PEACEFUL PARENTING PART 14

In this episode, we criticize the education system's shortcomings and the exploitation of children for political purposes. Join us for a discussion on prioritizing children's well-being and creating a safer environment for them.

Brief Summary

In this episode, we discuss the importance of prioritizing the well-being and protection of children. We critique the current education system and its failure to provide quality education. We condemn the manipulation and indoctrination of children for political gain. Join us as we explore how to create a world where children are safeguarded and nurtured.

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Chapters

0:00:00 Importance of Sibling Relationships in Peaceful Parenting
0:02:10 The Tragic Loss of Bond and Approval
0:12:29 The Power of Siblings in Overcoming Vanity
0:16:15 Treating Siblings Well: Witnesses to Your Childhood
0:20:53 Power Dynamics and Authority in Sibling Relationships
0:22:32 Divided Siblings and the Manipulation of Abusive Parents
0:23:52 Sacrificing the functional future for the dysfunctional past
0:24:14 Defending against rape: Punishment or Self-Defense?
0:26:02 Verbal abuse and neglect: Equally harmful to children's development
0:28:11 Family relationships and criminal activity: Morality over blood ties
0:29:35 The Responsibility of Extended Family in Child Abuse
0:32:03 Effects of Abuse on a Child's Personality
0:35:08 Avoiding Knowledge: Children vs. Adults
0:38:30 Protecting Children: Enthusiasm, Education, and Environment
0:39:32 A World that Protects Our Children

Long Summary

In this part of the conversation, I discuss the importance of prioritizing the well-being and protection of children. I criticize the current education system, stating that it often fails to provide the quality education necessary for children to thrive. I further argue that political agendas should not be prioritized over the future of children, as this can lead to decisions that do not benefit them in the long run. Additionally, I highlight the damaging effects of fear-based narratives and propaganda on children, emphasizing the need to shield them from such influences. I condemn those who manipulate and indoctrinate children for their own political gain, labeling them as sophists, propagandists, and ideologues. I emphasize the significance of collective commitment to goodness in creating a world where children are protected and nurtured.

Tags
episode, prioritizing, well-being, protection, children, education system, quality education, manipulation, indoctrination, political gain, safeguarded, nurtured

Transcript

Importance of Sibling Relationships in Peaceful Parenting

[0:00] Peaceful Parenting by Stefan Molyneux Siblings, Siblings are each other's greatest allies or greatest enemies.
There is very little in between.
Evolutionarily speaking, siblings compete for parental time, attention, and resources.
In situations of scarcity, they must view each other as rivals, enemies even, since there is not enough to go around for everyone.
On the other hand, siblings who ally with each other are virtually unbeatable in the adult arena.
A hunting or war party composed of loyal brothers can scarcely lose.
Affectionate sisters raising children in close proximity create great safety and security for their offspring. spring.
Unfortunately, since the powers that rule us always want us to be loyal to them rather than to each other, siblings are usually turned against each other from day one.

[1:09] Brothers. The way that modern society turns brothers against each other is to rigidly age-segregate children in schools, which promotes peer bonding rather than family bonding.
The older brother thus gains his status from hanging out with his peers rather than with his younger brother.
This leads to the dismal spectacle of the tag-along.
The younger brother desperately wants to spend time with his older brother and gain the status of having older friends, while the older brother's peer group asserts their dominance by constantly calling the younger brother a tag-along.
This also happens with sisters, of course.
In this way, the older brother is compelled to reject his own flesh and blood, the sibling with whom he shares 50% of his genes, in return for the social approval of unrelated peers.

The Tragic Loss of Bond and Approval

[2:10] Tragically, the older brother ends up losing both the bond of his younger brother and the approval of his peers.
His younger brother resents having been rejected for the sake of transitory classmates, while the classmates who shredded the bond grow up and move on to other lives.
The older brother ends up feeling lonely and tries to reconnect with his younger brother, but because of the prior power dynamics, the older brother refuses to submit to the humiliation of an honest apology.
The resentment of the younger brother triggers a status blowback, since the younger brother has learned that having higher status means rejecting a brother.
When his older brother reveals a need for him, thus giving him higher status, he rejects his older brother, just as his older brother rejected him when he had higher status.
Bound together in discontent is the tagline for most modern relationships.
Brothers included.

