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Nov. 27, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:47
1798 The Origins of War in Child Abuse - The Author Interview
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Well, thank you so much for taking the time, Lloyd.
I just wanted to express my admiration and appreciation of, I mean, a number of the books that you've put out over the last few decades.
But the work in progress, The Origins of War and Child Abuse, is a spectacularly mind-expanding and almost viscerally depressing at times book.
And I was wondering if you could give the listeners a little bit of a teaser.
I've talked about the book on the show before, but for people who are new to this conversation, if you could give the basic thesis of the book, which is sort of contained in the title but needs to be fleshed out a little bit more to help people to understand where you're coming from.
Sure can. It's a very simple thesis.
It's that when you're a child, and you're a little child, I'm not talking about 10 years old, I'm saying starting with your mother, particularly, and one doesn't talk about mothers when you're talking about wars, but of course, when you go to war, you always show the motherland who's the one that you're going to war for.
But the notion is that when you're a little kid, and you're told that you're impotent and a baby and so on that you resent that and you store it in a part of your brain in the fear center in the right side of your amygdala that is dissociated and you can't access it later on but you do act it out very often And all of these acting outs is what the book is about.
I go war after war after war since antiquity into Christian wars and early nationalist wars and the current wars and show that you're going to save the motherland and be the power behind your mother and represent her.
And the person that you're torturing and killing is essentially your own bad self.
That nasty baby who disappointed your mother or threw something at her or wouldn't eat your food.
And when you don't eat your food, what does your mother say to you?
I'm going to stuff it down your throat.
And when you go to war, why do you find that the enemy has to be militarily engaged?
Because they're trying to stuff things down our throat.
And I went back and I... I looked at every single war and every single leader, and I found evidence in the nation that the things that they were going to war about was not about economic stuff, was not about territory,
was not about anything that's realistic that's called realism, but rather that they started each one of these wars saying, out in the open, That it was because they needed to be more masculine, to be tougher, to be somebody that is respected and will show them our respect.
And I went down every single one of them.
I remember one of the earlier pieces I wrote.
Why did the Nazis kill Jews?
You know, the Jews were perfectly good Germans.
There was no reason to do so, and they weren't born as babies hating Jews.
So I looked and I found that, gee, isn't that interesting?
What they said was that they had to kill the Jews because they were, in fact, lice who were poisoning the bloodstream of Germany.
And I said, wait a minute, what is that?
And I went back to the early childhood.
When they were born, the German babies at that time were all wrapped up tightly in swaddling clothes and covered with lice.
And the parents used to say to them, oh, you filthy, lice, shit-covered baby, you don't mean anything to me.
And then when they grew up, they found that the Jews were, in fact, lice.
And they called him that.
And they killed him in the showers of the concentration camps to clean him out, right?
And clean out all that poisonous life that they were subjected to as a baby.
And I went down to each one of the leaders, particularly the American leaders, you know.
LBJ, you remember, started the Vietnam War by...
By faking an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, saying, and he says, you know, that incident was totally meaningless, actually.
He says they were actually shooting at fish later on, he said.
But I had to do it to show, to show, to start, I had to start the Vietnam War to show that my penis was bigger than Ho Chi Minh's penis.
And I said, what?
He actually said that?
This isn't like a Freudian reinterpretation of his language.
No, it's the actual words.
It was reported by all the people and he used to show off his penis regularly in meetings as president and say, I got a bigger one than anybody.
And used to hold parties, naked parties in the White House pool, showing off his penis and so on.
And everybody said, gee, you know, it's awfully hard to work for LBJ because he's always showing us his penis and showing how big it is.
And so on. And so I went out to each one of the presidents, starting, let's say, JFK. Can we just go back to LBJ? I don't want to necessarily dwell on the penis thing, but we can, I think, safely assume that a man who needs to reinforce his masculinity to that degree must have been humiliated, at least must have felt that his masculinity was humiliated as a child.
Did you find any of that in any descriptions of his childhood?
Sure. His mother used to beat him regularly.
And used to walk around, he said, pretending that I was dead.
Pay no attention to me, because I was dead.
And so each one of these presidents, you can go back to their childhood, which I did.
It's a considerable amount of research, you know, because I've written probably 200,000 footnotes to back up the stuff that I've got.
