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July 20, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:04:19
MUST WATCH! How Evil Grows...
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Why, what an ass am I? This is most brave that I, the son of a dear father, murdered, prompted to my revenge by heaven, and hell must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words and fall a-cursing like a very drab scullion.
I had this odd day.
I've got to tell you guys how strange it is sometimes to do what I do.
I had such a strange day.
These lines from Hamlet kept rolling around in my head.
I had a day, and I've had a couple of days where I've wanted to do this show.
And today I'm like, oh, maybe I'll do it upstairs.
Oh, maybe I'll do it on a tablet.
And I realized how I'm just avoiding the hell out of this topic.
And this line must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, has been rolled around in my head for reasons you'll see as I go through this topic.
So I'm just telling you, this is a hell of a tough topic for me.
I've been sitting on this bomb of evil for 45 years.
Boy, there's a time flash for you.
Yeah, 45 years, probably more.
And I want to tell you how evil comes into the world.
The standard narrative goes something like this, that, oh, you had a difficult childhood, you were traumatized as a child, and therefore you become an abuser.
No, that's not it. That's not it.
That's not causal, and I can explain clearly why.
That's not how evil or abuse or violence or destruction comes into the world.
It's nothing like that. It's related.
The causality is not off.
You have to be, I think, abused as a child and significantly in order to end up as an evil person, but it's not the abuse itself.
Being hurt is not what causes evil.
It's a sufficient but not necessary step towards evil to be abused and hurt as a child, but it's not enough.
So, to be hurt is one thing.
And I've been feeling very oddly nostalgic about this, my youth, my childhood.
Because when I was a child, of course, I was in an insane and abusive household.
But... I had this belief that I would leave this terrible and abusive and insane environment and I would get out into the world, you see. I would get out into the world and I knew the world wasn't perfect and I understand.
But I would get out into the world and what would happen is the world would be sane.
Now it could be improved.
But... You're born into a crazy household.
You fight to survive. You get out into the world.
And you assume, of course, that the world is going to be more sane than your household.
That's what you hope for.
That's what actually keeps you going.
If I believe...
Believed that I was clawing my way out of one torture asylum in order to get into a larger torture asylum while it would have been a little bit more tough to summon the strength and the motivation to escape, to get out.
Mental illness is so rife in my family that it was philosophy or the madhouse.
It was really the only fork in the road that exists for my gene pool.
I mean, there's just people go nuts all over the place.
It's like, Reality is the bowling ball and my family are the pins and it's a strike every time.
You've got to jump out of the way.
And it's philosophy or bust.
It was philosophy or insanity or possibly a great evil.
I mean, my language and persuasion skills are so high that if I had turned my mind towards immorality, towards sophistry, towards politics...
I could have done enormous damage to the world.
So let's thank philosophy for a moment, shall we?
So when I was starting out, not too long after I started out in this show, I invited people to come in and talk about what they cared about with regards to philosophy, their life, and so on.
And I didn't specify any particular content.
It was an open call-in show.
And originally, this is back in the day when Skype would let you have these sort of multifaceted calls, like people you just mute and unmute people, this big queue of people.
I didn't even know what people wanted to talk about.
I thought I would get, you know, nice juicy abstract topics, metaphysics, epistemology, and so on, some ethics, maybe some politics, but that is not what people wanted to talk about.
What they wanted to talk about was the effects of violence and irrationality in their own personal lives, Often to do with when they were children.
And that came as a bit of a surprise to me, but I want to meet people where they are.
I want to bring philosophy to where people are, and that's where they are.
And it's not like that's a bad thing.
I actually realized that they were more key and central to the The purpose of philosophy in terms of how you live is not abstract instruction, although that is helpful.
But it is fighting the effects of anti-rationality and evil in your own life, in your own heart, so that you can become a gateway through which you can pass to a higher sunlit plane of morality and virtue and all of that.
So people wanted to talk about their histories, their childhoods, and I was, okay, well, I'm not going to tell you what you should talk about.
So I did. And with that, I want to get into any particular details.
It doesn't really matter so many years later.
I said to people, you don't have to stay in abusive relationships.
That's what I learned. That's what I learned growing up.
That's what I learned growing up, which is all the feminists and all these other people saying to me, well, if you're a woman and you're in an abusive marriage, you should get out.
You should leave. Even if you're just dissatisfied.
You know, if you're some middle-aged Shirley Valentine out there and you're just kind of dissatisfied, you can just move out.
And you can go down to the Bohemian district, down to the Soho, and you can find some young muscled sculptor who is going to make you lattes and rub your feet.
And all of this middle-aged weird vanity stuff was going on.
But I was always told, you know, leave, you don't have to stay in abusive relationships.
Now, what I was told was you shouldn't, you must not, you must leave abusive relationships.
You have every right to it. It's a good thing and so on.
And so, you know, I didn't think it was wildly controversial to say to people, hey, you know, if your parents are like unrelenting, unrepentant abusers, you don't have to stay in the relationship when you're an adult, right?
As a kid, you've got little choice and all that.
And this is, of course, what I had heard earlier.
Growing up, with regards to women, husbands in general, I did not actually think it was particularly controversial.