[3:14] Sisterhood works in a similar manner.
Parents who claim authority based on being older create massive power imbalances among siblings.
The older sibling, identifying with the parents, asserts authority based on age, just like they do.
This creates an artificial sense of superiority among the older siblings and an equally artificial sense of inferiority among the younger siblings.
The older siblings become addicted to feeling superior, which creates unstable egos dependent on the imaginary inferiority of those around them.
The younger siblings eventually realize that if they want to have any power at all in life, they have to detach from the older siblings, who constantly need to cast them in an inferior role.
You either reject your older siblings, or you end up with very little in life other than propping up their vainglorious and imaginary superiority.

[4:17] When the younger sibling detaches out of a need for survival, the older sibling often explodes in hostility, either directly or indirectly.
Placing your entire value on the accidental, that you are superior for something you never earned, is the root of most violence and tyranny the world over.
The older sibling is addicted to his accidental superiority, and the subjugation of the younger sibling is the drug.
The deference of the younger sibling is how the drug is delivered.
And we all know what happens to addicts when their drug is withdrawn against their will.
Unstable escalation, tyranny, and eventually, we hope, hope, healing as the withdrawal slowly dissipates and new and more authentic sources of happiness are generated in the personality.

[5:18] These dynamics are only exacerbated if the older sibling happens to be taller or more physically attractive or more intelligent.
The accidental superiority of the birth order is then supplemented by other preferred physical or mental characteristics, and the chance to break out of the addiction becomes virtually zero.
Among sisters, the well-known verbal viciousness of female conflict often manifests in the older sister implanting cruel insults into the mind of the younger sister, which ends up with her feeling inferior and unlovable.
The high of verbal abuse often implants a kind of dangerous charisma into the personality of the older sister, which can make her more attractive to men.
She has a swaggering kind of confidence that is vampirically leeched from the younger sister, which makes her seem very appealing.

[6:18] The constant rejection and humiliation of her younger sister hollows out the older sister's personality, leaving her prone to ideology.
Ideology is the attempt to substitute the drug of pretend virtue virtue, after the withdrawal of the drug, a pretend superiority through accidental characteristics.
The older sister thus often gains a lot of romantic attention, but can never settle down with any one man because of the hollowness at the center of her personality.
She failed to develop genuine value because she was provided artificial value in the form of birth order.
She gets a lot of dates, but never experiences love, and so is never able to settle down.
Those who exploit others are often charming, but can never be loved.

[7:15] The frustration of constantly drawing male attention while never winning male commitment causes escalating aggression in the older sister.
She cannot blame herself for her hollowness. She cannot take responsibility for her exploitation.
And so she turns her anger and frustration outward to society, blaming the patriarchy or the system or capitalism or other such nonsense. nonsense.
Empathy, the ability to put herself in another's shoes, has been sacrificed on the altar of vanity, as it so often is.

[7:55] All that is required for older siblings to save themselves is to imagine what it would be like to be a younger sibling.
The humility of recognizing that so much of your value is accidental is essential to the development of empathy, and thus, the capacity to love and be loved.
You cannot pair bond without trust, and you cannot trust without consistently positive behavior.
And you cannot achieve consistently positive behavior if you are addicted to subjugating others, because you both need and despise your victims, and so will eternally swing between emotional extremes.

[8:46] A man who inherits his fortune is not an entrepreneur and did not earn it himself.
A woman who is born beautiful or with a great figure did not create her own value.
A sibling who happens to be born earlier is not made more valuable through the accidents of time.
Intelligence is largely genetic, it is an accidental gift of nature, and thus should never be used to feed the vanity of the ego.
Of course, we generally prefer to gain rewards without effort.
There's nothing wrong with that. It is the root of our industrial efficiency.
It's why we don't have to get up off the couch to change the channel on the television.
However, it is essential for us to recognize that we can never take as valuable that which we did not earn.

[9:48] Let's say you're a guy with a great head of hair. It's very tempting to look in the mirror, toss your locks, and feel superior to balding or mangy-headed men.
It's just an accident, though. If you're a tall man, it's easy to feel superior to shorter men.
That's just an accident, too. We all understand that. But we so often get addicted anyway.

