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Oct. 31, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:04
3880 Kevin Spacey's Personal House of Cards | Sexual Assault Allegations
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So in the potential category called Sympathy for the Devil, we're going to have a look at Kevin Spacey's childhood.
There is so much that is illustrative and instructive.
In this man's story, Kevin Spacey, of course, as you know, a famous actor who has been accused by another actor named Anthony Rapp, who himself is gay and was one of the original cast members of the rather mediocre musical called Rent.
The actor Anthony Rapp alleges that Spacey groped him on a bed at a party in 1986 when Anthony was 14 and Spacey was 26.
Spacey says, well, I was drunk.
And I don't know that that's much of a defense.
I mean, I haven't been drunk for over four, no, three decades, over three decades, not quite that old.
Over three decades.
When I played Macbeth, I was at a cast party, had a few too many, and just remembered, you know, that, oh, I'm not drunk if I can lie on the floor without holding on.
And it's like, oh, I've got the spins.
Oh, I'm nauseous. Oh, I have to pee again.
This is basically an illness that I'd pay to avoid, so I've never been drunk again.
But it's just in vino veritas.
The fact that you're drunk doesn't necessarily mean anything.
And, of course, you're responsible for what you do when you're drunk, right?
You don't get to say, well, I... I plowed into a school because I was drunk driving, so I guess that's okay.
Anyway, so... Kevin Spacey.
A good actor. Got a couple of tics.
Like, the longer you see these guys act, the more you realize it's kind of like a persona.
It's not really acting in that he doesn't really change that much from movie to movie.
I think I first saw him in where he played this really abusive...
Swimming with sharks, I think it was in play, this really abusive boss.
And this sadism, you know, he comes by it, honestly, in the same way that Glenn Close comes by her bunny boiler personality in her movies by having a crazy mom.
And so let's look at what's been talked about with regards to Kevin Spacey's childhood.
Now, do you care about Kevin Spacey?
Probably a little bit. We do have these oddly intimate relationships with actors.
Of course, we get to see them cry and laugh and masturbate, it seems, increasingly these days.
And there's this odd kind of intimacy with actors in that...
They're mimicking what might happen, minus the masturbation with people we'd be close to in real life.
So, does it matter?
It matters a little bit in that it's a great opportunity for teaching you about how to overcome a bad childhood.
So, let's look at some of these allegations.
I'm just going to read some of this.
Obviously, these are all allegations.
Kevin Spacey was raised by a Nazi father who raped his brother and abused his family so badly they nicknamed him The Creature, Spacey's older brother once sensationally claimed.
Allegations made by Spacey's brother Randall Fowler, who's 62, have resurfaced in the wake of an allegation of sexual misconduct against his younger brother that emerged recently.
And this actually was in 2004 this was talked about.
And his brother, who's four years older, made these claims about the brother's early home life under their father, whose name was Thomas Jeffrey Fowler.
This, he said to the Daily Mail in 2004.
He said there was so much darkness in her home, it was absolutely miserable.
Kevin tried to avoid what was going on, according to his older brother.
Their father joined the American Nazi Party when the brothers were children, trimming his mustache to more closely resemble Adolf Hitler.
Fowler, this is Kevin Spacey's older brother, says he was regularly whipped and raped by his father.
The abuse was so bad, Fowler alleged that he avoided having children of his own for fear that they would inherit the sexual predator gene.
So this interview was conducted after Spacey lodged, then dropped a police complaint about an incident that happened between he and another man at 4 a.m.
in a London park. Now, I don't mean to get all kinds of George Michael on this story, but basically Spacey said that he originally said the guy stole his phone and he was injured by running after him, and then it turned out that the reality was...
That he gave the guy his phone, the guy ran off and he fell for a con.
And Kevin Spacey said, I think they're always trying to, you know, say, what was he doing in that park at 4.30am?
My doggie had to go.
I don't know if that's an analogy or metaphor, but...
So in an interview after that headline-making incident, Fowler described his brother, Kevin Spacey, as an empty vessel who had never had a real relationship.
He said, neither of us had a chance growing up with two such damaged parents.
I went through three marriages and 40 affairs.
Fowler gave a harrowing account of the sexual abuse he claimed to have suffered at the hands of his father, who he said had pornographic pictures of men and women lining the walls of his home office.
