Glenn Beck recently asked the question - should we be shielding our kids from what is happening in the world? Between ISIS beheadings, endless wars, domestic violence, bullying and so many other incredibly dark situations happening in the world, what do we tell our children? It is an incredibly difficult situation for any parent and Stefan Molyneux - with some help from his five year old daughter – provides an answer.
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| So, Glenn Beck recently asked a very elemental, powerful, and often heartbreaking question, which is, as a parent or as somebody who spends time around kids, knowing the amount of evil that's in the world, how do you communicate, how much do you communicate, and in which way do you communicate the presence and prevalence of evil? | |
| To children. | |
| And as in all of these matters, the first place I went to was my daughter, who's five. | |
| And I said, should adults tell children about the bad things in the world, the nasty things, the mean things in the world? | |
| And she said, yes. | |
| And I said, why? | |
| And she said there were two reasons why adults should tell children about mean things in the world. | |
| Number one is that it will teach children who not to be friends with. | |
| Quite an important aspect to teaching children about evil. | |
| I believe that truly dedicatedly evil people are a virus that really can only be dealt with through social ostracism. | |
| Social ostracism means, number one, you're able to identify evil people. | |
| And number two, you have the courage, resolution and willingness to not associate with them. | |
| Given that we're tribal animals, anybody who's cut off from the tribe must reform or at least therefore cannot in particular harm the tribe. | |
| So, number one, you'll know who not to be friends with. | |
| It's, I think, a very important consideration. | |
| Number two, it's important for children to know about the meanness in the world so they can appreciate the goodness that's around them and within them, which I thought was a fine answer. | |
| And, of course, we don't become more virtuous because there are evil people in the world any more than we become healthier if our neighbor becomes sick, but... | |
| Part of virtue is combating the evils of the world, and so if you can identify the evils and work against the evils of the world, then you have a greater and deeper appreciation for the power and value of virtue. | |
| And since, in my formulation, love is our involuntary Response to virtue, if we're virtuous, then without virtue, and part of virtue is acting to thwart and repel evil, without virtue you can't know love. | |
| And so if you deny children knowledge of evil, then you don't teach them what to avoid, and you also don't teach them the virtues they're going to need to exercise when they get older to give and to receive love. | |
| Now, There are huge questions, of course, of appropriateness. | |
| You don't exactly say, hey, you're four, want to see an ISIS beheading video? | |
| Let's get you educated, shall we? | |
| That would be traumatic for me at the age of 47, let alone for a four-year-old. | |
| But my daughter knows about war. | |
| She knows about spanking. | |
| She knows about child abuse. | |
| She knows about a lot of the mean things that can occur in the world. | |
| And she knows about prisons. | |
| She knows about injustice. | |
| And... | |
| Seems to be relatively good with all this. | |
| In fact, she seems to be quite heroic in her desire to do good in the world. | |
| Or as she puts it, Daddy, it's important to be nice to the nice and mean to the mean, which is actually a very good formulation, I think, of successful strategies in the realm of virtue. | |
| So I would argue that you do need to tell your children about the evils of the world. | |
| The challenge, of course, is how and when, and that, of course, is every parent's decision to make. | |
| I am not going to tell my five-year-old daughter that... | |
| People are having their heads sawn off with blades. | |
| I don't want her to even have that kind of image in my head. | |
| In her head. | |
| I certainly wish the images weren't in my head either. | |
| But I feel that is very strong stuff to put in the heads of kids. | |
| I remember when I was six years old, I was in boarding school in England. | |
| A pretty Dickensian, old-style, Canem-where-it-hurts kind of boarding school. | |
| And we had movies every week. | |
| And we would see things like The Incredible Journey and your average sort of chitty-chitty bang-bang and stuff like that. | |
| And I don't know what happened. | |
| One week they put in a Charlton Heston film called The Omega Man. | |
| It was remade with Will Smith in the role recently about a guy... | |
