This is a follow-up to my conversation/slash debate with the fellow about religion and morals and ethics on the nature and existence of God.
The show is called, which was the 30th of December 2025.
And I wanted to follow up, not to litigate after the trial is done, so to speak, but to talk about the challenges of teaching children morality.
So, of course, when children are no longer babies and are in the toddler phase, you need to teach them not to hit, not to grab, not to push, not to steal, and so on, and to be good children.
And the problem, of course, with hyper-complicated explanations of morality, if you look at something like Kant, if you look at something like Hegel or Nietzsche, of course, you wouldn't really go too very far for morality.
But when you look at a variety of people and their arguments for morality, then you have a problem, right?
And the problem, of course, is that it's too complicated to teach children.
If you were to say to somebody, you can only be moral when you are fluent in English, Latin, and ancient Greek, right?
If that were to be your argument, then clearly it takes many years to become competent in those three languages, and it would be, you know, functionally and practically impossible for the child to be, for the person to be moral.
So with religion, with, again, I'll speak about Christianity, which of course is the religion I'm most familiar with.
If you say to kids, well, you can't steal because that's wrong.
And God says, thou shalt not steal.
You shouldn't lie because thou shalt not bear false witness.
You should not hit.
I mean, there's not any sort of specific thing about that in the Bible, like in the Ten Commandments and so on.
But in general, we have a don't hit, don't whack other kids in the face.
And do you want to teach them free speech?
Sticks and stones can hurt my bones, but words will never harm me.
That was my, when I was growing up as a kid.
And how do you get kids to live by that?
Well, you punish and reward them, praise and punishment, but that's training them like dogs, not like conceptual human beings.
You can say, you know, how would you like it if the other kid did that to you?
That's a challenge.
That is sort of primitive empathy.
It's to some degree along the continuum of the Kantian categorical imperative, which is, well, if everyone was able to do this, if this was everybody's rule, then how would you feel about it?
If you are setting up the hit others and then they get to hit you back, you wouldn't like that.
But to the violent, that is a poor argument.
To the violent, that's a poor argument because if you're a big kid, like you're the biggest kid in the daycare and you've got a hair-trigger temper and you enjoy violence or you like it or you get a thrill or you get a rush, then you're just going to be better at doing violence.
It would be like saying to the best tennis player who really enjoys playing tennis that all the goodies, candies, dates, whatever should be distributed according to victory in tennis or according to tennis ability.
He'd be like, yeah, that's a great rule.
I like that rule.
I'm willing to make tennis ability a universal rule.
But that's what violence is.
There are people who are big and strong.
They enjoy violence.
They're good at violence.
They get a thrill out of violence.
They like violence.
And so if you say to them, well, what if everyone did a violence?
They'd be like, yeah, okay, well, I'm fine with that because I'm going to be better at it.
I mean, I think there were only two times when I was ever really subject to any kind of bullying in a school, one somewhat minor, one somewhat not so minor.
But the kids, I was like 11 or 12, and a friend of mine and I got detained.
We were out hiking and some kids forced us to stay and built them a fire.
The kids were like 16 or 17, maybe even 18, because they were in the last year.
One of them was in their last year of high school, so the 18-year-old probably.
I mean, you know, easily twice her side, twice our size.
And I remember they called my friend who was crying at one point because he was really, he was really scared.
I mean, I was scared too.
I wasn't crying.
No biggie, but and they called him a sucky fag.
And I said, you know, I was kind of disgusted.
And I said, when you pick on people your own size, they punch me in the stomach.
And I doubled over and couldn't breathe.
And I've almost never taken a blow more proudly in my life.
Totally worth it.
Totally worth it.
But they said, listen, if you go to the cops, if you tell anyone, maybe we'll go to prison, we'll just come out and we'll kill you.
They were good at violence.
They enjoyed violence.
I still remember the name of one of them, believe it or not.
I met him many years later.
He had no memory of who I was, but by then I was working out and was a much bigger guy.
So he didn't give me any particular grief.
