All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 16, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:37
The Truth About Sadism! - Part 4
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome, of course, to Sadism Part 4.
Now, of course, because this is a presentation on sadism, it's always going to be just a little bit longer than feels comfortable.
You understand, that's just kind of inevitable.
So we're going to talk about sadism with regards to children.
A very, very misunderstood, unexplored topic.
And I'll make a couple of arguments here that may be a little bit surprising.
Hopefully you'll forgive me for the surprise and understand that I'm simply doing an analysis of the evolution of Of cruelty rather than a moral examination of its immorality, right? So just talking about how it came about, right?
I mean, the fact that we have cruel instincts is necessary for survival.
That doesn't mean it's moral in a civilizational way or from a civilizational standpoint.
So just understand we're talking about evolution, not moral justification here.
So, one of the things that really characterizes the modern world is the centralization of child abuse in the form of state education.
And this was the case, of course, when I was growing up more explicitly where children were allowed...
To be a hit, the hitting as a mechanism of control has largely been abandoned, but it's been replaced with increased propaganda and the drugging of children, right?
So mere hitting has been replaced with drugging, which in many cases, which is, I don't know, man, I wish we had neither, right?
But So, I want to make a case here about why cruelty towards children has evolved, right?
So, of course, it's a war of all against all human beings evolved from prehistory, from pre-consciousness, from superstition.
So in animals, of course, cause and effect is not reasoned.
It is immediate and essential.
It is to some degree programmed and to a large degree it's experiential.
So, if you think about animals, they don't care where the water comes from, they just need to get to it when it's thirsty.
They don't care about irrigation, they don't care about the cycle of evaporation and rain and so on.
They simply care about where the water is so that they can drink some.
So all they are is empiricists without theories, right?
So the two empiricisms that animals deal with, number one, of course, is they're thirsty, and so they have a desire to seek out water, and then when they drink water, their thirst goes away.
So the empiricism is internal, I'm thirsty, external, there's water, and so on, right?
So animals don't care about cause and effect.
They don't care about Theorizing outside of the satisfaction of immediate wants.
They don't have rights.
They don't do much of their own irrigation.
A couple of animals here and there do, but again, that's sort of largely instinctual.
So, animals don't have moral theories.
They don't have abstract explanations.
A monkey might pick up a rock, but it doesn't care what kind of rock it is.
It doesn't care about the geology.
It doesn't care about the formation.
So, human beings, we have, of course, this amazing and unique ability, as far as we know, to look for long-term cause and effect and not simply immediate satisfaction of wants and so on, right? So, what happens, evolutionarily speaking, is there's a lot of tribal conflict over resources and Because there's not much technology in warfare, manpower becomes everything.
There's not much technology in warfare, therefore manpower becomes everything.
I mean, if you look at some horrendous incidents like the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I mean, as far as the delivery mechanisms go, you have, you know, a couple of guys in, what was it, a B-17 or something like that, some four-engined or warplane, and they can go and wipe out like 100,000 people because of the technology of the bomb, right?
But in a place where it's rocks, sticks, stones, swords, even the bow and arrow, the manpower becomes pretty decisive.
Whereas now, technology tends to be more decisive in indirect, sort of open combat.
So because manpower is essential for gaining and keeping resources in a tribal situation, you need a unity.
Because Everyone who doesn't participate in the war, everybody who runs away, everybody who hides, everybody who joins the other side, well that's the difference between life and death.
So you need absolute, well, as close to absolute unity as you can get.
Now because there's no morality in early tribalism, There is simply blood loyalty, as there is in most animals, right?
Most animals will prefer their own offspring to other animals' offspring, prefer their own kind to other animals' species.
So, there is simply blood loyalty.
Now, blood loyalty for human beings is enhanced If the perception is that your own tribe is the best.
That your own tribe is the best.
Now, how do you get Babies, toddlers, children to believe that your tribe is the best.
And not like we are the champions, we are the greatest, but like morally better, morally superior.
And it could be just in terms of some levels of aesthetics or some level like we're more manly, we're better, we're just better.
Well, it's not usually an objective reason.
I mean, I can't imagine for most of primitive tribal development that there was a more moral or ethically better tribe.
So, how do you get unity In a situation where you're not particularly better, but, you know, you want to fight for your own tribe, who's going to fight harder?
People who are focusing on mere blood loyalties?
Well, that's equal, right? So how do you get the edge?
How do you get greater unity?
How do you get greater participation?
How do you get greater ferocity?
How do you get youths, and in particular, of course, we're talking about teenage warriors, how do you get youths to fight harder, to fight better, to fight more devotedly, to fight to the death, to sacrifice themselves?
Well, you have to create an abstract value that they're fighting for more than just red shirts versus blue shirts, our tribe versus their tribe.
Because, of course, the great danger in terms of survival is that if the other tribe is perceived as winning, if the other tribe is perceived as superior, then if the battle is going against the redshirts, the blueshirts are winning, the redshirts are losing, then the temptation, of course, from the redshirt members is to defect and join the blueshirts.
And the blueshirts may or may not welcome that depending on whether they think it's real or not.
But, of course, if If the blue shirts are winning and the red shirts join them and it's a genuine thing, then they can go on and beat up the purple shirts because they have both the blue and the red shirts have joined forces.
However, of course, the risk is that it's a pretend transfer and then they murder you in your sleep or something like that.
We'll join you and then there's betrayal and so on.
There's a lot of complex stuff that goes on here, but...
If a tribe has a reputation of intense ferocity, of fighting for the death of no quarter and executing then prisoners, then it's less likely that people will attack them.
So, there is a value, evolutionarily speaking, in creating something which infuses with your tribe, that makes it more than mortal, that makes it more than a bunch of bipeds fighting for resources, that makes it worth fighting to the death for, that makes a blood loyalty until the end of your life, no possibility of So switching to the other team, right?
