2243 Laurette Lynn and Stefan Molyneux: How to Achieve Freedom
Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, and Laurette Lynn discuss the Obama Phone Lady, the necessary steps to free the future, and the value of anger in breaking the cycle of abuse.
Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, and Laurette Lynn discuss the Obama Phone Lady, the necessary steps to free the future, and the value of anger in breaking the cycle of abuse.
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Obama! | |
You got Obama phone? | |
Yes! | |
Everybody in Cleveland, low minority, got Obama phone. | |
Keep Obama in president, you know? | |
He gave us a phone. | |
He gave you a phone? | |
How do he give you a phone? | |
You sign up if you're on full stamps, you're on Social Security, you got low income, you disability. | |
Hey, let me question. | |
Okay, what's wrong with Romney again? | |
Romney, he sucks! | |
He can't! | |
Hello, everybody. | |
It's Stefan Wallin from Free Domain Radio. | |
I'm back with Lola, Lorette Lynn, of UnpluggedMom.com. | |
Thanks so much for joining. | |
We've had a couple of shows before, and you sent me... | |
It was a video of a lady who was extraordinarily happy in a pretty incoherent way that she got a free phone, and you thought that there was something important about this, and I think I agree. | |
So I just wanted to start off with your thoughts about it. | |
But before we start that, your book... | |
It's back on the market, is that right? | |
My book is back on the market, yeah. | |
I had a... | |
For those that don't know, I had a... | |
Rough summer. | |
So I just took the summer off. | |
There were some personal issues going on there. | |
But everything is slowly returning back to normal. | |
Unplugged Mom is up and it's running. | |
I am working with Desiree on a new show. | |
It was going to be out in the beginning of November, but we're actually not starting until January. | |
So there will be a new show coming out in January. | |
But Unplugged Mom, the website is there. | |
Lorette Lynn is there. | |
And my book is back on the market. | |
Don't do drugs. | |
Stay out of school. | |
Available at Unplugmom.com. | |
I would highly recommend it. | |
So, yeah, what did you think of this? | |
And it's interesting, I didn't even know, there seems to be a genre of people yelling about freebies from Obama that I wasn't really very aware of. | |
I remember, I think in the election, like when he got in in OH, there was a woman saying, well, now Obama's going to pay my mortgage and my gas bills and my medical bills, and there seemed to be this... | |
Freebie planet going on. | |
I hadn't really seen much since then, although I did watch a Howard Stern clip where they were out there talking with a bunch of people about, you know, do you think that Mitt Romney is going to be able to get Osama bin Laden and so on and all this kind of stuff, which turned out to be, I mean, it's all nonsense, but that's what they were talking about. | |
And people were just, you know, roundly agreeing with them or disagreeing them about the most outlandish things. | |
And it does seem to be an undercurrent, you know, educated people tend to talk to other educated people and I think ignore that there's a mass of people out there who don't seem to have much of a clue about anything to do with politics or economics. | |
Yeah, and this has been an ongoing theme for me and an ongoing problem for me. | |
And as you know, Stefan, I've worked through this with you before with my own philosophies and whether or not I stand here or there. | |
And it's never a matter of where I stand along the political paradigm, whether it's on the left or the right. | |
I don't stand on either of those two extremes. | |
But whether or not folks should be actively involved in politics or whether or not to take an action. | |
Anarchist approach, which I'm learning does not equate to just not being involved. | |
It doesn't equate to not being informed. | |
It's still extremely necessary to be informed. | |
And here's an example. | |
This is the reason why. | |
And the conversation you mentioned with Howard Stern, I actually just listened to that yesterday. | |
I heard the audio. | |
I didn't see the video. | |
And, you know, all I could do is really roll my eyes around and say it's just amazing how many people are uninformed. | |
But what I'm coming to recently, and I'm trying to decide, and as I had a conversation with you previously off air, that I was talking about this with my kids. | |
And it was part of our history lesson and part of our talk about society and politics. | |
We have these conversations. | |
And my daughter was actually the one that brought up. | |
She theorized that anarchy was actually not possible. | |
At first, she said that anarchy was actually not possible, theoretically, because people don't want it. | |
Basically, people don't want it. | |
Because when you look through history, you see that time and time again, you'll have a small group of people that will try and that will talk about liberty and freedom and everything else. | |
But they seem to actually want to be led. | |
They want the freebies. | |
They want their Obama phone. | |
They want to be controlled. | |
And then I kind of wonder, well, does that have to do with lack of information? | |
Because all through it has history. | |
I mean, we can go back to ancient China. | |
And the first dynasties of China where the emperor of China was suppressing information so that the people were not informed because when people are informed, they make decisions and they overthrow tyrannical rulers. | |
So, of course, there's always suppression of information. | |
And as anybody that knows me knows that, of course, I blame the school system for that. | |
But then you have to take it a step further and wonder, do they even want the information? | |
What is human nature? | |
And this is a philosophical conversation that I wanted to have with you. | |
I sent you the video about the Obama phone lady. | |
I'm so disgusted by that. | |
Between that and Honey Boo Boo lately and Snooki and everything else. | |
You have to wonder. | |
The army here, is it upon us, you know? | |
And my first reaction to it was disgust. | |
And I said, you know, I just, I can't believe this. | |
And then somebody asks her, okay, but, and he's asking, you kind of tell in his voice, he has the tone of voice that he's, he's kind of tongue in cheek. | |
He knows he's going to get a ridiculous answer. | |
And he says, well, Well, what about Romney? | |
And her answer is he sucks. | |
And she has no idea why he sucks. | |
She has nothing to back it up. | |
He just sucks because he sucks. | |
And why are we voting for Obama? | |
We've got to keep Obama in president because we're going to get an Obama phone. | |
And then you have the other half, which the conversation that Howard Stern was having, that Obama's going to get Osama bin Laden. | |
So there's the freebies and the illusion of protection. | |
And, you know, we can have a whole other conversation about the misinformation about Osama bin Laden. | |
And there's a lot of schools of thought there, too. | |
And you go into conspiracy when you start talking about that. | |
So we don't need to go there. | |
But just the sheer sake of misinformation, how misinformed the public actually is. | |
And they are going to the voting booth and they are voting. | |
And it kind of makes me sit back and wonder, you know what? | |
I don't really think I should be involved in this. | |
And the good news is I'm not voting this year, so you'll be proud of me for that. | |
I'm not even voting on legislation this year. | |
Nothing. | |
I'm out of it. | |
But that doesn't mean that I don't stay informed. | |
You have to stay informed. | |
So I was just wondering, what were your thoughts? | |
Do people just... | |
Want the freebies. | |
Is this modern? | |
Is it just the Snooki generation and the Obamaphone lady? | |
Or has this really been going on throughout all of history, where people just seem to want to be protected and they call Caesar Protect Us? | |
Right. | |
Well, I mean, people, you know, we're mammals. | |
I mean, I don't think we are magic soul-filled ghosts in the machine. | |
We're mammals, and all animals want stuff for nothing. | |
Of course, I mean, that's success as an organism, is to gain the maximum calories with the minimum amount of effort, and that competition in the animal world. | |
So we have that drive, just as mammals. | |
Now, of course, we have ethics, and we have other things and so on that allow us to make Sort of more broad-ranged or universal decisions, but it is that drive to get something for nothing that is why you can't have, in my view, you can't have a state, because people want something for nothing. | |
And because people want something for nothing, if there's a mechanism which allows them To do that, that everybody accepts and believes is virtuous and necessary and justified and all of that, then you end up with this endless war of all against all with the inevitability of propaganda. | |
When you have a system that's fundamentally built on falsehoods and immorality like the state— You have to take care. | |
You have to take over the minds of the children because it's so irrational. | |
And it's so the opposite of what we tell children to do, which is to negotiate and to share and not to use force to get what they want. | |
And then we have this structure in society, which is all about using force for people to get what they want and so on. | |
And so when you have an irrational, crazy thing, thing, in the center of society... | |
Then you have to take over the minds of children. | |
You have to tell them a whole bunch of lies and pretend that they're true. | |
You have to have society organize the opposite of what we tell children is moral, and then we can never talk about that distinction. | |
So what I see when I look at these kinds of videos or videos of voters in general or citizens in general, I don't know if you remember the Iraq War, the first one, I guess, the one where they went in through Kuwait and all of that. | |
Saddam Hussein had this sort of burn and retreat, this scorched earth policy, where he would set fire to the derricks and these, you know, spires of smoke would go up from the oil derricks, you know, visible from space and going up miles into the atmosphere. | |
When I look at most citizens in a modern democracy, that's what I see coming out of their heads. | |