But, and you can see, I mean, this kind of physiognomy can be real in that you just, you see these sort of blunt hatchet faces, absolutely cold, dead eyes.
And you know that these are people who don't have any restraint.
They're predators, right?
They don't have any restraint and they do a cost benefit.
And they say, well, we like to bully kids.
We enjoy bullying kids.
And if the rule is you can do whatever you want, but you have to threaten to kill children in order to survive and be able to flourish as a bully.
You have to threaten to kill children.
You know, we don't fear prison.
We'll do whatever.
And now, you know, it was probably a bluff.
I mean, who knows, right?
It's like almost 50 years ago now.
So who cares, right?
But the reality is that if you set up a rule, right?
So these guys were like, if you go to the cops, if you tell us, if you tell anyone what we did, maybe we'll go to prison, but we'll get out and we'll just hunt you down.
We'll just hunt you down, we'll kill you.
Now, if you were to say, wait a minute, how would you like it if everyone bullied children and then threatened to murder them?
If they told, how would you like it if everyone did that?
They would say, deep down in their sort of primitive reptile brains, right?
They would say, yeah, we're fine with that.
Yeah, that's no problem.
Because we know they're not going to do it back, right?
They're not going to do it back.
I'm not going to be detaining kids and punching them.
And I'm not going to be threatening to kill them if they tell.
Like, I'm not going to be doing any of that because I'm not that kind of asshole, right?
I'm not that kind of evil person.
So act as if the principle of your action becomes a general rule.
Yes, the people who are good at violence, who are willing to threaten the life of an 11 or 12-year-old little kid, those people are happy with their approach being a general rule because they know that they're the best at violence.
They know that almost nobody is going to be detaining kids and threatening to kill them if they tell and beaten them up.
Or I wasn't really beaten up, just I was punched.
It was not a big deal.
But they're fine with that level of violence.
They're happy with it.
They're comfortable with it.
And they also know, as surely as you and I know the sun will rise tomorrow, they know for a simple, absolute fact that other people are very bad at doing violence.
In other words, when they saw my friend and I walking along the path in the deep woods, they knew, obviously, based upon our size, maybe our body language or whatever, they knew that we were nice kids unprotected, right?
We didn't have any big psycho dads or brothers who were going to go beat them up.
They knew whatever, however they knew, based upon our size.
And of course, we were unprotected relative to their size.
And of course, when you're in that kind of situation, and I do remember it very vividly because it was very instructive.
And actually, they gave me a very good moral education that day.
I learned more from that day in the woods about morality than I learned in any other single concentrated day of education.
So these guys gave me a good education about the world, about how helpless the government is in protecting children.
Of course, I was far from the first kid.
My friend and I were far from the first kids that they bullied.
And the teachers couldn't do anything.
I couldn't.
I mean, my mother was already hanging by a thread mentally, so I couldn't add to her burdens.
And they had figured out the police, right?
And they said, okay, so if we threaten to kill people who go to the cops, they won't go to the cops.
So these, for some reason, I think that they weren't the same age.
I think one was 17, one was 18.
I can't remember why I know that.
So they had already sorted it out.
They'd done this a whole bunch of times.
It had worked every single time.
And they were in no danger and had no fear of any legal structure.
We go to prison, we'll get out.
We don't fear prison.
Now, I'm sure they did fear prison.
I'm sure they didn't want to go to prison.
But they had realized that violence is fantastic for shifting the cost-benefit calculations of victims.
And of course, when I was in that situation for those couple of hours, when I was in that situation, I, like everyone, certainly for boys, I looked around and saw, okay, is there a thick branch that I can use to whack them on the head or whatever, right?
And you do that calculation.
And you say, okay, so if I grab the branch and I do manage to bring it down on his head, well, that's only one of them.
I can't signal my friend, you know, maybe if there was only one, it could have been possible.
But if I, let's say, even if I was somehow to pull something in a ninja mood, move and disable both of them, and we could somehow get away, well, then what?
Well, now they really have a grudge against you.
Now, you know, you've cracked them over the head.
