To what degree to we hold parents responsible for the wrongs they do to children? Looking to the criminal justice system, punishment of children at home and the punishment/reward system in public school for existing answers.
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| So this is another run of the topic. | |
| Sometimes we plow the field until it goes bald, but this is another run of the topic that is confusing to some people and sometimes not least of all myself, but it is the realm of adult responsibility for the cycle of Of violence. | |
| My parents had bad childhoods. | |
| My parents had bad childhoods. | |
| I don't know so much about my father's childhood, but I do know that my mother had a terrible childhood. | |
| I also know my father did go to boarding school, and he sent me to that selfsame boarding school at the age of six. | |
| And then, I think two years later, I was no longer going there. | |
| I think that money was an issue or something like that. | |
| So my mom had a wretched childhood. | |
| Berlin, war, you name it. | |
| I'm sure that there's nothing bad that could happen to a child that didn't happen to her in some level or another. | |
| So to what degree do we hold parents responsible for the wrongs that they do given the evils that they themselves suffered as children? | |
| Well, that's a fine question. | |
| And there's three... | |
| I mean, fortunately, we don't have to invent the answer because the first place to look for values is not in the bosom of God. | |
| It is not in the writings of the ancient Sumerians. | |
| It is not in the sky tracings of the contraire clouds. | |
| It is not in the physics of the universe, the logic of Socrates, or the back of a Cheerios box. | |
| the first place to look for values is in the minds and hearts of the people inflicting values. | |
| How dare I say it. | |
| I don't know who speaks Mandarin or who speaks English or Urdu or Klingon. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Not for sure, anyway. | |
| I do know when they open their mouth and use language that I can then probably determine at least whether they speak English or not. | |
| I can recognize a bunch of other languages. | |
| But if you come across someone on the street, you don't know whether they speak English or not. | |
| Not for sure. | |
| There may be some indicators of likelihood, but you don't know for sure if they speak English. | |
| Open their mouth, and you can find out. | |
| So when I look for values, first and foremost, in terms of what happened to me or how society is or whatever, then I look to the values that society inflicts as virtuous or encourages, if you don't want to use the term inflicts, encourages. | |
| Somebody who has a long and complicated conversation with me in English cannot later claim that they do not know English, or at least did not know English when we had that conversation. | |
| I'm thinking of all the philosophical Socrates-style caveats. | |
| Well, what if you had a brain injury since? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Stay with me. | |
| Don't get dragged into the vortices of the two-headed horses. | |
| The first place you look for values... | |
| It's in the people encouraging or inflicting or enforcing values. | |
| And there are three primary places to look for those values. | |
| Again, just so we don't have to reinvent the wheel or we don't have to try and produce imaginary values in people. | |
| I'm an empiricist. | |
| If I want to know what my mother valued, I look at the values she encouraged or inflicted on me. | |
| If I want to know what my father valued, if I want to know what society values, There are three places to look. | |
| The first is the criminal justice system. | |
| The second is the punishment of children at home. | |
| And the third is the punishment and reward system of children in school. | |
| These are where we find the values of society most clearly. | |
| Now, if I go and steal a car, let's say I'm 18 and I go steal a car. | |
| Let's talk about the criminal justice system first. | |
| There is no defense that I know of called, I had a bad childhood, therefore I should not be punished. | |
| There may be some ameliorating circumstances that In other words, I may say, well, I had a really bad childhood, and the judge may say, well, I might reduce your sentence, or I might sentence you to community service plus anger management or therapy or whatever, right? | |
| So there's still negative repercussions. | |
| So he doesn't get to say, oh, you had a bad childhood, therefore I am not going to punish you. | |
| For fairly obvious reasons, that if that were the defense, then everybody would use it, right? | |
| And the time spent investigating and validating the claims would be prodigious and uncertain. | |
| Because everyone could say, well, I was secretly raped by my uncle who has since died. | |
| And then who could verify that? | |
| Nobody. | |
| Nobody. | |
| So the bad childhood is not subject to verification, and if it were a claim that people could make to get off scot-free from committing crimes, then everybody would make that claim, and nobody would ever be convicted, and crime would skyrocket, right? | |
| So this is... | |
| I mean, you understand that what is still in most countries the legal crime of spanking is so common. | |
| The only reason it's so common is because parents get away with it. | |
| So that's important. | |
| Now, also in the criminal justice system, to my knowledge, and I think this is fairly true, in fact, I'm pretty sure it's totally true, If the defense, I had a bad childhood, is used, I don't believe that rewards are given for criminal behavior if the claim of having had a bad childhood is used. | |
| Like, there's no judge, I'll go steal a car when I'm 18, there's no judge who will say, you had a bad childhood, not only will I not prosecute you for the theft of this car, but here's another car for free. | |
| And if you come back to me every five years, I will also give you a car for free. | |
| There's no reward for immoral actions. | |
| So there may be some ameliorating factors in the punishment, But there's no reward, for sure. | |
| It's still an immoral act, for which I must show contrition. | |
| This is the other thing that's also quite common. | |
| And I know that we have the state-based system, but this stuff evolved out of common law, which was more of a free market system. | |
| Not totally, of course, but more of a free market system. | |
| And it has some validity based on that. | |
| So that's all... | |
| Pretty important to understand. | |
| Now, it's one thing if I steal a car when I'm 18. | |
| The punishments may be lessened, but I will still be put in some sort of correctional situation that will cost me time and money. | |
