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Nov. 7, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:06
2252 A Moral History of Me
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So somebody has asked me to answer some questions for their developmental psych course, which I'm happy to do, and they said I could read it as a podcast, so so much the better.
So here are the questions.
One.
Using your own words, no right or wrong answer, please briefly define morality.
Morality is universally preferable behavior.
Behavior which can be universalized, independent of time and place and person.
And preferable means it's better than the alternative.
And behavior means that we are judging actions, not thoughts.
So, universally preferable behavior.
Two, how do you think you came to acquire the moral sense you have today?
Was there any one person that influenced your moral development, I guess, who influenced your moral development the most?
I was interested in morality from a very early age.
The world seemed to me very confusing and very chaotic, very violent, and yet at the same time, the people, the adults around me, didn't seem to have any particular humility about their moral commandments or instructions.
So, I grew up in the 60s and 70s, steeped in the worship of the Second World War in England, as if that was some sort of success.
We were told, even as children, to watch out for suspicious packages in bus shelters because the Irish Republican Army was regularly bombing civilians in London.
and I remember when I was in boarding school when I was six, I had to go to the nurse for some reason, and I saw these sort of grainy black and white images on television of a tank going through, I thought at the time it was somewhere over in Eastern Europe.
You know, given the, it may have been the Hungarian Revolution.
No, I think that was before, that was when I was two.
But anyway, there was a lot of violence in the world, a lot of aggression in the world, a lot of war in the world.
And it seemed to me that all of the adults should have a little bit more humility when talking about ethics with the children, given what was happening in the world as a whole.
You know...
Having adults and school teachers and priests and so on lecture me about morality, given the state of the world, it seemed a little bit like having a fat guy lecture you about your diet or a smoker lecture you about lung health.
It just seemed kind of weird.
I was very...
Drawn towards Virtue as a little kid.
Again, when I was in boarding school, I lost a pen and then I'd heard that a pen had been found.
I went to the headmaster and it was a beautiful gold pen, but I said, no, that's not mine.
He seemed quite surprised and he praised me for my honesty.
And again, when I was young and working in stores, I was always the kid picked to take the money to the bank.
And I was always pretty honest that way, very honest that way.
I went through a phase then when I became sort of early teens, a very nihilistic phase, where I really just believed that morality was...
I didn't really think about it a huge amount, but...
It just seemed to me that morality was a lie told to the weak so that they could be controlled by the strong.
I was a little proto-Nichian.
But without a doubt, the moral development influence that was the greatest for me was Russian novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand.
She really made a very powerful case for the non-aggression principle.
And what she did was she gave ethics a backbone.
There was this kind of simpering, I think it's Alyosha, in The Brothers Karamazov, who is good and simpering and ineffective and weak and so on.
And Ayn Rand taught me that.
Morality was universal, that the non-aggression principle and property rights were very strongly defensible.
I think I've tried to expand a few of those defenses over time.
And also that you could be like a morality superhero.
You could be brave and tough and strong and not just have to sort of sit and pray while evil consumed the world.
Number three, do you remember witnessing actions by someone that you felt were good examples of morality or immorality at the time?
How old were you and how do you think exposure to those actions affected your current moral sense?
I was thinking about this.
I don't think I can see really good examples of morality.
I don't think, I mean, it just seemed really bad.
I mean, it just seemed really ethical sense and what past virtue just seemed really wretched when I was a kid.
It was horrible.
I mean, again, there was war, criminality, bombings, control.
I mean, when I went to boarding school, I mean, I was caned for something as simple as climbing over a fence to get a ball.
And so this all just seemed very hysterical and very aggressive.
And adults did not seem happy.
They did not seem productive.
They did not seem to be...
In a good position to have happy enough and fulfilled enough lives to lecture children on how they should be.
I don't remember getting any strong sense of morality from religion at all.
It just seemed to me, because there was no reason for anything.
So, with religion, it just all seemed to be like, well, if you obey these moral commandments, then you're good.
But I thought, well, if just obedience is all that's needed, then just obey.
That doesn't have any moral content to just obey, right?
Because we were told, well, just obey these moral commandments.
At the same time, we were told that the Germans in World War II were really bad because they just obeyed orders.