And it was actually quite a shock for me when the media and, you know, half the internet came down on me, like a ton of breaks and called me a cult leader and blah, blah, blah, right?
It was really quite...
And I remember, like, just sitting there thinking, like, till my brain was, like, red hot visible from space, like, what am I missing?
What am I missing? What am I missing? What am I missing?
And then, after a while, I got it.
It was not a conclusion I wanted to get at all because it's like out of the little asylum of childhood into the big asylum of adulthood is not where you want to go and it was a pretty tough and rough passage, right?
It's like Evel Knievel revving over the Grand Canyon just crossing your fingers hoping you're making it to the red dirt on the other side but I realized, I realized that the conscience of the world is terrible with regards to how it treats children and then when you say...
To adults, you don't have to spend time with abusive parents.
What happens? Well, a lot of people don't want to make apologies.
They don't want to be better, and they've done great harm to their children.
Individually and culturally and economically, you know, national debt, terrible government schools, and lying to them about the value of university degrees, you name it, right?
It's just a whole bunch of exploitation and predation on the unborn, on the pre-born, on the young.
I've said this before on the show.
I remember grade 8.
Yeah, grade 8 it was. Had a pretty good teacher.
I still remember he wrote a little essay that he handed out into class, which I thought was kind of cool.
He didn't have to. He was a history teacher.
And I remember this is back when both Russia and China were communist, and they were kind of at odds with each other.
And he said, yeah, well, remember that there's more that binds them together than drives them apart.
I just remember this years later, and I also remember him talking about when you guys get old and you get your pensions, like your government pensions, and we laughed.
Come on. First of all, when we get old, everyone's talking to us about nuclear war, and secondly, you know, dude, we know the math.
Massive debt already. Everybody knew about the national debt, even at that age, right?
So... I realized just how bad the conscience of the world was regarding how children are treated and that to stand up for children, adult children in particular, who have choice and free will regarding who they spend time with was something that provoked the conscience of some very bad people and those very bad people were kind of everywhere.
So I want to sort of point this out that it's not being harmed That causes you to become evil.
So you can imagine of course being harmed in a traffic accident.
That's not going to make you evil, right?
It's going to make your life difficult, of course, right?
And it's going to It's going to withhold some aspects of your physicality and it's your mental capacities.
It's going to advance other areas, you know, like you lose your sight, your hearing gets sharper and so on.
So it's going to be harmful to you and it's not something that you want.
It's not going to make you evil. You're going to sit there and say, oh, you know, I got whiplash, so I had to rob a bank.
I mean, it's not how psychology, how the soul, how the mind works.
If you experience harm, if you are wronged against morally, right?
Somebody keys your car, somebody sets fire to your dog, somebody, whatever, right?
If that happens and society as a whole recognizes the wrong that was done to you, punishes or at least ostracizes the wrongdoer, And gives you great sympathy, then the harm is sort of like a, it's like a cold virus, right?
You get a cold virus, and what, five to seven days your body fights it, and then you develop antibodies which last you the rest of your life, and then, you know, what are there, like a hundred different kinds of colds, so you get one a year, by the time you're George Burns age, you don't get more colds, right?
So if you are sinned against morally, and society recognizes a sinner, sympathizes with the fact that you were victimized, Punishes or at least ostracizes the sinner.
Well, you don't become evil.
Because the power of good is in society, the power to identify evil within society, and people will not spend time with evildoers, and that gives you great comfort and security and calm, so to speak, in your society.
So accidental harm... Evil intent harm does not cause you to become evil.
So the question is, what causes people to become evil?
Now, there's an alchemic mystery X factor called free will, which we can't really delve into here because it's free will.
It's the wholesome Brownian motion of choice and so on.
But let's talk about the influences of what happens and how it happens that people become so immoral.
So for me, there was a grave temptation to believe, it was more than a temptation really, to believe that I was isolated with evil, that I was sealed off from society in this sort of pocket of evil that was the little apartment or series of apartments that I lived in with my mother as a child.
Because when you are being abused, it's weird.
Because the signs are everywhere.
I had terrible clothing, holes in my clothes.
I was hungry. I was tired.
A friend of mine's father, who was a doctor, had to sit me down after puberty and say, dude, you've got to start using some deodorant, right?
I mean, no concept of self-care.
You're just trying to survive. You don't worry about how you smell when you're running from a bear, right?
So you're just trying to survive.
And so the signs are everywhere.
Everyone sees it. The esoteric science, it's like I never had a haircut or once my mother cut my hair with pinking shears, you know, that little awning like some Italian cafe or something.
It's not just that kind of stuff.
It's, you know, I mean, I lived in...
The apartments had thin walls, as they generally do, and the beatings and the screamings, and everybody knew.
Everybody knew. And nobody picked up the phone.
Nobody called the police.
No teacher said...
How are you doing?
I was blamed for this. I've talked about this before.
People said, oh, you're just lazy.
You're just inattentive.
You don't focus.
You don't concentrate. You're not willing to put to good use the gift that nature has given you, and you're just kind of lazy and fruity and so on.
So I remember when I was young, I wrote a poem about this in my teens, about how if...
If there were a bunch of people in line for a bus and there was a kid there and some dog came along and attacked the child, people would be like, oh my gosh, let's whisk the child to safety.
