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Aug. 4, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:41
2182 Do You Own Your Kids?

A philosophical examination of the relationship between ownership, parents and children.

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So, there are two questions that come up.
One important, I think one relatively unimportant, but an interesting theoretical test.
The first is, what is the moral status of the relationship between parents and children?
And the second is, can you sell your own freedom?
And let's deal with the first one.
Very important, and I've ground a few mental gears working on this one, so I hope what I've come up with makes some sense.
So, clearly, I do not have a moral obligation to feed everyone in the world.
It's nice if I, you know, help them out, but I have no fundamental moral obligation to feed everyone in the world.
However, I do have a moral obligation to feed my daughter food, because she can't get food for herself.
So, I've brought, you know, with my wife, I've brought this being into existence who is dependent upon me, And there is the implicit contract, of course, that if I do not give my child, or I do not release my child, or put my child up for adoption, if I do not give my child up to someone else, then the implicit contract is, I have to feed.
Because without me feeding my child, my child will die, and that is murder, right?
So, to enclose someone and then to refuse to feed them is murder.
Like, if I lock someone in my basement, then...
That's not good, right?
I mean, I've kidnapped him.
If I lock him in my basement and then I refuse to give him food and water and he dies, then I'm guilty of murder because I have enclosed him, right?
This is a similar principle to if some boy is drowning offshore and I say to everyone, no, no, no, I'm an Olympic swimmer and an expert lifeguard.
I will go and save this boy.
And then I go out and I say, stand back everyone, I've got this.
I'm a professional.
And then I swim out to the boy and then just tread water and watch him drown while I'm guilty of his death because I have discouraged other people from helping him by pretending I'm going to help him and then I haven't helped him and then it's too late for other people to come and save him so clearly I would be responsible for that boy's death.
And that is something that, sorry, there's just this motorcyclist went by like 800 miles an hour, who I hope will not be responsible for anyone's death.
And so, if I enclose someone, if I prevent other people from helping someone and then do not give the help myself, then I'm responsible for the resulting disaster.
And if you are a parent, then you have enclosed the child in your house.
And the child, by his or her very nature, can't go and get their own food and can't go and get a job and has no particular independence that way, particularly when they're babies.
And so, you have assumed the responsibility.
Again, this is sort of like a pet, right?
I don't have to feed every stray dog, though it's not bad if I do.
But if I... If I do choose to get a dog from the pet store, well, then the pet store owner is no longer responsible for feeding the dog.
That responsibility has transferred to me.
Now, this doesn't mean that I have to sign a contract with the pet store owner or have to sign a contract...
With the dog, obviously ridiculous, this is an implicit contract.
And implicit contracts are everywhere.
I don't have to sign a piece of paper when I go into a store that says, I'm not going to steal this stuff.
I don't have to sign a piece of paper when I go to a restaurant saying, I will pay for the meal when all is said and done.
So, these are just sort of implicit common sense contracts that sort of make sense.
So, I am responsible for the care of my child, and this means, of course, proper medical attention.
This means feeding, clothing, sheltering, and appropriate amounts of play and positive interactions.
I mean, this is kind of essential.
See, when you have a baby...
The baby is, you are the source of stimulation for that baby.
Visual, auditory and so on.
And touch in particular.
Babies, of course, incredibly sensitive to touch and really kind of need it to live.
Babies that aren't touched tend to expire.
And so, I have enclosed the baby in my house.
I have, through my implicit contract, no one at the doctor said to my wife and I, listen, you're going to feed this baby, right?
You're not going to sign here and tell me you're going to feed the baby and you're going to play with the baby and give the baby water and take her to the doctor and so on, right?
By taking the baby home, right, just as you take the pet home, that is the contract that is put in place, that is understood.
And anybody who can't understand that contract can't have a child, right?
Can't bring a child home.
If somebody's raped, who's mentally retarded, then they don't have any sense about how to feed them.
Obviously, that would be murder to just send the baby home with that person.
This is a very important aspect of understanding the groundwork for the parent-child relationship.
Because I'm not just responsible for the continued physical survival.
I'm responsible for the continued well-being and growth of the baby, right?
