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March 5, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:21
4020 Western Civilization's Butterfly Effect | Stefan Molyneux at 'A Night For Freedom, DC'
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I'm not a big one for explaining myself, but tonight I'm going to do that.
Because there has been some questions, confusion, curiosity about why I do what I do in the way that I do it.
So, to go back and to explain sort of why I do what I do.
In my late teens, I was an annoyingly precocious kid, as you can imagine.
In my late teens, early 20s, I read a lot of Freud.
And believed a lot of Freud, as one did back in the day.
And then I actually started learning more about Freud.
Now, why are we talking about Freud?
The reason we're talking about Freud is because I really want to reinforce for everyone here That this is a movement where everybody's choice really, really, really matters.
What you do with your day, what you do with your conflicts, what you do with your precious, short, biodegradable time on this planet really matters.
And I want to give you a case here that is really shocking, but I think very powerful, about one man's decision and the effect that it had on Western civilization as a whole, because it helps reinforce why the decisions that we make are so important.
So, anybody know a crazy person?
Anybody think they're currently looking at a crazy person?
Yeah, all right. Fair enough.
That's why they wanted selfies.
Right before he snaps, I got the last picture before he went mad.
So, Craziness, insanity has been a huge problem, of course, throughout most of human civilization.
Now, Freud had his argument, since civilization and its discontents, he said, you know, we've got this artificial, we've got this primal savage nature, and we've got these artificial constraints of civilization, and cities, and oh, be nice, and cross your legs when you sit, and all that kind of crap, and that makes us feral.
I don't know why, but that's the argument.
And...
Tough crowd.
I thought New York people were nicer, but all right.
Don't be less nice than New York people.
So yeah, now I want to go back to the studio because that was easy.
Although sometimes my hand puppets do hackle me horrendously.
So, yeah, craziness has been a big problem.
And does anybody know how insanity was generally answered through most of human history?
What do they say? Demons, absolutely.
Demons, devils, temptation, sin, possession.
This is how they explained it.
This is how they explained things like epilepsy and hearing voices and all of that kind of stuff.
Now, after Darwin in the mid...
19th century you got a more secular view of life, right?
So there was of course Freud who trained as a physician and was a rampant insane coke addict.
I mean like I don't know if you guys know this about Freud but I mean he basically had three nostrils by the time he was 30.
Like it was insane.
I mean I think he would have just injected it straight into his gums if he could but he just was a complete coke fiend and People would send women in particular to him because there was something called hysteria.
Do you guys know like? Hysteria, right?
Do you know where the word like hysterectomy, like it's to do with female reproductive organs, which apparently I think are in my belly.
My wife is not happy.
But anyway, so they would send these women, and these women had like crazy somatic symptoms, which means that they had some disturbed thinking, which translated into something weird with their bodies, right?
So there would be women whose eyes could function, the pupils would delay, but they said they couldn't see anything.
There was a woman who had a terrible stutter and a speech impediment.
It had eczema just around her mouth.
Other women had, like, their arms were completely numb and they couldn't feel anything.
Like, you could stick a pin in.
And nobody knew what the heck was going on.
And they would send these people to Freud and science was still pretty primitive back then.
And he would talk to them and he would...
This is where sort of psychoanalysis came from.
So he talked to these women.
And a pattern began to emerge as to what might be going on with these women.
The pattern that began to emerge was that they reported being sexually abused as children.
Everyone. Every single one of them.
And sometimes the abuse was highly correlated to the manifestation of the disturbance in the body.
So the woman who had the eczema around her mouth and a terrible speech impediment, she claimed to have been forced to orally rape her father, or however that works.
Her father forced her to perform oral sex.
And Freud, he was a terrible doctor, like all around, like horrible.
He didn't like the sight of blood.
He felt queasy with bodily fluids.
And one of the things that, like Darwin was the same way.
Darwin, when he was younger, went to see an operation of a child, a bowel operation prior to anesthetic.
And he was like, I've got to go on the Beagle, like I've got to sail around the world just to get away from that memory.
And Freud as well would go to the dissection of murdered people and sometimes would see children who had been raped to death.
And so he knew that this was going on in society.
And he was kind of open to listening to this problem.
And he was an atheist, of course, so he couldn't say, well, it's demonic possession.
So he had to ask questions if he was going to get to the bottom of it.
He couldn't do anything from a physical standpoint because the body was working.
So he asked them.