Now you've won and you have to go back to school.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
Even if you were to somehow beat them, the only way that you could remove them from taking vengeance upon you is old style killing them, which of course, like a million miles away from my mind, right?
I mean, obviously you think about these things in the moment, but a million miles away from my mind.
Like, I'm not going to go, what I'm going to go, I'm an 11-year-old kid.
I'm going to kill two guys, right?
Because I'm being bullied or confined.
Or not confined, but almost like a minor kidnapping or confinement.
So you say, okay, so there's a calculus involved in this.
And the calculus is quite simple.
What minimizes the harm to myself?
Because if I try to fight them, I have now given them an excuse to be extremely violent against me.
If I comply, and this is, you know, this is nothing new to me or like, this is a common thing that people do, kids do in particular.
What are the costs and benefits?
If I comply, and I didn't want to comply to an absurd degree, which is why I sneered at them and said, why don't you pick on someone your own size?
I mean, so I was in full compliance and I got my, I took my licks, still glad I said it, well worth it.
And that is the calculation.
If I try to use violence against them, you know, like I was building them a fire, they made me build them a fire.
And okay, well, if I take a burning branch, whatever, but none of it maybe made any sense.
And if I escalate, they will escalate, right?
If I resist, they will escalate.
And of course, people do this with abusive, violent parents all the time as well.
If I escalate, they will escalate.
And who's going to escalate more?
Well, they're better at violence than I am.
They're willing to impose a violent, coercive situation on others, which means they've done it before, which means they have experience, which means I don't have experience relative to them because I've never hit anyone in my life.
So they are experienced and I am not experienced.
It sort of reminds me of once there was a guy at the bowling alley, a Middle Eastern guy, and he was, I was go to the bowling alley, I was like 12 or whatever.
And there was a guy there who was 17 or 18, and he bet me that he could beat my score on Space Invaders and he knew some trick, like the 12th spaceship that goes along the top.
If you hit it at a certain time, it gives you extra points.
Like he just knew.
And so he got my quarter, you know?
And again, a very good education.
And I won't go so far as to say, well, I thank these people highly.
I'm not Erica Kirk.
But I would say that it was a useful education that they provided me, both in terms of how violent people operate and how helpless society is to a large degree.
And it's funny because there was another guy.
This is the second time that I was bullied.
I'm somewhat bullied.
Is that there was another guy who unplugged my game, video game while I was playing because I was doing really well and he wanted to play.
And I called him a jerk or I can't remember what I said or whatever it is.
And then he ran home to his psycho big brother and said that I had tried to beat him up and his big brother was going to get me and was sort of chasing me all over the school for a week until he, I don't know, his IQ80 brain found something else to focus on, perhaps a shiny belt buckle or something like that.
And I just dodged him because again, I was like 12 and he was like 17 or 18 and a big guy, again, with those psycho cold eyes and those all.
So, yeah, you just, I can't fight the guy.
And he punched me once in the arm.
I was going up the stairs.
He was going down.
He punched me in the shoulder and I said, I didn't, I didn't hit your brother.
Whatever, as if reason's going to matter, right?
But nothing really came of that.
Sorry, that was the guy that I met years later, not the other two guys.
I don't know what happened to them, but hopefully they did get their wish to go to prison.
I'm sure they did.
Or they're in charge of the country, one of the two.
So people do their calculations.
And if you're willing to use violence, you very quickly understand that other people will mostly comply.
Violence works, and threats of violence work very well.
This is how pedophiles operate: they say, if you tell anyone, I will kill your family.
And you say, well, but they're bluffing, but if they're not, and then you have the worry of is it going to happen or not?
And who do you tell?
And right?
And if you go to the police and say, this guy said he was going to kill me, what happens then?
Right.
They don't have any proof.
So it's just big, complicated, messy, messy stuff.
So sorry for that long sideshow, side quest.
But my point is that saying to kids, well, how would you like it if he did it to you?
