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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:23
A Theory of Mental Health Part 2
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Mullany from Freedom Aid Radio.
This is a theory of mental health part two.
So tens of millions of children around the world are deemed mentally ill and drugged with the default position that society is a well and healthy place for children and therefore any dysfunction that is exhibited on the part of the children must be a result of a chemical imbalance or something like that because almost no reference is ever made.
to the environment.
You'll hear it sort of in passing if you see documentaries on the dispensing of these kinds of psychotropic meds.
The doctors will say, well, yes, the family's in chaos and blah blah blah, but this is the best we can do.
But this is the society that feels that the children are the ones who have the problem.
1 in 4 girls is sexually abused before the age of 14.
1 in 4 girls.
Just think about that.
Just think about that.
If you're in a class with 40 children, there are 5 girls being sexually abused in your class.
1 in 6 boys is sexually abused before the age of 16.
More than 90% of all sexual abuse victims know their perpetrators.
Almost 50% of the offenders are household members and 38% are already acquaintances of the victim.
The average serial child molester has between 360 and 380 victims in his lifetime.
Only 12% of all cases of child abuse are reported.
How much are investigated is unclear.
The most common ages of children when sexual abuse occurs are between the age of 8 and 12.
Over the past 10 years, more than 20,000 American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members.
That is nearly four times the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I mean, we've got the recent scandals at Penn State and I think Syracuse, where coaches have been accused or assistant coaches have been accused of molesting children.
There's the Boy Scout scandals, there's the Catholic Church scandal.
But these all pale in comparison to the child abuse, child sexual abuse and child rape that is going on in households all over your community, all in your neighborhood.
You drive past in a car and, what is it, every fourth, every fifth house is a place of child rape or child sexual abuse.
The world is a rape room of children and our society, which knows this, has the astoundingly, unbelievably, immoral audacity
to say that children are failing to adapt to this wonderful healthy society that we have and therefore they have a mental illness and must be drugged I mean in the future when they write the history of our age No one will believe it.
They will read about it and they will frown and try to understand.
But nobody will really be able to understand how such thoughts, how such ideas, how such Massive green garbage drum back-lifting, dumping of human garbage and evil onto the minds and souls of children could possibly be achieved and sustained in a society with instantaneous communications where this information was available to everyone.
This is the society that pathologizes children and calls itself the summit of health.
And this raperoom called the world considers itself so perfect that deviations must be hunted down and injected with a kind of brain venom.
It's jaw-dropping.
It's astounding.
It's unbelievable.
It's incomprehensible.
I want to talk about the development of what I mean, what I call, I'm not the only one who calls it.
I certainly didn't invent the term.
It's very little that I do that is original.
But the false self and the true self is very, very important to understand.
If you want to think about things like mental health, at least from my, you know, amateur couch opinion.
In the 19th century they would take, and before that, they would take the feet of Chinese women and bind them, mash them, curl them, mash the toes back into the heels so that they ended up with these little club hooves and it was just unbelievably vile and an absolutely agonizing process.
And this unbelievable distortion of A healthy, natural limb, the foot, was endemic.
And it actually ended very, very quickly in the space of less than a generation.
It just stopped.
But we would not say that the women whose feet had been twisted in this unholy, abominable, wretched, disgusting, vile way, that the women whose feet had been tormented and twisted in this way were suffering from an illness.
No.
They were suffering from an assault.
They were suffering from torture.
They were not suffering from an illness.
They were mutilated.
We don't say about a woman whose clitoris is gouged out and ripped off that she suffers from an illness.
No, she has suffered from an assault.
Circumcision is not an ailment, is not an illness.
It is the result of an assault upon a helpless infant.
The assaults upon the young are not an illness, they are an evil.
I mean, we seem to have lost track of the devil in the modern world, probably because it's like a fish in water, it's everywhere.
So it's very hard to see.
You don't look for air, it just is.
The false self and the true self are very, very important ideas.
The true self is what we're all born with and that is a self that is attuned to reality, is empirical, is rational and is healthy.
