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May 4, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:03
The Philosophy of Child Discipline
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Yes, yes, yes. Good afternoon, everybody.
Well, good morning, actually. Hey, how often do we do a show in the AM? I am AM in the philosophy.
So, if you have questions, comments, issues, criticisms, whatever is on your mind, rank praise for the elaborate, exquisite Celtic braiding of my armpit hair.
I am all ears.
I did see something on the main channel that I wanted to talk about, but...
I'm here for you first and foremost, so I'll just wait for a moment.
If you have any issues, questions, whatever it is you want to talk about, if you can just raise your hand, I would appreciate it.
Otherwise, I will cook on the question of discipline.
Discipline. What was it?
I saw this meme the other day.
It was one of these Sergeant Slaughter boot camp guys.
Screaming to a guy, Did you come here to die?
To die? And the Australian goes, Now, I came here yesterday.
I don't know why these things amuse me so much, but I'm not going to lie.
They certainly do.
All right. Well, while we're waiting for people to muster up the questions, let's have a look at some of this.
It's a topic I visited before, but it never, ever hurts to do it again.
And the topic, my friends, is disciplining children.
So, people...
I'm not going to say in too mean a fashion, but people who...
Okay, I say that, but then it's going to sound mean, but give me a sec.
So, people who want to hit children will invent scenarios where they get to hit children.
And they get to feel good about hitting children and...
Then what they do is they say, hitting children is now justified, and so I'm going to hit children, right?
That's how it goes, right?
If you want to do something, then you'll create an extreme case scenario where doing that something is justified, and then you just expand it to everything else.
We know how this works, right?
If the government, let's say theoretically some government in the world, wanted to brutally suppress your free speech, Well, they don't just immediately do that, right?
What they do is, you know, it's always public safety and real-world harm and all this kind of stuff, except in America, where the First Amendment is pretty damn strong.
There's no hate speech, and you can really, unless it's immediate direct violence, my understanding is that you can pretty much say whatever you want.
And again, don't take any advice from me.
That's just my amateur understanding.
So, what they do is they just – they say real-world harm is occurring and it's just terrible and what we have to do is protect people from real-world harm and there are dangerous consequences and all that.
And it's in the guise of keeping you safe.
And then what they do is they take the least – like they'll rage a propaganda campaign against people, particular individuals.
And then they'll say, well, this person is just so terrible that clearly it's no loss if we remove their free sleep.
Like, you'll create some extreme case, some extreme scenario to break principle.
And then from there, it's just a matter of a war of degrees, right?
So it started with Andrew Anglin, and it extends to Tucker Carlson.
So that's just the way it works.
So if you want to do something corrupt, then you create an extreme case scenario that Where what you want to do is justified, you then use that to break principle.
And what you do after that is you just keep expanding the definition, right?
So, I mean, with regards to children, we all know this kind of stuff, right?
This is just how it plays.
The way it works with kids is you say, okay, is there a scenario where hitting or harming my child could potentially be justified in any way, shape, or form, right?
And then you say, okay, therefore hitting children is justified, therefore I can hit children.
And you just keep expanding the definition until you can hit children as much as you want, right?
And people do this all the time, right?
They do this all the time. And listen, we're all tempted by it.
It's the war of gradualism.
Create an extreme case, break principle, and then just keep breaking that principle in less and less extreme cases.
It's a satanic temptation, right?
It's a satanic temptation.
You get to justify yourself according to an extreme case and that justification expands until you can basically do whatever the hell you want.
So for instance, you know, we've heard these scenarios.
Are you allowed to smack your child's hand away if your child is reaching for a pot of boiling water on a stove?
And listen, I knew a woman when I was younger who had terrible scars on her body From a pot of boiling water falling on her when she was very little, and it was horrible, very, very difficult for her.
The skin was tough and leathery and painful, and it really, really affected her life in very foundational ways as a whole.
And massive sympathies.
It wasn't her fault. She was just a kid.
And then, so what you do is you just create this extreme scenario.
Or the other one, of course, is that they say, If your child is running towards a road with massive pet cemetery, semi-trucks rolling back and forth, are you allowed to, you know, tackle them to the ground and smack them to make sure that they don't run towards the road?
And so, yeah, you just create this scenario where what you're doing is by far the lesser of two evils and therefore it becomes a good.
So you say, oh, there's this speech out there on the internet that could provoke someone to mass murder, right?
Well, surely, surely restricting someone's hateful speech is better than mass murder, right?
All this kind of stuff. Now, of course, with regards to the free speech argument, it's mind-bendingly simple.