So if you go to the 18-year-old psychos and you say, well, how would you like it if the 11 or 12-year-old bullied you for a couple of hours and punched you and made you build a fire and then threatened you with death if you told, how would you like it if they did it to you?
They just laugh at you.
Yeah, yeah, bring it on.
Fine.
Yes, no problem.
Yeah, yeah, I can make this a general rule.
I can make this a general rule.
So the Kantian categorical imperative, I mean, hasn't worked, right?
You understand it.
It hasn't worked.
It hasn't worked.
Arguably, you know, we have more violence now than in the past if we count coercive debt enslavement as a form of violence, right?
Because the national debts and fund-funded liabilities have never been larger in the history of the planet.
And so it's really bad.
I mean, it's really terrible.
So the categorical imperative has not worked.
Religion has not worked.
Well, why not?
Because Christianity says, be nice because it's what God commands.
And the problem is, of course, if you don't particularly believe in God, then you don't accept the ethics.
Or if you do believe in God, you know, this is sort of the Protestant argument against the corruption of the Catholic Church in the past, the sort of 14th century, then if you do believe in God and you do believe in God's commandments, then you can pray for forgiveness.
So you can whack someone, you can apologize, and then they have to forgive you.
And if they don't forgive you, they're now the sinners.
And if they don't forgive you, you can run to the priest and you can have your confession and you can pray for forgiveness and you will be forgiven.
So that doesn't work either.
And of course, it is an argument from authority, which works a little bit better on girls than on boys, but boys tend to resist authority, which we have to do because boys are programmed when we get to our physical strength to take over from the prior generation.
So that doesn't work.
Punishment, well, we know the punishment doesn't work.
You can just look at my presentation, The Truth About Spanking, to see that punishment does not work.
It will give you short-term compliance, long-term rebellion, blah, blah, blah.
And even if, as some kids do, right, they internalize that sore and eye in the sky of God watching and judging and punishing and blah, blah, blah, and they try to live good lives and so on.
Well, they're unhappy because they're kind of paranoid, always being watched and judged and so on.
And they're unhappy.
And that's tough too, because if you're not happy and you're a moralist, then you are effectively, well, not selling moralism, right?
You're a fat guy trying to sell a diet book.
You're a guy with Pizza Face trying to sell acne control, right?
You're me selling hair regrowth formula.
It's not good at all.
And this is this sort of super nerdy kids who are hyper-religious and kind of miserable, you know, the Jesus camp kids and all of that.
Like it's, it's pretty rough.
You can get pretty neurotic feeling that you're always being watched and judged and always falling short and stained with original sin and never measuring up.
And like it just whittles you down to nothing and say, okay, well, I'm unhappy.
I'm an unhappy guy.
You want to be like me?
And that doesn't work very well at all.
You need to have some reasonable levels of happiness or at least resilience in order to, I mean, in a sense, sell or be an advocate for morality.
So that doesn't work particularly either.
And of course, if aggression is bad, but you are punished for aggression in an aggressive manner, then you don't believe you're punisher, right?
If you steal something and you are spanked or shaken or yelled at or intimidated or put in a naughty corner or grabbed or whatever, right?
If you are punished through aggression, then aggression is good and bad.
Aggression is bad if you do it.
Aggression is good if I do it.
And again, you can say, ah, yes, well, but it's a response.
I'm just talking about how the child's brain works.
I mean, I was a child, you were a child.
We all remember this stuff.
I worked in a daycare.
I've been a stay-at-home dad.
I've been around tons of kids.
So I know how children's brains works, which is you don't have credibility if you say violence is bad and you enforce that through violence, especially if it's later after the fact.
And especially if it's something like not violence, like theft or lying, like theft and lying are not violence, right?
I mean, they're not moral.
One's APA telling the truth is APA, respect for property rights is UPP compliant.
But it's not the same as violence.
If you sneak a cookie, right?
You learn your basic engineering by figuring out how to climb up to the top of the fridge where they keep the cookie jar and you go and steal the cookie.
And then you're caught.
It's not violence.
You haven't beaten anyone up.
