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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:49
Ending Violence Forever | James Corbett and Stefan Molyneux
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Welcome, friends.
This is James Corbett, CorbettReport.com.
It's the 6th of June, 2013, here in the land of the rising sun, but there in the land of the frigid snow in Canada.
It is still the 5th of June, 2013, and today I'm honoured to be joined on the line once again by the intellectual superstar and lion tamer and extraordinaire of the three-ring philosophical circus that is FreedomainRadio.com.
Steph, thank you again for joining us on the program.
Thanks.
I just wanted to remind everyone of the new slogan of Freedom Aid Radio.
Yes, I have tamed the lions, but they took my hair.
The bumper sticker will be out soon.
If only you'd tamed them in time, they wouldn't have taken my hair either.
But oh well.
We'll live with the consequences.
All right.
Well, Steph, thank you again for coming on today.
It's always great to have you here.
And today I want to talk about a subject that I know is near and dear to your philosophical heart and your human heart as well.
Something that should be near and dear to pretty much everyone in the audience, either all the people who have children or who have ever been to children.
So I think that'll include everyone who's listening today, has ever been a child.
Sorry, my English, grasp of the English language is fading today.
We're going to do kanji hand symbols for the second half of the show, right?
I've been working on those all day.
Okay.
Um, well let's, so let's get into the meat and potatoes and basically I want to start today's conversation, um, by once again, referring people to my earlier conversation earlier this week with Laurette Lin, where we talked and explored about some of the, uh, the, Consequences and some of the tasks involved in parenting in a nonviolent manner, which should be the norm in society, but still isn't for a large section of the population.
But with Steph, let's start today by talking about something that you've gone over in great detail in your work before, and I'd really like to impart this to the audience, which is to say that Talking about violence in childhood and childhood trauma is not some sort of airy-fairy subject that we're just making up on the fly.
This is something that's backed up by a lot of empirical evidence and research that's gone into The actual effects of childhood trauma and what that actually produces in children and the types of psychoses and problems that develop in later life.
So I don't know where you'd like to begin with that, but I'd really like you to start presenting some of the scientific evidence and the empirical evidence that's been amassed over the years that show exactly what this childhood violence and trauma is doing to the children.
Sure, and I would refer people if they go to the URL fdrurl.com forward slash bib, then they can look at some of the more detailed presentations.
There's a four or five part presentation on the science.
So we'll just touch on it briefly here for those who want more of the background, including an interview with Dr. Vincent Felitti, who's the head of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study for Kaiser Permanente.
I really recommend it.
It's well worth going in.
If you want to improve the world, then you have to start with what is.
And what is, is that, you know, significant majorities of children are going through really difficult stuff.
And some of that we recognize as difficult.
Obviously, you know, children who are sexually abused, emotionally abused, physically abused and verbally abused and so on, they are going to have trauma and we understand that that is going to have fundamental effects on their brain development.
Other things which are a little harder for people to see because they remain so much the norm such as spanking.
Eighty to ninety percent of parents are still spanking their children.
Spanking is considered to be a legitimate form of quote loving discipline for a lot of people but it has objectively negative results for children's development.
And something like public school is something which I would argue in the long run once we compare genuine free range education methods for children where they have a say, they have a choice, putting them in public school where they're subject to a lot of peer trauma.
We look at sort of top-down trauma from parents or teachers or priests and so on or other caregivers to children.
But peer trauma is also quite significant.
And whenever you cram a whole bunch of kids together, particularly in the same age category, you know, force them to go into a particular area and stay there in a not so quasi-prison-like environment, you're going to get that kind of horizontal peer-on-peer aggression.
So childhood as it stands is obviously significantly better than it was in the past.
But it's still got a long way to go.
And I think like all societies, we're tempted with the, well, we're done.
You know, we've got the major stuff done and, you know, the major aspects of society are tidied up and cleared away.
I would sort of argue not.
So very briefly, 17,000 or 18,000 people have been tracked through this Kaiser Permanente study.
And these are people that is not a cross-representative section of humanity.
These are generally rich, generally white, middle class and above, professionals usually, people who have signed up for fairly expensive private health care in the US.
So these are not ghetto kids, these are not street people, these are not poor people, these are not trailer park people, these are pretty well-off people.
And what happened was Dr. Filippi and others developed what's called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire and it's a questionnaire, it's on the videos, it's linked under the videos that I mentioned earlier.
people can go through this.
And it's like, you know, were you beaten?
Were you assaulted?
Were you verbally abused?
Was a family member in prison or dealing with addiction, all this kind of stuff?
And they tracked the development and health impacts of early childhood abuse on people and they found that it was incredibly correlated.
So for instance, it's almost a 50% rise in the incidence of cancer among people who've been abused.
It's the idea being the stress hormone cortisol is very bad for you in long doses and so on.
And so there's ischemic heart disease, diabetes, smoking, earlier teen pregnancies, drug addictions, alcoholism, all of these are highly correlated.
with early childhood abuse.