And he got the same story over and over and over again.
And it's the same thing.
I've had a guy on my show, a Canadian doctor named Gabor Maté.
He treats drug addicts in Vancouver, in a very tough area of Vancouver.
And he's found the same pattern.
100% of the female drug addicts were sexually abused as children.
100%. And they say, heroin, it feels like a warm hug.
And... I think if you look at someone like Freud, I've heard stories that both he and Jung were sexually abused as children.
It seems to be a bit of a pattern.
And when you have a lot of trauma as a child, your dopamine system gets all messed up and you end up with less mood stabilizers and so on.
And then what happens is cocaine moves you to a normal state.
And then what happens is you crash even further, but now you know what it's like to be normal, so...
You feel even worse.
Now, Freud was incredibly excited by this because this question of madness that had been terribly answered by religion, he had the answer.
He felt, I now know what is the cause of hysteria.
And he began to write about it.
And he began to speak about it.
And it was, I think, 1898 or something like that, that he gave his first big presentation about the etiology, the source of hysteria.
There have been a few people in human history who have confidently strode into the public square and said, I found something that's damaging to children.
Everyone's going to cheer me!
Arrows, arrows, arrows, arrows.
And this theory, which he had a lot of evidence for, implicated of course a lot of people in the Viennese upper middle class society in which he moved.
In fact, there's strong biographical evidence that his best friend of 15 years that he was confiding this theory and developing this theory with was himself a pedophile.
So what happened was he was very enthusiastic because he had solved one of the great riddles of the ages.
More important than whether the Sun or the Earth is the center of the solar system, a very powerful foundational revelation about where dysfunction in society comes from.
And any guesses as to how it went for him?
Questions? I think we had the director for the movie earlier tonight.
It did not go well.
Virtually unanimously, his contemporary society turned on him.
and attacked him and threatened his income and threatened to destroy him and these are just the public threats that we know about who knows you know how many horses heads he woke up next to or weird things in his mailbox or whatever so and he was the provider for his kids and and his wife didn't work and well worked at home and so he had this this choice he had this problem I have identified I believe the source of somaticization of Hysteria of madness,
perhaps. It's incredible.
Madness is a huge plague in society.
It's one of the reasons we're here, right?
But if he continued down this path, he feared for his life.
He feared for his income.
He certainly feared for his career.
And he'd come from a relatively poor family, and he said, second to cocaine, money is my drug.
So what do you do? That's a horrible decision to have to make.
Do I continue on with the protection for children?
Do I continue on to peel back this lid of hell itself that goes on in these families?
He couldn't undo the information he'd provided.
So simply saying, oh, I was wrong.
Because he was actually really, really bad at covering up his case studies.
Like he would write about Madam X, who has a mole here, and who has a limp, and who lives on this street.
But you know, I'm going to keep her anonymous.
So everybody knew. So he couldn't undo the information.
And he could not continue with the revelation of what he had found.
Does anybody know what he did?
What he did? Like all good scientists, is he went to a Greek myth.
Because, you know, nothing spells science like a Greek myth, right?
So he said, wow, you know, that story of Oedipus.
That's some good stuff, man.
Maybe I could work with that. A lot of death threats, probably.
So... Yeah, I know.
It's not that they were actually assaulted sexually by their parents.
It's that they wanted to be.
And they fantasized about it.
And it's a kind of wish fulfillment.
Like Oedipus. Yeah!
That's my proof! Oedipus!
Oedipus, you know, the story accidentally killed his father and married his mother.
I think his last name was Kardashian.
I'm not sure. You guys would know that.
You're a younger generation often, so.
So he says this is where the root of the oedipus complex, the electro complex and so on comes from.
Because he kept hearing these stories and more and more people began to hear these stories.
So you couldn't just wish them away because other psychoanalysts in the budding field were asking their patients and hearing these stories.
Couldn't wish it away. Couldn't wish it away.
So he had to turn it into fantasy.
This had to be universal because it was being talked about so much in therapy.
And so, he said, it's a primitive wish that is common to all people to castrate or kill the father, to marry and sleep with the mother and, you know, because Oedipus.
I mean, it's science.
Still beats global warming.
Anyway. Now, this was an astonishing decision.
And the ramifications of this decision I think it's almost impossible to overemphasize.
Because this was the first time in human history when this issue had come up to the surface for people to listen to and talk about.
First time in human history.