There's no blood on the floor.
Nobody's eyeballs hanging down their cheek.
So violence is bad and violence is good.
So it doesn't work.
And this is why the problem of human violence has not been solved.
And this is why people can't see that the violence of the state is bad because they're told that violence is bad and violence is good.
Violence on the part of the citizens is bad.
Violence on the part of the rulers is good because violence on the part of you is bad, but violence on the part of your teachers and parents and so on is good.
And I was, of course, punished only once in boarding school when I was caned because I had climbed a metal fence to get a ball from the sanatorium, which was a little healthcare, little tiny little hospital for the boys.
Because, you know, 500 boys, 500 girls, somebody was always unwell.
So I climbed to get the soccer ball, came back, somebody knocked me out to the headmaster.
I got taken upstairs.
I got caned.
And I was like, okay, so violence is good.
Honestly, I don't want to sound like it.
I don't want to make it out to be too traumatic.
It really wasn't.
I wasn't like bleeding and wasn't like spitting in Singapore or something like that.
So I don't want to over-dramatize it, but you know, obviously uncomfortable and unpleasant and weird and just weird.
But I'm like, okay, so then violence is good.
Violence is good and violence is necessary.
But so I didn't do anything violent by climbing a fence.
I didn't hurt anyone.
I didn't hurt myself.
I just got the ball.
And the reason I did it was because when the ball went over, we had precious little fun in boarding school.
And when the ball went over, sometimes it could take an hour or two to get it back.
And we only had an hour until suppertime.
And I wanted to play football.
I wanted to play soccer.
So it took forever to get the balls back.
And we didn't have anything else to do.
And, you know, you need to get your fun, man.
You need to get your fun when you're in a negative situation.
So violence is good.
So, yeah, you can't aggress children into believing that aggression is bad.
It kind of short-circuits them.
You can't use the categorical imperative because the kids good at violence are very happy to have that be a general rule because they're better at it.
And you can't use God because then you can just disbelieve in God and it is an argument from intimidation and authority and so on, right?
And why?
Why?
Why is this bad?
Or why is this good?
Because it's what God commands.
That's not an answer.
That's not for kids.
That's not an answer.
Because God, in his love and his wisdom, has ordained these to be the good, blah, blah, blah.
It's still not an answer.
It's just somebody with infinite power has decreed that this is the case.
But it's not an argument.
It's not an answer.
It's a commandment.
And a commandment, by definition, is not an argument.
Stop is not an argument.
Obey is not an argument.
It is the opposite of an argument.
It is the commandeering through threats and bribes of another sovereign conscience for the sake of obedience.
So none of this stuff works.
And it doesn't work.
And this is why we have the shit show of a society that we have.
I mean, Jesus never said, give your money to the government, let them pretend to take care of the poor.
Jesus said, sell what you own, give your money to the poor, and follow me.
Private charity, personal charity, thou shalt not steal, blah, blah, blah.
Did it stop the creation of the welfare state?
It did not.
Has it ended war?
It has not.
Has it entered intergenerational debt slavery?
It has not.
I'm just an empiricist.
I mean, people get mad at me, and I just look at, hey, man, you're getting a sunburn.
It's like, you did that to me.
It's like, no, I'm just pointing out that you got an old tomato and you probably want to try and sort that out or do something to make that better.
And yeah, just it hasn't worked.
And I'm pretty practical.
I like to think I'm pretty practical.
So if something doesn't work, I probably want to try something different because it's not working.
What we know for sure, I mean, the world is in a dire state.
War and debt and enslavement and violence and predation and like the world is in a bad state.
I mean, listen, don't get me wrong, I'd rather live now than any other time in history.
But it's a bad state.
And I say this having watched it go from a better state into a worse state.
So this is after 3,000 years of philosophy and 2,000 years of Christianity.
And it has not fucking worked.
If people have been trying to solve a problem for 5,000 years and the problem is getting worse, shouldn't we try something different?
Shouldn't we?
We've been trying to unlock world peace for thousands of years.