If you're going to have a principle that says certain speech leads to mass murder, Then any media outlet that promotes war, or anyone who promotes war, and I'm talking about an unjust war, not a war of immediate self-defense, but any media outlet that promotes war, well, that has to be shut down, and people have to be fined and or jailed under this principle, right?
People who advocate spanking, well, that's...
Language that leads to real-world harm.
I mean, literally leads directly to real-world harm, which is the hitting of children.
And so, if you're going to make that statement, taxation is coercion, so people who advocate for more taxation, yeah, you understand the general principle.
So, let's look at the dangers.
And, you know, whether you're a parent or not, we all have this I mean, it can be things as silly and yet repetitive as dieting, right?
So hit me with a why if you've ever – and I'll type why into this, right?
So hit me with a why if you ever have restricted your calories in order to lose weight.
You lose the weight and then you say, oh, thank goodness, I think I'm going to reward myself.
I'm going to eat less.
And then you gain your objective and then you break that principle as a way of saying, oh, I guess I can ease up.
And of course, you do have to ease up at some point because you can't restrict your calories into infinity, but yeah.
I mean, it's tough, right?
I saw this very funny. I think it was on Babylon Bee.
It was a very funny article that said, Man's shocked to discover after the age of 35 what awaits him for the rest of his life is endless yo-yo dieting and back pain.
He's going to spend the rest of his life trying to lose 10 or 15 pounds.
He's going to make some progress.
Then he's going to rediscover bread and cheese and put it all back on.
So I think we've all been there.
And so... So people will invent these extreme scenarios, right?
They want to hit children. And I'm just going to put it that blankly.
Like, you want to hit children.
It's good. You want to hit children.
It's good parenting, right? So you want to hit children.
And so you're going to invent a scenario where people say, well, yeah, okay, absolutely.
Hitting a child is better than the child being horribly burned or dying.
The invented disaster scenario, which allows you to break principle, and then you just expand it.
I mean, how many parents are in the situation where a child is running towards a street with traffic, and there's no barrier, and the child's just going to run out into the street?
There's no fence, right?
You're not between them and the, right?
How many people are in that situation?
You know, maybe one in 50 parents over the course of, right?
So, an entire parent.
So, it's a very, very extreme, rare, strange situation, right?
And the other thing too is that they'll drop you into this situation with no cause, no context, no capacity for prevention, right?
Just drop you into the situation, no capacity prevention.
So you're in a situation where a child is running towards the road, right?
Okay, well then you're going to be tempted for violence, right?
But of course the thing is too, if you know that that is such a dire situation, If you know that that's such a dire situation, then you would clearly work very hard to prevent yourself from getting into that situation.
It's like you're walking down a dark alley, wearing nothing but a bikini, and you are holding $10,000 in cash in a clear plastic bag in a terrible neighborhood.
What do you do? Well, I know what I'd do is not be in that situation.
I mean, obviously I do everything except not wear the bikini.
Wearing the bikini, absolutely.
Everything else, no. So if you're in this dire situation, how about you don't get into that dire situation?
Because if you're going to say to someone, well, theoretically, what do you do in this terrible situation?
Your toddler is reaching for the handles of a stove top boiling bowl, right?
A big pot of boiling water.
Okay, well, that's a very bad situation.
So you don't leave your toddler unattended in a kitchen with the handles of pots full of boiling water where he or she can reach them.
You turn the pot handles inward, right?
So when they say there's these horrible situations, well, somebody could misinterpret what you say online and go and commit egregious acts of violence, right?
Okay, well, what is it that has led this person to be so deranged, right?
Were they raised in an insane environment?
Were they badly taught at school or traumatized at school?
Were they bullied at school? Were they put on crazy drugs that don't do anything to help them often and generally will also often give them violent fantasies, right?
You have to look at the cause, right?
So people will give you this nonsense, dangerous nonsense, right?
And then say, okay, what would you do in this situation?
And my answer generally is, well, I wouldn't be in that situation.
My daughter is very, very active and always has been, like literally from two days into her life.
I remember the first night we were in the hospital and My daughter was sleeping peacefully through the night and everybody else's kids were crying and we were like, oh, this is great!
And then that first night and after that, she never wanted to sleep.
Always wanted to be played with.
Very high stimulus child, which I appreciate.
I think it's great. Who am I to talk, right?
And very curious, very exploratory.
And that's just something you know.
So, I mean, I have been a stay-at-home dad 14 and a half years now.
And it's funny because, you know, when I put out these theories ahead of time, people were always like, oh yeah, you wait till you have your own kid.
It's like, okay, well, I've had my own kid.
Oh yeah, well, you wait till the terrible twos.
