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Aug. 19, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:07:31

2188 Are Colleges Prisons of Brain-Freezing Conformity? Freedomain Radio Sunday Call In Show August 19 2012

How does a free society deal with criminals? Holding adults to the same standards as children, and dealing with more harassment at work. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the Internet - http://www.freedomainradio.com

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	Good afternoon, everybody.
	It is the 19th of August 2012.
	Welcome to the Freedom Aid Radio Sunday philosophy call-in show.
	Today it really is going to be a yodel-in show.
	So I won't, but all the questions will need to be informed of a Swedish yodel.
	If you've seen the recolor ads from when you were younger, you will know where to take it.
	I guess a Swedish chef also helps.
	So, the documentary is checking along.
	If you'd like to help out, freedomainradio.com forward slash donate would be most helpful.
	A couple of people have asked me how much it's going to cost.
	Well, to make, we're still working on that, but it's not cheap.
	But it's going to be free for you to enjoy and share.
	I mean, I guess we'll have DVD versions, which will kind of be a cost, but...
	The goal, of course, is to get it into as many brains as possible and unplug as many people from the matrix of the government program we call Language and Morality as possible.
	So, yes, we are going to continue the business model, if we call it that, of free because it's really easy to sell stuff when you don't charge for it.
	So, that's chugging along.
	Just a reminder, if you would like to Come out to Libertopia in October.
	I will be there for three days as the host, so I will be doing an entirely large amount of bad joke, chatty, and actually last year I sang Johnny Be Good with a band, and that was quite a lot of fun.
	So cool to sing on the same stage that Aretha Franklin's Vast Balk has just vacated, so quite exciting.
	So I hope you will come out to Libertopia.org and then there's going to be a Toronto Liberty Fest North run by Mises.ca November the 3rd I think and maybe even the 4th.
	So come up for that.
	Also it has been announced that I will be returning to Vancouver for the Capitalism and Morality Seminar.
	It's going to be slightly different for next year.
	I'll put the link for that on the video and on the podcast and Walter Block and I will be debating the efficacy of political action and by debating I mean twisting each other's nipples until one of us gives way.
	That really has always been the plan but obviously he's been hesitant to bring that because well I assume he has fairly large nipples and that's probably what the problem is.
	So anyway we will be doing that.
	That will be next summer and a couple other things in the mix.
	Which I will be releasing as time goes forward, just before we start.
	Okay, so I occasionally will have a look at Huffington Post because they have a nice iPad app.
	But let me tell you something that showed up.
	So this professor, Charles Negi, I don't know how to pronounce it, but let's just go with Negi.
	He wrote a letter to his students.
	He's an associate professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida.
	And somebody posted it on Reddit.
	And let me tell you what.
	I'll sort of skim it, but I'll put the link in the chat window.
	So he says, hello, cross-cultural students.
	I'm writing to express my views on how some of you have conducted yourself in this university course you're taking with me.
	And then he goes on to say, hey, maybe you're first-generation college students.
	You don't really understand.
	College isn't about being spoon-fed stuff and regurgitating stuff like high school.
	This is about actually thinking critically and challenging your beliefs and so on.
	And so he says the purpose of education is to help students who typically are not accustomed to thinking independently or applying a critical analysis to views or beliefs to start learning how to do so.
	We are not in class to learn facts and simply regurgitate the facts in a mindless way to items on a test.
	Critical thinking is a skill that develops over time.
	Independent thinking does not occur overnight.
	Critical thinkers are open to having their cherished beliefs challenged and must learn how to defend their views based on evidence or logic rather than simply pounding their chest and merely proclaiming that their views are valid.
	One characteristic of the critical independent thinker is being able to recognize fantasy versus reality, to recognize the difference between personal beliefs, which are nothing more than personal beliefs, versus views that are grounded in evidence, or which have no evidence.
	And so basically he had a couple of students who proclaimed Christianity as the most valid religion, and one guy got up and said to all the other Christians or religious people, you need to stop participating in this class, and so on.
	So he wrote, universities hold a special place in society where scholarly-minded folk can come together and discuss controversial, polemic, and often uncomfortable topics.
	Universities, including UCF, have special policies in place to protect both professors and students' freedom to express ourselves.
	Neither students nor professors have a right to censor speech that makes us uncomfortable.
	We're adults.
	We're at a university.
	There is no topic that is off-limits for us to address in class, even if only remotely related to the course topic.
	I hope you will digest this message, and just as important, we'll take it to heart, as it may apply to you.
	Well, I can only add a couple of things that pop into my mind about this, along with a dull, black, red-streaked, inchoate rage of my own time in graduate school and in three Ivy League colleges across Canada.
	The first, of course, is that he's basically saying that you're all completely retarded, bigoted, and ridiculous because you've been to government schools for 12 or 13 years.
	Well, I can only assume that then he's incredibly against public schools because he basically is saying that public schools make everyone an idiot, lack critical thinking, just regurgitate and dumb, dumb, dumb.
	So, okay.
	So, of course, then he should have patience because he's trying to teach them Mandarin and they've never been exposed to Mandarin, so I hope that he's going to have patience with that.
	The second is, I don't know if this has changed now.
	Maybe it has.
	I doubt it has because tenure keeps the zombie brains of professors alive far past their expiration date.
	But when I was going through, I went to York, a campus of York University called Glendon.
	I went to McGill and I went to University of Toronto.
	These are sort of the three top schools, at least in the arts.
	They're pretty high up there.
	Maybe the ranks have changed a little bit, but they're definitely top of the league, Ivy League schools.
	And I'm telling you, back in the day, there was no...
	Of receptivity to any ideas that were foreign to the professors at all.
	I mean, not even a shred of a tiny, tiny little bit.
	And that was something I was a little bit surprised.
	I had this idea, this impression of university, similar to what this guy was saying, that you could go and ask questions that, you know, despite their level of discomfort.
	But, I mean, you bring up that taxation is theft and, I mean, the whole room just There's either this embarrassed silence and somebody goes, okay then.
	Or the professor goes, well, I guess that's a different viewpoint.
	But moving on, right?
	So there's no room to point out the basic moral reality of statism.
	Not even a tiny bit.
	You can't question the welfare state.
	You can't question socialized medicine.
	You can't question unemployment.
	You can't question the use of coercion to organized society.
	You can't question public schools.
	You can't question public sector unions.
	Because, you know, it's pretty lefty in...
	In universities, certainly in Canada, maybe it's the case.
	But I mean, it's this idea that universities are free inquiry and open, blah, blah, blah.
	And you can't even do any counter-history.
	I mean, you can't even do any revisionist history.
	So, of course, in my history classes, I would point out that the Great Depression was caused by Federal Reserve policies and people would just ignore it or get upset or whatever.
	But you couldn't bring anything up like that.
	You couldn't bring up the failure of Keynesianism with stagflation in the 1970s.
	Couldn't bring up.
	Any of that whatsoever.
	You couldn't bring up the general reduction in prices and improvement in the poorest and working classes conditions in the 19th century.
	You couldn't bring up any of the beneficial aspects of the Industrial Revolution, like the fact that calorie count for workers went up like 300% or meat consumption went up by a third in a short period of time.
	You couldn't bring any of that up because, you know, the standard narrative is there was this bucolic, wonderful, medieval, princess bride kind of medieval life and then the satanic meals came in and ate all the children.
	Couldn't bring any of that up.
	You couldn't bring up, what else?
	Oh, I remember having quite a debate with a professor about Nixon versus Kennedy, right?
	John F. Kennedy, right?
	So he was all down on Nixon and talking all about the tapes and the break-ins and the Watergate and so on.
	And I pointed out that it was LBJ who actually installed the tape system and recorded everything and LBJ was even coarser and LBJ had affairs with secretaries and JFK had affairs with everyone and was continually stoned on a wide variety of mind-altering substances, some for back pain and other kinds of things that he was addicted to and that he actually, you know, the...
	The head of the US justice system, so to speak, with the presidency, or at least somebody very high up in this justice system, was having an affair with a woman who was also having an affair with a mob boss, and so on.
	And, you know, pointing out that it was...
	It was JFK who got America into Vietnam, and it was Nixon who got America out and who fought relationships with China, and it was the Democrats who lost China at the end of World War II, lost it to communism, and also Eastern Europe to communism.
	And the last thing, I mean, if you point out any revisionist history to do with McCarthyism, I mean, you're just toast, right?
	I mean, McCarthy, Joseph McCarthy was, I mean, a pretty coarse senator, and he Got information that there were vast numbers of Soviet spies working in the State Department.
	I mean, there were people who were asked to testify about this.
	It was pretty important.
	Imagine if there had been Nazis in the State Department during World War II. Well, having Soviet spies in the State Department, there were hundreds of them.
	Hugely influential.
	The advisor to To FDR, who was a Soviet spy, who was rather instrumental in helping Stalin help himself to all of Eastern Europe, pointing out all of these kinds of things.
	Any kind of revisionist history like that was completely...
	I never got anywhere with it.
	Never got anywhere with any kind of facts.
	It didn't matter how many facts, it didn't matter how many primary sources you had, the professor would make some joke at your expense, and then you would just get marked down.
	So the idea that universities are some kind of place of free inquiry, well, if your free inquiry is secular socialism, then by God, you're allowed to inquire anywhere that you want.
	But if your inquiry is not secular socialism, then particularly if it is libertarianism or anarchism, then you're simply not allowed.
	I mean, it is Soviet-style Suppression of dissenting viewpoints in all of the universities that I went to.
	And I've never heard it any different.
	I mean, I know that there are some people who've got different viewpoints who are teaching at various universities, so it's obviously across the board.
	But if anybody here is in this guy's class and you are a libertarian, please, please just go to this guy and say, hey, did you know that taxation is theft?
	Let's discuss that, shall we?
	And see what the reaction is.
	See how well this guy, you know, is he a pompous windbag who's lecturing everyone else about being open-minded while clinging to his own socialist doctrines till grim death do him part?
	Probably he will take them to the afterlife and bore everyone by lecturing them on the river Styx as well!
	But is he actually a critical thinker who's willing to examine even uncomfortable beliefs?
	Why don't you, say, bring up the prevalence of Judaism in the foundation of communism?
	Ah, I wonder if you've been comfortable talking about that.
	That's actually a fax that I got from Winston Churchill.
	Anyway, so...
	I wonder if he will be comfortable discussing all those kinds of things, whether he is actually committed to this, let's examine even uncomfortable topics, because in my experience, and in the experience of many people that I've talked to throughout university, I mean, it's a Soviet-style gulag as far as any kind of genuinely curious, principled, philosophical inquiry into anything that makes people uncomfortable.
	It's all just completely shut down.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	One of the things that would come out of this is I would go to the professor and say, okay, well, since public school is so terrible, you must be completely against public schools.
	I mean, because public school doesn't teach any critical thinking.
	It teaches ridiculous absorption and regurgitation.
	It doesn't teach any kind of reasoned evidence.
	It doesn't confront anybody with uncomfortable truths.
	Therefore, you must be very much against public schools because that's what you're saying the product of 12 years of it is, is people who can't even remotely think.
	Anyway, I just wanted to mention that it is...
	It just really reminded me of what a grim and brutal trek it was to go through.
	I really liked graduate school as a whole because I really didn't have to take that many courses and I could really focus on writing a great thesis, which I think I did, and got an A. I got an A! I'm so proud of it.
	Anyway, because it was not an easy A to get, let me tell you that.
	But it just reminded me of this myth that There is something open-minded about modern universities and certainly my experience, I mean, my god, it was just unbelievably brutal.
	To try and get any contrary information.
	And this was across many, many different professors, many, many different areas of study, and this was the case.
	I mean, if you want to throw something else in, when I was in theatre school, we did some historical plays, and I brought some alternate history to The Bear, because we would discuss the history of the time and so on.
	And when we did The Seagull, Chekhov's The Seagull, which is a very grim play.
	I brought up some Russian history of the time, and yeah, people were just this glazed thing, like you'd suddenly broken into Mandarin opera or something, like, what the hell are you talking about?
	It doesn't process at all.
	And so this idea that university is somehow doing anything to do with critical thinking, I mean...
	It's just mad.
	It's the old battle of secular socialism versus religious free market.
	I mean, it's the same old battle.
	Secular socialism is very much won out in the universities, but it's all nonsense.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	So, let's get on with you, the brains of the outfit, the callers.