We're not even close to achieving it.
All we have is pauses to reload in human history.
We don't see an end to violence.
I mean, governments are so addicted to violence, they import it these days.
So it really is remarkable to me, and I understand the impulse, but again, just sort of whatever is this bland Anglo-Saxon empiricism.
But in the conversation that I had with the fellow this morning, when he says, which he has to basically say that Christianity has not solved the problem of human evil.
He says, ah, but human beings are innately corrupt.
It's like, okay, then we should not have massive amounts of political power and blah, blah, blah, right?
And the best way to not have massive amounts of political power is to not have political power, right?
To have a free market, private society.
But people look at this, right, and they say, ooh, okay, so Christianity has failed to achieve morality.
Christianity is shrinking.
People are leaving the church.
And societies in the West are getting worse and more violent and more indebted and so on.
And they say, ooh, you know what's missing from this?
You know what's going to solve this problem that has been failed to be solved for 2,000 years, 2,025 years, I guess.
But you know what will solve this problem?
Massive additional layers of intellectual complications and obfuscations.
Oh, that's it.
That's the ticket.
That's that's okay.
If people can't find the map to the buried, people can't find the buried treasure.
I gave them the map.
They can't find the buried treasure.
I'm just going to make the map a whole lot more complicated.
I'm going to put lots of weird puzzles in there, make it kind of 3D, use ancient Aramaic.
So because people can't find the treasure, I'm not going to make the map simpler and clearer.
I'm going to make the map more complicated.
That's the ticket.
Well, that's not a thing that's going to work.
If someone can't understand what you're saying, throwing in additional buzzwords and complications and saying, well, this is like the theory of relativity and this is like epigenetics and this is like quantum mechanics and so on.
No.
If you have failed to make the world moral, making your morals and your proofs more complicated is not the answer.
People can't assemble the cabinet with the instructions I gave them.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make the instructions way more complicated and hard to understand.
And I'm going to introduce a whole bunch of buzzwords.
That's what I'm going to do.
Well, that's not a sensible thing to do.
If people were having trouble with the interface on my software, I worked to simplify the interface.
I did not work to make it more complicated.
Because if people aren't understanding the interface, making it more complicated is doing the opposite of what will work.
So that's the purpose behind UPB.
And again, I would invite you to listen to the ABCs of UPB, which is like, I don't know, 15, 17, 18 years old or whatever it is.
It's a show I did many, many years ago.
Oh, that's a lot of years.
Many years ago, which says how you explain UPB to children.
And I have explained it to a number of children and they get it.
They understand it.
It makes sense.
And it works.
It is what is needed.
Because if children can understand it, we can train children in morality when they're very young.
If children can't understand your moral theories and you have to resort to aggression or bribes, then you're training them like dogs and they're going to end up with the internalized virtues of dogs, which is to say, none.
It needs to be simple enough that children can understand it because we expect children to be moral.
Right?
So you make a game and you say, let's, oh, you want this candy bar.
Let's both steal it at the same time.
No, I'm stealing it.
No, yours.
Can we both steal it?
No.
Okay.
I want you to steal it from me.
What the?
I want you to want to.
I want you to say, Dad, I want you to steal.
This candy bar from me.
I'm desperate for you to have this candy bar.
And I say, okay, I'm stealing the candy bar you want me to take.
Is that stealing?
Well, no.
Why not?
Because you want me to take it, so it's not stealing.
It's like saying, I'm giving you a present and you're stealing the present, right?
So, I mean, these are the basics that you can make a game of it.
You can really get the idea across.
And children can easily understand.
Now, I guess I understand my daughter's pretty bright and all of that, but maybe it takes a couple of tries.
Maybe it takes a week.
But they can definitely get it.
And that way, instead of making things more complicated and demanding children follow rules that are just like quantum physics, right, then you can actually make rules that children understand and appreciate.
And I would understand and appreciate your support at freedomain.com slash donate.
Hope this is helpful.
Thank you so much.
Have a lovely, lovely, well, I guess end of the year 2025.