Like, I see these brains that had potential, that had genius, that had possibility, that had compassion, that had empathy, that had curiosity, all of the great things that we've talked about with child raising and unschooling and so on before. | |
And I see that there's just been these endless Bacteria-laden airstrikes of propaganda that has landed on them. | |
Lack of opportunity. | |
Lack of inspiration. | |
Lack of possibility. | |
And then if you pair that together with getting stuff for nothing, you know, the mind is a muscle. | |
It works against adversity like everything else. | |
You end up with these wreckages. | |
I just see these smoking wreckages all around me. | |
I don't think it's human nature, otherwise we wouldn't need to destroy what was whole. | |
But it's sort of where we're starting from for change. | |
So in other words, it's the presence of the state, the presence of an entity that is giving us something for nothing, that perpetuates our desire to have something for nothing. | |
Or in other words, we're innately born with a desire to have something for nothing because the easiest route is always the route that we take, right? | |
And because we're being handed it, we're automatically going to go that route. | |
But if the state didn't exist, Then, in other words, I'm just trying to understand what you're saying. | |
If the state didn't exist, we would be in a position where we would be almost forced to be more creative and be more innovative and inventive and find a way to acquire for our basic needs and probably be kinder to one another and communicate with one another. | |
Yeah, I think that's right. | |
I mean, getting something for nothing is, of course, it's not the reality, right? | |
I mean, you don't ever get something for nothing. | |
The cell phones are stolen from other people with this fee that is built into other people. | |
Well, the thing with the cell phones is that they're not actually free. | |
There is no such thing as something for free because taxpayers are paying for it. | |
And if you have a cell phone and it's actually on your bill... | |
I don't know if you looked into it at all, but anybody that has a cell phone, you're getting an extra charge for the Obama phones that are going out free to people. | |
So it actually, it's free for them maybe, but it's not really free for anybody. | |
You're always, even if it's not financial, you're kind of selling part of your soul for something. | |
There is no such thing, I think, as actually getting anything for actual free. | |
Well, and it's not even free for the poor. | |
Yeah, no, it's not even free for the poor because I remember years ago when I was in business, I went to some airport and the cab driver was giving me his receipt, right? | |
You give the receipt so you can bill it back as an expense. | |
And he said, hey man, you know, I won't put the number in. | |
You can put in whatever you want. | |
And that's kind of like a scam, right? | |
Because let's say the cab driver's 30 bucks and then you put in 60 bucks, you get free 30 bucks from your company or whatever if they don't check up on which they never would. | |
But I remember saying to him, I said, dude, you realize you're raising the price of everything you buy, right? | |
I mean, because, I mean, it may be small, but it's there, right? | |
So for the poor, the companies who have everyone on cell phones and, you know, the people who have everything on, they have to charge more. | |
It may be small, but it's there. | |
They have to charge more for everything which trickles down to the poor. | |
There are fewer jobs available for the poor. | |
And of course, you have all the government overhead, the misallocation of resources, all of that nonsense, where they had this video of this woman at 30 cell phones or something like that, or people who have cell phones who don't really need them. | |
And so it actually is—I mean, it's not free even if they get it for free and never pay a penny for it. | |
They just pay in other ways, and they probably pay more than they would for a regular cell phone, and they certainly pay more than richer people do relative to their income. | |
And it damages society even more. | |
It's a self-perpetuating conundrum. | |
But the problem is, I think, that the— I guess I hate to use the term they or the people in charge, but let's go ahead and use that term. | |
There's a small percentage of people that actually see that and perpetuate this on purpose. | |
And these are the same entities that would suppress information. | |
Like you have tyrannical governments that suppress information because the more people know, the more they are apt to... | |
Resent that information or resent the tyrannical rule and reject the free phones and Obama phones and the spooky culture and everything else. | |
So we're suppressing information and people are misunderstood. | |
And it's also this, not only a sense of apathy, but... | |
This inability for the general population to see beyond the tip of their nose. | |
Instant gratification. | |
All I know is that I have this free Obama phone and I don't know anything about where it's coming from or who's paying for it. | |
I just hear the word free and I get a phone and now I'm going to vote for Obama and that's all I know. | |
And, you know, this is a microcosm. | |
It's just an example of how everything else is working in society. | |
So my question is when I look at this and I don't want to just say to myself, well, we're in this situation because we put ourselves in this situation, which is true, and the suppression of information is definitely something that works to this advantage of this corrupt system, and of course, everything goes back to the education system, which is... | |
That's pretty much the theme of my book, why people should stay out of school so that they can really learn for themselves. | |
But then when you do learn and you do study history and you do go down the line, what disturbs me is that we see the same pattern repeated again and again and again. | |
I remember doing for my show an interview with Susan Weissbauer. | |
I don't know if you've heard of her, but she wrote The Story of the World, and she wrote a number of other books. | |
She's a historian, and she's also an advocate for home education, which is why I interviewed her. | |
And one of the questions that I asked her, since she is a historian, was, why does history repeat itself? | |
And I thought her answer was perfect. | |
She said, well, history doesn't repeat itself. | |
People repeat. | |
And I said, well, you know what? | |
That really does hit the nail on the head because history is different and it changes as time goes on. | |
But people keep repeating the same habits over and over again. | |
So when there is suppression of information, we don't learn from that. | |
And the next ruler comes in and tries to suppress information and control education and we allow it. | |
And the next ruler comes in and we have tyranny again and again and again. | |
And then you have maybe 10% of the people. | |
I'm going to Take the 90-10 rule here, because the 90-10 rule I think mathematically applies to everything in life. | |
10% of the people really do want to exercise liberty and freedom. | |
And 10% of the people are leaders and they understand human nature. | |
And 90% of the people just want to feel safe. | |
They just want things to be normal. | |
They just want to wake up every morning and know that everything's taken care of. | |
And because I see this pattern repeated over and over again, I don't know if I'm losing hope for humanity or what, but I'm wondering, is... | |
The way I see the anarchy now, and I've learned in part from you, so thank you for that, but the way I see anarchy now is really just a pursuit of liberty. | |
And I have to wonder, is it possible? | |
When I was having this conversation with my daughter, I think she's smarter than me in some cases, is she brought it up and we talked about it and I said, you know, I think you're right. | |
I think maybe it can only exist in the hypothetical because it does seem that people have rejected it over and over again throughout the years and people just constantly want something for nothing. | |
And whether there is a state entity there Like you said, there's a state entity there handing us something for nothing, so therefore we want something for nothing, and it's a cycle, and I agree with you, but even so, if the state didn't exist, if there was no government, if there was no entity controlling our information and handing us something for nothing, would the majority, again, the 1090 rule, would the majority of people Demand it. | |
Would they say that I can't live like this? | |
I don't want to find out on my own. | |
I want things to be planned for me. | |
I want things to be given to me. | |
And would they just automatically pick a leader? | |
And would somebody automatically assume that position? | |
Is it just a matter of human nature? | |
So when I said that, of course, my 11-year-old daughter said, just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean that it cannot be done. | |
And I said, well... | |
You got me there, I guess, so I don't know if she's just right or more hopeful than I am. | |
So I wonder, when we see people like the Obama phone lady, Do I have a right to be angry with her? | |
Or is she just exemplifying human nature? | |
And is it the school's fault? | |
Is it the tyranny's fault? | |
Is it the government's fault? | |
Or is it simply a matter of mammalian existence? | |
That's the question that's plaguing me, Stefan. | |
And I think you have the answer. | |
Yeah, I would say none of the above. | |
So when I looked at the Obama lady, what I saw was... | |
A very large and abandoned baby. | |
Saying, love me, pay attention to me, love me. | |
And feeling that that was never going to happen, right? | |
So, I mean, I sort of have a theory that all dysfunction fundamentally is the avoidance of legitimate grieving. | |
So if we go back to this woman's infancy, and of course, she's such a caricature now that of course, you know, but she started off as great and wonderful and with as much potential as everybody else. | |
And we go back to her infancy. | |
What... | |
What happened to her, or more particularly what didn't happen to her, that she grew up thinking that things could magically fall from the sky into her lap at nobody else's expense. | |
Well, if we think about what time in human life that represents, that represents infancy. | |
When you are an infant, boobs come flying out of the sky. | |
You just latch onto them and get your food. | |
You don't know where they come from. | |
You don't know that your mother has to drink juice to produce that milk. | |