We all understand that if I was such a hellacious parent that I gave the child only that which was just enough to keep that child alive and just hanging in there and not growing and so on and did not provide in some sort of hellacious Romanian orphanage-style deprivation tank, did not provide that child with any particular stimulation, then the child's brain would atrophy.
There would be big problems with development, just as if I did not expose the child to language.
So, you understand there's a lot more positive obligations that are necessary because babies are catch-and-release animals, right?
I mean, they are to be trained to go into the world to be independent, right?
Pets, not so much.
I mean, I guess if you're raising a wolf to go into the wild or something, but pets really aren't so much involved in, you know, you don't usually raise a goldfish to release them back into the ocean.
But if you did, then there would obviously be other things that you would need to do to prepare.
But childhood, It's the preparatory laboratory for the catch and release offspring of human beings, which is to be away from the parents when they grow older and to integrate within society to have children of their own and so on, right?
So, it is the manufacture of an adult that the parent is responsible for.
And this is why I make the argument that childhood is everybody's business, because we all have to live with the outcomes Of childhood.
We all have to live with the outcomes of people's childhoods.
If the child is beaten and raped and starved, there's a much higher likelihood that that child is going to be a criminal, a sociopath, a psychopath, and just do all kinds of terrible things to innocent victims, right?
And so, if you have a dog and you keep that dog inside, then it doesn't really matter to anyone else whether you train him to go poop in the right places and to sit and beg and roll over or whatever the hell else you teach dogs when you have them.
It doesn't really matter because you keep that dog inside.
Now, if you beat your bulldog and make him feral and then release him near a playground, well, that becomes everybody's business.
And please understand, I'm not saying I'm morally indifferent to whether a dog is mistreated in the home, but...
First of all, I mean, it's kind of unverifiable, right?
I mean, I guess you could find some ways of hearing about it, but let's say it's a cat or a goldfish.
You don't give a goldfish enough food and it dies.
Well, that's not particularly, I mean, there's a moral problem there, but that's not everybody's business.
But because human beings are, I hate to say catch and release, they grow and release entities, they integrate within society and society then has to deal with the positive or negative aspects of Of whatever parenting has occurred.
And that's why I have made the argument for many, many years to get involved in the childhoods of children around you.
To talk to the parents.
I was just at Freedom Fest in Vegas.
Probably two dozen people who came up to me saying, listen, your show is not hitting my kids anymore.
I'm not yelling at them.
We're negotiating.
It's great.
Thank you so much.
And we had many more conversations about that than about the Federal Reserve or fiat currency or whatever you call it.
That to me is great.
It's fantastic.
That's exactly how philosophy should be spreading, right?
You can't teach people how to think until they have the capacity to think, and they'll have a much greater capacity to think when they are raised peacefully and philosophically and so on.
So, the way that you parent is something that society has a say in.
I mean, I'm sorry, but when I talk to parents, if I see them harming their kids or hitting their kids or yelling at their kids, and I talk to parents and say, this is not acceptable.
This is not acceptable behavior.
You cannot do this.
People say, my kid!
Don't tell me how to raise my kid.
Okay, then you never let them out of the house when they get older, and that's fine.
But the problem is, they do get out of the house when they get older.
They do grow up to be strong and muscular and independent and are released into society.
So it does matter to me, it is important to me, how you raise your children, because I have to live in the world that they live in.
And my daughter has to grow up to live in the world that they live in.
So yes, it damn well is my business how you raise your child.
Because you won't be raising them forever.
They're going to go out into society and bring bouquets or bullets to the social interaction of the world they live in.
So yes, it is my business.
If you don't understand that, I'm not even sure you are a parent in any fundamental way.
Prison guard or something like that.
But if you don't understand that it is everyone's business and everyone does have a right to tell you when you're parenting badly, it is not your child.
Again, unless you want to keep them in your house forever, in which case I still have a fundamental moral problem with the mistreatment of children, but there's less of an argument from effect on it.
I'm not saying...
I understand.
I want to be clear here.
I'm not saying it's better if the children never get out, but children do get out.
Parents age and they do get out.
There's very few Norman Bates, and even the Norman Bates character ended up doing significant harm to other people.