| In a post-apocalyptic nightmare escape, trying to escape and not get killed by or drowned by or murdered or have his brains eaten by hordes of zombies and assorted liberal supporters. | |
| And, oh, I mean, it traumatized everyone. | |
| The whole dormitory was just whimpering themselves to sleep. | |
| And I remember vividly scenes from that movie more than 40 years later. | |
| So you don't want to give them the sensory view of evil. | |
| You want to give them the conceptual view of evil, that there are people in the human species who act as intraspecies predators, that human beings like to own each other. | |
| They like to traumatize each other for profit, political power, some aspects of religious power. | |
| There are huge amounts of power in the world that is based basically upon a model of human ownership, which is kind of traumatic for people and very destructive. | |
| And so recognizing that there are more than one kind of person in the world is really, There is a dividing line in the world between good and between evil. | |
| There are, of course, people in the middle that we hope to woo over to the side of the light, just as there are people in the middle that the evil people want to woo over to the side of evil. | |
| But I think if you look at Most science fiction movies, of course, war movies, fantasy movies, there's good and there's evil and there's a big battle. | |
| And that's what excites us if we are in the course or in the service of virtue to identify the enemy and fight the enemy. | |
| And that can mean usually a war of words. | |
| Occasionally it's a bit more robust than that. | |
| But we aim to coax people to virtue and deny social satisfactions to the evildoers. | |
| But when you tell children... | |
| About immorality in the world. | |
| The great challenge is it breaks the kumbaya, hippie-huggy, we-are-all family model of the geocentric loves, hugs, and cuddles model of... | |
| That there are good people, there are bad people. | |
| Good people will often use hierarchies to gain power. | |
| Sorry, bad people will often use these hierarchies to gain power over good people under the guise of things like religious extremism and hyper-nationalism and racism and sexism and so on. | |
| They just manipulate and create artificial victims and create all of the racial and gender and nationalistic and religious tensions in the world, which they set people against each other and profit off the discord and so on. | |
| So, I think the greatest challenge for me as a parent in talking about immorality with my daughter is to have her understand that, yeah, there are people on this side and there are people on that side. | |
| And the job of the people on the side of virtue is not to go and try and convert everyone who's evil into being good. | |
| That just ends up with you being manipulated and exploited 99 times out of 100. | |
| But to remind her that there is a line in the sand and you avoid evildoers as much as possible. | |
| If you can't, then you fight with words. | |
| If you can't fight with words, well, then you explore your other options. | |
| But I think that's hard for a lot of parents to talk about. | |
| I mean, it's kind of embarrassing to introduce the world to children who are pure of heart, innocent, wondrous, curious, wide-eyed, and enthusiastic about the future. | |
| And to introduce a lot of the ills in the world is... | |
| I don't know, it's like having some drunk relative in the house scratching his groin when your four-year-old is around. | |
| It's like, I don't know how to explain Uncle Spanky Fingers to you, but he's here, so we have to. | |
| And it's the same thing with evil in the world. | |
| But the continuing story of the human species is the escalation of the lights of virtue and the extinguishing of the darkness of immorality. | |
| We've come a hell of a long way over the past 2,500 years since moral philosophy was really first brought to the forefront of human consciousness among the ancient Greeks. | |
| We are far from done. | |
| And it's my hope, of course, that you and your children in the long run will enlist themselves in the army of light, fighting against the evildoers and liars and cheaters and sophists of the world, which we cannot reform but must simply work to overcome. | |
| And I think knowing that there is that battle in the world and knowing that your children will either see evildoers or will be exploited by evildoers, it is, I think, the most fundamental inoculation to expose your children to the descriptions of immorality so that when they see the most fundamental inoculation to expose your children to the descriptions of immorality they won't be shocked or surprised. | |
| But rather, they will receive the greatest gift of a moral education, resolution, courage and virtue against evildoers. |