| What if I'm still doing it when I'm 30. | |
| Right? | |
| In other words, what if I have stolen cars for 12 years straight, a car a week, a car every month, for 12 years straight, I'm 30 doing these immoral things, and then I say, but Your Honor, I had a bad childhood. | |
| Would not people kind of fundamentally laugh at that? | |
| Even if I did have a bad childhood, would that not just be an obvious ploy to get off? | |
| Punishment, right? | |
| Now, why would it be so ridiculous for someone to say, but I had a bad childhood, when they're 30, have been stealing hundreds of cars over the past 12 years? | |
| Well, for a variety of reasons. | |
| If somebody says at the age of 30, I had a bad childhood, therefore I should be rewarded, not punished for stealing all of these cars or out of sympathy not punished for stealing all of these cars or out of sympathy for my bad childhood, this Thank you. | |
| Judge, you should give me a house, because I had a bad childhood. | |
| One of the reasons it's ridiculous, of course, is that if you have a bad childhood, And you later use that as a defense. | |
| Something very interesting has occurred. | |
| And again, we don't need any reference to external systems of philosophy. | |
| If I say to the judge, I'm 30, I've stolen the house for 12 years, I had a bad childhood, give me a house. | |
| Then, clearly I'm saying to the judge, my bad childhood is relevant to my stealing. | |
| Like if I said to the judge, you should not punish me for stealing cars because I'm left-handed and balding. | |
| Then the judge would say, neither of those factors are causal in you stealing cars. | |
| I might send you for a psychiatric evaluation, but I'm not going... | |
| To let you off for stealing these cars or reward you. | |
| But if I say, I had a bad childhood and that's why I stole cars, then I'm saying, I know, or at least I'm claiming to know what the root cause of my car stealing is. | |
| Right? | |
| Which means I cannot use it as a defense. | |
| This is very important. | |
| If I say, I stole cars... | |
| Because I had a bad childhood that I'm saying, I know why I steal cars. | |
| Because I had a bad childhood. | |
| But if you know the cause of something, then you are now responsible for alleviating it. | |
| Or preventing it, in fact. | |
| One of the reasons why being drunk is no defense for bad driving, if you're a drunk driver, is that you know that getting drunk makes you dizzy and disoriented and so on, and it's going to impair your driving. | |
| Everybody knows that. | |
| And therefore, you cannot use that as a defense, because you know that it's going to make you a bad driver, and therefore you are responsible for not drinking. | |
| I mean, nobody who's been drinking for 10 years can say, I had no idea it made me disoriented, and therefore I want a new car, right? | |
| So if you know the cause of something, then you cannot claim it as an excuse. | |
| If I go to my college professor and say, the reason that I didn't do well on the exam was because I didn't study... | |
| So I should get an A. The professor would say, no. | |
| You know that if you don't study, you won't do well on an exam. | |
| Sociology excluded. | |
| And therefore, you are responsible for not studying because you know the cause of that, right? | |
| I mean, is there anyone who can credibly claim... | |
| That they did not know that smoking could make the mill. | |
| Yea, verily, under death's door. | |
| Of course everybody knows, right? | |
| So if somebody says, if I say, I stole because of my bad childhood and I did it for 12 years, then I can no longer use my bad childhood as the excuse because I know that it's causal. | |
| And so what I'm saying is that Either my stealing can be fixed. | |
| In other words, I can no longer steal. | |
| I can stop stealing. | |
| Or I can't. | |
| Now, if knowledge of the cause does not breed solution of the effects, then the effects are permanent. | |
| Right? | |
| Right? | |
| So, the cause of me falling is gravity. | |
| And knowing that doesn't mean that I can change it. | |
| It means that I must adapt to it, right? | |
| I have to wear a bike helmet. | |
| I like it when the airplane has lift. | |
| I think that a parachute is helpful if I'm jumping out of said airplane and so on. | |
| Which I actually did once. | |
| Anyway. | |
| If I know the cause, then either the cause gives me knowledge of the effect in order to change it, or it doesn't. | |
| In other words, if the cause is some physical property that cannot be changed, gravity and so on, So, if I know that, as a fair-skinned person, if I'm out in the sun without sunscreen, I will get a sunburn, then I can put sunscreen on and solve the problem. | |
| Knowledge of the cause, the correlation, either makes solution possible or it doesn't. | |
| Now, with regards to stealing, I'm saying I steal because of my bad childhood. | |
| And another reason why this defense doesn't work... | |
| It's because I know the cause. | |
| I'm claiming that I know the cause of my stealing. | |
| And for 12 years, I have kept stealing. | |
| Now, either knowing the cause can prevent me from stealing, like I go to therapy and deal with my bad childhood or whatever it is, right? | |
| Or it can't. | |
| Now, if it can, then I'm responsible, despite knowing the cause, for not having applied the solution for 12 years. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| I'm sorry to be so repetitive, but this is really important to understand. | |
| Of course, it really doesn't have anything to do with car stealing, more to do with what you probably experienced, but I really want to make sure these points get through. | |
| Now, if... | |
| Like dominoes, like gravity, like radiation. | |
| If knowledge of my childhood cannot change the effects of my childhood, knowledge of gravity cannot change the effects of gravity, knowing you'll get a sunburn doesn't cause you to not get a sunburn. | |
| If knowledge of my bad childhood cannot change the effects of my bad childhood, which I claim is stealing, then I can never be released from prison. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| Either I can do something to deal with my bad childhood, in which case I'm responsible for having not done anything to deal with my bad childhood and stop stealing, or if my bad childhood is like a domino, perfectly causal to my stealing, and it cannot be changed, then I cannot have a new childhood that's better, right? | |
| I can't have a different childhood. | |
| And therefore, I'm claiming, I'm stating, obviously and openly, that I will never ever be able to stop stealing. | |
| Because my bad childhood makes me steal, and it can't be changed. | |
