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Jan. 4, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:40
3550 FRANCE BANS SPANKING
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We're still going to be friends at the end of this conversation?
We'll see.
We'll see.
I'm going to have it with you anyway.
We'll find out.
France today outlawed hitting children.
Now 52 countries that outlawed hitting children.
That's a long overdue thing.
You know, the non-aggression principle basically says you're only allowed to use violence in self-defense.
And hitting children, it's not self-defense.
That's all you really need to know about the subject.
It is the initiation of force against basically biologically trapped prisoners in your home.
They can't leave.
You hit your wife, she can leave.
Hit your husband, he can leave.
Hit your children...
Where are they going to go?
Well, they can't go anywhere.
Oh, I guess in France now.
They can go somewhere.
And as is the case when this question comes up, and it's really not a complicated question at all.
Spanking is a violation.
Hitting children is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
It is the initiation of the use of force.
And...
There's really nothing more to be said.
And the amount of people who accept the non-aggression principle who justify spanking or hitting children, well, it just shows you that emotional scar tissue disrupts rationality in just about every conceivable context.
And I'm sorry, you know, for those of you who were hit as children and for those of you who are hitting their children at the moment, I'm sorry that this is going on.
It doesn't change the ethics of it at all.
You're still doing something completely and totally wrong.
And irredeemably immoral by hitting your children.
And so I'm going to go through a couple of comments in natural defenses that people come up with this.
Now, it's interesting.
Dr.
Elizabeth Groshoff, she's been on this show a couple of times, did a study at UTex, University of Texas.
She examined 20,000 kindergartners and their parents.
Do you spank your children at home?
Black parents, 89%.
Hispanic parents, 80%.
White parents, 79%.
And Asian parents, 73%.
It's still enormously prevalent.
So people who say, well, there's been a decline in spanking, therefore...
Okay, yeah, it has come down a little bit.
It used to be in the 90s.
But it's still incredibly prevalent.
And it simply speaks to the basic fact that parents don't know what...
You don't know what you're doing.
If you're hitting your children, trust me, you don't know what you're doing.
You know, like if you're trying to sell someone a car...
And you end up cold cocking them with a folding chair.
Yeah, you don't really know what you're doing.
If you're trying to sell someone some sort of life insurance and you end up with them in a half Nelson, yeah, you don't know what you're doing.
So when you end up using physical violence because you want to get something done, you have simply put up a giant flare that says, I have no clue what I'm doing.
I really feel something needs to get done.
I don't want to examine what I'm doing.
So I'm going to brutalize my children and Because I'm incompetent in this.
Now, these skills can be learned.
How do you learn how to be a parent without hitting?
Well, these skills can be learned.
I've talked a lot about peaceful parenting.
There's parent effectiveness training.
I've had a couple of experts on to talk about that.
You just have conversations and you have curiosity.
So we'll talk about a couple of the basics and then we'll go into the sort of spanking troll stuff that's going on.
Well, what if your children are running into the street?
Well, it's your job as a parent to have them not run into the street, right?
Stay with them.
Have a fence.
Keep them in some place that's away from the street.
Explain it to them repeatedly.
You know, that's your job, right?
The whole point is for them to learn how to be safe themselves, right?
I mean, not to be more afraid of your hand or your fist than they are of a car.
I mean, that doesn't really teach them anything other than big people will hit you if you disobey what they say.
Or, you know, pot of boiling water.
Oh, yeah, a really complicated.
Take that pot of boiling water, put it on the back burner, and turn the handle away.
There's nothing wrong with physically restraining your children if they're about to do something dangerous, just as you would do if some blind guy was about to walk into traffic.
You would grab him and you would hold him.
You wouldn't hurt him.
You would restrain him, not choke him or hit him or spank him or something like that.
So, of course, if you're close enough to hit your children and you're close enough to prevent them from doing, you know, if they're approaching, if you haven't childproofed your home, kind of your job.
If you didn't childproof your home and your kid is starting to jam forks into sockets and they're that young, that's on you.
That's not on you.
You get to hit the child because you're incompetent because you didn't childproof your home.
You don't get to hit the child because you did a bad job.
That's like you don't change the oil in your car.
You don't get to beat up the mechanic.
Who tries to fix it?
I mean, your incompetence has cost you money.
Your incompetence is endangering your children.
It's not their fault that you were not able to or willing to spend the time and energy to childproof your home.
If you're close enough to hit your child for reaching for a pot of boiling water, then you're close enough to gently pull them back.
And if they're too young, you don't hit them.
If they're too young, all they'll understand there is fear.
You know, baby, no light cortisol, stress hormones.
It's terrible.