Because before, it's the demons.
It's Satan. It's, you know, the abusive parents could wish it away, could will it away.
They had a scapegoat, right?
The ghost dude with the...
It's him. Now, in an increasingly secular society, that was not as believable, so...
It had to be universal, which is why it became...
Everybody has this fantasy.
Because it was so common in the upper middle class offices of these therapists.
Now, what this did, of course, is it switched the victim to the perpetrator.
It switched. Right?
Because... If the parent is sexually abusing the child, then the parent is the criminal and the child is the victim, obviously, morally.
But if the child comes to an analyst and says, this happened, but the child is wrong, or the adult is wrong when recounting a childhood experience, then the child is now a false accuser and the parent is the victim.
So that is a huge switch in society.
There's a huge switch in morality.
And that had enormous implications because we can...
Wouldn't it be great if this fight had happened over a hundred years ago?
You know, and we wouldn't have to...
You know this stuff, right?
Like the Haiti thing. We've got the UN has like, what, 50,000 rapes over the past little while.
There are various children's charities who covered up.
There's the Catholic Church and other churches.
Government schools! By God above, government schools are horrendous pits of sexual abuse.
Far worse, multiple times worse than anything that happened in the Catholic Church.
And we heard from the documentarian with his movie about how common and prevalent this still is.
And if you look up the statistics, it's hard to fathom.
It's hard to fathom. So, the children...
They had finally got a voice. They had finally been able to talk as adults about the crimes that had been committed against them.
And Freud listened and then betrayed them.
And delivered them under the hands of their abusers.
And delivered the next generation and the next generation.
Because it's a cycle.
Not always, but often.
Now, Imagine this.
This is why I think this is important.
And this is a moral decision that he made, whether he was going to stand up for victims of child abuse or he was going to fold under the pressure and betray them again.
If you're a child, you have to be very sensitive to the question of hypocrisy, particularly moral hypocrisy in your society.
This is the problem that people who speak for freedom have.
We start speaking for freedom and people get kind of jumpy, right?
And it's not just because they disagree with us.
It's because there used to be an old tactic.
You guys know, have you ever heard the phrase from Communist China?
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Have you ever heard that one? It was under Mao.
It was in the 60s, right? So Mao was having trouble finding enough people to kill because a lot of people in China, but by then there were a lot fewer people in China.
And so he's like, you know, I think we've been way too restrictive on this speech stuff.
You know, we're going to coax you out.
You know, it's fine. You know, we'll trail the breadcrumbs from you to a microphone.
Come, we wish to be criticized as the Communist Party.
We really, really wish to hear what you have to say because, you know, some of you may be discontent.
So, you know, come on up here. And so people were like, I don't know, man.
It's a trap. Like, I don't know if...
I don't know if this is like, I really do want to speak out against communism, but I'm like the last guy in my village, so I don't know if I should.
And Mao was like, no, seriously, dude, step right up, you know, we'd love to hear it.
And eventually, of course, people did.
He seemed sincere. He's, I like that tooth he's got, you know, it's black, but fetching.
And so they were like, yeah, okay, I'm going to Why did they do it?
The guy comes up to you in the medieval bar and says, I hate the king, don't you hate the king?
And you're like, no, yes, no, I don't know.
Who are you? So coaxing people into speaking treason was an old pattern of those in authority, right?
You speak out against the church, speak out against God, boom!
Speak out against the king, boom!
You're gone, you're dungeoned, right?
And so kids, kids don't mind it.
They don't like it, but they don't mind it if the society says, you know, kids are just tools, they're utilities, they're there to serve their elders, and there's no hypocrisy in that.
It's not nice. But there's no hypocrisy, but when you have a society that says, our children are everything, we love our children, the children are the future, and at the same time, cover up a lot of child rape, you've got a dangerous situation.
Moral hypocrisy is really, really dangerous, and kids are very good at figuring it out.
We have the great challenge as a movement of delegitimizing existing authority, because existing authority It's where people run to for protection, for security, for safety, for stability, for all of this stuff that they thirst for, that we all thirst for.
I was talking with a fine young lady earlier tonight about the shooting in Florida, the Nicholas Cruz shooting.
I mean, I won't even run through the whole list.
We all know it. You've got 39 calls the cops taken to this guy's house.
You've got the 20 calls to the authorities saying this guy's insane.
He wants to kill people. He's gathering weapons.