That is the true natural purpose of the mind, as I said in the last one, is to conceptualize, to extrapolate, to create logical rules out of the consistent behavior of matter and energy.
But, of course, as biological creatures we are attuned to two spheres of life, both of which are pretty essential to our survival.
The first sphere of life that we're attuned to is the natural world.
Gotta eat a banana, gotta get a coconut, gotta run away from a lion.
Right?
We are attuned to the natural world.
Thirsty?
Look for water.
Drink water.
Taste water.
Is it potable?
So we are attuned to the natural world and that is exactly as it should be.
And we require, of course, interaction with the natural world in order to survive.
Plant crops and water them and fertilize them and pull them and whatever, right?
Bake the bread.
You have to interact with the physical world in order to survive.
And that's rational.
The physical world is a rational place to be.
But, because we are a tribal species, we are also intensely attuned to the social world, to the world of approval, peer approval, particularly parental approval.
And it is our susceptibility and need for social approval that is in so many ways the root of evil and authority and hierarchy in this world.
We need nature to survive, but we depend upon others to survive as well.
And in the world that will be, in the world to come, in the world of philosophy and virtue and truth and compassion and love and peace, there will be no, no significant conflicts between the social world and the natural world, between the world of the tribe and the world of nature.
Because the beliefs of the tribe will mirror and match the principles of nature and there will be no tribalism, no nationalism, no superstition, no imaginary virtue of endless authority.
None of these things will exist because they don't exist in the world anyway and so they will simply be discarded like Zeus was, except the discarding of old gods will include all gods and even the modern gods, the state.
So when we are born, we are attuned to the physical world and we are attuned to, I mean, we're really first attuned to our mother or our primary caregiver.
We're attuned to that.
And then we become attuned to the natural world.
And what happens is, of course, as we grow older, these worlds begin to split.
These worlds begin to divide.
And the natural world, which is our reason and our certainty and our surety and our rationality, The natural world begins to be eclipsed by the generic shaky cam madness of social delusions, and aggressive and violent social delusions begin to eclipse the world for us.
And we begin to have to separate ourselves into that aspect of ourselves which conforms to the natural world, which opens the door before attempting to walk through it, and which looks both ways before crossing the street, the rational world.
We begin to split ourselves and we have to adapt to the rational world which is healthy and normal and doesn't actually require much adaptation.
But we also have to split ourselves into the twisted, grotesque, gargoyle masquerade of attempting to jam social convention onto the natural health and proportion of our faces, which results in a gruesome, fleshy mask that tortures and hurts us.
Adapting to the madness of society while attempting to navigate the rationality of nature causes an incredible tear right down the middle of our brain.
Right down the middle of our brain!
And we have to wear many hats, it turns out, in the long run.
But we have to wear at least these two major hats.
Dealing with the natural world requires rationality and empiricism and common sense and experience and it's predictable, right?
But dealing with the social world requires surrender to the mad, vengeful, bloodthirsty gods of the collective.
Whether it's democracy or religion or the state as a whole, or government education, I mean, all of these things are quite mad.
I'll give you just a few examples, just off the top of my head, I mean, because I know I'm talking in an abstract way.
I mean, you get tested from very early on when you're in school, and at some point, probably not when you're very old, you realize, or you find out, that teachers Resist being tested themselves, right?
Standardized testing is opposed by almost all public sector unions that I've ever heard of in the world.
And so the teachers union and the teachers very strongly and vehemently resist being tested, yet they inflict tests on five, six, seven, eight year olds.
You could ask that question.
That would be a rational question to ask.
Why is this not like that?
How come this is a standard for me but it's a standard that you yourself reject?
Why is testing so important to a six-year-old and so appallingly bad for a 60-year-old?
How could that be?
How could the same people who inflict tests as a valuable way of determining skills violently reject being tested as a way of determining skills?
It's an interesting question.
Teachers assign homework and they say, be empirical, you know, particularly the science teachers.
And you can say to the science teachers, okay, what is the empirical evidence that homework promotes learning?