| So either I'm responsible for not having dealt with the bad childhood that I know, or I claim that I know is causing me to steal, in which case I could have changed and stopped stealing, but I didn't. | |
| Or... | |
| I'm saying that knowledge of my bad childhood cannot change my stealing. | |
| In other words, it's an excuse for the past, but a condemnation of the future. | |
| Because at a bad childhood, I steal cars. | |
| It can't be changed. | |
| So now I'm not responsible for changing it. | |
| But now I can't ever be released back into society because by saying my childhood causes the stealing and I cannot change it, I will now forever be stealing cars and therefore cannot be released into society. | |
| And it is obviously a manipulation because if I say to the judge at the age of 30 after stealing cars for 12 years I steal cars because of my bad childhood that is clearly a ploy for leniency from the court. | |
| Because I'm saying I should be excused for having had a bad childhood That I should be shown mercy and leniency and kindness. | |
| But for 12 years, I've been stealing people's cars, showing them no leniency and mercy and kindness. | |
| So it's obviously a UPB violation, even on the aesthetics of ethics. | |
| In other words, I'm claiming benevolent treatment to myself that I have performed the opposite of towards everybody else. | |
| So I'm saying that being kind is a value to me, being cruel is a value to others. | |
| And there's many other reasons, but I think we can move on. | |
| That argument doesn't work. | |
| The defense doesn't work. | |
| And so, if you were spanked or hit or abandoned or whatever, right? | |
| Then your parents may say, you know, let's say they had you when they were 20 and then they were 30, they were still spanking you or punishing you or whatever, right? | |
| Well, they can't say, I had a bad childhood and that's why I did it. | |
| I mean, they can, obviously, whatever they want. | |
| But if they had a bad childhood, and they know that they spanked you or abused you in some manner, because they had a bad childhood, then they know the cause of their abuse. | |
| Now, if the cause of their abuse... | |
| Sorry, if the effect of the abuse from the cause could be changed... | |
| Based on the knowledge of the cause, right? | |
| I know I was abused as a child, so here's what I'm going to do about it. | |
| Therapy, anger management, whatever. | |
| parenting classes then they were responsible for changing what they did but didn't change it. | |
| And If, on the other hand, they say it was impossible for me To not abuse you. | |
| It was inevitable and unchangeable for me to abuse you based upon my bad childhood. | |
| Then you know for certain that they're going to continue to abuse you because it cannot be changed. | |
| The effect of abuse from the cause of the bad childhood cannot be changed. | |
| In other words, they're going to keep stealing cars. | |
| So somebody who says, if they were hitting their kids at the age of 30, says, I was... | |
| I was abused as a child and that's why I did it. | |
| They're either saying, well, I could have changed it or I couldn't have changed it. | |
| If I could have changed it, then they're responsible. | |
| Especially because they know. | |
| Especially because they know. | |
| They're saying, well, I know. | |
| I know why I hit you and I decided to do nothing to change it. | |
| Right? | |
| That's one aspect. | |
| Or they say, I know why I hit you and I can't change it. | |
| Well, then they're just saying they're going to continue to abuse you forever. | |
| Now, with regards, you know, and this could be other people in your family, we'll just talk about parents for now. | |
| With regards to parents, they may say, I had no idea that what I did was wrong. | |
| Now, there's a couple of tests for that, and again, we can turn back to criminal law about this. | |
| There's a couple of tests for that. | |
| The first is, did they do it openly and in public and in front of police officers and teachers and priests and other family members, or was it done in secret behind closed doors when no one was around and so on, right? | |
| When I pick my nose, I try not to do it on camera. | |
| Right? | |
| So, if they genuinely, in no way, shape, or form, believed that what they did was wrong, then they would have done it everywhere, right? | |
| So, giving my daughter a hug and a kiss is in no way, shape, or form wrong. | |
| In fact, it's very nice and right, and so there's almost no place where I won't do it. | |
| I'll do it at gymnastics, I'll do it at the mall, the car, whatever, right? | |
| Do it in front of a cop. | |
| So if they claim that they did not know that whatever they did was wrong, then the question is, did they do it in public or not? | |
| And were you free to bring up what they did with other people, with teachers and so on, right? | |
| You know, if my daughter says to the To the swimming teacher or the gymnastics teacher, my dad gave me a hug and a kiss this morning. | |
| Yeah, I'm okay with that. | |
| I think that's a... | |
| I'll survive. | |
| So, are you free to talk about it as you would any other subject? | |
| And do they do it in public? | |
| Do they do it in front of teachers and preachers and cops and family members and you name it, right? | |
| Now, if they hit it and you weren't free to talk about it, then they knew it was wrong. | |
| Or negative, or something to be hidden, or whatever. | |
| So that claim doesn't work. | |
| And secondly, of course, ignorance of the law, as we know from common law justice systems, ignorance of the law is no excuse. | |
| Because otherwise, again, everybody would say, well, I didn't know it was wrong. | |
| And since the contents of another person's head are not open to empirical examination, the thought contents at least, I guess you can see how much squishy stuff they have in there, but the contents of another person's thought are not open to rational examination. | |
| So, this is why, you know, whenever you see people in front of Congress, they're always saying, I don't remember, I don't know, I don't recall, right? | |
| Because these things cannot be proved. | |
| I mean, I guess... | |
| Actually, that means, sorry, they're hard to prove. | |
| And certainly in the verbal tradition of common law, right before emails that could be scoured and all that kind of stuff, in those situations, it was practically impossible to determine. | |
| Ignorance of the law is no excuse. | |
| Particularly also when something is premeditated. | |
| So in law, in common law, there's a difference between a crime of passion and premeditated crime. | |
