April 2, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:28:16
4044 0% Responsibility, 100% Trouble - Call In Show - March 28th, 2018
Question 1: [1:17] – “I went to public school as a kid and recall absolutely hating it. I was diagnosed with ADHD and took medication to mitigate the condition. I still got good grades but remember it being a chore and do not have any positive feelings about it. I only had one teacher that encouraged thinking, new ideas, and creativity. Then I went to college where it was pretty obvious what type of thinking they wanted. I went along with it because I wanted the grade. As a father, I think about what effect public schools will have on my children. Was my willingness to go along instead of thinking for myself a result of the schooling I had? Or was it just my personality and laziness?”Question 2: [40:33] – “In a recent debate, you had mentioned that the level of consciousness that animals possess is essentially worthless in the level of debate that take part in with one another. Would this viewpoint change in cases where an animal's ability to detect and draw relevant conclusions from certain types of information far surpass that of humans?”Question 3: [56:48] – “Reason and logic combined with science, technology and the western ideals of freedom appear to inevitably lead to ‘modern’ social changes that threaten to destroy civilizations. The mechanism of destruction is vast wealth, power and success which allows us to absorb foolish social decisions until our beloved Western societies are destroyed after an inevitable ‘point of no return.’ Can we balance the positives of reason and logic against the negative social impact of techno-freedom or are the products of modern ‘rationality’ far too dangerous for to be left uncontained? Can Western civilization survive its own success?”Question 4: [1:35:25] – “I hear you talk about the importance of committed marriage and how important it is for the healthy development of children, and I have also deeply valued this, remaining in a very difficult marriage in hopes of providing the best possible outcome for the children. However, I have also heard you speak to irreparable damage that can be done in a relationship and wonder if my marriage has reached that point. My husband has an ACE score of 8 and mine is a 1. In our marriage there have been many challenging issues, most of which I think relate to deeply entrenched unhealthy relational habits that began in childhood for him, as a result of the abuses and traumas he experienced. I also believe this unhealed trauma in his life has been at the root of a pornography addiction that started at a young age for him and, despite counseling and recovery programs, continues still. Is it possible that it could actually be better (or neutral) for the children for us to separate or divorce if I am finding that I cannot see a way forward for him to repair the damage he has caused in our marriage for over two decades?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
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So, yeah, quite a couple of great callers tonight.
A guy who was put on ADHD drugs when he was a kid and hates school wanted to talk about that, which was great.
The second caller wanted to know why I thought animals were worthless.
In debates.
Very interesting way to put it. We had a good conversation about that.
And the third caller wanted to know, can we balance the positives of reason and logic against the negative social impact of techno-freedom?
Or are the products of modern rationality far too dangerous to be left uncontained?
Good, juicy free speech topic.
In other words, can Western civilization survive its own success?
And the fourth caller, ah, well, yes, you see, her marriage is terrible.
It's everyone's fault but hers.
It's a long chat, but man, was it an important one.
So, no further ado, let's get started.
Alright, well up first today we have Matt.
Matt wrote in and said, I only had one teacher that encouraged thinking, new ideas, and creativity.
Then I went to college where it was pretty obvious what type of thinking they wanted.
I went along with it because I wanted the grade.
As a father, I think about what effect public schools will have on my children.
Was my willingness to go along instead of thinking for myself a result of the schooling I had?
Or was it just my personality and laziness?
That's from Matt. Matt, how are you doing?
I'm doing well. Steph, how are you?
I am troubled by your false dichotomy, my friend.
Troubled, I tell you. Alright.
At the moment, I'm doing well.
Good. No sickness.
So, yeah.
Okay, what effect did the ADHD meds have on you, do you think?
I remember thinking, I don't know, it's been a couple years ago, just reflecting on the Effects this has had on me.
And I remember there's a guy in high school and he said, he's like, you took your medicine today, didn't you?
And I said, yeah.
How do you know? Yeah.
And he's like, you're different.
He's like, you're not as funny.
And I didn't really, I don't think I thought about it too much at the time, but I mean, it just clicked.
Yeah. I don't know, I was thinking about all this, probably listening to you thinking about this.
So, yeah, it affected me negatively, so that's what I realized.
Probably a made-up illness.
What did your parents say about you going on these meds?
I mean, they were the ones that put me on it.
My mom was...
I was...
She was 41 when she had me.
By the time I was on the meds, I was like 10.
She was 50. That's the oddest excuse I've ever heard in my life.
She was 50, so she had no capacity to say no to anyone or research anything.
What do you mean? I think it might just be going along with what the doctor said and this is the issue, this is the Solution.
And you're still a young man, right?
I am 28. Yeah, so it wasn't like the internet was around.
It wasn't like there was any total counter.
I mean, there was some counter information around kind of stuff, right?
I don't know. I don't know if she did any research about it at all.
And your father? He worked a lot.
I mean, he was... He was a circuit court judge, so he was really busy.
I mean, that's not really an excuse, but...
Right.
Yeah. Was he an uninvolved dad, like a workaholic kind of thing?
He wasn't uninvolved.
He's just...
Yeah, I mean, in that capacity, yeah, probably.
You just kind of let my mom do everything.
You're sounding pretty vague here, man.
Like you're trying to describe someone in a novel from like you read maybe 10 years ago.
Well, I mean, my dad's, he died when I was 15.
So I haven't been able to talk to him about any of this since I started thinking about it.
Right. So, a lot of this is just from memory, from 15 years ago.
It's going to be a little clarity.
I don't know, man. My memories of my childhood are very vivid, but that may just be for other reasons or for particular reasons.
That was something else I wanted to talk to you about, too.
I don't really remember a whole lot from junior high and high school.
So I don't know if I was on maybe too high a dose of this stuff or what, but I just don't recollect a whole lot from school in general.
Right. Now, do you mean that there was a lot of it that was just kind of the same, or do you mean like you just don't remember entire stretches?
Are you like the Harry Potter actor for the last couple of movies when he said he basically was, well, he had had a few drinks.
Daniel Radcliffe. Yeah.
I don't know what he's talking about, but I know Michael J. Fox was saying that he was all blurred when he was doing the last two movies and his show.
So, I mean, yeah.
You mean the Family Ties show?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
It's a fine head of hair.
Fine Canadian head of hair. Do you remember stuff outside of school or just memories as a whole or...?
I remember stuff outside of school.
Yeah, I remember playing outside of school.
I don't know.
I guess it's just the content of the school was just uninteresting.
I mean, in high school we had a sociology textbook that made references to the Soviet Union.
Oh, that's a little historical, for those who don't know.
Right. Died in the 80s, so...
Right. Did it have...
Did you have those textbooks...
Where on page 78 it says, turn to page 42.
You go to page 42, it says, turn to page 123.
Turn to page 123. Turn to page 15.
Turn to page 15. Turn to page 81.
Page 81. The teacher has been looking at you the whole time.
Anyway. Those were the ones.
This is how bored we were.
It's that we sent each other on wild goose chases just to stay awake.
That's what it was. I was bored the whole time, I think.
No, it's horrible. Oh yeah, it's brutal.
It's brutal. It's a sensory deprivation tank.
So you take people at the height of their physical powers, at the height of their hormonal raging, at the height of their curiosity, and you put them in the most boring slash occasionally terrifying environments known to mankind, and And it really kills the spirit.
It really, I mean, it's just, it's a big, too wet fingered on the candle wick of youth.
Put it out. We'll need you when we need you to rally against gun control.
Until then, sit there in the veal fattening pens and make sure that the teachers don't get too much trouble so they'll continue to vote for Democrats.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I remember when I was in first grade, I got sent to the principal's office.
And I remember sitting in the chair, it would seem like forever.
And the principal finally showed up, and I think I must have been causing trouble in class for, I mean, what they thought was trouble.
But I was probably asking questions.
And I'm pretty sure it was to explain gravity.
So the principal had to explain to me how humans stayed on the earth.
So, I don't know.
Which, you know, would be interesting to a kid.
And the other thing, too, see, this is...
Let me just do a tiny little rant here about teachers.
Natald. I understand.
Not all teachers like that. But...
Women, in particular, tell me if this accords with your experience, or just mull it over, but women as a whole are intensely curious about people and intensely incurious or passively incurious about ideas.
Men, less interested in people, more interested in ideas.
So for boys, what we want to do is we want to learn ideas.
We want to learn principles.
We want to learn abstractions.
We want to learn how to think and reason and all of that.
Whereas the girls, they want to learn about people and they want to learn about cultures and they want to learn about, I don't know, different ways that people relate around the world.
And when you put a bunch of women in charge of a bunch of boys, you end up with the people who are least curious about ideas, trying to educate the group that is the most curious about ideas.
And you end up with, like, ideas cause offense.
And because women score very high in agreeableness and neuroticism, and this, more studies just came out, you can check the great Dr. George.
Jordan Peterson's Please Run Twitter feed for more on this, but ideas can cause offense, and so you also have the group that is the most conformist and the most triggered, teaching the people who are the most Exploratory and the least triggered.
And this is just a collision.
And the collision results in incredibly boring classes where there's no controversy.
No one can say anything.
If you cause a disruption, that's a problem.
Cause a disruption, Lord above, Zeus's armpit, civilization is a disruption.
It's a disruption of living like a cave animal, like a cave fish.
Buildings are a disruption.
We're supposed to live under trees.
Air conditioning is a disruption.
So the idea, well, you wouldn't want to cause a disruption, would you?
Oh, let me just go adjust the thermostat so I can magically control the temperature inside this box of degrading boredom.
So, yeah, you have this collision of female teachers and boys.
And the female teachers have not been taught the value of masculinity.
They inhabit masculinity. The value of masculinity.
Who built the schools? Men!
Who's supplying the electricity?
Men! Who built the plumbing?
Men! Who built the thermostat?
Men! You are living inside the competence and value of masculinity.
And all you can say is, those boys are disruptive.
Get them down.
They're not sitting quietly and nicely.
Yeah, that's right. Boys are disruptive.
They happen to disrupt things like, I don't know, your skull getting eaten by a saber-toothed tiger.
Wolves are masculine.
So this complete mismatch of female teaching styles and what boys actually like and need and use.
It's one of the reasons why almost 10% of American kids are on these horrible medications, or diagnosed at least.
And they're almost all boys.
Why?
Because you see, the feminists tell us that there's no difference between the boy brain and the girl brain, right?
It's exactly the same.
No difference. Well, if that is the case, then why, oh why, oh why?
Please explain to me. Are boys being diagnosed with ADHD so many more?
I think it's like 10 times more.
So it's like some nutty number.
And you can't drug something which isn't different, because it can't be different.
So if the boys' brains are the same as the girls' brains, then the only reason that the boys...
Are being drugged more than the girls is because of sexism.
You understand? When they say there's a wage gap, it's 100% because of sexism.
Now, if there's a drugging the poor children gap, why don't they talk about the sex?
Oh, you see, but that would be the sexism of the female teachers that we can't interrupt.
Gynocentric female privilege and female in-group preference and the...
Armed-linked estrogen brigade that defends female privilege.
Can't talk about any of that stuff at all, so it's tragic.
And the less exposure, this is why I asked you about your father, the less exposure that boys have to their fathers, the more likely they are to end up with these kinds of problems.
This is from many years ago, I mean like 15 years ago or more, when I wrote my novel The God of Atheists.
I remember doing this research, and there's a speech in it about the boys...
brought down by the predators of amphetamines and it shrinks the brain mass and the studies show showed back then that boys who were in the presence of their fathers displayed no symptoms of ADHD the cure for ADHD according to some research is involved fathers But you see,
we can't have involved fathers because when you have involved fathers, women won't marry the state and won't vote for bigger and bigger government.
So the father has to be destroyed so that the state can move in and screw the women in every way but the one that is fun.
So I just wanted to mention that because you've got this aspect to your email.
Well, you say, was my unwillingness to go along instead of thinking for myself a result of the schooling I had, or was it just my personality and laziness?
And that's why I said I was troubled by your false dichotomy.
It's because you were drugged.
You understand. You were told that you had a mental illness or a mental deficiency or a mental problem that needed some very powerful drugs to, quote, cure.
Now, if you were in the Soviet Union, or in the Soviet Union under Stalin and other dictators, they said, well, communism is perfect, so if you don't love communism, you're mentally ill, and we need to drug the living crap out of you.
Well, why did I go along with communism?
It's like, because you were punished for not going along with communism.
Why did you go along with all of this stuff?
Because you were drugged.
for not complying to a horribly destructive system and in particular a horribly destructive system for boys and it is one of these situations that results from not looking at gender and IQ boys develop more slowly but end up more complex so boys lag behind girls in some measures And then end up further ahead,
because that which is a universal principle throughout nature, that that which takes longer to develop ends up more complex.
And so what they say is, well, you know, girls just start to lag.
There's got to be, we've got to fix this.
Well, no. I mean, boys and girls start off about the same height and boys end up taller.
Does that mean that girls are malnourished?
No. It just means that there are differences in the way that the male and female brain develop.
And boys end up more intelligent, particularly at the higher edges.
And they say, well, you see, but this is because there's so much sexism against girls.
And so, because they've got this imaginary problem called sexism, which causes girls to lag behind, they solve it.
By tailoring everything to the girls and then drugging the boys who don't or can't or won't go along with education geared entirely towards solving a problem that everyone considers environmental.
In other words, the girls lag behind, which is in fact mostly, I would assume, biological.
So, I mean, why does it have to be...
My willingness to go along.
You weren't willing to go along.
You resisted, man, didn't you?
Matt, you resisted.
If you hadn't resisted, if you hadn't expressed your discontent with the situation in the environment, you wouldn't have been dropped, right?
Yeah. No.
Yeah, that's true. I just...
Looking at the...
Symptoms of ADHD here on LInternet.
And it's just everything that they discourage in public school.
Do you have it there? Do you want to read it?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Failure to play close attention to details, make hilarious mistakes in schoolwork, having trouble staying focused in tasks, appearing not to listen, having Difficulty flying through with instructions or finished schoolwork.
That right there to me means...
Ah, that brings back memory.
Man, I don't want this to sound like whining, but...
Whine away. When I was in fifth grade, I remember a workbook that we had to do.
And it was just repetition of math problems.
I don't know, it was probably multiplication by then.
But I remember getting so upset that I already knew how to do it.
But I didn't see if I knew how to do it.
I had to keep doing it. You know?
And? I mean, I was so upset.
And it took me forever to complete my homework just because I didn't want to do it.
Just because I knew that If I knew how to do it, why was I being made to complete 25 problems if it was something that was monotonous, you know? And didn't you have this sense, Matt, in education?
What is the point of all of this?
Why am I learning this?
What does it matter? When am I ever going to use it?
And if I want to, like if I'm going to need to use it, why don't I just learn it when I get older?
Like let's say I need to, in some fantastical scenario, I need to learn how to do algebraic division for my job.
Well, why don't I just learn it when I need it?
What's the point of learning it now when I won't be using it?
For years and years and years, and I'll probably just have to learn it again anyway.
Why am I learning all of this junk?
If I need it, I can just learn it when I need it.
And that, to me, was the big question.
Why am I learning the difference in cell reproduction?
Yeah, it's interesting. It's not terrible.
Why am I learning why an airplane climbs?
Yeah, it's not bad, but it's not that interesting.
And should I ever need to, I can just go look it up.
And this is even before you did it now.
You've got the infinite sum of human knowledge stuck to your ass half the time, right?
Why do I need to learn a second language?
I mean, why?
Because odds are, I'm not going to use it the moment I leave school.
And then I'm going to forget it.
But if I ever do need to learn that second language, surely there's better ways to do it.
Like, they teach you all this stuff, and the reason is very simple.
I just had this conversation today with Dr.
Duke Pester about the Ten Commandments.
Mmm! It was meaty, it was deep, it was powerful, it was exciting.
Like, what a great conversation.
You can't have those conversations in school for two reasons.
Number one... Women are intensely incurious about, or blandly incurious about ideas in general.
And I, look, I say this as, I mean, I was, the two women who've influenced me enormously, someone like Ann Coulter and Ayn Rand, that there's exceptions, I guess, but in general, in general.
And so women aren't going to want to have these kinds of discussions in general.
And number two, you got multiculturalism.
You try bringing in the Ten Commandments into multiculturalism, also not just multiculturalism, but the monoculturalism of radical leftism slash Marxism.
Marxism is innately hostile towards Christianity in particular, or religion in general, Christianity in particular, although it does like to ally itself with extreme elements of the Muslim faith from time to time.
But with the monoculture of communism, there's a massive hostility towards any discussion of universal ethics, because it is postmodern.
It is something which dismantles universality so that it can impose tyranny on you.
And of course, if you stop bringing in the Ten Commandments, then all of the non-Christian kids, as well as the communists, are going to raise blue bloody hell and murder.
So you can't have any meaning.
You can't have any ethics.
You can't have any philosophy in school because you got women teaching and you got the multicultural complaint switchboard which lights up like a bomb if you teach something that has any depth or meaning.