Well, killing.
So...
So, this is important.
You own your pets until they're dead, so to speak.
You are responsible for your pets until you're dead, but you're not responsible for your children until they're dead, right?
Because, generally, you die long before your children do, and they're out there independent in the world, making their own decisions, doing their own thing, and so on.
It also...
Sorry, let me just say one other thing about...
How you parent is my business because my child is also going to live in the world with your children.
And if your children are beaten and become bullies or mean or cold or thieves or whatever, even just verbally aggressive jerks, well, that is my business.
You may have seen this video, I just saw a snippet of it, of this grandmother on a bus with this bunch of young sociopaths saying that, you know, she's so fat that they could cut her open with a knife and all they'd find is like a Happy Meal or whatever, right?
I mean, just brutal, brutal verbal abusers with no conscience.
And they're asking her if her face is sweating or are those tears.
I mean, just horrible little monsters.
And again, I mean, sympathy to the kids, though these kids are teenagers, I think, and they're all off-camera, but you can tell, of course, exactly how they've been raised and the environments they've been in.
But it does matter, because my kid may be on that bus.
So it's not like we as parents have to wait until your kid becomes an adult.
To talk to you about your parenting because my kid has to live in that world.
The world that your kids are populating and the culture and the environment and the general social machinations that your kids are bringing to the table.
My kid has to live in that.
So yes, it matters to me how you parent.
And if you're parenting badly and if you're parenting abusively, I will say something.
And I will continue to say something.
Because what you do to your kids is my business.
And what I do to my child is your business too.
So, when people say, well, it's my kid.
Don't tell me how to parent my kid.
Well, it's not really your kid.
Certainly, children are not property.
That I think is kind of fundamental.
They're obviously not property like a boat or a car.
I mean, when I last took my car in to get serviced, It's a Volvo.
Now, it's 13 years old.
Air conditioning's busted.
One of the locks is busted.
Half the radio stations don't work.
Half the lights on the bottom of the car don't work.
I mean, on the inside, the ABS doesn't work.
I mean, it's just a clunker by now.
So I'm terrified to take it to the dealer.
I just keep the car.
But when I took the car, they dropped me off at home.
And the guy was saying, oh yeah, you know, if you get a big bill, don't worry about it.
I had a guy who had $6,000, but he didn't change the oil for like two years.
And so, of course, the car was just, you know, to replace the whole engine.
So if you break your own car...
Well, it's kind of irresponsible, kind of retarded, but, you know, it's your car.
You don't go to jail for harming your own car, whereas if you torture your dog, well, that's immoral.
And if you torture your child, that's even more immoral.
So, you can destroy that which you own, right?
I mean, I can take a hammer to my laptop and...
That's it.
It's my thing.
I can destroy it if I want.
I can go to jail for that.
So, you don't own children, obviously, in the way that you own a laptop or whatever, right?
And ownership of children is different from ownership of or custodianship.
I'll make the argument for custodianship, but just do ownership for now.
Ownership of children is different from ownership of animals, because the ownership of animals is a responsibility in perpetuity, and you are not required to groom them for independence.
You are not required to groom your poodle to go and be a productive and independent member of society.
So, it is a responsibility in perpetuity where, you know, good treatment and playing with the dog and all of that, but you don't have to educate the dog.
You don't have to civilize the dog, so to speak.
You don't have to give the dog the tools necessary to survive independently and flourish hopefully independently in society.
So, to my mind, Again, this is just my thoughts on it.
This is not all ironclad.
But to my mind, if you are a lawyer, and there's a kid, we'll call him Johnny.
Now, when Johnny is four years old, his wealthy parents both die.
And he goes to live with some other family.
But his parents had $5 million.
And their will was, okay, so when Johnny is young, if something happens to us, the lawyer will take care of the money.
But it's not the lawyer's money.
It could be an account.
I don't know how the hell this stuff works.
But the professional will take custodianship of the money as a trust.
He will hold it in trust.
He will invest it.
He will try and do something intelligent with it.
But he can't just go and spend it.
Now, he'll take a portion of it to pay for his time to manage it and so on.
But he has custodianship.