Let's deal with the dog.
Let's take out her umbrellas and poke it.
People would be like, oh my gosh, this is terrible.
The child's being attacked. In the line to a bus.
We must act. We must protect the child.
We must restrain the predator.
Restrain the predator.
You take that same situation and you make it apparent and you put it on the second floor of a building in London or in Toronto.
Nothing.
How many people?
I'm not talking about me.
I understand. I mean, I'm illustrating a point, a purpose with me, right?
I've gone through therapy for years for this stuff.
And so I have a great life now.
And again, I thank you for your support and your enthusiasm for what it is that I talk about.
And I feel in response to your generosity, your kindness, your support...
That I owe it to you to unpack my heart like a whore and tell you all that I have considered in understanding the growth of evil and in promoting the cause of virtue and the protection of children in this world.
I owe you the truth to unpack my heart and my mind and my history.
It's illustrative, right?
So I did a back of the napkin calculation many years ago about how many people knew that I was being abused as a child.
I can't remember the exact number, but if you take into account teachers, camp counselors, neighbors, friends, parents, friends, older siblings, and I kind of said, okay, well, there are a bunch of kids.
They could talk to their parents, but, you know, when you're kids, it's a little tougher.
So I limited it to adults.
And we moved a lot.
Like, we moved a lot when I was a kid.
And it was...
If I remember rightly, like sort of given the proximity above, below, like all around, you could hear at least two, like people in the hallway could hear beatings and screamings and so on.
And if I remember rightly, it was somewhere conservatively between 800 and 1,000 people.
And then once my mother called the cops on me and I got a big lecture from a tobacco breath cop and pinned in the corner where he was telling me that the poll problem was just some kind of generation gap and I needed to listen to my mother and all this kind of stuff, right?
I mean, nobody was crying and screaming and, you know, I think I was 11 or 12 or something like that.
Anyway, so, yeah, a thousand people, a thousand people knew, had direct evidence or significant evidence and so on, and nobody knew.
Not only did nobody say anything, but they expressed, wherever this topic came up, they expressed great sympathy, you see, for my mother.
Great sympathy. Oh, your poor mother.
Oh, your mother, she's, you know, not well.
Great sympathy for my mother and not one single question regarding what was going on in my house.
In my house. Which was not just physical violence, not just verbal violence, but creepy stuff, which I don't even want to get into here, but just not as bad as you conceive of, but not far from as bad as you could conceive of.
So, where does evil come from?
Well, as I said before, when I was in my...
Early teens, I went through a bit of a phase of nicking things from stores with friends.
And there was no, to me, there was no sense of like, like now, I mean, of course, and it's immoral, it's wrong, and it's theft, and it's bad, and it was never anything particularly big, but that's the principle at work here, right?
And for me, it was never a question of...
Well, this is wrong.
I should obey society's rules.
I felt in a complete state of nature with regards to society.
And this is why I've worked so hard over these many years.
To validate the suffering of children and work to give them the sympathy that they so richly deserve.
I mean, you've heard this if you've listened to my show recently.
Hundreds of times, if not north of a thousand, the people who've told me about their child says, like, I'm so sorry that happened to you.
Because I do care and I am sorry, and also because this is the inoculation.
Sympathy is the inoculation against evil.
Sympathy and standing up for what is good and right and just and fair and moral, that is the antidote to evil.
Why would I obey society's rules when society didn't give one flying frack about protecting me when society knew how harmed I was being?
And in fact, society blamed me for the dysfunctional aspects of my appearance, of my hygiene, of my work ethic, of this, that, and the other, right?
Society blamed me and held me Or cast me in a negative moral light for the effect of what had occurred or what was being inflicted upon me as a child.
So it's insult to injury, right?
Not only are we not going to protect you, not only are we going to sympathize with your mother but never with you, but we are going to insult and denigrate you for the effects of Of what's being done to you, of the evil that you're suffering, of the violence and abuse and other creepy stuff that you're suffering.
We are going to blame you.
And then, of course, society, which fails to protect children, sympathizes with their abusers and then blames the children for the effects of abuse.
Society then says, Well, we're so moral, you see.
We're so good. We're so virtuous.
We know so much about goodness that you really, really should obey our rules because we've earned it as a result of being just so gosh darn virtuous.
To which the abused child says, You pompous, self-aggrandizing, twisting yourself into a self-congratulary pretzel of hypocritical backstabbing, jerkwads from the nth dimension of moral hypocrisy.
How dare you, society, lecture the children that you failed to protect from the abusers you praised?
And the effects of which abuse you castigated in the children, how dare you?
Say to the children as they grow, you see, you must obey us in society.
We have these wonderful rules and we're so virtuous and we're so good.
You see, the manure that feeds the demon seed of evil, the bull, excrement, That is the essential nutrition.
That the diamond sunflowers of immorality is not harm.
It's hypocrisy.
It's hypocrisy.
If you've ever harmed someone in your life and they confront you and say, hey, you harmed me, right?
If you say, gosh, I'm...
If you accept, right, what they say.
You say, oh, I'm so sorry.
I'm really, really sorry. I don't know what I was thinking.
I really have to figure this one out.
What can I do to make it better and so on, right?