You don't know where, you know, you wake up and you cry and people just got to come and comfort you and you don't have any sense that you're interfering with their sleep. | |
I mean, what is it I wrote in a novel once? | |
Babies cry without conscience, it seems. | |
And that's very true. | |
They haven't developed... | |
A sense of empathy. | |
It's their needs, their needs. | |
It's win-lose, right? | |
So a lot of times when the baby gets what the baby wants, it's at the expense of somebody else's sleep or time or attention or whatever. | |
And that's natural and that's healthy. | |
That's exactly how babies should be and exactly how we should be as parents is to provide their And it's not negotiated. | |
It's not, let's find a win-win way where you can get what you need to eat every three hours and I can get eight hours of sleep. | |
That's not possible, right? | |
So when you're in a phase in infancy where your needs don't get met, what happens is your physical development, your body development continues, but your emotional development stops. | |
Because you're not getting what you need. | |
So your emotional development, I mean, if you don't give a child enough to eat, their bodies stop growing. | |
And if you don't give the child emotional nutrition, their emotions, their development stops growing. | |
But their physical development continues, which is why I view a significant percentage of adults as You know what, Stefan? | |
I'm listening to you right now, and I agree with you 100%, but a question is coming to my mind. | |
I agree that this does come down to the very core of it. | |
It's not a state problem. | |
It's not a political problem. | |
The very core of it comes down to a lack in parenting. | |
Okay? | |
But let's take that question now a step further and say... | |
Where did that lack of parenting come from? | |
Let's take her, for example, and I know this represents a large majority of the population, especially the modern population. | |
Why that lack of parenting? | |
What was it that happened to the parent that made the parent lack in his or her parenting abilities or insufficient as a parent so that the child now has this insatiable need That they'll never grow out of. | |
And this perpetual infancy that's going to carry with them through adulthood. | |
What happened to that parent? | |
What was the problem with that parent? | |
And how can we avoid that? | |
Now, we can also say that it's a matter of self-perpetuation because more than likely, not only is she stuck in infancy, her and people like her, but I'm going to theorize that she grew up in a family that also welcomed this type of environment because, as we know, welfare perpetuates itself. | |
So more than likely, her parents were on food stamps and welfare and everything else, and then they grow up expecting the same cycle to continue. | |
Now, I might be wrong, but I would bet that in a majority of cases like hers, It kind of just passes down from generation to generation. | |
You grew up in poverty, and you grow up, and you perpetuate the same cycle. | |
And there are the small number of people that break out of that. | |
We always hear those Rex Rich's stories, but they're not very often, are they? | |
They're maybe 10% of the population, and we highlight that 10% of the population. | |
And like I said in my book, we call them geniuses, and we call them rare, because we don't realize that everyone is actually born with that potential. | |
We just expect the cycle to continue. | |
Where did it start? | |
How did it start? | |
So yes, there is a deficiency in parenting there because this person obviously never graduated beyond infancy in her mental or emotional state. | |
But what happened to the parent to make them insufficient? | |
Right. | |
You know, so you have to keep asking, how does the root start? | |
And does it have anything to do with our training? | |
Are we actually trained to perpetuate this and why? | |
Well, boy, we're gonna go deep now. | |
Oh, yeah, let's put on the breath escape. | |
No, that's good. | |
Look, clearly, I mean, I'm with the psychohistorians and Lloyd DeMassen crew with this, that we emerged out of pretty brutalized childhoods in history. | |
I mean, he's had a standing bet for many years, if anyone can find somebody who, before the 18th century, would not have been immediately convicted of child abuse. | |
And, you know, back to the Aztecs with child sacrifice and so on. | |
I mean, we had a monstrous history with our children. | |
You know, one of the reasons why Germany was so psycho, according to some, I think, very credible theories, was that they maintained a medieval style of child raising. | |
Why was the French Revolution so brutal? | |
Because children were farmed out to wet nurses who didn't care about them. | |
You know, why was the metaphor of Jews as lice so powerful in Germany? | |
Because the German children were swaddled very tightly by babies for the convenience of parents where lice got in and they would, you know, so it was a very tangible and physical situation. | |
Yeah, so if we've grown out of this brutality towards children, that explains the violence of history. | |
Robin Grille has documented this, I think, quite well. | |
How to stop the cycle of violence is... | |
Easy to prescribe and hard to do. | |
The way that you stop the cycle of violence is you denormalize what happened to you, which means you have to get angry about it, which means that you have to get that you were deprived, you have to get angry at your caregivers and your teachers and your priests or whoever it was that manipulated you, that lied to you, that hit you, that beat you, that raped you, whatever it was that happened, people have to get angry. | |
There doesn't seem to be any other way to break the cycle of aggression except through anger. | |
I mean, it's very strange. | |
It's kind of counterintuitive, but that's the way it is. | |
I mean, it's counterintuitive to inject a small piece of smallpox into you to never get sick from smallpox. | |
But the vaccination against the cycle of violence is to get angry. | |
But when you try to get angry, let's say, at caregivers, if you have legitimate complaints, society moves in very quickly and blocks that. | |
Because there is a lot that we have given up on ancient moral instructions. | |
You know, we don't stone children to death who disobey their parents. | |
We don't kill witches anymore. | |
We've given up a lot of that stuff. | |
We don't stone unbelievers and so on. | |
But honor thy mother and thy father is just one of these absolutes that is really hard to chip away at. | |
I mean, I think we owe our parents justice. | |
We owe them fairness. | |
We owe them at least subjected them to the same moral imperatives they subjected us to as children. | |
But society will immediately start making excuses for parents, in my experience, as a whole. | |
It's not universal. | |
But when you start to criticize your parents, Or your preachers or your teachers. | |
People will start to immediately make excuses. | |
Well, they had tough childhoods and they did the best they could with the knowledge that they had. | |
And so society actively works to defuse the legitimate anger of those people who didn't get what they wanted or who got negative stuff as children, thus guaranteeing as much as possible that the cycle is going to continue. | |
Because of the excuses. | |
Yeah, the excuses mean that you are now being abusive for being angry that you were abused, because you are not being understanding. | |
But of course, it's easy to blow that away morally. | |
I mean, it's so illogical, right? | |
Because if having empathy and tolerance is important, then surely we should have that standard for 30-year-olds more than we should have for 3-year-olds. | |
So if you're saying, well, you know, you were beaten up when you were 3, but you've got to have empathy for your parents, you're saying, well, empathy is a value. | |
But if empathy is a value, then beating children up, which is a distinct lack of empathy, has got to be a vice. | |
But of course, we always create these separate moral categories. | |
We create them for gods, we create them for priests, we create them for politicians, we create them for parents, we just slice and dice ethics up for the convenience, emotional convenience and avoidance of suffering in the moment, and that fragments society into the mess that we have right now, where anytime anybody gets angry about being mistreated, we immediately make excuses for those who mistreat them. | |
I mean, in general, not for specific people like, you know, molester, child molesters or something, but particularly for parents and teachers and priests. | |
We immediately intervene, we block that anger, we push it back down because we're not comfortable with our own anger about if we were mistreated, and thus we perpetuate the cycle. | |
If we hold the standards called, you know, if we had the same parents, say, for adult-child relationships that we have for chosen relationships, like marital relationships, where abuse is unacceptable and blah blah blah, I mean, we'd be done with this in a generation, but we keep blocking the legitimate outrage of people who were harmed as children because of our own discomfort with it, and that's how we grease the wheels of the next generation of violence. | |
Well, it seems that we have evolved in many ways, so the hope is that we will continue to evolve, but I do still have some concerns, and I wonder whether or not... | |
You mean I haven't answered the entirety of objections to any of this stuff in 27 minutes? | |
No, no, of course, yeah, that makes sense. | |
I'm still exploring this because it's basically, it's not only government and politics that I'm trying to explore here, but basic human nature. | |
And it does seem that we have evolved, and it does seem that we no longer participate in the same violence as a human culture that we participated in many years ago. | |
But we are still participating in war. | |
We are still participating in violence. | |
Pretty heinous crimes against other human beings even though we're not seeing it on the news. | |
We're still seeing evidence of torture and sometimes being performed by Americans and American troops and American soldiers who have been desensitized and of course they've been trained to be desensitized and not actually see other human beings as other human beings. | |
They are the enemy so therefore they're no longer human. | |
