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Jan. 30, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:17
2313 Do Children Have To Be Taught Empathy?
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Listener, listener, question time.
And the question is this.
Do children need to be taught empathy, or does empathy come naturally to them?
A fine question.
The first question, of course, to answer is, what is empathy?
Well, to me, empathy is UPB in the realm of emotions.
But there's an important caveat to that.
So, universality in the realm of emotions is simply to say, as did Shylock in The Merchant of Venice,"'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' Are we not subject to the same emotions?
If I drive a spike through your genitals, would it not also hurt to have a spike driven through my genitals?
If you are sad over the loss of a pet, is it not likely that I will be sad over the loss of a pet?
So it's simply the acceptance of universality in the realm of emotions, that other people have emotions.
I'll get to the caveat in a sec, but let's just pretend that people are more or less the same.
There are no sociopaths and no narcissists and no sadists and all this kind of stuff.
So, we're talking about, of course, the world of the future.
So, the first thing to grasp, of course, is that empathy is the recognition that other people have feelings similar to yours.
Not identical.
Identical is more like narcissism, right?
So, narcissism is the continual mistaking of the world for yourself, looking into the world and seeing only a reflection of yourself.
Narcissists cannot tolerate dissent in general because everyone has to agree, and the reason that everyone has to agree is that they can't negotiate.
To me, at least, narcissism arises out of a failure of The capacity to negotiate, which means that not only was negotiation not taught to the future narcissist as a child, but any attempt on the part of that child to negotiate would be met with the hostility, rage, attack, indifference, withdrawal, abandonment, all the usual nasty tricks of the nasty parent's armory.
And so if you can't negotiate, differences of opinion are dangerous.
And If you can't negotiate, then differences of opinion can never be win-win.
If you can negotiate, then they can be win-win.
Otherwise, it's win-lose.
And I remember a friend of a friend, this is many, many years ago, a friend of a friend married a Christian.
And he knew that my friend and I were atheists, and we were talking a little bit about religion.
And he said, before his wife came over, guys, guys, time to cool the rhetoric a little.
Fantastic, fantastic phrase.
You really have to admire the corrupt and ugly beauty of such a phrase.
It is a magnificent dark science fiction.
Goda, Escher and Bach.
Painting of the inside of the alien spaceship from Aliens.
It is a dark thing of deep crystalline blood-soaked beauty.
Because it's time to cool the rhetoric.
Oh, it's just delicious!
So, he's getting anxious, but he's projecting his anxiety onto us, or his excitement, or his fear, or his rising emotional state onto us, which is why he tells us to cool it.
And rhetoric, of course, is an empty posturing kind of phrase in its general meaning.
A rhetorical question is one that is pompous and leading and When somebody already knows the answer, so it's a useless intellectual exercise designed to provoke and trap and all this kind of stuff.
Time to cool the rhetoric.
Oh, delicious.
Just delicious.
And why did he need to do that?
He needed to do that because he didn't have a way of negotiating with his wife about anything to do with metaphysics, epistemology, or science.
In other words, the reality that they claimed they were married in.
Baby Bathwater, you get the picture.
The typical interaction that you'll probably see at family gatherings is if a contentious topic arises, what happens is the women will flee the scene or will minimize or will gently or not so gently pry usually the men who are disagreeing apart and kind of mock them as that it's a pissing contest, you know, why don't we just...
You know, there's this cliché about two men who are arguing about something.
I think it's Candice Bergen in...
Oh, Murphy Brown.
God, I'm so shamed.
I can't tell you.
Oh, the time I have spent on television.
But it's all been...
I think it's all been very helpful.
But she, at one point, when two men were arguing, she said, basically, guys, why don't we just whip them out and measure them now?
In other words, all disagreements between men are a primitive dick measuring contest that has nothing to do with...
Any of the content, but it's merely a sort of silverback ape-based domination matrix, and it's all just posturing and nonsense and all that.
And that, of course, is a way of deflating The conflicts.
And the most anti-philosophical elements in society, in general, tend to be female.
And it's not because women are bad at philosophy.
My greatest influence in philosophy was a woman.
By far my greatest influence in philosophy.
I mean, without Ayn Rand, I wouldn't have ever bothered with the topic.
I would have slid off to historical invisibility and social inconsequence.
But because there is no accepted philosophical standard for resolving truth and falsehood, it is, to some degree, posturing and partisanship.