And JFK, too.
His mother used to beat him with wire coat hangers.
And, of course, when he got to the White House, he used to have White House naked pools, too.
And all of these presidents that had prostitutes for themselves before presidency and during their presidency all had to show that they really were men.
And, of course, this is the standard upbringing of the boy.
The boy doesn't get what the girl gets.
The girl has to appreciate the mother, but she doesn't have to disappear from the mother's presence.
But when a boy in any of these earlier societies, and today, for that matter, for the most part, boys, certainly it was true of me and my family, When a boy was three or four years old, he had to become a man.
He had to separate from his mother and not be a what?
A sissy. A girl.
He can't be a girl.
He can't be impotent.
He's got to be a big person.
And I just finished listening to television, and we're about to go to war now.
Do you know that? I did not know that.
Yes, this morning the North Koreans shot some people over on some stupid island in South Korea and off of Incheon.
Oh yeah, and America is sending some ships to the neighborhood.
Yeah, and the United States is sending it to military forces.
It's got an aircraft carrier that's heading over there and is about to start a goddamn war.
And you ask yourself why.
And you look at the real stuff that's not about anything.
It's about getting in trouble with China, who, by the way, are going to stop lending us our trillions of dollars if we push them like that, and so on.
And then you look at the words that they used to humiliate these people.
George Bush II, I remember, used to call Kim Jong-il a pygmy.
Now, that's not because he was short.
He was called a pygmy, meaning he's a baby.
He's helpless.
And we're more powerful.
So that's what you do to show off that you're a powerful nation.
And the United States, unfortunately, is 25th out of the 27 major democratic nations in decent child-rearing and in In the amount of problems children have later on and so on, and the amount of prisons that we have and so on.
And so the United States is the biggest war maker, the biggest person in the world, has half the amount of money going into our military, half of the entire world's amounts.
And we're trying to show that we're potent, we're masculine, we're men, not babies.
So if I understand it correctly, you're the expert, so correct me where I'm wrong, but the male, the boy as a child, and particularly as a very young child, is humiliated or attacked or beaten by usually a maternal figure.
who is attacking his sort of bad self and then he grows up and he hasn't dealt with this trauma the trauma remains as an alter within his unconscious and then he has to find he has to sort of reenact that abuse so he has to project his bad self onto somebody else or some other group or some other country and then attack them in the way that he was attacked and you know how early that occurs boys and girls form groups when they're three years old that are very similar they all kind of get together and they have little Groups of eight or ten and so on.
By the time they're four or five years old, boys are all playing war.
Girls never play war.
I just wanted to reinforce what you were saying and I think one of the reasons that I found your work so compelling to begin with was I sort of have a split family as far as war lines go that my mother's side is German and my father's side was British and Irish and fought on opposite sides during the Second World War.
When I would have, even as a little kid, I remember this being six or seven years old, my cousins from Germany would come to play And they were not allowed to play war.
They weren't allowed to play with guns.
And so the Germans had understood that there was something about the parenting that had occurred prior to the First and Second World Wars and had reversed that without any particular statement.
It had just happened almost of a spontaneous nature that they said, listen, we have to stop teaching our children that war is a glorious and fun and enjoyable game.
And I just remember that because, of course, the British kids were all war mad because there was such pride coming out of the Second World War.
And I just found it a very different sort of situation that my German cousins weren't allowed to play war and we had some great conversations about that even when we were a little kid.
I think it seemed to happen in Germany after the Second World War.
What happened after the Second World War proves my thesis.
I was over in Austria and I walked around Vienna and even parts of Germany and saw that the parents were looking at the children and And playing with them and giggling with them and teasing them in the streets, okay?
I counted the number, virtually 90%.
I had just come from London, and not one of the parents looked at or played with their children.
They were all well-disciplined.
And you can see the actual rate of heading children.
Go down in 1965, let's start with Austria because it was essentially in charge of more concentration camps than Germany was, and they passed a law saying you cannot hit your child.
Period. That's it.
All the European Union, there's now 30 nations around that have passed this law.
Now, if you hit your child, you don't get thrown in jail, but they send someone out and show you how to discipline your child or how to make sure he doesn't run out into the street even though you don't hit them.
