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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:28
The Connecticut School Shootings | True News
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Hi everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
This is just some thoughts about the shooting today in Connecticut where the young man shot his mother apparently in the face and then took her car and her three guns and drove to a school, shot 20 children and 10 adults apparently.
and targeted the principal and in particular the school psychologist for reasons that I'm sure don't need a huge amount of explanation and then massacred children before turning the gun on himself.
Now, of course, there is a temptation, when a tragedy like this occurs, to attempt to ratchet it into your own particular worldview, your own particular cause.
I'm really going to try and resist doing that.
And, I mean, I've covered this stuff before for this show, and I've certainly had my exposure to, what is it, 61 incidents of murdering more than four people in the U.S.
over the past couple of decades, and really clustering since Columbine in 1999.
There was something about this one.
I was actually at a mall doing the incredibly philosophical work of returning some headphones and I just happened to check the Freedom Aid radio message board and somebody posted about the shooting and I don't know why.
I mean, I've certainly covered a lot of violence and dark topics in this show, but this was just like some sort of, it's like a horse kick to the chest.
You know, I could feel the blood come out of my fingertips, and I was... I was really quite stunned.
I don't know why, because this is so close to Christmas, now all these Christmas presents are going to remain unopened.
I don't know.
I guess we always hope it's the last one, and then when there's another one, we hope that this The bell curve of trends is going down and it just doesn't seem to be.
Now, of course, the media has messed this up enormously.
I mean, they reported that it was a brother and then they reported that it was the elder brother who was 24, not the younger brother who's 20.
And then they reported that the mother was a teacher at the school, was murdered at the school.
It turns out she may or may not have been a teacher, maybe a volunteer.
She had some association with the school and she was murdered at home.
There was a second shooter, and now that theory seems to have fallen by the wayside, provoking, I imagine, doubtless endless conspiracy theories.
People say, of course, that this should be used for gun control, although the fact that he was 20 would bar him from buying guns anywhere in the US.
Not much about his childhood as yet, but there does certainly seem to be some family dysfunction.
The parents are divorced.
They seem to have money, at least the aerial photo of the house seems to be quite the mention.
The mother was described as incredibly rigid and hyper-controlling and had considered this boy, when he was a boy, this young man, when he was a boy, to have been a problem child who resisted authority, who had a learning disability, and who was Oppositional and defiant and so on.
So I imagine there was a fair amount of brutal emotional and physical control in that situation.
Of course, most of these shooters don't seem to have a lot of paternal involvement in their lives.
People say, well, why is it more men than women?
Generally women tend to internalize through depression, men tend to externalize through aggression.
That's a very broad stroke.
But also because women tend to be raised by other women and men, tragically these days, increasingly are not.
And so I don't know if they got just divorced last year and he was a very involved dad or whatever.
The brother, the elder brother, who was described as working in the tax field and having Completely clean hands, which doesn't sound like a very accurate description to me, but he said that he had no contact with his brother since 2010.
So, possibly, you know, upwards of two or three years, he'd had no contact with his younger brother since 2010.
That's very surprising, given that the younger brother lives with the mom.
We don't know what kind of contact he would have with the mom if the younger brother's around.
What, does he just hope the younger brother doesn't answer the phone?
If he calls his mom, I don't know if he's separate.
Who knows, right?
I mean, this is all... But if he targeted the psychologist and he had an identifiable or an identified mental disorder then it seems very likely that he would be on these incredibly toxic meds, right, these psychotropic drugs, which are unbelievably wretched.
Of course, paranoid, violent, delusional fantasies have been linked to suicide and feelings of murderous rage and so on.
So he may have been on these meds, he may have been on these meds for a long time.
My guess is he probably was, because that's what generally happens if you take a problem, quote, problem child to the mental health field, the mental health field, then the likelihood is that they're going to end up on these meds, and these meds, a known side effect of these meds is paranoia, delusions, and so on.
As to what happened, I mean, I guess probably no one will know, certainly not.