| So if you get into a drunken fight and you hit someone and they fall down and bump their head and they've hit you and it's whatever, right? | |
| It's not self-defense. | |
| You got into a bar fight. | |
| But it's also not premeditated murder. | |
| I mean, it's a terrible, tragic, monstrous accident that has resulted in someone's... | |
| But it's generally, what, third degree or manslaughter or something like that, negligent homicide. | |
| But it's not... | |
| You know, first degree murder is the worst, and that's when you... | |
| You know, you search the internet for your weapon of choice or your poison of choice, and then you slowly or even quickly, you sort of plot and plan and decide to kill someone, and then you sort of go forward and, you know, that crime and punishment, Raskolnikov kind of situation. | |
| That's, you know, that's the worst because it's sort of premeditated. | |
| Now, being a parent is premeditated at all times. | |
| At all times and under all situations and under all circumstances, having a child is a premeditated action. | |
| I mean, to take the traditional scenario, right, you get pregnant, you bring the child to term, it's usually not a surprise, and then you decide to, so you don't take the morning-after pill, you don't use contraception of 16 different types available for women in particular, you don't use birth control, you don't take the morning-after pill, you don't have an abortion. | |
| You bring the child to term and you don't give the child up for adoption. | |
| And then at any other time, after you are a parent, you keep the child in your house. | |
| As a parent, if you don't like being a parent, you can always drop the child off at a hospital or even a fire station and so on, and they will find a home for the child. | |
| So being a parent is always premeditated. | |
| There's no such thing as becoming a parent out of a crime of passion, so to speak. | |
| That just doesn't happen. | |
| And so, ignorance of best practices is not a valid defense in a premeditated situation. | |
| If I know a year ahead of time that I'm going to have to fly a plane, then showing up to fly that plane with no knowledge of how to fly it is my fault, right? | |
| If I go to my professor and I say, well, yeah, I've known for six months that I have to take this exam, and I told you yesterday, yeah, I'm going to be taking the exam, but I didn't know I was supposed to study, or I didn't bother studying, well, then I get an F. Right? | |
| And so parents who say, well, I didn't know that such and such was bad... | |
| Well, American Academy of Pediatrics, Canadian Pediatric Association, all around the world, I mean, the UN Declaration of the Rights of Child, endless amounts of data going back almost a quarter century, all say that spanking is bad, and there are parenting books that talk about alternatives to spanking further back, right? | |
| And so, and again, we're talking about Generalized spanking. | |
| If you're hit by implements, it's just basically criminal actions, right? | |
| Then there's zero excuse. | |
| It's actually illegal, right? | |
| And if you don't trouble to find out what is legal or illegal with regards to child raising, despite the fact that you knew you were going to have a child for at least nine months and had plenty of time to prepare, and you have decided to keep that child, and if you're spanking the child at the age of five, then you've had almost six years to figure out what is going on, then clearly there's no possibility of using ignorance as a defense at that point. | |
| It's your responsibility to know what is legal or not. | |
| If I sign a contract and then say later, I didn't read it, and therefore I'm not bound by it, my signature tells everyone that it must be assumed that I've read it. | |
| You understand? | |
| Because otherwise, people would sign contracts and then would just later claim, well, I'm exempt because I didn't read it. | |
| Well, if you didn't read it but you signed it anyway, that's too bad for you. | |
| It's not a valid defense to say, I signed a contract but I didn't read it. | |
| And it is not a valid defense in the same way to say, I had no idea what good parenting was. | |
| Well, you had a child. | |
| It's your responsibility. | |
| There's some things that are more esoteric and challenging, which we'll talk about another time, such as public school is bad, but the vast majority of people think it's both good and necessary. | |
| But we're talking about abuse, violations of the non-aggression principle in particular, and other legal, though, destructive habits such as spanking. | |
| Well, legal, at least here in Canada, in the U.S., in the U.K., but in many countries, of course, it's not. | |
| I mean, if a man... | |
| Hides his stash and tries to run away from the police, if he's got drugs on him, and then says, I had no idea drugs were illegal. | |
| The cop says he ran away, so now he knows he was in trouble. | |
| He knows he was wrong, because he ran. | |
| If I'm eating an ice cream and a cop comes up, I'm not going to run away, because I might spill my ice cream. | |
| Again, so these are just things we don't have to invent, things which we already accept. | |
| And even if you say, well, I don't believe in the justice system, and I think, I mean, people's parents almost universally do, right, accept the justice system and so on, so these are all essential things to know and to understand, right? | |
| So with regards to how parents discipline children, Again, these can be faster because they're pretty much the same principles. | |
| But if a mom spanks or hits a six-year-old for doing something wrong, then the parent is laying out a whole moral framework that is clear, that is concise, that is easily comprehensible. | |
| Because she's saying a six-year-old is responsible for what he does. | |
| Morally responsible for what he does. | |
| I mean, if I'm teaching my child tennis and she misses the ball, I don't get to hit her because we all understand that that's a matter of physical competence that she's learning, right? | |
| Now, if I tell her to practice and she doesn't practice, then if I were a bad parent, I would yell at her or hit her. | |
| Because she is responsible now for her lack of preparation to play tennis, right? | |
| So think about that sort of bitch Asian tiger mom scenario where the tiger mom is screaming at the kid to play piano better or whatever, right? | |
| So in that situation, the parent genuinely believes the child can do better. | |
| And believes that the child is... | |
| If the child hasn't practiced, right? | |
| If the daughter hasn't practiced, then the mom is going to scream at her even more because she's responsible for practicing, you see. | |