	I am all ears.
	Thank you for your indulgence through the intro.
	Don, can you hear us?
	Yes, sorry.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, go ahead.
	It helps if I take you off of me.
	Okay, yeah, so I appreciate you taking the call.
	I've been on a little bit of a philosophical journey.
	A lot of it's your fault, Stefan.
	I like to hear that.
	And you really messed up my life.
	About four years ago, I was pretty consistently attending Christian and...
	I had to discount all the atheist sections of your books, and so I had to excise quite a bit out, but recently I've been actually taking it all on face value.
	So anyway, I've had the whole impact on my personal circles to deal with and all that stuff as I actually accept truth on face value, so it's been pretty fun.
	What's happened in your social circles?
	Well, nothing's happened with my parents because I'm too scared, but my church attendance has stopped as of about two months ago, and it's been interesting seeing the reaction there.
	I got a couple of letters and had some concerned visits.
	One fellow today, my wife still attends church, and we really like to continue.
	We've met some of our best friends here in this church group.
	over here in Utah.
	But so they're pretty much-- Oh, I was a church in Utah.
	I didn't know that.
	Sorry, just kidding.
	Go on.
	Yeah.
	So the people are pretty concerned that my wife and I are going to be getting a divorce because of this change in my religious status.
	And they're pretty shocked to-- I don't think they quite believe it that we're together on this.
	She's been my sounding board for reviewing these ancient principles and applying implications, you know, working through the implications.
	And she's just an amazing woman.
	And so we've really grown closer, I think, as we've been able to talk through this.
	At least I like her a lot more than I used to.
	And I don't know if she likes me better, but I like myself a lot better.
	It's interesting.
	What was in the letter, if you don't mind me asking, that you got from your church?
	What was in the letter that we got from the church?
	It was the men's group leader.
	He sent me about a ten-page letter.
	We couldn't find one valid argument.
	It was mostly, don't trust your mind because logic is the tool of the devil, and you've got to rely on your heart or your emotions.
	To understand what's really true.
	So it's pretty much the middle truth that you talked about in your UPB book.
	Right.
	And he actually got into his sex life.
	He talked about how awesome his wife is and how he really didn't marry her because she's hot or because of any other reason besides the Holy Ghost telling him to marry her.
	I don't email you a copy of it.
	It's one of the most irrational Arguments that I've ever heard.
	Which is fine.
	You know, I'm actually still a deist.
	This is kind of where I've ended.
	I've come up with an empirical structure, I won't call it a proof, for the existence of God, mostly because I think that that's a comment on our potential.
	And so it's based off of, you know, I exist, therefore, not only does God have to exist, but He has to be good.
	But He doesn't really fall into the traditional It's more like a telepathic society of aliens that I've come up with.
	Anyway, so this is...
	Sorry, you took me on a bit of a journey there and it ended up in a telepathic society of aliens.
	It's like we're driving along in the conversation car and it's like, whoa, did we just hit something?
	We just hit a deer or a badger, yes.
	So anyway, that's where I've ended up and to actually be able to start making some of these Conceptual integrations to where I'm actually able to start communicating on this level.
	Right, right.
	Now, I mean, I think the important thing to understand is you don't have to be a god of articulation and rhetoric in order to benefit from philosophy.
	Like, you don't have to be a great singer to listen to music, right?
	And even to hum along or to sing along in your car or whatever.
	You don't have to be Pavarotti to love opera.
	But you can appreciate it.
	But you can appreciate it, yeah, absolutely.
	And so, in fact, not being good at something to me can really help me appreciate things more, right?
	So, you know, greatest singer ever, Freddie Mercury.
	And, you know, you try to sing along with him and you're like, oh shit, that's why he gets millions of dollars and I have to pay to go to karaoke, right?
	And so the fact that if you try to do something and you can't do it nearly as well as the expert, I think that only helps to enhance your appreciation of what the expert is up to and so on.
	So I don't think you need to have a goal of I need to be as eloquent as whoever you consider to be the most eloquent in order to You know, benefit or value.
	Philosophy or whatever.
	You don't have to go around changing people's minds.
	You may want to.
	And if you do, then there's things you can do to improve eloquence or all that kind of stuff.
	And it's a lot of it.
	It's just practice.
	Keep practicing.
	Very good point.
	I appreciate that.
	Yeah, look, I mean, you don't have to become a dietician when you lose weight, right?
	And you don't have to go out and pound tables and tell people they've got to go on juice fast or whatever.
	I mean, I don't know what the hell in terms of losing weight.
	But you don't have to be a proselytizer just because you've benefited from something.
	You know, every product I love, I don't have to become a salesman for.
	And the same thing is true of philosophy.
	I mean, I really want people to sort of understand that.
	Because if you absorb it, and then the moment you say, okay, I've absorbed it, it's having value in my life, it's getting me out of false things and into true things, and that's good.
	And now I have to go change the world.
	I think that is not...
	Certainly, for me, that wasn't the case.
	For me, there were more than 20 years between me getting into philosophy and me going out and really starting to change the world.
	If that brings you pleasure and joy and happiness and all of that, then I think that's great, but it's not something that you have to do.
	Just because you work out and you really like it doesn't mean you've now got to become a personal trainer and convince everyone else to do it, too.
	I love your analogy of the plague as well.
	To me, that's the biggest motivator is just knowing now that there is the plague of violence out there and recognizing the effects of that plague and now I'm able to address that sometimes really efficiently.
	One lady on Facebook, she says, I want my country back and puts a big old picture of the flag up and I just said, there's no truth in this.
	I said, read that and this will help you with some of your contradictions.
	Right, right.
	So anyway, yeah.
	But I wanted to review this.
	I'm trying to wrap my brain around your DRO idea, and I wanted to see if this was somewhat accurate.
	So I've got a service industry, or service business.
	I work in the service industry.
	And I've realized, I mean, people keep, libertarians keep advocating this collective approach.
	You know, I'll stop paying taxes when a million of my friends are willing to do it with me.
	I'll move to a free society when there's 200,000 people there already.
	We can have our own personal army, and blah, blah, blah.
	So I've been really thrilled with the personal approach, realizing that you can build your own community, really.
	It's your circle of friends, your business travels.
	It's really a very small thing, and I think we're messed up from this whole collective approach.
	Mentality of identifying ourselves with huge groups of people that don't actually have anything to do with our lives.
	And so I'm imagining, okay, what could I do to live in the free market and operate in the free market?
	And I'm realizing that simply taking cash for a job, simply not working for somebody else, so you're not...
	I mean, even to the extent of not having a bank account, But I've been thinking, what really is the advantage of the free market?
	And I thought about your DRO setup.
	Tell me if this is on the market.
	I'm sorry, I'm going to have to hurry you along to get to a question.
	Sorry to be an annoying guy, but you've got to get to your question at this point.
	So my question is, is this an accurate view of the DRO role in a free society?
	If you and I, let's say you got mad because I'm talking too much, you punched me in the nose.
	We have both got something like a trade card that we acquired like a driver's license and that would have had to study up on some natural principles and agree to use a DRO including a magistrate that would resolve any disputes or help us resolve any disputes.
	What I'm wondering is the education factor.
	People would say a free society won't work if there's not education, if people don't understand natural law.
	But couldn't you work that into a DRO that you couldn't really participate in the society unless you signed up for a DRO? And part of the DRO requirement is that you have to get this trade card or something like that, which requires you to go before a magistrate.
	And the magistrate would then Yeah, I mean, there's lots of ways to work it, but I think you want to not start with the middle of a situation, right?
	So, let's say that I'm someone who you said you're talking too much and I just punch you in the face, right?
	Well, why am I doing that?
	Why would I do that?
	Why would I be with someone and get so enraged and not talk about it and so on where my impulse, because this would be impulse control problem, right?
	Why would my impulsivity and my level of anger be so high that I would simply punch someone in the mouth who I thought was talking too much?
	Yeah, it's kind of a lifeboat scenario and I have to jump to those because it's...
	No, no, but you can't jump to those.
	You can't jump to those because remember, the DRO system starts before birth.
	Sure.
	Right?
	So a woman gets pregnant and her DRO will likely...
	She can pay for anything she wants, right?
	You can not be in the DRO system if you want.
	It's just that things will be more expensive.
	In the same way, you don't have to buy life insurance, it's just more expensive for you when you die, because you won't get the money back.
	In a DRO system, the woman's going to say, okay, so I've got to call up my DRO and tell them that I'm I'm pregnant.
	The VRO is going to say, oh man, okay, we've got all the best research out there.
	We know how to keep your pregnancy as risk-free and as safe as possible.
	So we're going to, you know, you're going to have insurance in case your kid is born with spina bifida or whatever, right?
	Whatever problems there are.
	So any kind of birth defects or any kind of congenital illnesses or ailments, we are going to, but we know everything you need to do In order to minimize those possibilities.
	And so we're going to set you up.
	It's going to all be free and so on.
	And we're going to pay you.
	But you have to make sure that we're doing these things, right?
	So they're going to be right there making sure that the fetus is getting the right environment and going to keep the mother as stress-free as possible because stress has negative effects on the fetus's life and so on.
	And so they're going to work with that.
	They're going to make sure that the parenting is peaceful and so on, because by the time all this comes around, the negative effects of aggressive parenting, which are starting to bubble up now scientifically and culturally, will be just as completely accepted, like the link between smoking and lung cancer.
	I mean, it's just going to be well understood.
	And so they're going to say, look, we will ensure the actions of your child.
	So if your child goes out and keys a car or sets fire to a house or whatever, then we will ensure that.
	But if you want us to ensure this, this is the parenting stuff that we need to see happening.
	Of course, by this time, most people will be doing this parenting stuff anyway, so it's not going to set up cameras in your house or anything like that, but they're going to send you parenting courses and if you complete this course, then you get a half price for the insurance for your kids and so on, right?
	And so, all of this stuff will be happening and the kid will be going to specialists because the last thing that a DRO wants is a criminal in society because when there's a criminal in society, the price of protecting everyone goes up enormously.
	Right?
	So the whole point of having a DRO is to reduce the prevalence of violence, of fraud, of rape, assault, murder, you know, theft, whatever, right?
	They really want to reduce that.
	And it will be very clear, and it certainly is clear to me, and I think it is clear to a lot of people, that the best way to eliminate almost all criminality is to have peaceful parenting, which again starts at the moment of conception, or maybe even before conception.
	I think sperm are affected by stress as well.
	Do you see the courtroom situation happening?
	No, but hang on a sec.
	In all of these, somebody who punches someone in the face for talking too much, that is the result of many years of mistreatment, of many years of missed opportunities for society to have a better outcome, to intervene, to do something right.
	Every criminal He wasn't raised in a shack in the woods.
	Every criminal in society has had probably about a thousand opportunities for people when he was a child to come forward and help him and help his family and intervene and do something or call someone or have it happen.
	Have it change.
	Have that kid's environment change so he's not being beaten, so he's not being neglected, so he's not being fed junk food, so he's not being abandoned, so he's not being humiliated, so he's not being raped, so he's not being abused.
	Every criminal that exists in society is a stain upon the honor of everyone who failed to act to protect that criminal when he was a child.
	And if you look at the history of criminals, and if you look into any depth of the history of criminals, almost invariably you will find that they were embedded in the community and they were being incredibly maltreated and not one person in that damn community stood up for that child.
	It is a shame on the face of society that there are so many criminals running around.
	And I don't just mean guys who jack cars.
	I mean people who run banks.
	I mean people who are politicians.
	These kinds of sociopaths as well.
	This is all, you know, you reap what you sow.
	It's an old saying, but it's true.
	You plant a demon seed, you raise a flower of fire.
	And society does not intervene when children are being mistreated.
	Society does not intervene when people are being mistreated.
	Friends, neighbors, relatives, you name it, they do not intervene when children are being mistreated.
	And they get the momentary comfort of not being in that uncomfortable situation of confronting a parent who's harming a child or doing something about it.
	And the only price that they pay, of course, is unemployment, national debt, general insecurity, drug addiction, drug wars, increased incarceration.
	This is the effect of not intervening.
	In situations where children are being maltreated.
	And I include in this public school.
	And I include in this certain churches, right?
	And so because adults don't intervene, and yet they claim that, you know, children are everything.
	I mean, look at the Jerry Sandusky thing.
	This went on for decades.