I mean, of course, in sports, it would be a funny thing, right?
If a soccer team, like the blue shirts are playing the red shirts, and the red shirts are winning, and then the blue team members start switching their shirts and joining, it'd be kind of funny, right?
So, but of course, in sports, you play to the end and you don't switch teams, right?
You play to the end, you keep trying your best, and you don't switch teams.
So there has to be some abstraction that is infused into your tribe that's more than material.
That's more than, well, we're just two biped, somewhat post-apes fighting for resources.
So this is where Where nationalism comes in, and of course this is before the nation state as a whole, but this is where tribalism comes in, as in my tribe is the best, my tribe is superior, my tribe worships the best god, my tribe has the best nature spirits that animate it, my tribe has the markers for this territory given to us by the best Wood nymphs or, you know, whatever you're coming up with, but it has to be something more than material.
So you have to get your children to bond.
And I remember going through this process as a kid.
I remember quite clearly going through this, you know, England is the best, you know, the Battle of Britain and the few and all of the Churchill.
And I remember the St. George and the dragon and You're the best.
You're the best. I remember going through all of that.
It's a little cringy, but I do remember, even in a football game, shouting forward for St.
George. I die a little inside when I think of that, although of course it is 50 years ago.
But forward for St.
George. I was very enthusiastic about it.
England and its history and so on, right?
That was programmed into me in a wide variety of ways.
And the media and the stories and the myths and the pride of the elders and all of that, you have the sense that just you're superior, And that means that you are sacrificing yourself, not for your leaders, but for an abstract virtue.
Of course, one of the ways that you see this manifesting is the concept of Valhalla, right?
You know, the sort of Norse fighters, if they die in battle.
Defending their leaders or defending their land or defending their women, right?
Then they go to paradise.
The fighters go to paradise.
So then you're fighting for not just your leaders, you're fighting for the gods and you're fighting for an eternity in paradise.
And this happens with a wide variety of religions and superstitions that the warriors are rewarded in eternity.
So, in order to get this massive loyalty fight to the death forward for St.
George stuff, in children, well, you kind of have to break their brains, right?
When you break the brains, crazy abstractions are the blood ichor that seeps into the rest of the mind.
When the empiricism of the natural self is smashed, what bleeds out is loyalty to concepts, not To mere tribe.
To the mere tribal. So, you have to reorient the natural empiricism of the child into believing in things that aren't real, that don't exist.
The superstitions and so on.
And the claimed superiority of your tribe This is nothing too unusual if you've ever known people who are sports-obsessed, which is, of course, really, really pathetic.
But if you know people who are sports-obsessed or sports-focused, you can see, of course, that, well, their team, my team, when I was growing up, it was the football team Crystal Palace.
My team is the best, and I would go and cheer for my team.
And, you know, I don't mean to sound overly precocious, but that just always struck me as supremely stupid.
Why would I cheer for some...
Basically, I'm cheering for a uniform.
The people are people. The other team wants to win.
Your team wants to win. You're just cheering for...
You're not cheering for a sports team.
You're cheering for tailors.
See, they used red dye on this team.
They used blue dye on that team.
So you're basically, you're cheering for coloring.
You're cheering for dye. You're not cheering for anything moral.
It's just your team.
And you have to break children's brains.
And the whole thing is so delicate, right?
Because all someone has to do is point out, well, you just happen to be born there, I just happen to be born here, why are we enemies?
But, of course, governments love funding sports because sports creates loyalty to abstractions that are anti-empirical, which gives people loyalty to the nation-state and all, and then, you know, cannon fodder for wars and sacrificial elements all over the place.
So there is an evolutionary demand, in a sense, for breaking the brains of children to rewire them to have loyalty to abstractions.
And then the leaders claim to represent these abstractions, and therefore you're not just serving the leaders, you're serving the abstractions, which are perfect, universal, and eternal.
I made this case many years ago, of course.
One of the problems with being a sort of brutal...
Young man who dominates everyone around him is you're going to age and other people, you know, you're going to age out and get old and brittle and wobbly and then other young men are going to come along and overthrow you.
So you have a problem.
How do you deal with the fact that if you live by the fist, your fist gets arthritis and you get beaten up by younger fists?
Well, you then create this abstraction that you represent.
You create this abstraction that I mean, the story of Macbeth is very powerful this way, right?
That Macbeth is a young, healthy, brutal warrior who kills an old king in order to ascend to the throne.
And then, you see, what happens is, because he has broken the order of royalty and he has murdered the king, he is cursed and he is destroyed and other people rise up against him, right?
So, there's like a supernatural response.
Of course, the original king got that through, I mean, his ancestors certainly got that through certain levels of brutality.
And I remember, of course, when I played Macbeth in my 20s, I remember having trouble with the character.
I mean, I had trouble with the whole story.
The language is beautiful, of course, but philosophically, it's a complete mess.
I had trouble with the Story as a whole, because in the beginning of Macbeth, Macbeth is coming in from a battlefield where he's probably killed like 20 guys, like 20 peasants or knights conscripts or, you know, even other people, like other nobles maybe, but probably he would just go and wait around and There'd be a bunch of farmhands with hoes and he would just smash them with his expertise, his armor and his excellent sword and just slaughter people, right?
So he's come in like a combine harvester after slaughtering like 20 people and that's great.
Everyone's cheering him. But then, and this is the question of crime and punishment, right?
So Macbeth strides in having just murdered like 20 people or killed 20 people on the command of the king.
He's a hitman. He's a hitman.
And so it's really great that he just murdered 20 peasants.
Could be more. It's not said.
So he comes in and he's a great guy and everyone cheers him because he just murdered 20 people.
But then when he kills one old king, the guy who actually ordered him to murder the 20 people, suddenly it's the worst thing in the world.
He can't sleep and he's an evil guy who has to be destroyed.