Well, that's not hypocritical, right?
That's... Or you can say, no, I don't accept that I harmed you and here's why.
And you have that debate. You have that discussion, right?
But if you deep down know that you've harmed someone, but you gaslight them, you fog them, you turn it back on them, you blame them, you excuse yourself, you attack them back by saying that they have ridiculous standards, that they're paranoid, that they're insecure, that they're unable to take responsibility for it.
I mean, if you just vomit-gorge the entire sophist, hypocritical bag of bullcrack tricks to further abuse them after having abused them, Well, you see, this is where violence comes from.
This is where evil fundamentally stems from.
Not from abuse.
Not from being victimized.
But the hypocritical.
Like, if society was honest, right?
If society was honest, that would be one thing.
Because if society said, yeah, listen kids, look, you don't vote.
You don't really pay any taxes.
Your parents, if they're abusive, can cause a lot of trouble for me, and you can't, right?
So let's say some teacher saw me and said, you know, what's going on?
You know, you're dazed, you've got no haircut, your clothes have holes in them, you smell, you're hungry, you're tired all the time.
time like what is going on at home?
Well, then I would say, What was going on? I mean, it might take a little while, but I would say.
And then, you know, that teacher would have a challenge, right?
Or a neighbor or a friend's parents would have a challenge.
And the challenge is... Okay, so now I've got to go talk to Steph's mom, and then what?
Right? Let's say that the teacher goes and talks to the mom or refers it to social services or something like that.
Well, then what? Well, she might beat it out of me as to who I told or who asked me or whatever, and then she might go and lodge a complaint or, I don't know, launch a suit or something against that person, right?
So... The school isn't designed for the children.
The school is designed to indoctrinate the children and funnel money to leftist causes in general.
But if society was honest, right?
And just said, yeah, you know, we don't...
I mean, we don't really care about kids.
We don't. We don't really care about kids.
You know, it's important to have kids, I guess, right?
You need future taxpayers, at least those you import from the third world don't seem to be paying a whack-load of taxes.
So, you know, we kind of need kids.
They're like a necessary evil, but...
I mean, society is not at all designed around the protection of children.
God, good Lord.
Good Lord. This guy, the Antifa guy who attacked the ICE facility, it was in Tacoma, I think it was.
I mean, this guy, no sympathy, right?
What he did was absolutely immoral.
But it's not probably completely unimportant that he had been involved in a child custody battle since 2013.
And from what I've talked about with people, both friends, acquaintances, and just people I've met, family court, particularly for the man, can make you completely insane.
Can make you completely insane.
And it's a terrifying experience.
As a male in particular, to be dragged into the family court system.
And this guy had no money to represent himself.
Six years, or it depends on when it started and ended, could be seven years.
Seven and a half years. Again, no sympathy.
What he did was absolutely wrong.
But that's the system that we have.
Does society care about kids?
Is it designed to make sure that children get the best start and the best life and the best...
No, of course not, right?
Of course not. Because what's best for kids is to parent...
Families and society has been encouraging divorce and subsidizing divorce and family breakup for 50 or 60 years.
Do kids like going to school?
No, of course not. They hate it.
They hate school, for the most part.
It's boring, it's irrelevant, particularly boys.
Do they change?
No, of course not. I mean, you can't love...
Many years ago, I asked a woman out and went on a date with her and sat down.
She seemed a little stressed, and I'm like, oh, what's going on?
And, you know, get to the root of things right up front.
Don't invest in a Titanic ticket.
And she said, oh, man, you know, I got a call from the I'm in a credit card company this morning.
My ex-boyfriend left me with $17,000 in credit card debt.
I still really care for him, but this is tough.
And I'm like, come on. You can't claim to love someone and then dump $17,000 of credit card debt on them and take off.
You can't. Not only is that not love, it's quite the opposite of love.
That's like Saying that a vampire enjoys nuzzling your neck because it turns you on.
So if society cared about children, there's no conceivable way that we would have a national debt.
In fact, we'd have a national surplus because you save for a rainy day, right?
So you understand all of this stuff, right?
If we cared about children, we would...
We would care about demographics.
We would care about the security of their childhood experience.
If we cared about children, we would do everything we could to keep them out of daycares, which are bad for children overall.
So as a society, we don't care.
For our kids. We view them as inconveniences a lot of times.
We view them as challenges to our authority that often have to be yelled or hit down.
Circumcision is still rampant.
The majority of children are still, and the majority of parents still hit their children.
Hit their children.
Hit their children.
The most vulnerable children.
Weak, dependent, no free will, didn't choose to be there, members of our society can be.
Hit with virtual impunity.
Yelled at, screamed, called names.
Things you would never do.
At your job.
You don't get some contract, you go scream at the customer.
Of course not. Do you threaten to hit him?
Take away his computer?
Come on. So we don't particularly care about children.
And my mistake when I was younger, and not even that much younger, I forgive myself, but it would be somewhat credible not to.
I thought that we did.
Because, you see, I listened to the words.
I listened to the words.
I listened to the words.
All the pompous virtue-signaling About how much society just loves its children.
Society just loves its children.
Everything for the kids.
I do anything for the kids. We love the kids.
How about we cut government spending and stop piling national debt on the children that they did not ask for, vote for, or benefit from?