And like you were saying before, we make excuses for our own convenience, for our own comfort, or the illusion of comfort, which is another matter of humanity, just something that human beings seem to do. | |
And whether or not they're trained to do that really comes into play. | |
Because now we have the talk of religious leaders, and religion is a big part in manipulating people for war. | |
Now, I think you and I both know that the wars that we're experiencing right now, a lot of people like To blame religion, it does seem like religion is the forefront of the reason why we're at war, but it really comes down to economics and money and power and control, which is another thing that people seem to crave. | |
Not only do they want something for nothing, but they want power. | |
So you have the majority who want something for nothing, you have 10% who craves power, and put that together and you have a relatively deadly mixture. | |
I'm taking this back. | |
I'm thinking to myself right now, taking this back to Mecca and the journey from Mecca to Medina and the problems that happened with Muhammad there. | |
And of course, just on a side note, my daughter believes that the angel Gabriel was a troublemaker because he seems to go around visiting everybody, telling everybody that they're God. | |
And that's a separate story and just a funny little anecdote. | |
You see the journey that Muhammad had, or at least we hear about the journey that Muhammad had from one city to the other. | |
And then they had problems. | |
They didn't have any food and they didn't have any water. | |
So they're... | |
The religious leader at the time, who was Muhammad, tells the people, well, you need to go and you need to steal from the caravans and you need to plunder and you need to take their food and take their money and take their supplies. | |
And when they said, but we're not supposed to do that, that's, you know, against the seven pillars or the five pillars of Islam, he said, well, it's justified because it's in the name of Allah. | |
So all these crimes and all these violence and all these acts of violence are justified if they're in the name of either a religious authority, or in Hitler's days, if they're in the name of the Fuhrer, or if they're in the name of being an American patriot, or if they're in the name of something. | |
So we still do tend to have these violent behaviors, and we pass on the violent behaviors from generation to generation, and we don't, we change. | |
But we don't seem to be able to stop. | |
We don't seem to be able to break free from it. | |
We change and then we make excuses and then we're saying, well, we're not really... | |
We're not... | |
We're not wrapping the feet of geisha girls anymore. | |
So therefore we've evolved as a human race. | |
And you're right. | |
We have. | |
We're not abusing children in the same way that we used to. | |
And we do have laws now that protect children from being abused. | |
And we have laws that protect women from being abused by their husbands. | |
And we just don't accept that behavior anymore. | |
And we don't stone witches anymore or unbelievers. | |
And we don't burn witches anymore. | |
So it does seem like we have evolved in many ways, but I'm wondering if we actually have or we just changed the violence and we're doing it in different ways because we're still seeing the evidence of people that are like the Obama phone lady or like months ago, I remember, and I was, this is one of the first times I was introduced to you is when I saw your rant about the people on Wall Street and I agreed with you 100%. | |
You have, you know, hordes of people That are pretty much demanding something for nothing. | |
And maybe it does stem from perpetual infantilism and this perpetual childhood where they're never able to break free from that. | |
But here's my question for you. | |
The cure is in getting angry. | |
You have to get angry first. | |
And I know that that agrees with what I have learned about psychology as well. | |
So I'm wondering if, as a whole, we are in that state right now. | |
And, you know, all the Ron Paul people and everyone else that is very riled up about the election and very riled up about politics, myself included, I feel angry a lot lately when I think about society and the economy and the political climate. | |
And I know that a lot of people out there too. | |
So are we in that stage? | |
And does that mean that we're ready to heal, that we're ready to move forward? | |
Are we on the verge of something better? | |
Yeah, I think we're close. | |
I think it's quite imminent, and it requires only one set of wires to be connected. | |
Now, it's a bit of a crab to get them connected, but it's just one set of wires. | |
And the first thing to understand is that our existing hierarchical society cannot survive if children are well treated. | |
We have a pyramid society with people on the top, but it all rests on an inverted pyramid to crush the child. | |
If the children are treated well, if they're respected, if they're negotiated with, if they're never aggressed against and so on, Then our society will be unrecognizable. | |
So every power structure that we have relies upon the maltreatment of children. | |
I mean, to take an example, of course, I mean, in religion, you have to say that children are going to be supernaturally punished if they don't obey the priest. | |
You can't reason with them because there's no reason behind the edict, so you have to terrify them with With hell and eternal lakes of fire, and if you've ever read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, it's an incredible, unbelievably psychotically evil chapter, which is a priest describing hell in all of its morbid and excruciating and sadistic detail to all the children. | |
Now, I know it's not quite that bad anymore, but you have to threaten children in order to sustain irrational hierarchies, or you least have to hide huge amounts of information from children to sustain this. | |
It's true of public schools, it's true of religion, it's true of a whole bunch of institutions. | |
And you can see this showing up, like these icebergs pop up, right? | |
Like, I mean, the fact that Jerry Sandusky was able to do what he did for decades before being apprehended. | |
There's this British scandal now where one of their presenters, and I think Gary Glitter now, went on for decades. | |
This is an entire society that if you touch the abuse of children, you rewrite society. | |
So this natural conservatism, so to speak, of society comes from that. | |
But I think what's really important is that we all know Exactly how to be great parents already. | |
Everybody knows exactly how to be a great parent already. | |
It is not a lack of knowledge that we have. | |
And I can give you proof positive of this in three sentences, or three questions. | |
First, have you ever seen a sitcom in a family where the child is spanked? | |
No. | |
Have you ever seen a movie about parenthood with a good parent who spanks the child on camera? | |
No. | |
Because inherently we know it's wrong. | |
Right. | |
So, I mean, and what do you see in portrayals of good parents in the media? | |
You see reasoning, you see talking sticks, you see cute, adorable kids who sass their parents and the parents laugh it off and they all sort it out. | |
And this is true, you know, all the way back to, you know, Michael J. Fox's Family Ties, to the Cosby Show. | |
I mean, this goes back to the 80s. | |
This even goes back to the 70s. | |
You have to go back to, like, the Waltons in the 60s to see... | |
A spanking even remotely legitimized, and that's off camera. | |
Yeah, it's usually inferred. | |
Yeah, you take them out back with the switch or whatever. | |
But for 40 or 50 years, I mean, think of Leave it to Beaver, never saw spanking. | |
My three sons, never saw... | |
I sound like a complete TV geek here, but I've looked at these things for evidence of this stuff. | |
For 50 years, half a freaking century, from the time almost it took from land to leave the ground in a rickety airplane to get to the moon, we've had... | |
Everybody being instructed for literally thousands of hours, even if you just watch a little bit of TV, by the time you're an adult, you watch these kids' shows, you have been instructed for thousands of hours on how to be a great parent. | |
Because I would argue that the parenting that is portrayed, for the most part, in sitcoms and TV shows and so on, where the parents are sympathetic, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good, right? | |
So television's good for us. | |
Well, no. | |
See, the problem is that there's this massive disconnect, right? | |
And the reason why... | |
I mean, imagine if you had a sitcom where you had a parent take down the pants of a six-year-old girl and smack her till it was read. | |
Can you imagine the outrage in society? | |
Yet 80 to 90 percent of parents spank their children, right? | |
So we all know that it's wrong. | |
That's proof that somewhere inherently we know that violence is wrong. | |
We couldn't stand to watch... | |
Violence, if we weren't already in an alter ego state, i.e. | |
inhabited by a prior abuser, that would allow us to sustain it emotionally. | |
In other words, if there was on some sitcom with kids a sudden spanking where people weren't emotionally prepared and hadn't gone into that altered state, they would be absolutely shocked and appalled. | |
I mean, it would be a revolutionary act. | |
I'm not saying we would necessarily be positive or you should do it, but if somebody did that, What a conversation it would provoke. | |
Because people would say, oh my god, that's terrible. | |
I can't believe they showed someone being spanked. | |
It's like, are you kidding me? | |
What about the kids being spanked? | |
So we all have thousands of hours of training. | |
I mean, because these things are all training. | |
It's training on how parents negotiate with kids. | |
It's training on how kids negotiate with each other. | |
It's training on peaceful resolution, win-win resolutions. | |
I mean, think of the talking stick in, I don't know, whatever that one was with the two cute little girls who grew up to be not-so-cute little girls. | |
Oh, the Olsen twins? | |
Yeah, the Olsen twins, right? | |
They had a talking stick, right? | |
And everybody was reasonable, everybody was peaceful, and so on. | |
Never any yelling, never any raised voices, never any name-calling, never any hitting. | |
You didn't even see time-outs in these shows. | |
And so we all have thousands of hours of exposure by the time we become parents of exactly how to raise children peacefully. | |