| She is responsible for doing better, right? | |
| Because she has sort of, in a sense, chosen not to practice and she's now responsible for the lack of knowledge that she has. | |
| She's not responsible for her lack of skill directly, but she's responsible for not... | |
| Practicing and thereby improving her skill. | |
| You should have practiced, you should have studied so that you're better at being a piano player. | |
| Well, that's a fine argument in a way. | |
| But like most arguments, people generally don't like it when it expands to include and absorb them, right? | |
| Arguments universalize. | |
| So an argument like that universalizes too. | |
| You should... | |
| Especially for very important things in life, you should practice, you should prepare, and you should strive for excellence, right? | |
| And, of course, I've had this conversation with countless listeners where they say, my father screamed at me because he was a perfectionist. | |
| And I say, oh, well, that's fantastic, in a way, right? | |
| Because he then is saying that becoming excellent at something is very good. | |
| So was he a perfectionist about his parenting? | |
| In other words, did he study? | |
| Did he work? | |
| Did he practice? | |
| Did he read? | |
| Did he consult? | |
| Did he... | |
| Did he talk to experts? | |
| Did he take courses on how to become an excellent parent? | |
| And of course the answer is no. | |
| Of course they didn't, right? | |
| Otherwise they wouldn't be screaming at their kids, right? | |
| Well, which is more important? | |
| Excellence in piano playing or excellence in parenting a helpless dependent child? | |
| Well, obviously the parenting is just about the most important task other than staying alive directly ourselves. | |
| Parenting is about the most important voluntary task we're ever going to take on. | |
| And anything that a child is punished for is considered to be a deviation from excellence that the child is morally responsible for. | |
| That's why you hit children, or scream at them, or punish them, or whatever. | |
| So, parents cannot say they weren't morally responsible for hitting children. | |
| If the child is considered to be morally responsible at the age of six, then surely at the age of thirty, Well, 40, the parent is morally responsible. | |
| And you can't say that a six-year-old has more moral responsibility than a 35-year-old. | |
| Anybody who says that is just, I mean, you can't talk to them. | |
| Anybody who would say that with a straight face, I mean, nobody would say that, you understand. | |
| They'll find some other Weasley way, because that's just clearly not even remotely credible, right? | |
| So these are, I think, very important considerations when talking about the punishment of parents. | |
| Now, a child who does something against best practices or best standards is morally responsible and must be punished. | |
| And there are not a lot of people who say that a child who does not conform to best practices, that child must in fact be rewarded, right? | |
| Not a lot of people who say that. | |
| And We should explore that a little bit. | |
| Alright, so let's move to the third area wherein we can see if we can tease out the true values of society. | |
| So, in the area of school. | |
| Now, I think we can generally accept, as a moral principle, Excuses unavailable to children are unavailable to adults. | |
| Right? | |
| I think we can understand that. | |
| So if a child forgets when a test is, the child generally will get an F or suffer some negative sanction. | |
| Certainly if the child keeps forgetting when the test is, then the child will experience negative repercussions. | |
| We give grades to children based upon success or failure in mastering, so usually trivial and ridiculous information, but nonetheless, we give them marks and they do not exactly receive positive consequences for passing, but they certainly will receive negative consequences for not passing. | |
| I guess you could say they get to go to the next grade or whatever, which I guess is sort of a positive consequence. | |
| Hey, another year in the hellhole of school, but it's not like you get a pony or a motorbike or an iPad. | |
| So if an excuse is not available to a child, the excuse cannot be claimed by an adult. | |
| I cannot think of any situation... | |
| Wherein an excuse unavailable to a child is available to an adult, like a just excuse, a fair, we'd say, oh, okay, right? | |
| Certainly in the realm of criminality, there are no crimes specific to children, and children, in fact, get leniency relative to adults. | |
| I mean, there are many responsibilities that accrue to adults which don't to children, like the need to earn your own income and so on. | |
| And moral responsibility for crimes and so on. | |
| But I can't think of any responsibilities that accrue to children that do not accrue to adults as well. | |
| So, I do believe that in schooling we can learn a lot about what society believes. | |
| Now, it is specific to a democracy insofar as schooling is not exactly a government... | |
| Imposed in a totalitarian style, a government-imposed obligation or environment. | |
| I mean, you get dragged off to a gulag under Stalin's Russia, then you are in an imposed environment. | |
| But if people vote against public schools, then public schools will most likely change or disappear. | |
| Like if the majority of people said, we don't want public schools anymore... | |
| Politicians would, to some degree, be likely to reflect that desire. | |
| So, education does reflect the will of the people. | |
| There's not massive protests against it. | |
| It's not singled out as viciously unfair. | |
| It's not singled out as morally hypocritical. | |
| It's praised. | |
| Listen to your teacher, give her an apple, and if you get detention, stay for detention, and so on. | |
| So, school must reflect... | |
| The values of society as it stands to some degree. | |
| I would say to a pretty significant degree. | |
| And if you doubt that, just let's pretend for a moment to be against government schools. | |
| Go up to someone and say government schools should be abolished and see what the reaction is. | |
| And people will be shocked and horrified. | |
| And so here is another place where we can find the values of society. | |
| Now, I had a bad childhood, very rough, and there was no excuse for me called you had a bad childhood so you get a different bell curve, right? | |
| You get a different set of standards relative to other children, right? | |
| I don't think I ever saw anyone who yelled at a teacher or hit another bell I never saw a child use the defense called, | |