And so it has to be just completely emptied out and evacuated of anything that has any depth or power or Or life utility.
Not a particular skill or ability that you can learn like algebraic division.
But something that can carry you through in your life.
Something that can give you wisdom.
Something that can help you make good decisions.
It all gets scraped and emptied out.
And it's like when I was a kid.
And I'd be at a dinner party.
And at the end of the dinner party...
The men would go into the living room, and the women would go into the kitchen.
And woe betide the child who gets caught in the kitchen, because those conversations are so boring.
Oh, do you know so-and-so bought this, and they're repainting their house, and then they went on this vacation to Aruba, and oh, isn't that a very nice tea set?
Oh, I think you need to do that dish again, honey, because I don't think it's quite clean.
And oh, isn't this lovely marble...
You go into the men's room, well, they're talking about something.
Something that's not that stuff.
And education has just turned into this big, empty-headed kitchen detritus.
So, yeah, it's rough.
Right. And your dad didn't go to bat for you, and your mom didn't go to bat for you.
They kind of threw you to the wolves, and they did not say...
Maybe you're boring teachers.
Can you imagine this? Okay, give me that sentence.
Give me that sentence by sentence.
Give me that. The first symptom.
Oh, this is inattention.
Fail to pay close attention to details or make killer's mistakes.
Right. Have trouble staying focused.
Okay, go ahead. So, imagine that you're producing a stage play or a movie or something like that, and the audience starts checking their phones.
Why? Because your movie's boring.
Because it's badly plotted, it's badly acted, it's badly shot, the dialogue is predictable, the scenarios are predictable, whatever.
They're bored! Now, as the director of said movie...
Would you then say, this audience has a mental deficiency problem and must be drugged?
Because my movie is fascinating.
And the fact that they're bored means that they're problematic and dysfunctional and have to have brain chemicals thrown into their system.
That would be the mark of a genuinely insane slash evil person.
And, again, not to sort of swish through the brushes of cliches, but there is a bit of an idea out there, which may not be entirely false, that men have a greater capacity for self-criticism than women do.
I don't know if you've ever heard this, but it's out there, and it may in fact be 1% correct.
Now, as a man in the public sphere, it is my job to engage the audience, my job to keep your interest.
And if I don't, it's my responsibility to do better until I do.
Give you something new. It's been 4,000 shows.
It's my job to bring you something new.
And if I don't, if people stop listening and people stop...
Well, it could be because I went...
Into a place without proper preparation of people blowing back or where they're upset or whatever.
Okay, well, then that's my job to manage that transition as well.
But it could be. It could happen.
It could happen that I have to say an unpalatable truth.
I know it's going to cost me listeners, but it's worth talking about because it's a philosophy show, not a Please the Listener show.
And philosophy and Please the Listener, they're not always the same circle.
They overlap, I hope, but it's not always the same.
But can you imagine if I was doing boring shows and people were tuning out, if I then said, well, these people...
I'm fascinating.
Every human being should be riveted to even watching me sleep or clean my ears.
I am gripping.
Phantasmagorical.
Illuminating. Phantasmagorical.
Interstellar. Phantasmagogy.
Whatever. Like, I'm fascinating.
That's gravity. So anybody who can't pay attention to me must hate philosophy, be dumb, and need brain surgery.
I mean, that would be the mark of a megalomaniacal, narcissistic psychopath.
Can't be anything wrong with the teachers.
Can't be anything wrong with the curriculum.
Can't be anything wrong with the school.
It's not that the teachers are boring.
It's that the boys are mentally damaged.
That is such an insane worldview.
I can't...
I mean, I hope I'm hoping to get this across in some manner.
Rather than reform the system, rather than even question the system, drug the children.
And of course, it's no accident that the Marxists who generally run the education departments have ended up in a system that kind of mirrors what happened in the Soviet Union.
Well, communism is perfect.
If you're not happy under communism, you're insane and we're going to drug you.
Can't fix the schools. Can't say...
I mean, if they polled the boys and said, do you like school, what would they say?
What would you have said, Matt?
Oh, Matt? Yeah, yeah, what's up?
Sorry. I was, uh...
You know what's funny? I was just talking about people not paying attention to me, and I think you might have wandered off, which is fine.
It's my job to keep your attention.
Yeah. Maybe you're telling me I'm going on a little too long.
No, I was actually thinking about expanding upon what you were thinking about.
No, but if someone had said to you when you were a kid before you were drugged, do you like school, what would you say?
No. Right, and what were you going to expand on that I was saying?
Oh, just I was thinking about how much they get wrong and how much they don't think about life skills.
Right. There was a trading card game we had back in, I don't know, junior high, and I think it taught negotiation skills and, like you mentioned earlier, the value of price, right? So like one card was worth more than the other, which was worth two of these, three of those, whatever.
So I just think that there's a lot of life skills that public schools don't teach now that They try to push down your throat with other things, like monotonous stuff that you don't need in the world.
Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's desperately true.
It's funny because I remember these glittering oases of the last day or two of school.
They were so much fun.
The last day or two of school, I went, even though there was really no point.
The reason being, the last day or two of school, we did fun stuff.
Like, we did trivia games with boys versus girls or, you know, redheads versus blondes or whatever.
And we did these games.
And it was so much fun. So much energy in that room.
Because there was no curriculum.
There were going to be no tests.
We were just there... Talking and the teachers sometimes would come up with these kind of cool games that we would play.
We're not dumb games. I mean, you know, do you know the whatever trivia or whatever?
And they were so much fun.
I so distinctly remember the energy in that room thinking like, why?
Why? It's like...
It's like you're dating the most boring woman in the world and then just as you're deciding to break up with her, she's like, let's go skydiving!
It's like, why?
It's just the end of the year.
Why can we only have fun at the end of the year?
Well, that's because there's freedom in that situation.
And we're not tied to all of this crap.
So I would put it on neither the column A or column B. You were not willing to go along.
You were not willing to go along.
You were drugged for not going along.
And you say, my personality and laziness, don't ever mistake laziness for boredom.
Right. There's an old saying that says, boredom is rage spread thin.
And I wrote once in a novel, courses or ambitions spread even thinner.
But that's a topic for another time.
But no, you're not lazy.
Why would you think you're lazy?
If it's really boring...
What you're watching if you don't understand the relevance because there is no relevance if it's make work busy work value emptied Crap that you have to learn because it's the least offensive thing that you have to swallow and regurgitate and if your teachers as they generally are a malcontented Incompetent fools Fools the people who go into teachers college have the lowest College entrance scores around.
They are the bottom of the barrel.
I mean, it's not even if you can't do, you teach.
If you can't think, you teach.
So when you put idiots in charge of teaching, they're about as inspiring as a soap dish.
You know, one of those wet soap dishes where you have to turn the soap over because it's too gooey on the bottom.
So they were boring.
You said you had one teacher out of probably...
I don't know, 50 you were exposed to.
You had one teacher. Yeah, sorry.
This teacher had, she talked as much as positively about Shakespeare as you did and made you think about uncomfortable topics.
And this is in my junior senior year of high school, so in my opinion, much too late for thinking.
I had a professor.
I actually ended up working for his wife, being a teacher's assistant in a gifted kids program.
But I had a professor when I was going through my English degree.
Where not only was he not very inspiring, but he was also kind of dangerous and short-tempered.
So I remember very clearly we were studying Billy Budd.
And he just...
It wasn't that exciting.
It wasn't that interesting. And I used to hand in extra essays to this guy, as I did for my philosophy teachers sometimes as well.
And we were studying Billy Budd, and I just couldn't get into it.
I've never had much luck with Herman Melville.
I mean, I recognize the quality of the writing and so on, but...
Dear God alive, get an editor, for God's sake.
Jeez, you don't need to know every little thing about how to tie a nautical knot.
Give me a story, give me a white whale, give me a shark bite, give me something.
Moves the story along. His plot is like a beached whale that never even explodes, just dies on the sand.
And I remember he was really, really short-tempered, really, really bad-tempered.
I went into one of his classes.
And he was asking questions about Billy Budd.
And people really weren't answering.
And so he said, all right.
All right. Hands up if you've not even read Billy Budd.
And the hands went up.
And he got up. He picked up his stuff from his desk.
He stormed out and he slammed the door.
Like we were just terrible people because we hadn't read Billy Budd.
We hadn't done our work.
We were lazy. Now that certainly is a possibility.
It certainly is a hypothesis.
But I love to read.
The question is...
What's he doing having a hissy fit and stormy out?
It's his job to motivate us.
The hissy fit stuff is...
And I've had this with a summer school teacher.
Who was so boring, I remember dozing off in the class sometimes.
And then when I walked up, I've said this before, I walked up to give a presentation.
And he screamed at the class.
He screamed, everybody, put your heads down on your desk and pretend to be asleep!
And then he looked at me and says, yeah, it's not so much fun, is it?
How do you feel when other people do that?
The guy was nuts.
Unstable in the extreme. And then he brought in someone to talk about the JFK assassination.
And he said, well, is that interesting enough for you, Stefan?
You people, what is your major malfunction, teachers?
Did you say yes? Yeah, I thought it was interesting, but...
Well, let's not get into the whole JFK thing.
That's a big old topic, and I... I don't know.
I don't want to provoke the inevitable comments because I won't have enough time to dive into it.
Yeah, it was more interesting than he was, for sure.
And he had the worst toupee.
I remember a year, I was starting to lose my, a couple of years later when I started to lose my hair, I'm like, hey, you know what I'm not doing?
I'm not getting a toupee because apparently it makes you insane.
It's just terrible. Just terrible.
Teachers are terrible. School is terrible.
It is worse than a prison sentence.
Because at least in a prison sentence, you have a gym.
At least you can form your cliques.
At least you can borrow a cell phone for cigarettes.
I shouldn't say it's worse than prison.
That is an exaggeration.
But it's in the category.
That's all I'm saying. Well, you can't leave on your own.
Yeah, you do get it.
You know what it is? It's like prison where you can go home at night.
It's like prison if you're Jeffrey Epstein, where you just show up for the day and you go home at night because you're a friend of the Clintons.
I work in a prison, so.
Oh, okay. Yeah.
So you never really got out.
That's what you're saying. That's pretty much it, yeah.
Lots of unintellectual conversation going on.
Yeah, that's true. So I would say don't be down on yourself.
Don't be down on yourself. Don't assume that you have a personal fault when you're thrown into a terrible system as a smart man or smart boy.
And it's toxic.
Government education is toxic.
And in particular, it's toxic for boys.
Alright? Yeah, no, I would just like to say that if anyone has a kid out there that isn't interested in school, And has subjects that they're not interested in.
There's going to be other subjects that they're interested in that don't get discussed.
I remember I just learned a few years ago that Venus has a longer day than it does a year.
Oh, it turns that slowly, eh?
Yeah, yeah.
It has a retrograde rotation.
Wow. Yeah. That's pretty cool.
It still feels shorter than some days in government schools, though.
Right, right, right.
It's just you don't learn a whole bunch of stuff that in public schools that you can find outside.
It is literally a prison for the mind.
You can't. And also, in a prison, I don't think they can drug you.
No. Yeah.
There's forced medication.
Oh, is there? Yeah.
That's for the guys who really actually need it, though.
All right.
Well, I hope that helps.
And maybe you can have a chat with your mom sometime about what the hell happened that you ended up getting drugged.
Maybe she knows something more about it.
But thanks for your call, Matt.
I appreciate it. Okay, thank you.
Alright, well up next we have Charles.
Charles wrote in and said, In a recent debate you had mentioned that the level of consciousness that animals possess is essentially worthless in the level of debate that humans take part in with one another.
Would this viewpoint change in cases where an animal's ability to detect and draw relevant conclusions from certain types of information far surpass that of humans?
That's from Charles. Hey Charles, how you doing?
Hey good, Stephen, how are you?
I'm good. What's your interest in this topic?
I don't know, I've just been listening to a bunch of your podcasts, whenever I first started listening to you, about half a year ago, and I really took interest in your consciousness videos.
And I'm actually a biology major, so I took a particular interest in the one where you were comparing it to the consciousness of animals.
Yeah, okay, so the language is very interesting.
Worthless. No, no, that's a very...
I'm sorry, but that's a judgment of value.
And I just want to point out, this is not an argument, I just wanted to point out that that's an interesting detail.
So, for instance, would you ever describe an animal as fiscally broke?
Fiscally isn't... In terms of how we view money or value in general?
No, would you ever describe an animal as broke or cheap or in possession of a bad credit rating?
It would make no sense, right?
So when you say the level of consciousness that animals possess is essentially worthless.
And that is a bit of a prejudicial statement, which means to me that it's coming from an emotional place within you, which is interesting to explore before I answer the question, at least from my viewpoint, which is kind of why I wanted to know why it was interesting to you.
That's fair.
It was more in terms of the way that humans partake in debate with one another And one of the comments I kind of latched on to in particular was you talking about how you would never debate a dog or a parrot or something like that because they can't compare something to an ideal standard.
Yeah, they cannot compare any proposed abstraction to an ideal standard.
Okay. And that was kind of...
I wanted some clarification before we...
We proceeded as far as what the ideal standard is.
Okay, we'll do that.
We'll do that. And I'm going to, maybe this is the third strikeout for me, Charles, but I'm still curious why this is your, this is very interesting to you, and why there's this emotionally charged language.
Worthless! It's like, I don't know.
Right? Gotcha. I mean, do you love your pets enormously?
I mean, what is it that makes...
This language appear within your mind.
Because I wouldn't, I mean, I would never refer to it as worthless.
I just, you know, it's inapplicable, because, you know, animals, it's like, you wouldn't say that dogs are worthless birds.
You know, their capacity to fly is essentially worthless.
It's like, what? That's fair.
Okay, I see where you're coming from on that.
As far as, I guess it would be emotionally charged, huh?
In terms of, I guess, a different context, I just meant without applicable value or without relevant value.
No, no, I know, but why the emotionally charged language?
That's what I'm curious about. Because if that's, I mean, again, we'll have the debate and all that, or we'll have the conversation, but I don't want to pretend that I haven't heard the emotionally charged language, because that might help the debate go a lot more amicably or easier, if that makes sense.
Sure. I mean, God, I wrote that question weeks ago.
Why do you feel that I would be devaluing animals?
Or do you feel that there was hostility or contempt towards animals for me on this?
I guess it was more of just the elevation of humans, which of course is the case.
There's not a single person alive that would say that the good of an animal supersedes the good of humanity or even one particular person.
Have you ever known anyone who was being cruel to animals?
Oh, God, yeah.
Who's that? Shit.
Neighbors... I work in, probably a field you despise, I work in code compliance and you get that all the time with people.
Either locking animals in cages or just to, I don't know, I don't know why they do it.
Do what? Abuse the animals.
And who abuses the, oh because you work in code compliance in terms of animal protection?
It's one of the things that we deal with, yeah.
People who hoard animals or keep them in substandard conditions that would create a safety and health hazard.
So you deal with people who treat animals not as incompetent in debating, or which is not even, like, again, a dog is not incompetent in flying, it's just not what the dog does.
But you deal with people who are cruel towards animals, who treat them as disposable or contemptible In their natures or in their lives rather than, well, they lack particular characteristics, which in no way justifies cruelty towards animals.
I mean, people who are cruel towards animals are horrifying human beings.
Animals are defenseless, particularly domesticated animals.
They don't have options to go.
They can't complain and they never grow up.
In some ways, it's worse than treating children badly because children will eventually grow up and will have choices if they survive.
But particularly domesticated animals, particularly dogs, I mean, in the way, of course, that dogs bond with their masters, even if the master is The dog owner is cruel or vicious to the dog.
The dog will often come crawling back to the master because it perceives it perhaps as an extreme act or a cruel act of dominance and so on.
So there's a kind of power that pet owners have over their animals that is, to me, not even analogous to the kind of power that parents have over their children.
The children are out of the house and can go and complain or get help or get resources.
It's not common, but at least they can.
Yeah. But the animals, they are incredibly dependent, incredibly bonded, and have no options.
Oh, absolutely. And that to me is, it is just, it is a hideous, hideous thing to do, to mistreat an animal in those kind of contexts.
So, I mean, I'm with you there, like 150% emotionally.
Yeah, and I don't think you're an animal abuser just because you don't be there.
Particularly useful in a debate.
They have value that they can add to a debate.
That wasn't my intention at all.
Although setting dogs on Marxists...
No, no, no. That's still not an argument.
It might be tasty. It might even be the right way to arrange the food chain, but it's not an argument.
Yeah. Hey, man, you train them in the right way.
They think it's a game, so...
That's right. Pack of rabid dogs when helicopters are just too expensive to refuel.
Yeah, so it may have just been an error in wording.
No, no, I don't think it was.
I think you care very much for animals and you were sensitive to what you might perceive as a derogation of animals.
Yeah, and I don't want to give off the impression that I'm going to take it as personal offense to your statements.
Okay, good. I just wanted to double check that.
Yeah, no, that's not going to play a role at all.
I'm working from your observation.
The essence is not humanity.