Fowler said that when he was 12 years old, his father summoned him to a bedroom and said he was going to teach him about the birds and the bees.
He unbuttoned my pants and started playing with me, he alleged.
He yelled for his mother, Kathleen Fowler, who pounded on the locked door before giving up.
All of a sudden, this is the elder brother, all of a sudden the pounding stopped.
Mom had left.
I'd never felt so abandoned.
Dad started to perform a sex act on me.
That was the beginning of my adolescence, he said.
As the abuse continued, Fowler said Spacey, younger by four years, quote, tried to avoid what was going on by wrapping himself in an emotional bubble.
He became very sly and smart.
He was so determined to try and avoid the whippings that he just minded his P's and Q's until there was nothing inside.
He had no feelings.
Their father died in 1992 at the age of 68, and Fowler said his mother called him to tell him he didn't need to come to the funeral.
Nasty specimen. He had earlier confronted her in 1990 about her alleged complicity with the abuse, but was met with, and I quote, a stony silence.
She died in 2003.
I assume that's physically, spiritually.
It would have been much, much earlier.
So, this is obviously terrible and terrifying.
I can't help but wonder if...
The father had been a communist, whether this story would be coming out, but the fact is Nazism goes left and Nazism anyway.
So here's some interesting things about this.
First of all, it is the excuses.
Oh, there's a sexual predator gene.
It's genetic. He says he didn't have kids for fear of that.
There's lots of these kinds of excuses that you can see floating around that are powerful and indicative of how people try and deal with just these kinds of horrors and just these kinds of tragedies, right?
There was so much darkness in her home, that is, to disembody the evil that is manifested In the parents, the older brother talks about, my parents were damaged rather than evil.
And so here you can see it's genetic, it's a disembodied darkness, they're damaged.
That is very powerful stuff and that is to my mind why the abuse continues.
Listen, this is all my opinion.
I'm not a professional, but it's all my opinion.
You don't have to have a miserable life.
You don't have to repeat abuse.
You don't have to be tormented and tortured by abuse if you suffered abuse as a child.
You don't have to fear replication.
You don't have to fear re-offending.
You don't have to fear that you're some massive flesh cage for the dangerous id demon of explosive childhood reenactments.
You don't. I went through a brutal and violent childhood, most of which I've never even really talked about, but suffice to say it was nasty stuff as a whole.
I am a peaceful, gentle father whose daughter loves him enormously, who I love enormously, and I've never raised my voice at her, I've never hit her, I've never neglected her, I've never punished her.
There are consequences, which is different from punishment.
And it's a wonderful family life.
I have a wonderful, loving wife, been married for 15 years.
We stay together forever.
It's a wonderful, great life.
And I came from a tortured and violent and abused history.
It doesn't have to be this way.
And the question is, how do you break the cycle?
Now, philosophically and personally, I have some things to say about it, which I hope will be helpful.
I know they'll be helpful, but difficult, but difficult.
So... First of all, you need to identify the evil as a chosen action by the people in your family.
That's number one.
You have to specifically identify evil that resulted from free-will choices that your parents made.
Let's just talk about parental abuse.
Let's just say beatings.
This would apply to other things.
So if your parents beat, let's say it's your father.
If your father beat you, he chose to beat you, and he could have chosen to not beat you.
You say, oh, how do we know he could have chosen to not beat you?
Well, the question is, if he had been standing in front of a policeman, would he have beaten you?
If he'd been standing at a mall, if he'd been in church, if he'd been in some public place where negative repercussions could have accrued to him by beating you, if he had, you know, really gone to town and you pulled out his leather belt, beaten the hell out of you, right in front of a policeman, did he ever do that?
In general? Of course not.
I'm not talking about genuinely insane people, but just the people, because insanity is different from evil.
So if the abuse was hidden in your household, then your parents, your father in this case, had the perfect and absolute capacity to not abuse you.
Why? How do we know that? Because he didn't abuse you in public.
He didn't abuse you at a parent-teacher meeting.
Did he turn around and punch you in the head right in front of the teacher?
No. I bet you he was all kinds of civilized.
Maybe a couple of... Evil stink-eye glances about what awaited you when you got home.