| I had a bad childhood or I'm having a bad childhood, therefore I'm not responsible for X or Y or Z. So this was not an excuse that was given to children, the bad childhood excuse. | |
| No teacher ever asked me about my childhood. | |
| They knew that something was amiss. | |
| I was smelly, I was badly dressed, and my clothes were torn, and my mom never showed up to parents, teacher interviews, and so on, right? | |
| And I knew. | |
| I knew that if I said I had a bad childhood, that it would not. | |
| Sorry about that, but you have to study and do the test and be judged just like everyone else on the objective right or wrongness of your answers. | |
| I remember I had an English teacher once who asked us to write down our favorite songs or songs that were meaningful to us. | |
| And say why, and I wrote a whole essay on Pink Floyd's The Wall, The Trial in particular. | |
| And boy, I'm sure you can look that up somewhere on the web. | |
| It's a pretty harrowing, vampiric, single mother kind of song. | |
| And she asked to listen to it, but I never heard anything about it again. | |
| Me and one other guy. | |
| The teacher asked us for the actual songs on tape so she could listen to them. | |
| So children don't even get to claim bad childhood as an excuse while that childhood is going on. | |
| And for things that are inconsequential, relatively inconsequential, like a math test or a spelling bee or something like that, or even just showing up on time. | |
| You know, one of the things that's true of highly dysfunctional households is that sleep is extremely dysregulated. | |
| I wasn't getting much sleep. | |
| I was tired all the time, hungry. | |
| But I had to perform the same as all the other kids who had teacher parents, summers off, comfortable, warm, well-fed household, good sleep, calm, emotional environments, no physical or emotional abuse. | |
| I mean, I still had to perform the same as those kids. | |
| So even when you're trapped in a bad childhood, it is not an excuse that children are allowed to claim. | |
| So if children are not allowed to claim bad childhood as an excuse when they're in the bad childhood for inconsequential things, then how can adults claim bad childhood as an excuse a decade or two after childhood has ended About much more important things. | |
| Do you see what I'm... | |
| This is really what I want to get across. | |
| Is that when people say, oh, bad childhood is an excuse, or I had a bad childhood and that's why I was a bad parent. | |
| The reason you know it's a manipulative defense is that if we all woke up tomorrow with this principle, right, and we said, well... | |
| People who have bad childhoods have excuses for bad behavior or problematic behavior or whatever. | |
| We wouldn't look at parents first. | |
| I don't even know where they'd be on the list. | |
| But if we all woke up tomorrow with this principle burning its righteous indignation way through our emotional stations, well, what would we do? | |
| We'd say, wow, bad childhoods are an excuse. | |
| Bad childhoods are an excuse. | |
| The first thing that we would do is not even think about parents. | |
| The first thing that we would do is we would reform schools. | |
| Right? | |
| We would reform schools. | |
| And we would say, well, okay, so we need to find out about these bad childhoods. | |
| We need to find out who's having bad childhoods and so on. | |
| And then you see what we need to do. | |
| We need to create a sliding scale where children with bad childhoods are not held to the same standards and are rewarded for dysfunctional behavior. | |
| Because they have an excuse. | |
| So the kids with bad childhoods always get an A. The kids with bad childhoods get an A and a candy bar every time there's a test. | |
| And they don't even have to show up for the test. | |
| Right? | |
| Kids with bad childhoods can show up to school whenever they feel like it. | |
| Kids with bad childhoods can hit other children. | |
| Kids with bad childhoods can steal from other children. | |
| Kids with bad childhoods can yell and scream at teachers and other children because, you see, they've had bad childhoods and so we must not only lower and accept but even praise and reward Bad behavior on the part of those kids. | |
| So every time they scream and hit another kid, we should give them a present, a prize, some treasure, some candy, something that they really love. | |
| Does this sound insane to you? | |
| Well, of course. | |
| Of course it does. | |
| If we treated childhood the way we treat adults, the first thing we'd do is we would socialize the Marx, right? | |
| We could call it Marxism. | |
| Ha ha ha. | |
| And we would say, look, some of you kids are born smart. | |
| And some of you kids are born dumb. | |
| Some of you kids have a good work ethic. | |
| Some of you kids don't have a good work ethic. | |
| So what we're going to do is we're going to take 50 or 60% of the grades... | |
| Of the smartest kids and we're going to reallocate them to the less smart kids. | |
| So if you get an A on a test, you're going to end up with a C because the kid who gets an F is going to get a C as well. | |
| We're going to take your marks and spread them out. | |
| Clearly as a kid, it's not your fault or not your particularly positive ability. | |
| That has you born a smart kid into a stable household with parents who are engaged in teaching you and help you with homework and so on. | |
| Although studies actually show that parents who help with homework end up doing more harm than good. | |
| But whatever, right? | |
| I mean, it's not your personal trophy that you're born smart, that you have good health, that you sleep well, that your family is secure and stable, that you have enough money and enough food, right? | |
| So clearly you didn't earn these marks. | |
| At least not all of them. | |
| Yeah, you did some work, but your brain is good. | |
| Your brain is smart, so you need to do less work. | |
| And you have a stable environment to study in, so you get more effective studying done. | |
| You didn't earn any of that. | |
| So we need to take your marks, and we need to give them to the kids from the tough backgrounds, to the kids who aren't so smart. | |
| You know, spread around. | |
| It's not spread around. | |
| Look at your mark. | |
| You didn't build that. | |
| That's what we would do. | |
| Now, why don't we do that? | |
| Because kids don't vote. | |
| Right. | |
| Because kids don't vote. | |
| Otherwise, they would be voting to redistribute marks from the smarter kids or the more hardworking kids or the kids with better families to the dumber kids, the lazier kids or the kids with bad families. | |
| But you see, we only do that for adults, you see, because adults vote. | |
| We don't do that for kids, because kids don't vote. | |