And another guy I've had on the show who wrote a book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Dr. Gabor Maté, has, I think more than a theory, it's fairly well validated that, you know, we have these kind of happy joy juices that flow around through our system.
And for people who've been raised in really abusive or difficult environments, they have like a happiness ratio of like 20.
Let's say the normal is like 100.
They have like 20.
And so if normal people, let's say, take a drug, just at some party and like, hey, I'll be one of the cool kids tonight.
And so maybe what you do is you go from 100 to like 130 in terms of your happiness, right?
And you get these endorphins or whatever it is, whatever they're producing that gives you the buzz.
And then you settle back down to 100.
And you're like, okay, well, that was nice, but I'm still at 100, so I'm okay.
But people who have a happiness level of like 20 or 30 as a result of childhood abuse, when they take these drugs they're particularly susceptible to them.
They go to like 80 or 90 or 100 and so in a sense they feel normal.
for the first time in their lives.
And what happens then is when they return back down to 20 or 30, they feel that as a deficiency, as an acute deficiency of happiness that they didn't feel before because that's all they'd ever known.
Like, you know, if you have some chronic pain and then you take some pill that takes it away, you're like, man, I can move my back.
I can stretch.
Like, you know, what's normal for us becomes ecstatic for them.
And then when they collapse back down, this is where the cycle of addiction seems to be so strong is that they now know in a very real way that they're miserable in a way that they never knew before because they haven't approached normal.
And then, of course, they take more of these drugs.
And because they have a deficiency of happiness to begin with, it goes lower, you know, 20, 15, 10, and then they need more of it.
So this is why some people become addicted and some people don't.
Like, I don't I think it was only 10 or 15 percent of the soldiers in Vietnam who got addicted to heroin maintained their addiction when they got home.
You know they just, oh I'm home, I'm out of the trauma so I'll stop you know taking heroin or whatever but some people of course find it much harder.
So you have a difficult childhood, it sets you up for a lot of problems in your body.
It also sets you up for a lot of problems in your brain.
A study just came out that's not referenced in this stuff I did a couple of years ago which is Kind of mind-blowing.
So what they do is they've done scans of – I think this was women who had – and they asked, did you have abuse?
What kind of abuse did you have?
They can actually target in the brain and see where the deficiency is occurring based upon the type of abuse that is occurring.
So there's an area in the brain which represents genitalia and women who are sexually abused have a thinning out of the neurons and the activity in that particular area.
For people who are physically abused it's in another place and people who are emotionally abused it's in another place which is really quite astounding.
I mean it's like a scan for abuse.
Somebody could not tell you that they were abused.
You'd be able to scan their brain and see not only that they were abused to a fair degree of likelihood but also what type of abuse they had experienced.
And the theory seems to be that when you have something like child rape, you have this overwhelming stimulation of the brain and the brain shuts itself down in that area, sort of like a fuse.
It's like it's too overwhelming.
And then what happens is it shields experiences or development around that particular neural pathway or that cluster of neural pathways and then you end up with this sort of avoidance.
And this is something that can produce actual amnesia later on.
I mean, according to studies, women who were known to be raped as children, like they went to hospital, they had rape kits done, you know, there was no question they've been raped, 40% of them in their 30s claimed to have absolutely no memory of this whatsoever.
And these weren't little babies.
These were like sort of 8, 10, 12 year olds.
So it has a very distracting effect on the brain.
And the last thing I'll sort of mention is, you know, the neofrontal cortex is the seat of higher reasoning, fails to develop in significant ways when children are exposed to abuse.
What does develop is the, you know, the amygdala, the sort of fight or flight mechanism.
And so when people go through this kind of abuse, When you think of, you know, some guy who's in a bar, who's really touchy, you know, if he thinks you look at him the wrong way, he's just going to start being really aggressive.
The fight-or-flight mechanism is highly developed, overdeveloped, and that the sort of restraining mechanism of the neofrontal cortex, which intercepts the impulses of the base brain fight-or-flight mechanism and attempts to dampen them down, and you really only have about a third to half a second to intercept those impulses, that is really atrophied.
And so you get these hair-triggered guys who are very aggressive, very violent, who take You know what they call in the hood, you know, he didn't give me respect.
You know, I need respect.
He didn't give me juice.
These are the guys who have gone through significant abuse and remain hair trigger and really quite primitive.
And if they're very prevalent in a society, people mistake that for human nature and say, well, we can't be free because there are all these crazy people around.
It's like, well, that really does come specifically from experiences as children.
And a lot of those people According to some researchers, Gabor Mater, among them says that, you know, the development of empathy, of course, hugely complex.
I mean, there are 10 to 12 complex systems within the brain that deal with empathy, mirror neurons and so on.
And if you fail to develop it as a child, you know, it's like learning Japanese.
If you're not taught it as a kid, it's really hard to learn it later on.