	It went on for decades.
	And even people who saw children being raped did not intervene.
	Think of the Catholic Church and other churches where these things have gone on.
	Think of the amount of inappropriate touching that goes on in public schools.
	People don't intervene.
	So let me just finish up.
	Sorry for the long speech.
	Let me finish up and then I'll let you respond.
	And so, until we as a society get the connection between not intervening in situations of child abuse and the resulting catastrophes in society, these catastrophes will still occur.
	But I guarantee you, unless someone has a brain tumor or something, I can virtually guarantee you, That somebody who's just gonna go punch someone for talking too much has had a history of significant severe maltreatment as a child.
	And the government of course has almost no incentive to get involved in that.
	Because the government needs criminals and the government needs cops and the government needs prison guards and the government needs soldiers and the government needs politicians and all these people come from traumatic childhoods.
	And so the government has no more incentive to get rid of criminals than anyone who sells a cure has in getting rid of an illness.
	And how many people have to get rid of their customers?
	Yeah, I mean, McDonald's is not going to try and get rid of people who like sugar.
	They're not going to find a pill that makes people not want sugar and salt and fat.
	So, I mean, this is the fundamental thing.
	If you're just going to say, well, what if there's just some guy in society, and I get this question all the time, so sorry for this long response, but he's like, no, no, I've got this guy in society who's just out there who's a serial killer.
	Well, people don't just wake up one morning.
	You know, Dr.
	Phil's not going to wake up tomorrow morning and say, I think I'm going to go on a crime spree.
	You know, I mean, this just doesn't happen.
	If you look at the history of serial killers and murderers, the amount of abuse that they received as children is unbelievable.
	I mean, look at what happened to Charles Manson, raised by a prostitute, abandoned, beaten, raped, just you name it, right?
	And this is not to say that everyone who becomes a criminal, but almost all criminals have this history.
	And so, yeah, this is the price.
	People complain about the world, and then they see a child getting hit, and they don't say anything.
	It's like, well, If you're not going to say anything when you see a child getting hit, then you lose the right to complain about the world because you're contributing, you're enabling, you're allowing it to happen.
	Right.
	My wife...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Oh, just on that line, my wife had a, well, I won't say a friend and acquaintance from church who has assigned her the title of best friend.
	She came over with her kids, and as she was yelling at her oldest daughter, who was about 10 years old, she turned to my wife and she says, Actually, she's referring to her daughter.
	She says, she won't care if I yell at you or if I beat you, because it's so important for you to obey me.
	And my wife was just shell-shocked.
	Afterwards, we talked about what she should have said, and the lady doesn't come over anymore, for obvious reasons, but I thought that was a good example of what you're talking about.
	Right, right.
	So the reality is that until we start intervening actively as a society to help and protect helpless, dependent and brutalized children, well, we're just going to keep getting the same old crap going around and around over and over again.
	But DROs have a financial incentive to do so because if they can prevent crime, they can lower their rates.
	And those who are best able to prevent crime are those who are going to be able to lower their rates.
	It's not the police department that came up with home alarm monitoring or those tags and those alarm bells that go off if you leave a store without getting the tags removed and car alarms and GPS tracking devices for things.
	But the police didn't come up with any of this shit.
	They don't care.
	That's not what they're there for.
	Where people have an incentive, this will occur.
	Obviously, I don't know if you've ever done this, Every now and then, if I see a child being mistreated, I will wait for a minute or two.
	If I'm in an area with other parents, I'll just wait for a minute or two.
	Because I'm always curious, right?
	I know from my own history of maltreatment, probably about a thousand people in three continents could have intervened, and nobody ever did, over like 15 years.
	Although, at least a thousand people knew what was going on in my household and in my family.
	And nobody intervened.
	And even now, if I see people from the old days, you know, they won't say anything about it.
	In fact, they'll, you know, indicate that everything was perfectly fine and they'll, how's your mother?
	And so on, right?
	And so there is this universal unwillingness to intervene.
	And I'm always curious if this has changed, right?
	So I'll wait for a minute or two and see if any of the other people are going to do anything.
	And nobody ever does.
	Nobody ever does.
	I'm always and forever the only person who says anything to the parent who's mistreating or caregiver or whoever it is who's mistreating a child.
	Nobody else will say or do anything.
	They will just...
	It's like it's not happening.
	It's like it's in another dimension.
	It's like there are ghosts that only I can see.
	People have this astounding ability to just turn off any compassion for the child who's being harmed.
	Then people have the audacity to complain about the state of the world.
	You're enabling the state of the world.
	You are colluding, you are participating, you are an accomplice in the state of the world if you stand and do nothing.
	You see violent people everywhere and they don't even know that they're violent.
	Yeah, and pretend nothing's happening.
	I mean, I've seen children getting hit with three other parents, three other sets of parents standing around, like right in front of them.
	Nobody even flinches.
	Nobody bats an eye.
	They don't even stop their conversation.
	Isn't a couple of minutes a little late to respond, though, to a situation like that?
	No, I don't think so.
	I mean, obviously, this is, you know, for whatever the kid's eight years old, it's been eight years, eight years and three minutes.
	It's not going to make the end of the world.
	So, for example, my wife, she's sitting here, this lady is abusing her kids, and she is bringing my wife in as an unwilling accomplice.
	If she had just said, no, I actually do care if you abuse your children, I think that would have been quite an eye-opener for this 10-year-old girl.
	Yeah, I mean, you don't intervene for the parents, you intervene for the children, right?
	Right, right.
	But yeah, that mom is a lost cause, probably.
	Well, I mean, maybe.
	I don't know.
	I think there are some people who are just genuinely sadistic.
	But there are other people who, to give them as much benefit of the doubt, they've just maybe never made any connection.
	They've just never heard anything different.
	You know, surrounded by a social situation where that is occurring all the time and so on.
	And maybe you just plant a little seed and you never know where that's going to go.
	So, you know, I do hold out some hope for the parents.
	But basically, I can tell you, I mean, I sometimes do wonder what my life would have been like if even one person in the, you know, big...
	I mean, I was abused in a very loud, like wall-piercing fashion.
	And we lived in apartment buildings my whole life.
	Hundreds and hundreds of people knew all about it, and I wonder what my life would have been.
	Actually, we lived next door to a policeman at one point for a couple of years, who of course heard everything going on next door.
	You're not assigning moral superiority to a policeman, aren't you?
	No, but what I mean is that, I mean, this is one of the reasons why the idea that, you know, cops are there to help serve and protect is, I'm a little skeptical of.
	But, so what I mean is that I wonder how my life would have been different if someone had intervened at any point.
	And I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I mean, whatever happened in my life I think has been to some degree for the good because I'm pioneering some of this stuff and you know what they say about it.
	You can always recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back.
	And I think whatever has contributed to make me as peaceful and respectful a parent as possible, I think, has been all for the good.
	But I just want to point out, like, if you just say, okay, well, how would the society work if suddenly, you know, there's a bunch of mass murderers around?
	Well, they don't just appear suddenly.
	You have to look at the pattern and the growth.
	And you have to have social mechanisms in society.
	I don't trust to virtue alone.
	Maybe in the future it would just be understood that you just intervene or whatever, right?
	I want there to be social mechanisms with economic profits in place to make sure that there's a strong economic incentive to overcome the natural reluctance that people seem to have to intervene in situations of child abuse.
	And so the DROs work really well that way.
	And I think that's...
	I mean, maybe you won't need them, right?
	Of course, as well.
	You know, you don't buy insurance against bubonic plague anymore because, you know, it's not around.
	And if violence turns out to be as curable as bubonic plague, then you won't even need DROs.
	But, you know, maybe there'll be a transition time or whatever.
	So anyway, listen, I want to make sure I get on to another caller.
	But thanks for great comments and great questions.
	Thanks, Stefan.
	All right.
	Sorry about that.
	We'll try to keep it moving for the next caller, but let's have him.
	Oh, sorry, before we go, San Francisco, if you want to get together with other Free Domain Radio listeners and ride the rails, I think they're mostly skateboarding face down through the big hills, you can check out Nash, N-A-S-H, on the Free Domain Radio message board.
	Just send him a PM. It's a great group.
	Nash is a completely delightful human being.
	And you should really hang out with him, and you should just ping him on the message for us, and he'll hook you up.
	So, sorry, go ahead.
	Next up, we have Geriden.
	Okay, I have a question about family, I guess, and just how I interact with them.
	I haven't do food yet, and I'm having some talks, trying to be more honest with my mother especially, but it is just that crippling, I don't want to say pity, but guilt that I'm just not sure how to deal with, really.
	I'm more guilt about your mom or guilt how?
	No, guilt about...
	Yeah, I guess about my mom.
	She never became really anything in her life, just a housewife, pretty much.
	I know that's not really up to me to worry about.
	Well, I must tell you, as a housewife, I find that offensive.
	Go on.
	Okay.
	Well, she complains a lot about this sort of thing.
	I never did anything.
	It's my parents' fault.
	They never sent me to university.
	How many siblings do you have?
	I have one older sister.
	She's eight years older than me.
	I'm 22 right now.
	Yeah.
	I mean, personally, I think that raising kids is a very noble profession and a very skilled requirement professional.
	I think a lot of people underestimate how challenging it is and how much knowledge you need.
	Absolutely.
	I totally agree with you.
	But I just want to point that out.
	To me, it would be a little insulting if my mom were to say, well, I did nothing with my life.
	Well, I'm here.
	Does that not...
	Anyway, go on.
	Okay.
	No, yeah.
	Absolutely.
	It's just like last night, for instance, we had a conversation...
	She's told me this multiple times, but she continues to say that she wishes she never had children.
	Wishes she never had children?
	Yes.
	And so the first time she said that, I said, you know, hey, that's a really disgusting thing to say to your child.
	And then she's just like, oh, well, you're just twisting my words.
	I was like, I don't understand how I'm twisting that sort of thing.
	Well, were you?
	I mean, did she say, I don't want to...
	She said I didn't listen to the tone of her voice.
	Oh, the tone.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	The great escape called tone.
	I hate you, but I don't mean that in a negative way.
	Don't listen to the words.
	Just listen to the tone.
	I can sing it.
	I hate you.
	Exactly.
	I really don't know how to...
	It is.
	She's very passive-aggressive, and I have listened to many of your podcasts.
	I just discovered SCR a month and a little bit ago, so I've just been plowing through podcasts and stuff.
	I have recognized corruption in my family, but I'm afraid that if I don't get over the feelings of guilt about leaving my mom and my dad, obviously it's going to carry over into whatever relationships I have in the future.
	I understand that.
	Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, you said something good.
	I just want to clarify.
	You said, like, I haven't defood yet.
	Like, this is some sort of rite of passage or some sort of, you know, to be in the club or something like that.
	I want to point out, you know, there are hundreds of thousands of listeners, you know, a couple of dozen defoods that I know of.
	It's very rare.
	It's certainly not necessary.
	There are lots of families who navigate through this kind of stuff well.
	And, you know, I get tons of messages from people who are like, oh, yeah, and I sat down and talked with my parents.
	It was really tough.
	It took a while.
	We had a great chat with Closer.
	I just want to point out that it's not, you know, well, you gotta.
	I just really want to point out that I'm about honesty in relationships and I don't think you should be in relationships Well, I think it's not that great to be in relationships where you can't be honest about your thoughts and feelings, where the other person is not curious, where there's not real intimacy.
	I mean, obviously anyone can do whatever they want.
	I just think that we should aim for something richer and deeper.
	So I just want to point that out.
	And the second thing, of course, is that if you are...
	Thinking of taking a break from family, this is therapy, therapy, therapy.
	That's the key, right?
	That's the key.
	That's something that is really, really important to make sure that you're not doing it in a reaction, you're not doing it too soon, you're not doing it without a plan, you're not doing it without the right support.
	Anyway, that's my usual, in case you haven't heard that stuff.
	Yeah, no problem.
	That's all totally valid.
	It's not like I haven't spoken with my parents vulnerably or just tried RTR. That's also really difficult for me just because I never really had that concept of telling other people how you feel in the moment.
	It was very strange for me because my family is generally quite...
	Even when I do start saying that, my mom will just kind of tell me back, well, I feel this because of you or something like that and I don't really know where to go from there.
	I don't really know how to Well, sorry, one thing that you said when your mother said that you wish you'd never had kids, that you said, well, that's a really disgusting thing to say.