The essence is rational consciousness.
It's the ability to compare abstractions to ideal standards.
Two and two make four is the comparison of two abstractions, two and two, to the ideal standard of four, the equals being the ideal standard.
And for ethics, you require abstractions and universality, which animals, other than human beings, are not capable of.
And again, this doesn't mean that there's no ethics with regards to animals.
So, it's the rational consciousness that matters.
So, if we discover an animal, if we dig deep into the earth, and we discover an animal that lives somewhere deep in the earth that has rational consciousness...
Then that would be subject to all the same rights and protections as a human being, because it is the rational consciousness that matters.
So space aliens come by, they have rational consciousness, which they would have to have in order to have spaceships and so on.
They would be entirely subject to all the same rights, privileges, abilities, and responsibilities of human beings.
So it's not the humanity, it's the rational consciousness aspect.
If we had some super genetic way, which I'm sure someone in China is working on, some super genetic way to turn an ape into a hybrid with a human brain, then that ape would have all of the rights, protections, responsibilities, And abilities of a human being, and that would be how that would flow logically, I think.
I do have one question on that, though.
How would you determine whether it has that aspect of rationality if you can't set up a clear method of communication?
What would be the physical display of that?
Well, it would be some form of technology, of course.
I mean, if it was space aliens, they would have to land in a spaceship.
And of course, if they have a spaceship, then they have the capacity for science abstractions and so on.
So that would be almost by definition an example of that.
And you can't have concepts without language.
And you can't really have language without concepts.
I mean, language and concepts are very sort of tightly bound together.
Mm-hmm. And I don't mean the sort of point and grunt language like banana, like concrete stuff.
I mean abstract classifications.
Abstract classifications such as, you know, I mean a monkey could certainly determine that you could probably get a monkey to organize things by color.
You know, like a yellow pepper and a yellow banana.
You know, you could probably train them. But you could not then get, I don't think you could train them To categorize by fruits versus vegetables, because that's a level of abstraction that is not immediately apparent to the senses.
So you would have to have a level of abstraction that went beyond the senses that allowed for the organization of new entities according to these universal abstractions.
Could you get an animal to sort other animals according to reptiles versus mammals?
And then if you brought a new animal in, I mean, as a biologist, of course, you could do that, right?
You look for boobs and hair, except for the damn platypus giving birth to live young and so on.
And so you would certainly have tests as to whether or not abstractions were occurring that you could begin to negotiate.
And then once you have the language for abstractions, you can begin to map them together.
And from there, you can build some sort of common framework for debate.
Okay. So this...
Sorry, I need to get the wording down.
The ideal standard.
So this is that abstract concept, or is it truth and fact?
Is it...
That's, I guess, kind of...
It could really be a short conversation or not, depending on how we define this.
Well, there's a difference between accuracy and truth.
A squirrel can accurately figure out the difference between nuts and rocks, and it can store the nuts for the winter, right?
Right. And so it's accurate in its evaluation.
And tigers don't attempt to take down trees or tumbleweeds, but they accurately identify the flesh-bearing mammals or animals that they can eat and so on.
So accuracy is one thing, and animals are extraordinarily accurate.
I mean, you see the...
You see these birds that dive and grab a fish out of nowhere.
That's incredibly accurate.
Think of a hawk and a rabbit.
It goes down and grabs that thing from the sky, a peregrine falcon, like the fastest animal.
right when it's diving at 250 miles an hour i mean that's an incredibly accurate animal or the anglerfish right like it squirts up its water and hits a dragonfly larva knocking it into the water which it can then eat and it's incredible so accuracy animals are perfectly capable of but truth is the comparison of an abstraction to a new entity And I do not know of any animals that are capable of that.
And again, that's the categorization of new information according to abstracts like mammal and amphibian and fruit and vegetable and living versus non-living.
So they can accurately determine living versus non-living, but they do not have the definitions of living versus non-living that they can apply to new entities accurately.
So, for instance, think of the dodo bird, right?
So the dodo bird, for those who don't know, was a flightless bird that went extinct, I don't know, 150 years ago, something like that.
The dodo? Yeah, the dodo bird.
And it went extinct because it did not recognize human beings as predators, because it had never met them before.
And therefore, it did not run, it did not run.
Now, after animals have been around human beings for a while, they recognize that we are A little on the aggressive side from time to time, and then they learn to run away from us.
I mean, look at a squirrel. Trying to get a squirrel to feed out of your hand is a challenge, right?
But the animals that have never come into human contact with human beings before often are not afraid of human beings.
beings, then they learn to be afraid of human beings, whereas a human being that comes in contact with a new animal is generally very cautious because it has the abstraction called "new, don't understand" and does not need to learn caution through repeated attacks.
So if they're scared of us, they're smart.
But no, I mean, the reason I guess I was asking why this is important to you is we're not going to find an animal that can reason.
I mean, we've been all over the world and there's nothing underground.
We're not going to find an animal that can reason now.
Maybe space aliens will visit tomorrow.
But that's why I was kind of curious why this was an important issue to you, because it's very, very off in the distance when it comes to philosophical priorities.
Yeah, well, and that is, I don't know, that's kind of why it drew me to it.
I wanted clarification on it, and yeah, I mean, I got it.
And I may have just missed the part where that ideal standard was initially defined, or I just misunderstood it.
But, yeah. Okay.
Because I was just under the impression of normal debate.
No, I think we've got a good clarification.
So thanks very much for your call, and move on to the next caller.
Yeah, sure thing. Thanks, man. Okay, up next we have Jeff.
Jeff wrote in and said, Can we balance the positives of reason and logic against the negative social impact of techno-freedom?
Or are the products of modern rationality far too dangerous to be left uncontained?
Can Western civilization survive its own success?
That's from Jeff. Hey Jeff, how you doing?
Hello. Very good.
I'm happy to talk to you.
Good. Well, thanks. It's a good question.
And this sort of reminds me of the cycle that we've all heard of that...
Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times.
Exactly. And the problem with the West is we just didn't go far enough.
We did not go far enough in terms of freedom because we continue to have the state at the center of our social organization.
And if we don't have the state at the center of our social organization, or frankly anywhere in our social organization, then we'll get out of this cycle.
But as long as we have the state, then people will eventually hijack it.
Wealth produces a massive amount of assets that you can use to borrow and print and so on, future taxpayers paying the receipts that you can borrow and print based upon.
And so you do end up with the situation where success breeds failure.
Now, if we don't have a state at the center of society, then there will be no coercive mechanism to hijack the progress and turn it towards evil and sophistry and lying and the buying of votes and the creation of the dependent classes of the military-industrial complex, the single mother state, the welfare state, and so on.
So, unfortunately, we got close, or at least America got close in the 18th century in terms of making a very small state, which created a lot of economic growth and opportunity, and then, because there was a very large state, we are going through the cycle.
And as soon as people finally understand that we will never escape these tragedies as long as we have a state, well, then we can start to build something sustainable.
But as you can see, of course, we ain't there yet.
Okay. So if the state...
You view or you visualize the state as the center, or I guess the center cause of these issues.
What would be the center or an alternative center?
Well, the state is coercion, so it would be negotiation.
The state is violence, it would be non-violence.
You would have, let's just say, a geographical area with no state.
You say, oh, but we have to have a state.
It's like, well, they said that about slavery.
You have to have slavery.
You don't. You don't have to have a state.
You don't have to have slavery.
And the world got fairly far along, at least the Western world got fairly far along the ending slavery thing, but then they substituted the income tax and the draft and the enslavement of future generations through debt.
Slavery has not vanished.
Now it's been transformed more into an abstract kind of serfdom.
Where children are born over a million dollars in debt.
That is a form of indentured servitude.
That their futures have been fed into the bottomless moor of democratic greed in the here and now.
So we kind of got close and then we kind of pulled back.
So I've got books at freedomainradio.com where you can find out more about a stateless society.
But, yeah, as long as we have the state, this is going to keep happening, and success will breed its own failure, as long as we have the government organizing everything or trying to in society.
It's too much power. We all know power corrupts, power corrupts, power corrupts.
Well, exactly. I think I completely agree, but I'm looking at it at kind of a different perspective.
I look at all this wealth generated by Western ideals as sort of an enabler.
It gives people a great deal of options.
I mean, one of the reasons why I was sort of inspired to call you was that There was a YouTube channel that was discussing the male birth control pill.
And you've talked before about the impact of the female birth control pill.
And so what do we have here?
We have options. But what had occurred to me is that all this wealth, all this science, all these options basically results in a sterilization of the entire species, as long as you're able to afford it.
Because as long as you're seeking options, whether or not there's a state or not, you're going to open the door to a diversity of behaviors that will result in unexpected consequences.
Do you agree? I'm not sure if I agree, because I'm not sure what you're talking about.
I'm sorry if I lost the thread there, but give it another shot.
Well, what I'm saying is that when you achieve great deals of wealth in the presence of freedom, Then what you end up with is options.
Isn't that correct? Options?
Sure, yeah. Okay.
Now, these options, because just the way people are different, everybody's different from everybody else, they pursue different courses of action based on how they want to pursue their lives.
And what I've noticed is that People don't necessarily do things what's good for the civilization.
They do what's good for themselves.
And so when you give individuals tremendous power and options, inevitably what I see happen is that civilization won't hold together precisely because individuals have been empowered to such an extent, such as birth control, etc., Okay, so is your argument that with birth control basically people put off having kids and then we die out?
Is that what you mean? Sure!
Absolutely, because it's optional.
Because now you can do it. Same thing with feminism.
Same thing with glory and praise.
No, no, no. Feminism is a big giant government program.
Feminism is not something that spontaneously emerged from the free market of ideas.
Feminism was a big giant government program.
It originated with the CIA. It was fed by Marxists.
It was propagated through universities, through grants, through the conscripted and enslaved dollar labor of the taxpayers.
This is not an organic phenomenon.
It is a massive propaganda scheme funded by the state.
And so that's a bit of a challenge.
With regards to birth control, people say, well, you know, the birth control changed everything.
No, it didn't. No, what changed was the welfare state.
What changed was the welfare state.
That changed everything, not birth control.
No problem with birth control whatsoever.
But birth control combined with the welfare state, now that causes significant problems.
People say, ah, well, you see, fewer smart people have children when there's birth control.
No, I don't think that's necessarily true.
In the past, the smarter you were, the more children you had.
I mean, this is one of the arguments for high Jewish IQ, that the smartest Jews, the rabbis, who learned a bunch of languages and studied a lot of arcane and abstract thought, the rabbis had the most children, and because they were the smartest, you had a third of a point of IQ increase per Jewish generation, and, you know, over 700 years, that gives you the 15 points, give or take.
And so, in a free society, if you're smart...
Then you make more money.
And if you make more money, you can afford more children.
And you say, ah, but the women, the women don't want to have children because they're too smart.
No. This is the result of propaganda that said, oh, women, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and motherhood is...
Dumb work and it can be replaced by minimum labor from the third world.
And if you really want to exercise your brain, you don't raise the next generation of children.
You go and type under fluorescent lights in a veal fattening cubicle pen and a floor with no windows that open.
This is all propaganda that turned women away from child raising and also, of course, through the welfare state.
You took money by force.
From smart people who were being productive, and you handed it out to dumb people who were breeding.
And so this idea...
Well, you see, it was the pill that made smart women not have kids.
No! Whatever you subsidize, you get more of.
Whatever you tax, you decrease.
And if you tax smart families, you decrease the number of children that they have.
And if you subsidize or pay massive amounts of money...
To women who don't plan, women who don't think, and single moms are well below the average in terms of IQ, well, then you end up with this.
And so people think that the pill somehow magically changed all of this, but they take out all of the other factors that came, you know, not entirely coincidentally after the pill.
And so...
So from your perspective, we can have...
A highly capable, highly technological, idealistic, open, egalitarian, free-loving society that is stable as long as we get rid of the state.
That's the key.
Gotta get rid of the state.
And then everything snaps back.
Yeah, I mean, the positive adjectives that you put out in terms of stable, I mean, there's always going to be the creative destruction of the free market.
And, you know, we have a huge convergence of coincidences imminent within Western culture.
We have... A massive clump of retirees heading onto the jugulars of the young because they want their retirement savings plans, they want their pensions And they want their free healthcare and they want all of this wonderful stuff and there's no money to pay for it.
In fact, they've run up this massive debt and now they need to hang on to the necks of the young in order to extract from them the arterial blood of their futures because they simply won't take any...
I've talked to enough boomers now.
They're simply not going to take responsibility for it and they'll just ride the whole system into the side of the mountain.
And if you look at the... Just look at the 20th, 21st century alone.
You have central banking.
You've got giant wars, two of them.
Well, no more than two, really, but the two biggest ones, the First and Second World War.
You had the stock market bubble of the 20s.
You had a 13-year Great Depression.
You had the collapse of formerly stable relative democracies into totalitarian regimes in various countries throughout the West.
In particular, of course, I'm thinking of Italy and Germany.
And then you have the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War.
You have the collapse of the imperialistic British Empire, you have the establishment of the soft American Empire, then you have the collapse of the Soviet Union, you have a brief spread of peace, and then you have the CIA training the Mujahideen to take down very, well, of course, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, they trained them in the 80s to take down the Russian Empire.
Then you have a brief period of peace, and then you had 9-11, you had the Patriot Act, you had the war in Afghanistan, you had the war in Iraq, you had the destabilization and destruction of Syria, and...
Libya. And look at that level of instability is insane.
And now you have the migrant crisis, you have massive multicultural madhouse experiments going on throughout the West, you have the fragmentation of just about everything that's occurring.
Throughout history, and we are facing the literal threatened end of Western civilization.
So I'll take my chances on who will build the roads, and I think we've been trying to take our chances with the state for the last couple of thousand years, and all we get is this grim and horrifying cycle of civilization.
I'll take my chances with freedom.
Right. So now...
I view a lot of the problems that are discussed on your show and your call-in program as mainly an outgrowth of the problems of modernity that are caused by all these options that I discussed.
But you view it as the state.
But when I really think of the state, I view the state as an option that was chosen because we could afford it.
We can now afford to be stupid.
So that's how I view the situation.
Wait, you chose the state? Did you choose the state?
Well, sure. Absolutely, yes.
The people chose the state.
Wait, did you choose the state?
Well, okay.
I didn't personally choose the state.
I was born into it. But certainly many, many people voted for various government benefits, including some of these boomers that you talk to.
That are interested in these benefits, that are supported by the state, and none of this would be possible without the tremendous wealth of modernity.
So, see, I... No, but hang on, hang on, hang on.
No, just a sec. There are certainly people who prefer the state because they get free stuff.
Sure. But that's like saying slave owners prefer slavery because they get, quote, free labor, or at least cheaper labor.
So the fact that some people prefer the state because they get free stuff, okay, sure.
Well, in any social organization, there are winners and losers, and some people preferred communism because they were sadists and liked to torture people in concentration camps, as did some people who preferred Nazism for the very same reason.
So the fact that some people prefer the state in no way legitimizes its ethics.
The state is the initiation of the use of force and fraud.
It's the initiation of the use of force through the police and the law courts and the prison system and it's the initiation of fraud through the currency system and a lot of other things that it does.
And also saying that people choose the state when they're in fact indoctrinated by the state is like saying that people chose communism in 1950s Russia despite the fact that they were pretty much from birth and in all environments and circumstances indoctrinated into Being supportive of communism.
Until children are raised in a free manner, we can't say what the hell they choose or not because they're so heavily indoctrinated that ascribing choice to how their minds turn out is like throwing a rock off a cliff and saying it's choosing to go down.
Stefan, Stefan, I went to the Soviet Union when I was much younger.
And I got to see how it operated.
And I can tell you that it would not have lasted as long as it did that horrible system if it wasn't for modernity.
The incredible high technology that those guys had, those Soviets had, Let it last for decades longer than it needed to.
Well, subsidize from the West.
There's a book called East Minus West Equals Zero.
It was the subsidies of the West, both directly in terms of just grain and money and technology and indirectly just in terms of the inventions of the West that were stolen by the Soviets.
As many inventions in the West are stolen by the Chinese, it is a form of massive subsidy that kept it going.
That's certainly part of it.
But I think we're all talking about the same thing.
The power of Western ideals leads to tremendous wealth, which allows you to do stupid things.
And people do stupid things, such as communism, such as the welfare state, all kinds of statism, consumerism, single motherhood, anti-natalism, anti-family.
All of these things Are options that people can only choose because they're wealthy enough to be stupid.
So my point is, my argument, is that Western lifestyles or Western ways of thinking have embedded in them the seeds of their own destruction.
Because they allow people in the society to increasingly do stupid things like I listed out.
No, but it's only because of the state.
It's not the wealth that's the problem.
It's the state that's the problem.
Because you say it allows them to do stupid things like the welfare state.
But the welfare state is not stupid if you're stupid.
See, here's the example.
So you're a young woman, and you find some guy really sexy, and you go out and you trip him up and you jump underneath and you bang his bones like you're Don Henley on drums.
And then you get pregnant.