Right? So you kill 20 people, that's great.
But then you kill the one old guy who ordered you to kill the 20 people, the mafia head, so to speak, and suddenly it's the worst thing in the world.
Do you understand? It's there to break your brain.
That's the problem I had with the character.
I wanted to play him as a mafioso.
It's a hitman. The director and I had some vociferous disagreements about all of that, but, I mean, I wanted to be true to the ethics of the story, not just the surface level, right?
So, he kills, like, Macbeth kills, like, 20 guys, but he's, you know, vastly superior in training and resources and equipment.
So, Macbeth kills 20 guys, sleeps like a baby, but then he kills one old guy who ordered him to kill 20 guys, and suddenly it's the worst thing in the world.
Like, see, I understand. It's just programming.
Of course, Shakespeare didn't have much choice in the matter, because he lived in a time of significant censorship, and we wouldn't have this wonderful poetry if he had approached things from an objective moral standpoint.
I get all of that. He would have just been killed by the king, because his poetic powers would be put towards It's great to kill 20 guys, but when you kill the guy who told you to kill the 20 guys, it's the worst evil in the world and you are cursed and will be destroyed and can't sleep and...
And of course, I think that deep down, I couldn't know for sure, obviously, right?
But I think that deep down Shakespeare was aware of this contradiction.
And while he was writing Macbeth, had insomnia because his conceptual capacities for language were probably never to be excelled.
I certainly haven't been excelled since he was around.
And the unification and conceptualization abilities he had with language was tickling his brain deep down and saying, you can't have been a bad guy here by making this play.
You're kind of being a bad guy here.
I mean, you could easily set Macbeth in a Sopranos universe and it would actually be very accurate.
So, you have to assault empiricism in order to get fight to the death loyalty to abstractions.
You have to attack children's minds and get them to cheer that which does not exist at the expense even of their own lives.
I mean, honestly, the sports stuff is crazy.
The sports stuff is like beyond insane when you sort of deep down conceptualize it.
Or even if you just conceptualize it at the surface level, sports stuff is deranged.
I mean, it's, for a lot of people, sports is like a part-time job.
I remember, I almost said one of the Monty Python guys did these ripping yarns, and there was one about a sports-obsessed guy, and he just couldn't, he couldn't get to the truth of it.
It was actually one of the worst ones.
Tompkinson School Days was really good, a couple of other ones that were really good, but The one about the sports nut was wrong because you just can't, it's really hard to get there intellectually and emotionally.
But you think about this, right?
I mean, a lot of people like eight hours a week on sports, like a part-time job.
So 8 hours on sports a week times 52 weeks is 416 hours.
That's over 10 weeks of work.
That's like 11. It depends on how much you work.
11 or 12 weeks of work.
If you do this for 50 years, then you've got 20,800 hours.
20,800 hours.
You could be an expert in two incredible things.
You could be an expert in Philosophy or piano or guitar or anything.
Twice over. 10,000 hours to be fantastic.
20,800 hours.
Let's divide that by 7.5 hours in a workday.
That's 2,773 workdays.
That's wild.
2,773 workdays people are spending on the sports stuff.
So you divide that by 260 working days in a year.
I mean, it's crazy just how much time people are spending on sports.
Like, you won't believe it when I tell you I just ran the numbers twice.
So, somebody who's spending eight hours a week on sports, and, you know, this is watching sports.
I'm not counting playing sports.
It's watching sports, talking about sports, getting ready for sports, going to games, buying tickets, buying paraphernalia, all of that kind of stuff.
Somebody spending eight hours a week on sports over 50 years, that's 10 years of working.
And it's funny because I had to like, that's way too high.
So, I ran the numbers again, but then, of course, it makes sense.
If you're working 37 and a half hours a week, but you spend 8 hours a week on sports, that's one-fifth of your working life.
It's an extra work day.
So yeah, over 50 years, it could be longer, right?
But give or take, somebody spending 10 working years on sports.
I mean, that obviously is completely deranged.
This is going with 260 working days in a common year.
Not counting leap years.
But, you know, even if you're only spending four hours a week on sports, that's still five years of work.
Five years of work. Five working years of your life is being spent on sports.
I mean, that's completely mad.
It's beyond deranged, right?
So, you have to break children's minds and reprogram them to have loyalty, To abstractions and things that don't exist rather than loyalty to truth, virtue, UPB, all of these things.
They all have to go. They all have to be destroyed.
Now, how do you most effectively do this?
I mean, there's a certain drive to do this just to survive, but how do you do this?
Well, the most efficient way to break people's brains is to hate them.
Is to hate them.
So, you're right, you're good, you're virtuous, and the children who resist you are wrong, immoral, demonic, possessed, disobedient, talk-back, defiant, like, you just break them, right?
Oppositional defiant disorder, and you smash them, you beat them, you abuse them, you drug them.
You yell at them. They have to be broken to break children.
Now, if you hate something, it's easier to break it.
You have to kill your empathy, and so you have to hate children in order to reprogram them to be loyal to abstractions rather than things that are.
That the original state of children, which is skepticism towards things that don't exist, obviously, skepticism towards things that don't exist, right?
This is the story I read when I managed to get a whole series of books that were being thrown out, which were Reader's Digest condensed books.
Reader's Digest used to put out these books where they took out all the fat.
And there was a book where...
A kid was poor and hungry, and he said, I'm hungry, and the mother said, then go eat a kungri.
K-U-N-G-R-Y. Go eat a kungri.
Of course, the kid was annoyed because there was no such thing as a kungri and couldn't eat it, and so he couldn't eat that which does not exist.
So you have to rip out the wiring that ties children to things that are real, things that are true, things that are valid, and you then have to replace that wiring with loyalty towards children.
That which does not exist towards abstractions, towards the leaders, towards red shirts, blue shirts, towards the nation state.