And Tony Blair the other day said on television, I hit my one-year-old baby, of course, because he couldn't talk because, you know, how else will he be disciplined?
You know, I just wanted to interrupt because it is an astounding thing and people in the future will look back and their jaws will drop at what we, in such a blasé way, accepted in parenting.
Imagine if he'd said, well, I beat my wife because she didn't agree with me.
I mean, it would be the end of his career as a civilized human being.
And yet a child who did not choose to enter into a relationship with a parent, you can talk about beating a child and nobody either cares or they approve of it.
Whereas, of course, if you talk about beating an adult who has far more options, far more freedom, and has chosen to be there, everybody's horrified.
It really is astounding the degree to which we can ignore that kind of criminal.
Furthermore, one of the themes of my latest book is that if you start treating females, girls, and women better, Then they are more able to beat efficient mothers and not beat their children and so on.
So the second thing that they passed in 1965 in Austria and Germany, and now is further around, is the law that says every single baby that is born, the mother gets three solid years from the government, not from their company, but from the government of freedom that they get paid.
Paid whatever they were paid before, so the mother doesn't have to...
Now, in America, 77% of the babies who are born, the mothers have to go out and work.
We don't have a law that...
I think some of the places give 10 weeks or something, but we don't have a law saying that the babies in the first three years of their lives should really be taken care of, do we?
And so each one of these, you know, as nations go to war, you can see the reasons that they give.
Prior to World War I, in my latest piece, I have a whole description of World War I. Before World War I, girls started going out to school more.
They started to get jobs more.
They started to drive cars and so on.
And all the boys, all the men said, we've got to go to war to show we're tough, because otherwise the women are going to take it over the world.
Returning them to a state when they were dependent upon their mothers and feared that kind of humiliation, is that right?
Exactly. Right, and I think it's, I'm really looking forward to this chapter on World War I because it is something that remains inexplicable historically.
I mean, I have a graduate degree in history and never found a convincing explanation for the First World War because it was such a senseless genocide.
It's the simplest war you ever had, yeah.
And you've talked a lot about, and I really wanted to probe this in more detail, this question of growth anxiety I think is very important.
You say that the democratic nations have never gone to war in a depression.
It's always during a time of expansion of economic returns or social liberties that there's a kind of growth anxiety that causes the war, which as far as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, the war is Fundamentally, from the elder generation to the younger generation.
The foreigners, in a sense, are just a way...
It's an excuse to attack and punish the younger generation for taking the freedoms that would have caused, in a sense, murderousness on the part of the elder generation's parents.
Is that a fair summation? That certainly is.
and our current situation, which has produced the Republican Tea Party revolution, is a proof of the thing.
What is it that they're opposed to?
They're opposed to progress, aren't they?
They're essentially all reactionaries.
They're all saying, Oh gosh, we can't have a motherland.
We can't have a nanny Washington, right?
Isn't that what it's called, the nanny government?
They oppose equal rights for homosexuals and other things that would be progressive.
They look very much back towards the American Revolution as though everything was great for women and children.
And blacks and Native Americans back in those days, they have a very filtered view of history that I think is completely distorted.
But yeah, they're trying to build the future by looking back at the past, and they generally oppose the kind of egalitarianism that comes with more equal rights for all.
Equality is very threatening, isn't it, really?
They're saying we can't just all get a small tax relief from what they're trying to do at the end of this session in Congress.
We've got to let the big guys get more.
They get the trillions of dollars, and just you and I, we're just kids.
We don't deserve it, do we?
It is interesting and I've done some research and had some friends help me with some research on this because I think it's very hard to understand the degree to which when people are talking about the largest and most abstract social institutions like the church, like the state, and like the nation, In my view, they're almost always talking about their own families, but they're entirely unconscious of that.
I mean, if you just look at the metaphors that surround the state, as you say, the motherland, the fatherland, we have the founding fathers, we have the first lady, and the first lady we all meet, of course, is generally our mother.
There are so many ways.
The Department of Home It's the homeland security.
It's the home. It's the home country.
It's the home nation.
And I think that it's not exactly a conscious, but it's a very powerful way of hooking into family mythologies and family histories, which we all have so deeply embedded within us.