And so it just seemed weird.
So we fought this big war, I was told, against Germany because the Germans were just bad people who just obeyed orders.
And then how should you obey the law?
Because of rule, you can't.
And you should obey the Ten Commandments and the priests because it's like, well, isn't that just the same?
Anyway, it's just the same thing, it seemed.
But the most fundamental immorality that...
What I experienced as a child was I was physically, emotionally and mentally abused in very loud and destructive ways as a child.
And we didn't live in a cave.
We didn't live in a tree house in the middle of the woods.
We didn't live in an isolated house.
We lived in an apartment building with thin walls.
This occurred everywhere we lived.
I lived in a variety of countries and places.
And everywhere it was the same story that, you know, my mother would be screaming or hitting or beating or throwing things or smashing plates or whatever.
And no one did anything.
No one made a phone call.
Nobody knocked on the door.
Nobody did anything whatsoever.
This was universal.
Everywhere we went, it was the same thing.
And that just seemed to me entirely the depths of hell scumbaggery.
And of course, this is at the same time where you get all these messages that children are everything and we care about the children and the society and this and that.
And I really got very fundamentally, very fundamentally, that society doesn't give a rat's ass about children.
I mean, people as a whole, universally, when they hear direct evidence through the walls continually of vicious and repetitive child abuse, won't do a damn thing.
And even as a kid, I remember thinking...
I didn't really expect it to happen, but I do remember thinking...
That if I ever got to any kind of position of prominence, that I was going to do everything I could, no matter what, to speak up for children and to expose abusers.
And as it turned out, I did through my podcast and video show, Free Domain Radio, I've been able to have some capacity to affect positive change in that area.
4.
Would you describe your parents or caregivers as moral people?
No.
No, I mean, abuse, abandonment, neglect, just terrible stuff.
And the immorality is fundamentally because the actions in private were directly opposite from the actions in public.
My parents were, you know, certainly my mother, I grew up, my father left when I was a baby.
She could be enormously charming and funny and positive and playful and all that, but then, of course, in private, there was just this completely different demonic side that came out, so...
Just the hypocrisy.
And of course, once somebody knows what the right action is, they're responsible for the wrong action.
And when people behave well in public and immorally in private, then they clearly are revealing that they are immoral because they know different actions, right?
I mean, if your mom is completely crazy and hits you in front of a police officer, that's one thing.
But if she's all smiles and butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and all that, and then when you're in private, it's the complete opposite, then of course she's morally responsible.
Let's see here.
Five.
Provide an example of an immoral act you committed early in life.
Something minor, of course.
What were the immediate consequences?
Were you caught or corrected?
And what did you take away from it?
Please describe feelings, etc.
An immoral act.
I think this is a tough thing to talk about because the immorality that I was surrounded by, like the evil that I was surrounded by, was so prodigious that I really can't Speak to myself as immoral when I was younger.
And so I can't say that I did something wrong given that I was so badly instructed morally, or so negatively instructed morally, that I can't say that I did an immoral act early in life.
So I'll have to pass that one by.
6.
Compare and contrast your current moral sense and your sense of morals earlier in life.
How has your understanding of morality changed over time?
Well, I would say that it's sort of been, in terms of virtue, it's been like an inverse bell curve, right?
So I started off, I think, that the universal sense of children really aids in the understanding and extension of ethics, right?
If ethics is universally preferable behavior, I've read a whole book about this.
Then children start off pretty moral, pretty universal.
And this is now I'm a stay-at-home dad for four years.
I can certainly confirm that as the case.
And now I'm very much back in the same place, in the middle for probably about five or six years from maybe the age of sort of 10 to 15.
There was kind of a nihilistic cynicism and skepticism towards ethics.
I think that my ethical idealism had just been sort of worn away through repeated exposure to immorality and Neglect on the part of all adults around adults who lived in the apartment building, who knew of the abuse and didn't do anything about it, parents of friends who knew all about the abuse and didn't do anything about it, and still many years later refused to acknowledge it.
It really just got worn away, and I really just believed that ethics was a bunch of nonsense that people made up to sucker you into obeying them rather than because anybody believed in anything virtuous.
So, I am back where I started but I know it for the first time as the poem goes.
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