	That's not exactly what I mean by RTR. Oh, I absolutely know.
	That's not RTR. I know.
	That's an attack with conclusion, and that's also my great temptation.
	I get very passionate and heated sometimes in these discussions with them, and I can be very...
	I remember just a few weeks ago, one of my main points was I just told them that they emotionally destroyed my sister.
	And my mom was like, oh, well, I'm just never forgiving you for saying that.
	How could you say that?
	It is the truth, but I obviously took the wrong way of getting to that.
	Right.
	Yeah, I guess.
	How is it that you maintain composure or just...
	While RCRing with other people.
	You have to...
	The way that I sort of maintain composure is I have to stay in contact with myself, with my own emotional experience and to simply inform the other person what I am experiencing.
	We so much fall into the temptation, and I look, I do it too, right down here in the trenches.
	I have to fight this stuff all the time as well.
	But we want to have an effect on the other person.
	We want the other person to get it, to get how upset we are.
	So when you say, well, that's a really disgusting thing to say, you want your mom to, I assume, to really get what a shocking thing that is for you to hear.
	And it is.
	It is shocking.
	It's like being married for 20 years and then your wife says, I wish I'd never gotten married to you.
	I mean, I don't know where you go from there.
	I don't know when somebody...
	I mean, that's not even as bad because your mom's wishing you're non-existent, so to speak, right?
	Well, she says that.
	Yeah, but no, I mean, look, my mom said the same stuff, so I get it.
	I mean, and I also get just how appalling it is.
	But it's my experience of how I feel.
	Because I want to give, when I'm having conflicts with people, I want to give the other person as much of a chance as possible to break through to any potential empathy they have.
	And to do that, I can't be using their tools, their toolset, their weapons.
	I can't be trying to control them or manipulate them or get them to understand something in some indirect way or whatever.
	Because disgusting is...
	When you say that's really disgusting, that's not a feeling, so to speak.
	It had an emotional impact on you.
	And if you can communicate the emotional impact of what someone else is doing to you, Then it gives them the best chance, I think.
	It's not manipulative because it's honest, but it gives them the best chance to connect with you emotionally, if there is a chance.
	And of course, for some people there isn't, but if there is a chance, it gives them the best chance.
	But I really have a very strong resolve to stay with and communicate my own experience.
	And that doesn't mean not to repeat my own experience.
	I'm curious about the other person's experience too.
	But I try to sort of stay in that saddle of my own experience and communicating about it because I'm just not going to abandon myself in those situations where I need myself the most.
	You know, I sort of think of, you know, my sort of inner child or whatever, the inner Miko system, like if I just start to grab that sword and hacking with, you know, manipulation and falsehood and all that kind of stuff, then I've just abandoned myself, and I won't do that.
	I mean, that's sort of my grim resolution, and it can be hard to keep sometimes, but I simply won't throw myself overboard and join in the general muckety-muck of human miscommunication.
	Yeah, no, I understand.
	I guess...
	It's not just attacking with conclusions that I only do.
	It's very difficult to express yourself in a way that will, especially parents, that will make them aware that they are parents.
	The moment that you're speaking to have an effect, I would say that that's just not really that very authentic.
	So you know how to communicate in such a way to remind your parents that they're parents or whatever, right?
	But that's trying to make honest self-expression have an effect on someone.
	And the moment you're trying to have an effect on someone, I don't think that you can be honest in your self-expression because you're already modifying what you're saying to have an effect.
	To have someone get something, to have someone realize something, to have someone understand something.
	But to me, I mean, our personal relationships, they're not schools, they're not mentorships, they're not, you know, it's not that kind of information exchange.
	It's honesty, it's intimacy, it's truth exchange.
	And the moment, I know for myself, the moment I'm trying to get someone to get something, then I'm no longer expressing myself honestly because I'm trying to have an effect.
	I know this sounds really abstract.
	No, no, that makes sense to me.
	Yeah, I think it's really important.
	And if you get it, I won't try and analogize it, but I just want to speak the truth of my experience of the other person rather than try and get the other person to do it.
	Because I can control whether I'm honest.
	It's honestly and factually true that I can control the degree to which I'm going to be honest in a situation.
	Even if I have to take five breaths, take a step backwards, maybe even wait a day, I can control how honest I'm going to be in that situation.
	What I can't control is what the other person does with it.
	The moment I try and get the other person to change their mind, to change their behavior, to change their perspective, Then I've lost.
	I'm no longer in an honest communication.
	The other person has taken power over my honesty.
	I have abandoned my honesty in order to have an argument from effect, which is this communication is worthwhile, it's effective if the other person changes their mind.
	I have no control over whether the other person changes their mind.
	And they, if they're not particularly well-intentioned, if I stop being honest in order to get them to change their minds, they can keep me from being honest by refusing to change their mind.
	Does that make sense?
	Yes.
	Then they have control over my integrity.
	They have control over my honesty.
	I've been this way my entire life.
	My mom and my dad...
	This is the language you were taught, I would assume, right?
	Is that fair to say?
	To want others to change, you mean?
	Or just...
	Well, yeah, I mean, things that are said for effect in order to have some sort of effect on the other person.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Rather than, this is my genuine experience.
	Yes, yeah, that would be correct.
	I mean, I'm going to guess.
	I don't know, obviously, right?
	But I'm going to try and put myself in your mother's shoes.
	But my guess would be that...
	Your mother doesn't mean to say that she didn't want to be a mother.
	I think that what your mother wants to say is, I wish I'd been a better mother.
	Yeah, yeah.
	That is what she clarified afterward.
	Right, but saying I want to be a better mother in a way that shocks and appalls your adult child is kind of doing the opposite of what you want, right?
	Yeah.
	And so, of course, that's a shocking thing to hear.
	It is kind of a fracturing statement.
	It's hard to recover from that, right?
	To wish your non-existence, to wish that you'd never had a relationship with your mother, that she'd never had a relationship with you, and so on.
	I mean, it's a pretty astounding thing.
	And I assume, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, I assume that this is not the first time that your mother may have said something inappropriate to you?
	No, no, this is definitely not the first time.
	And my guess is that it started kind of early?
	Yeah, as early as I can remember, yeah.
	Right.
	Right, yeah, I mean, there's a lot.
	Again, I'm trying not to project, right?
	My mom was like this, too.
	She told me all about eating disasters and problems.
	The only thing I could say that was different is just no beatings for me.
	Right, but there's a lack of concern for your experience as a child.
	A dispiriting number of parents do this.
	They just dump on their kids.
	It happens in divorces.
	Parents tell kids about other parents' affairs.
	To me, it's just horrible.
	It's a real abuse of power to burden children with adult problems for the momentary relief of the adult.
	And what it does, of course, is it prevents the children from having much of a childhood, and it also prevents the parents from developing other relationships where this kind of communication would be much more appropriate and beneficial.
	But, you know, children are not there for the pleasure and relief of the parents.
	That's not what they're about.
	And, yeah, I'm sorry.
	I'm so sorry that that happened.
	Well, that kept happening.
	So how is it that I handle these feelings of guilt?
	Because it's like every time I think about Talking to her and understanding that you know, I'm just beating my head against this wall and eventually I'm just gonna Concuss myself or just walk away It's like I feel about the walking away bit is like I'm like taken right to the moment of her death almost like I just see her in this poor shell of a woman and I I don't know like like my heart just goes out to people like everywhere who are like this and I don't know how to deal with that.
	I don't know how to kind of...
	Yeah, it's like the Eleanor Rigby song.
	You heard that from the Beatles.
	Yeah.
	I mean, guilt is a challenge, but in guilt there is a narrative.
	Right?
	In guilt there is a narrative, and if you can't find the narrative, I don't think you'll have much luck with the guilt, if that makes any sense.
	So there's a story in the guilt, and maybe you can tell me what that story is.
	So if we unpack the guilt and look for the sort of Grimm's fairy tale behind it, what is it?
	The story behind the guilt is...
	I don't know.
	For me personally, to my mother, I suppose, I just...
	I very much lived for her.
	I never got the best grades in school, relative to what she wanted.
	I'm 22, I haven't even bothered to start any kind of degree.
	She sent me to France, lived with my aunt and uncle.
	I really didn't want to study France.
	It's just lots of decisions that I made that I myself I may regret not applying myself to the fullest degree, but certain things like learning French I just didn't want to do and I felt forced.
	And then later on when I just didn't achieve anything of worth regarding that language, I was aggressed against and I got lambasted for my lethargy and stupidity.
	For not applying yourself to something that you didn't really want to do?
	Yeah.
	I guess there's quite a bit of guilt about that.
	And did your mother say that you should have applied yourself to something better, more, should have worked harder at it?
	Oh yeah, pretty much everything.
	And how hard did she work at being a good parent?
	Not very much, not very hard at all.
	What do you think is more important, learning French or being a good parent?
	Being a good parent, obviously.
	I would think so.
	I think it's important to be aware that most times that people are criticizing, not always, some people have legitimate criticisms, but it takes a lot of self-knowledge to be a good critic.
	When you criticize someone, the most important thing, I think, If you really want to help the person, of course, is to help them understand why they are the way they are.
	Otherwise, you give them a contextless negative judgment.
	Like, so you have to help them understand why they are the way they are, because if you can't understand root causes, you can't solve any problems, right?
	And so...
	But I see it as, like, I know how my mother...
	I know why my mother is, because I know her past.
	It was her parents as well, and, you know, horrible.
	As it was.
	I understand it, so it's like I almost give her that excuse.
	I know it's no excuse to yell at your child and say the things she's said to me.
	No, look, I mean, I've wrestled with this one, too.
	I've wrestled with this one, too, so I get where you're coming from.
	It's like, well, my mom had a bad childhood, and therefore, therefore, therefore, right?
	Yeah, I guess.
	Okay, there's a couple of things.
	First of all, You didn't have that great a childhood either, right?
	There's a legal principle called estoppel, which is that you can't use a rule that you've denied to others.
	You can't have a moral judgment that you've denied to others.
	That's just hypocrisy, right?
	If I go strangle someone, I can't morally reject the use of violence in response to that, because I've already used violence, right?
	If I steal your bicycle and then you come and steal it back, I can't morally, legitimately get outraged over your theft.
	You can't inflict a moral that you have violated.
	And so, your mother can, in my opinion, can legitimately claim, well, I had a bad childhood and so on, As long as she recognizes that the same thing is true.
	So she could say, well, I'm not responsible because I had a bad childhood.
	Or you could say that about her.
	But that's, you know, UPB says, okay, well, then that's a universal, right?
	And therefore, you can't be criticized because you had a bad childhood.
	If your mother can't be criticized, then you can't be criticized because you both had bad childhoods, right?
	Now, if your mother says you are responsible for your behavior, regardless of your history, then, well, UPB does that one too, right?
	Yeah.
	Then what does that say about your mother?
	So, I've always just kind of intuited that she's just a massive hypocrite.
	Me and my sister both feel this way.
	Right.
	Right.
	So, yeah, so I would suggest that.
	I also would suggest to look at the possibility that the guilt is covering up anger.
	On my part, you mean?
	Yeah.
	Oh, well...
	I always try to say that I'm not angry, but yeah, obviously I am.
	I just don't like to feel really angry.
	It's not something I enjoy.
	Well, I don't know that anyone enjoys it, but that doesn't mean it's not healthy, right?
	I don't like going to the dentist, right?
	You know, you've got to get teeth bleached, right?
	I'm sure it's important, yeah.
	Yeah, it is important.
	And it may not be you who doesn't like feeling angry.
	It may be that there are other people around you who benefit from you not feeling angry.
	Yeah, that is true.
	Like, along those lines, how is it that I can sort of just quickly just to kind of wrap up...
	I don't really understand how it is.
	Every time I talk with people, I always try to explain things to them.
	I try to help them out.
	My mom will talk to me about her father and I'll be like, well, he's obviously an evil man.
	She'll be like, well, no.
	He's this, he's that.
	I'll just try to argue with her and be like, oh no, there's certain aspects that are just wrong.
	Why is it you continuously defend him when this and this?
	I don't RTR in that sense.
	Like I said, I really just want to fix things.
	I want to help things progress emotionally.
	Yeah, you want to change your mother to the point where you feel more comfortable RTRing, is that fair to say?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, now, what you could, I mean, you certainly could RTR at any time, but I understand if you feel it's too scary, then you've got to respect that feeling as well, right?
