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Jan. 13, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:04
1829 We Reap What We Sow

Loughner, Giffords, the media, the shooting, and the larger lessons for society...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well. This is going to be a long video where we're going to go deep.
So if you're into the short and flashy, this is not the video for you.
But if there is one message, one message that I can impart to you in all of what I'm doing, this is that message.
So I hope that you will be patient as we talk about this.
I made a prediction some time back that Jared Lochner's parents, the shooter in the recent tragedy in Arizona, that his parents were not going to be mentioned as causal or in any way responsible for what he ended up doing.
That prediction has come true.
I just finished reading a lengthy article, seven or eight pages long, in Maclean's magazine where his parents aren't mentioned at all.
Now, some stuff has been floating up on the internet that Jared showed up drunk because his father had been verbally abusive.
I've had unconfirmed reports sent to me from people who claim to know the Loch Ness that his dad would scream at people for not putting their garbage out on time, was verbally abusive, even a stranger said.
You can imagine what was going on inside the home.
The mom, of course, has been portrayed as shocked and appalled and crying all day in bed because even though the school said he was dangerous and delusional, there's no evidence that his parents took him in for a psych exam, for a psychiatric evaluation.
Come on. To not talk about parental responsibility in this is such an abdication of reason, such an abdication of morality.
That we're focusing on Sarah Palin's goddamn crosshairs and what some guy said thousands of miles away in some political campaign, or Obama saying they bring a knife, we bring a gun, and all these metaphors.
I mean, that's so wide of the mark.
It can't even be conceived of unless you understand what is really going on.
This is my Argument as to what is really going on.
Why parental responsibility, which is so clear and so obvious in this matter.
His parents were warned that he was dangerous and delusional.
He lived with them.
They have responsibility for him.
They are paying his bills.
Where did he get the money?
For internet access, for computers, for webcams, for video equipment, for guns, for bullets.
He didn't have a job.
His parents paid.
You pay, you're responsible.
But nobody can talk about this.
This can't even be examined obliquely.
And why is that?
Well, I'll tell you why.
There is a cycle of life that, if we miss it, We become very unhappy, guilt-ridden, manipulative, and false in the long run.
And the cycle of life is that children are inconvenient when they're very young, and parents are inconvenient when they're very old.
And I say this as a stay-at-home dad of a highly energetic and active and curious and independent daughter.
Yeah, there's a lot of inconvenience with children.
You know, they're poopy, they have to be constantly managed and kept safe, and they want to get up way too early in the morning and they want to go to bed way too late at night.
All of these things are natural.
They don't want to brush their teeth. They want to eat chocolate.
These are all Natural and healthy things, and all incredibly inconvenient.
I mean, it's not like I wake up thinking, oh, yay, I get to read Cinderella for the 12 billionth time today.
I mean, but that's parenting.
That's what you do. That's what you sign up for.
That children are inconvenient.
Glorious, wonderful, beautiful, magnificent, but inconvenient.
And the responsibility that I have taken on It's taken on by very few parents, relatively speaking, compared to how it used to be in the post-war period, 50s and 60s.
Most children grew up with a stay-at-home parent.
Now, very few do.
And my wife and I have made sacrifices to ensure that we're both home for my daughter, be available for her, to give her continuity, to give her a sense of Of security and being loved and being treasured and being valued.
And I wouldn't trade that for the world, for the world, for the world.
But most people don't do that.
Most people go back to work and put their kids into daycare.
And daycare Not only makes kids ill all the time, but daycare psychologically and emotionally in terms of development has been, at least according to the X books that I've read, an outright disaster for children.
Children are not designed to be raised by strangers.
And the bonding that occurs within the family when parents really take care of their children, that is the bond that is necessary For there to be continuity in the desire for adult children to take care of aging parents, right? You invest, you get your return.
You are generous and you reap generosity.
That's been my experience running Free Domain Radio with giving everything out for free and asking for donations.
That has been my experience so far with parenting.
It has been my experience with marriage and my relationships.
Generosity without expectation breeds generosity.
You reap what you sow.
