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June 7, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:01
1926 The Cynical Ethics of Childhood

The lectures I remember from my youth...

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For some reason, it's always tricky to know how this stuff cooks around in the brain.
For some reason, I'm thinking about a meeting that my school had with all the kids when I was...
Let's see, okay.
So I was 11, I came to Canada, lived in Whitby, went to grade A for a couple of months, came to Toronto, went to grade 6...
And this is when I went to grade 7, so I would have been 12.
Yeah, probably just about to turn 13.
And all the kids were brought into the cafeteria.
And the vice principal said that he had a present for us.
And, I don't know, me, I thought, hey, candy!
Yay! I had a candy bar or something to welcome us to...
Junior high school. This was grade 7, I guess.
And there was this long lecture that we got about, you know, this was the big school, we were going to be more responsible, and that he had a great present for us.
And with great ceremony, what happened was...
We ended up getting a thesaurus.
And I guess like all kids who were vaguely into dinosaurs, I sort of knew what it was, but part of me thought, hey, it'd be cool to get a dinosaur.
That would be a lot of fun.
And we were given this thesaurus with great veneration, and we were instructed to write our name in it, and we were instructed to use our thesaurus in the composition of this, that, and the other.
What I really remember about that meeting was the very serious tone about virtue.
And that reminds me also of when I was in boarding school, we would go through these crazes, you know, these crazes like any caged animals, I guess.
One of them was called conquerors.
You get these chestnuts from a tree, put a string through them, and you try and hit each other's conquerors to figure out who had the stronger conqueror, so to speak.
I guess conqueror. It's C-O-N-K-E-R, also C-O-N-Q-U-E-R, I suppose.
Then we went through another phase.
We went through a phase of paper airplanes, where everything was turned into a paper airplane.
And it was all competitive and, you know, it was pretty hysterical in hindsight.
But again, we were in a pretty compressed environment where you could get caned for misdeeds.
And I also distinctly remember spending a Christmas at the boarding school with, like, two other kids.
I don't know where my brother was.
Maybe I was six or so.
For probably a week or ten days.
There were, I guess, a skeleton crew.
Boy, that's a creepy sound.
A skeleton crew at the boarding school.
There was a skeleton crew, and I remember sitting at a table with some other kids.
I think it was a Christmas. It seemed like a long time I was there.
But during the phase of paper airplanes, I had a Guinness Book of Records, and I tore a page out because I couldn't get any paper.
I had to make a paper airplane.
I had an idea for a new one. And it was a...
I think it was some Roman coins.
Actually, I know. There were some Roman coins on it.
And I was caught.
I think they'd been banned at this point.
And I was caught.
With my paper airplane. And I guess he figured that I tore it out of a book.
And so this was, you know, there was very little chastised in private, I guess, except the beatings in boarding school.
So I was sort of hauled up in front of the class.
And I remember this guy. I still remember him very vividly to this day.
He married the music teacher, Miss Black.
And he was such a 70s dude, you know, that blonde Stusky and hush mustache and big-ass sunglasses outtake from chips.
And he brought me up in front of the class, and I got this long lecture about respect for property.
And the lecture was, your mother worked very hard to be able to provide you with this book and to rip it up as a disrespect to her work and her generosity and her kindness.
They just grind you down into this really fine, disintegrated, morally guilty paste.
And even at the time, I think I'd been there for a year, so I was probably seven by this time.
Even at the time, I got that this was just stuff you had to get through.
This is just stuff. I mean, obviously I knew who my mom was.
There was no doubt about that in my mind at the time.
And so the idea that my mom was a great and generous soul whose kindness I had spurned and so on was not very realistic to me.
And so I just kind of got that when it came to...
Moral condemnations from those in authority.
You just kind of had to grit your teeth and get through it, you know, like some wild adventurer strapping himself to a tree during a hurricane to see what it's like.
You know, you just had to kind of get through it.
And it stuck a little bit, but not too much.
And of course, I was only really concerned that I was caught, not that I was spitting on my mother's truly generous-hearted kindness and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Because, I mean, I think I got at the time that it was kind of tough to lecture me about respect for property in an environment where I would get caned for not obeying silly rules.
In other words, that I should have a great respect for a But they could haul me off and beat me with a cane whenever they wanted.
So, I think even at the time, there was just this...
Why it was just so hard to believe.
It wouldn't say hard. It's even impossible to believe that I was a bad person.
That's been pretty hard for me to believe ever since.
It hasn't been impossible, really. And I didn't get this at the time, I don't think.
But... I did feel a great sorrow during these sorts of lectures, particularly the one in boarding school.
You know, like this guy, later on, who was giving us the thesaurus, was giving us big lectures, as we always got, about respect for property.
Respect for property, you see, was so important.
You had to take care of your thesaurus and feed it.
And you had to not bend the pages, and you had to treat it with respect and all that.
And I remember a friend of mine I think she ended up making him pay.
For the textbook, which is pretty expensive.
And what I really got from people in authority when I was a kid, and these are just, you know, you have the same nonsense, I'm sure, in your life, so I don't need to keep illustrating it with examples from my life, but...
We were all forced to go to school, and we were forced to take the classes that other people wanted, and we had virtually no choice in what it is we could do.
We weren't allowed to choose our schools, or whether we went to school, or our parents weren't allowed to choose whether they paid, whether they had kids or not, or liked the school or not, or sent their kids to school, or did something else.