	I mean, otherwise, whatever, right?
	But if she's able to, it doesn't matter what the details are, whatever, but if she's able to forgive her dad for bad things that he did, was she able to forgive you for bad things you did as a child?
	Um...
	Or say failing to be French?
	Yeah, she got angry in the moment, I remember, but it was never like those things carried on.
	I guess certain things did.
	I really don't know.
	I'd have to ask her.
	Well, no, you don't have to ask her because you were there too.
	It's like a one-way street in society.
	Sorry, this will be a minor speech, but I hope this makes sense.
	These are just my thoughts.
	This is not all fully worked out philosophically.
	I'm mulling over this as a short book.
	I do wrestle with this, and I fully recognize that a lot of parents who don't parent very well have themselves had bad childhoods.
	And yet, you know what is strange?
	Is that clearly adults have more independent choice and more moral responsibility than children.
	And I never caught a single break because I was a victim of child abuse, like when I was a kid.
	Like, no one ever said, well listen, you get an extra couple of days to prepare for the test because your home life is just insane, right?
	Nobody ever said, you know, you're not getting any sleep.
	I just thought in the cinema, my mom would be up typing on a manual typewriter in my room until like 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning.
	Electric typewriter, sorry.
	Those things are damn loud.
	I'd be exhausted going to school.
	So nobody ever said, listen, okay, so you've got this crazy home life, you don't get any sleep, so you don't have to come to school till 10 because you need to get your sleep in the morning after your mom goes to work.
	Nobody ever said, you get free food because your mom is not shopping for you or hasn't gotten out of bed in two weeks or whatever, right?
	Nobody ever said, we're not going to evict you because your mom is whatever, right?
	Not functioning economically or whatever.
	And so I never got any breaks for my behavior being victimized.
	I mean, clearly that's not fair, right?
	And so it's hard for me to say, well, we should give all the forgiveness and cut all the breaks to parents, but none to children.
	I'm willing to extend breaks to parents when those breaks are extended to children.
	I'm willing to turn the other cheek with parents if society is willing to turn the other cheek with children.
	But until society is willing to cut Victims of child abuse breaks.
	I don't see how we can then have infinitely higher moral standards for a 5-year-old than we can for a 40-year-old.
	In other words, that the victim, some 5, 6, 7, 8-year-old or 12-year-old victim of child abuse is held to exactly the same standards as everyone else, but their parents get all the breaks in the world.
	Yeah.
	I get that.
	Okay.
	I guess that's really important.
	Yeah, and so if you were punished as a child, then those who punished you cannot claim the excuse of their own histories.
	Because they punished you for, quote, bad behavior you had as a child.
	Now, if they're punishing you for, quote, bad behavior you had as a child was in itself bad behavior, when you get bigger and older and wiser and more independent and they suddenly switch to, well, you know, we should forgive people who have bad childhoods, it's like, well, I had a bad childhood because you didn't forgive me, because you did punish me, because you did retaliate against me.
	And so that doesn't work.
	I can't find a way.
	I mean, I'm open to suggestions.
	I really am.
	I cannot find a way.
	To make that work.
	If adults are not responsible because of their histories from 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, how can children be responsible despite what happened that night or that morning?
	You know, if my mother must be excused because of what happened to her 30 years prior, how can I not be excused for what happened the very morning I went to school, whatever bad thing it was?
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Because this is a UPB thing.
	I mean, I'm happy to hear moral arguments, but the moment, not you, but the moment people say, well, here's the moral argument, but it only applies to adults, and the complete opposite moral argument applies to children, it's like, well, okay, wait, wait, wait a second.
	Okay, well, yeah, I'll certainly take that and try to digest it a little more.
	Alright.
	And listen, I hope that you will keep the conversation going.
	I mean, I hope that...
	I mean, I just...
	I really do think it's important to, you know, try and connect as much as possible.
	There are always options if you can't, but I do think that...
	I do think it continues if you don't get closure.
	And to be closure is...
	It's nothing more than certainty.
	I mean, when people say closure, all they think they mean is, I no longer have any doubt.
	And I hope that that comes on the sunny side of the street if you're able to break through, but I would really recommend keeping up with the conversation as best as you can, because I do think it's really important, and I think it will free you up in other areas no matter what happens.
	Yeah.
	Well, thank you.
	All right.
	Thank you, and let's move on to the next one.
	Mikal, Michael, you're up.
	Mike, are you with me?
	Are you with us?
	Echo, hello.
	Okay, sorry.
	I got a question.
	I had a talk with my new therapist and she did notice that I'm not really talking with other people too much.
	Yes, so she asked me some question about it and I told her that people can't really think for themselves.
	And yeah, And yeah, I think she later thought that maybe I'm thinking I'm better than other people and I don't really want to start any I think she later thought that maybe I'm thinking I'm better than other people that taxation is theft or something.
	I would like to avoid that, but I also don't want her to think that...
	I'm not really sure about that.
	I don't want to prove her that people can't think, but Yeah, I don't know really how to avoid that.
	Well, so is your therapist, is she or she of the opinion that you think that other people can't think and that makes you smarter and that's a problem?
	Yeah, because also I sometimes put down other people.
	Like, I don't like them feel-- Well, put down a fairly judgmental way of phrasing it.
	I mean, I think it's fairly clear that the majority of people cannot think philosophically.
	I mean, I think that's fairly indisputable, and I think anybody who would dispute that has the wrong definition of either people thinking or philosophy.
	But I think that a lot of people, the majority of people, cannot think philosophically.
	And I say this, you know, 30 years of experience trying to talk to people philosophically.
	There are some, of course, but the majority of people can't do that.
	And that's not necessarily a condemnation of the human race.
	I mean, that's like saying that the vast majority of people can't fill a cavity.
	I mean, it takes, you know, a lot of training and expertise and so on to think philosophically.
	People have got to read about it, they've got to study it, they may go to school for it or whatever.
	But, you know, saying that the majority of people don't speak Croatian is not...
	You've got to study Croatian.
	It's not an insult.
	It's just a statement of facts.
	If you're telling the truth, it's not slander.
	It's not a put down if you're telling the truth.
	Yes?
	If you say someone's fat, who's maybe five pounds overweight, that's obviously a bit more of an extreme situation.
	Or if you say, no one could even put two and two together and make four, we may say that in exasperation, but we wouldn't say that's a true statement, right?
	Yes.
	So, if you have an ability called philosophy or rational critical thinking or whatever that the majority of people don't have, then to state that as a fact, I don't consider that to be problematic, right?
	I mean, it's true, right?
	Yes.
	If I say I was born in Ireland and the majority of people are not born in Ireland, I'm not putting other people down to stating a fact, right?
	And so if you're comfortable with the fact that most people can't think philosophically or critically, And you can, then if you're comfortable with that, then I think really that's all that matters.
	Now, if you're not comfortable with that, or if you're uncomfortable with your therapist's discomfort, then, you know, obviously I don't have any clue how you should do therapy, but if you would ask my amateur opinion, I would say that it's important to sit down with your therapist and say, when we had this conversation, I felt this.
	I felt, you know, I felt uncomfortable.
	I thought maybe it came from your discomfort.
	What was your opinion of me saying most people can't think?
	And talk about the feelings, the emotional interaction.
	I mean, I think, I think, in my, again, admittedly amateur opinion, that's what therapy is for.
	It's not to discuss philosophy, it's to discuss emotional experiences in the moment.
	Yes, yes, I cannot understand that.
	Don't go back and try and convince her that the majority of people can't think.
	I don't think that really matters.
	What matters is your emotional reaction and his or her emotional reaction in the moment.
	And to discuss that I think is important.
	Yes, thank you.
	Emotions will come out of having a skill that other people don't have.
	There will be emotions.
	I think emotions will in particular come out of that If other people think they have those skills and they don't.
	Lots of people think that they're smart and think critically and so on and then you present them with something that they don't like and it's like...
	suddenly they change.
	It's sort of how I started out the show with this professor from Florida as a possible candidate for that.
	But to have a skill called critical thinking is an emotional challenge in a deluded world.
	Would you sort of agree?
	Could you say that again?
	Well, to be able to think critically in a world of largely deluded people, would you not say that that's difficult emotionally sometimes?
	Yes, that is certainly very difficult.
	Right, so I think talking about those emotional difficulties, now if your therapist thinks that this is a sign of grandiosity or mechalamedia on your part and so on, you say, well, let's We can talk about that, but I really want to talk about my emotional experience of feeling superior to the majority in this instance.
	I am not superior to the majority in my ability to do the Macarena, or to play basketball, or to fly a biplane upside down.
	I'm perfectly willing to cede enormous expertise to people who are better at fixing shoes than I am, but in this particular area, which is important to me and is often claimed by the majority of people, I mean, very few people will say, the contents of my head have nothing to do with Rational thinking or evidence or truth or anything like that.
	Everyone believes that it's critical thinking that got them where they are.
	And the majority of people are just wrong about that.
	And so it is difficult.
	It is difficult because if somebody can't do the Macarena, they're usually not emotionally invested in not being able to do it.
	But people are usually very emotionally invested in believing that their thoughts come from some sort of intelligent reference to reason and evidence.
	And if you contradict that in them, it's very, very hard for them.
	How does culture survive?
	Culture survives by inflicting false beliefs on children.
	And then the truth becomes the enemy of their pseudo-personalities, right?
	And then when they have kids, the natural curiosity and empiricism of children becomes a threat to them and they react aggressively against those children because they legitimately feel like they're acting in self-defense.
	Because they feel like the natural skepticism of the young child is unraveling the falsehoods that are the Ethereal candy floss base of their non-personalities.
	And so when you get people to believe false things, a huge amount of dominoes go into place that tend to go round and round and just keep things going over and over again.
	It's a generational cycle.
	And when you see that, it's a little tricky to live in society.
	And there are emotions associated with that.
	That's why I suggest that anyone who gets into philosophy should also spend some time in therapy because philosophy is hard.
	In a world of not only unreason, but significant portions of anti-reason.
	And it's emotionally hard to process.
	So I strongly recommend that to people.
	So I commend you for being in therapy, but I think it's just really important to talk about the feelings rather than the ideas, if that makes sense.
	Yes, I agree.
	I was actually feeling quite stressed or a lot of fear, but I'm not really sure where did it come from.
	Stressed about the wife?
	Well, talking about that, maybe because I couldn't really concentrate before on what do I want to ask exactly.
	Right, because, I mean, if your therapist were to come down on you and call you, you know, some crazy megalomaniacal guy because you believe that you think better than other people, I mean, I'm not saying she would, right?
	I'm assuming it's a she, but that would be very painful, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	But also I do see that she can be right a little bit about me not talking with other people because that doesn't really make me a nice person if I, let's say, put some people down.
	For not knowing, you know, basics of philosophy or thinking.
	Right, and that means that there may be an expectation that you have that's unrealistic.
	And we all have that expectation, I think.
	I'll speak for you, but because I'm very influenced by reason and evidence, and if I hear a rationally true argument, I may sort of kick around and resist it for a bit, but it's kind of inescapable in the long run for me.
	I sort of have the expectation that this should be everyone's behavior as well.
	That's projection, right?
	That which I am is how everyone kind of is.
	And it took me a long time to accept that the vast majority of people are quite the opposite.
	And so you may get more frustrated if you have a false belief about the world, a false optimism about where the world is.
	And that can add to some additional frustration.
	Whereas if you accept that, okay, 99 people out of 100 I meet are not going to be able to differentiate prejudice from philosophy, then that's just the reality, right?
	I mean, it's not saying it's fun, but it does mean that it's less stressful, because it's not something that is going against my beliefs about the world, if that makes sense.
	It certainly makes sense.
	In my case it may be a little different, because I do understand that people can't really understand what I'm talking about, but I'm still trying to do that anyway, which is actually not very personal.
	Yeah, and of course there is a logical problem of saying, I am rejecting the empirical evidence that most people reject empirical evidence, because then you're in that group, right?
	Yes, exactly.
	So, you know, sorry, I know you get it, but just for others, right?
	So if you say, well, you know, other people are stupid because they don't reject empirical evidence, and I'm continually frustrated by this fact, then I'm rejecting the empirical evidence, which is that most people reject empirical evidence.
	So I become, I'm in their category then, and I'm complaining about the behavior that I myself am exhibiting and so on.