[10:14] Some men get really big muscles when they lift weights. Most men don't.
Some women are naturally lean and have a tough time gaining weight, even if they want to.
Some people who garden have what is called a green thumb.
They just have a natural instinct for growing things and outproduce other gardeners 10 or 20 to 1.
Some people are naturally gifted at singing. Others sound terrible, even if they take lessons.
Some people have perfect pitch. which others can't tell the difference between two similar notes.
Some people can get by on only a few hours of sleep a night.
Other people are tired if they get less than nine hours.
This is all genetic variance and a delightful variety in the species.
But the recipients of unearned gifts must strive to avoid feeling superior for being in accidental possession of great value.

[11:18] The devil, so to speak, tempts older brothers and sisters with the offer of existential value for an accidental characteristic, being older.
The only value we can possess is the virtue that we earn.
It is a whole lot easier to imagine that we have value for something we never earned than it is to manifest and spread virtue in a dangerously immoral world.
Evildoers silently applaud you for pretending to have value for that which you did not earn. That is the surest path to joining their ranks.
To actually manifest and spread virtue in the world, though?
Well, that is the most extreme sport known to man and God.
If you're not facing resistance, you're not building muscle.
If you're not being opposed, you're not doing good.
The Power of Siblings in Overcoming Vanity

[12:29] Sibling potential.
Siblings who overcome vanity and become allies are the most powerful force for good in the world.
Siblings are the only people in your life who can go through the entire journey with you.
When your parents die, only your siblings really remember your life as a child.
Your siblings remain the only witnesses to the forces that shaped you.
Your siblings have enormous, detailed, exquisite and deep knowledge about you.
How they use it often determines your future.
True bonding, true love, is when you trust someone enough to reveal your deepest thoughts and fears, knowing that you are placing great power over you in their hands.
As an adult, you can choose whether or not to reveal yourself to people.
As a child, to your siblings, you are exposed no matter what.
Imagine, as an adult, if you found out that your most secret thoughts and actions were actually recorded and published.

[13:51] Siblings see everything, like it or not.
As an adult, you have expectations of privacy. As a sibling, you have little to no privacy.
Siblings hold enormous power over each other.
This power is not earned. It is innate to witnessing childhood. childhood.
Do parents train siblings to use their power over each other for good or ill?

[14:26] It all depends on how the parents use their own power over their children for good or ill.
The opinions of anonymous strangers about you probably don't hold much weight in your world.
The opinions of your spouse and best friends hopefully do.
If you have complicated finances, a highly skilled accountant can either help you stay solvent or rob you blind. mind.
People who know everything about you hold great power over you.
Siblings don't earn this power and rarely seem to use it wisely.
If parents model the principle that larger and older equals dominant and aggressive, then older siblings will inflict that model model on younger siblings.
In other words, siblings always end up speaking the same language, the language that is taught to them by their parents.

[15:32] Aggressive parenting destroys sibling bonds.
For abusive parents, having more than one child is basically worse than useless.
All the abuse does is turn the siblings against each other, shattering the family unit over time.
Abusive parents don't just create distant siblings.
They often produce mortal enemies. means.
I've seen this play out countless times over the course of my life, and I've seen a few exceptions to this trend as well.
And I have given this speech to a large number of battling siblings.
Treating Siblings Well: Witnesses to Your Childhood

[16:15] You have to treat each other well for so many reasons. First of all, your parents are going to get old and die, and then the only witnesses to your childhood will be each other.
Your sibling is the only person who can go through the whole journey of life from you from start to end with every stop along the way they saw you learn how to walk watched you grow go through puberty learn how to date get educated get a job get married have children deal with aging you all have so much knowledge about each other you can do incredible things to help each other things Things that no one else can do.
You are like expert mechanics. You can fix anything and break everything too.
Siblings are bound together so closely that it is like living with someone whose lips are right up against your ear but who screams instead of whispering.
Of course you want to get away from someone who knows so much about you but doesn't want the best for you because they can do so much damage because of everything they know.
It's like a doctor who knows everything about the human body.
He can either heal you like crazy or torture you half to death.