And the problem is, of course, that
Empathy starts with self-empathy of course and if you don't if you're not in touch with your own feelings you can't empathize with other people and the challenge is that to develop empathy like to say well it's important enough for me to go through the painful process of developing empathy would require that you would have self-empathy to begin with and empathy for other people to understand that it would be important for them for other people for you to develop empathy so it's like the part of the brain that needs to fix itself is the part of the brain that breaks first and so it's like saying well my car is broken down so I'll drive it to the garage.
It's like well no unfortunately your car is broken down so you can't drive it and that I think happens a lot with empathy.
So I think for my particular approach and I think again I try to be as sort of scientifically validated as possible.
There's not a lot of cure for these kinds of things.
Doesn't mean people can't improve.
I mean I had a difficult childhood.
I went to therapy and I think I've made great progress.
So you can.
It's very expensive.
I dropped like over $20,000 on therapy.
So that's not available for everyone to have the time and the money to be able to pursue it.
And so I really look at prevention more so than cure and that involves this beautiful parenting thing.
So I hope that wasn't too long and boring an intro.
I'll give you a chance to talk now but that's sort of the general overview.
I mean, that's all extremely important stuff that I hope people will will follow that link.
And of course, I'll put it in the show notes to your Bomb in the Brain series where you go through this evidence in greater detail.
But it is overwhelming.
And the thing that I find fascinating about this is that it is the evidence is so overwhelming empirically, and it correlates to what we would expect from a common sense sort of view.
I think if you're subjected to horrific events during childhood, it is going to have an adverse effect on your life.
And yet, despite that, there is such resistance to this idea from certain quarters of society to this day, to the point where people will still defend a lot of these practices, including, of course, spanking, as you can't raise a child without a little bit of discipline, as people would term it, despite what the empirical evidence shows.
And I think there are a lot of different reasons for that.
Obviously, some powerful psychological reasons why people might want to attempt to normalize their own childhoods.
But something that I think a lot of people will grasp onto is that in our own day and age, the The scientific current, it seems to be running, at least in popular culture, in the popular imagination, towards the idea that we are genetically determined beings, that everything, if we can just discover the gene, then we will understand and be able to piece together someone's personality.
So, can you speak to the epigenetics phenomenon and what this is showing about how that assumption is mistaken?
Yeah, I mean, this is quite new.
At least when I first started looking into this stuff, probably 8 or 10 years ago, it was not particularly prevalent.
Now, so when I was growing up, and maybe you've sort of had the same thing, it's like nature versus nurture.
You know, you're born with these genes, but somehow your personality changes, you know, based upon whatever, right?
So it's like, you know, I have blue eyes, and I, you know, no amount of what happens to me as a human being is going to change that.
That's just sort of my genetics.
So there was considered to be this stuff that was all fixed.
And then there was this stuff that was variable, which was sort of experience.
But that's not really the way that it works fundamentally.
I mean some stuff, yes, blue eyes, whatever, you know, hair color, whatever, but that's not what we talk about in terms of personality.
But epigenetics is the understanding that genes are switched on and switched off according to experience throughout your life.
So the genes that you're born with cannot possibly be your personality because the genes that you're born with are not the genes that you have six months later or two years later or 10 years later or 50 or 80 years later.
The genes that you have later in life are switched on and switched off depending upon your experiences.
So some studies have shown that people who have boys who have a particular gene who are subjected to physical abuse become criminals with a near 100% certainty.
You say, well, is that genetic?
Well, they have the gene and the boys who don't have the gene who are subjected to physical abuse do become criminals, but just not at as high a rate.
But the boys who have this gene and who are subjected to physical abuse almost all become criminals.
And that, how could you say, well, there's a genetic predisposition, but that doesn't mean anything fundamentally.
unless you have the abuse.
And so it's sort of like, you know, some people smoke and they don't get sick.
You know, George Burns smoked lived to be like hundreds.
So whatever, he had some sort of magic elven shield or something.
But of course, you don't know ahead of time whether smoking is going to kill you or not, which is why it's a good idea to avoid it.
In the same way, you can't really say, well, if your kid turns out violent and you hit him, you say, well, but it was the genes.
Well, it was the genes plus his environment.
And because we don't know, and I don't think we'll ever know fundamentally the degree to which certain experiences will turn off and on particular genetic markers or modifiers.
Because we don't know that, you just simply have to do right by your kids.
You have to not aggress against them, not hit them.
I mean, obviously, for the moral reasons, but also for the practical reasons.
You don't know what it's going to do to their genetics.
So this nature versus nurture thing, I think, is, you know, it's like flipping the coin and saying, well, which side is spinning?
Well, they're both spinning because they're both two sides of the same coin.
And we really can't separate them, I think, as well as we could, at least when I was growing up and had that sort of stuff explained to me.
Well, it all makes sense to me, and I'd like to be positive and hopeful and optimistic about where society is heading on this issue, because I always get the sense that more and more people are understanding that things like spanking are violence.