	You get all of that, right?
	Yes, exactly.
	I knew that before and I still sometimes have the tendency to do it anyway.
	Oh no, me too.
	Me too.
	I totally get that.
	Okay, great.
	Thank you, Steph, very much.
	Well, listen, I hope it goes well and congratulations again on being a therapist.
	It's a great step and I think this would be a good conversation to have with her.
	Thanks, man, very much and good time for another caller or two.
	He's on the list.
	Anthony.
	Oh, okay, cool.
	I guess that's me.
	I just have a question again about another co-worker this time.
	This one is, I guess I would say, more of a perfectionist.
	Oh, it's the, you're my restaurant bitch guy, right?
	Oh, no, I'm sorry.
	No, this is a different co-worker now.
	No, but you're the same guy who called in before.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	Oh, yeah, I see.
	A perfectionist in a restaurant.
	Wow, I've never heard of that.
	Okay, go on.
	That's a good point.
	Okay.
	Yeah, so basically, like, it happens out of spontaneity, I guess.
	I don't really know.
	Well, maybe I just haven't recognized why, but today, I got really taken down, and that's sort of really, I want to find out where I went wrong, because she does this thing where she'll...
	Wait for me to do something, and I'll just give you an example.
	Okay, so I was panning bread, and this is going to be a little detailed, but I'm just going to try to be specific.
	When you put the bread in the oven, there's one loaf less than when you take it out that are supposed to be in the rack when it's ready.
	And so...
	Basically, I took it out of the oven, and it's hot, and I let it cool down, and then there's a liner also holding the bread, and so after it cools down, then you take the bread out of the liner, and after you do that, you have to add another loaf of bread to the rack.
	And obviously we have many different kinds of bread.
	So when I did that, I was just in the art of just like, you know, separating the bread from the liner.
	And she came by and she was like, you know, you need to make sure that you're only doing one thing at a time because then you'll never get anything done.
	And so I challenged that and I said, well, why do you say that?
	And then she said, well, because you're not going to get anything done, I said, well, I have plenty of time and it's only going to take another couple of minutes.
	And then she said, you're not understanding what I'm saying.
	You're not listening.
	And that's sort of where she goes.
	And then, like, and this happened, that's one example, but that's sort of what happens.
	Like, she'll get into the detail of something that I'm doing and she'll say I'm doing it wrong.
	And then, you know what I'm saying?
	Like, I'll explain myself, but then she'll say that I'm not listening, which obviously that's, you know, kind of a contradiction, right?
	Talk about projection.
	A lot is going on there, right?
	First of all, was she doing Was she on her way to do something while she stopped criticizing you?
	No, that's the thing, too, is that it only happens when, because she's not doing, like, she'll be texting in the back or something, and I'll be doing something, then she'll come over, and that's sort of a good point, because at first I think it's just because maybe she feels guilty that I'm doing something and she's not, so it's like, well, now she wants to attack me to make it look like, well, I'm better off not doing anything.
	If she was carrying plates to the dishwasher saying you can't do two things at once, then I would say, well, you're criticizing me in carrying plates.
	Am I missing something here?
	Is this a rule for everyone or just for me?
	Do I get this special little tasty rule?
	Okay, so she says you can't do two things at once, right?
	Actually, I'm sorry.
	Well, that's what I said to you, I know.
	But this is what I mean.
	She makes it irrational.
	She's like, you can't do everything at once.
	And I'll say everything.
	And then she's like, you're not getting the point.
	And then that's how it goes off into this lala.
	It's nothing to do with what I'm doing.
	Well, yeah, okay.
	So you're not getting the point.
	I like that.
	You can't do everything at once.
	Yes, I would agree with you.
	I cannot juggle and be an elephant and solve the deficit crisis and, and, and, right?
	And so when you point out that someone has done something irrational, then...
	So when you criticize this person, right?
	So she's criticizing you and then you're criticizing her for being inaccurate or incorrect in her criticism, right?
	And then she says, you're not getting the point, you're not listening.
	Well, first of all, of course, she's the one who's not listening.
	Because she's put forward a proposition and you're putting forward a rebuttal and then she says, you're not listening.
	It's like, well no, she's not listening.
	Otherwise she'd be processing your rebuttal.
	That's sort of the first thing.
	So that's just projection.
	That tells you that you're dealing, in my opinion, with a very primitive personality.
	Somebody who doesn't even know that she's projecting.
	That she's ascribing to you in the very moment that she's performing the behavior, she's ascribing that behavior to you.
	And has no consciousness of that occurring.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
	I just don't know where to go from there because my overall frustration...
	We'll get there.
	Let's just unpack this a little bit more.
	The second thing she says is, you're not listening.
	I actually just wrote this in the article on the spanking violate the non-aggression principle.
	A lot of people, they say listening, but they mean agreeing.
	She says, you're not listening to me.
	It's like, well...
	I mean, I would say, did you just tell me that I'm not listening to you?
	And she'd say, yes.
	I said, well, that's just proof that I am, because I just repeated back to you what I said.
	So let's put that aside, that I'm not listening to you because I just proved to you that I did.
	So what do you really mean?
	And the person would have to say, well, you're not agreeing with me.
	It's like, well, of course I'm not agreeing with you.
	I know that I'm not agreeing with you.
	You don't need to tell me that because I'm disagreeing with you.
	Does that make sense?
	You don't need to tell me that I'm disagreeing with you because I'm disagreeing with you.
	Yeah.
	So maybe what you believe, my co-worker friend, is that if I really genuinely understood what you were saying, then I would agree with you.
	But you understand, that does not give me a voice in this interaction.
	That erases me.
	Because it doesn't give me a chance to have my own opinion that's different from yours.
	Because if I understood what you were saying, I would immediately agree with you.
	And if you have that expectation for other people, you can't actually have much of a dialogue with them at all.
	I can't have a dialogue with you if you genuinely believe that if I understood what you were saying, I would immediately agree.
	Because then the only reason that I would disagree with you is because I'm not listening.
	And that puts me in a complete no-win situation.
	So I either agree with you with something I disagree with, which is humiliating, or I disagree with you, in which case I'm a bad person for not listening to you.
	Do you understand?
	This sets me up in a no-win situation.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And it doesn't give me any kind of voice.
	Now, if you want to have a conversation where I'm not present, just go have it with the mop.
	Like, turn the mop upside down so it looks like it's got hair.
	And then you can go have that conversation with the mop because that mop will listen to you and won't disagree with you.
	Or at least it won't disagree with you, I can guarantee you that.
	So if you want to have a conversation with me where I'm not here, you can go and have it with the salt shaker or the mop or the seeing-eyed dog at table number 12.
	Wow, yeah.
	And also, if I'm not understanding your point, could it also be that you're failing to explain your point properly?
	If you can get angry at me for not understanding your point, what that means is you're taking zero responsibility for explaining your point.
	In other words, you're explaining your point perfectly, And I'm just not understanding it.
	But if you say one sentence to me called you can't do everything, obviously that's not a very valid thing to say.
	So you made a mistake in your criticism because you said you can't do everything, which of course I completely agree with, but doesn't mean I'm not trying to do everything.
	I'm trying to do two things.
	That's not everything, right?
	And so if you are criticizing me and then getting angry at me for not understanding your criticism, even though your criticism is only one sentence, Then one of two things is happening.
	Either you're criticizing badly, in which case getting upset with me is ridiculous, or I'm so dumb that I can't understand a single sentence.
	But if I'm so dumb that I can't understand a simple English sentence, then you're trying to reason with somebody who's halfway between a dog and a chimpanzee.
	So either way, I'm off the hook.
	I'm not intelligent enough to understand your sentence and therefore you can't expect me to do anything more intelligent than what I'm doing.
	In fact, I should be amazed that I don't have my fucking shoes on my hands and my chef's hat up my ass.
	Now, I'm not saying you have to say all of this, but I think that's what you have to understand from the interaction because that way it's not going to haunt you, right?
	Yeah, definitely, definitely, yeah.
	And I'm definitely going to go through that on paper, too, because it's going to take me a little while to figure that out.
	But I know that is like half the battle, is that I don't want to fall prey because I haven't understood what she's saying myself to actually believing what she's saying.
	There is also another way to deal with a nag, if I may use the phrase advisedly, and that's just get a piece of paper.
	I've tried this before.
	It's actually quite interesting.
	Just get a piece of paper.
	Next time you go to work, just put a little pad of paper and a pen in your pocket or a pencil, right?
	And you write stuff down.
	Okay, so I can't do everything.
	Let me just write that down.
	Can't do everything at once.
	Okay, got it.
	What else do you have?
	Number two.
	My hat should be adjusted somewhat differently.
	Okay, got it.
	Number three.
	And just keep drawing the person.
	It's almost like drawing venom out of a snake bite.
	You know, just keep drawing more information out of the person.
	And be neutral and don't promise anything, but just be neutral.
	But just make sure you understand all the criticisms that that person has of you.
	Wow, yeah.
	Yeah, that sounds helpful.
	And then, you know, you may get two or three pages covered.
	You know, whatever, right?
	And you can say, okay, well, I'm going to sign these a number.
	I'll make you a copy.
	I'll bring it to work next week.
	And so, if you want to criticize me, just say, hey, 13.
	Okay, 13, that was this one.
	Okay, got it.
	We can make it more efficient.
	Because, you know, we're all about making things efficient, right?
	And that way, if you're doing something and you want to criticize me, you just have to call out a number.
	You don't have to come over, because then you're trying to do two things at once, and that's not good by what you say, right?
	Oh my god.
	Yeah.
	And the other person, like when they fill up a page or two or three of criticisms, they might actually laugh because they may realize just how ridiculous this is, right?
	Right, yeah.
	I guess that's another thing, then.
	That's a really good approach, and I really appreciate that.
	It's called not being afraid, right?
	Because, look, the criticisms only matter.
	I mean, this is right.
	Nobody can fundamentally criticize you except yourself, fundamentally, right?
	But if it's like, hey, I'm open, tell me more.
	I mean, you've seen me do this a million times.
	Someone's got, oh, my friend has, you know, he hates what you're doing.
	Great, bring him on the show.
	Have him correct me.
	Do they ever show up?
	No, I haven't seen any.
	No.
	People bitch and complain about me all over the internet.
	Hey, come on the show.
	I run a show every Sunday.
	I won't shield you.
	You come on.
	You tell me exactly what's what.
	And I'm real keen to hear how I can improve, how I can be better, ways I've gotten things wrong.
	Do people ever show up?
	Nope.
	I mean, who was the last person to accept?
	I put out dozens of debate invitations a year.
	And do people show up?
	No.
	No.
	I'm happy to be criticized because it's not personal.
	If I've made a statement that's false, I haven't done it because I'm malevolent or mean.
	I've made a statement that's false.
	I didn't double check some source or something like that.
	I've done an entire show where I'm reading out corrections to a show that I've done.
	Fantastic.
	See, that's not me being a bad person.
	That's just me having bad information.
	You know, oh shit, I just gave someone directions.
	Turns out I was holding the map upside down.
	Oops.
	But that doesn't make me a bad guy.
	That just means I held the map upside down.
	It wasn't any malevolence, right?
	So, to welcome criticism Is the best way to find genuinely helpful critics, right?
	If people are just bitching about you because of their own stupid childhood shit that's unprocessed and they're being immature about it, then they'll never show up to criticize you, really.
	But if you're welcome and open to criticism, you know, oh, so doing this and this is really bad.
	Okay, well, what's the worst thing that could happen?
	Has it ever happened to you?
	Have you ever seen it happen to other people?
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Should we make a policy of this?
	Should we sit down and have a staff meeting?
	Should we, you know...
	Be open to it, and encourage criticism, and I swear to God, 99 times out of 100, people will say, well, shit, I can't bully this guy, so...
	Fuck.
	Too bad.
	I gotta find somebody else, right?
	Right, that's a really good point, just because that's what, I mean, that's really the main thing right now, because I've overcome a lot of other fears I've had, is that that's really the only thing I have against me at work, that they can use anyway.
	Like, I do, the thing is, though, is I do accept criticism, just like, when it's like this, there is fear behind it, and that's where I understand that I just sort of had to work through that.
	Well, yes, and of course, if you had a lot of criticism as a child, this was unavoidable.
	These strategies, I don't advise these strategies for kids, not that any kids listen to a show as dull as this.