Well, no, no, you can't do that.
How about we improve schools so they're not dangerous hellholes of weapons of mass distraction and lack of concentration camps where children have to go through metal detectors and hope that they survive?
We wouldn't be jamming our children into these Kleenex boxes with bars on the window and metal detectors to hopefully have children cross their fingers and pray that they survive the multicultural, joyful ride of exquisite unlearning.
We wouldn't be doing any of these things.
So society, you see, thirsts for the unearned.
I was reading about how Bernie Sanders has been talking about we need a $15 minimum wage forever, right?
And it turns out members of his campaign staff are fighting really hard and are not able to get to $15 minimum wage or to get benefits like subsidized or free health care if they make less than a certain amount, right?
Because it's easy to say, well, I want people to have free stuff if you don't have to provide it because then you realize it's not free, right?
So everybody wants this, oh, I want to help all the world and let's bring all the refugees and welcome and hearts and hugs, right?
Because it's not your own resources that are at stake.
And so this thirst for the unearned is really, really key.
And so the whole thing with society and children is a giant propaganda campaign.
Because if you can convince the children that society cares for them, then you can demand obedience from the children.
And if the children don't obey you or obey society, the rules, the laws, the...
Edicts. The standards, then you can say, well, they're bad children because we care for children.
We love children. They're dreamers.
We don't want children separated at the border.
We just care about the children so much.
And that is a demand for compliance, for subjugation, for obedience from the children, right?
We sacrificed everything.
Everything for you, like the boomer mantra, right?
Oh, we did the best we could with the knowledge that we had.
Yeah, right. I don't know how to fly a plane other than flight simulators.
I jump behind the joystick of a plane and I fly it into a tree and I say, hey, I flew the best I could with the knowledge I had.
What would people say? It's like, what the hell were you doing behind the joystick of a plane if you didn't know how to fly a plane?
Well, no, no, no. Listen, technically I did the best I could with the knowledge I had.
I shouldn't laugh, but this is literally how crazy the argument is.
Of course you didn't do the best you could with the knowledge you had.
The purpose, if you're going to get behind the joystick of a plane, is to know how to fly the damn plane.
And if you don't know how to fly the damn plane...
You're responsible for the resulting damage, even though technically you did the best you could, but come on, right?
You're still going to be a parent. You need to read up on it.
You need to learn things. You need to introspect.
You need to figure out your own childhood.
You need to be a good parent, none of which involves hitting or verbal abuse or screaming or threats or...
Anyway. But, see, society just keeps saying to kids, well, we love kids.
We're all about the kids.
We love them.
It's a demand for... Obedience, a demand for subjugation, which you could justly earn if, as a society, you did actually care about children.
If, as a society, you really did care about children, then you'd have a legitimate reason to say to the kids, hey, you know, we're a good society.
We care about kids. You really owe us some allegiance.
We protected you. We took care of you.
We took on the evildoers.
We prevented you from harm.
We encouraged and enhanced your learning and wisdom.
So, you know, Pay up.
Pay up with some kind of obedience.
But you see, society doesn't want to actually protect children or care for children fundamentally.
What it wants to do is gain the allegiance and obedience of children by indoctrinating them about how much society cares for the children.
But empirically, factually, logically, it's not happening.
In fact, quite the opposite is happening.
And that's when I came many, many years ago now to perhaps the most chilling realization of my adult life.
I unpack my heart like a whore.
The most chilling realization of my adult life was this.
That my mother wasn't crazy.
I was. I was.
See, my childhood, I was waiting for the cavalry to come.
I was waiting for people to notice, people to wake up.
Family, my dad, extended family.
And even, you know, when I got older and I told people, it was all just minimized and brushed under and blah, blah, blah.
So I kept waiting for the cavalry to come.
Like I had this, I mean, a necessary delusion that there were good people out there who would help me because, you know, society just cares so much for the children.
And I never, you know, I turned on the TV. I saw all these happy families, right?
It's all these happy families where people reasoned with each other.
They had fun together. They negotiated with each other.
I won't get into the list, but you know, the Lever to Beaver, the Alex B. Keaton family, the eight is enough, the, you know, you name it, right?
So society knows exactly how families should work.
They know, you know, if you had a show that showed my life as a child, people would be shocked, appalled, and demanded be taken off the air.
So, society knows what treating children well looks like because that's what you see.
My three sons, right?
That's what you see, is reasonable people negotiating with children.
You don't see the children getting beaten.
I never watched Little House on the program, but I've heard there's a little bit of Behind the Woodshed stuff there, but you didn't see it, right?
You didn't see it. I don't know that...
I mean, it's rare, I guess...
But for the most part, certainly on television when I was growing up, you never saw children being mistreated in any fundamental way.
The Brady Bunch, it was all, you know, fun and goofy and reasonable.
So society knows exactly what a healthy family looks like.
And that's the big problem, right?
So I kept waiting.
Well, society knows what a good family is like.
They can hear me being beaten. So they're coming.
They're going to help. But Shatterland style, you just wait forever.
So what I realized, and it was one of these thunderbolts that lights up your spine and changes the course of your life, what I realized was that my mother had a far more accurate, no, not even more accurate, I had a completely inaccurate map of the world and of society, and my mother was completely sane with regards to society, and I was the crazy one.
