Why does Stefan point out when people laugh or chuckle when describing abuse they have suffered? Please help us continue to fight the good fight - we cannot do it without you! http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing very well. | |
| Please, please, please, this Christmas season, help us out. | |
| Help us survive. | |
| FreeDomainRadio.com slash donate. | |
| Your support is essential. | |
| We, or I, respectfully request 50 cents a podcast or 50 cents a show that you listen to. | |
| So, I get a question a lot and somebody just sent one in which reminded me, which is, Steph, why do you... | |
| Pushback when people laugh about trauma that they've experienced, when they present it as funny or laugh about it, is it a natural human reaction to attempt to minimize or to turn into comedy that which is tragedy, as the old saying goes? | |
| Comedy is tragedy plus time. | |
| And it's a good question. | |
| It's a good question. | |
| I can certainly tell you Why I do it, and this of course is not any kind of syllogistic proof, but I do think that it is helpful to know this stuff. | |
| So, the question to my mind is always... | |
| Who has control of the personality in the moment? | |
| Look, we are not a single identity. | |
| I've sort of talked about this for years. | |
| I view our personalities as an ecosystem, much like a jungle or the ocean and so on. | |
| It's an ecosystem of competing influences and particularly competing personalities. | |
| And when I was a little kid, I remember this reading... | |
| The Many Minds of Billy Mulligan. | |
| This is off the top of my head, but I remember reading it in the laundry room of the highly rent-controlled, low-rent apartments that I lived in, or my family lived in, when we came to Canada. | |
| And there's sort of multiple personalities, people in the spotlight, and so on. | |
| I found quite interesting. | |
| I think it's to some degree not considered nearly as valid anymore, multiple personalities. | |
| I think it's called dissociative personality disorder or something now, but it was a fascinating phenomenon. | |
| The Many Faces of Eve was another one, and there was a movie with Richard Gere and Ed Norton, which had a similar sort of idea of different personalities and so on. | |
| Now, that's an extreme, extreme case and so on. | |
| But if you've listened to my conversations with listeners, their roleplays, when they're roleplaying people in their lives, are really accurate. | |
| Bang on. | |
| Actors, of course, when I was an actor, I studied theater in theater school for years, And we would work on this in this capacity to develop different patterns of thinking and different ways of expressing ourselves that can very much be seen as disparate or discrete personalities is very common. | |
| So when I'm talking to someone in particular about difficult things, my question to myself is, who am I talking to? | |
| Because I'm not always talking to, if I'm talking to, say, an adult victim of child abuse, I'm not always talking to the adult child or victim of child abuse. | |
| I am usually, or oftentimes, talking to the abuser through the victim. | |
| Now, this may sound kind of all woo-woo and so on, but let me make the case for it, and you can, of course, discard it as pure nonsense if you like, but I think I can make a pretty good case for it. | |
| So, when you are a victim of child abuse, then The question is, how do you minimize the damage that is going to be done to you or that is done to you? | |
| How do you minimize that damage? | |
| It's a really, really tough question. | |
| It's a really tough question. | |
| How do you minimize the damage? | |
| Well, I mean, there are two kinds of abusers. | |
| There are reactive abusers and proactive abusers. | |
| So the reactive abusers are, you know, they just turn around and scream at you because they lose their temper, because you're fighting with your sibling in the back of a car, or something like that. | |
| Just reactive abusers. | |
| They're not exactly the same as premeditatedly or consciously or cruel. | |
| They just... | |
| Overreact, I suppose. | |
| The pot boileth over and they just lash out. | |
| Whereas the other kind of abuser is sort of cold and calculated and so on and sadistic. | |
| And, of course, sexual abusers, I would imagine, would fall mostly into this category because it's not like you accidentally abuse someone sexually. | |
| And so the... | |
| The parent who just hits because they're frustrated versus the parent who speaks to you about the whole punishment and gets you over his knee and hits your butt and so on and then explains it afterwards. | |
| That's more conscious. | |
| That's more controlled. | |
| That would be a proactive abuser rather than a reactive abuser. | |
| Let's just talk about reactive abusers. | |
| Now, If you have a, let's just say a mom, right? | |
| If you have a mom who's a reactive abuser, then your best strategy for minimizing abuse is to minimize stress on the part of the parent. | |
| Now, this is more a strategy that is pursued in early childhood up through the latency period from like six or seven to puberty. | |