PTSD. I mean, you're hitting your children.
You can't possibly, if someone gave you a million dollars, a million dollars to not hit your children for a day, would you be able to do it?
Yeah, see, see, if someone gives a million dollars, I'm still bald.
Be hairy for a million dollars.
Can't do it.
But if somebody gave you a million dollars to not hit your children for a day and not yell at them and not call them names, I mean, of course you could, right?
And you'd find another way, so it's perfectly possible.
It's just, is there an incentive called your children's mental health, intelligence, and happiness that's worth a million dollars to you?
I leave that to your discretion.
So people say, well, spanking does work.
And they say this because they have no clue.
The studies are very clear.
Spanking will produce short-term compliance and long-term rebellion.
It's very...
And we're talking minutes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You hit your kids.
They'll...
Right?
And then they'll go off and do their thing.
Right?
So spanking doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
All it will do...
It's a discharge of frustration on the part of the parent.
The parent is out of control.
And it doesn't work.
It doesn't work in...
If spanking worked...
You'd be able to stop doing it.
But spanking just goes on and on and on and on.
I mean, if it works, you'd stop doing it.
Do you condemn any and all spanking, like even a couple of slaps on the butt?
It's not up to me.
It's not my condemnation.
It's the moral rules.
Is it the initiation of force?
People say, well, a couple of light taps on the butt.
First of all, bullshit.
I call complete bullshit on that.
I don't believe it for a second.
The whole point of spanking is to inflict pain and fear on the part of the child sufficient to change behavior.
It has to be aversive, right?
It has to be something the child really, really doesn't want.
So if it's just a couple of light taps on the butt, the child isn't going to care, right?
That's not spanking.
Spanking is when you're doing it to alter the child's behavior, which means it has to be fearful and painful enough to really imprint and to try and alter that behavior.
So, no, I don't believe there's always a couple of light slaps on the butt.
That's bullshit.
That's bullshit.
I mean, nobody does that.
And...
And even still, it's not teaching the child anything, even if that's all that you did.
Someone said, I disagree with you on this one.
Spanking can be useful when it's not overdone.
Beating a child is very different.
Statistically, it's not.
The effects on the child are fairly indistinguishable between beating and what you call spanking.
Spanking has an element of humiliation.
It is an exercise of pure power.
Why are you doing it?
Because you can.
Why are you doing it?
Because you're bigger.
Why are you doing it?
Because you have the power.
Why are you doing it?
Because you have control and no other reason.
And so your child is very aware that you as the adult are only hitting him or her and you're not hitting other people's children.
You're not hitting a waiter who brought your food cold.
You're not hitting someone who is doing something annoying to you.
You're not hitting your grandmother.
You're not hitting...
Just that.
And they understand.
Okay, so when you're big and powerful, you can inflict your hostile will on weaker and more vulnerable people.
Gosh, I wonder if there's going to be any problem with bullying in society or with subjugation to statist control or anything like that.
No.
You do it because you can, because it's legally allowed, because it's permissible.
You don't do it.
Well, you see, children, they lack cognitive abilities to understand.
You've got to teach them with hitting.
It's like, okay, well, so when you get old, let's say you have senior moments, you forget where your keys are.
Boom!
Do they get to hit you for that?
Do they get to pull down your pants, peel back your depends, and slap your liver-spotted ass?
No.
You treat somebody whose brain is deteriorating, whose cognitive faculties are diminished, you treat them with care and compassion.
You don't hit them, right?
Where did you park the car, Granddad?
Where did you park the car?
Do you want to hit me or want me to hit you or to slap you?
Where did you park the car?
I told you to remember where you parked the car.
Boom!
Boom!
No, you see, but that's bad.
That's wrong.
We all get that.
Well, there's somebody who's got diminished mental capacity, just like a child.
Why is it bad?
For the adult, but not for the grandpa, not for the child.
We all understand this, and deep down, right?
We know.
We know this.
Spanking is at least one way to establish a circumstance where they can't argue their way out of a situation.
I'm sorry, this looks terrible.
Oh my god.
What are you people...
What are you doing?
Why?
Jackie Chan face again.
What are you doing?
Spanking is at least one way to establish a circumstance where they can't argue their way out of a situation.
So let's say you're a 30-year-old person with a 5-year-old child.
You can't out-argue a 5-year-old?
You can't out-debate a 5-year-old?
Are you kidding?
How do you tie your shoes?
How do you find your way back home again?
Let's say you're 40 and your child is 15.
You still have a quarter-century experience.
In the world, your brain is bigger.
It's more mature.
It should be flourishing with learning and thinking and reasoning and speaking.
You can't out-argue a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old.