Yeah, no, went through the terrible twos.
They weren't terrible at all. My daughter's terrible twos weren't terrible at all.
There was no problem because she was perfectly welcome to say no.
Well, you just wait till this and you wait till they hit the double digits.
You wait till, you just wait till, till puberty hits.
You just wait till they're a teenager.
It's like, yeah, okay, she's been a teenager for close on two years now and it's great.
It's great. I went out with her, what, two days ago.
We went out for an afternoon, just the two of us, and we went to a fun place, a place of fun.
And we were out from like, I don't know, we left at sort of 3 o'clock in the afternoon and we got home 10 o'clock at night.
And we had a blast.
It was so much fun.
At one point, she was laughing so hard.
I won't get into the details.
At one point, she was laughing so hard.
Tears were streaming down her face.
Let's just say I can scream quite high when I'm nervous on a ride.
So anyway, I mean, it's just, it's fun.
It's fun. It's fun.
You just wait. Everybody wants to believe that the disasters of their parenting are inevitable, right?
And, I mean, it's got to be, I get it, it's got to be uncomfortable for people, right?
Not this audience lovely people that you are, but, you know, for a lot of people it's got to be kind of discombobulating, right?
It's got to be kind of upsetting. You just wait, right?
You wait till, it's like, eh, you know, my daughter will be 40 and people are like, well, you just wait till your daughter hits menopause, man!
Okay, I probably won't be around for that, but, you know.
It's really tragic.
So, you just reject these principles.
You don't get to hit your child and justify it because you're retarded enough as a parent to put them in situations of imminent death and danger.
It's your job to prevent that.
It's your job to prevent that.
And if your child is in a situation where they're in imminent risk of death or grievous bodily injury, That's on you as a parent.
That's on you as a parent.
Now, maybe you, of course, you have to grab the child to prevent the child from running into traffic or whatever it is, right?
You have to snatch the child's hand back if they're grabbing at the handle of a pot of boiling water.
I get all of that. But the idea that, and grabbing the child to prevent the child from doing something harmful I mean, if the child is running, like you've got a campfire going, the child is running, and then stumbles and is about to fall into the fire, and you grab the child's arm to prevent them from falling into the fire, that's not assaulting the child, that's not hitting the child, that's not spanking or beating, you're not punishing the child, you're simply preventing the child from harming himself or herself.
It's when you have messed up as a parent and your child is in imminent danger of death, Or a serious injury, and you hit the child to punish the child for your failure as a parent.
That's the injustice.
And look, all parents make mistakes.
All parents have issues.
Maybe not running into traffic issues, but all parents are like, whoops, you know, whatever, right?
Okay, so then you feel bad.
You comfort your child if your child...
Has, you know, got a boo-boo or something.
You comfort the child, but you don't punish the child if you've done something careless as a parent.
You don't punish the child for that.
And the reason you don't do that is, let's take the kitchen example, right?
You've got the pot of boiling water on the stove.
Let's take that example, right? So, you've got a three-year-old or four-year-old or five-year-old.
For some bizarre reason, even after you've explained how dangerous it is, You've put all the pot handles towards the back.
Whatever. Some reason where the child keeps grabbing at the stuff on the stove, right?
If you hit the child, then you are not preventing that child from coming back and doing it again.
You're just not doing it.
More than a quarter of children keep getting spanked or hit even past junior high school.
It doesn't work.
You're actually putting your child in more danger because you've got these Parts of boiling water on the stove, your child reaches for them, you smack the child, you hit the child, you spank the child, and you think, oh good, that's solved now.
And then you just keep that dangerous situation going, thinking you've solved the problem.
But you haven't. The child is resentful, the child is rebellious, the child forgets, and now there's a fascination.
So you're actually putting a situation of repetition and danger there, right?
If your child, for some reason, bizarrely wants to run towards traffic and there's no fence or security or safety, which is your mess up as a parent, and you smack your child, you think you solved the problem, but you haven't.
So you keep taking your child into that dangerous environment thinking, aha, I've solved the problem, when you haven't, you're actually putting your child in more danger.
Whereas if you've messed up as a parent and your child has almost injured himself or herself, Then what you do is you say, well, I'm not going to punish the child for my mess-up.
If you punch in the wrong destination in your GPS, you mess up.
It happens, right? Well, it happens to me, maybe.
It certainly happens to me. You punch in the wrong destination in your GPS, do you yell at the child for failing to get where you want to be on time?
No. Of course you don't.
It's your mess-up as a parent.
It's not your child's fault.
So if you say, the kid's running towards traffic, and you say, okay, I've got to restrain my kid, got to pull my kid back, that's not violence.