Why did my mother do what she did?
She didn't have to.
She never did it in public. She never did it at the mall.
She never did it in front of a teacher or a policeman or at a museum or a bookstore or library or anything.
Never did any of that.
It's usually the perfect capacity to To restrain the devils of her nature.
Perfect capacity. It wasn't like Tourette's or epilepsy where you don't have control.
So she had perfect control.
So why did my mother do what she did?
My mother did what she did because she understood the world and I did not.
So she understood that nobody was coming.
She could commit these crimes, and they were crimes, so she could commit these crimes in full earshot of dozens and dozens of people, hundreds over the years, hundreds and hundreds over the years.
She could commit these crimes in full earshot of people with absolute confidence that nobody was going to pick up the phone and say, a child is being mistreated next door, which they could have done anonymously, they could have done in an untraceable way, they could write...
My mother was institutionalized.
My mother was institutionalized.
Nobody called. Nobody came over.
Nobody asked if I had food or rent or anything like that.
I was like 12 or 13 years old.
Got three jobs.
Gotta eat. So, nobody...
The doctor who institutionalized, he never called up and said, hey man, you know, your mom's got to put your mom in the institution, but hey, let's make sure you get the...
Like, nothing. Nothing.
It was not a massive secret.
Friends' parents knew. I mean, there was a little bit of sort of, oh, you know, stay for dinner, or, you know, we made you some food to go and all that, but, you know, no, like, hey, kid, your sole caregiver is in the loony bin.
Do you need a little help at all?
Anything we can do to...
Nothing. Nothing.
And even many years later, even after I had talked about it.
How is your poor mother?
So, my mom had a mental map of the world that was infinitely more accurate.
So it's one thing to be going slightly in the wrong direction, but I was in the complete opposite direction, because I was listening to the words of the world rather than empirically reading the actions of the world, and this lasted, one could argue, a little bit longer than it should have.
Because that is the world.
Why did my mother do what she did?
Because she had absolute That everybody would enable her.
Nobody would call. She'd never get in any trouble.
I would be blamed. She would get off scot-free.
And she, as the abuser, would receive the sympathy.
And I, as the victim, would receive the condemnation.
That the world would support and protect her and punish and degrade me as the victim of child abuse.
That's the world, folks.
That's the empirical reality.
And you've heard me talk to people for the last 15 years about their childhoods and so on.
How many people have you ever heard say, oh yeah, no, well, once people found out, man, there was a big intervention and the extended family got around and they dealt with it, they talked about it, they got her into therapy, they sympathized with us, right?
Doesn't happen. Doesn't happen.
My mother was sane. I was crazed.
Now, it was a necessary craziness to get through my childhood.
I'm not blaming myself or saying I'm fundamentally mad.
But my mother was right about the world, and I was wrong.
I had expectations of virtue that my mother knew would never manifest.
In fact, quite the opposite.
It was not my mother, fundamentally, who was abusing me.
It was society.
The society that knew, colluded, excused, avoided, minimized, repressed, blamed me, excused her.
That's why it happened.
The fist to the face is not an individual act in a community.
It is a community act.
You understand, right? It is a community act.
There were many, many, many people...
Driving my mother's fist.
She couldn't have done it otherwise.
Now, when you see this in the world, well, it's pretty freaking chilling, right?
It's chilling, right?
What's beyond the matrix is not robots, but evil.
Now, why did people let it happen?
Well... After I stood up for adult children of abuse, I understood why people let it happen, because society will viciously attack you for standing up to the real victims in society.
And very few, if any, people will support you when you're being viciously attacked and slandered for standing up for the adult victims of child abuse.
Because this is a great unholy pact.
It's a great smoking Satan...
Sulfur handshake in society, which is we'll all smile and nod and pretend we care about the children and hope they buy it.
Because, you see, if you're getting the effects of virtue without the cause of virtue, there's not really much point being virtuous unless you have like an abstract commitment to it on principle, right?
So if If children are told to sort of honor thy mother and thy father regardless of how they behave, then there's, it's like giving people a million dollars and then giving them saying, oh, we want you to do this terrible job cleaning out the sewers with a toothbrush and say, no, I got a million dollars.
I want to do this. Not going to happen, right?
Or saying to Katy Perry, you know, I think the next step on your career is janitor.
And she'd be like, no, I don't really think that that's the next step on my career, right?
So if you're getting the effects of virtue without the cause of virtue, why on earth would you want to be virtuous?
So if you get the allegiance of children without actually having to protect and care for children, why the hell would you bother protecting and caring for children, which is very difficult.
It puts you in conflict with some seriously nasty freaking people in this world who have a lot of power.
So we'll just nag and guilt and bully and all this kind of stuff, rather than actually living up to the rhetoric of how much we care about children.
So, I will now...
Give you the core and the reality of the genesis of evil.
Evil... Now, let me rephrase that.
Trauma. It does not hate accidents.
It may fear accidents, it may resent, but it doesn't hate accidents.
Accidents are accidents, right? Trauma does not fundamentally hate evildoers, provided it has the balm of sympathy on the other side of being victimized.