Are you kidding me?
I mean, my daughter is smart as a whip.
I can still take her verbally most times.
Occasionally, she wins and more power to her.
I think that's fantastic, but...
If you can't out-argue someone, you don't get to hit them.
I don't know why this...
If you can't verbally find a way to convince someone of something, when you're much more intelligent and your brain is like twice the size, you don't get to hit them.
Maybe what you can do is try and figure out either A, whether you have a valid position at all, or B, you might want to up your game when it comes to debating.
If you're regularly being beaten by a child...
And that's not the child's fault.
What do you mean you beat me at chess?
Boom!
You've got to be kidding.
Someone says, uh, kids lacking discipline is why crime has skyrocketed.
Corporal punishment by parents backed with reasoning works.
Yeah, that's right.
Hitting people backed by reasoning with them works.
Yeah, right.
Because, you know, the reasoning should always follow the fist or the open hand.
Um...
No, first of all, crime has not skyrocketed.
Now it's gone up recently because of the Ferguson effect.
I think that's basically the reason, because the cops are paralyzed.
And even what Sweden's bikini cop has quit.
So no, crime has diminished in many ways.
But no, it's not the kids who lack discipline.
It's the parents who lack discipline.
It's the parents who lack commitment and who lack discipline.
First of all, marriages have collapsed and where crime has gone up, crime has gone up with divorce rates, with single motherhood and so on.
So it is the lack of discipline on the part of the parents, I mean, that that is the issue.
The discipline to keep your damn vows, to stay together, to be committed, to until death do you part, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, stick to your damn vows and stop hitting children for the effects of Bullshit inconstancy on the part of parents.
And yes, ladies, given that 60 to 70% of divorces are initiated by you, and the number one cause is I'm dissatisfied, yeah, I'm talking to you.
Stop blaming the kids for the inconstancy of the parents.
And the other thing, too, it's the daycare effect.
We've got this whole, they're called snowflakes, the social justice warriors, the snowflakes, the people that cry bullies and so on.
Where's this coming from?
Of course it's coming from a lot of Marxist indoctrination, but why is Marxist indoctrination falling on such fertile soil?
Well, these are the daycare kids.
I worked in a daycare.
I worked as a teacher's assistant in a school for gifted kids, and I also worked at a daycare for years when I was a teenager.
And it's rough.
It's a rough environment.
It's the lowest common denominator.
It's Lord of the Flies.
It's kids trying to parent each other.
It's kids trying to figure out how to become...
The next day older by referencing their peers rather than their parents, right?
So it's a mess.
And infants who are put into daycare for more than 20 hours a week experience exactly the same symptoms as children who've been abandoned by their mothers, maternal abandonment, the same symptoms.
Children don't know eight hours.
Babies certainly don't know eight hours.
It's an eternity.
So you've got kids with no particular bond with their parents who've grown up entirely disoriented and messed up by the lowest common denominator Mush and mashup of peer tumbling and peer attacks and peer relationships and so on.
They have no particular relationship to benevolent authority and they've been raised by women.
I mean, daycare teachers are almost all women and primary school teachers are almost all women.
A lot of kids don't end up with any male authority figures of any significance until they get into their early to mid-teens.
So...
It's a mess.
The daycare generation, I think, has severely disrupted bonds with their parents.
And they're lost.
And they, of course, have no respect for the existing system.
The existing system has denied them the basic connection and contact and intimacy and sense of importance from their parents.
You dump your kid in daycare so you can go off and work.
The kid understands it.
It's not that tough an equation at all.
You like working more than you like your child.
That's not that hard to figure out.
And kids figure it out very quickly.
And then they see that their parents are tired and often complaining about work.
Grabbing about work.
Oh, my boss this.
Oh, the customer's that.
Oh, the whatever, right?
And so the child understands that you're dumping the child in daycare to go to a job you don't even like that much.
So you dislike your job, but you dislike your child even more?
And we expect these children to have some respect for the society that treats them this way?
Are you kidding me?
Daycare workers, like, make nothing.
They make nothing.
It's like minimum wage or, I mean...
Imagine.
Imagine you call up your wife.
It's your anniversary.
Call up your wife.
I'm sorry, honey.
I can't make it.
But I did get someone from Guatemala.
Some guy from Guatemala.
Doesn't speak English that well.
He's going to take you out instead.
You know, because me as your husband and this guy from Guatemala, you know, I'm paying him five bucks an hour to take you out for dinner if you don't mind paying for that.
It's pretty much the same, right?
Your wife would be like, what are you talking about?
Can I just send me out on a date with some guy from Guatemala for five bucks an hour?
But this is what happens when you put your kids in daycare.