Do you think, though, that being that most of us, most of our society, especially someone that's from your generation, from my generation, and especially younger than my generation, because we have had these thousands and thousands of hours of being trained on what an appropriate family situation should be and what appropriate parenting should be, do you think that it causes It causes us to hold ourselves to that measure. | |
And if we do mess up as a family and we do mess up as parents or we do have some situation happen to us that we don't deal with according to the ideal television situation, do you think it messes with a family psychologically and kind of can have a backfiring sort of effect? | |
Yeah, I don't know. | |
Because nobody is Lever to Beaver. | |
I mean, the shows today kind of maybe more clearly reflect what the modern American family is, but back in the Lever to Beaver days, nobody was like that. | |
That's why the Roseanne show was so shocking at the time, because it was so much more realistic than the shows at that time. | |
Not even Family Ties was all that realistic. | |
I mean, it was great, and you had the kid that didn't agree with his parents politically, and, you know, so you had a little bit of shock value there, but it still wasn't... | |
Exactly what the typical family was because people don't want to see the typical family on TV. They don't want to see a reflection of themselves on TV. They want to see the ideal on TV. But then we hold ourselves to that ideal as a measuring stick for how we should be and when we don't meet that ideal, do we punish ourselves and does that backfoy? | |
I think mostly what people do is they punish their children for failing to meet the ideal. | |
How come you're not like the kids on TV and make me have to do this or whatever, right? | |
Well, the Roseanne thing too, I mean, the Roseanne phenomenon, I mean, it was very verbally acidic and so on, but you still had a two-parent household. | |
You still had a pretty gentle dad. | |
There was some verbal snarkiness between the mom and particularly the- There was no abuse in that. | |
Yeah, there was no spanking, there was no screaming, there was no hitting, there was no verbal abuse, she didn't call them stupid or assholes or idiots or anything like that. | |
There was kind of like a wry, deadpan, lower class humor, but it still was vastly above. | |
Again, I go back to the statistics, even now, 80 to 90% of parents are hitting their children, and you never see that reflected, even in the darkest moments. | |
And so we all know. | |
So we're not mimicking media. | |
Why is there still so much violence? | |
If it's not media that we're mimicking, who is providing that training for us? | |
If it's not – I mean, because clearly it's not the media. | |
You're right. | |
We're actually being trained to not smear our children. | |
But there are still so many parents out there that are violent. | |
And I think far less now than would have been even in the 80s. | |
And in the 80s, it was far less than was in the 60s and 50s. | |
And now I know that we're not a spanking family. | |
We're not a hitting family. | |
We're a talking family. | |
And there are many more families now that are. | |
So why still so much violence in the world and in the way that we treat other people? | |
Who's providing that training? | |
Who's manipulating our children to grow up and still feel entitlement and still feel hostile and violent toward their fellow human being? | |
Right. | |
Well, the argument that I would make is that where you have voluntarism in your relationships, there you have the greatest possibility of quality, right? | |
So it's the difference between going to the restaurant and going to the IRS, the difference between going to the mall and going to the Department of Motor Vehicles. | |
So where you have involuntarism in relationships, there's the least chance for there to be quality. | |
And to take an obvious example, if it were illegal, For women to divorce their husbands or for husbands to divorce their wives, do we think that abuse would go up or go down? | |
Down? | |
Sure, of course it would. | |
In the same way that the quality of a relationship goes up in a company when it gets out of the government. | |
And your argument, of course, about schools. | |
One of the reasons they're so terrible is that they're compulsory, right? | |
That there's not voluntarism in the relationship. | |
And so one of the goals that I've had for many years is to remind people of voluntarism within the family. | |
And so, if your parents treat you like crap, if they hit you, if they beat you, if they rape you, if they, whatever, scream at you all the time, then when you become an adult, you can try and work it out with them, you can try to get them into family counseling. | |
If it doesn't work out, and it's the same thing we would tell anybody in an abusive relationship, you have the option to not be in that relationship. | |
Of course, it's my hope and goal that people can work things out. | |
But to introduce the idea of voluntarism, we all accept that a woman being beaten up by her husband or a husband being beaten up by the wife is probably better if they can't reform the relationship out of that relationship. | |
But it's a really, it's a taboo topic among adult children and their parents. | |
And so, because the parents never have to, quote, worry about voluntarism in the relationship, And because society kind of moves in to block any adult children who are thinking about maybe not seeing abusive parents, there's not that voluntarism that produces checks and balances on the aggression within the relationship. | |
And that doesn't mean, of course, that all parents are aggressive and lots of parents are great. | |
But I think until we can start to think about voluntarism, not just horizontally, not just economically, not just in terms of marriages. | |
I mean, imagine if you could never be fired from your job, your boss would probably not be a better boss. | |
If you could never quit your job and never be fired from your job, I mean, just look at the post office. | |
I mean, it's a terribly abusive environment because it's just so—and you can even have the right to quit, although you're kind of locked in by all these benefits. | |
And so if we can start to look at voluntarism vertically, rather than just horizontally, right? | |
And it should be the most in families, I think, voluntarism, because at least you choose your spouse, right? | |
You get to test drive them, you date them, you get engaged, you can all that, and you choose them. | |
You know, choose your parents. | |
So the quality and the voluntarism should be highest, I think. | |
Excuse me, in the adult-parent-child relationship than any other relationship, but it's actually where there is the least voluntarism that is acceptable. | |
I don't know if that makes any sense, but I think that's what we need to start working on extending. | |
Of course it makes sense. | |
I agree with you, Stefan, insofar it all does come down to how we're treated as children, because if you can control the children and the minds of the children, you essentially can control the future, because you're training them when they're formable and when they're I mean, when you're between the ages of 4 and 15, 16 years old, those are the most formidable years of your life, right? | |
So if you can capture the children's attention during that time, and whether it's by an abusive parent situation or an abusive Board of Education situation, and in both cases, I think that those entities can be abusive forces in a child's life, even if we don't see them as abusive forces. | |
Even if the parents aren't spanking the child, it might still be an abusive situation because maybe they are being withheld in other ways. | |
Maybe they are being forced in other ways or emotionally stunted or neglected or psychologically stunted. | |
And of course I see the compulsory school situation as an abusive situation because children are being emotionally suppressed and they're being creatively suppressed. | |
So we have generation after generation after generation of abused children becoming parents and continuing to abuse other children by perpetuating the same motion. | |
So I guess the obvious question is Where do we begin if we do want to see that change? | |
Because if we are going to move to a place in humanity where we are going to enter into a different age and we are going to change history and we're going to stop repeating the different variations of the same behavior over and over again, then something's got to stop the rhythm. | |
Something's got to stop the flow. | |
So if we're going to change that in parenting and we're going to stop the welfare cycle of entitlement and the perpetuation of Obamaphone ladies, which she's affectionately come to be known in my house now, the Obamaphone lady, if we're going to stop that cycle, Then it needs to stop in parenting. | |
So besides folks like you and I talking about it and trying to reach other people, what are other ways that society as a whole can really change to make sure that we are moving in the right direction here? | |
I mean, we can talk about abuse laws as much as we want, but we really don't want to install more laws onto society. | |
We don't want to make more things legal. | |
We don't need more rules. | |
We need to change it from the beginning. | |
So, you know, just to clarify that we can definitely evolve and go into the right direction. | |
We know what the problem is. | |
How do we solve it, in other words? | |
Well, I think it's also important, I mean, just before I answer that, just a very brief overview. | |
I mean, so a lot of parenting, I think, has improved over the past couple of decades. | |
But unfortunately, I'm not sure that the quality of childhood has improved, because other things have moved in to take the place of kinder parenting. | |
Schools have gotten much worse, much worse. | |
Even since when I was a child. | |
Kids spend almost more time with teachers than they do with their parents. | |
And so schools have gotten much worse. | |
The family as a whole, I mean, it's absolutely stunning. | |
It has... | |
More than half disintegrated from where it was. | |
I mean, so, for instance, you know, like 50 years ago, illegitimacy rates in the black community were way lower, single digits, way lower than in the white community. | |
Now, they're like 80-90%. | |
I mean, it's crazy. | |
The rise of single motherhood, unprecedented throughout human history. | |
And, you know, a lot of single mothers are trying to do their best, but statistically, it's really stacking the odds against the success of their kids. | |