It's brutal. So you have to hate the natural empiricism of children, and you have to view them as resistant to that which is good and right and noble and true, and you have to break them.
You have to view them like in the same way that you would view an addict, that you may have to break them from the addiction, right?
You might have to put them in rehab, you might have to make sure that they don't get access to the drugs.
So you have to hate the addiction.
Love the person, hate the addiction.
So then you have to view children's natural empiricism and reality focusing, which was sort of all born with, as an addiction that has to be broken.
I mean, you can imagine, and I, of course, had this as a kid, right?
For whatever reason, I can't claim credit for it, it's just the way my brain worked as a kid.
But I remember being a very little kid, and some kid was taunting me about his sports team, and mocking my sports team, and I'm like, well, you just happened to be born over there, I'm born over here, like, who cares?
You're having loyalty to something that's completely artificial and arbitrary and irrelevant.
Of course, I didn't use those terms, I wasn't that precocious, but It just never made any sense to me.
And of course, the society wasn't protecting me, so why on earth would I protect the fantasy called society when society did nothing to protect me from the reality of being abused?
I have no loyalty. I have no loyalty.
What am I going to protect?
Why on earth? I had the sense of reciprocity in relationships even back then.
Society wasn't protecting me at all, so why on earth would I feed the imaginary virtue called society?
Like, no. Absolutely not.
Why? Not a thing.
So, the reason I'm giving you all this sort of background, that there's an evolutionary pressure to hate the natural empiricism of children and to want to destroy it, rip out the wiring of the natural self and replace it with loyalty to abstractions.
And to do that, you have to hate children, you have to view them as, like, this is what original sin, right?
What is original sin? The original sin is always one and the same.
Like, the original sin is always, always one and the same thing.
Original sin is skepticism.
Original sin is skepticism.
Look at Eve, right?
Don't eat of this fruit.
Well, why not? You made it.
You're perfect. You're all good. You made us.
We're perfect. We're all good.
The Garden of Eden is all good.
You wouldn't put evil in the Garden of Eden.
You wouldn't create evil, so why can't I eat this fruit?
Skepticism, right? Skepticism is the original sin of predatory delusion.
How do you know? All differences in outcomes are the result of prejudice.
Bigotry, right? Well, I'm skeptical.
Like, how do you know?
How do you know that's true? I'd like to see the evidence.
I'd like to see the facts. How do you know?
How do you know? And this, of course, is you can go too far in skepticism, like I know nothing, the Socratic thing, which is more nihilism.
Socrates was a nihilist, not a skeptic, because he claimed to know nothing, right?
The only thing I'm certain of is I know nothing, blah, blah, blah, right?
So he was a nihilist. And nihilists can be forgiven because they're too ridiculous, and the tribe can dismiss the nihilist.
But if you are certain of true morality, such as UPB, then that's unforgivable, right?
You can't be forgiven. You can't be forgiven for that.
So, the skepticism, and children are born skeptical, right?
Of course they're born skeptical, because skepticism is how we gain knowledge.
Society is full of a bunch of predatory delusions, and the skepticism of the children comes crashing up against these predatory delusions, and all tribes that did not hate the skepticism of children tended to be outmanned on the battlefield by those who had infected their children.
With concept-serving delusions.
Sorry, I know that's a real mouthful, but I'm sure you can get it.
So, let's look at the sadism of the modern world with regards to education.
Of course, as you, I'm sure, know if you've read any John Taylor Gatto, things like that.
Let's look at the Prussian system of education.
In the West, many schools across the world are based on this.
So, the Prussian system began in 1810 with the establishment of a highly centralized educational structure under state control, encompassing all facets of schooling.
From the curriculum to the teaching methodologies, overall administration, who got to become a teacher, you had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops and prove your ideological purity, so to speak, in order to become a teacher.
The system mandated attendance in government schools for children, and the children were organized into distinct age groups, ensuring a standardized educational experience and content delivery.
Now, of course, you really, really want to destroy empathy for peers in children, right?
You want to destroy empathy for peers, and you want to rewire that with sensitivity to the commands of the elders.
And one of the ways you do that is you segregate children by age.
And what this does, of course, is it breaks up family loyalties, because then it becomes cool for the children who are older.
The younger children want to hang out with the cooler older children, the older siblings.
The older siblings are like, oh, you're just an annoying, snot-nosed little brother.
Why does your little brother have to tag long?
And you then replace loyalty to family with loyalty to peers, right, by age-segregating the children.
And this, of course, takes away the empathy that the older children would have in trying to teach the younger children.
So one of the foundations of the Prussian school system is to ensure that you bond with peers and reject your family.
This, of course, is useful, more than useful.
It's essential for warfare, right?
It's essential for warfare because you need to bond with your soldiers, not with your family.
If you bond with your family, you don't want to go to war.
If you bond with your peers, then you'll be a good soldier and shoot whoever they point at, right?
Thank you. So the core of the Prussian curriculum is designed to instill strict adherence to rules and authority.
And it focused heavily on memorization and discipline and obedience.
The approach in the Prussian school is geared towards grooming students to be compliant, follow orders without thought, and conforming to societal expectations.
I mean, it really dehumanizes you, as you know.
The school system...
It's got bell-driven schedules, right?
And I hated that stuff because you'd be in the middle of thinking about something or working on something.
Bell, got to change to something else.
Reduces children to just cargs in a machine, and the children are expected to respond mechanically to external cues.
And, of course, this method of conditioning, which is right up there with Pavlovian training, strips away any semblance of autonomy or self-determination.
Traits that are foundational as genuine learning and growth.
And the last thing you'd ever want to teach children is skepticism or critical thinking.
So what you do, of course, and this is typical, this is how you get children to abandon their own minds and simply become cogs of social conformity, is you present facts as absolute.
I mean, this is all off the story of the Emperor's New Clothes.