This is an obvious point. So why is it that the media won't talk about the responsibility of Jared's parents?
Well, people who are in charge of the media are very ambitious people.
They're very hard-working people.
People who are in charge of newsrooms probably rose up through the ranks of reporters and did a lot of traveling and a lot of late hours and a lot of weekends and a lot of nights and a lot of time away from their kids.
Do you see? And the world hangs in front of you, you know, like the devil's amulets.
The world hangs in front of you all of these goodies for giving up and giving away your children to spend the majority of their time being raised by strangers.
The world dangles all of these wonderful things in front of you.
I know, because I've given up most of them.
It dangles money.
It dangles fame.
It dangles approval.
It dangles positive feedback.
It dangles having an effect.
It dangles a byline, a name in headlights.
It dangles all of these wonderful things.
In front of you, all you have to do is let strangers raise your kids.
And you are set.
The world pays you beautifully for that.
Because the powers that be don't want very strong family bonds.
Because very strong family bonds reduces the need for oligarchical hierarchies.
Which we'll talk about another time.
It's not relevant particularly here.
The why. But this is the what.
So people... When they're sort of young and middle-aged, they're very ambitious, and most people have kids in their late 20s, early 30s, and they want to go and get all the goodies the world has to offer, and they tell themselves that their kids are fine, their kids are happy in daycare, although the research and the reality is that they're not, that they miss their parents like you would miss your leg, or legs, really, were they to be taken from you.
And they go for these glittering prizes, the devil's amulets, that hang before them because those prizes are near and shiny and beautiful and wonderful.
And we lust after those prizes, those material goodies, those approval goodies, those money goodies, those status and career goodies that are dangled in front of us.
Just give up your kids and you get all of this stuff.
And people do that.
We do that as a society.
But you know what happens? This is the truly great tragedy of the second half of life.
What happens is you age.
Obviously, you get older.
And all of the people who dangled all those goodies in front of you, they drain away from your life.
All the customers that you served, all the readers that you had, All the viewers of your television program.
Everyone who flipped open your magazine.
They're strangers to you.
You don't know them. They barely know you.
And so you have drained away the sinew, marrow, beauty and value of your intimate personal relationships for the sake of chasing after The glittering, seemingly diamond-hung spiderwebs of other people's approval and money.
Only to find that it is just spiderwebs, with dew and water and nothing on them.
Because when you get older, your customers, your bosses, your co-workers, your employees, your stockholders, your audience, will not be there for you.
They will not be there for you.
They will all vanish.
I read an article many years ago about a woman who was cleaning out her desk drawer after decades.
I think she was in a senior HR position.
And she came across like a newsletter that she'd written like 20 years before.
It was a newsletter that had to go out.
And she missed her daughter's birthday party in order to stay in the office and get this newsletter out.
And she just wept.
Wept. And who wouldn't?
Because nobody in the world remembers that 20-year-old newsletter anymore.
But her daughter still remembers the time when mommy didn't come home for her birthday party.
We reap what we sow.
So the people who are in charge of the media are guilty parents.
Guilty parents.
Why can't they talk about Jared's parents?
I think the answer should be fairly obvious.
And it's not just, obviously, about this shooter, and I'm not trying to say these parents did things as grossly negligent and terrible as Jared's parents, but it's a generational thing.
You see, we all hang before a precipice of the greatest inevitable and seemingly necessary theft in the history of the world, which is the transfer of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, health care, and other resources to the richest generation that has ever existed, which is the Western boomers.
They all start retiring this year.
Tens of thousands of them are going to retire every single month.
And going from net producers to net consumers of government, quote, income.
And there is nothing for them.
There's no money. The money's all been spent and blown and vanished.
In fact, there's nothing but a big pile of debt.
There's not even money. There's not even nothing.
There's debt. There's no money to pay them with.
And for those who've written to me and who've said, but the money was stolen from them their whole lives and now we owe it to them and it wasn't their fault, I say, well, that's just bullshit.
Come on. This problem has been known about since the 1960s.
Forty years or more this problem has been known about.