Hmm. Now, in a stateless society, that's a big problem.
Because no one's going to pay for your baby except your parents.
I don't think you're going to buy thought insurance that is going to pay for all of these things, right?
Or if you do, it's going to come with a chastity belt and a taser where your vulva is.
So this is now your family's problem and your problem.
Now, nobody wants to be the example of what not to do.
So you get knocked up.
You're not married. You don't want to be held up as, hey, remember that woman who got knocked up and then nobody would marry her and she lived a life of loneliness and her kid turned out screwed up because it didn't have a father.
Don't be like that, person.
We all want those examples because in a free society, it will keep people on the straight and narrow, on the righteous path of keeping your legs closed.
But nobody wants to be that example.
And so with the welfare state, you get knocked up, you go fill out your forms, government gives you thousands and thousands of dollars a month in direct and indirect benefits.
And I'm talking, you know, like the free healthcare, the subsidized housing, the SNAP, the government education, the dentistry, you name it.
You get thousands and thousands of dollars a month in free stuff just for getting knocked up.
Now, it's not dumb to want free stuff.
You're right. And it's not dumb to want to avoid being the, my life is now a disaster example that scares the pants on everyone else.
So you say, well, it allows people to do dumb things.
It's not dumb. The woman, Ida May something or whatever, Fuller, I think her name was, who paid $20 Into the social security system and got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars out in benefits because she had like one paycheck and then she retired and she just got massive.
It's not dumb for her.
The guy who wins the lottery, who goes in to cash in the lottery ticket and wins $10 million tax-free, it's not dumb for him to cash that lottery ticket.
Now, you could say to him, well, this is going to raise taxes in general to other people, right?
It's not dumb for him to cash in that lottery ticket, but it's a state that's making it all possible.
It's a state that's enforcing all of this.
That's true. I am in complete agreement.
My tax rates are somewhere around 40%.
Now...
Wait, do you mean your direct income tax rates or the entirety, including property taxes and taxes on alcohol and gasoline and you name it?
Oh my God, have I included that?
I live in Massachusetts, so I guess it might be around 50%.
I think you mispronounced that. You mean Taxachusetts.
Anyway... Yes.
You're well north of 50% and that doesn't even include the unfunded liabilities that you or your children are going to be subject to.
You're absolutely right.
But here's the thing.
I would be starving, living in a gutter, if it wasn't for the incredible wealth-building power of Western ideas.
So my point is that all of this would be not sustainable.
I would be just basically dead, I guess, under those kinds of tax rates if it wasn't for the high productivity of Western modernity.
So my point is that all this modernity is an enabler of the state.
The root cause, in my view, is modernity.
And then from that comes the state, because the state comes and they say, don't you want to care for single mothers?
Don't you want to care for the downtrodden?
Well, of course, and we can afford it, so then we do.
Now, The thing is, is that in the old days, you used to go to the church for help if you were poor or a single mother or something like that.
But again, what are the options that people have now?
You don't go to the church.
Why? Well, you don't need to.
What I'm saying is, Stefan, is that people do things, and you said it once yourself, you said something like, nature is right.
You said that in one of your shows.
And it occurs to me, you are absolutely right.
You are as right as nature.
Nature is right.
But what does nature say?
Nature says, do what you must.
And when you have options provided by modernity, you don't have to do anything.
Well, much. So my point is, is that when you see my point, you view The government is the root cause of all evil.
But I view...
No, make your own arguments.
Don't try and put words into my mouth, just so we can keep it friendly.
Just make your arguments, but don't tell me what I'm saying.
Oh, okay. I don't mean to be hostile.
I'm just like, let's not derail things with you now telling me what I'm saying, because that's not reasonable.
Let me state my cases and you state yours.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Well, no, I don't.
Yeah, I really get over it.
My point is, or the thing that I wonder is, how can we have...
A high level of wealth without people making bad decisions on a massive scale.
And some of those bad decisions are state-related.
And so I think that you said it earlier.
I want to pick up on an idea that you mentioned earlier.
And you said something like, well, if people could...
Yeah, I think this is how I interpreted what you said.
You said, if people could go somewhere, a place without the state, you know, And maybe do things their own way without state interference.
To have those diversity of options, that's where diversity would actually be positive.
But the problem is, when people see all the goodies they can get one state over, they wouldn't go to a place like that.
I don't see any resolution here, really.
I think that we're on a downhill spiral in Western society Driven by modernity, whether or not the state is the executor of that is up for debate.
Yeah, I mean, here's the problem. The word modernity doesn't mean anything other than recent.
So when you say modernity produces all this wealth, no, it's the free market that produces this wealth.
And it's pillaged by, like there's the makers and the takers, right?
The people who make stuff and then the people who use the state.
To take their stuff, right?
There are the producers and there are the parasites.
And the parasites are both rich and poor and to some degree middle class, although the middle class tends to be the producers as a whole.
The state is not the root of all evil.
The state is a manifestation of a lot of evil.
The state is fundamentally satanic in that it pretends it has value, but it's offering things that it's stolen.
And so the solution is for moralists to point out that the state is the initiation of force.
To point out, this goes back to a speech that I made in New Hampshire in 2008.
I think it was one of my first public speeches.
The state is forced.
And people who support the state support violence.
And people who support taxation, if you don't, support you being arrested at gunpoint and thrown into a cage where you may be raped because you disagree with them.
Now, if we have the courage to make that case repeatedly, The state is immoral.
The state is forced. The state is coercion.
And violence is wrong!
It's evil. Well, then we can make that case, if we're willing to really stand our ground when it comes to that moral reality.
Yeah, the only option is the Atlas Shrugged scenario.
Basically, you just have to quit.
Well, that's what people are doing.
That's the MGTOW movement, right?
People are, men are quitting.
When men quit on relationships, they quit on economic productivity, because why on earth would you want to work really, really hard to gain resources if you're not going to have family?
So when men quit, like when families become difficult to impossible for men, then they will quit working so hard, and they're kind of going on strike.
Right, right.
So... I mean, I have...
I agree with everything you said, really.
I guess that's why I listen to your show.
But the thing is, is that I... So, I don't really see a solution here.
Yeah, I mean... Go ahead.
I mean, was it just today?
Sorry. Just today, a rapper, DMX, going to jail for tax fraud.
Look at what happened to Wesley Snipes.
Look at what happened to Erwin Schiff, Peter Schiff's father.
They're not kidding.
You don't pay your taxes.
You go into jail, and if you resist, they'll shoot you.
And that is the foundational immorality of the system that we worship.
And yes, it produces disasters.
Why? Because immorality produces disasters.
Now, the reason why immorality exists is like the same reason that smoking exists.
It's because the fun is now.
The disasters are later.
Why does promiscuity exist?
Because the fun is now. The disasters are later.
Why did Paris Hilton lose her $2 million engagement ring while out drinking and partying?
Because the fun is now.
The payment is later.
I definitely see your point of view.
You know, the smoking and the other examples are really good cases.
These are cases where an individual choice causes expenses that are borne by the civilization through the state.
So you might find a smoker, you know, who's been smoking for 20 years and then, I don't know, an enormous Medicare liability Is generated from that.
So I suppose that's part of the problem is that individual decisions are then the cost of those decisions are not being borne by the decision maker because of state intervention.
Is that right? Yeah.
Charity is a ridiculously complicated endeavor.
It is a ridiculous, like truly helping people is really, really complicated.
Because if you try to help people, you're often enabling their bad behavior.
You want to help people make better decisions, and you want to shield them to some degree from the consequences of their bad decisions, but not to the point where you're subsidizing future bad decisions.
It's really, really difficult to help people.
Just throwing guns at the problem doesn't really help people in any way, shape, or form.
Like this rapper, he just got sentenced to a year.
Okay, he's a father of 15, cried through the sentencing, detailed his abusive childhood, including beatings and abandonment by his mother, and sobbed while asking for leniency so he could spend more time with his 18-month-old son who has a medical condition that has already required two operations.
I was in a cloud!
I was in a cloud! Simmons told the judge about his past mistakes, which included drug use.
I wasn't thinking straight!
Simmons apologized for his tax fraud, saying he didn't realize at the time how serious it was.
I mean, okay, he's an infamous jerk with a long arrest record.
He's got 15 kids, and he evaded $1.7 million in taxes.
He got a year in prison, probably be out in six months, but...
That is, they want their pound of flesh.
They want their money.
And if you don't give them their money, they will come to you with guns and they will throw you in a cage.
And that is a horrible, primitive, vile, disgusting way.
You know, like the people who say, oh, you know, Islam is such a primitive way to run society.
The state. The state.
Talk about a primitive way.
You give me money or I'll hit you with a club.
Come on. It's Genghis Khan in suits.
It's Vikings with tax cuts.
I mean, it's so primitive.
Give me stuff, obey, or put a bullet in your head.
It's disorganized crime.
I agree. I agree.
It's very primitive.
It's positively barbaric.
But it makes me think, how did we deal with these kinds of situations before the Industrial Revolution?
Were you saying there was no state before the Industrial Revolution?
Well, it was certainly minimal compared to today.
No, no, no, no, no. No, it wasn't minimal.
I mean, you had... The church owned vast tracts of land.
There was massive censorship, very little freedom of speech.
There was serfdom, book burnings, And trade and commerce were so tightly regulated that if you're at a fair trying to sell your goods, you're not even allowed to sneeze.
You could be put in jail or put in the stocks for sneezing.
Why? Because it's considered unfair competition.
Because if you sneeze, someone says, bless you, and then you get into a conversation and you sell them their stuff.
That's unfair competition. You have these guilds which had an iron-clad, iron-grip control over various trades, and you couldn't enter the trade without joining the guild and paying off its members.
And you had incredible controls over international trade.
The tariffs, the controls over international trade were staggering.
And trying to bring those down, I mean, you can look up the corn laws and so on, trying to bring those down in the mid-19th century was...
A massive challenge.
There was very, very little economic freedom.
The land could not be freely bought and sold, certainly without buying and selling the people on it.
You had incredible restrictions on what you could bring to market, and taxes were onerous, and there was very, very little Free trade and free market prior to in agriculture the mid to late 18th century and for urban goods the 19th century.
This was the big change and this is what brought about the agricultural revolution which produced the industrial revolution.
But if you look further back in time, good heavens.
I mean people were burnt at the stake for suggesting That the Earth was not the center of the solar system.
Books were regularly burned.
And Martin Luther faced torture for daring to question some tenets of Catholicism.
Although, you know, with all due respect to a great chat that I had about the Catholic Church and Western civilization with Tom Woods, as far as the rights of free speech that we enjoy now, it was a long way.
And the rights of freedom of trade and movement that we enjoy now...
No, no, we can't say that there were stateless societies in the past.
There were some examples, like in Ireland there was a stateless society for hundreds of years, but I haven't studied that very much, but it certainly did not result in an industrial revolution.
It's all relative.
I mean, I view the size of the state of basically how much of my paycheck or my aggregate income they take, you know, but...
Well, no, but compared to what?
You know, you'd rather pay 40% on $100,000 than 20% on $5,000, right?
Well, okay, okay, but I guess that proves my point, is that my point is, is that, look, So modernity, which, again, is just a word, right, but it means I view it as meaning the capability generated by science, science and technology, which is only available by in the modern era, gives us so much wealth that we can afford such high taxes because my income is so much higher.
It's not science and technology, though.
It's the free market. Exactly.
No, no, no. It's not science and technology.
It's the free market. And that's the problem.
But you see, Stefan, that's part of the problem, because the free market, in part, allows people to make poor decisions, such as, I don't know, just basically sterilizing themselves, I suppose.
Or, as I would say, through consumerism and global trade, which you seem to really think is a good thing, You can completely wipe out all of your industry in a nation, if you believe a nation is important.
So, I mean, because I care about myself getting cheap things at Walmart, I can maybe wipe out all of the industry in my entire country.
I mean, in aggregate.
You see? Wait, I don't understand.
And that's part of the problem. Let me ask you this.
Are you watching TV as we talk?
No. Oh my god!
You're wiping out television stations!
You're not reading a newspaper.
You're consuming alternative media.
You're destroying the print media.
I mean, the fact that people want cheap stuff or free stuff, no.
The industrial base of America did not diminish or vanish because of the free market.
And we know that because after Trump, some of these jobs are coming back.
I mean, it left for a variety of reasons.
Some of it to do with just overprinting money.
Some of it to do with overborrowing money.
A lot of it to do with massive environmental regulations.
A lot of it to do with massive protections for unions that exclude a lot of people from the free market.
But what drove manufacturing overseas had a lot to do with government interference in the free market, taxes, tariffs, subsidies, environmental hyper-regulations, OSHA, occupational health and safety hyper-regulations, and so on, to the point where it just became, and of course, the entire lawsuit-happy insanity of the United States, right?
We had like 15 million lawsuits filed every single year.
I mean, this is just not a business-friendly...
In America, it's not a very business-friendly environment.
And of course, America with one of the highest corporate tax rates, at least until the recent tax changes last year, one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world.
So the idea that it's just somehow the free market that destroys industry, sometimes it does.
The horse industry for urban transport was killed by the car.
Sure. And there was not a whole lot...
of regulations that did that.
And certainly the car-heavy culture of the United States was heavily funded by, under Eisenhower, the interstate highway system, which was put in place in case of nuclear war, certainly facilitated the growing dependence upon cars, which poured a lot of money into the Middle East, which helped spread Islam, in particular Wahhabism, but Yeah, just always look forward more freedom and more freedom.
That's the answer. And I think putting everything in a big bag of modernity is not as discreet as it should be.
But I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I really appreciate your call.
It's a very interesting topic. It certainly was.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Okay, up next we have Christy.
She wrote in and said, I hear you talk about the importance of committed marriage and how important it is for the healthy development of children, and I have also deeply valued this remaining in a very difficult marriage in hopes of providing the best possible outcome for the children.
However, I have also heard you speak to the irreparable damage that can be done in a relationship, and wonder if my marriage has reached that point.
My husband has an ACE score of 8, and mine is a 1.
In our marriage, there have been many challenging issues, most of which I think relate, to deeply entrenched unhealthy relational habits that began in childhood for him, as a result of the abuses and traumas he experienced.
I also believe this unhealed trauma in his life has been at the root of a pornography addiction that started at a young age for him, and despite counseling and recovery programs, continues still.
Is it possible that it could actually be better or neutral for the children for us to separate or divorce?
If I am finding that I cannot see a way forward for him to repair the damage he has caused in our marriage for over two decades.
That's from Christy.
Okay.
Hi, Christy. How are you doing today?
Good. Thank you so much for having me on, Stefan.
I am very sorry for the challenges that you're facing in your marriage.
Just to sort of say that up front, that it's a very, very difficult situation to deal with.
Now, when you say that your husband has faced this pornography addiction since he was very young, I mean, what age are we talking about?
So he had a single mom, and he was probably first exposed to pornography At really quite a young age when she would work like a second or third job and he would find stuff in like the dumpster and so you know maybe five to seven somewhere in that age range and yeah and just lots of you know of course through the years and Mom also had a drug addiction and I just heard his brother talk about and asked him,
asked my husband if it was true, something about that mom would sometimes be in the same room and they would observe her also with partners.
And can I tell you this is a pretty broad statement, so to speak, but single moms have been known to get some serious kink on.
I have no idea.
I'm not going to go into any more detail, but I'm just going to point that out.
And you can let me know in the comments below if you've ever seen or experienced this.
But single moms can be, well, let's just say they have to bring something to the market which takes into account the fact that they're single moms.
And sometimes that can be some massive kink.
All right. Well, I've listened to you for a little over a year, and I've listened to quite a bit of you, so I know I've heard you refer to things like that before, and I hadn't really made that connection, but yeah, that's probably...
That's an interesting thought. Thanks.
I mean, you have to throw some strange into the mix to make up for the fact that you're probably broke and have kids.
You have to be willing to do stuff.
And I'm afraid to get into more detail or it's kind of stomach churning to get into more detail.
So let me ask this, and I'm sure this is the question that It has gone through your mind quite a bit with regards to your husband.
Christy, what was your attraction to him?
So we met at church in a singles group.
And...
Over the years, I've thought back about how that came about.
And I realized that I had, you know, started going to the church that we ended up meeting at in about May, but I never really saw him until September at a Bible study.
And I remember he was a fireman and he was talking about maybe doing a CPR class or something.
And I just remember thinking, well, he's really cute.
I would be willing to be Annie or whatever and the patient and never expressed that.
But I don't think I saw him again until January when there was a New Year's Eve get together and a social event.
And then we really just hit it off that night and ended up talking a lot and visiting.
And then A year later, we married.
When did you find out about his childhood?
I knew that his parents were divorced.
I remember very early on in the relationship, a week or two into the relationship, wanting to have a conversation with him where I wanted him to know some things about my past because I didn't want to be rejected six months down the road.
And so I wanted to kind of like bring out the whole suitcase and say, this is what, you know, you need to know because I don't want to get six months down the road and have you find out and say that's a deal breaker.