So you present facts as absolute.
And then anyone who has even the slightest doubt about these facts is foolish, immoral, ridiculous, and must be punished, mocked, attacked, it's a grave moral error, and so on.
I mean, you think about this in terms of something like, I don't know, global warming or things like that.
You present it as an absolute and a fact and a reality and a truth, and anyone who has even the slightest questions...
Is immoral and wants to destroy the planet and doesn't care about nature and is probably being infected by sinister minds on the internet.
And so you just mock.
You mock, you attack, you punish, you degrade, you humiliate.
And this inevitably draws the other children into this net of anyone who has any questions is immoral, is a bad person.
And you can see this all over the place, and we all experience it, of course.
We see this all over the place. Anybody who has any questions about anything, you know, like, well, hang on, so if England went to war in 1939 to protect Poland, then England must have lost the war if Poland ended up under communism.
Well, I mean, these are interesting questions.
I find myself in general, I just, I never get offended by questions because they're interesting.
The idea that you would get enraged at questions is, it's just foreign to my entire mindset.
It just seems bizarre to me.
But, again, it's sort of been my nature in philosophy is helping with this kind of stuff.
So, yeah, you can't, you present things as absolutes and then you just relentlessly attack and punish and mock people.
Anyone who has any doubts about these answers.
And this is straight up sophistry, right?
Sophistry is, I mean, the old thing, science is questions that must be asked, and sophistry is answers that cannot be questioned, right?
So, sophistry is, you are evil for even thinking this might be a question.
This is an absolute fact.
And only evil people would doubt this answer.
And of course, this also relies with an appeal to authority.
All these scientists, all these doctors, all say the same thing.
Who are you to? Don't do your own research.
You can't think for yourself and all of that.
And this creates a lot of tension among anybody who's curious.
It's like, well, hang on. If you're presenting this as an absolute, then you must have really good reasons.
I mean, it's an absolute, and to even question it is immoral, therefore it should be easy to answer.
And the way that you know if someone really understands something is they can present the case against their beliefs.
I mean, I did this in a variety of ways and places.
I do this when I role-play a bad parent.
I present the case for bad parenting.
I did a whole steelman case in both my book Peaceful Parenting and in my novel The Future, the steelman case for being aggressive towards So, yeah, I mean, of course, I mean, you've got to understand the opposite position and argument in order to be certain and truthful.
So if somebody says to me, why is hitting children immoral?
It's like, hey, you know, great question.
Let's answer that. Let's explore that.
As opposed to, I'm going to punish you for even thinking that this could ever be a question.
That's really boring and dangerous.
And you end up really running blind in society.
So, in order to attack a child for having questions, you have to really, really hate independent thought.
You have to really, really feel cruelty and sadism towards the most natural thing.
The most natural thing for kids is to ask questions.
Of course it is. It's healthy.
It's good. It's right. Of course, kids should ask questions.
Of course, kids are born skeptical.
And they should. I mean, kids should be the challenging new perspectives that keeps society's ideas fresh and alive rather than stale and dominant and brutal.
But I mean, you can't have that in the world as it's currently constituted.
But I mean, that certainly is the ideal for the future.
So you have to enjoy hurting children by punishing them for asking questions.
Right? So if you're a teacher, right?
You sort of imagine this, right? So if you're a teacher and you say to kids, you can't use violence to get what you want.
You can't use force to get what you want.
That's wrong. Don't push, don't hit, don't kick, don't whatever, right?
You can't, like, that's immoral.
And if some kid were to say, like, say, in front of the whole school, well, wait a minute, my parents are forced to pay your salary by force, right?
I mean, that's a very real question.
That's a very, very real question.
And can they answer that?
I mean, of course there are ways to answer it.
We could get into that another time.
There are ways to answer it, but it's not simple.
I'm not saying the answers are good, but there certainly are ways to answer it, but it's not simple at all, right?
Not simple at all.
So you have to have this rage against the natural skepticism of children and view it as a demon to be exercised as a demon.
An immorality to be attacked and punished.
And of course, that's because you've been raised believing a bunch of lies.
You've based your entire personality on lies.
And I don't mean necessarily things that are false.
I just mean things that you claim you know that you don't know.
Right? So you may claim to know something that is accidentally true, but you claim to know it according to some rational methodology which you haven't pursued.
You've just conformed with the brutality of your own childhood, which is understandable.
Of course, it's very common. It works.
People do it because it works. And so you claim to be a teacher, but you're an indoctrinator.
And so the fact that you are a brutal, sadistic indoctrinator is revealed.
By the skepticism of the children, and therefore, you think you're being a good person, you're actually being an immoral person by harming children and ripping out their natural wiring and replacing it with loyalty to abstractions and rulers wiring.
And that's hard for you, right?
If you've defined yourself as good, but what you're doing is actually evil, then, you know, so talk about the Prussian system, you have to fight back against that knowledge.
So, you have to hate the natural self of children, right?
Education should be facilitation, not indoctrination, right?
Oh, you want to do this? Well, let me help you figure out how to get there.
Oh, you want to learn this? Let's help you figure out how to get there.
You have questions? Let's explore them together.
And it's around honesty, right?
Thou shalt not bear false witness.
When a child says, how do you know?
If you don't know, you have to be honest and say, well, I don't know.
It's honesty, right? But if you lie and say you do know, but you don't actually know, the kid keeps asking questions.
And then the limitations of your knowledge are revealed.
The natural response for most people is rage against the child.
Like the child is showing you the hollowness of your own lack of identity, your conformity, you're actually immoral when you think you're good.
The child's curiosity begins to expose that in yourself, that self-contempt, that self-hatred, that horror of your own trauma.
And therefore, because you feel really bad, because the child is asking questions, the child is therefore bad for asking questions, right?
So you feeling bad makes the other person immoral.