You know, my first thought was, oh, he shot his mom and then just decided to go out in a blaze of glory, but apparently he had some sort of bulletproof vest and all these kinds of things.
He was described as Asperger's, autistic, as people just... the word evil or demonic possession doesn't hold much weight anymore for a lot of people, so we need some other label.
to describe people like this.
But clearly he was functional.
He had a girlfriend.
The girlfriend is missing.
At least one of the friends is missing.
He was obviously able to get the guns, drive to the school, order the bulletproof vest ahead of time.
So clearly he's not completely schizophrenic and completely out of it.
I mean, his capacity to plan, capacity to organize, and so on.
And, of course, one of his friends, or one of the people who knew him, I guess he graduated, what, two years ago, three years ago, one of the people who knew him said, oh, he's been really troubled for a long time.
Which, of course, is what everyone says after the fact, and not a lot of people seem to act on it before the fact.
I believe he has also murdered his father.
That's sort of what I understand.
Of course, all this may prove to be nonsense in the days to come.
Now, I know that there's things that make sense to say from a libertarian standpoint.
Sorry.
From a voluntarist standpoint, I know there are things that make sense to say, like Obama tearing up when talking about the deaths of these children, which is monstrous and evil and unfathomably wicked.
But This is the same America, it wasn't Obama, but it's the same America that in the US, UK led sanctions against Iran in the 1990s caused the verified death of half a million children in Iraq and continue to do so through the invasion and the occupation.
I read a story where a man whose son had received a terrible wound from the war, he had to hold his son while his son's leg was amputated with no anesthetic.
Because there were sanctions and because the entire infrastructure of the country has been bombed and destroyed.
So, I mean, U.S.
actions in the 90s alone just caused the death of half a million children, to which Madeleine Albright said, I believe it's justified.
And it's trite but true, and it's something we really need to grasp, that the horror of 20 children being murdered in America is very real, is very tangible.
I don't know that we're ever going to really have peace in this world until we process the horror of the Obama-sanctioned drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries that routinely blow children into the stratosphere and leave weeping, horrendously scarred, emotionally brutalized parents in their wake
In America, five children every day are murdered by their parents.
Five children every day are murdered by their parents.
This death count is equivalent to four days of your average life in America with regards to children.
It's a holocaust against children in many ways.
And I don't know that we're gonna really find peace as a species and find calm and reflection and the deep power of heading bottom as a virtuous or supposedly virtuous culture and finding our feet and really fighting for what is right.
What is right is that we also experience some horror at the victims of our societies that occur outside of our societies as well as the victims within our own societies.
So, of course, we can talk about the crocodile tears of Obama, but I mean, I don't know, the guy, he seems genuinely moved by what is occurring.
He probably doesn't make much of a connection to the drone strikes, because that's very abstract, that's very overseas, that's very them, right?
That's very other, that's very over the mountains, beyond the horizon of empathetic imagination.
And these I mean it feels so random, you know, it feels like these, I don't know how to put it, these ammo-laden asteroids just BAM!
come down and land on people from time to time.
And it is chilling, and it is predatory, and it is something we need to keep a very deep eye on.
But I don't want to make it about US foreign policy.
There is that element, of course.
But it's probably not the parents' fault.
The parents who are suffering here, it's certainly not the parents' fault over in Pakistan that these drones are coming down on them and killing innocents.
But I think the one thing that I will really try to say, I don't want to talk about fatherlessness, single parents, divorce...
I don't even in particular want to talk about the meds thing, I don't even in particular want to talk about the child abuse thing.
I mean, to me it's as clear as day, it's as clear as a spear of sunlight to the third eye and the forehead, but I think I just want to talk about this idea, this phrase that's just been rolling around in my head all day.
Children are more people.
Children are more people.
We don't treat our children hugely well as a culture.
Individuals do, but as a culture we really don't treat our children that well.
You know, we circumcise them.
We yell at them.
We sit them in front of TVs.
We spank them.
Ninety percent of people hit their children.