Exactly. When people are talking about the nation, if you actually peel it back, they're almost always talking about their own families.
And that's why there are such divergent views of the same thing.
That's essentially what it is.
And there's some very good studies of it, which the academics very often overlook, that show that the people who killed Jews most and were most happy with it had the worst child-rearing.
And the people who were saving Jews, well, there were some of them, had the most advanced child-rearing in Germany at that particular time.
So progressives and reactionaries are two different parts of the nation.
As they go to war or as they take excessive risks and put themselves into depressions like the one that we just started and the one in the 30s, that the reactionaries just are against freedoms for people and are for siding with the powerful punishing parent.
Right, right. So the people, the liberties which they themselves wanted to take or tried to take as children were violently opposed by their own parents and so they viewed those liberties as provoking attack on the part of the parents and therefore when as adults they see other people taking those liberties it provokes that same fight-or-flight response and the anxiety management is to control the liberties of others in order to avoid the activation of the punishing parent alter.
Is that fairly close?
Exactly. And psychohistory started with a guy called Eric Frum, who wrote some books about freedom anxiety.
Anxiety over freedom.
And he says, you know, when people are put into therapy, you've got to mainly address their fear of being healthy.
Of being free, of being assertive and in charge of themselves, and of being proud of themselves.
For the most part, people who come into psychoanalysis, and boy, I've had 20 years of it.
I remember I went back to my childhood in Detroit, Michigan, and my father used to tell me to eat the fat off the side of the steak that he wanted the center part of.
Now that's called, you know, stuffing it down, you know?
You've got to eat it.
Right, right. Well, I think that it is disheartening, I think, the degree to which there is still an enormous amount of resistance.
I mean, if you go back 2,500 years, know thyself is the basic commandment of Socrates, and really, I think, in-depth psychology or self-analysis has been around You could say for, you know, 120, 130, 140 years.
It really does seem to be taking quite some time to take root.
And of course, it's taking root in particular areas of society and provoking a retrogressive reaction from the other areas of society.
And I think that is a civil war that you talk about, the different psycho classes.
I was wondering if you could go into that In a little bit more detail, because we like to think of the nation as one thing, but it really is, in a sense, all the way from Stone Age to the future in terms of parenting practices, which creates quite a lot of schisms within society.
You've got to remember, for instance, in apocalyptic Christian and Jewish homes today, they expect the world to end tomorrow, don't they?
They expect either Christ to come back or somebody else to come back.
And, of course, the Islams in various nations, especially Iran, look forward to that and tell the terrorists to produce the final Imam that then destroys the world so that they can go up to heaven and fuse with God,
fuse with Allah. You go back into Christianity and what's astonishing to me since I went through Columbia University and finally when I got out I decided I didn't want to continue at the universities because after my doctorate because every word that I wrote would be a threat to my children's feed for next food because you know the head of Columbia University's political science department I was in was Kissinger and Brzezinski and other people who loved wars.
And you can't write about these things, but you write about Christianity, for instance, and you find...
I make a good case in my book, in my Christian chapter, for the fact that virtually no Christian parents brought up their own kids.
They believed that Eve gave her sinfulness, right?
Threw her menstrual fluid into the mother's breast milk.
So you wouldn't want the baby to have the mother's breast milk, would you?
Because that's poisonous, right?
And they should go right to hell if they become sinful.
So all of the babies were given away to wet nurses in neighboring villages or...
Hell, I got a statistic in Paris that 90% of the mothers didn't feed their own babies in Paris in 1905 at a big census that they did for a good one.
And they sent them out to the Alters.
They didn't follow them.
And when they got them back three or four years later, They'd say, oh, I forgot I had that one.
What's his name? And so the notion that mothers bring up their children, particularly in early Christian times, it didn't really change until 17th, 18th centuries, a bit, and the notion that mothers and fathers bring up their...
And fathers, of course, even today, rarely have about three hours a week in America with their children.
They rarely see them.
The fathers like myself and probably yourself who are 50-50 fathers and share, you know, even bottle feeding and all kinds of other taking around and learning and so on are very rare.
And so fathers only become parents late in history and same thing essentially that But you give girls a little bit of respect and you give mothers a little bit of help and you give a little bit of empathy for families in your national laws that you passed and things change.