| After that, a lot of times you're so full of hatred and contempt that you provoke, you fight, because you can do so now that you're bigger and so on. | |
| But when you're little, your best strategy for minimizing abuse from a reactive abuser is to minimize the stressors. | |
| Minimize the negative emotional experiences of your abuser, which is why you see a lot of kids who are hyper-compliant and who do what the parent says and who become sort of the mini-parent, particularly to the younger children. | |
| And try and clean up the place and, you know, all that kind of stuff. | |
| Now, the reactive abuser blames the other person for the reaction. | |
| You kids are driving me crazy. | |
| If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, and another thing, how many times, and so on, right? | |
| They view the child as provoking the stress and Now that externalization of internal stimuli makes the parent feel like a victim and makes the lashing out seem like or be justifiable as self-defense on the part of the parent. | |
| The parent is thus in the position of being the victim of the child not listening or the children fighting or whatever. | |
| So, the parent is the victim and they are lashing out to prevent aggressive behavior against the parent on the part of the children who damn well should know better. | |
| And so, if you have a reactively abusive parent, if you provoke negative emotions on the part of that parent, that parent will attack. | |
| Because the parent... | |
| It does not have what is sometimes called the locus of control within themselves. | |
| They do not view that as their own thoughts and their own history and their own personality that is the source of their emotions. | |
| They view themselves as a giant series of hyper-vulnerable buttons that other people just play maladroitly or meanly. | |
| So, it's pretty easy to understand that when you have this reactively abusive parent, you want to make sure that you do not provoke negative emotions on the part of that parent. | |
| Make sense? | |
| Because the parent will lash out and will attack you. | |
| Surely as if they were in a dark alley and someone came rushing at them with a knife and they had a gun, they would use it in self-defense. | |
| They view themselves as victims, you as the aggressor. | |
| And you are making them feel bad, therefore you are in the wrong and you must be punished so that you don't make them feel bad. | |
| Now, with a reactive abuser, managing the abuser's emotions is Is job one. | |
| And preventing the abuser from experiencing negative emotions is job one. | |
| Now, if when the abuser hits you or screams at you or neglects you or refuses to talk to you or avoids you or doesn't feed you or feeds you things you hate or whatever, then if you express calmly and Forcefully, although calmly and forcefully, are usually two of the same things. | |
| But if you say, look, it's really not right for you to hit me. | |
| Mom, it's not my fault that X, Y, or Z may have happened. | |
| You know, it's not... | |
| It's not my fault. | |
| It's unjust and unfair and wrong for you to hit me. | |
| Well, if you are correct... | |
| If it is unjust for the parent to hit you, then you are going to be provoking an emotion on the part of your parent which is called guilt and shame and will most likely result in an escalation and a reenactment of the abuse. | |
| There's a fairly famous scene in a movie I paid with my own money from my job to see when I was a kid. | |
| I think it was late 70s called Kramer vs. | |
| Kramer. | |
| I've talked about this on the show before. | |
| There's a famous scene with Dustin Hoffman who's trying to cook something for his son and it kind of all goes wrong and at the end he says, God damn her. | |
| In other words, God damn his wife. | |
| He's angry at his wife. | |
| He's taking it out on his kid. | |
| Now, kids know when things are unjust. | |
| I mean, the only reason justice is not a more powerful force in the adult world is because it's pounded out of kids when they're young. | |
| I mean, try giving two kids unequal portions of a dessert and see what they have to say about justice. | |
| Well, quite a lot. | |
| So, if you... | |
| And if a reactive parent lashes out at you, like hits you, and then you are sad and crying... | |
| Then the reactive parent feels bad. | |
| And then will attack you for making him or her feel bad because you're still sad, upset that you've been hit. | |
| Right? | |
| So in the movie Boyhood by Richard Linklater, there's a scene where a husband hits his wife and says to the kids, well... | |
| First she had an accident, now she's just being dramatic. | |
| In other words, she's milking it, she's faking it, and so on. | |
| Oh, that movie. | |
| Anyway, that's a topic for another time. | |
| So you do not want to be vulnerable and sad and honest about the effects of a reactive abuser's abuse upon you. | |
| And therefore, you must swallow your hurt and outrage, and you must, when you are traumatized, you must focus on managing, i.e. | |
| minimizing, any negative emotional experience on the part of your abuser, lest they reinflict and escalate. | |
| So that's the commandment. | |
| Now, when you're a kid, it's around suppression. | |
| Now, when you get older... | |