We yell at them.
We are inconvenienced by them.
We indoctrinate them.
We teach them things that aren't true in order to maintain our own illusions.
We send them to government schools and then we complain about bullying and violence and sexual abuse from teachers which is distressingly common in schools and we complain that they just don't seem to have their heads on right.
We complain a lot about our children.
We fundamentally, we use, we use our children.
We dress them up in the family Sunday best to make them look good at church.
We want them to do well in sports because that reflects well on us.
We want them to be smart.
We want them to be creative.
We want them to be polite for us, for our shallow gene pool advertisements.
We dress them up.
We hit them.
We yell at them.
We prod them.
We poke them.
We lie to them and call it virtue.
And we are not... we are neither apologetic nor humble about the world that we have created and given to them or force upon them.
We are not apologetic for being involved in or supporting a system that has them hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to bankers and bondholders before they even draw their first breath.
Or these terrible schools that we try and wedge these fiery rainbow disco ball creative monster fun brains into these tiny tiny little squares of conformity and rote and repetition and memorization and please raise your hand if you wish to go to the bathroom.
These schools We teach them that the greatest gods died for their sins.
We topple these ancient dusty bloody crucifixes into their very cribs and say, you did that.
And we praise a system of politics and we praise a system of democracy that has served them so badly.
Our experience of the state and of political hierarchies when we're children It is wretched!
Wretched!
Because our first experience of the government is public schools.
And they're terrible.
They are unbelievably wretched compared to what could be.
Especially with our technology.
Especially with the fact that, I don't know if you knew this, but a hundred years ago the average IQ of the average American was 67.
Your great-grandparents were technically morons.
according to the nomenclature of the time.
It's 3% a decade.
It's the Flynn effect.
Kids are getting smarter and smarter and smarter and we're still teaching them with these unholy, brain-deadening, Prussian-make-troops-and-workers systems that were designed over 200 years ago.
And they just keep getting smarter and smarter and smarter.
And we drug them. - Good.
With untested, off-label drugs, nobody knows the long-term effects, there haven't been studies, and the ailments that they're supposed to treat do not show up on any medical test whatsoever.
The ailments called independence and boredom.
You know, sit down and watch some foreign language instructional film from 50 years ago.
and try to keep your attention on it.
You can't do it.
I can't do it.
We all get bored.
This is easier for us with mature brains than for children to pay attention in public school.
But we use them.
We use them.
Children are the fluid that allows the grinding gears of adult conflicts to keep going on and on and on without ever coming to a head.
We throw them to the teachers' unions so that we don't provoke conflicts with the teachers.
We throw them at the bankers.
We sell them off to the bankers so that we don't have to deal with entitlement spending in the here and now.
We throw them overseas to kill and die.
So that we don't have to take on the military-industrial complex here at home.
We throw them in prisons for nothing.
For vegetation.
Because we don't want to take on a corrupt legal court and prison-industrial complex here at home.
Do you see?
We use them.
We stuff them into the cracks of a crumbling system.
We drug them rather than make school interesting.
We indoctrinate them rather than offend our Christian aunts and uncles.
We drug them.
We hit them rather than admit that we were frightened and bullied as children.
We yell at them out of self-righteousness because we are not willing to accept and examine the catastrophes of our existing system.
We blame them for laziness when they graduate to a true lunar landscape of economic and career possibilities.
We indoctrinate them about college, college, college, and then watch them graduate tens of thousands of dollars in debt to near certain unemployment or underemployment.
We use our children.
in the world.
If children were more people, do you see what I mean?
They are more people than you and I. Society should be designed around the needs, preferences, and requirements of children, of free thought, of free minds, of free inquiry, of skepticism, of materialism, of rationalism, of philosophy.
All children are born Socrates and we use the Chinese foot-binding brain tortures of culture and superstition and hierarchy and indoctrination to turn them into Savonarola.
Into Tertullian, who said, I believe because it is absurd.
This is what we have to offer our children.