Over the money, and he is expected to deliver the money in good health to Johnny when Johnny reaches 18 or 21 or whatever the law says or whatever the contract says.
When he is married or whatever it is.
And that, to me, is the closest analogy of the relationship between the parent and the child.
It is a form of custodianship where the ownership...
Because babies do not own themselves, right?
They're not responsible for their actions.
I mean, if you're changing their diaper and they kick you in the head, you don't get to charge them with assault.
They barely have control over their own limbs.
So a baby is not a self-owning entity.
They do not have ownership over them.
I mean, if I, you know, if I pee in your face, assuming this is not contractually settled on ahead of time, if I pee in your face, it's a pretty aggressive and nasty action.
You know, if a baby pees in your face, that simply means that you're a parent, right?
So, and have, you know, a little boy.
So, babies do not have self-ownership.
Adults do have self-ownership.
And so the purpose, of course, of parenting is to bestow a healthy, efficacious, and productive self-ownership on the children.
You do that in a million different ways, which we also have to go into example and instruction and all that kind of stuff.
And it's something where it doesn't obviously flip over from one moment to the next.
My daughter at three and a half has significant self-ownership.
She is responsible for a good portion of her actions.
She is responsible for judging what she can and cannot do physically.
And that is a very important aspect of being a parent, is to slowly, you know, like tilting a seesaw, working up a seesaw, you want to encourage, model, instruct, and help bestow self-ownership on people.
And the child reaches independence before full mental maturity occurs.
Full mental maturity occurs around the age of 24, 25.
The child, hopefully, is going to be somewhat independent before then, unless they are a young Italian man, according to all stereotypes and reports.
And this aspect of bestowing self-ownership is something that does not occur for pets.
And does, and obviously doesn't occur for laptops, but does occur for human beings.
So, if you are somebody who holds somebody else's money in trust for little Johnny, for when he grows up, then you have responsibility for the money, but you do not own the money.
And the purpose of having that responsibility for the money is to I think that's really important.
So, imagine if you're part of a law firm...
And you have regular meetings, and you are in charge of these $5 million.
And over the last six months, the $5 million has gone down to $3 million.
And you report this to your partners at the law firm, and they say, what the hell are you doing to this money?
This is not good.
You can't just lost 40% of the money in six months.
This is disastrous.
Would you reasonably as a lawyer say...
Don't you tell me how to run my money.
This is my money.
Don't you tell me what to do with my money.
What would the partner say?
They would say, dude, it's not your money.
You're holding it in trust.
It is not your money to do with as you see fit.
It is not your property.
If you want to go blow $2 million of your own money, we may talk you out of it.
We'll try to talk you out of it, but it's not.
Wrong what you're doing.
But if you are treating this money as your money, that is criminal.
Because it is not your money.
It is a voluntary custodianship that you have assumed to protect the value of this asset and deliver it to an adult.
Well, this is exactly analogous to parenting.
It is a voluntary custodianship that you have assumed by having a child or by taking a child in, if you're a foster parent, It is a voluntary custodianship that you have assumed where you are to protect and grow the value of that which you have custodianship over to deliver it to an adult, which is the health, well-being, in every sense, mental, physical, spiritual, of the child when the child reaches maturity.
That is the essence of the parent-child relationship.
You do not own the child.
And it is your responsibility to groom the child for adulthood, to protect the value of the child's asset, soul, intelligence, maturity, wisdom, judgment, all these kinds of good things.
But the child is no more yours to hit than the money the lawyer has custodianship over is his to steal and spend.
Because to hit the child is to damage the value of the child.
To harm the child.
In extremely predictable ways.
Exactly the same as if you take $2 million from the $5 million and go and spend it on whatever you want, you have harmed the value of Johnny's money in entirely predictable ways.
I mean, if you go and take $100,000 and you put it on Red 22, it's conceivable that you might win and put another couple of million dollars back in and then wouldn't Johnny be happy you made that decision.
But that's not the case with yelling and spanking.
Yelling and spanking harm the value of that which you need to deliver to the adult child, which is a healthy mind, soul, and body, in entirely predictable ways.
Scientifically validated, one-way negative ways.