| And a society that structures itself around ignoring the needs of children, which is fundamentally what a democratic state of society does, is setting itself up for disaster. | |
| Oh, you know what else would be great, too, for Marxism? | |
| This kind of Marxism? | |
| It would be to take Marx from future kids, right? | |
| Right? | |
| So, everyone here can get an A. We're just stealing marks from the future. | |
| We're going to end up with a classroom marks deficit, which will have to be paid off by kids in the future who are all going to end up getting D's or F's because we've stolen their A's. | |
| Wouldn't that be great? | |
| And you guys will... | |
| It'll be years and years and years before any of that happens. | |
| So, if we genuinely believed... | |
| The defense is put forward by bad parents. | |
| If these were genuinely our values, the first place we would be putting those values into practice would be for children at home. | |
| And we'd say, wow, so kids with bad households are not responsible and must be rewarded for bad behavior. | |
| Or, you could say more accurately, given rewards despite bad behavior. | |
| But not given rewards of that bad behavior. | |
| Well, given rewards regardless of good or bad behavior. | |
| Everyone gets an A. Everyone gets a first place prize. | |
| Everyone gets a trophy. | |
| Everyone gets a car. | |
| Right? | |
| So, that's what we would do. | |
| If we really believed these values. | |
| We wouldn't be bothering ourselves with parents. | |
| Because, you know, that's a generation's work right there. | |
| Changing and reforming the entire school system. | |
| But of course, you know exactly what would happen if the marks from the smarter kids were given to the dumber kids, or the more hard-working kids, or the kids with better environments. | |
| Well, the kids would stop working as hard, right? | |
| The smart kids would stop working as hard. | |
| And the kids who weren't doing as well on tests would have little to no incentive to work harder if we socialized the Marxism. | |
| I mean, the whole system would collapse. | |
| We understand that. | |
| And unproductive behavior would be rewarded and productive behavior would be unrewarded. | |
| you know, all that kind of stuff. | |
| But this is what I mean, this is how we run society. | |
| This is how we run society for adults. | |
| So if people genuinely believed That a bad childhood created excuses. | |
| We would change that in the criminal justice system, we would change that in schools, and we would change it in parenting. | |
| Because if you're a parent, and you're being a bad parent, you're currently giving your child a bad childhood. | |
| And therefore, you cannot punish or blame the child for events which come out of that bad childhood, and therefore the child is no longer going to be punished, thus making their childhood not bad. | |
| But if a parent continues to punish a child, to harm a child, to verbally or emotionally or physically abuse the child, if the parent does that, then the parent is fully accepting that a bad childhood is no excuse, or childhood itself is no excuse. | |
| Now, why am I talking about rewarding for so long and so often, right? | |
| So I talked about it in the criminal justice system. | |
| You stole cars for 12 years. | |
| Okay, you had a bad childhood. | |
| Here's a new car every six months for the rest of your life. | |
| Oh, you had a bad childhood. | |
| You're yelling and hitting other kids and doing all this bad stuff. | |
| Okay, well, you get a candy bar. | |
| You get a motorbike. | |
| You get a pony! | |
| Why am I talking about that? | |
| Well, because if you had abusive parents and they desire your company, your care, your love, your support, particularly as they age, become perhaps ill or forgetful or demented, then it's not like The state declines to press charges, right? | |
| So, let's say you had parents who beat you, some illegal action, right? | |
| And you become an adult and you get it, that it was immoral, evil, and illegal, right? | |
| And you go to your parents and you say, listen, we're all going to go to therapy, we're all going to work this out, because this was really destructive and tragic and abusive, right? | |
| And they say, no, I hit you because I had a bad childhood and I was hit. | |
| And, you know, you get all of this and you try to, like all this moral reasoning we're talking about here. | |
| And then you say, well, okay, I'm not going to press charges. | |
| I don't want to see you anymore because you are an abuser who's now defending his action and her actions, but I am not going to press charges. | |
| Well, that would be the equivalent of the state not pressing charges against the car thief. | |
| But that's not what abusive parents want. | |
| They want to be rewarded with your time, care, attention, resources, support, and involvement, and presence for the next 40 years, which is considerably more than a pony, a motorbike, and a candy bar, and considerably more than giving the car thief a new car every six months. | |
| Because we're not talking about whether parents are morally culpable. | |
| We're talking about whether parents should be rewarded with time now that you're an adult. | |
| I assume that you're a nice person. | |
| I assume that you're a decent person. | |
| I assume that you have your quality company. | |
| And that's what your parents want. | |
| They're not saying, don't press charges. | |
| They're saying, reward me With your time, care, attention, resources, money, focus, support, you name it, right? | |
| That's what they're saying. | |
| So if we fail to identify and punish bad behavior, and in fact we reward it with lifelong commitment, we understand that this is why the bad behavior continues. | |
| Because people who abuse their children Claim the right to have their children involved intimately in their lives for the rest of their lives, which not only is a failure to punish, it is an active reward. | |
| Now, should you have abusive parents in your life? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't. | |
| I don't know what's right for you. | |
| I do know that child abuse is immoral. | |
| I do know that I was told repeatedly, in the context of marriage and so on, I was told repeatedly to not have abusive people in my life, to not have violent or destructive or harmful people in my life, and that this is the concept behind no-fault divorce, that you can leave a marriage where you've committed to spend your whole life, you've sworn an oath before God, society, the judge, whoever, The Elvis impersonator. | |
| And you break that out for no good reason that you can identify. | |