And this sort of translation of, I feel bad, therefore you're immoral, it's not exactly ended in the modern world.
So, of course, along with wanting to reprogram children, harm children, comes physical violence, right?
They call it corporate punishment. It's just assault, assaulting children, right?
You can call it whatever you want.
It's just assaulting children. Of course, this was embedded into the Prussian system, and now they do it with humiliation.
And of course, the other thing that they do in society as a whole at the moment is people don't want to hit children for a variety of reasons.
We can sort of get into another time.
So people have recoiled from wanting to hit children.
So all they do is they mock and exclude children and let the bullies do the physical punishment, right?
So the bullies are an integral part.
So why are there bullies in school?
Well, bullies are an integral part of school.
Bullies is getting, in a sense, the trapped children to fight each other.
And so the teachers don't hit the children directly, but what they do is they provoke mockery and exclusion of the children to the point where they are attacked, they are ostracized, they are excluded, they are avoided, they are, whatever, rejected.
And so that's the pain now.
They are provoking the other children to join in the attack upon the questioners rather than attacking themselves directly.
And that actually is much more efficient because if you attack the children directly, like you hit the children directly, there's a great risk that the children will unite against you.
But if you get the children to fight each other, right, if you basically say, this is the kid who it's good to mock, this is the kid who it's good to attack, this is the bad kid who's good to ostracize, then that kid will be attacked, ostracized, And then there's no unity against the abuser because everybody's attacking each other.
So you splinter and you fragment any possibility of unity.
It's a much, much more efficient way to do things.
But back in the day, of course, child assault was essential to the Prussian system.
So it was really, really sadistic, right?
And sadism is really against the original sin of skepticism, right?
So it wasn't a benign tool for maintaining order.
It couldn't really be defined that way even in the abstraction.
The practice was a clear manifestation of cruelty, designed to instill fear rather than understanding.
The infliction of physical pain is a response to noncompliance or error or questions.
It's not just morally reprehensible, but of course psychologically damaging, fostering an environment of terror rather than Trust.
There's an 1842 engraving of a teacher administering a beating.
And of course the other children are all there.
The child is over a bench where there's some pretty brutal implement.
And it's bare buttocks, right?
So it's bare buttocks.
There is of course a sadistic, erotic, horrendous, paraphilic or pedophilic impulse behind these kinds of bare-bottom beatings in public.
I mean the ritual humiliation on...
A zone which is erotic, like the buttocks are erotic, which is why you can't show them in public.
So, yeah, it's really brutal and public.
And, of course, it is designed to frighten all of the other children.
And, yeah, there is a really bizarre...
And I remember this when I would get caned.
It was like, well, there's something really bizarre about...
Like, why? There's something so bizarre about this.
There's something so not on the surface and creepy and subterranean about all of this.
So, we're going to talk about the children's strike.
So, throughout Greater Poland, which was annexed by Germany in the late 18th century, German became the primary language for school instruction starting from 1873.
This shift was further enforced in March 1901, when German authorities mandated the use of German in religious educational classes.
In response...
About 118 students in the Catholic People's School, and I'm not even going to try and pronounce this, or something like that, but I'm sure it's some mouthful of marbles, Polish pronunciation, which I can say, because my name is Polish, first name is Polish.
But the Catholic People's School, they resisted, about 118 students resisted this change.
So the school's response to this resistance involved detentions and physical punishment.
So in a crowded first-floor classroom, students were presented with a final opportunity to recite a German religious song by memory.
Those who succeeded were allowed to go home, while the others were detained for severe corporal punishment.
So each student was individually escorted, the students who wouldn't recite this German religious song, each student was individually escorted to a designated ground-floor room for the punishment.
There, Johann Schultzen, a teacher known for his strict adherence to Prussian discipline, was ready to administer the punishment.
The punishment involved receiving four to eight sharp strikes with a birch cane.
Boys received the blows on their buttocks while girls were struck on their open hands.
The severity of the assault was so great that one girl fainted from the pain, and several others found themselves unable to hold their books due to the swelling in their hands.
The situation escalated over the following weeks as parents protested the treatment of their children.
On May the 20th, the demonstration comprising 100 to 200 individuals took place in front of the school, leading to police intervention.
The adults participating in these protests, right, the parents trying to protect their children from these assaults, these abuses, faced legal repercussions for causing public disturbance, obstructing official duties, trespassing, and related offenses.
A total of 26 parents were formally accused, and on November 19th, 1901, 20 of them received sentences ranging from several weeks to over two years in prison.
I mean, of course, the eradication of a people's language is part of a cultural attack that is brutal, of course, and often quite successful, sadly.
So, yeah, this is...
The children were assaulted, and parents who protested the assaults upon their children were jailed.
This is how... The system works.
You can't ask any questions. You can't have any skepticism.
You can't have any doubt about the inflicted conclusions of teachers and authorities.
And of course, this is the fragile nature, right?
Fragility and violence are two sides of the same coin, right?
So if you want to create violence in society, the first thing that you do is inflict answers without reasons.
You inflict answers without reasons, and then you invite the children to mock those who ask questions.
And that draws the children into the cycle and circle of abuse, and then the children are then inoculated against asking questions, right?
So once you've abused and rejected and attacked a child for asking questions, Then that's your inoculation against asking questions.
Because then you just have to swallow whatever the people in authority tell you to, because the moment you start asking questions, the guilt about how you attack the child who asks questions arises, and you want to avoid that, and the best way to avoid that is mute, stupid, bovine-compliant to whatever people in authority tell you.
Summoning children to attack.
Other children. And this, of course, happened to be in boarding school.
Why I got caned? Why did I get caned?
Because I was playing football, and the ball went over a fence.
I climbed the fence to get the ball, and another child ratted me up, right?
Went and got the teacher who then dragged me up to get caned, right?
So, I mean, the caning wasn't particularly bad, honestly.