You've got the kid cutting himself on Instagram.
He's posting, I want to be a professional school shooter.
I want to do what the...
Clock Tower Shooter in 66 in Texas did.
You've got to 13-minute calls to the FBI, people saying he's amassing weapons, he wants to kill people.
You've got the parents calling in saying he's held guns to people's head, he says he wants to kill people.
This is not fucking Sherlock Holmes, people.
This is not, well, we're not psychic.
How could we know? So, what does it mean?
It's a code for death.
And so you have people saying, well, so we've got to take people's guns away because the police won't do their job.
So the police won't do their job, so only the police should have guns.
Anyway, speaking of insanity, I don't know what happened to these people as kids.
So if you have a society...
That has moral authority in their structures, right?
In the church, in the community, in the synagogue, in the government, to the police, you have to believe in that moral authority.
Now, I will submit to you that if there is a culture of child abuse, I'm not just talking sexual abuse, but if the culture of child abuse that is condoned and covered up by existing institutions, They're going to lose moral authority.
Not just lose it, it's going to become negative.
Now that's the big challenge we have, right?
How do you delegitimize institutions which people think are both good and necessary?
So that, like we say, let's go be free, and we know what it looks like, it's a beautiful place, but they think it's like, go hike in the desert with no water, good luck.
Like they feel that you need the water, you need the compass, you need the camel, you need direction.
The reason why It is so hard to fight for the protection of children.
Of course, there are a lot of people out there exploiting children.
Again, it's financial exploitation of children that the children are economic assets to be borrowed against to bribe voters.
Like, you know, our society cares so much about the children, that's why they're born $1.7 million in debt and unfunded liabilities, because we love them.
We do, but we love debt more, so sorry.
It's a wild thing about the world, just by the by.
For every single man, woman and child alive on this planet at the moment, they're in debt $30,000.
We have had a hundred years almost of converting debt into human beings, of converting numbers typed into a computer into living, breathing human beings.
Fiat currency into flesh and blood.
We have been converting debt into people for a hundred years.
And when the debt is unsustainable, this is why it's so cruel.
When the debt is unsustainable, the people sadly, a lot of them will be unsustainable because you can't go into debt forever.
So, if a hundred years ago, if Freud had made a different decision, this is why these decisions that we make individually to individuals are so important.
If Freud had made a different decision, If he'd have said, no, I'm going to stand with this.
I'm not going to betray my patience.
I'm going to affirm my Hippocratic Oath.
I'm going to affirm my integrity.
I'm going to affirm what I actually know, what the data is.
He would have faced a lot of blowback.
Of course, he was facing a lot of blowback.
But if he'd made a different decision...
I want to give you a scenario.
Let me know what you think. It's 1914 and for the last 20 years, let's say, society has been wracked by these accusations and counter accusations of sexual abuse and the horrifying things done to children and so on.
Like the Me Too movement but on total steroids because it's the first time ever and they don't have a counter effect.
They've been, you know, the pedophiles around have been running the show, it seems, for a long time in a lot of different places.
And society has been unearthing this stuff from the mid-1890s to 1914.
It's almost 20 years. Do we not think that the existing political structures would have been delegitimized just a little bit by that process?
Because it's not like everyone up there is a pedophile, but if the moral instructors of mankind don't even notice that the guy next to them is a pedophile, who the hell are they to tell us what to do?
So it's not just the pedophiles and the child rapists and so on, it is the people around them.
Because either you know, in which case you're complicit, or you don't know, in which case you have no moral authority.
Because you can't tell other people how to live if you can't even figure out that the guy next to you is a pedophile, if you have no idea.
So this is why this issue is so sensitive.
This is why what Freud did altered, I believe, the course of Western history.
Because it's 1914, and you've had 20 years of the undermining of the moral authority of both secular and ecclesiastical institutions throughout the Western world.
Maybe more than the Western world.
And then, Ferdinand de Skilt, 1914.
You don't believe in the moral authority of these institutions.
Because they've been revealed to be hotbeds of pedophilia, of child abuse, and all of the claims of, I didn't know.
It doesn't matter. I mean, it matters morally, but as far as the credibility of the institution morally, it doesn't matter at all.
And then they say, we need you to go to war.
Now. Strap them up!
Load them up on the ships. We've got to send them off to France.
You've got to fight a war for us.
What do you think people would have said?
Oh, we'll fight a war.
And you will be involved.