Twenty years ago, America had a very good study How many kids were being hit and otherwise badly disciplined, and it was about 90%.
Now it's around 65%.
That's pretty good. That's at least to start.
And that's what produced, if you will, Obama.
Obama's mother was a very sweet woman, wasn't she?
How about McCain, the reactionary part of the last election?
McCain's He used to be hit so badly that he would hold his breath as a little boy and pass out.
So his parents said, we're going to cure you of that.
And the next time you do that, wait until you see what happens.
So he did it, and he passed out, and they filled up the bathtub with ice water, including the ice, and threw him in unconscious.
That cured him.
And that, of course, was the basis of his going to Vietnam and being such a good prisoner and still being for military action and so on.
You can trace every single one of these kinds of more reactionary and more progressive leaders and periods throughout history.
It's not hard to do.
What about George W. Bush?
What was his childhood like?
Because, of course, he started these two terrifically destructive and ugly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I remember when he was first elected.
No, it was when he was re-elected?
I'm not sure which one.
I went downtown and there were a million of us on the street in New York City complaining that George Bush was going to try to be president.
And I came home and I watched CNN. And here was George Bush talking to the guy and they asked him, what makes you such a tough guy and so militarily strong and so on?
And he said, he turned around and he pointed to the audience and he said, see that white haired lady over there?
She used to beat me up all the time.
She was the decider.
Now I'm the decider.
That's what he said. So the political ambition is driven by the early humiliation and dominance from the mob.
Right, right.
And when he went to war in Iraq, what are the exact words he said?
For the reason he did it.
God told me to do it.
Well, we know God wears a dress, doesn't he?
Now, that's something I've had a little trouble following in the psychohistory research.
I was wondering if you could dip into that idea that God is...
I mean, he's so often portrayed as masculine with sort of a feminine sub-deity, so to speak, like the Virgin Mary.
But the psychohistory argument, if I understand it right, is that God is essentially feminine and is the mother.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the evidence for that.
Yeah, well, it's a blending of the two, obviously.
My mother didn't beat me, but she turned me over to my father, who used a razor strap.
And so I was more focused on the paternal side of the thing.
As I say, she agreed with my father that I should be locked up at three years old in the basement in the house that we had in the coal cellar if I was bad for the night.
And I remember worrying that the coal would all come down on my head.
And at that point, I had to run away from home and hide for a couple of days.
They were worried where I was.
Three? Three years old?
Come on, give me a break.
The earlier, the better, the earlier, the more influence it has, let's say it that way.
And if the mother is essentially the only one that's around, and if women are, sometimes it's grandmother, you know, in America, if you're poor, you've got to hand your kid over to your mother in order to take care of them because you're out there working, as virtually all of them are.
So, the question of whether...
Let's say it a different way around.
I have about 25 books on my shelf right here in front of me here that are all pictures of Mother Mary and Jesus as a baby.
Until the 17th century, Mother Mary never, ever, in the pictures, the drawings they do, the paintings, the statues that are in the churches, and so on, the mother never looks at Jesus, never looks at Him, never smiles at Him, never tickles Him, never does anything that's human.
Instead, baby Jesus turns around sometimes and wipes the tear from Mary's eye.
That's your job. That is the salvation fantasy that a lot of people still have, that the child is going to save them, that the child is going to enrich their lives, that the child is going to give love to them, that it's going to fill up the emptiness within them.
And when the child, of course, doesn't do that, as children aren't ever going to do, they take it out on the child almost in an act of rage or rejection.
Yep, yep. Yes, indeed.
Well, if we have a few more There are periods like, as I say, early Obama's period where the young people go out.
After all, the new generation is that's the persons that hired the guy, right, that voted for him.
And what we're worried about right now is that the election that just took place, the young people sort of gave up, and they poofed out, and we've got virtually all of the actionaries up there in Washington.
And so we'll see.
Thank goodness we've at least got Obama for another couple years, because otherwise we'd have endless wars like we're apparently trying to start in Korea right now.
You know, I fought over in Korea, and I was in 8th Army Headquarters at Seoul at the parallel, And I was in Maxwell Taylor, who's interested only in his own superiority, in his sole headquarters of 8th Army.