Women are not entirely wrong to mock it, but they are preventing, of course, the moving forward of any rational discourse.
And because there is this huge problem that If things can't be resolved in society because there's no rational, philosophical, moral standard to appeal to, yet we're working on it, then conflicts will escalate to the point of fracturing relationships.
Universals are bigger than people.
People will die rather than break universal.
And we know this because so many people, if the draft comes along, simply go and fight.
I mean, there's a few who don't, but most people will just up and fight.
So, the moral trumps the survival.
This is the power of philosophy.
This is why Hitler asked all of his soldiers to swear an oath of loyalty to him, because that oath of loyalty would then determine their mass, lemming-like, suicidal plunge over the cliff of National Socialism into the moor of a fearful, waiting, and indifferent Europe.
So empathy as a universal is very important.
It is an acceptance that other people are more or less like you.
And empathy is an acceptance of difference Rigidity is a mark, of course, of intellectual paralysis and immaturity.
Rigidity is that you have to hold on to your beliefs no matter what new facts or evidence come along.
And that, of course, is a problem.
And the reason that people do that is depressingly simple.
It's merely because they were...
Attacked for being wrong, quote, wrong in the past, right?
I mean, this happens a lot.
It happens in religions.
Of course, it happens in school.
It happens in families where if you end up being wrong about something, what happens is you are mocked In some families.
And it goes into the family annals.
Oh, the family annals.
The family mythology.
Oh my goodness.
What a desperately bad monster compendium that really is.
It goes into that.
And we don't like that at all.
And most people will do a lot to avoid becoming the ex in a family.
Like, oh, Sally, she's the clumsy one.
Or, oh, he's the hot-tempered one.
And you get boxed into these mythologies in families and What happens is sometimes if you admit that you're wrong, then everybody chortles and laughs and it gets permanently lodged as a dominance meme in everybody's Cro-Manion forehead.
In other words, oh, so you're certain about this, are you?
Well, you remember that time when you were certain about that and it turned out that you were completely wrong?
Well, how are we to know that this is not the case as well?
In other words, if you've had the maturity to correct yourself, Based on new evidence and new arguments, better information, then what happens is you are no longer allowed to have certainty about anything ever again.
And so people, if you are in a myth-making family, a pantheon manufacturing family, then it's really costly to change your mind.
There's just no flexibility in the family.
And again, this is a family.
It's very primitive in its evolution.
Very nasty in its...
Actualization and its interaction.
And a family which is, I mean, that's just a rope around the neck of anybody who's growing.
If you are empathetic, you recognize that you are not going to hold all the same beliefs in five years or maybe even five days than you do now.
You will understand new things, hear new information, get new arguments.
Greater aggregations of data will come along where trends can be developed or distinguished that weren't possible before.
Think of the amount of new arguments that have been put forward simply by the creation of computers and databases and charts and spreadsheets and all of that kind of...
Mathematica and all those kinds of cool programs.
So we have much more information now, and not just the raw information, but the synthesis or aggregation of that raw information is something actually quite useful.
So all of those Aspects are empathy with yourself in the future means that there will be differences of opinion between you and your future self and therefore you do not demand a universality of identical opinions in those around you because that's rigid and it stifles growth and it also blocks off the flow of new information to you as well.
Anybody who laughs at anyone who corrects their...
like anybody who laughs and mocks and attempts to...
Mythologize and encapsulate into a negative stereotype someone who changes his or her mind.
It's simply not going to have people around who are comfortable bringing new information to that person or whatever, right?
So, you're right in your own little bubble which sinks into the sea of indifference.
Now, the other way of handling disagreements that cannot be negotiated, I mean, one, of course, is the rigid hierarchy of Believe this or else.
Whether that's religion or statism or family hierarchies or honor thy mother and thy father or whatever, right?
The one is to impose a rigid discipline and the other is the totally horrible, passive-aggressive, hippy-dippy, let's just agree to disagree.
Aren't I clever?
Let's just agree to disagree.
You have cancer, says the doctor.
No, I don't.
Okay, let's just agree to disagree, says the doctor.
Now, on your way!
Oh, dear.
The road ends in 200 meters.
You should really slow down the car.
No, I think the road keeps going.
I think that it's just a cunning illusion, that brick wall at the end of the road.
Okay, let's just agree to disagree.
Push me off this high wall.
I believe I can float.
And it's mad.
Disagree to disagree is so sad.