So, the I'm sorry to interrupt you, but when you have the single motherhood and the breakdown in the family, and I would never, ever support a woman staying in an abusive relationship, so I understand why there needs to be single motherhood in some situations, | |
but as you said, it has risen, and now you have these situations where a lot is put on a single parent, whether it's a mother or a father, a lot of financial burden is put now on that single parent, and these things do affect the Yes, | |
and of course, the choice of partner and the choice of pregnancy is, to some degree, whether it's consciously or unconsciously, is inevitably shaped by the social policies that are in place, right? | |
So if the woman can get, you know, free healthcare, free education, subsidized housing, blah blah blah blah blah, then She, I think, is going to be less rigorous in vetting the father of her kids because it's not like this guy or charity that's going to be really skeptical and humiliating. | |
So it's a problem. | |
It's a cyclical problem that is really hard to disentangle. | |
So I think for kids, there has been some improvement in quality and standards of how to treat children have improved in an artistic abstract and sometimes in a very real way. | |
But the disintegration of the family and the drop of value in education, the drop of quality in education, is catastrophic because kids need to spend time one-on-one with adults. | |
And single moms with a couple of kids just don't have that kind of time. | |
A teacher who's got 30 kids in the classroom doesn't have that kind of time. | |
Kids need to socialize, they need to bond, they need to make decisions about how they're going to be in society. | |
If they're not going to get it from adults, they're going to get it from their peers. | |
And then you've got this Lord of the Flies situation where you've got these very primitive peers who are also probably traumatized. | |
They're all attempting to raise each other in very destructive ways. | |
This is why there's so much bullying and so much dysfunction because we have largely taken adults out of the equation. | |
Both parents are working, they're doing chores on the weekends, the teachers are too busy for one-on-one attention, so the kids naturally gravitate towards socializing horizontally. | |
Which is a complete Blind Leading the Blind, Lord of the Flies festering situation where you end up with so much peer pressure that I think that's another way of stunting growth. | |
Children need mentoring. | |
They need growth. | |
They need to be around a wide variety of ages and all that. | |
So I think that in some ways parenting has improved and the quality of how we treat children has improved. | |
But in other ways, it seems like we've taken one step forward and two steps back. | |
You know, you mentioned something before. | |
Just now, actually, just a minute ago where you were saying you have a Lord of the Flies situation and socialization. | |
That is interesting to me because I know I've spoken about this with you before. | |
One of the top arguments, if not the top argument, against homeschooling and home education Is always socialization. | |
And I really think that's a compulsory thing that people just say. | |
I don't really think that they put much thought into it before they say it. | |
They just say, well, I'm going to homeschool and, you know, the person says, okay, what about socialization? | |
I don't. | |
They just kind of say it. | |
It's just something to say. | |
No government. | |
What about the roads? | |
What about national defense? | |
What about the poor? | |
Exactly. | |
Exactly. | |
You know, well, you know, if we don't have government, how are we going to have roads? | |
You know, what have the roadman's ever done for us? | |
But it's just this compulsory thing that people say. | |
And when you really dissect it and really think about it, you realize that Healthy socialization is actually not happening in school at all. | |
The school situation stunts healthy socialization because they're really not having the quality time that they need with their parents. | |
And children do need quality time with their parents. | |
Those relationships are extremely important because if you don't have them, they do lead to things like we were saying before, perpetual infancy. | |
And this needs not being met constantly, constantly needs not being met because they're not having this relationship with their parents. | |
But they also need relationships and they need to learn how to interact with everyone around them, not just the same 30 kids in the same classroom and the one adult that's really not paying that much one-on-one attention to them. | |
We would never let the government assign us our friends. | |
As adults, right? | |
right? | |
Like we'd never go to the friend pool and the government says, you have to be here. | |
These are your friends. | |
You know, three of them are criminals. | |
Two of them are embezzlers. | |
One of them is an art dealer. | |
And you know, three of them are car dealerships and whatever. | |
And we would never let the government choose our friends for us, but we let the government choose our friends for our kids. | |
Put me into a room with 30 other women, exactly the same age as ma'am. | |
I'm not going to tell you what that is. | |
And I have to choose from one of these women or one of these people who I'm going to be friends with. | |
That's not how it works in the real world. | |
How it works in the real world is you have diversity and you have variety and you have all different people and other adults to interact with and children to interact with. | |
And that's what children need. | |
They need reality. | |
But when they're in this situation, and I know you've talked about bullying before, Stefan, These situations, like you said, this kind of peer pressure, this kind of Lord of the Flies atmosphere, or we have Hunger Games is a good macrocosm of what we're seeing in the school system right now. | |
You have this atmosphere where it actually breeds bullying. | |
Bullying was not, I mean, I know we had violence all throughout human history, but bullying and peer pressure were not parts of our vernacular prior to the compulsory school age. | |
This is an atmosphere that actually breeds bullying and perpetuates the kind of behavior. | |
So the people then, of course, graduate from this situation, graduate, and then they go on into what they consider the real world to be, and they actually construct the real world now and the real world becomes something different that's not very natural anymore and not very organic anymore and over generation after generation it has become the new version of what the real world is and everyone just accepts this compulsory systematic entitlement political paradigm | |
separation as a representation of the real world so in as many ways as we've evolved Like you said, the situation with the compulsory school has almost taken over for the lack in parenting. | |
So now, instead of having miserable parents, the parents maybe are doing a little bit better, but we're putting them into another abusive situation, still perpetuating the cycle. | |
And everybody understands this, right? | |
So whenever you talk about privatizing schools, people immediately think, well, society's going to fall apart. | |
And they're absolutely right. | |
Society as we know it cannot survive voluntarism in childhood, right? | |
Because so much of adult society is compelled. | |
You know, I mean, your taxes are compelled, regulations are compelled. | |
National debts are surreptitiously compelled. | |
The currency you have to use is compelled. | |
The provocation, the wars you have to pay for are compelled. | |
So much of what we deal with as adults is compelled. | |
And there's no way that we could get used to that if we weren't taught that as children. | |
I mean, we would just be astonished. | |
I mean, for someone to be raised in a peaceful society or a peaceful environment suddenly to jump into our society would be like you and I jumping into Mandarin society and expecting to know the language. | |
We wouldn't know what the heck was going on or how people could stand it. | |
And so, the only way that I know is, you know, reform childhood, promote peaceful parenting and promote volunteerism within the family so that parents can't treat their kids like crap and expect them to hang around forever no matter what, and if they ever try and make a break for it, society's gonna lasso them and pull them back with guilt and obligation and ostracism and shame and blah blah blah. | |
So, you know, the promotion of volunteerism, the promotion of peaceful parenting That is going to fundamentally reshape society in ways that we can't even really conceivably imagine. | |
Because, you know, you say, well, it's more like marriage. | |
But the problem is marriage is entered into by all these broken meme-bots, right, that have been propagandized and subjected to all this control and compulsion as children. | |
And we would no more say to children, well, you need to go to school to be socialized than we'd say, oh, you're going to jail for 13 years. | |
Boy, you're going to be really well socialized when you come out. | |
Because, you know, the children don't choose their friends in school anymore, their classmates, than prisoners choose their cellmates. | |
And so, this expansion of voluntarism, which has been a huge human project that's been going on for thousands of years, you know, we've extended it to slaves and gotten rid of slavery, we've extended it to the worst subjugation of women and promoted more equality between the sexes. | |
We've promoted, of course, it was illegal to divorce throughout most of human history. | |
We've promoted it among marriages with the result, I think, that marital quality has significantly improved. | |
When we extend it to childhood, boy, we're done. | |
That's it. | |
There's nothing else to extend it to, which is why it's that last and really tough nut to crack. | |
Well, you know what? | |
You've provided me with the necessary hope that I needed to ponder this topic because I came into this conversation kind of with just one bullet point after the other, proving how human history just repeats the same mistakes over and over again. | |
And in the last 30 seconds, you've just listed all the ways in which we have improved and we have embraced voluntarism and we have embraced true liberty. | |
So perhaps... | |