They're senseless, irrational acts of attempting to inflict pain on someone in order to get them to comply with your wishes, which cannot possibly be the type of example we want to set for developing young minds.
And yet people, to a large extent, still do defend the practice.
I've been dispirited by some of the things I've seen online recently, including that pulse of the internet, reddit.com, where there was recently a front page post where there was a large thread about people defending the practice of spanking.
Well, I was spanked and I turned out fine and I was a bad little kid, but I learnt my lesson, kind of thing.
And it really does make you wonder if we are achieving progress on this front.
From your perspective, you've been dealing with this for years, what is your perspective on this?
Are you optimistic about where we're heading?
Oh yeah, I mean absolutely.
I mean you almost would expect people who were spanked to say that.
So spanking for instance can shave three to five IQ points off a person and that's moderate spanking.
More excessive spanking I'm sure would shave even more IQ points off and so it's like if someone scooped out half your brain you probably wouldn't feel dumb.
Because you would only have half a brain left with which to feel anything and therefore you'd be like, oh, I feel fine.
And so people who've been through this kind of considerable aggression from caregivers, the fact that they're not smart enough to have any doubts about it is in a sense a result of What's happened to them?
It is brain damage.
Spanking produces, I mean, not just the IQ points, which are considerable, but, you know, social empathy goes down, a level of conflict goes up, social skills go down.
I mean, there's just so many problems.
A level of aggression goes up.
Ability to concentrate goes down.
And so it damages the brain.
And so the fact that people who have been damaged by aggression don't see anything wrong with that aggression simply is another way of saying Aggression is bad.
Like people who heard the spanking studies and said, wow, that's really interesting.
I mean, I always thought it was fine, but here are some facts that contradict my experience.
An intelligent thing would be to put aside your own personal experience and look for the facts.
People who can't do that Lack cognitive abilities, which is exactly what you'd expect coming out of spanking.
The resistance, of course, comes from the parents, right?
The resistance comes from the parents.
In the same way that feminism said, you know, maybe we should be treating wives better, you know, the guys who were really great husbands didn't have a huge problem with feminism.
Guys who were jerks, you know, who were hitting their wives or yelling at them or just putting them down all the time.
When someone comes along and says to the women, you know, you really shouldn't be putting up with this, you know, this is really abusive, this is really bad, you know, you can leave if you want.
I mean the nasty husbands all throughout the world had a huge problem with that because they want to get all of the fruits of their relationship without actually having to be virtuous.
Now if the theories and the moral understanding of the immorality of spanking and child abuse, if it's true, well then the parents have a lot to answer for and do they necessarily – parents who've exercised authority like brutally, who've hit kids, who've yelled at kids, who've put them down, who've locked them in their rooms and so on, they've treated them like prisoners.
How comfortable are they going to be with modifying that behavior?
Well, if they had the capacity to reason, they wouldn't be hitting in the first place.
It's like going to the guy who's the expert car thief and saying, here, would you mind being my valet for the evening?
Almost by definition, these people are going to want to use aggression against anyone who stands up for kids because that's what they're used to doing, right?
But there have been a lot of articles out recently talking about, you know, are children still beholden in that Old Testament honor their mother and father way to abusive parents?
And a lot of people, I mean I've been saying it for years, that it's something to be really examined from a moral standpoint.
But I mean, there's a lot of it.
There's Dr. Phil, his website on the New York Times and Slate.
I just read an article recently about that.
So I think just the promotion of voluntarism, which is to say, if you have a great relationship with your parents, fantastic, you know, love them, kiss them, say thanks a million times.
You know, if they're horrible and abusive to you and you, you know, don't want to spend any time with them, feel free not to.
You will, in fact, prevent the spread of that kind of nasty behavior to your own children, which they're not responsible for, you know, the grandparents or whatever.
So, like all things, it's the introduction of, you know, ethics and facts and voluntarism that seems to be what has the greatest capacity for improvement.
But there is still a lot, even among very secular people, this idea that you just have to honor your mother and father no matter what.
Which wouldn't be a commandment if there weren't so many who shouldn't be honored, you know The commandments always cover up the the exceptions.
So I do I do have optimism, but it definitely is gonna be a rough road Unfortunately, so but but hopefully we are making progress and part of that progress comes from from things that doing what we're not told to do and and again one of the pop culture kind of pop psych ideas out there is that If some pain or trauma or something has been inflicted on you in the past, just forgive, forget, move on.
If you don't unburden yourself of that, then it will fester in your soul or something like that, something to that effect.
But something that you pointed out on your podcast and that I think is very important to think about is that people should not normalize their childhood.
They should not forgive and forget and move on.
They should be angry about what happened to them, especially if violence has been inflicted on them.
And they should be able to deal with that and to face it squarely, not to simply bury it in the past and pretend that nothing has come of it.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure.
I mean, if you've had raging, angry, abusive parents, then you're afraid of anger.
Of course, because it's being used in a very destructive way.
But anger is a very healthy emotion.