So imagine. Imagine this.
If Freud had made one different decision on that day.
We all know what the First World War did.
The First World War wiped out virtually all of the economic gains of the Industrial Revolution.
The First World War killed 10 million, mostly men.
The First World War killed another 20 million in the Spanish flu as the troops were returning home.
The First World War elevated Freudianism to a position of prominence because they had all this shell shock, right?
They had these PTSD because wars didn't go on that long in human history.
You had like 20, maybe 200 or 500 knights out there in the middle of nowhere whacking each other with swords and then everybody just decided from there.
But this war that ground on and on and on with tanks and bombs and mustard gas and shellings that went on for months People were shell-shocked and two thinkers became prominent out of that shell-shock because they couldn't figure out the reason they called it shell-shock because they thought the brain had been damaged like NFL style by these bombs going off.
But it wasn't shell-shock and Freud was able to do something to explain it and Nietzsche, of course, was quite powerful in helping to explain that.
If you don't have the First World War, you don't have communism in Russia.
We all know communism ended up in Russia because America entered into the war, which meant that the Germans had to stop fighting a two-front war, which meant they had to take Russia out of the war immediately, which meant that they funded communists to go into Russia and take over.
No First World War, no communism.
Gold standard. We still have a gold standard.
We still have private currencies.
That direction would have probably continued.
No Treaty of Versailles.
No massive war reparations.
And then if you have no massive war reparations, there's no need for hyperinflation in Germany under the Weimar Republic.
No hyperinflation, no destruction of the middle class, no Hitler, no vengeance, no Second World War, no Cold War.
It would have been an incredible century, I believe.
And I see that very clearly.
I'm not saying I'm right, I'm just saying...
I could see it like, whoa, the dragon, right?
But I can see it really clearly, and I think that's a good case to be made for it.
One guy makes a decision.
Nobody goes to war for pedophiles to defend that system.
No one does it.
And without the First World War, you don't have the 20th century that we had.
A quarter million people, a quarter of a billion people killed by their own governments outside of war.
A hundred million dead through communism.
One man's decision.
If we had tackled the issue of child exploitation, of child abuse, of sexual abuse over a hundred years ago, we wouldn't have to be tackling it now, as we have to, it seems, again and again and again, because this stuff erupts, and then it goes into the memory hole, right?
It erupts, and then it goes into the memory hole.
Oh, we've dealt with it. Oh, you know, we got the guy, and off it goes.
Now that is a powerful thing.
One person's moral decision.
I don't know about you guys. I mean, when I was thinking about this, I was thinking about looking at my own life.
And if you look inwards, your own life, your own history, has there been a chance or a choice that you've made that with what you know now, and hindsight is 20-20, you look back and you say, ooh, I don't know.
You're 100%. Yeah, I mean, if it was a call-in show, I'd ask you that.
But... That's how important the decisions we make every day are.
Because it wasn't just Freud's decision.
The point I'm trying to make is not just Freud's decision.
If how many people had stood up to stand with Freud for the children, for what he had heard about, for all of the horrors that he'd experienced in his listening to the tales of this abuse, if people had stood up, maybe it would say, oh, Freud, bad guy, bad guy.
Okay, maybe, yeah, but...
What if enough people had stood up and say, man, you ever done this with a friend?
Like, they're faltering, they're faltering.
Or you do it with yourself sometimes, right?
You're faltering, you're faltering. What do they say in that movie?
Tits up, man. Tits up. Works better for women.
But anyway, I'm over 50.
I'm getting there. But if you stand up for someone, you don't know where it might lead.
If 20 people had stood up for Freud, Would he have made a different decision?
I think he would have. So it's not just whether the decision falls into your lap.
It's who do you know who has the power to bring this kind of illumination to the world?
Will they listen to you?
Can you give them that tits-up speech that has them stand up and say, I will do this.
I will stay with what I know to be true.
I will listen and sympathize.
I will listen to Jesus who said, whatever you do to the least among me, thus you also do to me.
And my purpose in talking about this, it is an inverted pyramid and it's a hell of a case.
I'm not sure I'd want to prosecute it in front of The Supreme Court, but I think that there is an interesting case to be made and a powerful case to be made to really review where you are in life.
I mean, I do this perhaps obsessively, but really review where you are in life.
Who can you support? Mike and I, we talk about this.
You know, who's out there? Who can we help promote?
Who can we defend? What community can we bring together?