| The tragic and violent and abusive and or aggressive events of your childhood need to be reframed as comedy. | |
| Because now you have freedom. | |
| And so the propaganda has to escalate because you have more freedom as an adult in your relationship with an abusive parent than you do as a child, obviously, just sort of by the very nature of growing up and becoming independent. | |
| And so there is usually... | |
| It's not often that you'll find little kids who will laugh about having been yelled at or hit or abused. | |
| But a lot of times you'll find it among adults. | |
| And that is because there has to be... | |
| Again, it's all unconscious, I believe. | |
| I'm subconscious for the most part. | |
| But when you become an adult and you gain more independence... | |
| Then the propaganda has to escalate to match your freedom. | |
| And then, as an adult, of course, when you are an adult, the abusive parent, whether reactive or proactive, the abusive parent is always afraid, always afraid of you remembering, right? | |
| Of you remembering. | |
| Recalling of you becoming vulnerable, because you have independence and freedom now, you have more capacity to become vulnerable without being attacked. | |
| So the abusive parent no longer has the capacity to just inflict abuse upon you. | |
| The abusive parent now has to rely on more subtle and more proactive forms of control of the victim, of the ex-victim, or how to... | |
| And so what happens is the family as a whole, and particularly the elders, the parents and the grandparents, the family as a whole, in general, begins to reframe what happened to you as a child as comedy, as funny. | |
| And, uh, and, and this way they also get to, you know, when you're an abusive parent and your kids grow up, it's a problem because you, you know, you kind of run out of victims. | |
| You run out of people to, uh, certainly dependents, right? | |
| And it's not like the relationship that a chronically abusive relationship doesn't change because you grow up and move out. | |
| It just becomes more subtle. | |
| And so then what happens is when you grow up to be an adult, the conversation shifts. | |
| And the way that it shifts is The abuse is reframed as comedy, should it ever come up, and sometimes proactively abusive parents will bring it up, reactively, so reactively abusive parents will bring it up, and it will be reframed. | |
| And the way that it's reframed, of course, is, ha ha ha, when you were a kid, blah de blah de blah, and if you show any kind of upset or vulnerability, then of course you are Mocked and attacked and undermined and so on because, you see, you just don't have a sense of humor, you're too sensitive, you're holding on to grudges, you just don't understand, when you're kids you'll know, blah-de-blah-de-blah. | |
| And that's the reality of becoming an adult when you've had a history of trauma. | |
| The trauma must be reframed. | |
| As comedy, because my question is, who does the laughter serve? | |
| Who does the emotional attitude in a conversation that I'm having, who does it serve? | |
| Does it serve the victim of abuse to laugh about the abuse? | |
| Well, of course not. | |
| Of course it doesn't. | |
| Who does it serve? | |
| Well, to laugh about the abuse serves the needs of the abusers. | |
| And look, I... I can't go for that. | |
| I can't be down with that. | |
| I can't go along with that. | |
| I can't go along with anything that obscures violations of the non-aggression principle. | |
| It's not really much more complicated than that. | |
| I recognize that laughing over abuse is a cover-up of a violation of the non-aggression principle. | |
| And since I have dedicated my life to Spreading the non-aggression principle, I can't collude in a cover-up of the non-aggression principle, and that's why I do what I do. | |
| Now, with regards to proactive abusers, the mechanics are quite different. | |
| Reactive abusers are... | |
| Pushing back against a negative emotion that they're feeling. | |
| The child makes them feel stressed, overwhelmed, upset, angry, scared. | |
| You know, like a child does something dangerous and the parent hits the child because the child, quote, made the parent feel scared and the child must be punished for the negative emotional experience of the parent. | |
| That's reactive. | |
| Now, a proactive abuser, though, is quite a bit different. | |
| Now, there are two kinds of proactive abusers. | |
| Again, you know I'm no psychologist, it's just my thoughts on it, right? | |
| But there are two kinds of proactive abusers. | |
| In one kind, the abuser... | |
| is fulfilling the abuser's own needs with no recognition that the child has any needs of his or her own. | |
| A sexual abuser, to me, would fall into this category. | |
| It's, of course, selfishly using the child for sexual gratification with not even the slightest thought, I would imagine, of the devastating effect it has on the child. | |
| And there is another kind of proactive abuser who is the sadist. | |
| So the reactive abuser is attempting to punish the child for what is usually an unexpected negative stimulus, or the more unexpected, the more punishment on the part of the parent. | |