I'm not going to try and over-dramatize it, but That kid's soul would die that day, right?
Like, I've now participated in getting a child beaten for an innocuous action, right?
I just climbed a fence, right? So, yeah, it was very sad.
Very sad for him. Very sad for him.
I mean, my life is great.
I'm sure that his life is terrible.
So, yeah, even if you try to protect your children, right?
I mean, you end up being thrown in jail for weeks to years, right?
So, in essence, the Prussian model, and of course its reflections in certain modern educational systems, is a sadism disguised as pedagogy, disguised as education, right?
It glorifies obedience at the expense of critical thinking and human dignity.
Using fear and force and ridicule and ostracism and rejection as its primary tools.
It doesn't create disciplined individuals, right?
It's all about discipline.
No, it's about subjugation.
It's about the abandonment of your mind and getting the wiring of your soul ripped out and replaced with NPC programming that serves those in power.
And of course, the purpose of the Prussian system, and this is not my theory, this is openly stated, the purpose of the Prussian system was to create what?
Two things, to create passive urban workers and soldiers, people who would just sit there on a line and make widgets all day and never complain and never question and never oppose, and soldiers who will obey without question.
Now, of course, the Prussian educational system, started in the early 19th century, profoundly influenced the development of modern schooling in the Western world, especially In the United States.
Right? So, I mean, government schooling was sold in America in the mid-19th century as, well, you have all of these non-Protestants coming in, you need to have government schools in order to preserve your culture.
Now, of course, government schools are used to undo a lot of cultural stuff, so...
So, this system, Prussian system, what is it?
Structured hierarchical format, mandatory curriculum, fixed grades based on age, and a professional class of trained teachers.
Right, so, of course, in the free market, who should teach your children?
Well, the person...
Who has the greatest knowledge that your children like the most?
Who should teach your children?
The person with the greatest knowledge that your children like the most.
Now, of course, we assume that the children like the person because he's able to productively engage with them in the transfer of knowledge.
But your children liking the teacher is essential to education.
Because if your children don't like the teacher, the teacher can't be effective, right?
The teacher, the kids don't want to be there.
They don't respect the teacher. They don't want to learn from the teacher.
And so enthusiasm for knowledge, enthusiasm for children, love of knowledge, love of knowledge transfer, love of children's potential, all of this stuff.
Children respond very warmly to people who really like them as a whole, right?
I know this from my time as a daycare teacher's aide.
And I did this for years.
And so, in a free market, it should be that the kids want to go to school, they want to learn, or they want to be educated, they want to, they're excited to do it.
And, of course, children do love to learn and all of that.
So, I mean, I taught my daughter a lot of math through Dungeons& Dragons, right?
Through probabilities and odds and all of that kind of stuff, right?
And percentages, right?
Oh, you have to roll a 20.
What percentage is that? Oh, 5%, right?
So you get all of that, right?
And of course, I love you guys, and I love talking about philosophy, and so this is why this show has done so well.
And of course, we're in a little bit of a jazz club scenario, but that just means it's better later on, right?
Because this stuff is more relevant to the future.
So, the idea that you have passed a test set by the rulers, therefore you are now a teacher, is incomprehensible to a free market environment or scenario.
It absolutely makes zero sense whatsoever.
I remember watching a movie called, I think it was called Hollywood Shuffle, about the difficulties of black actors.
And there was one guy, he was auditioning, and he's like, oh, well, I've completed RADA, and I've completed this course, and I've completed that, and I've got a master's degree in performance art, and blah, blah, blah.
And then he started doing the reading, and the directors were like, you're like the worst actor we've ever seen.
No, no, no, but I have all these credentials, right?
So the idea that you don't have auditions for the lead in your movie, or significant roles in your movie, the idea that you don't have auditions, but what you do is simply ask for people's credentials, would be incomprehensible, right?
I mean, maybe the credentials help a little bit, maybe they help get you in the door or whatever, but you still have to audition, right?
So, the idea that credentials make a teacher is completely incomprehensible in any free market scenario.
What makes a teacher is the audition, right?
What makes a teacher is, can you engage and interest children in the subject matter?
Do they want you to be the teacher?
Do they want you to be the teacher?
Do they want to come to your class?
Do they want to learn? Are they enthusiastic?
Like that. So, credentialism, it's so incomprehensible in a free market scenario or environment that, I mean, of course, we have credentialism all over the place, right?
In healthcare in particular.
So, I mean, to me, the best healers are those who inspire people towards healthy lifestyles.
Right? So, does your doctor inspire you towards a healthy lifestyle?
Do they educate you on prevention?
Do they educate you on exercise?
On vitamin D? On good diets?
All these kinds of things. It's not my health advice.
I'm just saying what I think a good doctor should be working on.
Of course, this used to be the case, right?
As I've talked about before, in China, prior to communism, you would pay your doctor every month until you got sick, and then he'd have to treat you for free.
So, his whole incentive was to keep you healthy so that he could make money, right?
So... The idea that, well, you've passed a bunch of tests, therefore, you are a good healer.
I mean, of course, healers need knowledge.
I get all of that for sure, but...
I mean, do you listen to me because I have a graduate degree focusing on the history of philosophy?
Do you listen to me because of that?
Do I ever talk about credentialism?
Do I ever say, you should listen to me because I did a really tough graduate degree in a pretty hostile academic environment and pulled off an A? No, you shouldn't listen to me because of that.
Have I ever claimed to be right because of credentials?
Nope. I love philosophy.
I love talking about philosophy.
I love the curiosity of the audience and you all are willing to join me on this very challenging journey which I hugely appreciate.
But the idea that I should be allowed to do what I do because of credentialism is completely incomprehensible.
Completely incomprehensible.
I mean there are many many famous actors who have little to no training at all.
There are many many famous artists who never went to art school.
There are many many famous thinkers.
