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Nov. 29, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:45
Practical Reasons to Stop Spanking Your Kids
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Is there a non-libertarian argument against spanking?
Yeah, I mean, there are definitely non-libertarian arguments against spanking.
So, the libertarian argument, and I just published this again recently, it was on a message board that was A free domain message board from years and years ago, but we had to shut it down because people kept doing DDoS attacks through it.
But yeah, so the non-libertarian argument against spanking would be more of a pragmatic one, the libertarian argument, and you can do a search for this on my blog at freedomain.com, which is to spanking violate the non-aggression principle.
And of course, once you establish that spanking violates the non-aggression principle, then your answer as to whether you should spank is clear, right?
I mean, it's an immoral thing to do.
The other argument would be more of a consequentialist argument, which is Do you want a good relationship with your children?
Say, ah, well, but I want them to respect me.
And it's like, well, but hitting people doesn't breed respect.
It will breed fear. It will breed compliance.
It will breed conformity.
But it will not breed trust.
It will not breed respect, right?
Because, you know, this word respect gets kind of complicated because people talk about, well, you've got to respect the lion.
It's dangerous. It's like, well, you fear the lion and you fear what it will do.
But you don't want to blur the word when you have...
The human capacity to earn respect through being reasonable and conciliatory and assertive when necessary, but without being abusive.
So there's ways to earn respect, which I think is a really, really important thing to pursue.
And you're not going to get respect from your kids by hitting them.
You're not. I mean, they'll fear you.
And they will comply.
But hitting breeds resentment, right?
Hitting your children will breed resentment.
And what will happen is none of the lessons that you wish to transmit to your children will be internalized by your children if you hit them.
Because all you're teaching them is that if you disobey someone who's bigger than you and has more power than you, then they can make you feel pain.
If you don't conform to their wishes.
Well, that is not internalizing any kind of moral standard.
Right? At all.
And so it won't work.
And it's one thing when you're bigger and the kids are smaller, when the kids grow and you get older and they get stronger and you get weaker, well the tables turn.
Particularly in the teenage years, and I've talked about this before, that the power shifts when the kids get to be 15 or 16 in particular, a little bit earlier depending on where you live.
But when the kids Get more independent and less easy to control and you can't really go around hitting a 15 or 16 year old because, you know, you could be punching up not down anymore.
Then the kids are not going to have any respect for you.
They're not going to have any respect for you.
And the reason being So in program, there's something called a nested loop, which is a loop within another loop, right?
Like you start reading through it. You start a table scan, and you do a search, and you do a search until the end of that table or the end of the search records or whatever it is, right?
So it's called a nested loop.
It's a loop within a loop. You can also do subroutines that call themselves.
You use those for building...
Tree iterations in a usually, well, what used to be an ActiveX control, now I guess it's dynamic HTML or whatever.
But anyway, so there are these nested loops, these subroutines and so on.
And what I mean by that is if you tell your kids or if you show your kids it's okay to hit them when they don't do what you want, then they go to school and they find smaller kids who don't do what they want and do they hit those kids?
Well then suddenly you as a parent say, well, you're not allowed To hit people who are younger than you because they don't do what they want.
That's being a bully. That's being abusive.
That's absolutely unacceptable, right?
But where did they learn it from?
They learned it from the parent hitting them for not doing what the parent wants.
So we say, okay, well, the rule is if you're bigger, you can hit the person who doesn't agree with you until they conform.
Then they go to school and they bully and suddenly it's bad, right?
So, they get this deep down.
They just, they won't respect you.
And then when you try to teach them the important stuff around, say, sexuality or physical size and physical strength or fighting or whatever it is, self-discipline, when they get them to be teenagers, they won't listen to you.
And because they won't listen to you, they'll go to the internet.
They'll go to their peers.
They'll go to who knows what, right?
And those people won't have their best interests at heart because they're not their parents, right?
So, you don't want to break that bond with your kids.
If you teach children to negotiate, then they're going to be better off in life.
Because in life, if you use violence to get what you want as an adult, you're going to end up in jail, right?
Or worse, somebody's going to hit you back so hard you're going to time travel or something, right?
But life as an adult is all about negotiation.
And so when you teach children how to negotiate, you're teaching them an essential life skill.
I think it raises their verbal IQ, I think it raises their IQ as a whole, and maybe not much beyond what's genetically possible, but I think that there's more that's genetically possible that can be enhanced through that.
And the last thing that I would say is that it doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
You know, if you have a dog and you say, oh, I want to house train this dog or whatever, right?
If you're still hitting the dog when the dog is 12 or 13 or 14 years old, well, clearly it didn't work.
And so the question with spanking is, does it work?
Does it... Well, and it doesn't.
Statistically, we know this, right?
It just produces short-term compliance and then long-term resentment and subterfuge, right?
And do the kids just hide the behavior that gets them hit?
And so... Yeah, it doesn't work.
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