You have, of course, an incredibly valuable asset as a parent, which is the child.
And it is your duty, right?
A lawyer who has custodianship of a trust fund has a fiduciary duty to maintain and grow the value of that trust fund.
Otherwise, what would be the point of hiring a lawyer to do it?
I mean, if all the lawyer does is stick the money in a bank and then it loses money relative to inflation over the next 13 years and he's like, okay, here's your two and a half million from the five million we got or whatever.
Well, the guy would say, well, wait a sec, so you drew a salary for sticking it in a bank and never doing anything with it?
Well, what the hell?
I mean, anyone could have just stuck that in a bank and not touched it.
How did you earn your money?
Well, you earn your money, right, by growing the value of that which you have custodianship over, by acting proactively.
And if you only spend one hour a month dealing with this $5 million, then...
Clearly, that's not very good for the $5 million.
It's not enough time to proactively manage that kind of money.
And you wouldn't obviously be worth paying much of anything for that kind of service.
In the same way, if you only spend half an hour a week chatting with your kids, well, you are not investing enough in helping them to grow.
If you are not present for significant portions or most or all of your children's childhood, then you have abandoned your fiduciary responsibility.
This actually came, your parental responsibility, this came from a speech I heard probably, gosh, I was probably 17 or 18.
I was listening to a lot of Libertarian tapes.
And if anyone knows this, please let me know.
But this is what I was listening to.
It was some libertarian.
He had one thing that I'll remember.
And again, if you know who this is, I'd love to hear all these tapes again after 20 plus years.
My God, more than 20 years.
27 years.
But in it, the guy was saying how useful metaphors are in the explanations of ideas, right?
So, the story that he put forward was something like this.
So, the story goes that Judas sold out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.
And then he was so ridden with guilt after he betrayed Jesus that he went and hung himself on a tree.
And legend has it that the tree died after he hung himself on the tree.
And how many of us take the same deal, the same rotten deal?
Let's say we're really great at being an artist and we work for some company as an artist and then somebody says, hey, you should be an art director.
So we go and become an art director.
We end up with all this bureaucracy and paperwork and we don't actually end up being able to do much art anymore.
And we've betrayed that which is highest within us for the sake of a little money, a little prestige, 30 pieces of silver.
Now, most of us, we don't go and hang ourselves.
But you know what?
When we make those choices, when we betray ourselves in that way, the tree dies anyway.
To me, it's a very powerful story.
It's a very good use of allegory.
And he also had a discussion of parents.
And in it he said, well, what do we owe our parents?
Well, we owe them, I think, what we owe everyone else, which is justice.
And again, I'm 27 years after the fact, so this is what I remember.
We owe our parents justice, fairness.
And if they've been good to us, then, you know, I think we should be good to them.
And if they've not been good to us, then I don't think we owe them much of anything.
And this, again, is Murray Rothbard's argument.
If you don't like your parents when you become an adult...
I hope to see them.
But this is something that if you have done a great job managing Johnny's finances, it's quite likely he's going to want to have you keep managing the finances because you've done a great job.
On the other hand, if you've cratered their value and you hand him eight bucks, he's not going to He's not really going to want to have you do anything for him in the future.
And I think that the investment that parents make, which they expect to recoup, I mean, there is this kind of deal, and it's an important deal.
There's this kind of deal with parents to children, which is the parents say, well, I will take care of you when you, the child, are young, and it would be nice if you took a little care of me when I got really old and creaky in my final sunset years.
I think that's a reasonable deal.
I certainly hope that Isabella will be more or less okay with that deal.
I'm not saying that she'll want to necessarily do all this, you know, whatever I need when I'm 900 years old.
But I think that it will be something that she will do, I think.
I think.
We'll see.
She's certainly not obligated.
I'm obligated to take care of her when she's a child because I chose to have a child and we've enclosed her in her house.
I owe her.
She doesn't actually owe me, obviously, anything.
It would be nice if, but she doesn't owe me.
But the same thing is true of my wife.
I hope my wife will take care of me when I get old.
She doesn't owe me that.
She can divorce me the moment I develop a particularly alarming cough.
I don't have any concerns about that.