I mean, rage, abuse, this is not particularly related to anger.
It's like saying, well, a gun that's used in self-defense and a gun that's used to rob a bank are both the same action.
No, I mean, it's the same thing, but it's completely opposite intention.
You know, when it comes to things like getting vaccinated, you take a tiny little bit, this is the theory, so you take a tiny little bit of the illness and that actually protects you.
And if you take a little bit of anger at how you've been treated statistically, and Robin Grill writes about this, he's also been on my show, I have to say this every time, but Robin Grill writes about this in a free book that you can get called Parenting for a Peaceful World, a really great book, that anger, somebody who gets angry at their past if they've been abused is statistically the least likely to re-offend.
And so, anger against injustice is, I think, a very just and valid and fair and healthy emotion to have.
Now, people are obviously very concerned about getting stuck in anger, stuck in resentment and so on, but if you get angry at people who've done you wrong and you confront them, which I think is, you know, do not bear false witness against thy neighbor, talk to people who've done you wrong.
If you can have a breakthrough, if you can get some kind of connection, some kind of healing, fantastic.
But I think that the reason that forgiveness comes out is that if people feel like they have to stay with their parents no matter what for the rest of their lives, which is even more irrational than saying I have to stay with an abusive spouse for the rest of my life no matter what.
At least you've got to choose your spouse, you've got to date them, take them for test drives and go marry them voluntarily.
We don't choose our parents, right?
This is why you have to have the highest moral standards with parents than with any other relationship.
involuntary relationship where children are effectively prisoners of the parents.
I mean, you can't change that.
I mean, my daughter's not going to go out at four.
She's not going to get a job or something.
So she's not, she didn't choose to be born.
She certainly didn't choose me as a father and she's not choosing her environment and she can't leave it, right?
So it's the least voluntary relationship, which means you have to have the highest moral standards for that relationship as the least voluntary.
And so if we can promote the idea of voluntarism in parent-child relationships, that's the best way, you know, to make relationships better.
I mean, we don't run around yelling at public school teachers to be better or the post office to be better or the IRS to be better.
We should just privatize these things, make them voluntary and the improvements flow from there and that's sort of my argument with the family.
The voluntary family is the quality family and the degree to which we assume that our children are just our property to yell at, to hit, to demand resources from, to have them come and wipe our asses when we're 80 no matter how we treat them, of course that's basically socialism.
It's basically a dictatorship.
of the family.
Whereas if we recognize that our children are voluntary, independent beings, they can't choose to be with us now, but we should treat them as if they could and would choose us over everyone.
That I think is the best approach.
The forgiveness thing comes when you can't get angry at your mom or dad, and you also can't choose not to see them because it's such a taboo to say, I don't want these abusive people in my life.
Um, I, I don't, I mean I've quote forgiven my mom for some terrible things she did when I was a child.
I mean I was sort of so wake up every day, mom, you're a pretty great life, positive life and a happy life.
So I've sort of forgiven her in that I'm not going back and pressing charges.
But that doesn't mean that I have to then go and see her every Sunday, right?
So you may say, you know, I forgive the guy who robbed me last year.
You know, I'm going to move on.
But that doesn't mean I have to go over to his house every Sunday for dinner and admire all my stolen goods on his mantelpiece, right?
So once we have voluntarism I think there's less of a need to continually forgive.
And the last thing I'll say is that I think forgiveness Like laughter, like love, like I think all of the best of the involuntary emotions.
Like you can choose to make your thumb hurt by hitting it with a hammer, you know, you can choose I guess to make yourself happy by taking heroin in the short run, but the involuntary emotions I think are the best, right?
Love and passion and so on.
And we can't will those.
And I think forgiveness is something that is evoked in us by someone else's genuine and effective approach towards restitution, towards, you know, maybe a parent who's harmed us will really listen to us, will pay for some therapy, will go for co-therapy, will really try to understand it and break through family patterns.
Then I think you may have forgiveness even with abuse and you may have a positive and productive relationship in the future.
But the parents who double down just become more abusive.
I don't know what forgiveness would even mean in that.
Forgiveness has to be earned, like love, like gratitude.
It has to be earned.
I don't think it's something you just squeeze out of yourself like an empty toothpaste.
Very well put.
And let me just say how sorry I am for the obvious, I mean, terrible childhood and upbringing that you had, but that you pulled through it and have done what you've done and accomplished what you've accomplished is hope for all the people out there in a similar situation.
And from the other side of the coin, let me just say that there's the normalization of childhood that comes from people who have had abusive childhoods and want to sort of normalize that and pretend that everything was happy.
On the other side of the coin, myself personally, I had two of the most loving, supportive parents that a person could possibly ask for.
who are always there for me, who never spanked or hit me or inflicted violence on me in order to punish me.
And I think for a long time, I normalized that and thought, well, everyone must have had a similar upbringing.
And I haven't really appreciated just how wonderful my parents have been to me in the past.