Right?
I mean, I'm supposed to dissect this frog empirically.
I'm supposed to light this magnesium flare empirically.
I'm supposed to study these plants empirically.
So empirical evidence is the key.
So what is the empirical evidence that homework improves learning?
I mean, again, just off the top of my head, you could, you know, in school, you're supposed to adapt every year to some new thing, you're supposed to keep adapting to new things and keep adapting to new things.
And this is true at the better level, they throw in new math, or they change the curriculum all the time, or they try all these bizarre socialist Marxist experiments on the minds of children, and they're always, they're all catastrophic, because they're driven by ideology, not by demand.
And so you say, okay, so teacher, I'm supposed to adapt to all of these new things.
I'm supposed to learn all of these new things.
I'm supposed to adapt to this new environment all the time.
So how on earth is it, if adaptation to new things is so valuable, how is it that there's still this, you know, two months off in the summer when this was for farming, when nobody farms here anymore?
So if I'm supposed to adapt at the age of five, six, and seven to new curriculums, to new topics, to just new things in the next year, if I'm supposed to adapt to that because adaptation is a really good thing to new circumstances and learning new things is really good and conforming to new things is good, so how on earth is it possible that we still have this really archaic thing from 150 years ago called summers off to help with farming?
You could ask that.
How far are you going to get?
Well, not very far.
Or you could just say in general, you know, stand up at a school meeting and say, you know, everyone says that, you know, all these posters on the wall, education's for the kids.
It's all about the kids.
And everyone you hear about society is all about the kids.
We're all about the kids.
We just want to please the kids.
The kids are everything.
Family is everything.
We love everything about the kids.
Well, why is it then that none of us have ever been asked what we like about school and what we would prefer about school?
I mean, when I go to Chuck E. Cheese, I can fill out a comment card, and I can say what I liked and what I didn't like, and they'll listen.
I go to a movie, I can fill out a comment card.
I go to a pizza place, they listen to me.
I mean, Disney does extensive market research, and they test their movies on kids in different plot lines to see what kids are going to like the most and so on.
You can say that's manipulative, but, I mean, so is makeup.
So why is it, if education is supposed to be all about kids, why is it that we, as the actual consumers of this service, have never been asked what we want, what we like, and how it should be?
How can I reconcile that?
It's supposed to be all about me, but you've never asked my opinion about what I want.
You know, help me square that circle.
Oh, maybe you say, well, okay, so I'm a kid, but I don't remember my parents.
being asked about this stuff either.
They were just presented with a curriculum and told where I had to go to school, and of course they're forced to pay, whether they like it or not, whether they homeschooled or not, whether they want some other alternative.
So, help me understand, if it's all about kids, if society cares so much about kids, how come society never asks kids what we want?
I don't understand that.
How do we know that the way that we're being educated right now, which is pretty much the same as it was a hundred and fifty years ago, okay, we've gone from a blackboard to a whiteboard, we call that progress in the statist world, but how do we know empirically that this way of us being taught, you know, jammed into this classroom, sitting in rows, watching someone talk at a blackboard, doing homework,
No individual speed, no individual pace, no choice of your own subjects, no choice to disengage from something that you're less interested in for a while, to focus on something you're more... Like, how do we know that this is the best way, the very best way that children should be educated?
Because everyone says that children's education is the most important thing, education is everything.
So how do we know that this system, where Teachers can't be fired.
We'll get to that in a sec.
How do we know that this system is the very, very best system that could possibly be?
Have there been double-blind experiments?
Have we tried every conceivable alternative?
Where's the statistics?
Where's the proof?
And I know that teachers can't get fired.
They can go to rubber rooms, I guess, and get paid for doing nothing.
Which is, I think, an improvement on most of their teaching skills, but if I can fail, how come teachers can't fail?
If I can be held back a grade, how come teachers can't lose their jobs?
If I can get an F, how come teachers and principals can't get an F?
I mean, again, you could go on, and I'm just picking one, but you could do this in church, you could do this in your family, you could do this in your sports teams, you could do this in school, as the example, you could do it in politics, in culture, in your country as a whole, in nationalism, in whatever, right?