And I was told by the guy who put me in there, because I was just the secretary, that when I played tennis with Maxwell Taylor, I better lose, because he can't stand losing.
Well, that's what the Korean War was about.
We couldn't stand losing.
And we started the Korean War essentially by trying to invade the North 23 times.
You don't usually learn that in a history course, but the South tried to push toward the North so often, and then MacArthur, of course, took over and decided that this is a good time to invade China, and threatened China with dropping a nuclear bomb on them.
I don't know if you know that. And finally he had to be fired because it was just too much.
But we're in the same position now, essentially.
North Korea is the one that's the irritator.
But we're going to China.
We're telling them they have to stop the nuclear weapon buildup material, the enrichment material, from going into North Korea.
Well, very shortly, the Chinese are going to stop lending us our trillions of dollars, aren't they?
If they don't like the way we talk to them, if we call them a pygmy and embarrass them and humiliate them.
In the bigger picture of things, I think that there's a lot to be encouraged about in the idea of more benevolent and peaceful child raising.
As you say, the statistics of very young children being hit have dropped from over 90% to about two-thirds.
But in some ways, it almost feels like there have been a number of steps backwards.
For instance, in the post-war period, usually one parent could stay home and there was often at least one parent home.
And it was not this passing up the buck.
I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad, and I see this with my daughter when I take her out, that there's grandmothers who have older styles of child raising and less ability to get down and mix it up and play with the kids simply because of physical limitations.
So it feels like with the herding of moms into the workforce, particularly in the United States and in England, that there's been a step backwards insofar as the children have lost the pair bonding with at least one parent and are now in these state run or state managed institutions, which I think causes them to bond with the state, which I actually don't think is particularly a good idea to fuse in a sense with the nation.
And they're missing out on that peaceful, quiet, relaxed interaction that occurs with one parent at home.
So while the amount of physical attacks is down, it feels like there's been a big step backwards in terms of, you know, tax policies and other social problems, and to some degree, A narrow-minded view of feminism that work is to be the be-all and end-all, that there's a step backwards in terms of parenting.
Is that your view as well?
It is, and I prove my thesis by the fact that the European Union nations that are giving each mother for each child three solid years worth of state help so they can stay home and take care of their babies, It has changed the European Union.
Look, the European Union, as you know, has just recently gone through, particularly in Ireland and Italy and Spain and so on, a terrible, upsetting depression.
That was essentially like the one that preceded the Second World War and that Hitler came to power in.
Do you see any Hitler coming into power?
Has Austria and Germany attacked Poland in the last year?
No! There's peace!
And the reason that there's peace is because 40 or 50 years ago, they gave mothers some more time, and they gave mothers some help, and they have preschool for children.
They have all kinds of help for bringing up a child.
And indeed, the statistics show that there's practically nobody hits their kids anymore.
It started... So as a result, there's less trauma buried in the amygdala, which then doesn't...
So then there's nothing to charge out and attack because there's no self-management of early trauma that's unconscious to deal with.
Yeah, yeah. It started in the northern nations in Sweden and Switzerland and so on.
And it moved down into the rest of the European Union.
And the peaceful nations are ones that very simply give some help to the mothers to bring up their children and give them a little time, a little extra visits.
They actually have visiting people.
They don't, as I say, put you in jail for doing the wrong thing, but they send people out from the center of Austria and visit you and show you how you can bring up your kids a little bit better.
And there certainly does seem to be in the EU a growing awareness of the reality that decriminalizing drug use and rather giving people treatment rather than jail time is the way to deal with it because they're just self-medicating early trauma for the most part.
And Portugal has even decriminalized drugs to a huge extent and has had an enormous amount of benefit from that.
And that, of course, is still decades away in the US. Exactly.
One of my psychohistorians, Abby Stein, teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice right nearby here in Manhattan.
And she teaches that every single solitary criminal, you can go back and find the trauma that put them there, and that you can help them get out of there.
Listen to this. There's a guy...
Who was a psychiatrist in charge of a big jail that had something like 70 or 80 percent recidivism, meaning that they come back after they get out rate.
And he said, you know, all those people would need is some respect.
They need respect.
And so I'm going to take over this.
If you would give me the money to do so, I'm going to take over this jail and I'm going to turn it into a school, a university.