And for me, that was just that I had been sexual with someone in the past.
And to me, that was a really big deal.
And so I wanted to make sure that was on the table.
And so he told me that when he was in the military in Germany, that he would go into bars and do these bar fights, which I really didn't have any idea what that was all about.
But he told me that's the only time you really hit anybody and I never hit his sisters.
And I remember him, you know, telling me some things that had happened.
But I kind of feel like he brought out like a toiletries bag, and I brought out my whole suitcase.
And I also, you know, I knew things about his family.
I knew that he had a single mom, and he was kind of man of the house and parentified from probably the age of five, six, seven, until he was 10 when he moved in with his dad and his stepmom.
And, um, he was the oldest of four children originally.
And then mom had an affair with the pharmacist and there was a child produced from that affair.
Um, she was obtaining, um, drugs from that relationship.
And, um, and then dad said there was those four kids and he was also taking care of the baby when he was with the single mom.
Then dad, um, mom ended up giving up custody because my husband, the oldest was starting to get into a lot of trouble in the neighborhood and skipping school and, um, just kind of becoming a hoodlum.
And, um, And the kids went to go live with the dad shortly after because the single mom was realizing that they needed that.
So dad had remarried and stepmom had two children.
So then there's a family of six and the one baby died.
I stayed with a single mom.
And so that's kind of some of the family dynamics that I knew and was aware of.
I don't know if that helps answer your question.
I think at the time I was maybe 20 when I first met him, and I think I had no concept.
I grew up with a two-family household, and I really think I had no concept of what all that meant.
So his ACE score is nine, which is batting a thousand for trauma.
Yeah. And just so people who don't know about it, just very briefly, verbal abuse threats, physical abuse Not including spanking.
So, at least according to this category, there's nothing that could have gone wrong that didn't go wrong.
Right, except that the, what was there, one about prison?
Yeah. Right. Nobody in his household went to prison, but yeah, lots of those things happened.
When did you find out about this stuff?
I do not remember if he told me about the sexual abuse before we got married.
Or if it was like six years into the marriage when it was the first time I knew about the pornography addiction.
Wait, wait, you don't know if he told you if he was sexually abused before you got married or whether it was six years into the marriage?
I just, yeah, I don't remember because I think for him he felt like it was a really, it was, for him he felt like...
How cute is this guy? How sexy is this guy?
That you're launching your eggs at this guy without the due diligence you'd give your average used car.
Come on, you gotta tell me.
Give me a one to ten.
Okay, well, his picture is on it.
He's in good shape. He was in the military.
He's a fireman. I mean, what kind of chiseled, jaw-busting, kraut head has he got?
Yeah, he's handsome.
You can look at the picture on the Skype.
Nine. Nine.
Good body, good physique.
Yeah. And so your head was kind of turned, right?
Definitely. But there were a couple of things that over the course of the year that I knew him really were impactful.
And when I met his family, his stepmom, Stepmom said, of all of the six children that she, you know, because there was the four and the two that she raised, she always felt like he was going to be the one to make the best spouse because he just had so many great qualities.
And I will tell you, people are always very impressed with how much he does.
He makes dinner probably half of the time.
He probably changed as many diapers as I did.
He gets up in the middle of the night with kids.
He... Um...
When they're sick, he's just more like that nurturing type.
And so he will lay next to them and catch their puke.
And I'm kind of more like, well, the toilet is over there.
And so I like them to be independent.
And there's a lot of really great qualities because I understand why his stepmom would say that.
And I also would watch him with his nephews.
But his stepmom was part of a family structure that produced this level.
Of unbelievably egregious abuse, right?
Exactly. So this may not be the very most objective judge of these things.
Can I give you another piece of information that might help understand why I would value her opinion?
Sure. So when...
Okay, so this all happened...
Wait, just what do you mean this?
All of his childhood stuff until he was 10 and then moved in with mom and dad, stepmom and dad when he was about 11 or something like that.
And at 12 years old, his father who had been raised Catholic said, "God, if you will get my family out of this horrible liberal city in the south of the U.S., if you will get us out of this place, I will give you my family." So they moved to...
Some other place, yeah.
Some other place that was north and a better place for raising a family.
And they all began going to church and they, to this day, continue faithful churchgoers.
So Christianity is a very important piece of And I've told you, we met in church.
But he, my husband, very much learned to speak the language and to kind of do the Are you saying that your husband is the religious hypocrite when the family produced this level of abuse,
which is certainly not sanctioned or condoned within the Bible, as the Bible says, whatever you do to the little children, whatever you do to the least among you there, that also do you do to me?
And so if you've got divorce and alcoholism and molestation and beatings and neglect and so on, that is not Christian child raising.
And so I think it would...
I would hesitate to say that it is your husband who is the major religious hypocrite in the environment.
Okay. So keep in mind we're talking about some of the stuff happened on his trauma score while he lived with his single mother.
And then...
And then she saw the disaster was coming and she realized he needed a home that could provide Some structure that she wasn't providing.
And so there is some of this that the mother-in-law and the father are responsible for.
I mean, certainly. But so they were alcoholics and drinking and things like that.
But then when they moved to Washington, they transformed their lives and began to try to figure out how to do it better.
So yes, there is a season of life in very early childhood.
And there's a season of life when he moves in with his stepmom and his dad that has all those problems.
They try to figure out how to get on the right path.
And did they then apologize for all that he had gone through as a child?
Did they attempt to make restitution?
Did they get him some therapy?
Did they go to family therapy?
Did they actually take ownership, as Jesus commands, to take ownership of the sins that you have made and to attempt restitution to the very best of your ability?
They probably have failed to do fully what they need to there.
Fully? What percentage, Christy?
What percentage are we talking about here when you say failed fully?
See, I have failed fully to become a ballerina.
I'm telling you. I failed fully.
Completely. 100%.
I'm not at 100% in my ballerina career.
They didn't do counseling for him.
I'm not sure if they've apologized to him or not.
Because... Oh...
My worst fear is that I was going to, that I'm half scared to talk to you.
No, I'm listening.
I'm interested why the emotions, which are more than welcome in the conversation, that they're important, but why the emotions came up when I asked about Whether they had apologized.
And you said you weren't sure if they had apologized to him, and that's when the feelings hit for you, right?
So where's that coming from?
That's coming from, because I'm feeling like I'm concerned that...
See, I don't know his story as well.
I'm concerned that...
They're going to be hard on me.
And I want to be completely honest and upfront.
Don't talk about anything that's going to make you feel too anxious to continue.
And I certainly don't want you spilling other people's secrets.
So let's just go with, to your knowledge, there's not been a big amount of apology and restitution.
Yes, I agree there should be more restitution.
And I believe my husband has really been hungry for that.
He's not in a place to pursue that and I believe his parents should.
Why is he not in a place to pursue that?
I think because he still deals with so much of the trauma and feeling like his parents didn't do what they should.
He still is trying to sort through that trauma and so when we're around his parents it's It's cordial and nice and pleasant, but he feels a lot of tension and a lot of anger.
And so he's in a place where in the last couple of years he's been identifying his emotions and kind of just processing that and getting used to that.
So they're still sacrificing him.
They're still sacrificing him by forcing him to pretend something other than what happened when they're around him.
Right.
I'm sure because I know what your words mean towards me in my situation and me feeling on the receiving end of mistreatment from my husband.
I'm sure that that's true in regards to relationship relationship.
Between my husband and his parents.
And I also just want to say his parents live on the other side of the state from us and we see them usually two or three times a year for a short period of time for a few days.
So we aren't seeing them all the time.
I'm not saying that necessarily.
I'm just trying to give you a picture of what that looks like.
No, no, but in his mind's eye. And let me just do a sidebar to parents who have done this kind of damage.
I know it's tough. I know it's tough, but you were the ones responsible.
You were the ones in charge of the family.
And if this kind of abuse happened under your watch, even if you didn't do it directly, it's your responsibility to keep your children safe.
I know that the great temptation is to smile and grin and pretend that everything's fine, that it's all in the past, that it's deep in the rear view, but it's not.
Right. Things move into the past when they're dealt with.
Yes. And too many people deal with history like a hit and run.
Bang! Let's just keep driving.
But that leaves...
The past, dying, and the bodies don't leave the car, they just drag and scrape.
And you need to do the right thing.
If your children were harmed under your watch, either by you or you allowing it to happen, it's...
You're still responsible either way.
Let's say you hired a babysitter that harmed your children.
Let's say that you threw them in daycare and that harmed their bond.
Let's say that you had a nanny that cycled through or nannies that cycled through and that harmed their bond.
Let's say with the very best of intentions, with least knowledge, it's still under your watch.
And if there was knowledge in the world that you did not avail yourself of that resulted in your children being harmed, Then you need to sit down with them and you need to take ownership for that.
Right. I agree fully with you.
If you don't take the ownership for it, your children will blame themselves.
Children survive being abused by blaming themselves because it gives you the illusion of control in a fundamentally chaotic situation.
And the hot potato of responsibility has to be taken back by the parents when children have been abused.
And I don't care if you're on your deathbed, you have to take that back.
And I'll give you sort of a tiny example.
So when I went to go and visit my father when I was 16, when he was still in South Africa, I could not connect with the guy at all.
And of course I felt that I had done something wrong, that I had somehow been deficient in some manner.
And then many, many years later, it was probably five years later maybe, I was on a very long bus ride with him and he told me the story of his life.
And he did talk about that time when I went to visit him in South Africa.
And he said that he was so depressed he couldn't be there.
He couldn't connect with me.
I mean, it gave me an enormous amount of relief.
It wasn't I who had failed.
It was...
I mean, let's just be generous as possible and say it was circumstances that made it impossible.
And a few times in my life, people have taken ownership for things that I had formerly taken ownership for myself.
And it is an incredible moment of liberation.
And actually, people don't take responsibility because they think they're going to be hated.
But that's not true.
It's the closest I came to loving the man.
The respect that I had for him for taking ownership for something that was not my fault.
Listen, when your father's never been around and you're 16 and you go to visit him, you as a 16-year-old, you can't fix it.
You can't make it happen.
You can't do the connection thing because you're 16.
And you have no history.
You have no experience with the man.
And you have this weird proximity distance.
You're very close to each other in terms of genetics and family in the abstract.
But as far as actually having experience with the person, you don't know.
So I just wanted to make this case.
It's really, really a plea. You may think that you'll be hated for taking ownership.
I think quite the opposite might happen.
This might be a real breakthrough.
If you're a parent who either harmed your child or allowed the child to be harmed on your watch, whether intentionally or not, take ownership for it.
Take ownership. You were the parent.
It was your job. And you might be incredibly surprised at the response your child has.
There may be some anger initially, but there will be an enormous amount of relief.
And In general, I believe there will be respect that comes out of it, in the same way that anyone who takes away a pain justly.
You know, we always talk about parents who sacrifice themselves for their children.
Oh, I'd do anything for you. I would cross the desert to get you water if you were thirsty.
I would do anything. For you.
And there's so much that parents whose children have been hurt can do just in terms of tell them that you were in charge.
It wasn't their fault. Take ownership.
That can be such an incredibly powerful breakthrough in parent-child relations.
I believe that it will not be the living hell that you imagine, but will provide enormous relief to your children and will vastly improve your relationship.
Have conversations about things that are difficult.
You will find that it's not that hard, and the benefits are so astounding that you will genuinely kick yourself for not having done it before.
I just really wanted to mention that as a whole to parents.
I mean, maybe this goes out to your Husband's parents as well, but I just really, really wanted to make that case as a whole.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
I feel like what you've spoken is fantastic for my in-laws to hear,
and certainly You know, in the places where in my own upbringing of my children, if I've harmed them, I apologize because I feel like that's what I'm called to.
I'm called to live a life of humility and to go before the Lord and to go to my children when I've been harmful to them.
So I wholeheartedly agree.
I found that it's a fantastic path with my own children to greater Closeness and growth for me personally and that sort of thing.
So I do agree.
That's a lovely bit of filler, but now let's get back to the actual issue.
I appreciate the word salad, but I'm going to have to get back.
Now, you mentioned the pornography addiction, of course, but you also talked about, you said there have been many challenging issues.
And what sort of stuff are we talking about?
Infidelity or abuse or emotional absence or what?
Yeah, I would say emotional absence.
I would say that...
I don't know if this phrase is something you've heard before, but covert abuse.
Very, very subtle.
Gaslighting and stuff? Yeah, yeah.
And I feel like even...
So our oldest is 18 now, and when he was 14, and he knew we were going to counseling...
He would say to me, Mom, you know, I don't know why you and Dad have to go to counseling because it's not that hard to get along with him.
You just talk with him. And I'm like, well, I don't know, but I've been married to him for 19 years and that's not really quite the case.
And just one year later, he said to me, you know, Mom, I can talk to Dad about anything as long as it's something that doesn't matter.
So in that year, he was starting to process and put together.
Just like you with his parents, right? Right.
And so what I'm finding is that when my children get to a certain age and my husband hasn't matured through that process, that it's tricky for my children and I have to walk them through that.
So my daughter, who's about to turn 13, when she was 9 and 10, she started slamming the doors and she started having all kinds of anger and outbursts.
For the longest time because of my Christian training, and I'm just going to tell you, Stefan, that I have a really tricky relationship with the church as I've gone through a process in the last four and a half years or so where I'm kind of unwinding this and trying to make sense of it.
But I would have to say to my daughter, you know what?
Your dad doesn't understand your anger because he doesn't understand his own anger.
And so I would just sit and hold her and I would just say, Daddy loves you.
And, you know, he's doing the best he can and I'm doing the best I can.
And that really seemed to address it as well as I could.
Before that, I was always trying to be united in appearance because I feel like that's what the church teaches couples to do, which is really not helpful in the kind of dynamic that we had going on.
So my kids always saw me as united with him and he was always doing these things that were covertly getting back at me.
Or we would make an agreement about something and the kids would know about this agreement, like something we were going to eat or do or not do.
And then he would change the rules and they would be left perplexed because they kind of knew what the deal was.
So it created a lot of very, very subtle confusion.
In the children. So the counseling place we went to for an intensive a couple years ago, they call what he does being in the good box.
He's like a professional and he's studied and he, it's like his life, I'm not saying he set out to do this, I'm just saying he became very proficient at a very young age, my husband, at learning what normal is and then behaving normal and putting it on the exterior, no matter what was going on internally within him.
And so he's fantastic at performing and looking normal.
And so he was able to do that.
And so that everybody at church thinks he's just this fantastic guy.
And the kids, you know, for a long time, they saw that.
It's not until they started becoming teenagers and they started, I think, growing past him in maturity.
And I wanted to say, like, four and a half years ago, I woke up one day and I thought, I don't really believe anything my husband says.
I don't know if when he says he has a stomach ache or a headache if it's just because he doesn't want to go to the parenting class or if he really does.
I don't know if he doesn't want to go to work that day so he says he has a stomach ache.
I don't know if he had an affair because he had a pornography addiction and at one point many years ago he told me That he had actually begun contemplating soliciting a prostitute.
And so I thought, well, I don't really know if he did solicit a prostitute at some point.
I don't really know.
I don't know if I'm married to a con man.
How dangerous is he? I have no clue.
Who is this person? And so I started to go to counseling.
I started talking to the counselor about that.
And her reply to me was, that must be exhausting, which I didn't feel was very helpful.
But over the course of time, I have kind of put the pieces together, and I don't feel like he's this really dangerous con man that I had these big questions about.
The questions about infidelity continued to bother me.
When we went for a counseling intensive, we went to a place that specialized in doing I'm sorry, the word is escaping me right now.
Polygraph test. And so that I could ask all the questions about the degree to which this...
Yeah. Is a marital counseling place with a polygraph?
Yeah, because they specialize in sexual addiction.
And it's a national center.
It's one of the leading...
Wow. I mean, don't take my surprise as anything judgmental.
I've just never heard of such a thing.
That's quite something. Right.
So does that give you, I mean, does that, that's, and so that was two years ago in April.
And I felt like before we went there, I also want to tell you.
What happened?
You got him wired up.
This is like some spouse's fantasy.
I ain't going to get the truth. So you had him wired up to a polygraph and you got to ask him anything?
Yeah. Actually, what they do, because in order for the polygraph to really be effective, you have to understand how people are that are very deceptive and manipulative, and you have to ask very specific kinds of questions.
And so they're very practiced at this, and they coached me on how to craft the questions, and I was not in the room.
They have a person that does this...
That regularly does these specific kind of polygraphs for these specific kinds of marriage situations.
And so there were questions about finances and they know how to craft the question.
There were questions about other women.
There were questions about soliciting prostitute.
There was questions about the regularity of seeking pornography and acting out with that.
Yeah. And so it turned out that he was telling me the truth.
About everything that he told me.
It was accurate what the regularity of the pornography use was.
And there was no prostitute and there was no affair.
So I was able to kind of get my feet under me with that information.
Because then I felt like I knew what I was kind of dealing with.
Whereas before, I just had such a hard time knowing what to even believe.
Right. Right.
Right. So you said this four and a half years ago.
Did that help at all in terms of trust or believing that he's telling the truth?
Right. Well, so four and a half years ago is when I woke up one day and I thought, I just don't really even know who I'm married to.
I don't understand. And if there's no trust in our marriage, there's no foundation.
Right. And so for two and a half years, we tried to get help in the local location where we are, but it was really hard because I kept going, we kept going to Christian counselors and, um, they treat things.
I don't know if you're familiar with that, how that, how it works, but they've always, it's, it, I'm just in a really tricky place right now with my relationship with my faith, um, because of how they handle marriage situations and, um, Typically, they put weight on the wife's shoulders to kind of come together and kind of treat it neutrally.
So I was seen as overreacting locally.
So there was more harm to me that continued to happen, even though we were getting counseling.
There was more? What that happened?
Sorry, I just missed that. More harm, meaning that I was expected...
I wasn't treated as if I was being harmed, but as if I was part of the problem.
And if I would try harder and approach it from a family systems kind of an approach, which it's true, that can be helpful.
So two years ago when we left and we went to that intensive in a different state, I was at a place where I homeschool and I've devoted my life to raising children and staying home.
And I was having a hard time figuring out how to get out of bed every day.
Right. Kind of depressed?
Yeah. Didn't want to live the life.
I thought I might need to just get out of the marriage at that point.
In order to just to go to get out sort of like alive and to start over and then I would figure out how to be a mom later after I felt better.
But when we went to Colorado and we got effective counseling it immediately turned around and I for me it didn't nothing significant changed with him but I felt like We had people that would be able to advise us and coach us along because they understood the true dynamics of the situation.
And so I had kept trying.
I've always exercised and eaten well.
And I had put on like 20 or 30 pounds and I just couldn't...
Be consistent and care for myself.
But when we came home, I immediately started taking care of myself again and just really started getting my feet under me and started to make strides again to become the kind of person that I had always been before.
I've always kind of approached my marriage like, well, I've got this to do and like I'm raising kids and I've got to, you know, we've got this thing in our schedule and then we're going to do this and there has to be dinner and there's grocery shopping and I'm just going to kind of tackle those things.
And my husband's just kind of, I mean, he goes to work and he pays the bills and And he's a great dad in lots of ways, but if our marriage wasn't perfect, it's not like I was...
I don't think I'm extremely needy emotionally.
I would just kind of keep putting one foot in front of the other and going and going and going.
But when I began to realize how hard it was to get help, and the thing that really impacted me too was that I felt like I was seeing the damage in my children.
My son was 14, 15, 16, and I couldn't stop the impact on my kids.
So I could do life as healthy as I possibly could.
I could read lots of books.
I could take in information.
I could be intentional. I could take care of myself.
And then I started seeing impacts in my children that I couldn't be two healthy people.
I can only be one healthy person.
And I was seeing the impact on my children.
And it was heartbreaking.
So I don't remember what your question was.
Maybe I've gone on too long.
No, no, no. It's fine.
It's perfectly fine. I appreciate the outline.
I have a solution for you.
And you're not going to like it.
I have a solution for you, and it's the kind of solution we'd be like, is there any other possible solution?
Well, and here's the other thing, is that I feel like, and I've read some of your relationship, real-time relationship thing, and I was kind of curious what you're going to say about this, but I really do feel tricked into the relationship.
I feel like there were certain things that he withheld from me and that he knew about other past relationships that I walked away from relationships with.
Wait, wait. He knew about other past relationships of yours?
Of mine, where I had walked away from certain things.
And if I would have known certain things, I would never have married him.
And he knew those things and he withheld them from me.
And you were eager to have them withheld from you because he was handsome.
Yeah, and I also asked my dad, Dad, what do you see?
And my dad gave me his best wisdom, and I asked, you know, I took the input from his mom, which, you know, you have a great point in understanding where she was coming from, but from my vantage point, she was a Christian lady who had raised these six kids, and she had gone through some counseling herself, so I felt like her Um, perspective, you know, um, had, had value.
Um, and I was 20.
I feel like I was so unprepared for life by my childhood.
I had... What did your father say, Chrissy?
Well, my mother and father don't have a great relationship.
Um, my memories of my dad are that he would...
Turn and leave the room if my mom was trying to talk to him about something and they were disagreeing.
And she would follow him into the bedroom and he wouldn't talk to her about it.
And so I always thought that my mom was the difficult one.
But then after I was married, I realized that he was actually refusing to resolve anything with her and he was very controlling.
Wait, your father is emotionally unavailable just like your husband?
Yeah. I'm sure that's not a big insight.
You know, I just wanted to clarify that for the listeners.
I've read a book or two. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and for the listening audience, yeah.
And so my dad's advice to me was, well, as long as neither of you ever change.
And I just remember being so perplexed by that.
Wait, wait, wait. What does that mean?
As long as neither of you ever change.
What does that mean? As long as husband doesn't change and wife doesn't change, which that translates into...
Wait, as long as... What's the end of that thought?
You spontaneously combust?
You get a free ride to Mars?
You win the lottery? What happens as a result of you not changing?
I think... I think that marriage will be fine.
Oh, so he's saying as long as you guys don't change, the marriage will be fine.
Yeah. That to me seems like, I can't imagine how that would be good under any scenario.
Because if you don't change, it means that you don't grow.
I agree.
How can that be any kind of good advice?
That was the extent of the wisdom that was offered to me.
Um, and, and I was, I had listened to all of this Christian material about how to do the best job possible choosing a spouse.
And so, um, now I've heard other ideas of like, I could have asked other people, but the kind of information I was listening to said, well, go to your dad because he loves you and he'll want the best for you.
And he'll have insight that you don't have.
When did you find out that he got into bar fights?
That was really early on in the relationship, like a week or two in.
Really early on in the relationship, he joined the military and beat men bloody in bars.
He didn't lie about that, right?
Right. Now, where does that fit into theology as a whole?
Where does that fit into good, stable, balanced, emotionally available guy?
Now, Stefan, you're not going to hold me personally responsible for my personal choices, are you?
No, no, absolutely not. I'm sorry.
I forgot. I thought you were a man.
No, no, I'm just, this is a piece of information that...
I know, I know. Because you're making the case that you were lied to, but he didn't lie about that, and that seems kind of important.
I know, and you know what, there are other things that I look back and I go, yeah, that was a red flag.
I just think I wasn't prepared in life to see those red flags.
Like, I didn't, because he said, no, I don't do that anymore.
And so I thought, well, okay, then...
When did you find out that his mother had used drugs?
You know, I think that I knew that she used drugs.
Oh, man.
I don't know when I found that out.
I have, in the last few years, asked a lot more questions about what was going on.
I sat down... Okay, before you spit out syllables like a startled octopus spits out ink.
So, was it early or late?
That I knew that his mom did drugs.
I would say...
It's been 23 years.
It's hard to remember.
Can we just say this just for the sake of...
Not in the last few years, right?
No. Right.
Maybe I knew before we were married.
I can't say for sure that that's true or not, but let's just say that I had enough information to know ahead of time.
Now, do you have any, and I know that these are big, it's a long time and so on, but what about knowing that his mother had given him up because she was unable to take care of him or unwilling to take care of him?
Wow.
Like, you knew that he had transitioned from his mother to his father.
Is that right? Right.
I knew that. Because there was a stepmom in the picture.
So you know that shortly after knowing him.
And certainly when you met his family, it'd be like, oh, is this your mom?
No, that's my stepmom.
And then you can ask all of those questions, right?
Right, right. So that must have been pretty early.
Well, I knew from very early on about his stepmom, just that who he called his mom was his stepmom because his mom died of breast cancer before I ever met him.
So I never actually met his mom.
Ah, okay. But you knew that she had given him up to the dad?
I knew that the four children had gone to live with dad.
I knew that before I was married.
I don't know what I knew about that situation.
And as I've played detective over the course of years, I've connected a lot of pieces.
I don't know how aware I was or anyone in the circle, like his parents and siblings and whatever, how...
I look back and if I knew today, if I had this information back then, I would have made better choices, but I don't remember.
For one, I didn't realize it was such a...
You didn't realize it was an ACE score of 9?
Exactly. Like I just really, you know, and also when you read through those, some of those scores can be like more on like there's a milder version and then there's an extreme version.
So when there's one about being hit or something, I think that one might be or like things thrown at you or something.
And so there are stories of driving down the road in the suburban with the six kids and stepmom is frustrated with some of the kids at the back.
So she throws a brush.
You know, across the suburban.
I'm not saying it's okay.
I'm just saying...
It's not beating with a wooden post or something, right?
Right, right. So there's a difference in there in how those questions could be...
So I feel like the big things in his life are that there was neglect.
Like he would come home and wonder...
He would pray that his mom would be... No, it's a drug addict.
I don't think you need to get into details.
The drug addict is focused on the drugs.
But what about the molestation?
The molestation was situations where he was going to an after-school program that was a program where kids would go.
And so that's a place where pedophiles will tend to be attracted.
And so there was someone there that groomed him and was sexually abusive to him.
And then mom had a friend in the desert.
How long was it groomed and how long did that occur for?
And the grooming plus the actual abuse?
I think you said there was a couple of different...
I was asking about it recently.
That's okay. If you don't know, you don't know.
I know there was a period of grooming and there was more than one incident with that person and there was a place that his mom would go in the desert and this man had motorcycles and there was this incentive to get to ride the motorcycle and it was...
Manipulated that way. And I think that other siblings also, when they went out there, may have.
So your mother brought him to a pedophile.
His mother. Sorry, his mother brought him to a pedophile.
His mother. Yes, his mother.
His mother brought him to a pedophile.
Yep. I guess they would stay time out there a night or two or a period of time out in the desert at this person's house.
Does his father know about this?
Do you know? Yeah.
Really? Yeah.
I left you with the woman who brought you to a pedophile.
Yeah. And I didn't know my husband at the time that any apologies or anything like that would have happened, so I don't really understand the extent of that.
I suspect there's maybe, to some degree, at least an apology, but I know from my experience of...
Oh, I would not assume that.
I would not assume that there's been an apology.
I could be wrong. Well, no, I'm not wrong.
I would not assume it, for sure.
That's something you need to verify.
Well, here's what I was going to say about that.
What I know from my experience with my husband is that I actually need him to apologize more than once for things.
Yeah, it needs to be constant.
Because it comes up again, right? Yeah, because otherwise the apology is just this magic spell to put everything deep in the rear view, never to be discussed again.
The point is you want to know that whoever's wronged you, that it stays in their mind.
Absolutely. That's still not the magic, oh, I'm sorry, and then if you bring it up, I already said I was sorry, then you know that it's not continuing in their mind.
Right. I understand that because of how the relationship with my husband is and my experience of that.
I don't know, especially because in the church there is this problem with forgive and magic and it just goes away and you have to just forgive once.
I would say that my guess is that they likely apologized for some things or something or some, you know, whatever.
At least once. That's my guess.
And I'm guessing it never went beyond that because their faith journey doesn't help them necessarily understand that.
So there's like a need for seeking forgiveness, but an incomplete teaching, I believe generally in the church, about the dynamics of reconciliation, restitution, and a relationship.
Right. An inadequate teaching about forgiveness.
Right. My thought is that his parents probably feel like they've done what they need to do and all they know to do and have been taught within Christianity.
And so I think that's where some of my confusion comes, you know, like I don't know when it comes to them because I wasn't around when they would have done that.
So it's not part of my experience, my memory in his relationship with them.
Right. No, and I listen, I mean, the reason I would say I would assume, and I'm always trying not to project my own experiences, but, you know, my father kept being in touch with me, and eventually I... It was probably about 15 years ago, maybe.
I sent him...
I sent him an email with, these are the things that happened to me.
This is what the woman did to me that you left me with.
And basically the reply came back, well, that's terrible.
Mm-hmm. Like, it just happened to me.
Like, this wasn't who he chose to marry, who he chose to leave his child with.
That's terrible. Your mother really does seem to have some criminals.
Yeah. So I would assume nothing when it comes to this.
It's incomprehensible to me, the way some people's minds operate, but...
That's life. That's diversity, I guess you could say.
Now, what is the one thing that you didn't want to talk about that I mentioned about 10 minutes ago, my dear?
Oh, you said, I know what you need to do, and then I wasn't going to like it.
Is that correct? Then where did you take me?
Let's go on a journey.
Yes, exactly. I know, because I really wanted...
Please don't turn me into a leader in this situation.
No, I mean, we can keep doing the detour.
I'm just telling you, I haven't forgotten and I know where we are.
You are welcome if you're, you know, okay, so personal responsibility, great.
No, no, listen, I'm not going to say you need to do anything with regards to yourself.
I mean, yes, maybe you chose the wrong guy, but you got the kids and if there's any way to fix it, you can fix it.
And I think I know the way to fix it.
And then you're going to wish I'd never said it.
Are you ready? Go ahead.
I'm as ready as I'll ever be.
You need to take your husband's heart and connect it to his family's history.
You need to be a leader in your family, Christy, and you need to get these people together and get them talking.
No bullshit, no excuses, no avoidance.
You need to make a trip.
You need to get your kids taken care of.
And you need to go out there for a week if it needs to be.
And you need to get this history discussed.
Yeah.
Because if he can't connect to his history, he can't connect to you.
Thank you.
If he's got pornography addiction as a form of self-soothing or something like that because of the traumatized history, it's because he's still owning the traumatized history.
And he feels he needs to soothe because he was somehow responsible.
If the responsibility of the history is placed upon his father and his stepmother, not because they necessarily did it to him, but he chose the woman, he left her with a drug addict, Where she's rutting away for drugs in the same room as her children?
God! And then when he found out about how bad things were, he didn't take ownership and he didn't get his child the help he needed.
So your husband is carrying a terrible burden of self-blame.
Why? Because his father and stepmother and maybe others, I don't know, aunts, uncles, whoever knew of this situation is culpable.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge is responsibility.
If you want to release him from the past, other people have got to take the burden that's rightly theirs and lift it from him.
Okay. I think that is really powerful advice.
But? And I do think that's what I will do.
However, the damage that has been done in my relationship with my husband You know, the call that caused me to write to you was when I listened.
I think it was a call in February and there were these two gay men and one of them had really dealt with the issues with his mother and the other one hadn't.
And you talked about reconciliation, restitution.
And I typed up all of your words So that I would have them for this call.
So I have all of that.
And it rings so true in our situation.
But you can't give an apology, and I don't doubt that your husband owes you an apology, or many.
I don't think you can give an apology when you're owed an even bigger one.
Now, if he's owed an even bigger apology for his childhood, an adverse childhood experience score of nine.
Yeah. There have been only a handful of people in the 11 years I've been doing this show, Christy, who've had that kind of horror in their childhood.
And his father and stepmother are the only people alive outside of extended family who are responsible for that.
Did his father not know that his ex-wife was a drug addict?
Well, you've got to know these things.
Right. Well, what I know is that his aunt, my husband's aunt that used to babysit him, she was 13, and she talks of coming over and sometimes the house was like a complete disaster and you couldn't hardly walk through a room and then they would get it all cleaned up and help her get her life in order.
And then, you know, that would happen again.
But she talked about when she would go over and babysit that the medicine cabinet was sometimes locked and she didn't know what that meant when she was 13.
But now that she's- But she would have told.
She would have told what a disaster it was.
And of course, if you are an ex-spouse, you've got to check on the environment your child is in.
I mean, I assume that she was not a high-powered lawyer and a drug addict.
I'm going to assume at this level of chaos, the entire life was a mess.
She's driving out to the desert for pedophiles with motorcycles, right?
The entire life was chaos.
The mess was evident from space, right?
Yeah, yeah. So, the father knew.
The father knew that there was massive dysfunction on the part of the mother.
Did he rescue? Did he try to get sole custody?
Did he pay her off?
Like, what did he do? Did he go to the court and say, here's the evidence that's been gathered.
Here's the picture of the house.
I opened the medicine cabinet.
Here's what's in the medicine. Did he do what was necessary to save his children?
Or he's like, I got a new wife with fresh boobs.
I'm doing well.
Fuck him.
No.
Your husband...
I'm not trying to short-circuit your pain.
I really am not. You've got to focus on his victimization.
I'm not. But the reality is, he was abandoned.
To pedophiles and wreckage and drug addiction and rutting in the room and dysfunction and lack of food, lack of healthcare, lack of connection, lack of safety, lack of everything that could be conceived of.
It would have been better for him to grow up in a war zone because there can be love, at least in a war zone.
And he is owed unbelievable amounts of apology.
And restitution. And somebody has got to be a hero in this family and step in and take the burden off the children.
Now, when the burden is taken off his childhood, he can assume more burdens from his adulthood.
But right now, He's like that Atlas Shrugged guy with the world on his...
Bending, breaking, bleeding shoulders.
He can't take any more ownership because he's already taking so much in his childhood that nobody else seems to be taking responsibility for.
Now, as far as how you've been harmed, I will argue this to you.
This may have us not part as friends, but I am very committed to trying to get you what you want, which is a better marriage, not a divorce.