You got low-rank people who are constantly cycling over.
I mean, either they don't like the daycare teachers, in which case they're going to hide out of the peer group and you get this savagery.
There's a bunch of savages running around in universities because they've not been raised and civilized in any particular way.
And, I mean, I walked in the daycare.
It was two of us, and we had, like, 20 kids, ages 5 to 10.
It was nuts!
I don't know if it's the same anymore, but it was a lot.
And, I think...
Civilization is this slow netting of decent values and standards into, you know, the feral ape-like mind that we all start with, you know, the advantage-seeking, selfish mind that we all start with.
You've got to ned the empathy.
It doesn't happen in daycare, to my knowledge and experience, and I think according to the studies, it doesn't happen.
So you've got a bunch of feral, panicked, no regard, no respect, no self-disciplined kids running around.
It's not because spanking has diminished, it's because parenting has vanished.
Parenting has vanished.
So, as someone says, I don't know, I'm glad I got spanked as a child that sucked then, but I can tell you, I was also a little asshole too.
Well, you see, that...
That's the self-blame, right?
That's, well, you know, Stalin did send me to the gulag, so I bet I did something wrong.
No, that's...
I'm glad I got spanked as a child.
Well, what that means is that spanking has screwed you up so much that you can't wait to inflict it on your own children, so it sure as hell aren't going to question the value of it, because if you question the value of it and don't do it to your own children, it means you've got to deal with the pain of having been hit by your own parents.
This is a basic, simple...
People repeat stuff because they want to face the pain of changing, of confronting, of challenging these ethics in their heart of heart.
Someone says spanking is useful depending on how it's administered.
You had an abusive parent who spanked as a first resort.
Mine didn't.
If you know that spanking is on...
that being hit is on the table, everything is conditioned by that.
Everything is conditioned by that.
So it's not like...
100% rationality, 100% rationality, oh, then spanking.
Because the child knows.
It's not a rational conversation if the child knows that he or she is going to be hit if they don't agree.
It's not rational.
If I kidnap your cat and say, well, you have to agree with my argument so you don't get to see your cat again, and then I make my arguments...
Is it a perfectly rational?
No, you're worried about your cat.
You may agree with me, but it's because of the cat.
I don't know if it's rational.
It's not rational to kidnap your cat.
So if this big, giant, smacky hand is hovering in the background, there's no rationality going on before that.
All the people are thinking.
Kids are thinking of that.
Compared to not spanking me, I'm glad they did.
In my mind, a talking to would have done nothing to dissuade me.
Yeah, this is kind of toughness.
I was such a tough kid.
It's the only choice my parents had.
How do you know?
How do you know?
How do you know if you hadn't been reasoned with, if you hadn't had a connection, if you hadn't had respect, if your parents hadn't modeled the kind of behavior that they wanted you to replicate?
How do you know?
You don't know.
We do know that spanking shaves IQ down.
Kind of what you do.
No, no, no.
And it's not that the low IQ kids get spanked more.
They've done all that causality and we've got the truth about spanking.
It's the whole presentation of all the sources.
Let's see here.
Just spank the kid.
Who cares if it's retarded, annoying like a dog?
You spank it.
Well, that's, you know, this is how you train an animal.
And dogs can't reason.
Children can reason starting at 10 months of age.
Children can do moral reasoning starting at a year to a year and a half of age.
These studies have all been done.
All been done.
Raising, someone says, raising narcissistic kids with zero sense of repercussions or empathy is immoral and very dangerous.
So the way you teach empathy is by hitting people?
Really?
That's how you teach fear.
That's how you teach immediate compliance.
And that's how you teach a complete lack of respect for rules.
Fear is not respect.
Fear is not respect.
Fear is not the internalization of moral standards.
I don't want to get hit.
I mean, that's not how you teach a human being to be a good person.
I don't have a position on spanking, but what would be the penalty for parents who spank?
Well, I don't know.
I'm not a statist, so I couldn't tell.
I would hope that it would be something to do with, here's some education about spanking.
You know, all the studies about spanking, they've been done for decades, and they've been out for decades.
There's just this big giant silence about it because right now society is kind of structured so that women go to work and they dump their kids in daycare.
And the way – the reason it's structured that way is so that, you know, governments get more control over your children and governments get you to pay more taxes.
Like women stay home and there's just not as many – there's not as much tax money which they can use as collateral to borrow against the children in daycare to bribe the voters in the present.
You understand all of this, right?
So right now we've got a whole society that is set up around women working.
And if women stay home, then they can parent better.
They can know their children better.
Now, I know a lot of women's bank and all that, so that's still a big problem and all of that, but...