But I bet you he was perfectly civilized in those kinds of situations.
And people wouldn't guess, wouldn't imagine, wouldn't know.
Would have no idea what he was capable of behind closed doors.
So when you can control your behavior...
In public, it means, guess what?
You can control your behavior, which means that unleashing your evil in private is a choice.
You are perfectly capable of not abusing, but you choose to abuse when you won't get caught.
And this is a fundamental defense, right?
If you say you're insane, then you should not Avoid trying to be caught.
But the moment you avoid trying to be caught, you're not insane, and therefore you are evil.
If you can control your own behavior, in public it means you don't have to abuse, you don't have to be an abuser, which means if you enact it in private, it's a perfect 100% free will, free choice, enactment of evil.
It is a self-indulgence.
That kind of abuse. Any kind of abuse.
Again, assuming that it was hidden.
So if it was not known to others, that means it is evil, not crazy.
Now, Kevin Spacey's childhood was monstrous, horrifying, and horrible.
I have no doubt whatsoever that Kevin Spacey's father's childhood was monstrous, horrible, and abusive.
So then we say, ah, well, but my father who beat me himself had a terrible childhood.
No.
No, it's not enough.
And here's the most dangerous thing.
If you make that excuse, what you're saying is a bad childhood means that you can be forgiven or it can be understandable or there's some justification for you being abusive as an adult.
Your father lives within you.
The child is the father of the man.
Your parents live within you.
We are not individuals.
We are what I call them ecosystem.
We are an ecosystem of competing perspectives, which is why we debate with ourselves, which is why we argue with ourselves, which is why people who do horrible things often hear parental voices yelling at them.
We have a competing ecosystem of personalities and perspectives in our minds.
We are not one thing.
It's like saying a jungle is one thing.
No, a jungle is an ecosystem and we are an ecosystem.
Our identity is complicated.
That's why people can write plays, because they have more than one person.
You go read Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey Into Night, a play that cost him so much emotionally that he demanded it never be performed until at least 10 years after his death about his morphine-addicted mother and his fame-addicted father.
Look at Tennessee Williams.
Writes A Streetcar Named Desire.
He's sitting... In a rented room, and he sees a streetcar rattling up and down the old quarter, and it has its destination written on the top, and one is Desire, and the other is Cemetery, and he rides a streetcar named Desire, and he says, I am Blanche Dubois.
But he was a gay man, so he's more of a caricature of femininity, and therefore so was Blanche Dubois, as was Stanley Kowalski, a parody or an exaggeration, a parody to some degree of masculinity.
So we are complicated.
Now... We also universalize.
Whatever rule we apply to our parents will be consciously or unconsciously applied to ourselves.
So if we say, well, our parents did bad things, but they themselves had bad childhoods, what you're saying is, if your parents abused you, if your father abused you in this case, then you're saying, well, I can do bad things in the future, but I had a bad childhood, so it's okay.
Or it's not as bad, or it's whatever, right?
See, this is giving yourself...
If you give your parents forgiveness, you give yourself permission.
You understand how this works?
And you cannot give yourself permission to reenact evil, to become evil.
There is no excuse. None whatsoever.
If you give no excuse to your parents, you give no excuse to yourself.
If you give free will to your parents, you get free will for yourself.
If you give evil to your parents, you get to drop the burden of evil yourself.
Somebody's got to hold it. If you say, well, they did the best they could with the knowledge they had, how is that falsifiable?
What's the null hypothesis for that hypothesis?
How could you disprove it?
It's impossible. So it's not a standard of ending.
It's a standard of forgiveness and self-erasure.
Because whatever you justify in terms of the evil your parents did to you, you are then punishing yourself for being angry about it.
Because anger, in the face of that which instead should be understood, is an irrational and immature response.
To get angry at the sky for raining is immature and it's ridiculous.
It's irrational. And so if your parents were nobly struggling under the burden of their own childhood and unfortunately lashed out against their better judgment and did the best they could and you should forgive, then the natural anger you have about being violated gets recast as immaturity and pettiness.
And you don't get a chance to use that anger to build healthy barriers and boundaries and choose better people in your life as an adult.
It's toxic. In my view, it's a toxic and destructive perspective.