| The parent feels bad, the child's, quote, responsible for it, the child must be punished. | |
| It's reactive. | |
| The proactive sadist... | |
| Pursues and seeks out and creates situations of harm against the child because harming another human being creates pleasure, releases endorphins, creates pleasure in the mind and heart of the sadist. | |
| It makes him feel happy to hurt. | |
| So that's necessarily more proactive. | |
| The difference between, oh, there's a piece of chocolate that's lying around. | |
| I guess I'll eat it even though I'm not that hungry. | |
| More reactive. | |
| Proactive is, I've got to go get some food. | |
| I'm starving. | |
| I'm going to go drive to a restaurant. | |
| I'm going to order the food and so on. | |
| Now, the sadist is the person who must engineer and create situations. | |
| Wherein harm is done to the child's mind or heart or body, emotions and so on. | |
| Now, in that situation, you have to be a very good actor to convince the sadist that the harm has been done so he'll get the rush and happiness of his sadism and will then stop the torture, right? | |
| And this need to be convincing is central to all of this stuff. | |
| So, for instance, if you want to see a real challenge, remember this from acting school, right? | |
| Crying and laughing are big challenges on stage or while acting or whatever. | |
| Because... | |
| Just try this. | |
| Open your cell phone, shoot a selfie video of you laughing, play it back, and see if it looks believable. | |
| It's tough. | |
| So you really have to internalize these things in order to make it believable to the abusers. | |
| The abusers who want you to laugh at the abuse... | |
| They know if you're faking, and that's not good. | |
| So you have to be really authentic. | |
| And the best way, you know, in the 1984, I now really love Big Brother, the best way to make something true is to believe it yourself. | |
| To make something appear true is to believe it yourself. | |
| And so when you're laughing about abuse, you have to genuinely believe that it is funny in order for it to stave off escalations of abuse or attacks. | |
| You have to believe that stuff. | |
| And, in the same way, if the sadist wants you to break down and cry in order for him to give you relief from his attacks, well, then you really have to be believable in that. | |
| You really have to make him know, make him believe, make him accept that he's really hurt you to the point where he gets the relief rush, the happiness, and therefore stops his attack. | |
| And that's good acting. | |
| It's good. | |
| It's good. | |
| You've got to really believe it. | |
| And, of course, when people are laughing about their abuse or minimizing their abuse, In my presence, they're treating me as if I am an abuser. | |
| And I really have to break that cycle. | |
| Because if they're treating me like I'm an abuser, when I'm one of the biggest advocates for childhood security and safety around, if they're treating me as an abuser, I have to break them of that habit. | |
| It's disrespectful to me. | |
| It's disrespectful to them. | |
| And it tells me that they can't differentiate between friend and foe. | |
| Which means that the abusers have really done a bang-up job of confusing and ensnaring and Stockholm syndroming them. | |
| So I have to push back. | |
| I have to say, what you're saying is not funny. | |
| Because it's not. | |
| There's nothing funny about child abuse, of course, right? | |
| And so I have to tell them it's not funny without hostility because I don't want to reproduce the abuser cycle wherein they're, quote, provoking negative feelings in me and therefore I'm punishing them by humiliating them for laughing, right? | |
| I.e., well, you're treating me like an abuser. | |
| That's incredibly disrespectful. | |
| How horrible. | |
| Now I'm, quote, being offended and making them feel bad. | |
| That is to replicate, which is why you'll always hear me say, I'm not criticizing. | |
| I'm simply pointing it out. | |
| I say this with all sympathy, but this is not funny. | |
| I need you to stop laughing about this because it's not funny. | |
| I mean, look, if you were an advocate for the end of apartheid and somebody was giggling hysterically about Nelson Mandela being in prison, you would, I hope, say to that person, this is not appropriate laughter here, this is not a funny situation. | |
| A man had been in prison for over two decades. | |
| This is not funny stuff, right? | |
| You know, someone who laughs about rape or somebody who, like, it's just, you don't have to attack the person. | |
| In fact, I think it's not a good idea to do that at all. | |
| But you can't support it, right? | |
| I mean, it's unhealthy for everyone, and I do want them to know that there are people out there who will listen to stories of child abuse and seriously not find them funny, but without the counterattack, which is a replication of the original defense. | |
| So, I hope that helps. | |
| I hope that clarifies things. | |
| I'm not saying it's a proof. | |
| I'm just saying this is where I'm coming from. | |
| I always welcome better arguments and information. | |
| As always, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show. |