And so it was really hard when we were all, like to go back to the thesaurus meeting, we were all hauled into this auditorium, this cafeteria.
You know, the bell rang and we all got herded in by the teachers like a bunch of sheep with sheepdogs.
And then we were taught about respect for property.
But we were being treated as property disrespectfully.
We were being treated as property disrespectfully.
And this is the weird disconnect that goes on in authority systems, particularly state authority systems.
You must treat the communal property with respect, but you as a private individual We'll be hit or detained or any number of things, any number of punishments.
You'll be herded around, ordered to go here or there, and you'll never be asked whether you're interested in what you're being taught or what you would like to learn instead.
You will never be allowed to deviate from the rows and the marching orders that are being laid down in front of you.
Your life is like you have as much choice of direction as a train without even any switches.
And so we were treated as property disrespectfully, but we were told to treat inanimate property, a piece of paper, a book, with great respect.
And I do remember watching my friend get attacked and humiliated by the teacher for doodling in his textbook.
I do remember thinking At the time, well, why the fuck don't you treat us with respect?
And then, as water goes down a hill, we will treat books with respect.
Right? I mean, there is, of course, a kind of petty rebellion, and there is boredom in the way textbooks are handled.
I mean, I remember it was very common, particularly in science and math textbooks, that Yeah, page 22.
Go to page 65. Page 65.
Go to page 42. Page 42.
Go to page 89. Page 89.
Go to page 126. Page 2026.
You realize the teacher's been watching the whole time, don't you?
There were doodles, there were defacement messages from one person to another because everybody was so bored and so constrained and so constricted and so tired.
Because, of course, in any private school system, free system...
Nobody would ever start school for teenagers at 8.30 in the morning.
It would be 10, probably, or whatever, because a teenager just doesn't wake up that early or that well.
And so I remember feeling that if the teachers wanted us to treat property with respect, then should they not treat us with respect?
I mean, I don't remember a couple of times in university, but I don't remember any time In state schools, or even private school in England, being treated with any kind of respect, having a teacher have any kind of curiosity about my thoughts, or my preferences, or anything like that.
I mean, we really were just faces in a herd.
And to be treated as an inanimate object to be taught at...
It was, you know, in hindsight, so profoundly disrespectful to the freedom, individuality, and identity of us as children that They really took something very, very precious from us.
And yeah, okay, some of it's obvious, like identity and all that.
But what I really missed as a kid was respect for the leadership of adults.
I really, really missed that.
You know, just sort of thinking about it now in hindsight, I really think that was a common experience for most of us, that I think children really want to look up to someone.
They really want to admire someone.
And that was taken away by these petty, pouty, hypersensitive moralists that were everywhere in that environment.
The slow-grinding, wildly hypocritical moral lecture that I received So many times as a kid was just so sad and ridiculous, so pathetic. And you can see this actually in British comedies, the lack of respect for authority, the lack of respect for parents.
Somebody posted this on the board, outnumbered as a British comedy.
I've watched a few episodes. And it's very key, very key that the parents are kind of ridiculous and the children have no respect for them.
But that's the case, of course, in a state of society that you will always lose respect for your parents.
Because of the hypocrisy in the essence of a state of society, that the children are told not to use violence, but everything, almost everything that is achieved in society at any kind of national level is achieved through the coercion of the state.
Or you tell children not to use violence, but the entire school system is based on coercion.
So... It's really hard for kids to take that kind of stuff seriously, and I missed having an authority figure to look up to, but to be inspired by, to be ennobled by, to be encouraged by.
Not necessarily by any particular individual example, but just to look up and admire someone would have been great.
But even more fundamentally than that, I think, it was that I had virtue taken away.
I had goodness.
The self-respect that comes from goodness, the happiness that comes from goodness, the pride, the benevolence that comes from goodness.
All of that was taken away because goodness was co-opted and owned by pompous, vainglorious, petty, bureaucratic fools who used it as a kind of Fargo-based wood chipper on the souls of the children.
And that was very sad.
That was a very sad thing. The same thing almost happened with exercise for me.
But anyway, we don't have to worry about that.
I mean, really, goodness is...
Because we weren't allowed to exercise our reason, and therefore we weren't able to achieve virtue, and therefore we could not achieve happiness as children.
I mean, it was fundamentally robbed in that way.
It was a very sad, very sad thing.
And... I think another thing that was really clear was that there's such an enormous escalation involved in moral lectures.
I mean, morality is, as I've always argued, the most powerful thing in human nature, in human society, in the world, in human society anyway.
And so, when someone takes a moral stand, or somebody makes a heavy, deep, and powerful moral argument...
There really is a very, very powerful line drawn in the sand.
And that line is, if you question this, if you expose anything about this, I will fuck you up big time.
I will go medieval on your ass, so to speak.
That is something that you really see in these kinds of moral arguments.
So, yeah, in the school system it's really obvious.
If you were to question, like to say, okay, so we're supposed to treat this with respect, but how are we being treated with respect in this whole system?
Well, there would have been just something horrendous come out of that.
Just horrendous. And this is why people become so afraid of virtue, and rightly so.
It's a very powerful thing to start to overturn in society.
It exposes a huge amount of hypocrisy and...
The gravest and greatest evil in society, which is the use of hypocritical virtue for the sake of achieving power over others.
Well, that's about as bad as it gets.
So I just wanted to share some of these memories and share some of the sadness they have that inspiration and virtue was taken from me as a kid with all this hypocrisy and power-mongering.
Let me know if you've had similar experiences.
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