Well, not so much anymore because credentialism has become such a big thing.
But if you strip... Credentialism is in general for insecure people, right?
So, anyway, the idea that you are a teacher if you pass a test is like saying you are an actor if you graduated from acting school.
Lots of people who graduate from acting school aren't particularly good, and lots of people that are fantastic who never graduated from acting school.
Credentialism is just a way of...
It's ensuring that teachers believe, like, to believe that you're a teacher because you are credentialed is automatically saying that you don't know what a teacher is.
Right. Now, again, there are lots of teachers who are very good out there who happen to be credentialed.
They try to jump through the hoops, and I'm not sort of complaining about that kind of thing.
But anyone who says, I'm a teacher because a bureaucrat has told me that I am a teacher.
I've jumped through these hoops.
I am now a teacher because...
Like, no, you're a teacher if people want to learn from you.
That's when you're a teacher when people want to learn from you.
That's it. That makes you a teacher.
Now, of course, you have to have the knowledge and all of that, but people generally don't want to learn from you if you don't have the knowledge.
You are a teacher if people want to learn from you.
You are an actor if people pay to watch you act.
You are a singer if people pay To listen to you sing?
I mean, has Taylor Swift taken massive amounts of singing lessons?
I don't know. I'm sure she's taken some, but just really to preserve her voice, Freddie Mercury never took a singing lesson his whole life, considered to be one of the greatest vocalists in human history.
So, yes, credentialism is part of sadism.
I know that sounds kind of odd.
Credentialism is part of sadism.
But credentialism is a way of ensuring that people are going to demand respect and obedience and Without being good at what they do, which is going to promote cruelty.
Like, why? Wasn't this a question?
I think we all had this, those of us who think, right?
Why am I listening to this person?
Why is this person in charge of my education?
Why am I spending all this time listening to this person?
Well, because you're kind of forced to be there because there's all this credentialism and so on.
And didn't you always have teachers who just demanded respect?
And who demanded subjugation?
And who demanded that you listen?
And who demanded that you do your homework?
Right? So, credentialism leads to aggression because it puts entitled people in charge of children They haven't earned the respect of their children by being productive and positive and loving the kids and loving knowledge and being excited and enthusiastic.
Okay, then you get some respect out of that, or at least listening.
But credentialism breeds sadism because it puts entitled people who haven't earned respect And obedience in charge of children, and therefore the fact that the children don't respect or want to obey them means that they end up feeling enraged at the children for not giving them what they damn well deserve, apparently, which is respect and obedience, but they haven't earned it.
So then they have to become aggressive, right?
So credentialism puts people in charge of children who inevitably end up being aggressive because the children, you know, like, I kind of give homework sometimes to people, right?
You hear this in call-in shows, right?
You know, I certainly give the homework of go to therapy and I've sent people significant amounts of money to help them with their therapy costs and all of that.
Or I say, you know, if I were in your shoes, I'd go talk to my parents and try and work things out and all of this.
So I kind of give homework.
I've never had anybody resent me for it.
And whether people do it or not, sometimes I hear about it, sometimes I don't.
But the idea that I'm giving homework or, you know, say if you want to debate UPB with me, then read the book UPB. It's kind of like homework, right?
And people do debate with me, and they usually have read UPB, but nobody gets mad at me.
They say, how dare you give me homework?
And if people don't do it, I mean, I think it's a good idea, but if people don't do what I recommend, that's on them.
I'm not going to chase them down and humiliate them and so on, right?
So, credentialism says, you're now a teacher and the children should damn well listen to you because I gave you this piece of paper and then you go in and the children don't like you, so you just get angry at them and you get aggressive, right?
So, whereas, of course, if teachers are chosen by their ability to inspire and excite children, you know, the amount of loss, oh, the amount of loss, like how much fun school could have been compared to how it was, just terrible.
All right, so, sorry, I said it's going to go too long.
Maybe I will. So, what is the purpose?
Well, the primary goal of the Prussian system is to instill a sense of obedience, discipline, and punctuality in students, which, of course, is the needs of the emerging proto-capitalist or crapitalist or crony-capitalist industrial society, growing bureaucratic state, and the need for more and more soldiers in a wartime.
So this approach to education emphasizes uniformity and conformity and subjugation was seen as highly efficient and became a model for public educational systems worldwide.
In the U.S., the Prussian system inspired key educational changes in the 19th and 20th centuries, leading to the establishment of compulsory schooling laws and the graded class structure that are familiar in schools today.
This legacy of the Prussian model is evident in the emphasis on standardized testing, regimented class schedules, and a focus on core subjects often irrelevant to the children that are still prevalent in American education.
I mean, this is the sad thing. I mean, I'll end here, right?
But this is a really sad thing. You think about all the problems that we face in the West and in society, and so many of them, I mean, you're probably younger than me, but so many of them occurred or were set in motion before you were born and before I was born.
You know, the downfall of the West was the government takeover of the educational system, which is like 150, 160 years ago in, say, America, right?
So, we didn't make the problems.
We didn't have a choice about the problems.
We just inherited the problems.
And when you look at the massive escalation of sadism that is, you know, say, civil war or rampant child abuse or, of course, genocide in its final form, we really, really want to stop this ball rolling sooner rather than
later and understanding the origins of sadism is really really
important in trying to avert the escalations of cruelty that seem to be occurring
in the modern world.
Thank you so much for listening of course.
I really, really appreciate it.
And your support, which makes all of this possible, is...
More valuable to me than I'll ever, ever be able to express.
I just consider it such an enormous privilege to be at the center of this conversation, and I always hope that I'm doing you proud with your support and your listening.
freedomain.com slash donate.
If you'd like to help out the show, I would really, really appreciate that.
freedomain.com slash donate.
I look forward to your feedback. Thank you so much, as always, for listening.
Lots of love from up here. I'll talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection