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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:44
'But They Did The Best They Could' A Moral Examination of Historical Parenting
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There's a story in society, and it's a very interesting story.
It's a very prevalent story.
And the story in society is that if you had problems with your parents, if your parents were abusive or violent or destructive or whatever, that when you get older and you look at your parents' behavior from an ethical standpoint, from an objective moral standpoint, And you say, well, some bad stuff went down.
Some really bad stuff went down.
There's a story in society that says, when your parents did the best they could with the knowledge that they had, and therefore, you should continue to respect and love and spend time with them and care for them as they grow old and so on.
And this is a universal perspective.
This is a universal piece of soul calcifying propaganda that you will hear coming rushing at you from every direction the moment you begin to question the virtue of your parents.
I'm only talking about abusive parents here.
All parents.
And I think it's a very interesting question.
To what degree are parents responsible for destructive elements of their parenting?
It's a very, very interesting question.
I'm an empiricist, which means I don't care what people say.
I only care what they do.
And you should not care what I say.
You should care for the evidence that I present.
Forget about the quality or entertainment value or florid language of my arguments.
Simply look at the facts.
So, I'm an empiricist, which means I don't care what people say.
I only care what they do.
So when I was examining the moral nature of my parents, which is an absolutely essential thing for everyone to do, whether your parents were good, bad, or indifferent, it's very, very important to understand this because you cannot have a clearer relationship with any authority than you have with your own parents.
Philosophy starts with the personal and extends to the universal.
Everybody wants to leap over the personal.
And go straight to massive authority figures like gods and governments and other forms of structures and corporations and so on.
But you cannot.
You cannot understand the distant until you understand the near.
You cannot understand the abstract until you understand the personal.
Philosophy starts with self-knowledge and only then extends from self-knowledge to wider spheres of knowledge.
The unexamined life, as Socrates said, is not worth living because you're not really alive.
You're simply bouncing off your own emotional defenses and avoidances.
Pretending to understand the world.
So, we look at the empiricism of the question of parental morality.
So, if I'm going to claim to you that I did the very best I could in a particular situation.
Let's say I'm studying for passing the bar.
I'm a lawyer, I want to pass the bar.
And let's say that I fail.
And I say to you, but I did everything that I could do, the very best that I could.
Well, your question would be then, well, what did you do?
And if I say, well, I didn't study.
When people came along and tried to give me information that would help me, I kind of rejected and avoided them.
Sometimes I just get mean to them.
And so I drank, and I was out late, and so on, right?
And then I failed.
But I did the very best that I could.
Well, there would be a complete disconnect here.
Doing the very best that you can do does not mean not studying, and avoiding knowledge, and drinking, and being out late, or whatever.
If I'm studying for the bar, or some exam, and I failed, Doing the very best that I could do would mean that I studied my brains out, I tried to work as hard as I could, I exercised to stay clear, I focused, I got a good night's sleep the night before, I was prepared, I had three pencils and two watches and gave it my very best shot.
Well, then if I fail, I can easily say with a good and clear conscience that I did the very best that I could.
But I failed.
Well, that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I've failed at many things in my life and regret none of them.
So when people say, or your parents may say this as well, and this is not just your parents, this is anybody, but we'll just focus on parents for the moment.
We did the very best we could.
Your parents did the very best they could.
With the knowledge that they had, it was a different time, under the circumstances and so on.
Well, my question would be, what's the proof of that?
What's the evidence for that?
Did your parents take parenting classes?
Did they study with experts?
Did they read books?
Did they get advice?
Did they go to the library and take out magazines on parenting?
Did they consult with people that they considered to be good parents to find out how they did?
Did they work to study for the exam called parenting, which is the most important test of knowledge and virtue in the world?
Much more important than a goddamn bar exam at LSAT or an MCAT or an SAT.
Those things are completely unimportant relative to the importance of parenting.
So if parenting is an important test, the question is, did your parents study for it?
Did they actually empirically, verifiably do the very best that they could do?
And if they didn't, if they just went on history, and inertia, and defenses, and dysfunction, and they did not even try to escape the cycle of abuse, but merely re-inflicted what happened to them, then they're like people who claim that they did the very best they could to study and pass for an exam without ever having studied for the exam.
Well clearly, if somebody hasn't studied for an exam, they're not doing the best that they could.
So that's the first answer.
Now the second answer that I would have is this.
If somebody fails a test, and let's pretend that all tests are as important as parenting, but there's no more important test than parenting for making the world a better place.
But let's say that all tests are equally important to parenting.
Let's also say, and I think this is a fairly I mean, it would be crazy to not believe this ethical rule.
Let's also say that we should not have higher moral standards for a 7-year-old than we do for a 40-year-old.
Let's just say that.
I think that that's a fair thing to say.
You cannot possibly rationally defend the proposition that we should have higher moral standards for 7-year-olds than we do for 40-year-olds.
So whatever rule is applicable to a 40-year-old must be equally applicable to a 7-year-old.
And whatever rule is applied to a 7-year-old must, many times over, more strictly be applied to a 40-year-old.
So let's look and see.
Parents who are 30 or 40, who do a terrible job or a bad job, who then get that get-out-of-jail-free card called, they did the best they could.
Well, let's see how that applies to your average 7-year-old.
So your average 7-year-old or 10-year-old or 15-year-old, they have a series of tests in life, particularly in school.
And let's say you have a 12-year-old or a 15-year-old and he doesn't study for a particular test and then he fails.
Well, society as a whole should give him a pass anyway.
Because we give the pass to the parents who are 30 or 40 years old who fail the test of parenting, they get the instant whiteout of all problems called they did the best they could.
Even if there's no evidence that they did do the best they could.
So why cannot a 7 or 10 or 15-year-old come out of a test he has not studied for Why can he not get a passing grade by just waving the magic words called, I did the best I could!
Or, if you are a 30 or 40 year old parent, and you say to your son, I want you to do X, Y, and Z. I want you to watch the car.
And he doesn't get off the couch for the entire afternoon, he's playing Nintendo.
And you go at and you say, the car is not washed.
Why haven't you washed the car?
And he says, I did the best that I could.
Do you then say as a parent, okay, I completely understand.
Thank you so much.
You did a great job.
Or even if you didn't do a great job, you absolutely did the best that you could.
So no problem.
How many parents would do that?
But this is what parents expect when children become adults and children question the ethics of their parenting.
Do you see, I mean the fundamental bias is always dishonesty and the dishonesty in the realm of morality is always hypocrisy.
If society has moral rules that it expects You average 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 year old to follow.
Then surely the parents must be subject to the same rules.
And if we do not allow children who do not study for tests to pass their exams, and if we do not forgive and praise children who lift not a finger to fulfill chores they have promised to do, Because we do not give them the excuse called, we did the best we could with no evidence whatsoever.
Then how can it possibly apply to parents?
How can we possibly have infinitely higher moral standards for children than we do for parents?
Well, the answer to that, my friends, is that morality is always and forever used as a club to grind down the dependent.
And we can never subject our masters to the moral rules they inflict on us.
How insane would that be?
That is to misunderstand the entire purpose of ethics, which is to inculcate guilt, obedience, and soul-crushing conformity in those who are dependent on those in power, whether they are citizens, or parishioners, or students in public schools.
When we begin to apply these moral rules universally, and even try to apply the same moral rules to adults that we have forever inflicted upon children, then we begin to blow away the dust and fog of propaganda, and we begin to see the true purpose of ethics.
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