I mean, we will take care of each other until the end.
Because I think that, I mean, in the same way that I don't charge for any of this stuff, but people send me money enough to live on.
And I think generosity begets generosity.
And I think we do have kind of an innate sense of fairness and all of that.
And so, the deal that parents want is the deal that says, well, I took care of you when you were a kid, and now I would really like it if you would Pay some attention to me, come to visit to maybe even take care of me or help me with things now that I'm old.
And these always seem to me the kind of deals that if you have to invoke punishment or guilt or hostility or entitlement, then you're just basically saying that you didn't invest enough to gain the return of generosity from your children when they become adults and you become old.
I mean, I don't really get sick, but the last time I got sick was a couple of years ago.
I got a bad sandwich at a place and spent a day in bed.
I didn't have to say to my wife, you know, I can't believe it.
Why don't you get me some soup?
God, I do so much around here.
I might have to manipulate her and, you know, she took the day off work and took care of me and so on.
Maybe five or six years ago was the last time I was sick.
And so she, I mean, there's no, right, this is just reciprocity.
And if she gets sick, I'm obviously happy to take care of her, and so on.
And so, if parents have not invested enough time in their kids, and I got this very sad email some time back from a young man in his mid-twenties,
And he was saying, he'd listened to my shows on parenting and so on, and he began, he sort of ached about the gap, and he said, you know, well, my parents, they just kind of dumped me at babysitters and daycares and all that when I was a kid, and...
Oh, no, he was in his 30s, sorry.
He said, when I was a kid, they just kind of dumped me at daycare and babysitters and didn't spend much time with me, and now that they're old, they're in a home, I don't really have any connection with them and all that kind of stuff.
And, I mean, it was very, very sad.
It was heartbreaking.
Email.
And I think I wrote to him saying, you know, talk to them.
My God, talk to them.
They're not going to be around forever.
Talk to your parents.
Tell them how you feel.
Tell them what you think.
Maybe you can get some healing.
Maybe you can get some closeness.
Maybe you can get some closure on this stuff.
Talk, talk, talk to people.
Always.
Talk until you can talk no more.
Then talk some more.
But this is a kind of...
Deal, a kind of bargain that some parents are not particularly honorable about, right?
So they don't invest that much in their kids when they're young.
And then when they get older, they want all these resources back.
And, you know, maybe it's just a point of pride for me or something like that, but I just cannot ask for resources from people who don't want to give them to me, if that makes any sense.
I mean, I think that...
Isabella's reciprocity, when I get old, will be there spontaneously.
It's just part of the deal.
Not a deal, but just, you know, when you invest, you get returns.
And I mean, I don't do it for that, but that's sort of the idea.
And yet, if you haven't done the investment, but you want the return, well, I don't know.
That's the public sector of parenting, right?
I can't get fired, no matter how badly I do, and you owe me raises, whether you like my service or not.
I mean, this is...
It'd be interesting to see the quality of parenting of public sector workers, but it's a direct analogy, right?
You can't fire public sector workers and they get raises no matter what.
You owe them no matter what.
And same thing with abusive parents, you can't ever leave them and you owe them resources no matter what.
I mean, it's going to privatize the family before we can even think about privatizing society.
You can't have these contradictions.
So, I hope this makes some sense about the responsibilities of parents.
Parents are responsible, like kids who grow and release entities.
And so, your parenting, my parenting is everybody's business.
It is everybody's business.
And I will continue to get up in people's grills about their parenting because it is my business how they parent and it's their business how I parent.
Because we do not keep these wonderful creatures in our houses forever.
They go into the wild.
They go into society unattended.
And if they are not prepared or are traumatized, we all have to live with the consequences.
So, I think that if you sort of mull over, then I'm happy to hear your thoughts, and this is certainly not conclusive.
These are just my thoughts on the subject.
I'm happy to hear what you think of this.
You know, host at freedomainradio.com.
You know, give me a shout.
I think the custodianship model is pretty good.
It's obviously not perfect, but it is a pretty good...
And I look forward to your comments.
Please feel free to donate at freedomainradio.com.
And thank you so much for all of your support for making this truly amazing conversation possible.
All my best.
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