That the boomers are going to retire and there's not going to be any money.
When I was 13 years old, and maybe a tad precocious, but my friends and I, when we first learned about the Canada Pension Plan, in the classroom, we actually laughed.
We laughed! The teacher was like, well, yeah, I mean, your retirement will, you know, your money is going to be taken from you when you're working, but money will be there when you retire.
And we laughed. I mean, we were 13.
I didn't know my ass from a hole in the ground, politically.
But the idea that people were going to keep your money safe and not spend it, despite all the political gain they could get from it, going to keep your money safe for another 50-odd years, was ridiculous.
I mean, we got it at 13 that it was never going to happen.
So, I mean, the idea that This was not known by everybody involved in the political system, including the voters.
It's ridiculous. Anybody who didn't know this is a liar or just so studiously avoided the political realities they lived in that they should never have even been allowed to vote.
But there is an intergenerational guilt that we're facing.
In my opinion, the bad conscience of parents runs the entire planet fundamentally.
It's what defines ethics and public policy in its most fundamental way.
Because if you have, if you did as a parent, toss your kids into daycare and go to work, if you went after Satan's amulets because of their glittering proximity, and you did not build the bonds of blood and care and love and time and investment with your children, then it's really hard to understand what right the elderly have.
What you have, what right you have as a parent to demand things of your children.
First of all, you should never demand anything from your children because they didn't choose to be born to you.
They didn't choose to be born at all.
You are their servant.
Their caretaker, their custodian.
You do not ask for reciprocity with your children.
I believe if you raise your children right, reciprocity will inevitably manifest itself.
Because I believe that the human mind fundamentally runs either on justice or manipulation.
One of the two. But if you have been a parent who has spent very little time with their kids, who saw your kids an hour or two a day maybe, Bathing, feeding, getting them to bed, very little quality time, maybe a little bit on weekends.
If you divorced, terrible for children, terrible, wretched and abominable for children.
If you were a workaholic, if you golfed on Saturdays rather than spend time with your children, if you made them feel negligent, inconsequential, unwanted, peripheral to your life's goals, your life's joys. Then you have no right to demand anything of them as you age.
But because this terrible equation only becomes visible to people when they get on the downward spiral of life, when they realize too late that all of the fame and status and money, such as it was, That they pursued in their youth and middle age has evaporated to nothing but a glittering afterdust of inconsequential memory.
When they realize how much they need their family, their children, their relationships, their friends, how much they are going to depend upon the true social safety net, which is the umbilical cord of a tightly knit family, That they pursued the devil off a cliff and fell into the nothingness of insubstantial unrelatedness.
When they realize all that, it's so late you can't go back and give your children an intimate, warm, happy and connected childhood.
It's... It's too late.
It's too late. Restitution has become impossible.
Undoing has become impossible.
At the time when you did not invest in your relationships, when they could have been really useful, and when other people really needed it, particularly your children, when you did not invest, and you languished in the empty disco ball glass of success and the approval and money of strangers, when you did not invest, And now you need.
You need support.
You need help. You need money.
You don't want to be put in a home and left to the care of the government.
But you want your friends, your family, your children to be with you.
But it's too late. You can't go back, so what do you do?
Well, you use guilt.
You use manipulation.
You invent ought tos and shoulds.
You know, in Japan, they're thinking of passing a law to require children to visit their parents.
What does that say about Japanese parenting?
That you have to have a law requiring children to visit their parents?
Well, everybody says we're children are just selfish.
Nonsense. Nonsense.
Nonsense. My daughter is the most generous person that I know.
Well, it's too late, and so you have to use guilt, you have to use manipulation, and you have to, by God, evade and pretend the non-existence of any questions of parental responsibility and culpability for what has happened to the children.
And you have to pretend that the children are bad and ungrateful how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have an ungrateful child, quotes King Lear.
And you have to pretend that you just deserve all of these goodies and all of this love and all of this caring and all of this tenderness.
As if you gave it.
You think it's a debt that is owed to you.
No. No.
If you don't invest, you don't get the reward.
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