So that's something that I think I've come to from all of this and from my newfound fatherhood as well, is that I, to a large extent, perhaps have been going around and in a cloud thinking that everybody had relatively okay childhoods, and it's important for us who have had relatively okay childhoods to also understand that other people might be in a very different position.
So there's a lot of issues here, and it goes right to the roots of people's family life, personal life.
It goes right to the core of who people are, and their worldviews are shaped by this.
So it's something that I understand a lot of people are very hesitant to really look at closely, because it might bring up a lot of things that are very uncomfortable for people.
But just finally then, I don't want to dwell solely on the violence and the negativity.
Let's dwell a little bit on the peaceful side of this, the peaceful parenting, what should just be called parenting.
Having productive, happy, voluntary relationships with your child, in which your child actually wants to be your child and wants to be around you.
What a revolutionary idea.
Let's talk a little bit about that, how you implement that in your own life, and the types of effects that we can expect from children who are raised in that manner.
Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that and I wanted to, of course, I know that your mother has passed away, I don't know about your father, but I want to pass along my compliments.
It is a shock, if you've been raised well, it is a shock to realize that it's not really the norm, but it is also a relief in a way, because if everyone was raised peacefully and well and the world still looked the way it looked, We'd be out of improvement.
Like we'd be done because if like nothing we like, oh my God, this is the last thing that we've got to do is to really improve people's childhoods.
And then I think the world will look at a very different place.
Lesbianophobia, patriotism, nationalism, superstition, racism, homophobia, war lust, violence, criminality.
All of these things can more or less be tied directly back to early childhood experiences.
So I know it's a shock to find out a lot of people out there with bad childhoods, but it is kind of a relief in a way.
In that we actually have something we can genuinely improve because if everyone had great childhoods and peaceful childhoods and the world was as violent and predatory as it is, Well, I don't know.
It's like if your car is going as fast as it can and you can't hit the gas anymore, that's as fast as you can go.
But there is so much to improve and I think that does make the world make a lot more sense when you look at it through that lens.
But yeah, peaceful parenting, non-aggression principle, right?
Respect for property rights.
So, thou shalt not initiate force against others to me is the foundation of ethics, right?
And where else would we want to apply that first other than with I mean that is the least voluntary as I mentioned relationship.
It's the one where we should have the highest moral standards.
Wherever there's a disparity of power, we assume that the standards of ethics should be higher, right?
So I can date a coworker but if that coworker is actually my employee and I'm a boss, there's a difference of power there.
And therefore, I have to have a different set of moral standards because of the power disparity.
So where power disparity increases, ethics have to increase as well.
And there's no power disparity in the world greater than that between parent and child, particularly when the child is very young.
And that's where we have to have the highest moral standards.
Insanely, and the future will view this as completely bad, we have the opposite.
Where we have the greatest moral disparity, sorry, where we have the greatest power disparity, we have the lowest moral standards.
I mean, how insane is that?
This is, I think, power corrupts and if you have the sense of yourself as the parent, as the authority, I'm going to tell this kid what to do, I'm going to teach this kid about my religion, I'm going to teach this kid to worship this country, I'm going to send that kid to some school that neither he nor I have chosen, I'm going to just drag this kid around and tell him how much he can eat and when to go to bed and how much money he's going to have.
If you're basically a little dictator at home, That's going to have an effect on your child's development, right?
So the peaceful parenting is simply not initiating force and recognizing that where the power disparity is greatest, the ethics standards have to be highest rather than lowest.
I don't know if you've seen this, if you've known any mean people in your life.
Take them to a restaurant, usually they're quite nice to the waiter.
They may be snarling at their kids in the car five minutes later but usually they're chatting and joking with the waiter and that's just mad.
I mean what the hell do you care about the waiter for God's sake?
If you're going to have high moral standards in your behavior… So forget the checkout clerk that you're making a joke with, you know, how about your flesh and blood, who you want to be there when you get old and anyway.
So it's really, it's simple in its principles and complex in its execution, sort of like the free market, you know, it's the respect property, don't initiate force, those are some basic simple principles.
How that manifests is extremely complicated.
So if you sort of say as a parent, well, I'm not going to initiate force against children.
Now that means basically two things.
It means not obviously striking them or violating their physicality in any way, but it also means not using negative language against them in any way.
Because if you're a friend, like if I just say, oh, James, you're a stinky poo head or something like that, you can choose to not ever talk to me again.
You know, I'm not going to burrow through the planet and find you in Japan or whatever.
So you can choose to voluntarily associate, disassociate with somebody who is being verbally abusive towards you.
Children don't have that right.
So the moral standards for verbal abuse are far higher when it comes to parents and children than it would be for any other adult.
And we have laws that libel and slander and so on but of course children don't have access to any of those.
So you have to recognize that you're dealing with the developing brain that whatever you say on a repetitive basis gets internalized as a child and you'll see this as you get older.
My daughter spills something and she says, oh, that's okay, daddy, we'll clean it up.
Why?