I would argue, Christy, that you have been harmed primarily by your lack of leadership and not even by your husband.
He is damaged.
You have an ACE of 1.
He has an ACE of 9.
If there's to be a leader in the path to health, it will be you, not him.
Stefan, it has always been.
Why couldn't he take himself to counseling and give them straight answers?
Why can't he... No, no, it's not...
The issue is not with him.
The issue is his relationship with his father and stepmother and everyone else who knew what happened to him as a child or what was happening to him as a child.
He cannot fix this himself.
He needs either for other people to take responsibility or for him to directly see that they never will.
Either way, the burden is lifted.
If you're the victim of a crime, what helps the most what helps the most is justice for the perpetrator, right?
It doesn't make everything right.
It doesn't make everything perfect.
But we don't just go to the victim of a crime and say, well, if a woman's been raped, we don't just say, well, you've got to go to counseling to deal with the rape and not pursue justice against the rapist, right?
Right. Because if everyone just internalizes everything and says, it's my issue to deal with my problem to solve, none of the bad people should ever have any consequences for the crimes they've committed, the world doesn't get any safer.
And if the world doesn't get any safer, how are you supposed to feel secure?
So saying, well, if he'd just gone to therapy, it's not enough.
He has gone to therapy.
We've spent thousands and thousands of dollars on therapy.
And those responsible for his ACE of nine have got away scar-free!
I agree.
So the therapy hasn't helped, right?
Okay, so Stefan, what about the fact, now if you take that whole conversation...
Now what you're going to say is I chose this.
If I would have Okay, so... Three months into the marriage, I thought, I don't know how I'm going to be able to be married to this man for 50 years.
Why is that? What happened?
It was just so horrible and painful.
I just knew that every time I tried to talk to him about anything, I couldn't talk to him about anything.
We had bought a house to fix up, and I would say, when are we going to fix it up?
And then I would be in trouble for asking about when we were going to do stuff.
What do you mean you'd be in trouble?
Give me a specific conversation as you remember.
So the house that we bought, the lady that lived there was old and incontinent, so the carpet was full of pee, and the wood underneath it needed to be replaced.
So we waited to move in together until we were married.
So he moved in and he started doing some fixing up of the house and getting the old wood out of there so that it wouldn't smell like urine.
And so we lived in a house with particle board floors for a long time, like for three years.
And I would bring up, like, well, I thought we were going to...
Do projects and fix this up and sell it in a year.
I thought this was going to be a short-term house that we bought.
We bought it the last two months before we were going to get married.
And there was, you know, significant stuff and I would bring it up and he would attack me with, like, I don't remember.
I just remember feeling like I couldn't bring anything up.
Now, do you know what you're doing?
I don't know.
well You are trying to take me on another ride to a quarter century ago because I've given you something to do tomorrow.
And you're trying to drag me back in time.
Okay. Yeah. 25 years?
23 years? A long time.
Decades. Here's something you can do tomorrow.
Wait a minute. The important stuff was in the 1980s.
Okay, wait, Stefan.
What I'm wanting to do is say, from the very beginning, I didn't divorce him because I was going to church and you're not allowed to divorce.
But if I would have known them what I know today, I would have divorced him before he ever had children.
And then church taught me and I believed the lies that if I just was sweet and kind and submissive, and if I just always had grace and mercy and love and kindness, if I always didn't return anger when he would be angry to me, That he would become more loving and kind through my example.
And so I endured that for a long time.
And we didn't have a child for five years.
If I knew today what I knew then, I would have divorced him.
There are so many things I would have done differently.
But Stefan, I don't have good memories in my marriage.
And I do have four children.
But what I'm interested in in this conversation with you is is there a way to move forward that he gets the help that he needs and I'm happy to start that tomorrow and to make a call to his parents and to let them know and to whatever.
But I'm interested in is there a way that I can step away because You said all that stuff about a person who's been harmed, that's a victim.
And I'm just disappointed that you've called me to leadership when I've done leadership for 23 years, and some of it missed out.
Wait, wait, wait. What leadership have you done?
You were submissive, you were nice, you were kind, and you sent him to therapists.
Yeah, I was told that if I did that...
No, but you see, if you're being told what to do, you're not being a leader, and this is the price of being told what to do.
I agree.
I agree. Which is one of the reasons why I might not do what you tell me to do, because I'm also in a place in my life where I have to evaluate all people's...
Ideas, and I value yours greatly, so I wanted your input on this.
And I'm trying to give you the most empowering thing that you can do, which is not to put the fate into somebody else's hands, to not throw him off to a therapist or hope that someone else is going to fix it, but for you to take the leadership to try and fix it yourself.
Because that would be the best outcome for my children.
Correct? You see, you gave him four kids, and the reason I'm not putting him in the same category as him, Christy, as you know, is that he didn't choose his parents, and he couldn't leave his parents.
You did choose him, and you could have left him.
Now, you say, well, the church told me not to.
And that's the price you pay for listening to people, rather than...
Thinking things through yourself.
And I understand it.
Listen, I'm not trying to throw you under the bus here.
I mean, I completely sympathize with all of the forces arrayed around you to keep you in the marriage.
I sympathize and I'm not trying to say, oh, he was weak.
I mean, these were very, very important facts.
And you don't want your children to be susceptible to the same things.
And so when I say your husband was a victim and you say, but I was a victim, there is a difference.
Your husband did not choose his parents and he could not leave the relationship.
You did choose him, and you could have left the relationship.
But now, after you have four children with him, one of whom hasn't even broken double digits yet, now?
Yeah, Stefan, this is actually a really significant problem in the Christian church.
And there's like this cultural thing that happens that...
No, no, no. No, no, no.
I'm so sorry to be annoying.
But I have to be, I mean, I have to demonstrate leadership.
I'm not going to talk about the church.
I want to talk about you. Okay, then I'm, if you don't want to understand that...
No, I understand that.
The church encourages marriages to stay together.
I understand that. No, not only that.
And they tell the wives to submit and that the man is the leader and it creates abusive marriages in large numbers.
How do you know it creates abusive marriages in large numbers?
Because I have many friends in a very similar scenario because the dynamics that the church teaches leads to this.
And I talk to my friends and I say, That is not the truth.
And they start choosing different choices in their marriage, and their marriages are transforming and changing.
Are you telling me that the issue in your marriage is not the fact that your husband has an adverse childhood experience score of 9, but the church's teachings on marriage?
I say the combination.
Let's focus on what we can control here, which is that you can do something about the adverse childhood experience of 9.
You can't do much about, at least in the short run, overturning church teachings at the moment.
But I have been addressing his trauma score of 9 for a long time.
I read a book several years ago, The Process of Maturity, and I said, I understand what happened.
I said to him, listen, when you were little, this happened.
And when you were 1 to 4, you were supposed to have these needs met, and they weren't met.
And when you were 4 to 12, you should have had these needs met, and they weren't met.
And then from 12 on, you needed a man to teach you to be a man, and that didn't happen.
And so now you are stuck at this place.
And I've tried getting him help, and I've taken us places.
No one has given me the idea to go to his parents and to deal with the family stuff.
So why are you getting frustrated?
I mean, unless you want me to tell you, which I'm not going to do, to just leave him.
If I'm giving you a new option or a new solution, something that you can take a real leadership role in, please understand, Christy, I'm not saying do this and never leave him.
I mean, I can tell you whether to stay in your marriage or not, of course, right?
But in my particular perspective, in my particular opinion, This is the best chance you have of breaking this cycle because the problem is you keep trying to tell me that you're powerless and I'm trying to give you something powerful to do.
Now, what this might do is it might cause So there's a couple of scenarios.
One, you arrange this and there's these incredible conversations and there's some kind of healing, there's some kind of progress, there's some kind of relief on the part of your husband.
His isolated early childhood experience is finally broken through, the burden is lifted, and there's a massive breakthrough.
And then you end up with a far better marriage and it's like, yay, I'm really glad I talked to Steph, right?
Another situation could be that you go out and you try and facilitate these kinds of conversations.
And you know what this is? This is, thou shalt not bear false witness.
Thou shalt not bear false witness by not facilitating these conversations with his parents.
You have been a silent participation in the ignoring of unbelievable levels of child abuse.
You have been bearing false witness with regards to your husband and his parents, because you have been colluding in the burying of the child abuse, because that level of child abuse will never be a non-topic.
It doesn't mean you talk about it every time, but if you have open lines of communication, then it will never be a non-topic.
It will never be something, well, we'll never talk about this again.
Never will it happen, because that amount of child abuse is unbelievable.
It's incredibly staggering.
I mean, other than being raised in a satanic cult.
Anyway, so maybe he goes out, and you facilitate this, and they just shut him down.
They shut him down.
They're total assholes about it.
They won't accept anything.
They won't accept any responsibility.
They blame him for bringing it up.
They say, it's all in the past.
Why are you digging around for this?
And honor their dad, and honor thy mother, and they're complete jerks about it.
Well, that's a relief as well.
That is a huge relief as well.
It was a relief for me when my father said I was too depressed to connect with you, and it was a relief for me when my father, on hearing what my mother did, said, that's terrible.
Because it's like, okay, well, I don't have to own this anymore.
I gave it to you. Now, the fact that you're not willing to hold it, the fact that you try and throw it back in my face, it doesn't stick anymore.
Because I'm putting responsibility where the responsibility actually is.
Was it my responsibility to fix my mother?
No. Was it my mother's responsibility to fix my mother?
Yes. Was it my father's responsibility to fix my mom?
Not exactly, but he did marry her, but it certainly was my father's responsibility to keep me safe and to do whatever it took to keep me safe.
And he didn't. Now, I don't have to take any ownership for that.
That's not my deal.
That's nothing that I feel I should have done differently or maybe if I'd done this or I take no ownership for it at all.
And by placing the onus on my parents for failing to keep me safe, for failing to keep me secure, I then take 100% ownership for myself as a father.
Because if you give 100% ownership to your father, you then take 100% ownership for yourself.
And it doesn't feel like an additional burden because you have room on your shoulders and strength in your legs to stand it.
So maybe you take him out to this meeting, to this conversation with his mom and his stepmom, and you facilitate the damn thing.
Until your voice is hoarse and you can't cry anymore and they're just stone walls.
Okay, then you see this elemental, I would say, satanic coldness in their heart and you drive home with a sense of relief that can scarcely be expressed.
If they are open-hearted and they're warm and you chip at it and chisel at it and you break through and they take ownership, fantastic.
If they don't and they don't and they don't, you still get that relief and that release.
You can't lose. You can't lose in what I'm proposing because you either get a breakthrough or you get the reality of their cold-heartedness and their selfishness.
And they're continuing to place burdens on their children that they damn well should have taken themselves and should take themselves now.
And there's relief and release in both scenarios.
He's not going to do it.
Why? Because he has an ACE of nine.
They're not going to do it. Why?
Because they haven't. You can do it.
Now, the reason I'm saying this, maybe you say this is what needs to be done, and nobody in the family will participate.
You work really hard to make it work.
You maybe even surprise them.
I don't know. I'm not real big on up-top ethics for people who participated in decades of egregious child abuse, so maybe it's like, hey, surprise!
This isn't just a social visit, but, you know, that's fine with me too.
Whatever gets the people in the room talking is what matters.
And maybe this meeting never comes about.
Maybe everyone storms off. Maybe nothing happens.
Maybe your husband refuses to do it.
Maybe he refuses to even talk about it.
Okay, well then at least in this scenario you say, okay, well I can't be a leader in this.
And if I can't be a leader in this, and I've spent a lot of years trying to get other people to help him, I mean, maybe there's something else to do.
I'm certainly no psychologist, but that, okay, maybe there's nothing else to do, in which case you can make your decision accordingly.
But you earn your way out of these things through the relentless application of leadership.
And people either follow your leadership and you lead them to a better place, or they refuse to follow your leadership, and maybe you just find that place on your own.
But here's the thing. His parents are responsible for what happened to him as a child, and you're responsible, as you know, for having four children with this man.
You say, oh, well, after a couple of months I would have left him, but you did choose to have four children with the man.
And you think you're helpless?
How are they doing? Are you asking me the question?
You have talked to me about your helplessness, but have not mentioned much about your children's helplessness.
You chose him, they didn't.
Right. And I... It hasn't turned out perfect, but I have led and I have fought on their behalf every step of the way.
And... Um, the, the counselor we've talked to, we had some issues with our 18 year old.
Our issues with our 18 year old are not about drugs or drinking or staying out late.
He has a really great group of friends and, you know, I don't know, college bound and all that kind of stuff.
And he, um, you know, reads more than he should because he loves to read books.
Um, he loves philosophy.
He, um, likes to talk about ideas.
He, um, So he's realized that he can't talk to his dad.
And at the same time, even though that's not all perfect, when we've talked to our counselor, our counselor said, your 18-year-old is going to be fine when he moves out.
So essentially, my husband doesn't tend to let consequences fall to him, and my 18-year-old's kind of been sheltered from So he's kind of unmotivated and some things like that.
And she said, when he moves up...
Sorry, your husband doesn't let consequences accrue to him, is that right?
Correct. Yeah, that's because no consequences have accrued to his stepmother and his father.
We can't have higher standards for ourselves than we apply to those around us.
If you want your husband to start accruing consequences to himself, then his parents have to start accruing consequences for their...
Enabling of his vicious child abuse and molestation.
They're getting away scot-free.
Why on earth should there be consequences to him?
Right. Yeah.
There's this chain, you know, of people who've done wrong in this world.
There's this chain.
And they're all holding together on this chain, saying, nobody break the chain.
Nobody give us responsibility.
Nobody ever even hint that we should be held accountable for what we have done and what we have not done.
Right. For our sins of omission and our sins of commission.
Nobody turn on the light.
Nobody hold us responsible.
Nobody confronts. Us with what we have done.
Responsibility then becomes like a demon that is only summoned.
When responsibility is assigned, it's like some ritual, some pentagram-based ritual that summons the demon of responsibility simply by identifying the fact that people are responsible.
And your husband's parents are part of this chain.
And your husband is part of this chain.
And you, my dear, are part of this chain.
Because everyone says to the victims, just deal with being a victim, just process this, just do that.
It's all self-management.
But the way we get out of victimhood is to assign responsibility to the abusers.
Justice cures abuse.
Honesty, truth. Consequences cure the symptoms of abuse.
Not journaling.
Not a dream analysis.
These things are fine.
They can be useful.
They can be productive.
But what cures the effects of evil is justice.
And justice cannot arise or arrive in the presence of active collusion to hide the crimes.
What happened to your husband were crimes.
And I'm not just talking about moral crimes, legal crimes for which people do decades in prison.
And often are killed, particularly pedophiles, are killed in prison.
Now... I'm going to assume, given how long ago it was, that the pedophiles who groomed and abused your husband are either dead or so old or whatever, but the fact that the family did nothing about this, the fact that this was never dealt with, meant that these men continued to prey upon children, right?
Yeah. One of them did later go to prison, and the children were asked...
Did this person ever harm you?
And all of the children said no, which is also kind of consistent with what tends to happen.
It's what tends to happen in families where there's no communication.
Yeah. I really, really, really appreciate, Stefan, your unique insight into things.
And I've never really thought about...
I mean, I've thought about how my father-in-law needs to take responsibility, but I've never felt like it was my place to step up.
If not you, who? You think the family with the ACE of nine on the children is going to take a moral leadership and expose crimes?
You're right. I mean, I just never...
And here's the things to find why your show is so different.
Nobody, hardly anybody else out there is saying what you're saying.
And there are counselors and there are therapists.
All over. And they're not...
No one's ever encouraged me to do that.
And I think if anybody ever would have, I would have.
You will. You will do it.
I mean, I know you will. Because no matter what happens to your marriage, you care about the father of your children.
Yes, absolutely.
And if there's something you can do that brings justice to the people who colluded or perpetrated criminal levels of child abuse...
This isn't he was spanked too hard.
This isn't he was unjustly sent to his room without dinner.
This is criminal neglect, abuse, torture, molestation, you name it.
Yeah. This is like a crime syndicate.
This is like he got into the clutches of a Pakistani gang in England.
Yeah. And I do not know how there can be peace Without justice.
And I don't know how that can be justice if nobody even talks about the crimes.
Everybody's colluding in the cover-up of criminal activity.
Right. And I think until maybe five or six months ago, I came across this new thing that caused me to be aware of how much lying is such a problem.
And that's one of my big struggles with Christianity right now.
It is how much you're asked to lie, and yet they claim to have the truth and to tell the truth, but I was asked for years to lie about the real nature of my marriage.
So I'm realizing how when we ask others to lie in these really subtle ways, you are so right, like the justice and the confronting and the Putting it before someone and giving them a chance to own it or not.
And I feel like life is short and there are fantastic people out there that are going to enjoy me and I'm going to enjoy them.
And I don't have to have a hundred friends.
All I really need is a few really fantastic friends that I get them, they get me, and there are millions of people out there.