And you say, okay, well, what I need to do is not be in a situation where my child can fairly easily run towards a road with no barrier in between.
I need to make sure we play in the backyard.
I need to make sure we play in a park.
I need to explain more about road safety.
I mean, I just need to prevent that situation from arising.
But if you hit the child and think you've solved it, then your child is now fascinated and gets attention from you, besides, by pots of boiling water and traffic and roads and all that kind of stuff, right?
Not only have you not solved the problem, you've actually made it worse.
When you think you've solved the problem but you haven't, you've actually made the problem worse.
Now, of course, grabbing a child to prevent the child from injuring himself is perfectly valid.
That's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
I mean, if you're staring at your phone and you're about to walk into traffic and somebody stops you, grabs you, whoa!
Somebody stops you.
Are you mad at them?
Will you charge them with assault?
And you call over the police officer and say, hey man, this guy just grabbed me.
The police officer says, well, what happened?
He says, the guy was on his phone.
He was about to walk in front of a bus.
Is that true? Well, yeah.
Okay, then stop complaining.
He just saved your life.
That's not assault. Even if you're insane enough to want to have the freedom to walk into a bus lane with a bus coming, even if you're that crazy, I mean, there's no sane legal system in the world that would say, oh my gosh, you saved that guy's life?
Absolutely, we're charging him with assault.
Because if you charge someone with assault, you're saying, well, I didn't want to be harmed, but if the person is preventing you from dying with a minor grab to the wrist or whatever it is, right?
Clearly, it makes no sense to say, well, my bodily integrity...
It's everything to me, and therefore somebody who saved me from becoming a bus's rocketing grill jam residue is just terrible.
It's awful. So yeah, of course you can do that.
And there's a couple of basic principles.
If I'm about to walk into traffic and you stop, I'm going to be enormously thankful to you.
If I park just behind another car, and I'm going to back out, and I'm just about to hit the gas, and you say to me, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're in drive, not reverse.
Am I going to be there and say, oh my god, you startled me.
That's terrible. I'm so nervous.
I'm like, oh man, thanks, right?
I mean, I have a policy with my wife, which is, if you ever see me doing anything that's even, you know, 1% risky or dangerous or careless in the car, always tell me.
I will never, ever be upset or offended if you say, well, what's your left?
Or whatever, right? You can turn your blinker off now.
Absolutely. Tell me.
Tell me. I mean, yes, of course.
Safety first, right? So, with kids...
If you do things that they will thank you for, then you don't have to get their permission ahead of time, right?
If you're teaching your kid how to drive and your kid is about to turn the wrong way down a one-way street and you say, whoa, whoa, stop, stop, even if you grab the wheel, are they going to sit there and say, hey, man, you're interfering with my autonomy?
And they'll be like, whoa, okay, thank you.
Wow, that would have been very dangerous, right?
If they're about to take the exit ramp on a highway as if it's an entrance ramp, yeah, you got to stop that, right?
Well, they thank you. With regards to sugar consumption, if you restrict sugar consumption for your kids, which the best way to do that is to restrict sugar consumption for yourself, if you restrict sugar consumption for your kids, of course they will be less happy in the moment.
And I've sort of explained this to my daughter.
My goal is for when you become an adult, you are reasonably happy with the choices that I make.
Now, if you become an adult and you're obese and you have terrible teeth and you're pre-diabetic, Will you say to me, will you sit across the table and say to me, when it comes time to evaluate my parenting, will you say, gee, I'm so glad you were so indulgent, Dad. That was fantastic.
Thank you so much for delivering me to adulthood with a BMI of 35, a half-rotted pancreas, pre-diabetes, and only half my adult teeth.
I said, no, you won't thank me for that.
Thank you so much for making sure that the attractive boys will never be attracted to me.
Thank you. Appreciate that.
Because, man, those Snickers were really good.
No, of course not, right?
Of course not. You know, when it comes to exercise, if I deliver you to adulthood, flabby, no muscle tone, blah, blah, blah, right?
Oh, and by the by, just remember, this is for dudes, right?
After 30, your muscles...
Wither away. They start withering away.
If you don't, like, use it or lose it.
You know, you don't just get to stay the way you are.
After 30, you just wither away.
So, please, do some weights.
Please, I'm begging you.
So, will someone thank you afterwards?
Right? If you're about to open a box, I heard this from a friend of mine who lives in Florida.
He got a box delivered and didn't see that there was a snake on it.
Now, I don't know how dangerous the snakes are in Florida, I assume.
Somewhere between Ireland and Australia.