Trauma hates unrelenting, manipulative, sociopathic, convoluted, gaslighting, Soul-erasing, demanding, pretentious, virtue-signaling hypocrisy.
That is the great unbearable opposite of trauma.
It's what exacerbates and provokes trauma, because when you come out of a traumatized childhood and you realize that the world supports the abusers and attacks the victims, You have a tough, tough time ahead of you.
Now, you see, like all mammals, and we are mammals, however, spiritual aside, you may believe we have, we are mammals.
Mammals are drawn to power, like little boys to dinosaurs, choo-choo trains, and superheroes.
We are drawn to power. Without a doubt, in my mind, great evil dominated my mother when she was a child.
When she grew up in World War II, she was subject to the invasion of some pretty predatory Russians, and she was a beautiful little girl, and I mean...
No doubt. I think if you know enough about someone's history, it's almost impossible to avoid sympathy.
It doesn't mean excuse, but it's almost impossible to avoid sympathy.
So without a doubt, with regards to my mother, great evil was visited upon her repeatedly, I'm sure, as a child.
And I'm sure, like all victims of abuse as children, she tried talking to people about it.
And they told her she was wrong.
She told her it never happened.
They excused the abuse.
Whatever it is, right? And she couldn't stand living in Germany, so she left and became an international curio, and she met my dad.
Anyway, so we map the world and its powers when we grow up.
And I thought that the world liked virtue and liked the truth, right?
So I heard some creepy crime recording.
It was a recording. Somebody was recording on their phone while they were being driven away by some creep who was going to kill them.
And the woman was saying, wait, we're supposed to be going north.
We're supposed to be going north, right?
So someone picks you up and says, oh, I'm going to this mall and you know the direction, right?
And then the person takes the wrong turn and says, you're supposed to be going north or you're going south, right?
Now, if the person wants to get to the mall, they'll say, oh, all right, okay, you know this neighborhood better than I do, I'll turn around, right?
Because they want to get to the mall. But if the person is going in the opposite direction and you say, hey, you're going the wrong way, and they hit the gas, you're screwed.
Right? So I was like society, hey, you know, you're not really very good at protecting children.
In fact, you kind of enable the abusers, you blame the children, you have terrible institutions, national debt, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So I thought, since society said, well, we want to protect children, and I pointed out where society wasn't protecting children, they'd be like, oh, you know, we should really reorient that.
Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
We're going the wrong way, not to them all.
But instead, what they did was, well, I'm going to try to murder my reputation, but they just hit the gas going the wrong way.
They were caught, right? They'd never wanted to go the right way.
They just talked about going the right way to get you into the car.
So you could be dismembered in a quarry or something, right?
So that's the world.
That's what is.
That's what is.
And because we seek power, when we've been traumatized, we look at society.
We don't look at our abusers.
We don't look at our abusers.
They're like somebody standing, leaning over you With the sun right behind their head, right?
You see a shadow and you see this bright halo, this penumbra, this eclipse of a head, right?
So the abuser is the black face staring at you in the face.
You can't see anything because there's a void, right?
But what you really see and what you map is society on the other side.
Society on the other side of that abuser.
Now, when you've been abused and society protects your abuser and attacks you and attacks anyone who stands up for children, you realize they're never going to the freaking mall.
They're going to the quarry.
So you map that.
And then you say, okay, society is a grim, underhanded, bottom layer of hell, handshake under the table, pact of abuse.
So, my choice is to be A, a victim, or B, an abuser.
It's the only choice.
Sympathy, growth, morality, no.
None of that exists.
And if you want to ever be really abused as an adult, hold hypocrites up to the standards they proclaim and they will curb stump you pretty solid.
So people say, well, I can either be a victim for the rest of my life or I can be an abuser.
There's no choice, because anybody who tries to actually be moral gets destroyed.
And that's where evil come from.
Because evildoers kind of rule the world.
Anybody who seeks power has to join them.
And that's why Christianity had to be cheese-grated into cultural irrelevance because Christianity says we do right no matter what.
We do right no matter what.
Atheists don't have the same impulse.
They have this weird reciprocal Darwinian reciprocal altruism, help Eugene Pools die.
It's not enough to stand up to the mob.
It's not enough to stand up to evildoers.
When the socialists can just redefine anyone who opposed the resources they want as evil, racist, sexist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, whatever, right?
They just redefine anyone who stands between them and the resources they want as evil so there's nothing to stand up to.
It's just well-linguistically oiled ramp to greed.
Other religious beliefs have rampant in-group preferences and no moral obligations to outsiders, no universal ethics there.
Stand up to the mob, El, you are the mob.
Philosophy, when objectively and rationally practiced, is universal ethics.
I have a whole book called Universally Preferable Behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics that was welcomed by the atheist community I thought were treated as a...
Sofia Vergara popping out of a cake.
It was treated as if I'd taken a slow-down bond at a wedding cake, but...
Yeah. Hypocrisy, exploitation, immorality.
Yeah, it runs the show. It runs the show.
My mom understood that.
She totally got that.
She totally got that.
Totally understood that.
Everyone was going to support her and attack me, which is what happened.
So my mom understood the world long before I did.
Long before I did. I was completely in the opposite.
Oh, we're going to the mall. We're going the wrong way.