And so when you come to a place in a relationship where If a person doesn't value you because they won't make amends or they don't want to own it, you know, going two separate ways is a really good response.
Well, there is, of course, and I talked about this with Dr.
Pastor today, there is the challenging injunction to honor thy mother and thy father.
Yeah. And I do take that seriously.
I think it is a very powerful commandment.
But I believe it is subordinate to the commandment, thou shalt not bear false witness.
Yeah. Thou shalt tell the truth.
Thou shalt be honest.
And thou shalt work to bring about thy parents' salvation with all the energy you possess, while giving them the respect and the honor and the dignity of free fucking will.
Mm-hmm. Yes.
I did honor my mother and my father.
I honored everyone in my family by coming to them with the truth.
By coming to them with reality.
And I granted them that respect.
And this is what I encourage people to do.
Go talk to your family. Go talk to your parents.
If you were mistreated, if you were abused, go talk to them.
Give them the respect of honesty.
And give them the honor and respect of free will, which means they are responsible for how they handle the truth of what they did.
If your husband's Parents, Christy, were bank robbers.
If they were bank robbers and they were living wealthy off stealing from banks, and let's for the moment pretend that banks were honorable institutions.
But if your parents were bank robbers, would at some point it not be worth sitting down and saying, So, all that bank robbing, I think we should probably talk about it.
Because I think by ignoring it, I'm not teaching my children respect for property rights and avoiding a life of fucking crime.
Right. Now, a bank robber is infinitely more honorable than somebody who allows his child to accumulate an adverse childhood experience brutality score of 100% evil.
Far better to be a bank robber than someone who allows the abuse of a child.
Banks got insurance, and banks are kind of stealing anyway.
So, if we understand that parents have a responsibility to keep their children safe, I don't care what your damn excuse is.
Parents, you have a responsibility to keep your children safe, and if an offspring of yours ends up with a drug addict and a rudder, Short of food?
Short of medical attention?
Short of cleanliness?
Short of support? Short of love?
Short of security? That's on you.
She's a drug addict.
She's gone. She's lost to reason.
It's on you.
I mean, would you let someone blind drunk drive your children in an icy storm?
No. If you do, and your child gets injured, that's on you.
We say, well, yes, but it's on the mom too.
Well, the mom's dead. Right.
And the mom was a drug addict.
And how did the courts handle this back then?
Because sometimes, and I've heard you talk about the court system.
I just imagine it could come up in conversation.
If she's a drug addict and you can document this, she's going to lose custody.
Mm-hmm. I mean, I assume that there are some resources in the family.
I don't know why I get that impression.
Maybe it's because of your intellect.
But I assume that there are some resources in the family.
You can get a child or children away from a drug addict who's having sex in front of the children.
Come on. I mean, I know the court system is not friendly a lot of times to fathers, but it's also not completely mental.
And the court would have to find some way to justify the children staying in a sex and drug addicted single mother's household and not going to a stable two parent household with no addiction.
Right. And I don't care.
You still should have tried.
Yeah. What is it too expensive?
You chose the woman.
She's a drug addict, and you chose a woman who ended up as a drug addict as the mother of your children.
Sorry, that's kind of on you too.
I do know that his dad has said if he would have been a better husband, the divorce never would have happened.
Well... I don't mean...
That's sentimental emptiness.
Who cares, right? Talk to your son about his adverse childhood experience score of 9 out of 9.
I don't care about the sentimental Hallmark card of like, well, if I'd have been a hell of a...
Like, who cares? Right.
Are you saying that you're responsible for the marriage breaking up and for your child being stuck in a hovel with a drug addict?
Well, you've got to take ownership for that.
If he was the only functional parent left, it's on him what happened to your husband.
And you guys are going over there and glad-handing and barbecuing?
Are you kidding me?
This guy delivered your husband unto evil.
This was a satanic, demonic, horrendous environment of brutality and rape and addiction and destruction and mental crazy horror.
And I think, I think when you go and talk to his father about this and his stepmother about this, I think you'll see exactly why this situation played out the way it did.
And that's why everybody glad hands and talks about nothing.
If I was in possession of the commission of a crime, I wouldn't want to talk about anything meaningful either.
In a relationship is usually proportional to the level of guilty conscience.
Depth is reserved for a clean conscience.
Right. Emptiness is reserved for guilt.
Trivia is reserved for guilt.
Nothingness is the province of self-hatred.
And you need to see...
See, if you can see what your husband has always seen, you may understand him in a way that you can't imagine right now.
And again, this doesn't mean, oh, well, that's stay, you leave, whatever.
What I'm saying is that your husband, I guarantee you, your husband stood before his father at some point begging for help.
Or at least begging him to notice that help was needed.
And he stood before everyone in that family, and he stood before his step-mother, and he stood before the babysitter that you talked about, and he stood before either explicitly or implicitly begging on bloody knees for help, for salvation, for rescue.
And they all turned and walked away and left him there to rot in that hell.
So what's going to happen when you arrange this conversation, Christy, is your husband is going to be back in a situation where he's asking his father and stepmother for help.
But as an adult now, with independence, not as a child who has to go back To the refuse-strewn, garbage-strewn, needle-strewn, condom-strewn wreckage of a drug addict's hovel.
He is going to be back in the situation of asking his parents for help.
That is a very powerful thing to do as an adult.
As a child, you could only beg for it.
As an adult, you can do more than beg.
You can demand it, and you have choices, and you have options, and you have resources, you have independence, you have freedom, liberty, autonomy.
There shall be no end to our journeyings, says the poem, and the point of all of our journeyings shall be returned to the place that we started and know it for the first time, consciously, completely, fully.
To put yourself in a position of vulnerability that you have avoided for many years, that has rendered you to be helpless, is a very powerful thing to do.
To go and to beg and to ask for succor, for help, for salvation.
For people to take the just burden of their own criminal actions or inactions.
To do that as an adult is an incredibly powerful thing to do.
Because you're saying, I am worth the pursuit of justice.
I am no longer going to carry the load of other people's moral horrors.
I am going to hand it back to them.
And if they don't want to take it, I sure as hell ain't leaving with it.
And if nobody will do any of that, Christy, nothing's going to change.
Thank you.
Yeah. Because people have not been doing that for decades and nothing has changed, right?
Right. Thank you.
I really appreciate your thoughts.
How are you feeling? I'm really sad.
Sad for him and the situation.
Concerned about the conversation.
With his parents and probably his family.
But also really sad.
For me, you only know, Stavon, glimpses of what I've been able to tell you.
And you've spent so much time with me.
It has been my pleasure and honor to do so.
I hope you know that. This is not a burden.
I'm very honored that you would trust me with this.
I remain highly doubting that there's repair that can be done to my relationship with my husband.
One of the things that I heard you say on a show was, and I think it was on the one with the two gay guys, is Myself personally, I have not had a relationship that began with dysfunction and survived the cure of dysfunction.
That doesn't mean it's not possible.
I'm just telling you my particular experience.
that's what you said and I just because I know the complete story of course I just doubt that there really is yeah but and I'll say this
Christy, that the purpose of all of this may not be to save your marriage.
As you say, I mean, I've had a glimpse for an hour and a half and you've lived it for decades, so obviously your experience infinitely trumps mine.
But he is always and forever going to be the father of your children.
Right. Absolutely.
And if there's something that you can do that can provide him relief, even if it doesn't save the marriage, even if all it does is improve his relationship with his children, or mean that if you get divorced and he moves forward in his life and he's had some relief with his parents, then he can choose a far better partner next time than otherwise.
Absolutely. And since your children won't be around that partner, there's no way to lose from this, even if it doesn't save your marriage.
It may make the divorce much less fractious.
It may make him much healthier going forward.
And it will mean that the next woman who's around your kids is going to be much more functional.
Right. And what I've been contemplating is, is there a way to move forward and divorce?
Because for me to be able to be like...
I've been set free from something that I feel like I've been trapped in because of lies and manipulation.
And I started going through training to become a mediator.
So I didn't see this all transpiring this way when I began that process over a year ago.
But I know that you can mediate amicable divorces.
And you can come up with creative plans.
I've heard you talk about single moms and boys and my two little ones are boys and I've actually moved to the spare bedroom a month ago and I'm kind of wondering if I can find a way to create income to get on my two feet.
I have boys that are dyslexic so I'd like to homeschool them for a couple more years.
They're really solid readers because I've done a ton of research about that and I kind of I don't know where else to get the help that they need to really get that reading piece solid and figure out a creative path forward.
My husband is a fantastic dad.
Those two little boys will need him and not me.
And then my oldest is moving out and my daughter is teen.
Having lived through this, and then her 18-year-old brother has been abusive to her in the way that my husband's abusive to me.
And so her and I have done a lot of work in the last year about how to handle that relationship.
And she's learned about drawing boundaries and standing her ground and things like that.
So that I've seen her really have a complex understanding of relationships and harm and restitution and reconciliation.
I think I may have to interrupt you here, my friend.
Because, and I understand this mindset, but what you're doing is, so you have a clear plan of action that, you know, listen, if you have a therapist you can talk to yourself with that you trust, that would be my very strong recommendation.
I mean, in terms of, like, moving forward to try and get some truth between your husband and his parents.
But you're now trying to map on the other side of that, right?
Right. Right.
But you can't, because the other side of that is unexplored territory.
So, it's going to look very different after these efforts than before.
And so, trying to say, okay, so once I get this done, and this is going to happen, but you don't know what it's going to look like after you get this done.
So I would say try to not think three hills over the march.
But this is a one foot in front of the other time.
Focus on what you can do tomorrow and the day after and be alert and sensitive to how the ground shifts after you make your choices and after you take your leadership role.
Because you don't know what the family is going to look like.
You don't know how your relationship with your husband is going to shake out.
You don't know what's going to be going forward.
And so sometimes we cast our minds so far ahead in order to distract ourself from what we need to do right now.
And I can't, of course, I can't answer the questions of how things are going to look or what you should do.
Your kids are dyslexic. I mean, this is something that you're going to have to negotiate going forward.
The only thing that I can suggest is that honesty is the best policy.
This is the philosophical principle that I'm bringing.
And the honest fact seems to be, based on your reporting, that Your father, sorry, the father of your children, your husband, was extraordinarily badly treated.
And there's two people alive, at least, who have ownership of that.
And that needs to be talked about.
That needs to be discussed.
Now, that's a big enough project, I think, for the next little while.
What happens after that is...
It's so hard to envision since we don't even know, or you don't even know, nobody knows how that's going to go.
Because they do have the wonderful capacity of free will.
So how they respond is up to them.
Maybe they will respond positively.
Maybe a little bit of relief to them.
Maybe they will respond in a hostile manner.
Maybe they'll continue to avoid.
Maybe they'll give you... What I call the BNAP, like the bullshit non-apology.
Well, you know, it was bad. We did the best we could.
I can understand you're upset. Let's move on, right?
So who knows? But this is a big enough project that I would say just focus on this.
And be then sensitive to how things change after that.
But trying to plan for what it looks like after that when you don't even know when or how or what response has been happened or how many meetings it's going to take, that's your focus, in my opinion.
I mean, in a sense, it's like you got thrown overboard, you're clinging to a barrel in the middle of a storm and you're saying, okay, but what stock should I invest in for my retirement plan?
It's like, I don't know.
Let's get to shore first.
Yeah. Yeah, I feel like I've been through this process so long and we've done so many different things to try to heal and address things.
And I also wrote initially a month ago and over the course of time without having talked to you, I've really very much felt like I don't see this marriage going into the future.
I know that. I've heard that in every syllable you have poured into my ear, my dear.
I absolutely, completely and totally hear that.
If I were a betting man, the odds I would put upon your wanting to continue this marriage would be zero to infinity.
So, I mean, I don't want to pretend I haven't heard that.
I mean, I absolutely have.
And you have been, in a sense, saying, give me the exit slip as quickly as you can.
I'm fumbling with this eject button.
I'm fumbling with the, you know, like, why won't this thing work?
So, I completely understand that.
And nothing I'm saying is for or against that.
But I think you want a clearer side of where things are before that.
Yeah. And what about this?
You know, it's one thing if he was, say, 9 or 10 or 15, but he's been an adult for three decades.
So at what point is it just his responsibility?
Yes, but you are focusing on his responsibility, which I understand.
And what I'm trying to do...
Is give you your responsibility, which is you have colluded with his criminal parents in burying his child abuse for as long as he's been an adult.
Yeah. And you have the least excuse because they're not your parents and it wasn't your childhood that was ravaged in this way.
You weren't raped, you weren't abandoned, you weren't abused, you weren't neglected.
So you're the one with the most strength and capacity to have dealt with this proactively And to brought these crimes to light over the past couple of decades, and you decided to take the easy route.
And you have found, as we all do when we take the easy route, it ain't so easy in the long run, right?
Every single day, you didn't make that phone call.
Every single day, you didn't set up that meeting.
Every single day, you didn't bring this issue to the fore.
And that made each individual day easier, but the accumulation of it over decades is agony, right?
Well, I agree with that statement.
The accumulation over decades is agony.
Here's the thing is that I was under the impression that they were a happy family.
Because when we get together for Christmas or a couple times a year, it was always fun and activities and going bowling and doing this and doing that.
And I didn't... I wasn't really aware of how...
Tense this relationship was for my husband really until in the last few years as I've started to...
When I woke up and I was like, who am I married to?
I don't understand. And I started...
Processing through that and understanding...
Okay. Now, I'm going to give you even more responsibility since you keep dodging it.
I'm going to give you even more responsibility.
Can we just get off the phone right now?
I know, I know, I know.
Listen, these violins are swelling in my ear as well.
You've got a whole orchestra behind you.
Trust me, I can hear it.
I can see the gleams, the little broken hairs of the violins going up and down about how they fooled you and this and that.
I mean, listen, I completely understand what a seductive pit The abandonment of free will and personal responsibility is.
Trust me, I fight that battle every single day.
But here's the reality.
You didn't ask. You didn't dig in.
You didn't find out. You're right. I didn't.
I completely agree with you.
The Nigerian scammer was lying to me.
He's like, well, did you do a Google on it?
Whatever. Duck, duck, go.
I agree. So you were also colluding in, well, it's a happy family and you preferred it to be that way rather than to dig in and to find out.
Right? Yeah, and this Christmas I said, I don't want to go be around your family and pretend like everything's okay, so let's make it a short trip.
And because I don't feel like everybody wants to really address it.
You think? Yeah.
Criminals don't want to be confronted with their crimes and have any consequences?
Well, of course they don't. Right.
And I'm on the outside because I'm, you know, a daughter in law.
I'm sorry, you just garbled out for a second there, Christy, if you could just repeat that last thing.
Yeah, because I'm the daughter-in-law and I'm not, you know, the, yeah.
And the idea never crossed my mind until you said it, that it is my responsibility.
Because, Stefan, nobody in our culture talks about that.
That's true. And I'm doing my very best and I wish people would.
I wish people would. I take very seriously that thou shalt not bear false witness, and that includes lies of omission as well as commission.
I'm trying to take that one more seriously instead of a different world.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm very grateful. Thank you so much.
Thank you for not letting me.
It was wrong for them to fool you.
Don't get me wrong. I mean, I'm not saying that they're blameless, and I'm not putting all the onus on you, of course.
I mean, there's a lot of wrong that they have done.
Yeah. There is a lot of wrong that they have done and I have no doubt that there's an enormous amount of wrong that your husband has done.
I absolutely, completely and totally accept everything that you're saying as far as that goes because I don't want to make that same mistake and put, oh, now it's all on you and he's like, but I have always found it difficult but necessary to take the maximum possible responsibility that I can.
That gives me the most knowledge and eventually the most liberty and choice that can be conceived of.
Yeah. Yes.
How are you feeling now? Better.
Good. Yeah, I wasn't sad.
Like, where we were talking before, that was not satisfying for me as a place to end the conversation because I knew that there were still a few violins in the back.
I could hear them.
I could hear them. You know, there's an old British comedy called...
Oh, I can't remember what it's called.
Anyway, there's a woman who's complaining about her butt.
And she says, I'm not even eating and my butt's getting bigger.
I can feel it back there snacking.
Coupling, that's what it's called.
And yeah, I mean, when it comes to...
Listen, you have reason for self-pity.
You have reason for...
Feeling hard done by, you have a reason for all of that.
And I sympathize and I completely understand.
And when I say, you know, take maximum responsibility, that doesn't mean forever and that doesn't mean for everyone.
But maximum power right now is also what your kids need to see.
They need to see someone being proactive.
They need to see someone being a leader.
And they don't have to know the details of what was talked about, of course.
They'll just pick it up.
Mm-hmm. Mom's putting on her golden armor.
She's jumping in her invisible plane with her lasso, and she's now a superhero.
And that's what your daughters need to see, and that's what your sons need to see.
Yeah. Yes.
All right. Will you let us know how it goes?
I will. I definitely will.
Thank you for a very great conversation, and I truly respect and admire your courage in taking this on.
It is powerful, powerful, powerful.
All right. Well, thanks everyone so much for the calls.
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