Believe in society because it is absurd.
Respect your elders, although they are absurd.
Listen to your priest, although he is absurd.
Obey your teacher, although she is absurd, because she is absurd.
And imagine, imagine what society would look like if we threw everything that we had inherited from the prehistory of our species out the window and we designed and thought about society with the same amount of creativity and curiosity that we do with the next goddamn iPad.
Just imagine if we did not allow these clanking, ball-busting chains of historical inevitability to slide down and slither around our necks like cold, revolting anacondas and strangle the life out of us and our future.
What if we just swept everything aside and started with a completely blank slate?
It can't be done.
It can be done.
We don't have to orbit history forever.
We don't have to accept that which we have inherited, which has been passed down through trauma, through violence, through spanking, through aggression, through abuse, through neglect, through abandonment, through indoctrination.
We don't have to accept it.
We can wipe the slate of culture clean.
And sit the hell down and say, What do the children need most?
What do the children need most?
That is the sun around which we should design the solar system of society.
What do the children need most?
Well, they need two parents.
They need connection.
They need peace.
They need curiosity.
They need good sense of humor.
They need encouragement.
They need negotiation.
They need maturity.
And we don't send them down to work in the kind of factories that were built in 1820, so why the hell are we sending them down to public schools that were invented at around the same time and have changed so little since?
200 years ago, what did you have?
A little room with 30 kids in a row and a teacher with a blackboard.
And the only damn thing that has changed is sometimes it's gone to a whiteboard.
That's it.
Everything else around society has unbelievably changed.
We've gone from not being able to have a car to being able to fly to the moon and send probes to Jupiter's moons.
But our educational system remains exactly the same.
It's like a cyst.
Violence forms around So, violence forms around statist institutions and renders them immune fundamentally from change.
Why do they have summers off?
Because a hundred years ago seventy percent of people were involved in agriculture and needed to help in the summers.
But now we still have it because nothing changes.
Dear God, if Apple was a government agency, they'd be offering us not the iPad 4, but the stone tablet 1.01.
These historical inevitabilities are completely mismatched with everything else that's going on in our society.
These historical inheritances, the state, the church, public schools, taxation, all of these things were thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago evolved out of the most primitive and disgusting and repulsive and immoral Human societies.
Tribalism.
The only thing that we have in common is we have a much gentler form of child sacrifice.
But what if we just wiped all of that away?
Even if it was just in our minds.
Wiped it all away.
And we said, what do the children need?
Because if the children need it, given that they are pure and clear and clean and wonderful and have no weight of history You know, we come out of the womb with an umbilical, and that is cut.
We don't come out with a full chain, leading all the way back to the Stone Age, that we have to drag around for the rest of our lives, all of these dead imaginary gods, and all of these dead imaginary Hierarchies!
And all of these dead imaginary indoctrinations, we don't come out of the womb that way.
We come out of the womb in the present, pointed at the future, not chained and enslaved to the past, not lashed to a Titanic, sinking into history, taking us with it.
We come out of the womb like a rocket, like a springbok, ready to leap forward into the future, with no sense of history and no ties to the past.
Free!
Ah, but we have to be weighed down, we have to be chained up, we have to be tied up by the Mafia, burlap sack of indoctrination put over our head, our legs dunked into the concrete called culture, and down into the everlasting, ever-cold, ever-chill river we go, to join everyone else at the bottom of the river, bouncing around with our concrete feet in the silhouettes of seaweed wrapped around our faces, holding out our drinks and pretending to talk about the fact
that the heir of a successful murder clan's penis works and hey, he's going to have a baby with someone named Kate.
But we don't have to.
Yeah.
Thank you.
We don't have to.
Children are more people.
They are the most people.
They are what society should be designed around.
What society should fold around.
Like fog wraps itself around a statue, our conception of the needs of children should be central to everything that we think about, and everything that harms the interests of children, we should be damn well ashamed of, and we should apologize for them, and we should have the humility to say, we let history screw us over.
But you know what?
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