| Not infidelity, not failure to provide, not abuse, drunkenness, just dissatisfaction. | |
| Not too happy. | |
| And this is considered to be fine. | |
| This was never talked about as bad or wrong or immoral. | |
| And certainly, even if you're just bored of the relationship, you're indifferent, you just don't love the person anymore. | |
| You kind of drifted apart. | |
| Then divorce is considered to be fine. | |
| I never saw it portrayed negatively when I was a kid. | |
| Now, of course, women vote, women have money, but nonetheless, this is what I was taught. | |
| Oh, the perils of a society when faced by someone who's actually listened. | |
| Well, how can it be then that we can reward abusive and unrepentant parents with our time, energy, commitment, money, resources, support, quote, commitment, money, resources, support, quote, love? | |
| Thank you. | |
| Because if we believe that unrepentant people who've done immoral actions should be rewarded, then we need to make that Our standard. | |
| Right? | |
| We need to make that our standard. | |
| If that's our standard. | |
| I mean, shoot me. | |
| I'm a philosopher. | |
| So, don't be too upset when I try to universalize moral rules. | |
| Because that's kind of the important job of philosophy. | |
| It's the most important job of philosophy. | |
| Universalization of moral rules. | |
| Everything else is... | |
| Prior to that is necessary for that. | |
| Why do we deal with metaphysics? | |
| So we can get to epistemology. | |
| Why do we deal with epistemology? | |
| So we can get to ethics. | |
| So we can get to ethics. | |
| Why do we deal with ethics? | |
| So we can get rid of politics. | |
| That's the sequence, right? | |
| That's how it works. | |
| So, if it's wrong to not have If it's wrong to press charges against abusive parents for immoral actions they've done against you in the past, if those actions were illegal at the time, and if the statute of limitations has not expired, | |
| which generally it does for the convenience of adults, parents in particular, if it's moral to not press charges, then we refrain from punishing. | |
| Evildoers. | |
| Well, okay. | |
| So then we have a standard called let's not punish evildoers. | |
| Oh, but we can't have different standards for Karthis and parents, right? | |
| Can't have different standards. | |
| I mean, you can't. | |
| You can say there are different standards or it's different, but then you're not dealing with ethics. | |
| You're just dealing with mere opinion, manipulation. | |
| That's not ethics. | |
| The moment you create different rules for the same thing, it's not science, not math. | |
| Two and two make four, unless the numbers are green, in which case they make a unicorn! | |
| Yay! | |
| My daughter will be so happy. | |
| Well, if it's fine for women to get out of relationships that they voluntarily chose and committed for life, if it's fine for women to get out of those relationships, Why is it not fine for the victims of child abuse to get out of parental relationships? | |
| I mean, the women chose to get married to the husbands. | |
| Kids never chose the parents. | |
| A woman could leave at any time. | |
| Kids can't leave at any time. | |
| A woman had the chance to test drive the man for months or years before marrying him. | |
| Kids don't get that opportunity at all. | |
| I'm genuinely open to arguments to the contrary. | |
| I don't think they're going to work, but I am genuinely interested in arguments to the contrary. | |
| You know, help me understand. | |
| You say, well, the parents provided for the child. | |
| Well, the child didn't choose to be born, didn't choose the parents. | |
| But even if we accept... | |
| That the child has an obligation to the parents because the parents provide it to the child. | |
| Therefore, the child must stay in a relationship as an adult with abusive parents. | |
| Well, fine. | |
| Then we have to ban divorce for women who don't work because their husbands provide for them and therefore have bought them for the future. | |
| I mean, if you support a wife for a couple of years or five years or ten years or fifteen years, then that wife can never leave you. | |
| Because you paid for her. | |
| You bought her. | |
| We understand that's a kind of slavery, right? | |
| And if you try proposing that as a law, divorce is no longer available to women or men who've been paid for. | |
| Well, people would say that's outrageous. | |
| Current generosity cannot strip people of their future choice. | |
| And that's in a husband-wife scenario, which again is vastly different from a parent-child relationship. | |
| So I don't think that works. | |
| If you say, well, parents are always right, I mean, that's very easy to demolish, right? | |
| Very easy to demolish. | |
| I mean, just find one parent who's an evildoer, right? | |
| One parent who's a murderer, one parent who's a thief, and then parents aren't always right. | |
| And if parents are always right, then of course we need to get rid of rules against, laws against child abuse. | |
| We need to get rid of child protective services and so on, right? | |
| And nobody's proposing anything like that either. | |
| So that doesn't work. | |
| You owe your parents because they made you. | |
| Well, I don't know about that. | |
| You don't sign a contract. | |
| You don't choose to be born and you can't choose to leave. | |
| You know, if I lock a guy in my basement and feed him for five years, how much money does he owe me when I finally let him out or he escapes? | |
| Well, everybody would say none. | |
| In fact, I owe him restitution for stripping five years of his freedom. | |
| Right? | |
| So that doesn't work either. | |
| Again, I'm wide open to arguments. | |
| But I don't think there are any. | |
| So anyway, these are my thoughts on the defense of my mom or dad had a bad childhood or my teacher had a bad childhood or whatever, right? | |
| My older sibling had a bad childhood. | |
| These are my thoughts and I hope that they make sense to you. | |
| I hope that if you disagree with me, you will take the time to Tell me where my reasoning has gone astray, where my arguments are invalid, and we can approach the truth of this thorny and challenging issue together. | |
| Because I sure would like to see less child abuse and less child harming. | |
| And if we keep rewarding harmful parents It is like bribing people to commit crimes. | |
| I think that all we will see is a net increase in criminality, dysfunction, and abuse. | |
| Thank you so much as always. | |
| This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Should you find these conversations useful, fdrurl.com forward slash donate. | |
| Thank you, Duke Nukem. | |
| Have a great day, everyone. |