I would hope that it would be education, educate children on this kind of stuff.
And the penalty for parents who spank?
I have no idea.
I mean, you don't want to grab them and throw them in jail, I assume, right?
So I don't know what the penalty would be for parents who spank.
But it is an immoral thing to do.
And I'm not a huge fan of dragging people straight to prison and all that, of course, right?
That's not...
Ideal.
So I don't know what the penalty would be for parents who spank.
That's not relevant.
It's certainly not the job of a philosopher to figure this kind of stuff out.
I mean, my job is simply to say what is moral and make the case and what is immoral and make the case.
The consequences of that...
So someone says, my argument is that fear kept kids in line.
Fear of the belt.
Fear of the wooden spoon.
There were consequences to fucking up.
And you can tell, you know, there's a kind of a cordite smell and a battery taste in the language of people who've been brutalized in this kind of way.
Now the belt and the wooden spoon...
In Canada, my understanding is that you can hit children from the waist to the neck, or you can't hit their face or anything like that, and from the ages of 2 to 12, and you can't use implements.
Fear of the belt, fear of the wooden spoon, it's just assault.
I mean, it's just plain assault.
And again, it doesn't have a huge effect on children, whether they're spanked or beaten.
The effects are both equally bad, equally destructive.
But yeah, there were consequences to fucking up.
It's harsh.
You need to hit kids.
Consequences.
Because this sets up this cat and mouse game.
And also...
If you set up fear-based consequences for children, then you're actually rewarding the children who don't feel fear, like the sociopaths.
They don't feel fear.
They'll feel fear.
They may feel some caution.
So they actually are fine with that kind of system.
So it's not, I don't think that's particularly great.
Someone said, it sickens me to see so many people stand up for child abuse just like they do for genital mutilation.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, genital mutilation, circumcision is brutal as well.
Okay, running into the street.
Your declaration of its immorality is simply opinion.
Should we set our morals based precisely on what you think?
Well, I've got a whole free book called Universally Preferable Behavior.
A rational proof of secular ethics goes into more of this.
And I've got, you know, the case against banking, a whole moral case, and interviews with experts.
So yeah, it's tightly reasoned out.
There's sufficient evidence to make it a fairly airtight case.
So no, it's not just my...
I mean, of course, opinions would be useless with regards to philosophy.
Because anecdotal evidence based on experience is all the argument I need.
Done correctly, spanking works.
QED! It works compared to what?
Let's see here.
I was spanked and I'm fantastically behaved.
My brother wasn't spanked and he's the worst spanker.
It's anecdotal.
We don't know.
And again, wouldn't you have more curiosity about why your brother went off the rails?
You know, something really bad could have happened to him that you don't know about, that didn't happen to you.
Right?
I mean, I won't even speculate because this is just one particular person's comments, but the idea that it all comes down to spanking.
Maybe your brother had something really bad happen to him as a child, and you don't know about it.
And maybe your parents don't know about it.
Maybe he's never shared it with anyone.
Maybe it's not to do with spanking.
But when you come up with these answers, well, it's spanking!
You have an answer, but you don't know.
You don't know.
And the false answers, they prevent further exploration, right?
A lot of people don't consider spanking or a slap to the face to be anything close to child abuse.
Which means what exactly?
So what?
Well, who cares what the majority of people think?
I mean, philosophy is not democratic.
Science is not consensus.
It's reason and evidence that matter.
My point is that it worked for centuries and centuries.
We've been told today that it doesn't work because, right?
So what?
Serfdom worked for centuries.
Slavery worked for centuries.
I mean, come on.
I mean, the hell centuries and centuries.
Who cares, right?
I mean...
Hitting daughters teaches them to submit to male authority and not become spoiled and rotten.
Okay.
Well, I'm not sure which side of the desert that's coming from, but I'm going to put out a guess.
So, I mean, I'm not going to make the whole case.
I've made it a bunch of times before, but don't hit your children.
Don't hit your children.
Look, you need to parent.
Like, it's 30 years in the future.
Because when your kids grow up and evaluate and, you know, come across people like me and others who are gonna lay out the moral case, they're gonna judge you by the moral standards Of 20 or 30 years from now.
At least 20.
So you've got a parent looking down the tunnel of time into the future.
What is going to be acceptable in the future?
And if you roll the dice and say, well, I'm sure spanking is going to be considered perfectly acceptable in the future, I and others are going to work very hard to make sure that you make a bad choice with that.
And we're going to tell your kids very much that the information was out there.
You chose not to access it.
You chose to hit them.
And they can make their choices then.
Because yes, you have total control over your children right now, and in most places in the world you can hit them with impunity.
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