If you forgive your parents, then you give yourself permission to reenact.
So you give them 100% free will.
You take away the excuse of their bad childhood.
What that does is it gives you 100% free will and choice and it takes away the excuse of your bad childhood.
You have to have high standards in order to improve and you can't have high standards for yourself and low standards for your parents.
That's just another form of abuse.
You understand? So you give them 100% responsibility and And they did evil to you, if this is what happened.
And this liberates you from the cycle of history.
This breaks the chain.
This breaks the cycle. This gives you a choice.
But you cannot take in your mind, in your heart, in your soul, you cannot take more choice than you are willing to give to your parents.
You cannot take more moral responsibility than you are willing to give to your parents.
It's impossible. Logically, it won't work.
It can't happen. And what this means, logically and emotionally, is that you sit down with your parents and you say, you did me wrong.
You were responsible and you did me wrong, and here's why.
And if they say, well, I don't remember, well, you have to trust your own memories and your own experience.
And you also have to say, was the excuse called, I don't remember, available to me when I was 6 or 7 or 8 or 10 years old or 12 or 14?
When I was a child, was it enough for me to say, if you thought I had done wrong, I didn't remember.
I don't remember. I forgot.
Now, if you, as a child, were not allowed that excuse but were punished anyway...
Because the parent remembered, well, that's interesting, isn't it?
You see, let's say that you were eight, and you forgot something.
You forgot what time it was, and you came home late.
Or you forgot you were supposed to pick up something, or you forgot about a particular rule, or you forgot.
Were you allowed to say, well, I should be forgiven because I forgot.
Or, I forgot, therefore, nothing negative should occur to me.
I have no responsibility because I just forgot.
Well if you weren't allowed that excuse as a child, then your parents can't be allowed that excuse as adults.
If your father, when he was 30, beat you when you were 8, despite your protestations that you forgot, but then, when he's 50, says, well, I forgot about beating you, therefore no negative repercussions should occur, then what he's saying is that an 8-year-old has higher moral standards and responsibility than a 30-year-old or a 50-year-old, because you will punish the 8-year-old for, I forgot, but the 30-year-old or the 50-year-old can make that magic...
Negative repercussion go away by saying, I forgot.
You cannot have higher moral standards for children than you have for adults.
No excuse That you were denied as a child can be claimed by your parents as adults.
You understand? Not one.
Because that is to say, well, an eight-year-old has a moral responsibility of ten, but a thirty-year-old or a fifty-year-old or a sixty-year-old has a moral responsibility of zero or one or two.
Come on. Come on.
Children have less moral responsibility than adults.
And so this is another thing.
You cannot Don't rationally offer any excuse to your parents that they denied to you as a child.
If they punished you despite protestations of innocence as a child, then they cannot claim, as a way of getting out of what they did, protestations of innocence as an adult.
I mean, they can, but you shouldn't accept it.
Because if you remember it, and they claim to forget, and of course claiming to forget is This is a Kevin Spacey debate.
I forget, I forget.
No. No, it's not enough.
So, sitting down and talking to your parents about the wrongs they did to you is important because you need to gauge, certainly you need to give them the opportunity to remember and to apologize and to give you the sweet relief, the sweet release of unburdening yourself.
And... It doesn't fix things, but it can give you some relief.
Now, if they withhold from you acknowledgement of the wrongs that they did, then the abuse continues.
Because if they deny the experience that you had of being abused, then they are further burdening you with unreality, with a feeling of craziness.
They are refusing to take the honorable burden of admitting that they did wrong to you.
And that is a continuation of the same abuse that happened as a child.
Abuse gets more sophisticated as parents age, you understand.
This is the great tipping point, particularly for boys, of the teenage years, right?
You get into your teens, you know, and suddenly your mom is not finger-wagging down, but she's finger-wagging up, right?
You punch down, you nag up.
That's the way it often works with moms in particular.
And so when you're little, when you're a little boy, a little girl, then often the abuse is very physical, beatings and so on.
When you get older and when you get bigger, oh, looky la!
The moment you get to be close in size or have outside contacts, outside friends, the moment that you're big enough to fight back, to flee, or to get help, look at that!
Isn't that amazing?
Your parents magically gained the ability to stop beating you.
Wow! What a remarkable coincidence.
I mean, this is another reason why you know it's all manipulative, and this is another reason why you know, if this happened to you, that they have 100% responsibility.
You know, if someone has epilepsy, they can't stop.
They'll have epilepsy in front of a cop, they'll have epilepsy on a plane, they'll have epilepsy while dancing in the rain.
But if people can't control their behavior, if they hit you when you're small and don't hit you when you're big, then they have the capacity to not hit you when you were small.
Why? Because they have the capacity to not hit you.
So you have to give them 100% moral responsibility, 100% free will, which means that what they did was evil.
Now, that builds a barrier between you and evil.
That is unacceptable.
You had perfect choice.
You chose to do evil.
By granting free will, you take free will.
You cannot have more free will or moral responsibility than you are willing to grant to those around you.
Otherwise you're making yourself an exception.
Well, they're not responsible, but I'm responsible.
They weren't responsible for what they did as adults, but I'm responsible for what I do as an adult.
They have the excuse of a bad childhood, but I don't have the excuse of a bad childhood.
That will make you crazy.
Because you're splitting human beings into two opposing categories.
Those who have moral responsibility and 100% responsible, and those who are mere machineries of history, mere robots programmed by the past to act out and blah, blah, blah, right?
It's not justifiable.
People are people. Human beings are human beings.
You have moral responsibility as a human being or you don't.
And unless they were genetically or generally or provably insane, which you still are going to have trauma and, of course, this radiates out, right?
Let's say your parents were insane.
Well, there were those around who knew it and what did they do?
Because the immorality is not just specific to your parents.
If this is what happened, the immorality spreads out in waves, in waves.
To everyone around who knew extended family, priests, teachers.
Who knows who? All the people who had reason to believe or knew that you could be mistreated.
All the people you did not talk about being mistreated with.
All the people you did not connect with or approach talking about being mistreated with.
Did they not want to know?
Did they not ask? Did they not move heaven and earth to find out because everyone wanted to protect their kids?
Because if you provide circumstantial, genetic, they did the best they could, they had bad childhoods, if you provide all of these excuses to your parents, then you provide them to everyone, and then you have no defense against immorality.
Because you can't judge anything as immoral because you've just made it a whole series of historical dominoes.
Bing, bing, bing, they fell. It's like an asteroid hitting your backyard.
You don't think that God's targeting you.
It's just an accident. It's just what happens.
Just machinery in motion. Just matter and energy rolling its way through its inevitable and predetermined course in the universe.
You can't then trust yourself to do different.
Because whatever you ascribe to others, you also ascribe to yourselves.
As the old saying goes, Lord of the Flies, a spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.
Whatever you put into others, you put into yourself.
Whatever standards you lower for others, you lower for yourself, which means you can't trust yourself.
You don't have a clear demarcation between acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
You won't give yourself 100% free will if you strip free will from others.
You won't give yourself 100% moral responsibility if you ascribe less moral responsibility to others, because we're all human.
We can't deny that fact.
You can't just create these magical separate categories deep down in your mind, which is why If this has not been dealt with, if the evils of the father have not been addressed, and, in this case, the evils of the mother.
And I know, people get upset when I talk about this.
I'm afraid that's why I talk about it.
You're getting a massage for sore back.
You kind of want them to work the path that's sore because that's what needs to get better.
And... The mom chose the father and the mom, if these claims are true, who'll know?
She's dead. He's dead.
But the mom chose the father and chose to stay with the father and chose to have children with the father and pounded on the door when the father was about to rape the 12-year-old boy and then walked away and stayed with him.
And you can see the little verbal dig at the end of her life.
So the father dies. Mom calls up the son who the father raped and said, you don't have to bother coming to the funeral.
That is venomous. That is nasty.
And yet, still, of course, many people will view her as a victim.
No. No.
100% moral agency for everyone.
It's like that Oprah show, you get a car, you get free will, you get free will, everybody gets free will, because that way you can choose your future.
You can plot your course, you can make it different, you have something to avoid, something to recoil from.
When you place 100% moral responsibility in the category of evil on people, you recoil from them.
You move away from them.
Now the question is, what if they do apologize and try and make restitution?
My particular perspective and opinion, this is an individual basis thing.