[17:32] You will never meet anyone else in the future who knows you as well as your sibling does.
I don't care if you're married for 50 years and tell your spouse everything.
He or she just wasn't there for your entire childhood and hasn't seen you grow all the way up.
As siblings, you are all so close. That's not an option. That's just a historical fact.
And you can use that closeness, that knowledge of each other to raise each other to the very skies or cast each other to the very bottom, into hell, really.
If you turn on each other, if you use your deep, unearned knowledge to harm and undermine each other, you will never stop paying the price for that choice.
You will never be able to trust anyone else, not fully, because you can't trust yourself because you handled your power over another human soul so badly.
You will in fact be reproducing all the things your parents did that you hate so much.

[18:46] If you harm each other, you will be falling into the ultimate trap.
Those who suffered alongside you when you were children, they should be your natural allies.
If you allow yourself to be turned against them, you are unnecessarily following an entirely evil plan.
Divide and conquer, divide and conquer. That's all the bad people need to achieve to continue to conquer us all. or whether in the family, in society, our country, or the world as a whole.

[19:24] You, the older sibling, you were not better because you happened to be born first.
That's a really pathetic thing to base your value on. You didn't earn it, right?
And all those best friends that you threw your sibling aside for, where are they now?
Pray tell. Are they here?
Will they follow you from start to end? Will they help you watch your kids, nurse you when you are sick, talk you out of bad decisions?
Will these best buddies that you kicked your siblings to the curb for help you out when your parents get sick and need years of care and attention?
Will you be able to call them up and ask them to help with the costs of aging parents?
Of course not. You probably don't even know where they ended up.
And if you did call them, wouldn't they just kind of laugh at you?

[20:21] This is who you gave your blood kin up for.
Strangers with their own lives who live for their own needs.
Isn't that pathetic?
How could you ever trust your judgment when you made such a stupid decision?
For many years, against nature, against history, against your family, against your own blood.
Power Dynamics and Authority in Sibling Relationships

[20:53] And now you want to go to your younger siblings as if you have any kind of authority and tell them how to live and ask them for favors and still try to be in charge.
Go talk to your precious friends, they want to say. You know, your besties that you spent years kicking me to the curb for.
You know that you're going to end up alone if you don't apologize and make this right.
And you, yes, you, the younger siblings who are addicted to playing the victim, do you honestly believe that if you had been the older sibling that you wouldn't have done pretty much the same thing?
You are angry with your older siblings because they did not empathize with you.
They did not put themselves in your shoes and realize how sad and alone you were.
But have you ever tried putting yourself in your older siblings? Shoes?
Taking the full brunt of parental misdeeds? Programmed by society to prefer peers over kin?
And with a whole gaggle of younger siblings to wield power over?

[22:08] If you've not held that kind of power, it's very easy to judge those who misuse it.
You are tempted to be angry at your older sibling.
That is an essential part of the plan of abusive parents. You all fight amongst each other while we skate free of all judgment.
Divided Siblings and the Manipulation of Abusive Parents

[22:32] You claim that the negativity of your older siblings has had a great effect on you.
How much more effect did your parents have on them?
You attack each other and thereby excuse your parents.
That is exactly what they want.
They are still running the show. That is the saddest thing.
You squabble with each other and blame each other and curse each other and your parents laugh because they are let off the hook for now and all time.
You are all victims, all forced to play your part in a play orchestrated by your parents.
You all made mistakes, forgive each other as children and put the blame where it squarely belongs, on the adults.

[23:36] Your parents are part of your past. They no longer parent you.
But your siblings are not only your present, but your future as well.
Sacrificing the functional future for the dysfunctional past

[23:52] Sacrificing the functional future for the sake of the dysfunctional past is a terrible idea, one that will cost you all for the rest of your lives. if you do not change.
Defending against rape: Punishment or Self-Defense?

[24:14] Extended family, if we accept, as every moral person does, that rape is evil, would it make any sense to punish women for defending themselves against rape?
Would we argue that murder is evil, but that defending yourself against being murdered is more evil?
Would we argue that theft is morally wrong, but it is also evil to take any steps to prevent theft or punish thieves?
Of course not. If we define an action as evil, we cannot also define as evil any steps taken to prevent or punish that action.
In fact, one of the inevitable consequences of defining an action as evil is to praise and defend those who oppose that action.