	No lasers!
	But it's not a situation that you would do in an involuntary environment, like when you're a kid or whatever.
	But you're an adult now, and again, trying to learn new strategies when you're an adult is really tough, because the survival strategies for involuntary relationships, like parent-child, It's very hard to adapt those to voluntary relationships.
	That's why I focus on this voluntarism within the family.
	If you have voluntarism within the family, that prepares you for an adult life of voluntary relationships and eventually will prepare everyone for an adult life of no-state voluntary relationships all over.
	But if you are a parent who's grinding down on and criticizing and abusing the power that you have out of the involuntary nature of the relationship, Then you are not preparing your children for the voluntarism of adulthood that is the essence of their romantic and professional and educational life.
	Why?
	Because you are in a voluntary environment now at the restaurant and if you develop strategies for an involuntary relationship and then you try to move to transition to a voluntary set of relationships it's really tough and you will attempt or draw into or it will be recreated that those involuntary relationships the characteristic the negative characteristics those will be recreated in your voluntary relationships because that's the only language you speak but transitioning from involuntary relationships to voluntary relationships is is really tough and
	this is why I think within the family we should try and work as if the relationships were voluntary Because that prepares children to go out into the world and have voluntary relationships that are positive.
	Anyway, so I mentioned that.
	Yeah, thanks.
	I don't know if this is more of a minor, maybe missing the point question, but if I'm to just express myself and try to be fearless, obviously I'm not like that now if I do take it personally in that way, so I don't know if this is the right question.
	Another thing she'll do is that she'll overemphasize how big of a problem what she's bringing up is.
	She'll say, No!
	Don't do that!
	No, no, no!
	Don't do that!
	That's exactly how she'll say something sometimes.
	But it's such a minor thing.
	And after, over and over and over, that's when I start to want to minimize mistakes.
	And I noticed that I was about to fall into what I noticed that she would do to people, where I was trying to be passive-aggressive and trying to get back at her and stuff.
	And I just stopped myself.
	But at that point, I think it's already a little too late, and I should work on the first interaction.
	Yeah, I mean, I know what you mean about the escalation and the hysteria that goes on with some people.
	And again, I mean, I had a restaurant manager when I worked in a pizza hut many years ago.
	I mean, he would sometimes throw up blood after lunch.
	Like, he was that stressed about...
	I mean, restaurants can be, you know, that's the...
	I don't know, what's that Gordon Ramsay character, right?
	I mean, it's like, it's just food.
	You know, as long as nobody's dying from muscle poisoning, then...
	You know, which is sometimes what happens to me when I work out.
	But anyway, I mean, it's just a restaurant, right?
	I mean, it's not life and death.
	It's not cardiothoracic surgery or whatever.
	But, I mean, people escalate for a wide variety of reasons.
	But, I mean, I think mostly it just has to do with their childhoods.
	You know, I mean, were they given an appropriate level of response to stressful situations or non-stressful situations?
	Was everything a panic?
	Were they raised by a hysteric?
	All these kinds of things, right?
	And it is a way, of course, of dominating other people because whoever has the shriek of urgency in their voice tends to be the de facto leader because everybody just wants to pacify that person at the moment.
	The other thing, too, is to not take it personally.
	I think it's always helpful to look at what happens right before the interaction.
	You mentioned that the woman was texting before this.
	Maybe she got bad news in the text and maybe just her natural reaction for whatever lack of self-knowledge reason is, well, I got bad news, I feel bad, so I got to go and put someone else down to feel better.
	It's called leveling up rather than, I'm just going to go step on someone to feel a little bit taller because I've been put down or whatever.
	And so I think it's important to look at what happens beforehand, because once you see what happens beforehand, you recognize that the person's just leveling up, it doesn't have anything to do with you, and it's not any kind of objective criticism, it's just an immature emotional reaction to something which has made them feel less powerful or efficacious.
	Yeah, excellent point.
	Now, again, this might come from ignorance, but, um, see, with stuff like that, like, that's a really good point, and I didn't think of it, but when you mention it, I have, like, a lot of empirical evidence for that, and, like, that makes a lot of sense.
	It could just be something that simple.
	And the thing is, though, is, like, you know, it's like, why don't I ask that kind of a question?
	I think, really, it's just because, like, you know, when you're, you know, out of fear, you don't really think rationally.
	Sorry, ask which kind of question?
	Well, like what you said, you said she was texting, maybe she just had a bad text or whatever.
	Right.
	Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily ask her that kind of question.
	Oh, no, yeah, that's not what I'm saying.
	You mean for yourself?
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, I would suggest, right, so if you grew up in a situation where you were criticized because other people were in bad moods, and I mean, from my own history, I remember, you know, mom would be in a bad mood and slamming stuff, and it'd just be a matter of time until she found something to get mad at me about.
	Yeah.
	And, I mean, that was just, you just sit there and wait for it, find something, you know, you left this out, or, you know, this was uncovered, or, you know, you left a A cup on the...
	You left a cup without a coaster on the table or something.
	It'd be something like that, and then, you know, you'd just be away to the races.
	And so these are the kind of things that I knew were coming as a kid, but I couldn't do anything to prevent them.
	You know, like if I went out, she'd get mad at me for wanting to go out.
	And if I stayed in, she'd get mad at me for something that I did or didn't do.
	Or if she couldn't find anything and I was sort of hiding in my room, she'd be like, you're always hiding in your room, you've got to come out and talk to me like a real family member.
	You couldn't win, no matter what you did.
	In that kind of situation, looking for causality, what's the point?
	It's like looking for causality in a deterministic universe.
	Nothing's going to change, it doesn't matter.
	And so I think that if we come from situations like that, then we lose the habit of looking for causality.
	And I also think, again, this is just my opinion, but I think that when we're kids, we desperately desire, we really, really want to still believe that our parents are not that petty.
	You know, I did an interview.
	I don't know if I'll publish it or not.
	I had an interview with a woman.
	And I was just talking about, you know, one of the terrible...
	I read about this in my novel, The God of Atheists.
	But, you know, it's amazing.
	One of the incredible secrets of childhood, which I got really early, was how unbelievably fragile most adults are.
	How uncertain, how...
	How groundless are their beliefs?
	I always got that.
	When I was a kid, aggression on the part of adulthood always struck me as that Munch painting, The Scream.
	Just some disintegration panic, like James Taggart has at the end of some book.
	But how unbelievably fragile adults are and how unbelievably petty a lot of adults are.
	Not all, but most of them.
	Like if you say something that upsets them, they turn into three-year-olds either having a tantrum or pouting or they're just storming around or whatever.
	Like how childish most adults were when I was growing up.
	I just really got how fragile adults were.
	That's a really difficult thing to process as a kid because then you're not being corrected By any objective standard.
	And I never really felt that I was being corrected by any objective standard.
	So when I was in boarding school and I went to go and get a ball that had gone over a fence and I got caned, I never believed that I was being caned because it was a really bad thing to go over a wall and get a ball.
	I never believed that.
	I mean, I got that it was scary.
	I got that it was painful.
	And when my mom would get mad, I never genuinely felt that it was because I had done something wrong.
	So like one time she did beat the living tar out of me because I had left a cup without a coaster when I was five or six.
	I left a cup without a coaster on a table and it had left a little ring.
	And sure enough, that ring dried up in the next day or two and then was invisible.
	But I never believed that it had anything to do with the cup or me going to get a ball over a fence or anything like that.
	I never believed that the punishments I got...
	I remember in In Canada, the first year that I was there, I sprained my wrist playing basketball or something like that.
	And then I talked too much in class or whatever, and I was given lines to take home.
	And the teacher didn't...
	Like I couldn't do them because my wrist I couldn't write.
	And so I went in the next day and I got double lines and I said, well, you know...
	My wrist I can't write.
	Okay, I'll just wait until it's better.
	I never got that these punishments meant anything or that they were any kind of moral judgment.
	I got that adults had power and I also got that adults were incredibly frightened of children.
	Because you don't bully something that you're not scared of.
	It has to arouse some anxiety that you're managing by By controlling or humiliating, right?
	So I really got how fragile adults are and how fragile their beliefs are.
	Because the hysterical punishments that were meted out in my world as a child couldn't have anything to do with certainty.
	And so I really got that there was something about adult society that had to be an enormous amount of incredibly unstable bullshit.
	I mean, it just had to be.
	There was just no other way to explain the fear and hostility and aggression that adults had towards kids.
	You know, like we were just...
	We had to be controlled.
	We were animals.
	It was Lord of the Flies.
	We had to be domesticated.
	We were born, you know, not exactly sinful, although there was certainly some of that in my childhood.
	But we were just born bad and wild and disobedient and chaotic and disrespectful.
	And we had to be taught empathy and decency and politeness.
	And, you know, we had to be really restrained and reined in like some wild animals that had to be domesticated with repeated applications of some sort of taser.
	I mean, it was crazy.
	I thought, what is so wrong?
	What is so fucked up with human society that the natural born child has to be so incredibly controlled, restrained, brutalized, lied to, managed, punished?
	Like, what the hell is wrong with society that we need this much fucking conditioning to turn from the square pegs of our natural birthright into the round, shredded, blown up holes of adulthood?
	Never made any sense to me.
	I just want to point that out that if we get that, we may be punished by society, and it may be scary to be punished by society, but it's not a moral judgment.
	It's just a hysterical reaction, usually to some sort of residual skepticism towards a base personality belief that is just not true.
	And that's something that If you get that, I think you'll understand just how little criticism has anything to do with you.
	And I don't mean ignore all criticism and so on, but listen to your heart.
	If a critic is scary, they're not out for your best interest.
	Because a critic should be someone who wants to make you...
	You don't want to correct behavior if you're a critic.
	What you want to do is to stimulate enthusiasm for betterment.
	I mean, a good teacher doesn't want to teach facts, but wants to stimulate a desire for lifelong learning, right?
	And punishment doesn't have anything to do with stimulating enthusiasm.
	Punishment is just to do with control and bullying.
	That's why we don't punish my daughter.
	We just don't do it.
	Because punishment is a statement of, I'm false, I'm scared, I will not examine myself, and so you must conform.
	I don't have any good reasons or any good evidence, and so I'm just going to scare you until you conform.
	I'm just going to control you until you conform.
	I will not do that.
	And if you had that done to you a lot, then it's entirely natural that you're not going to look for the cause of correction, so to speak.
	Because the cause of correction is the frailty and immaturity of adults.
	It is not the wayward behavior of children, in my opinion.
	Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
	I have one more example, if you have time for it.
	Hang on a sec, James, do we have another call?
	Yes, we have Nate on the line.
	I'm so sorry, my friend.
	Perhaps we can do that another time.
	Yeah, sure.
	Let's see if we can dig through the rest.
	But thanks for calling in.
	Great questions.
	Thank you.
	Nate.
	I'm Nate the peg, diddly-dly-dly-dly with an extra leg.
	Can you hear me?
	I can.
	Go ahead.
	I would have to agree with the caller before, the one you were just talking to, Michael, about I and myself going through therapy.
	And I've had the same sort of conversation where I felt that it was moving more towards...
	I think it had moved to like a philosophical aspect as compared to talking about my feelings, but that was also my fault because I started talking things about like the non-aggression principle and war and my feelings on that and everything.
	Then I kind of realized, wait a minute, I'm paying money to talk about something when I could talk to one of my good friends who I would enjoy infinitely more with.
	I was listening today to your podcast that you had done about Do We Own Our Children?
	Because I had brought that – I have a really good friend who – he was a libertarian before I was, and he kind of brought me to some things.
	And I had since then joined the ranks but then moved forward more to an archaic society.
	And I brought that up too in talking about how you were saying that it's because we don't keep our kids inside our homes for the rest of their lives like we would a pet.
	That it makes sense to be mindful of what other parents do in regards to how they raise their kids, because my children will have to go out in the world and deal with, I mean, they could have been the ones 20 years from now walking into a movie theater and getting killed, heaven forbid, right?
	And I find that argument very compelling, and I find myself now looking around when I'm just out and about and watching other parents and how they do things, and I never hear a child cry and hear a parent berate them.
	And I really feel a lot of empathy towards the kids because they have no – they've got no choice.
	I mean, they have to sit there and listen.
	But my friend's argument was that how does that translate into – How do you get there without becoming inflammatory with the parents?
