national debt? | |
| National debt. | |
| Stealing and bullying is wrong! | |
| But the moment some public sector union threatens politicians with a strike, with unrest, with civil disobedience, with blocking traffic, Let's heap all the gold we can and bury these fuckers. | |
| But you see, bullying is wrong. | |
| Unless, of course, you're a public sector union, in which case you can hold the government hostage, or unless, of course, you're a bank who's screwed up on mortgage-backed securities, in which case you can hold the government hostage by threatening a breakdown of the entire financial system and reap trillions of dollars From grabbing these pencil-necked bureaucrats and politicians by the neck and shaking them! | |
| Until all the money in the world falls out of their pockets. | |
| Your pockets. Our pockets. | |
| Our children's future. | |
| But bullying is wrong, children. | |
| Bullying is wrong. You shouldn't bully. | |
| It's bad. You should negotiate peacefully. | |
| You should learn to share. You should do things in a voluntary way. | |
| No, no, no! Unless, of course, what you want to do is claim to help the poor. | |
| In which case, you set up the welfare state, you stick guns into people's necks, you take their money. | |
| And if they don't agree, you send them letters, you set up court dates, you throw them in jail! | |
| That's how we help the poor! | |
| It's with violence and with the guns of the state! | |
| That's how we help the poor! That's how we help the old! | |
| Because we steal from everybody, we spend their money, we send a big fucking IOU to the next generation with more money than they could conceivably ever save or make in an entire lifetime. | |
| Now, children, we've sold you off to the Chinese, to the Japanese. | |
| We've indebted you and your children and your children's children almost to infinity. | |
| In order to pay off and bribe the voters in the present who will threaten to withdraw a favor and to bribe and to appease the public and private sector unions who threaten strikes in a disruption of the tax cattle farm system. | |
| We have sold you off for fear of bullies in the present. | |
| But bullying, you see, is wrong and you shouldn't do it. | |
| We do it all the time. | |
| Our entire system is based on bullying and threats and intimidation, on counterfeiting, on shoveling money around at the point of a gun, and herding people around, herding them to work, herding them home, herding them everywhere. | |
| Regulations threatening people at every turn, throwing people in jail for having little bits of innocent vegetation in their pocket. | |
| Throwing people in jail who don't support the latest regulations and government programs. | |
| Throwing people in jail who disagree with the enforced, arbitrary standards of the ruling classes. | |
| What's astounding is that children are so restrained in their bullying, given the kind of examples we're setting them. | |
| If we want children to stop bullying, Maybe, just maybe, we should stop blaming the children and look in the goddamn mirror at the true source of the ugliness and violence in our society, |
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