There's always two sides to the coin, and I need to be looking at that side of the coin and seeing in just how many ways we have progressed. | |
And you're right, if we have the children, then it's all about that. | |
I guess the final question I have for you is, going back to suppressing information, we have governments suppressing information through the school system, or more important than suppressing information, is manipulating and controlling information and purposely divvying out incorrect information. | |
Now, to me, information is extremely important and, you know, the pursuit of truth is kind of an elusive thing because you need to use discernment and you need to use critical thinking and judgment to really understand whether or not the information you're getting is worthwhile information and can stand on its own merit. | |
And in order to be able to use discernment, you do have to kind of... | |
Build your critical thinking skills. | |
So as far as information, I know that schools are a lot to blame for this, but What are your thoughts on pursuing that information when it comes to parenting and helping children discover and pursue information and use critical thinking and using their faculties and being aware of what is going on in their society and what is going on in their world? | |
What is a parent's role? | |
In your opinion, I'm asking you, which is kind of turning the tables here. | |
Because it's usually me that's answering this question. | |
What is the parent's role in helping a child have the intellectual ability to steer clear of The abuses and the confinements that are offered in the world. | |
So, you know, in other words, it's our job as parents to make sure that our children aren't being abused or neglected so they don't perpetuate the violence. | |
But there is also, we want to make sure that we're essentially protecting them from manipulation of information. | |
What is our role as parents and how do we assure ourselves that we're going to do the best we can by our children, intellectually as well as physically? | |
Yeah, I mean, to me, it's you model the kind of society that you want your children to be part of, right? | |
Because society isn't some big geographical box. | |
That's just some artificial nonsense called a country. | |
That's just a tax form. | |
But the society that we want our children to inhabit, we model for them. | |
Because parents are the first society, I mean, stay-at-home parents in particular, we are the first society that our children experience. | |
You know, the very first word that you give to an object is the word that your child remembers. | |
And if you're consistent with it, that's the language they speak, right? | |
My kids don't speak Mandarin. | |
They don't speak whatever they speak in Timbuktu. | |
They don't speak Martian. | |
They don't speak Elvish. | |
They speak English, because that's the language that I teach them. | |
And so they're going to grow up, and they're not going to have any trouble understanding English. | |
My daughter's going to be 20. | |
Somebody's going to say, hi, how are you today? | |
And she's not going to hear... | |
She's going to hear the words, right? | |
So to model the social language, right? | |
Because the language that we're speaking here is just the tip of the iceberg, right? | |
There's body language, there's the pregnant pause, there's snarky little asides that are designed to snip away at your self-esteem and so on, right? | |
Like I was watching a film the other day with Charlize Theron, where some woman was giving her some snarky aside and she said, "You know, I think you're doing magnificently for a single mom. | |
I really wanted to tell you that." You know, and of course it's such a double-sided entendre, you know, it's just designed to put you down and so on. | |
But if your child has never experienced that, they will experience that as different. | |
They will experience that as unusual. | |
They will experience that as, "Ehh, that doesn't feel right. | |
That doesn't seem right." And, of course, when they experience those things, they'll come home, and if you've got clear, open channels of communication, they'll say, well, this person said this thing to me, and I'm really turning it over my head, and you can unpack it, and you can help them understand, you know, what happened and why it's different and so on. | |
And so it's the same thing with the acquisition of information. | |
Boy, there's nothing that makes you humble as a parent more than realizing how little you know about frogs and millipedes and centipedes when your daughter is three. | |
It's just astounding. | |
You know, what's the difference between a frog and a toad? | |
I don't know, some rearranged letters? | |
Martian ghosts live on their backs. | |
I have no idea. | |
So, you know, I don't know and let's go find out is the key. | |
But I think really it's the emotional tone of the conversation you have with your children is the best inoculation. | |
If they've never been threatened or harmed or yelled at or hit, Then they will never have any affinity for that. | |
They won't be susceptible to it. | |
They will flee that without a second's thought. | |
And so the best inoculation is all of the interactions that you accumulate with your children as they're growing up. | |
That which they learn, they live. | |
And that which they've never experienced, they will inevitably, if it's negative, they will inevitably identify very quickly. | |
Because there's this idea that if you grow up peaceful, Then you're naive to bad things. | |
Nothing could be further from the truth. | |
Nothing could be further from the truth. | |
If you grew up in a violent situation, statistically, you are a great risk for susceptibility to violence or for the enacting of violence. | |
If you grew up in a peaceful situation, statistically, it's almost impossible to get a brain tumor or a spike through the head. | |
It's almost impossible for you to end up in a violent situation. | |
The language of interactions is taught. | |
If we examine the most peaceful Prominent people throughout history that would serve as examples for humanity. | |
They were not ignorant people. | |
They were probably in the top of the intellectual people. | |
It's the more violent people like even Attila Hun or people in today's economy or today's political climate that I would consider relatively violent and also not too bright. | |
So it's normally where the opposite is true. | |
The more violent a person is, the less likely they are to be highly intellectual. | |
But the more peaceful they are, Gandhi was very intellectual. | |
Carl Sagan, I would consider a very peaceful person, also very intelligent. | |
So when you really think about it, it is actually intelligence and peaceful mindedness really do go hand in hand. | |
Yeah, and so... | |
Not ignorance and peacefulness. | |
No, so I don't believe that... | |
There's this myth that if you raise your children peacefully, they'll be susceptible to manipulation by bad people. | |
But to me, that's exactly the same as saying, well, if you never raise them with any exposure to Gaelic, they'll be fluent in Gaelic the first time someone speaks that language to them. | |
They won't. | |
They won't understand what the person is saying, and they won't be able to process anything that's coming out of their mouths. | |
And that's the same thing that happens. | |
Being raised peacefully... | |
It gives you a deep knowledge of the difference between peace and violence because it's not infected you, right? | |
I mean, an infection doesn't usually make you stronger. | |
And it gives you a great resistance to it because it has no capacity to hold power over you. | |
So I was yelled at a lot as a kid. | |
So if someone yells at me, a part of me is like, ugh! | |
But if that had never occurred to me, I don't think it would be like, wow, that person's yelling. | |
How strange. | |
It wouldn't have the same emotional power. | |
So I think it gives you great immunity to and a deep knowledge of Immorality or danger or aggression if you're raised peacefully. | |
It doesn't make you naive. | |
That's just a story that people tell themselves so that they can think that they're toughening their kids up and they're just harming and breaking them. | |
Yeah, or they can justify their own behavior, their own shortcomings and their own behavior. | |
And I'm sorry that I'm asking you a lot of questions, but I'm curious, you did bring up a while back to the way priests would use hell to abuse children or to scare children, and that's a scare tactic. | |
And it just kind of makes me think back to, as you know, I'm no longer, but I was raised Catholic, so I was raised with the idea of hell and And punishment and eternal damnation if we meet on Fridays or whatever it is. | |
But of course, there's absolution. | |
And if you go to confession on Saturday, oral is forgiven. | |
You can pretty much do anything you want during the week as long as you go to confession. | |
Then I get older, of course, and I learn that it's mostly story. | |
And the whole idea of hell isn't even really biblical in the Christian sense. | |
But it's based on Dante's Inferno, which is actually quite funny that there are whole religions based on a work of fiction. | |
And I know that's pretty much how it is anyway, but would you consider, because like I consider a lot of these compulsory situations, abusive situations outside of the family, so even though children are not being abused inside the family, we still have abuse by society that we're allowing as a society to continue abuses on children, whether it be mental, spiritual, physical abuse, they're happening, and one of them is the compulsory school system. | |
And I'm starting to wonder whether or not organized religion is another form of abuse. | |
Because I used to be very forgiving and figure, well, you know, people have to find their own path. | |
But now I'm wondering whether or not these forms of organized religion are actually, and this might sound conspiratorial to some degree, but whether or not organized religion is an arm of... | |
The state and uses a manipulation tool and whether or not it is an actual form of abuse because it uses scare tactics to get people to behave. | |
Right. | |
Well, I mean, I just wanted to sort of qualify the term abuse. | |
I think that abuse has to have some knowledge of the wrongness of the action, right? | |
I mean, so, you know, a doctor in the 15th century who was putting leeches on someone, he was doing bad medicine, but he didn't have the capacity to do any better medicine, if that makes sense, right? | |
