All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 28, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:41
1813 Isabella Achieves UPB!

At 2 years and 2 days! :) This is both very good and very bad news.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, I must say, ladies and gentlemen, that on this month of our Lord, December 2010, my gorgeous and brilliant daughter, At the grand old age of two years and maybe two or three days, has achieved UPB. Yay!
As Isabella would say, yay!
Yeah, it's really cool.
It's really cool. She has achieved UPB. And what that means is that she has taken a parental rule and she has applied it back to her parents.
With full conscious knowledge that that rule is universal.
Amazing! I didn't think it would happen quite this young, but there it is.
So the tale is this.
For probably...
Four or five months, you know, one of the challenges that Christine and I have been working through with Isabella is that she can be too rough, right?
I mean, she gets overexcited.
Her impulse control, of course, is, well, I think pretty good, but obviously not exactly where it needs to be given.
Her strength and, of course, her ability to affect things or affect change in the world is...
Pretty new and pretty cool and pretty powerful to her.
And so she doesn't realize that she's too strong.
And when she hit when she was younger, it was kind of cute, right?
But now she's getting bigger and stronger.
It's a little less cute, right?
She can really do some damage if she kicks or hits.
And she doesn't hit out of anger or just out of excitement or enthusiasm.
Or the fact that she can throw a ball pretty hard now.
It's pretty important, right?
So we have to teach her, if you don't throw these balls, you don't throw these hard things, you can only throw ping pong balls because they can't hurt and whatever, right?
So getting her to understand these sensible limitations and why has just been a matter of patient repetition that we've had to do.
And that's been perfectly fine.
And there's only been once where I got angry at the situation, which is where she threw something at me.
Out of exuberance, and I was actually, my hands were full, and I couldn't protect myself, and it was a pretty heavy thing.
It could have actually done some real damage.
But I mean, and of course I didn't.
I was just like, please don't.
I didn't raise my voice or anything.
But there's been this phrase, and so what we say is, we say, Isabella, be gentle, be gentle, right?
And we sort of, if she's hitting, we'll sort of take her hand, and she's learned how to do this, and she does this on her own now, that she sort of pats very gently, rather than hits hard.
And this is a constant refrain, right, that she's heard for a couple of months off and on, be gentle.
And she's pretty much got it down by now.
She very rarely does anything like that anymore.
But anyway, so we were, Christina and Izzy and I were sitting on the, lying around and playing around on the floor.
And... She likes it when I sort of pick her up and hold her upside down and chew on the backs of her calves or whatever, right?
She finds that stuff. She really giggles or whatever, right?
Anyway, so I don't remember doing anything different.
Certainly, I didn't do anything that hurt her or anything like that, but I did sort of pick her up and I was holding her upside down and maybe I was holding her too tight in some way or something like that, but she certainly wasn't hurt or anything like that.
She didn't cry or anything. But she did cry out.
She said, Dada! Be gentle!
Which I thought was fantastic.
I thought it was fantastic.
That she'd taken this, you know, you can say it's a rule or whatever, but she'd taken this rule that we had applied to her.
And she had recognized that it was a rule.
She'd recognized that it was a necessary or a good rule, a helpful rule.
And she'd recognized that it did not just apply to her, but was universal.
In other words, it applied to me and to her mom as much as it applied to her.
She also recognized, which I think was really cool, she also recognized that...
Quote, authority figures, i.e.
parents, are capable of breaking the rules that they have insisted on her following, right?
So, me, as a dad, she understood that I was capable of not following my own rules.
You could say the rules that I insisted, or you can say inflicted if you like, but insisted that she follow.
That I was capable of not following them.
And I thought that was really cool.
I don't know, I'm probably over-explaining it, but I think it's really important to get this.
This process where she cried out, be gentle.
And again, she wasn't in any pain, she wasn't crying, she wasn't upset, but she was perceiving that the game was more rough and tumble than her taste at the moment wanted.
And that's the kind of thing that changes from time to time.
She understood that it was not just a rule from me to her.
It wasn't specific to her.
It wasn't specific to any situation.
It was universal and therefore it applied to me as surely as it applied to her.
And by reminding me Or insisting that I remember the rule called be gentle.
She was telling me, Dad, you have this rule that you apply to me.
I now know that it also applies to you.
I also know that you are capable of not following a rule that you have set for me and insisted that I follow.
I am going to remind you of that.
And she wasn't angry and she was just, you know, just telling me.
I'm going to remind you of the rule that you have Set for me and remind you that it's important that you follow the rules that you have set for me.
That to me is fantastic.
It is great news and it is completely terrible news for people who want to change the world.
It's great news because it means that it's, as I did this podcast, right?
I think the ABCs of UPB are something about how kids are UPB machines, right?
And so I get that that is what has occurred for her, that she's a UPB machine.
So that's a great, I think, a great and positive confirmation of a theory that I've held for many, many years, even before FDR. So I'm happy that this has occurred, in that it, you know, validates, and I guess everybody likes to be right.
And so I was waiting for this to occur.
I didn't think it was going to occur much before two and a half to three, but here it is, right?
And it's really good news from that standpoint.
It's good news for the theory. But it's really, really bad news for anything other than multigenerational change because of this reason.
Because if this is what is natural to human beings, right?
So if UPB is this natural for human beings that it organically develops around the age of two, and let me be clear, I'm sure that it happened for her before the age of two, right?
The one thing that you have to remember when you're a parent of little kids Is that their reasoning and processing powers far exceed their verbal abilities.
In other words, they understand a lot more than they can say.
You know when you're a kid and somebody doesn't speak your language, they always appear kind of dumb?
Well, that, of course, is a very irrational judgment.
They're not dumb, they're just not articulate in your language, though in their own language they may be complete geniuses.
Other than if they have a British accent and are hard to understand, in which case he was just assumed that they're brilliant and witty anyway, I'm sure.
So I'm sure that the UPB occurred for her in her mind before she was able to express it this clearly.
So the reason that it's bad news is that people who've had Their instinctual knowledge and understanding and expression and appreciation and enactment of UPB, you know, broken and shattered by terrible authority figures in their lives, that the further back something reaches, the more impossible it The earlier the trauma, the more resistant it is to argument.
And since UPB, at least according to what I've seen so far, is part of the organic development and natural development of the human mind, the degree to which people are frightened of, hostile to, resistant towards, manipulative about UPB is the degree to which they've had trauma inflicted on them.
And if this trauma has been inflicted on them around the age of 18 months to two years to two and a half years to three years, then I believe it is going to be pretty much, in almost all situations, completely and totally impervious to reason.
Because those defenses are too early.
The defenses are semi-verbal.
In fact, they would be pre-verbal in the defense aspect, right?
Because defenses are more sophisticated then.
So, Isabella can say what she's feeling, but she can't say necessarily why.
Occasionally she can, but I think that's more hit than miss.
Sorry, more miss than hit.
So, if the destruction or the driving underground or the attack or assault upon UPB by authority figures is occurring around 18 to 30 months of life, then the defenses are so embedded that they've become the personality.
The avoidance or the stress or the trauma that's brought up by UPB is going to be so deep that it can't be uprooted.
And you see this over and over again when people get in and start talking about UPB and they just go round and round in these awful circles and they get all this kind of pretzel logic and they refuse to see that every time they make a statement that the other person is wrong about UPB, they're using UPB. That's because this is all bomb in the brain stuff.
So I'm really excited that it's happened very early for Isabella.
I think that's great for the theory, but it is a complete cold shot of ice water to the nuts for the motivation to reason people into UBB and helps to remind me at least or reinforce the reality that it is going to be a multi-generational solution,
▲
Export Selection