[25:11] Is it evil to hit children?
It is one of the greatest evils for two main reasons The first is that the children are helpless, defenseless and bound to their abusers and trapped in their homes for many years to come, The second is that hitting children is the source of many adults evils.
Hitting children legitimizes the use of violence, teaches them that it is good for the strong to terrorize the weak, and destroys their capacity for empathy and pair bonding.

[25:56] Hitting children is breeding criminals.
Verbal abuse and neglect: Equally harmful to children's development

[26:02] Is it evil to verbally abuse children?
It can be an even greater evil than hitting them.
The personality and self-image of the child is formed by the language of his or her parents and instructors.
We start as soft concrete, moldable by those around us.
We harden over time, and it takes great effort to change our shape in adulthood.

[26:38] Is it evil to neglect children? It can be an even greater evil than verbally abusing or hitting them.
Children experience neglect as an existential death threat.
Neglect produces adults with significant social anxiety and few, if any, relationship skills.
But that is not the worst aspect. there is more.

[27:10] There is the criminal and there is the accessory to the crime.
There is the bank robber and there is the getaway driver.
Robbing a bank is illegal. Driving is not unless helping the robber drive away is the only reason the bank was robbed in the first place.
If your facilitation of a crime is the only reason the crime occurs curse, then you are equally a criminal.
If you allow child abusers to harm your children, you are equal to a child abuser.
There is no fundamental moral difference.
If you are a parent and someone abuses your child, you are fully responsible for that abuse.
There is no escape from your culpability.
Family relationships and criminal activity: Morality over blood ties

[28:11] In the law, family relationships have little to no standing.
If you rob a bank and your father is the getaway driver, he is charged regardless.
If your brother murders a woman and you help cover up the crime, you are not excused because of your blood relationship.

[28:34] This is for two reasons. The first is that morality is more important than family.
And the second is that if blood relations were excused from criminal activity, then criminals would just work with family members, and most people could never be charged.
Do you see where I am going with this? Of course you do, brilliant reader.
Pickpockets often work in pairs. Bob bumps into you and Sally takes your wallet.
Bumping into people is not illegal. Stealing their wallet is.
Both Bob and Sally are charged with the crime, since the crime only occurs because both participate.
It doesn't matter if they are husband and wife, brother and sister, father and daughter.
The moral law serves morality, Not family.
The Responsibility of Extended Family in Child Abuse

[29:35] If you were abused as a child, how much responsibility does your extended family have?
I'm talking aunts, uncles, grandparents, perhaps cousins and nieces if they're older.
There were probably dozens of extended family members around when you were a child.
Were they responsible for your abuse?
Let us ask this question another way.
If your extended family had acted strongly against your abuse, if they had confronted your parents, demanded that your family get the help it needed in order to stop the abuse, would your parents have been able to continue to abuse you?
Of course not. If your grandparents had demanded that your parents stop abusing you, either the abuse would have stopped or your grandparents would have taken you out of harm's way.
In other words, people are 100% responsible for ongoing abuse if their actions could have prevented the abuse from continuing.

[30:49] Of course, extended family members inevitably claim that they had no knowledge of any abuse that was occurring.
Very well. Although we will never have any proof, let us take them at their word.
What are they really saying?
They are saying that they had no idea that a family member they had known for decades, that they saw growing up from a child to an adult, had any capacity for cruelty or viciousness whatsoever.
Grandparents in particular raised abusive parents are they really going to claim that they had not even the slightest suspicion that the children they raised might have any capacity for cruelty whatsoever this is utterly unbelievable imagine if they had given a violent dog to their children a dog that they had raised for a full decade when the dog inevitably bit one of the children Children, would anyone believe the grandparents when they said they had absolutely no idea that the dog was capable of any aggression whatsoever?
Effects of Abuse on a Child's Personality

[32:03] A child who is experiencing abuse displays particular characteristics.
Depression, anxiety, introversion, avoidance. The symptoms are virtually endless.
Is the entirety of the extended family going to claim that they had absolutely no idea that the child or children being abused was undergoing any personality effects whatsoever?
Imagine you had a girlfriend and she went to some party and was brutally raped.
Do you not think that you would detect some of the effects of this hideous violence on her personality the next day?
If that example is too harsh, what if she had just been beaten up or robbed?
Do you think that she would be exactly the same the next day and would show no difference in her personality or interactions whatsoever?
Can you imagine the boyfriend of some woman who had experienced a violent crime claiming that he had no idea that she had been attacked at all?
How could he possibly know?