I'm going to teach each one of these people how to read better, how to get more respect, how to find a job and get respect out of their lives.
And I'm going to reduce the recidivism rate.
Do you know what the rate was three years after he put his plan into operation?
Zero. Every single one of them was non-violent and obeyed the laws because they got some respect in their lives.
And this, as I say, Abby Stein, Professor Stein, writes for my journal of Psychohistory, Which, if anybody wants to see a copy of, I'll send you a free copy if you just send to the address that's on your website.
Yeah, I will put a link on the video and audio and I'll make sure that people have the information.
It has always struck me that a punitive state that is selling, quote, protection from enemies has a vested interest in creating those enemies.
And I think that not protecting children and further traumatizing criminals rather than trying to give them the mental health help that they need, they're keeping a population frightened of Their fellow citizens, in a sense, rather than, I think, what they should be frightened of, which is the sort of military-industrial complex.
And so it's always struck me that the way that the government deals with criminality is just so counterproductive to everything except its own interests in continuing to frighten its population and have them cling to the state for protection from enemies that the state is, in fact, creating and promoting.
And I think that's a real tragedy in a cycle that is very hard for people to see it break out of.
You're absolutely right.
And furthermore, of the 300 nations or so that have signed the Children's Rights Agreement around the world, there are only two major nations, only two, Samoa and America, who refuse to sign the rights of children and say that they're going to work toward giving children more rights.
Well, I mean, I think that has a lot...
It's very hard to understand America if you look at it in the company of First World Nations.
If you look at it in the company of Third World Nations, these statistics kind of pop into focus in terms of religiosity and superstition and belief in astrology and magic and...
The child mortality statistics and illness statistics and all of that.
It has no place in the first world nations.
It really has to be looked at as a third world country.
And that sort of makes it make sense.
And I think you're right. It is tragic the degree to which children receive just terrible, terrible education.
And I think America would have to give up.
It's religiosity, as so many of the European nations have done, whereas I think rates of atheism in the northern countries, or at least non-religiosity, are 70-80% or more.
America would have to give up the indoctrination of its children in religiosity, of course, which is terrifying to most children, that there's a hell and punishment and judgment and lakes of fire and blood.
You would never have in a children's movie a guy getting nailed to a crossword.
But you can show that to children in a book and you can show it to them in church and somehow that's considered okay.
America would have to take a step back from this sort of terrifying children with sort of religious horror in order to have that become less traumatic and to join the country.
I'm puzzled by the fact that one third right now of America is the fundamentalist Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish churches, you know, that are expecting some Savior to come back during their lifetime.
I mean, that wasn't true back when America started.
We had, essentially, all the people who disappeared from England that said that that was the craziest thing they ever saw.
You know, they weren't going to go along with the Catholic stuff that they had, and the kings, and stuff like that.
They were going to be independent, and they were going to come here and establish their own farms and be saved by themselves.
And, I mean, a good chunk of the Founding Fathers had nothing to do with Christianity.
They were atheists or agnostic or deists, and now it's been completely hijacked that somehow it is a Christian nation.
I mean, it was specifically aimed to not be a religious nation, but that That primitive style of parenting.
I interviewed, I'll send you a link to this if you like, I interviewed Dr.
John Omaha who says that you can't understand America without understanding the degree to which it collectively as a nation is suffering from PTSD in its refusal to admit its own crimes such as the genocide against the Native Americans.
The moral effects of slavery and of militarism and imperialism around the world.
Because it continues to ignore all of these traumas collectively, it continues to reproduce them.
And he sort of has a fascinating analysis of the American character from a PTSD standpoint.
Yes, and the people who came to the northeastern part of America were the more progressive parts, came over in full families and decided their family should be independent and so on of the British nation.
But the people who came to the South were not those kinds of people.
They were later-born boys that didn't get any money from their parents, or they were servants, or they were pirates, or they were all kinds of other people who were not part of families.
So the South in America has always been behind more reactionary, both in child-rearing and in the military, than the Northeast.
And you see this, of course, with the obsession with guns and hunting and the drinking and substance abuse and machismo and swaggering.
Yeah, it's a strong argument to be made that it came from, as you say, fragmented families and from a much more primitive area within England and some parts of Europe.