You could do this with, if your family's rich, why they maybe don't give as much to the poor or why they're not as grateful or give as much back as they could.
Again, I'm just, you know, maybe that's not the case with your family or whatever, but it's a possibility.
But what I'm trying to say is that You have to shut the fuck up with this stuff.
You can't bring it up.
You can't bring it up.
Everybody knows.
I mean, I bet you if I'm talking like that, you may be laughing, but I bet you if you tried to do it, you'd feel an icy, you know, snow eagle talon claw fist close around your shrinking heart.
If it was only your heart that it was closing around.
Knowing just how wretched and awful and terrible it would be.
How dangerous it would be.
How people would turn on you, how people would tell you to shut up, how the other kids would be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
What are you talking about, geek loser?
You can't talk about this stuff.
And this is what I mean.
This is the fundamental tear that goes down the middle of a brain and it just keeps getting torn until our integrity is, you know, confetti in a lowbrow Satan's fart in a high wind.
This is the central tear down our brain.
Conform to reality.
Conform to social insanity.
Conform to the empiricism and objectivity of nature.
Conform to the subjectivity and aggression of social delusions.
Now there's a reason why this split.
Why don't we just go completely insane or why don't we just go completely sane?
Well, because if we go completely insane we're no use to our rulers, right?
Remember, society is Livestock management, right?
I mean, you've got the tax farmers at the top who run the show, and you've got the verbal abusers called the media, and you have the child abusers called, well, just about everyone who's in charge of children, you know, except for some loving parents.
And to manage your livestock, They have to be productive, but they can't be free.
So they have to be, you have to be sane enough to go and farm so that the Lord can come and steal your grain, or part of it, right?
And yet you can't be so sane that you reject the social hierarchy that's ground into you.
Now that's really, really important.
This is why cultures have to sort of walk this balance beam, right?
Which is, if you tip too much towards rationality, science, empiricism, reason, philosophy, and objectivity, then you end up with people no longer believing in these fictional hierarchies, you know, called the church, called the state, called in many ways the family and the innate or automatic authority and morality of parents, which is nonsense.
Parental virtue, like all other virtues, is errant.
It's not automatic.
And so if people go too much towards reason and evidence then they no longer believe in gods and countries and hierarchies and presidents and popes and all this kind of bullshit.
That's not good for the rulers.
They need you crazy.
They need you frightened.
They need you disoriented.
They need you crushed with regards to social power so that they can rule over you and exploit and steal some of the value that you get from being sane in the material world.
I mean, if you are the local priest in a fishing village, you need to say, God will provide.
Well, you still want these people to go out and fish, because you know deep down as the priest, if you just say, God will provide, you're going to starve to death.
Because it doesn't rain fish very often.
And so you say, well, God will provide, but God helps those who help themselves.
So you got to go out and pull up some fish.
So, you know, because Father Molyneux wants to, uh, wants to eat some nice dindins.
So you got to get people to go out there and actually deal with reality in an empirical, rational fashion.
Go and get the net and make the net and go and get the fish and hold it in and give some to you.
Because if they're insane with regards to reality, you can't steal anything from them.
But you can't have them sane in the social world because then they will take that same empiricism and rationality and apply it to your superstitious religiosity and dismiss it out of hand.
So you gotta rip people in two, at least in two, so that they're productive with regards to reality.
But they are insane with regards to society.
They're productive enough to steal from, but not so rational that they will reject the authority of theft.
And this tearing apart of the human mind, this setting of The splitting of the human soul, the setting of unease and anxiety and war and depression and stress and so much you gotta juggle.
Right?
If you just go completely crazy you gotta juggle a whole lot less but you gotta stay sane to be exploited.
You gotta go to work so you can be stolen from but you gotta believe that being stolen from is virtuous and you gotta believe That the gods and the kings and the presidents and the lords put above you are somehow sane and healthy and rational in a way that is completely exploded by empirical reality.
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