But his wife knocked the package out of his hand because there was a snake on the side.
And she saw, what was it, a black and red.
It's something that indicates it could be dangerous, like could be dangerous.
So she knocked the package out of his hand.
That startled him. And he's like, what the hell?
And she's like, there's a snake.
And then he's like, oh, thank you.
My daughter stole my toast.
I put some toast in.
It was gone. I thought somebody else had eaten my toast.
And I was like, hey, what happened to my toast?
And she's like, actually, it was moldy, so I threw it out.
I'm like, oh, thank you. So if you're going to thank someone afterwards, you can do it ahead of time.
You can do it ahead of time.
Whether you get the permission before or after is immaterial.
And so you act with the reasonable expectation that the child will thank you.
So if your child is running towards traffic and you don't stop them, of course you would, but if you don't stop them and then a car runs over their foot and they spend six weeks in hospital and have a limp, Maybe for the rest of their life?
And you say, well, I didn't want to give you a potential bruise by grabbing your arm and preventing you from running into traffic.
Would your child say, yeah, that makes sense.
I'd much rather have a limp for the rest of my life and be in constant pain rather than get a potential bruise from you grabbing me.
And by the way, why the hell did you have me in a situation where I could run to the road?
Right? Will the child thank you?
Child's going to be, hey, man, you gave me a bruise.
It's like, yes, but you are running towards the road and the consequences were much worse.
And even if they don't understand it at the time, they certainly will understand it later.
You know, when you're a parent and you're in a city and you park on the road, right,
so you park on the right side of the road, your kids on the left, you never want your
kids getting out into the road on the left, right?
Right, they get out on the sidewalk.
You never want them getting out. In fact, I knew a kid when I was younger.
Oh, man, what a brutal story this was.
He was in a car with a good friend of mine.
He was in a car and...
He was sitting on the right, the car parked on the right, and his friend opened the door, jumped out onto the road, and was creamed by a car.
Like, died instantly.
That's brutal. Obviously, right?
Horrendous. Traumatic. I mean, for everyone.
So you want to prevent that.
You want to prevent the driver from killing a kid.
You want to prevent the parents.
You want to prevent the trauma. You want to prevent all of that.
And even if you were to slam the door shut and it would have pinched the kid's hand, it would be better than the alternative, right?
Will they thank you afterwards?
I did not enjoy getting a smallpox inoculation, but I'm glad I didn't get smallpox.
So I'm appreciative of that.
So these are just some basic principles.
If your child's in danger, that's on you as a parent.
And you don't get to punish the child for your failure as a parent.
And recognize that we all have these failures as parents.
But you don't get to punish the child.
And you don't get to make up ridiculous trolley scenarios.
Which do you throw to save who or what, right?
You don't get to invent these trolley scenarios to justify immorality.
I mean, you can do it, of course.
You can do whatever you want. It doesn't make it moral, though.
I mean, you can go kick a dog.
It doesn't make it moral. So inventing these scenarios, well, if this is happening, wouldn't you hit the kids?
It's like, no, I wouldn't. Because I think it's pathetic and ridiculous and foolish and contemptible to punish a child for your failure to protect him.
Like you have a little toddler, you've got to put the barriers, the little gates at the top of the stairs, right?
Yeah, they're mildly inconvenient.
But if you forget to close the gate at the top of the stairs and your kid tumbles down the stairs, do you get to hit the kid?
No! Because you messed up.
You failed to keep the environment safe.
You messed up. And of course a lot of times parents get down so hard on themselves that they hit the child because the child is making them feel bad because they're coming down so hard on themselves.
Your child tumbles down the stairs because you forgot to close the gate and you're so horrified and so terrified that you get angry at the child.
Again, I understand the temptation, but just recognize that that's wicked to the first degree.
So, yeah, extreme case scenarios, I don't care.
You just make them up. You use them to justify hitting children, and then children get hit for the most ridiculous things.
You have to just stand on principle.
You have to just stand on principle.
That's sort of a First Amendment thing, right?
Just stand on principle. And, of course, inventing these ridiculous scenarios with no context, no preparation, no responsibility on the part of the parent for being in those situations to begin with.
Just coming up with these ridiculous situations in order to snap the spine of principle and then just everything turns into a jellyfish.
There's no principle. There's no morals.
Oh, no, but in an extremity, right?
Right? Well, you have the right to freedom of movement unless there's a pandemic thing.
In which case, eh, you don't have any of this, right?
You have the right to free speech unless it's offensive.
Could lead to real-world harm.
I don't know, how about like saying that the vaccines prevent infection and transmission?
Did that lead to real-world harm?
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