So he didn't know, he thought he was doing the right thing. | |
Yeah, he thought he was doing the right thing. | |
He could have been the very best trained doctor, but he was still doing bad medicine, right? | |
So I think that it's important to differentiate. | |
Most people, of course, when they think of public schools, they think of good citizens, they think of education, and they think, of course... | |
Because only the government largely provides the schools, if the government didn't provide the schools, there would be no schools. | |
Which is the same as saying, if the government did arrange marriages and forced everyone to get married, that if the government didn't arrange marriage, if it got out of that business, no one would get married and the human race would die out. | |
Voluntarism replaces coercion. | |
And the mistake of thinking that something that is coercively provided will never be provided voluntarily is a fundamental mistake. | |
But for most people, They send their kids to public school really thinking that they're doing the right thing. | |
They've never heard any arguments to the contrary. | |
People do timeouts and maybe even yell at their kids saying, well, you know, I've graduated from hitting and I'm doing this. | |
Never heard arguments to the contrary. | |
So to me, ethics is a kind of technology. | |
It's a kind of knowledge base. | |
And if you simply have never been exposed to it, I mean, we can't expect people to invent ethics from the ground up while they're doing everything else. | |
It's a hell of a job. | |
So just to be really clear, right? | |
So... | |
Just because an action is abusive doesn't mean that the person is an abuser, I think, to morally judge that. | |
And the key differentiator is, do they do it in public kind of thing, right? | |
And of course, religion is done in public. | |
I mean, religion is with everyone else in the church, I mean, for the most part, right? | |
So it may be harmful to the children, it may be abusive in an action, but to me that does not translate into, you know, everybody who teaches their kids about hell is abusive. | |
With knowledge, with intent, with knowledge of alternatives and so on. | |
I just really want to be clear about that because the two terms are used interchangeably. | |
I'm guilty of that myself too, but I just want to be clear on that. | |
As far as religion being an arm of the state, I think that there is a lot of commonality between the two institutions. | |
They rely on punishment and rewards for virtue, right? | |
I mean, you go to hell, you go to heaven, right? | |
You get to stay free or you go to jail, right, in the government sense. | |
So sticking a carrot is not good. | |
Also in its structure, because you have the Vatican being a huge religious force and a huge political influence. | |
So, you know, in its very structure, the leaders are almost one and the same. | |
Yes, and you need punishment because the arguments don't hold, right? | |
So, I mean, I was talking about this at Libertopia recently when I was giving the closing speech, but you don't see a science article that says, well, you have to accept the inverse square law or you'll burn in hell forever. | |
Right. | |
Because they actually have proof of that. | |
You don't have to accept that objects accelerate to the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second, or demons will rip out your eyeballs forever with hot pokers. | |
I mean, you don't hear those kinds of hysterical arguments from people who have facts and reason and evidence to back up what they're saying. | |
You hear hysterical arguments from people who've got nothing to Good to say, nothing useful to say, and in fact, are lying to you, right? | |
Hysterical arguments always go with lying, which is why, oh my god, without a government, we'll all be decapitating each other with boomerangs and, you know, just be—you hear these hysterical arguments from a fact from people who don't have good arguments. | |
It's like, well, you have to follow X deity, otherwise all these terrible things are going to happen. | |
That's just an argument from fear, and it's a threat, and it's, you know— It's terrible. | |
And we would never allow that, of course, in the free market. | |
You can't justly say, I'm going to inflict you with an imaginary illness called sin, and then you have to pay me $5,000 a year to cure you forever. | |
I mean, that would be illegal in any reasonable society, or it would certainly be in Unacceptable in any reason. | |
You can't just make up imaginary illnesses. | |
Inflict them on children who don't know any better. | |
Say that, you know, there's this thing called you were born with called original sin that's going to have you go to hell, and it's nothing you did. | |
It's just who you are. | |
And so to remove this imaginary curse, you have to obey me. | |
You have to come every Sunday. | |
You've got to put money in the donation plate. | |
I mean, if you just look at it as the infliction of an imaginary illness upon children who can't reason their way or who are too subjected to the power of their elders to avoid it... | |
Which you then charge for the removal of an imaginary curse forever. | |
I mean, this is just, it is unholy. | |
It is absolutely an abomination. | |
And the fact that it continues only shows just how much momentum there is in the history of irrationality. | |
Well, I think that it's organized religion, maybe not an actual arm of the government, but it's used as a manipulation tool because it does kind of work as a manipulation tool and it has historically. | |
Sorry, but historically the priest would say that the king was put there by God, so you have to obey him. | |
And in return... | |
The king would go kill competing religions and lock them up. | |
And so you would get a monopoly on religion to whoever would convince the most people that the king was divine. | |
And in return for saying the king was divine, the king would grant you that monopoly on religion. | |
So there are two monopolistic, coercive-based institutions. | |
The one is directly physically coercive against adults. | |
Another one is more emotionally abusive towards children. | |
But it's really two sides of the same coin, I think. | |
They can't really sustain in the absence of each other for too long. | |
I think that the state and organized religion need each other to survive, and in order for humanity to move forward, and this ties back to the original question I had in this entire interview, in order for society to move forward and evolve, we may have to look at both, and not only the dismantling of the state, but dismantling of archaic religions as well. | |
So we may have to embark upon a completely new age in human society and human growth, If we are going to see generations from now a society of true liberty and volunteerism. | |
And whether or not it is something that is actually possible, like my 11-year-old daughter pointed out to me, just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean that it cannot happen. | |
I think that's true now, and I do see, like you said, there are a lot of ways in which we have moved forward as a society. | |
I think that we have a lot further to go, but I do think that we have to broaden our perspective a little bit and not only look at the state and the control that's going on there, but also the way that our information is manipulated and controlled, the way our society parents are Like you said, because it really comes down to how you grow up as a child and whether or not you grow up, whether or not you're able to reach past that infant stage. | |
And I think that for many of us, for almost all of us, there are many ways in which we are still very immature. | |
And I think that on an individual basis, we need to learn how to mature and we need to make sure that we're bestowing better habits upon our children. | |
And just doing better by our children. | |
But there are many aspects of our society that will need to change in order for us to move forward and change. | |
But the good news is I'm walking away from the conversation feeling much more positive and refreshed as usual. | |
So thank you. | |
You're welcome. | |
I just wanted to mention... | |
Yeah, if we grieve our losses and we are angry at the injustices we have suffered, that unlocks the gate to a free future. | |
It doesn't seem to be scientifically or morally any particular alternative. | |
I agree with you. | |
If you get rid of religion without dealing with the underlying trauma, what happens is people double down on the state, right? | |
So if you look at the great atheistic movements of the 20th century, you have, you know, secular socialism and communism. | |
And to some degree fascism, where you get a diminishment of the church without a processing of the early childhood trauma, you end up with a swelling of the state. | |
Right. | |
Well, in Russia, religion was actually illegal in Russia, and that's going to the other extreme. | |
Right. | |
Right, and so you get a smaller church and you get a monstrous government. | |
Right, so the two need to be dealt with at the same time, simultaneously. | |
Yes, yes. | |
Well, I really appreciate that. | |
I know it's been a long chat, but fantastic questions, and I'm glad that we had an opportunity to discuss these. | |
I think they really are at the very essence of what reasonable, peaceful... | |
People who, you know, want the best in a very rational way for the future. | |
These are the issues that we really need to be concerned about. | |
And science is doing us a huge favor by handing over evidence after evidence, brain scan after brain scan, of exactly how this stuff works. | |
And so, you know, I think if we defer to the science, I think we can't lose. | |
I mean, it is emotionally challenging to do these things, but I think it is the essence of how we're going to free things to come. | |
Well, to move forward, we need to keep asking questions and keep pondering and keep thinking. | |
That is progress. | |
That is the way to move forward as a society. | |
And I hope so. | |
And it always includes love and patience and kindness, of course, for the fellow human being. | |
And I think at the root of love and patience and kindness lies communication, to be able to communicate with one another effectively. | |
And we do that through conversation. | |
So that is why I appreciate these talks that we have. | |
Well, thanks, Lorette, and I hope we can do it again soon. | |
Have yourself a great night. | |
You too. | |
Thanks, Stefan. | |
All my best to your daughter for her great questions. | |
Take care. | |
Yeah. | |
Bye-bye. |