This is why I like what Mike is doing.
He's bringing people into the same room.
Don't let this end. Talk to each other.
Exchange information. Stay in touch.
You need support. If Freud had been supported, literally 400 million people might still be alive today.
The entire course of Western history could have been radically different.
Those decisions are very important and because we're all intelligent and active in the world, we all have people in our lives or things in our lives that we need to really review and stand up for.
And I'm trying to make a case.
And you could pick a lot of different things in history.
This is just the one that came to me.
And I read this whole story when I was in my early 20s.
30 years ago now. 30 years ago.
Let me tell you something.
I was nobody back then, as far as the public went.
And I remember very clearly Sitting in my little Raskolnikov style dorm room reading all of this and I was really appalled like what a horrible betrayal of People who were courageous enough to finally speak the truth after how many thousands of years of what children have gone through and I remember thinking I don't know I'm getting this deja vu even just thinking about this because I said I don't know how I'm gonna end up with a microphone standing in New York and I don't know how it's gonna happen but I know I have a lot to offer.
I know I have a lot of good ideas and I've been pretty good at communicating them.
And I remember thinking if I ever get that opportunity, is that me?
If I ever get that opportunity to speak to the world And if it comes into my knowledge and it comes into my orbit mentally, that people say to me that they have suffered, I will learn from Freud.
And I will never, ever back down from supporting those who have been so egregiously and horrifyingly wronged.
Well, I'd love to go back in time and slap some sense into that coke-addled lunatic's head, but given that the time machine is probably the next version of the iPhone, I can't.
But I did, because people say, well, why do you talk about this family stuff, the personal stuff, and why, you know?
Because 30 years ago, I read the story And I said, if I ever have the opportunity and the public voice to listen and to support people who've been wronged, that is a powerful political action.
Because if you support those who've been wronged, you begin to erode people's faith in all of the wrong institutions that have shielded them.
This is part of the horrifying and horrible opportunity to talk about what happened in Florida.
This was a systemic failure, if you want to call it that.
I mean, calling this a systemic failure is like saying, well, we should just try and make Soviet factories more productive, because it's just the nature of the incentives and all of that.
But I will not ever back down.
There have been times when it's been tempting, you know, when people have really, like with Freud, you know, he starts talking about this stuff and people really went for him.
And when I started supporting people publicly about their experiences as children, people went for me significantly.
Big institutions, big media outlets and so on went for me.
And it was tough, you know, because part of me is like, yeah, it's not my job.
I'm not a professional. But what gave me the strength to just keep doing it and stand up and fight back even harder is like, no, no, no, no, no.
I've seen what happens when you betray the honesty and the intimacy and the openness of people who are talking about things that are very difficult to talk about.
And don't we all do this, like we have stuff in our lives that's tough about and we start talking about it with people and we're just waiting for them to go...
You know, in some subtle way, they're like, oh, yeah, but the weather has been...
That's interesting, but sports and...
And so when we, you know, we all have tough stuff in our lives, good and bad, and we're looking for someone to just listen.
Just listen and talk back and be honest about what happened.
That is such a powerful thing to do.
You know, the left is right about some things for sure.
The personal is the political.
We can't end the Fed. We can't stop military escalations.
Nobody can stand in front of the trucks sending hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons to the Saudis.
We can't do it. I mean, we could, but it wouldn't last very long.
So we can't do that, but we can do, I think, the root cause issues.
We can listen to the root cause issues and stand up and have these important conversations about the good and bad of our histories and the good and bad of the histories of the people around us.
It's a very powerful thing to do.
The more honest we are about how badly society treats children, and it's the one prejudice and bias you never hear about.
Racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, you don't hear about childism, which is the treating of children as less than human.
I can't take out a giant loan on my Muslim neighbor's mosque.
You know, but children who aren't even glimmers in their daddy's eyes, we can use them as collateral, and we can stuff them in terrible schools, and we can drug them if they don't comply, and we can hit them, as we so often do.
The people who are most deserving of society's protections are the ones who are exploited and hit and drugged the most.
If we can't fix that, I don't think we can fix anything.
And that, fortunately, is what we have the most power to affect in our lives.
And I just want to just close with that and also to say thank you so much to everyone who's been coming up and chatting.
It's a huge delight for me. Tell me more about how you're raising your children well.
That makes everything over the last 30 years worthwhile.
Thank you so much, everyone.
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