Because for four years I've been saying, oh, that's okay, Isabella, we'll clean it up.
I mean, she's completely internalized half the things I've said to her and you are an infectious personality as a parent to a child and you want to make sure you infect with as positive things as possible.
Now, if you say, well, I'm not going to raise my voice, I'm not going to name call, I'm not going to threaten and I'm certainly not going to physically hit or threaten to hit.
Well, for a lot of people there's like, okay, So what do I do?
You know, there's this huge void because that's just how we're used to dealing with children, whether nicely, you know, or maybe it's a timeout.
If you say, well, I don't do timeouts either because, you know, if I have a disagreement with a friend, I don't tell him to go and sit in the corner and think about what he's done, right?
So higher standards again.
If you don't give yourself access to any of the traditional authoritarian parenting tools, then you actually do have to really start to think in a very creative way about how to interact with and engage with your children.
In the same way that if you're a business who gets massive subsidies from the government, you don't really have to think about your business plan too much other than lobby government.
But as soon as you're thrown back into the vagaries of the free market, you have to become really creative in terms of how it is you're going to win customers and you suddenly have to really think about a whole bunch of things you didn't have to think about before.
So once you are working from a truly voluntaristic perspective with your children and you are denying yourself the historical, top-down, hierarchical, kind of brutal approaches to parenting, then you really have the opportunity to think creatively about...
about how to resolve conflicts with your children and that is, to me, it's the greatest fun of parenting.
It's sort of saying, okay, well I'm not going to use the cheat codes of authority so how am I going to win this game without using the cheat codes?
And it's amazing because then you have to start negotiating.
You can start negotiating with children at, you know, 18 months, a little bit, two years, definitely two and a half years for sure.
And you know my daughter now half the day we're just making deals and shaking on them and that is a great way of course to teach how to negotiate self-esteem, self-respect and so on.
Make sure they have their voices heard and have an input into the family environment because they should.
So I don't really have a lot of answers about how to deal with this and that every particular situation any more than someone who says let's get the government out of the economy knows how the economy should run in any particular situation.
But if you do deny yourself The bad tools of historical parenting and resolutely, you know, stand before any possibility of aggression in your parenting.
You will be amazed just what you can work out, you know, if you don't have, you know, any of the old thing where if you have only all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Well, if all you have is authority and top down and aggression, then that's what every parenting problem looks like to be solved by.
But if you deny yourself that, then you really do end up with a free market of negotiation.
And that is so much more fun.
It's so much.
I think it was.
Dana Martin who said, you know, spending your whole day trying to control someone?
It's pretty tiring.
It's pretty exhausting.
But spending your day playing and negotiating is a huge amount more fun.
And I think what happens is parents end up using these authoritarian tools.
The kids end up resentful.
The kids end up not learning any lessons other than avoid the band hammer of the parental authority and finding ways to work around it.
So it becomes this cat and mouse game.
And then what happens is the parents get annoyed.
The children get resentful.
And so they have even less fun together.
And that causes more irritation, more sneaking around, more authority.
And it becomes this kind of death spiral into negativity.
It's really hard to pull that off.
Some parents do, and I've certainly talked to some who have, but boy, if you just lay the foundation of peace and voluntary negotiation at the beginning, man, it's a huge amount of fun.
Absolutely.
Well, you bring up, just finally before we go here, you bring up an important point that very simple principles can have very complex effects when they play themselves out.
So, for example, in the free market, some very simple principles and simple processes can lead to the creation of something Deceptively simple, like a pencil, which in fact is a mind-blowing thing when you think of where all the materials are being sourced from and how they're being mined and shipped all around the world and manufactured, etc., etc.
So for anyone who has not seen iPencil or any of its derivatives, the essay by Leonard Reid, that name is not coming to mind at the moment.
A brilliant summation of that.
Well, let's think of that in the parenting context.
So, I know you don't have a crystal ball, but if we were to apply these principles and this was to become the norm in society, what type of society would we be looking at a generation or two out?
Oh, I mean, it's a free society.
It's a society without, let's see, the grim superstitions of religion, which is separate from imagination.
I mean, religion is fantasy.
Fantasy is not the same as imagination.
You know, I mean, imagination is writing a great screenplay.
Fantasy is thinking that, you know, bats are flying around in the room or that you have to wash your hands about 1,500 times a day.
So we would not have, I think, the dangerous superstitions that are very scary to children, you know, hell and demons and fire and all that kind of stuff.
Without a doubt, there would be a vast, I dare say total, but, you know, you can't go that's in the sociology sciences, social sciences, but a vast reduction in criminality, a vast reduction in abuse, a vast reduction in substance abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse, and so on, and a vast reduction in promiscuity, and a vast reduction in early teen pregnancies, and so on, greater intelligence, greater social skills,
greater negotiation skills, with all of that put together, then if you have almost greater negotiation skills, with all of that put together, then if you have almost no criminals, and the only criminals I think that would be around were people who have brain tumors or something, whether some physical degeneration within the brain, which is causing some lack of inhibition from the neofrontal cortex, and So this is extraordinarily rare.