Why do you have a knife in your driving hand?
Right? My mom got it.
All the other abusers got it.
What account do they have to stand?
Now, I come and say, well, you know, if people abuse you and they're unrelenting, you don't have to spend time with them.
Oh, no. Suddenly, you see, immorality has consequences.
Right? Oh no!
Suddenly immorality has consequences.
Now rather than become good people, a lot of people just, oh well let's attack the guy who doesn't want to subsidize our evil doing with the bullied and subjugated resources of our adult children.
And it rained holy hell on me.
And it woke me the hell up to the reality of the world.
You wonder why evil is growing.
Well, evil is growing because hypocrisy is growing.
Hypocrisy breeds such rage because you're a hypocrite in particular.
Hypocrisy, you know what the right thing to do is.
You do the opposite and then you gaslight people into thinking that you did the right thing and they owe you, right?
Right? Somebody... Says, ship me this, I'll ship you a hundred bucks.
You never ship them, then you demand the hundred bucks.
You threaten them, and you gaslight them, I did send it to you, and blah, blah, blah, right?
It's really frustrating and arranging.
You say, oh, I didn't ship it to you, and they don't have to pay you the hundred bucks, right?
So society can't be honest and say, no, we don't.
Kids, my God. Kids are wonderful assets through which we can borrow to bribe boomers and keep their real estate prices high.
We don't care about kids. We care about kids.
What kind of society would we have?
And how would it look like our current society if we did, in fact, care about kids?
Well, it wouldn't look anything like that.
Now, of course, if you've got someone in the car and you're going to dismember them in a quarry, you want them to think you're heading to the mall as long as humanly possible until you're out of earshot of people, right?
So, of course, yeah, I mean, society wants everyone, oh, you know, we care about the kids and we owe allegiance to society.
It's not true. If you're committed to objective morality and virtue and telling the truth, then you have a path called honesty.
Now, honesty and moral courage is like the third way between being an abuser and being a victim.
Just tell the truth about abuse, right?
The abolitionist is the third way between the slave and the slave owner.
And so if we sympathize with people, we open up a third path other than being a victim or being an abuser.
And the third path is having sympathy bestowed upon you.
The grace, the halo, the penumbra, the virtuous, scalding, illuminating light of sympathy and compassion and gentleness and concern and care and validation.
You know, I've talked about being abused as a child, very honestly, for, I think it was my sixth podcast back in 2015 or, sorry, 2005 or something like that.
So it was 15 years, close to 15 years I've talked about it.
How much sympathy have I received?
Well, none, right? I have received attack, right?
So whenever somebody talks honestly and provides sympathy for others and puts the blame where it lies, which is upon the abusers and not upon the children...
Society goes insane, you understand?
And then all of the pejoratives heaped upon me has nothing to do with my philosophy.
It's nothing to do with the controversial.
It's just to do with the fact that I sympathize.
I mean, as I understand, it's the same verbal abuse I experienced as a kid.
Now, I have a commitment, and I know what happens when the third door called sympathy is not available, when people either go to victim or victimizer.
You go to masochist, you go to sadist.
There's no third path.
There's no other way. There's no other way.
The elevator door goes to the top floor and the bottom floor.
There's no exit, and it doesn't stop anywhere in between, right?
So you need a third way, and the third way is sympathy.
But sympathy draws a lot of fire from the abusers because sympathy interferes with the resources they expect from their children because society...
Applauds women who frivolously leave marriages, but attacks adult victims of child abuse who decide not to see abusive parents, which tells you everything you need to know about society.
So the genesis of evil says, oh, well, if you're a victim, you're more likely to become an abuser.
Oh, yeah, statistically that's true, but that's because we don't give fairness and sympathy to the victims.
We don't. We make up a whole bunch of victims.
Everybody claims to be a victim, but they're real victims.
I've talked about this.
Between 40 and 60% of black girls report being sexually abused, raped, molested, whatever.
40 to 60% of black girls report being sexually abused by black men when the girls are children, right?
We can cut the difference and say half, right?
Half a black girl's report could be higher, right?
It's just the ones who report. Half a black girl's report being molested, raped, abused by black men when they're growing up.
Is that a bit more important than slavery 150 years ago in terms of how it shapes the black community?
Of course it is. But we can't give those women that sympathy.
I think it's terrible that we can't.
Horrendous. Horrendous what's happening.
And that lack of sympathy forces people into victims or victimizers.
And even worse, those who do provide sympathy to the victims of abuse, to attack them.
Is to tell people to shut the hell up or we'll do the same to you.
Never open up this third way of sympathy.
Never get out of the polarizing whiplash of victim or victimizer.
Never escape the continuum of abuse.
Never get out, never escape, never grow up, never get free.
Your childhood is a prison that lasts to your grave.
But we're all about protecting and taking care of and loving children.
We're going to put all these wonderful loving depictions of children and families and everyone getting along and being happy and having fun together because we know exactly what a happy family looks like.
And we use that like an anglerfish lures little fish into its jaws with its light and hangs over its forehead.
It's manipulation. It's cunning.
It's control. It's brutality.
It's hypocrisy. And if your childhood is a prison that lasts your whole life, that's all you have to look forward to.
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