And it is, of course, a way of managing conflict by pretending that there's no real conflict.
And that's really a sad confession of a lack of methodology for resolving disputes, a lack of capacity to negotiate.
And it, of course, also indicates, and the reason why it's passive-aggressive is it indicates a complete lack of respect for the other person.
I mean, God, do not make love with people you do not respect.
And do not debate with people that you do not respect, at least.
Not more than once.
And I think that's Pretty important to understand.
So universality of emotions and the flexibility of changing one's mind and openness to new information and so on, that really doesn't have to be taught.
Because children are always attempting to process universals.
I mean, that's the key aspect of our mind.
The language is a universal.
Math is a universal.
The morphines and letters of the language are all universals.
And science is a universal and all that.
So, we're always, as a species, this is our prime distinction, is the capacity, willingness, and ability to...
Pursue and process universals.
So empathy is a universal.
I feel, hey, you feel.
If I put a staple through my thumb and you put a staple through your thumb, neither of us is having much fun.
No fun with thumb with staple.
So that is something that...
Doesn't really need to be taught.
My daughter didn't need to be taught empathy.
We take care of her, and therefore, that's what people do, is they take care of each other.
We didn't need to teach it to her in the way that we need to teach language to her or accounting.
That wasn't necessary.
Because there are things that a child will mirror Or analytic, synthetic, blah, blah, blah.
There are things that a child will mirror which they'll just absorb through repetition and through practice, right?
Like a ball rolls, a wooden block doesn't, snow is cold, sand on a beach is hot, you know, that kind of stuff.
So, there's stuff that a child will simply absorb.
That's not really the same as teaching.
I don't know what you would call that exactly.
Living, imbuing, embodying, whatever it is.
Child doesn't need to be taught that you're bigger than the child, that, you know, like Isabella will ask me to pick her up, she never offers to pick me up.
I didn't need to teach her that.
I didn't need to draw little pictures and say, I'm bigger than you, I can pick you up, you cannot pick me up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
That wasn't...
That wasn't necessary.
These are just things that are absorbed in the environment.
They're not taught specifically.
And empathy doesn't need to be taught.
It obviously needs to be embodied, and it's helpful if it is, but it doesn't need to be taught in any particular way.
Now, where self-protection on the part of the child is important is to understand that some people do not have empathy.
Some people are mean and cruel and evil walks in the world and evil seems in some ways, in many ways, to really run the world.
And so, that is something that is really important to understand.
Empathy is a universal among empathetic people, but it is highly dangerous to empathize with non-empathetic people.
It is very dangerous to empathize with a sadist, just to punch yourself in the nuts.
And unless that's your masochistic thing, not really a great idea.
So, teaching your children that there are good people in the world and there are bad people in the world...
You know, where appropriate and in a context that makes sense.
And hopefully, of course, keeping...
I mean, the best way to teach children about bad people is...
To surround them with good people.
I mean, that's the best way because then they'll really notice the difference, right?
So, if everyone around them is thin and then someone with a giant belly walks in, they'll say, hey, that person is different and they will understand that.
If you surround them with fat people, they won't really notice fat people so much.
So, if you want them to really notice evil people, then don't surround them with malevolent people.
Surround them with good, healthy people.
So, That would sort of be my answer.
I think that it is innate to adapt to one's environment, and an empathetic person does not survive well in a warlike or violent tribe.
A violent person does not survive well in an empathetic tribe, and so these are the issues that I think are most important.
You know, we have enough capacity for travel and variety in the modern world that we can kind of get the tribe that we want.
We're not doomed to Wander around with the face-painted monstrosities of the Stone Age culture that we happened to be born in 5,000 years ago.
We can actually do other things.
We can choose our own tribe in a very positive and productive kind of way.
And so, to embody empathy, which is obviously that the child is feeling, and the child has feelings, and the feelings are like your feelings, and to empathize with what the child can say, and what the child can't say, what the child can express, and can't express, and so on.
These things are all very helpful and very useful.
So, yeah, I would argue that it needs to be embodied.
It doesn't need to be taught.
But it's important for the child over time to understand that there are significant and dangerous exceptions to the near universality of empathy, the sociopaths and sadists, narcissists, psychopaths, and all that kind of stuff.
But the best way to teach them is simply to be resolute in your expression of empathy and curiosity about their thoughts and feelings.
I hope this helps them.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
I look forward to your donations.
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