So if we had a world with no drug abuse No alcoholism, very little to no smoking, no criminality, no fraud, really, because fraud is just, you know, low self-esteem criminality by another name.
Would we even feel the need to have a state?
I mean wouldn't that be like going to an atheist convention and trying to sell demon insurance?
I mean it just wouldn't – they'd be like, sorry, you're trying to protect me from all these things that aren't there.
And if people from the state came around and said, well you see, you need to give us half your income and sell off your children's futures because there are all these bad people in the world who are going to take stuff from you.
It's like actually I only see one.
It's just the guy standing in front of me trying to tell me the idea of the state.
So from a sort of demand standpoint, the state would seem ridiculous.
Like, just protect me from what?
I mean, you know, it's like, hey, James, I got this great woolly mammoth insurance that I can sell you.
It's like, no, I haven't seen a woolly mammoth in quite a few hundred thousand years, so not so much for me.
But also on the other side, you know, the people, if you read the childhoods of politicians, They're brutal.
I mean, I can't remember who, somebody sent a history of the childhoods of US presidents.
I mean, they're just monsters, complete sociopaths, and you can see from their childhood histories just how damaged these human beings are and what unholy lusts for power and domination grow out of a smashed and broken early childhood where people are spending their whole life trying to control others because they were so controlled as children and so brutalized as children.
And you can see this even with Barack Obama.
I mean, their childhoods are just wretched.
I mean, Bill Clinton, you know, drunken, deadbeat, gun-toting, crazy family life, right?
So from the pull standpoint, like from the demand standpoint, people would be unable to sell the concept of a monopoly of violence to protect you from violence.
It just wouldn't make any sense.
But people also wouldn't want that kind of power.
I mean if you've had a healthy childhood, you don't grow up thirsting and lusting for violent power over other people.
I mean it just can't happen.
You know for people to be to be hierarchically dominatrix bound in some violent pact with the citizens without having had a happy childhood it's like going into and saying you look my arm is broken but I never damaged it.
It's like no if your arm is broken it must have been damaged and if people have this power lust they must have been damaged as children.
So without the boogeyman showing up that the state is continually scaring us with Why would we even feel the need for the state and who would be trying to sell us a state since they'd get much more happiness and pleasure out of negotiating and participating with us than they would out of controlling and violently dominating us.
So I think we would see a society without countries, a society without a state, a society without superstition and a society where if people were treating their children badly they'd show up so clearly and of course the brain scans would show it very clearly and interventions would happen but it would be so rare that It would be, you know, in the Middle Ages, people got so insane, you know, I mean, the Middle Ages, I mean, the theology was so powerful.
I mean, there was this thing called Synvitus Dance, where people would have hysterical dancing because they would think that dancing would drive away the demons and the demons were everywhere.
And they would dance until they passed out or died of thirst.
And this was surprisingly common.
And yet you don't see this happening anymore because we have a more rational approach to the world.
And I don't see any reason why that can't continue going on.
And I don't believe that it's like pushing that Sisyphus rock uphill.
You know, you have a peaceful generation and then if you don't keep fighting for it, it's It all comes sliding back down.
I just don't think that's going to be the case.
I think once we reach that plateau, it's going to become the foundation.
Well, I certainly hope that at any rate that is the case, and it does seem to be a system of self-generating cycles.
So, we have to break the cycle of violence and put, at least in our own lives, we can't control other people, we can't control what's happening on the macrocosmic scale, but we can control our own family and what we choose to do and how we choose to relate to our children.
So, Steph, a lot of food for thought in this conversation.
I certainly hope people are going to listen to it critically.
Take it on board, no matter what types of demons it might dredge up from people's individual pasts.
Just before we go, let's give people a chance to find yourself, your website, and your work.
Oh, sure.
It's freedomainradio.com.
And the YouTube channel is youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio.
And yeah, people can come.
I've got a whole bunch of books there that are all free.
The shows are all free.
People can donate if and when they see fit.
And I really appreciate everyone's support.
We have 50 million downloads.
So doing something not too wrong.
Not too wrong.
That's the motto of Freedom Main Radio.
So I appreciate that.
And for my listeners, it's Corbett Report.
And it is 1B2Ts, if I remember rightly.
That's right, c-r-b-t-t-report.com.
So I think we'll leave it there for now.
But Steph, I certainly hope we can have you on in the future to talk more about this, especially as my son grows up and I start encountering more things myself in my own life.
So excellent conversation today.
Thank you again for your time.
Thanks.
And I just wanted to point out how lucky your son is to have you as a dad.
He is a very, very lucky young man, and I'm sure he will grow to appreciate that.
But congratulations on the way that you're parenting.
I'm sure it's just fantastic.
So good for you.
Well, thank you for that.
And I think I'll go get to parenting right now.
So thank you again for your time.
All right.
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