[33:14] If you were abused, and your extended family claims to have no idea that anything negative had ever occurred, then they cannot also claim to be close to you, or love you, or care about you, because they are claiming to have no clue about your personality, your history, your experiences, or how you were parented.
What is even worse is that every single adult on this planet knows that child abuse is a significant risk in the world and thus needs to inquire of every child in their vicinity, especially within their own families, whether or not abuse is occurring.
People who claim not to know things that every moral person has an obligation to know do not get excused. they are even further condemned.
Even in the legal system ignorance of the law is no excuse even when the laws are staggeringly complicated and sometimes contradictory.

[34:20] Also, as a child were you forgiven if you forgot that there was a test on some particular day and ended up failing that test? Of course not.
It was your job to know when there was a test and to prepare for it.
Well, it is the job of your extended family to keep you safe and make sure that you are not being harmed in any way.
In fact, extended family members who fail to intervene in situations of child abuse are doing so because they fully expect that their claims of ignorance will be accepted down the road in the years and decades to come.
Avoiding Knowledge: Children vs. Adults

[35:08] Every extended family member who refused to ask you if you were harmed as a child is explicitly avoiding knowledge and thus cannot claim a lack of knowledge as an excuse.
If you know you have an exam coming up and you fail to study for it, you are responsible for your failing grade because you specifically and explicitly avoided gaining the knowledge you needed to pass the exam.
It is a sick and twisted aspect of society that we punish children for avoiding required knowledge, but we hand out endless forgiveness to adults who avoided infinitely more important knowledge whether the children in their family were being harmed or abused in any way.

[36:04] Grandparents who raised abusive parents do not want to look in the mirror and see the harm that they have done and know that harm is continuing so of course they mindlessly chatter on about unimportant topics avoiding the reality of child abuse in the family they created, They may even enjoy watching the abuse get re-inflicted on the next generation.
Sometimes immoral people are not just avoidant, but actively sadistic.
As a parent, you are entirely responsible for ensuring that your children are not abused. used.
If a stranger verbally attacks them in public, you must charge to the rescue.

[36:57] If a crazy person pushes them to the ground, you must defend them.
If they are bullied by another child, you must get them to safety and ensure their continued security.
If a man on a bus grabs your daughter and tells her that she is going to die soon, that everyone is going to die soon, you have to protect her, not just from being grabbed, but from the verbal threat of imminent and universal death.
If your children are told at school that they are evil on the grounds of sex, race or socioeconomic status you must protect them from this verbal abuse, If their teachers tell them that the world is going to end soon because plants might conceivably have a bit too much food then you need to reason with that teacher, And if the teacher does not listen to reason, you need to get your children out of this teacher's classroom.
It's not optional. You simply cannot allow people to verbally and physically abuse your children.

[38:14] As I said before, life becomes a whole lot simpler if you accept and act on universal, simple principles.

Protecting Children: Enthusiasm, Education, and Environment

[38:30] What is more universal than protect your children?
If your child is bored at school, you need to protect her enthusiasm for learning by fixing or changing her environment.
If your child is threatened with being drugged because he is bored or restless, you need to protect your child.
If your child is born into mind-crushing economic slavery due to national debts and unfunded liabilities, you need to protect your child by relentlessly advocating, for a more sane and sustainable political and economic system.
If your child will be harmed by a divorce, as almost all children are, then you need to find a way to work it out with your spouse and stay together to keep them safe.

A World that Protects Our Children

[39:32] Imagine a world that honestly operated on the simple, universal principle it claims to live by.
Protect our children.
We wouldn't force our children into terrible schools.
We wouldn't sell their future to bribe voters in the present?
We wouldn't fill their precious heads with doomsday scenarios of the world ending by weather?
We wouldn't let sophists, propagandists, and ideologues loose on their innocent minds to program them to bow before political power?
The world could be a paradise, But we need to be good.