	Like talking to parents?
	Yeah.
	Getting to the point where you don't cause an immediate emotional response, although I think more likely that's going to happen more rather than not just based on how They were raised as children.
	You get what I'm saying?
	It's a great challenge and there's no easy answers.
	I think the way that I approach it is I do try to be as sympathetic to the parents as possible.
	I may not feel that particularly in the moment.
	Yeah.
	But I do think that it's important to be as sympathetic to the parents until...
	I mean, to know that some parent is just some complete monster who just wants to hurt...
	I mean, I don't think that's particularly common.
	I mean, I think a lot of parents, you know, may be avoiding some of the knowledge that might make their parenting more challenging, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're, you know, just really bad people allowed to hurt their kids.
	I think that's very much a minority.
	But what I want to do is...
	To recognize that the odds of changing the parent are very small.
	But to recognize that for the child to see somebody say that what you're doing is not good in a way that is not going to provoke retaliation against the child later, I think is the best thing to do.
	So it's like, wow, you seem really frustrated.
	Is there something I can do to help?
	Or, you know, I can take the child.
	Why don't you have the child come and play with me for a few minutes because you seem to be very upset or, you know, because, you know, this kind of stuff.
	And I will mention, you know, if I see spanking, I will say, you know, I mean, You know, I sympathize.
	This is probably how you were raised.
	I strongly urge you to look into some of the latest research on spanking because it does appear to be quite harmful to kids.
	You know, I mean, a lot of parents think it's the right thing to do, and I get that, but I really urge you to look at some of the science and reconsider that as an option.
	Again, that's not, you know, you rat bastard child abuser, I'm going to whatever, right?
	But, you know, I think that in that situation, you want to try and give I think it's because if you humiliate the parent, and the parent has a particularly immature personality, then the parent may humiliate the child.
	You made that person come up and, you know, whatever, tell me all these mean things.
	And obviously you don't want that.
	So I think, you know, supportive and as positive as possible and look at it, until further evidence, look at it as a lack of information.
	That is the best.
	I think that's the best approach.
	Again, people have lots of different ways of doing it, but I think that is the best approach to give the parents.
	To inject something into their mind.
	Maybe they'll go Google and whatever.
	Again, I get probably a dozen emails a week of people saying, I used to spank, I don't spank, I used to punish, I don't punish, and so on.
	What I've been doing is something.
	The other thing, of course, is that the key thing with families is privatizing.
	The volunteerism within the family is the key.
	If there's not voluntarism in the family, the level of quality improvement is not going to be particularly significant and certainly not going to be particularly fast.
	Right?
	So, I mean, as a good old libertarian, you know, what's the best way to improve the quality of the service that the post office provides?
	To eliminate his connection entirely from, I would say, the state and have them Become more efficient through having, I don't know, shareholders or there's any number of ways you can go ahead and make that so it would be better for everyone involved.
	And if people didn't want to pay for it and they didn't want to use the service, they can opt out and, you know, go a different way.
	And I think, you know, those are kind of my thoughts.
	Plus, I think with the digital, like, everything being digitized, the post office is becoming more and more relevant anyway.
	Right, so you privatize it, right?
	I mean, you don't have to sit there and get older managers to become more efficient and try and nag everyone to be more market-driven and so on.
	You just privatize it.
	And the family, at the moment, because of probably the Judeo-Christian, you know, honor their mother and their father and no matter what kind of thing, which Dr.
	Phil specifically opposes.
	He basically says, if your parents are not good to you and they won't change, just move on.
	Just leave.
	I mean, this is, again, this is still something that's bubbling up in society.
	But the issue is, privatize.
	You privatize.
	The best way to improve quality is to introduce volunteerism into the mix and to help parents understand.
	Children are customers of your services.
	They are not your lifelong chattel serfs to come and stay and do things for you no matter how you treat them.
	I mean, they will achieve A voluntary status with you when they become adults.
	And that is the best way to improve parenting, is to remind everyone of the fundamental legal and moral reality of the voluntarism of adult-parent-child relationships.
	If parents believe that no matter how they treat their kids, their kids will always have to be around, then the odds of that improving, the odds of parenting improving remain relatively low.
	But if volunteerism will come in, right, if volunteerism will enter into the mix, then parents cannot assume that children will just be their chattel serfs for the rest of their life, no matter how they treat them.
	They will say, oh, okay, well, if I'm really bad to my kids, then maybe as an adult they won't want to have anything to do with me.
	Well, that is, you know, people respond to incentives.
	And we know that you can't change the culture of a socialized institution Without privatizing it.
	I mean, you can try, but you're just wasting your time, right?
	And the privatization of the family is the only way the voluntary society can be achieved, in my opinion.
	I agree with you, I would say 100%, because I can't think of anything that I would disagree with that.
	And, you know, my good friend, I've also expressed that to him, and I talked to him about four months ago about, well, you're a libertarian, but you spank your children, and isn't that the initiation of force?
	And since then, he hasn't decided, you know what?
	I mean, it was at that day, it was actually that day that we had talked about it.
	We spent four or five hours just outside talking about that.
	And he said, you know, I can't really justify my actions anyway, because...
	No matter what scenario we came up with, we just spitballed back and forth, like, what happens with this or whatever.
	And every time, it just came down to, it was, you know, just pretty much beating your kids.
	Well, I wouldn't say, like, beating them...
	No, no, it's spanking, but it's, you know, people say, well, it's just a little swat on the butt, but the whole point of spanking is it has to be scary enough to deter behavior.
	And I had an argument with a Christian...
	After I became an atheist, right?
	And he was talking about the point of spanking is because God, a man is supposed to fear God, the whole point of spanking for children is to get them to fear their parents so they can fear God.
	And I looked at him and I felt such immense pity for that man's children to think that it just made, it really made me physically ill.
	And I was like, who am I talking to right now that that would be, ugh.
	I told them, look, there's no way I could ever agree with that, that making anyone fearful of anybody does anything but a great harm in the long run.
	Because it's not voluntary, you're forcing them to change their behavior based on fear, not based on them understanding, like, if you run out on the street and get hit by a car, that is the reason why you don't want to run out on the street without looking.
	If you run out on the street, I'm going to blister your bottom, you know?
	Right.
	Well, I mean, false beliefs have a huge effect on parenting.
	But first of all, let's go back to your other friend.
	Next time you see him, you're going to see him again soon?
	Oh yeah, we work together and we talk on a regular basis.
	Okay, so the next time you work to hear, and I want to make sure you use some mouthwash before this.
	Make sure your breath is minty, fresh, and clean.
	Maybe put on a little deodorant.
	I want you to walk back to him, and straight from me, Full on mouth kiss.
	Listen man, you can even use some tongue.
	I have no problem with that.
	You can swirl it around a bit.
	You can roof him.
	Whatever.
	It's going to express my incredible gratitude at his heroic nobility of recognizing a rational argument and adjusting his behavior.
	Just pass along to him to me.
	For what it's worth, I'm fucking levitating right now.
	I mean, that is some seriously deep philosophical mojo that you pulled off and immense admiration and heroism and medals and honors and fireworks displays and everything to him.
	I just really want to tell him, you just tell him from me, that that's just the most amazing thing and he should be incredibly proud to really put values in front of history.
	That's just fantastic.
	Well, to be quite honest with you, you should feel for yourself.
	You're the one that brought this idea to me.
	You're the person I heard talk about it.
	And then you got my mind going, so I was able to talk to him.
	I can't speak for him, but I would say I'm grateful to you as well.
	And I'm just going to settle for a firm handshake and...
	Okay, fine, fine, but I'm putting some Vaseline on my hand.
	That's my plan, because we've got to get the Greek tradition in there somewhere.
	That's all I'm saying.
	Okay, okay, but at least let's pole vault naked together.
	That's all I'm saying.
	Or maybe some hurdles where we really, really don't want to jump too low.
	So anyway, I just want to mention that.
	False beliefs have a huge effect on parenting, on all forms of instruction.
	If you have things that aren't true, how are you going to get your kids to accept it?
	There's no empirical evidence for it, reason argues against it, and so on.
	How are you going to Get your kids to accept it.
	I mean, if you really want your kids to go to college still believing in Santa Claus, how are you going to do that?
	As they get smarter, wiser, and more empirical, and more mature, and more worldly, you would have to come up with hysterical punishments.
	You'd have to come up with whole rituals.
	You'd have to come up with all of these social, right?
	This is why parenting and philosophy are so intertwined.
	If parents believe things that are true, Then they don't need aggression to teach their children.
	But if parents believe things that are false, they have to use some sort of aggression.
	Whether it's their own aggression or the third party aggression of heaven and hell, or you know, some parents I've heard, they pretend to call the cops to take their kids to jail.
	They have to use the secular punishment.
	Do they have to use some threat of punishment if what they believe is not credible to their children and that's why getting parents, particularly with UPB, to give them a way of talking about ethics that makes sense when you have reason you don't need punishment I don't ever remember someone's science teacher saying to me, yes, the world is round, and those of you who won't accept it are going to burn in hell forever!
	Because it was true, it was provable, you could show how it could be proven and so on.
	And so there was no need for threats where the statement was reasonable and valid and empirical, but where you have anti-rational, anti-empirical statements that are considered essential, you have to backfill with aggression.
	to get the kids to accept it and so this is why false beliefs lead to more aggressive parenting and the more true beliefs you have the less aggressive you need to be as a parent and I mean my daughter has no fear of me whatsoever in fact she gives me warning fingers sometimes and I mean she's incredibly affectionate let me just share one other thing it just happened the other day we were pretending to go camping and I'm reading to her bits from the Hobbit and What happened was she
	was pretending she had some baby mum-mums, like some crackers or whatever, while we were camping.
	And then I made jokes about different kinds of crackers.
	Are they strawberry?
	Are they marshmallow?
	Are they chocolate?
	Are they made from sticky insects and so on?
	And then I said, oh, they're goblin crackers.
	And she said, okay, they're goblin crackers.
	And I said, oh, they taste like poo-poo.
	And so she took it.
	She said, okay, I will take it away from you.
	And then she broke it over a plant.
	And I said, oh, the plants don't like the goblin crackers.
	And she turned around like instantly and said, of course they do, because plants really like poo-poo.
	And that's true, because plants, you know, plants, they grow from manure.
	I mean, she's three and a half.
	I mean, she blows my mind.
	She absolutely blows my mind.
	I never would have made that connection.
	When she made that connection, it just, I was like, bang, right there, seeing all of these.
	It's like watching, instead of looking at the night sky, just with stars, you're seeing all these lines and pictures and constellations forming.
	I mean, it's just incredible, the associations that she makes.
	And I mean, I admire her so much.
	She really does blow my mind about things that I've never thought of and connections that she can make that had never occurred to me.
	I mean, I'm a guy who occasionally tries to make a few connections himself.
	And I think that that comes out of just a lack of fear.
	I have some resources.
	I have maybe some authority if I can explain to her the consequences.
	But there's no fear and there's no punishments.
	It's a beautiful thing and it's a beautiful relationship.
	So yeah, I would strongly urge the parents to...
	To drop the fear and be willing to learn from your kids.
	Everything that I thought was true has turned out to be even more true than I thought, which is always a good thing, because otherwise I'd have a whole lot of apologizing to do.
	I agree with you when I stopped as well, that it was just like, I can't even explain it.
	It was one of those times when they realized that, and by they, I mean my kids, and they're like, wait a minute, there's no, oh, okay, this is better.
	And then able to talk about things and honestly listen to their opinions without interjecting or projecting my own past onto them.
	It was, it's great.
	Fantastic.
	And hopefully the more and more people we get like this, the better off.
	I know we all will be in the long run.
	So thanks to you.
	Thanks for all you do.
	And thanks for being one of the beacons of light that's out there for the rest of us.
	So thanks.
	Oh, it's my pleasure.
	And thanks to everyone for all of your support of the show.
	And with that mutual grab fest, I think we'll probably wind up.
	It's been a long show, but I really appreciate everyone's questions.
	Thanks again to James for manning the helm.
	And I think that's majorly it for the news and the weather.
	I don't think I've got anything on in September.
	I'm mulling over an invitation that I may or may not go to.
	But have yourselves a wonderful week.
	Freedomandradio.com forward slash donate.
	If you want to help out and have yourselves a great week, everyone.
	I will talk to you in seven days minus two hours.

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