It didn't happen with me, but I will say this, that there's a sort of rule of thumb that says you need seven times the good for every bad.
Like if you have a bad day with your wife, you need seven good days just to kind of break even.
So, you know, if you had 20 bad years with your parents, by that rule of thumb, you'd need 140 perfect years with your parents to even it out, even if we don't count the fact that first impressions tend to be just a little bit more lasting than later ones.
Restitution generally occurs when you can be made whole, right?
So, if someone It breaks a garden gnome in your front yard.
They can go on eBay, they can buy the garden gnome, they can put it in and then you've been made whole to some degree.
I mean, mine is sentimental value and so on, but at least you have the garden gnome back.
I remember once I was dating a woman and she lent me her treasured copy of The Princess Bride and I left it on the subway.
Oh, it's terrible. And what I did was I scoured all the used bookstores that I could find until I found the same year and I, you know, apologized and gave it back to her and she was fine with it because obviously I'd done what I could.
I mean, I made a mistake. I got her the copy of The Princess Bride back, the book, and that's the best that I could do.
So the question, of course, when it comes to...
Restitution is when you are not either glad or sad that something happened.
But you're kind of neutral.
Right? So if someone takes a garden gnome from you and then gives you back a garden gnome, maybe throws in a gift certificate or coupon or something to make up for the upset and the time that you spent...
Then you're like, okay, I'm not glad that it happened, but I'm okay that it happened.
That's restitution, and that's when you can forgive someone.
Forgiveness is something that's earned.
It's not something you will. It's not something you push out of yourself like toothpaste out of a tube.
Other people have to elicit it from you through their positive actions.
It's like love. You don't force love.
You don't force forgiveness. It's not something you will, and it's not something that you are good for providing if the person hasn't earned it.
Forgiveness must be earned. It's an emotional state that you passively wait and see, how do I feel about this?
Passive with love. I don't force myself to love someone.
How do I feel about this person? Love or indifference or not good.
And so restitution is when you're, you know, if somebody breaks your garden dome and then offers you a million dollars, you're glad that that person broke your garden dome, right?
Yay! That's too much.
Too much, right? So restitution is when you're...
It's fine.
It's fine. Let's put it in the past.
It's fine. It's not great.
It's not bad. I'm at the tipping point of it's okay.
So that, of course, is the question.
Can restitution be provided for an abused past?
Well, if your parent...
Breaks your toy and then buys you another toy and takes you out to a restaurant that you love and says sorry, you're kind of okay.
There's restitution, right?
If your parent or your spouse snaps at you and it's like, oh, I'm so sorry, and you figure out what happened, and you then...
I've actually, I mean, I had conflicts with people in my life where I'm actually happy that the conflict occurred because it gave us great progress and great knowledge, wisdom, understanding.
It made us more secure that it wasn't going to happen again, and rightly so.
So restitution is when you're okay.
Is restitution possible for certain crimes?
I don't mean should it be pursued, or can it have any kind of benefit, but is it really possible?
Let's say someone drives over, some drunk driver drives over your beloved dog.
Is restitution really possible?
Will anything occur? We say, yeah, I'm okay that that happened.
Somebody beats you for 10 years in your childhood.
What could they do that you say, yeah, I'm okay, I'm good with that now, it's fine.
It's, you know... This is why you don't continue to do wrong to people, because at some point you go over what you can recover from.
At some point you just go right over that cliff, you go right over that waterfall and you can't come back up.
This is why you have to, when you do something wrong to someone, you kind of have to freak out and you really have to correct it right away.
You know, you walk a mile in the wrong direction, it just takes extra time to go back to the right.
But if you do wrong to someone day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, at some point you've passed the event horizon of restitution.
Because nothing that you can do will make it okay.
Let's say the father was still alive.
Let's say the mother was still alive of the Spacey family.
What could they do at this point?
Kevin Spacey is 58.
His brother is 62. What could they do after this lifetime?
What could they do where the brothers would say, yeah, we're okay with it now.
Yeah, you know, it's evened out.
Guy didn't even have kids.
Terrified because he misidentified the cause.
So these are all of the challenges and the dangers.
Forgiveness for parents, forgiveness for evil is permission for yourself.
And don't do that much wrong to people.
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