A sort of previous psychoplast, they all went down into the South, as you would expect from an agricultural standpoint.
The economic sector has got to be more primitive than an industrial one, and that has taken such a long time to work itself out and still remains very primitive.
That's the root of religiosity, that's the root of reactionary republicanism and the Tea Parties and so on.
And it is, if you don't understand the degree to which these histories of childhoods are playing out in the modern world, it really does look like a random jigsaw puzzle just being assembled and torn apart.
I'm torn apart over and over again until you see the patterns of childhoods and their imprint on current events.
And I think that's one thing that the psychohistory movement is so powerful and good at and has really helped me to understand the modern world in such a great way.
Thank you for putting all of this amazing work out for free at psychohistory.com.
I've been getting very good feedback, although people find it quite appalling the amount of trauma in history that is underreported or in fact not reported.
Is there anything you think that people can do to help this movement, which I think is so essential?
We're either going to have self-knowledge or we're going to have war.
Those are the only two forks in the road for humanity as a whole.
Is there anything you think that people can do to help spread the word, to help move this knowledge further out into a pretty resistant society?
In the upcoming issue of the Journal of Psychohistory, which will be published on psychohistory.com, and they can read it, is my final chapter of my war book.
And essentially, it's About two things.
There's two major ways to avoid war in the future.
The first is to improve child rearing, and I give all kinds of places, including India and China and God knows other places when China stopped the foot binding and so on, and all around America, of places that show how you can improve child rearing and how you can give help to mothers and so on.
And I quote probably 200 different sources to that thing.
So improving child-rearing around the world is certainly terribly important.
And the second part of the final chapter is about what I call peace counselors.
In other words, all the stuff that we've learned in psychohistory and all the stuff that psychoanalysis has learned Since Freud first started it, and since Eric Fromm started the study of national child-rearing styles, all of those essentially are able to feed into a new profession, which I think should be a separate department at each university.
And even at local high schools and so on, on peace counseling.
That is to say, peace counselors go in to a place, let's say that they're trained in dissociated, repressed feelings of marital partners, okay?
They're marriage counselors. They're used to getting two people in who are ready to kill each other and have been throwing knives at each other for the past two months, right?
If you're a marriage counselor, so you get a person who's trained in that, and they come in and they walk in to a peace session as nations are going to war, and they may not even talk to the top leaders by a long shot.
They may get together. This has been done in several countries, especially in Russia by a man named Vulcan, and even has been done in In Palestine and Israel.
You get the people who are professionals, they're lawyers, they're doctors, and they're doing things that are leading toward war, and you start talking to them and you start showing them all kinds of interesting things.
And I have about 20 different techniques.
For instance, show them pictures, if you're a Palestinian, show both Palestinians who are there and the Israelis, pictures of babies being killed on the battlefield.
And what do you feel?
What do you think? What goes through your mind?
And, by the way, you're not going in there to negotiate any kind of a peace.
You're a counselor, and you go in there without any threats, without any promises, Without anything except what a normal psychotherapist would have or a marriage counselor would have.
And you start getting them to almost act out and live out the kinds of things and you become the person who is causing all of their troubles and they project stuff into you and you show them that they're projecting and all sorts of other methods that come from both psychohistory and marriage counseling and other kinds of Of things.
And then slowly, more and more people come.
You have meetings, say, two or three weeks at a time.
And no one ever publishes any word of that.
It's all quite secret.
And they go back to their nations, and they say, God, you know, it's possible that when we attack Hamas, we're being self-destructive.
We want them to come back and attack us.
We're looking for that.
And their friends say, oh, I couldn't be.
Let me go to the next one and see if that's true.
And peace counseling, it seems to me, is a way to stop all the wars and all the violence that's going to take place until such time as all of the child-rearing is improved around the world.
Well, I think that is a beautiful, beautiful hope.
And I hope that it's more than a hope.
And I really do want to thank you so much for your time.
I'm going to make sure that people go to psychohistory.com and repeat your offer that you will send out a free copy of the journal Psychohistory, which I consider pretty essential reading for Understanding the World.
Will do. And thank you so much for the book.
Thank you, Stefan. It is really inspirational.
Okay, good. Bye.
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