This episode delves into peaceful parenting, childhood experiences, literature's impact, Scared Straight program, genuine apologies, moral knowledge, trust, and taking responsibility for our actions.
Brief Summary
In this episode, we explore peaceful parenting and the impact of childhood experiences on our perspective. We discuss the importance of literature, reflect on the Scared Straight program, and emphasize the need for genuine apologies in parenting. We stress the significance of moral knowledge and highlight the importance of trust and taking responsibility for our actions.
Chapters
0:00:00 Reader's Digest Impact on Childhood
0:02:22 The Trauma of Corrupted Morality
0:05:22 Society's Inability to Defend Against Violence
0:09:17 Elders' Failure to Address Significant Evil in Schools
0:12:40 The Failure of Adults to Address Immorality
0:16:31 The Taboo of Moral Hypocrisy
0:17:33 Society's Education by Evildoers
0:20:03 Society's collusion with bullies
0:23:17 Tragic consequences of unchecked immorality
0:26:08 Hedonism vs. the necessity of virtue
0:27:32 Society: A Dark Comedy of Self-Righteousness
0:34:04 Apologizing and Restoring Trust
0:39:20 Restitution and Commitment for Restoring Trust
0:42:07 Apologizing to Children, Excuses, and Taking Responsibility
0:45:19 The irrationality of condemning after apologizing for hitting
0:47:52 Apologies without admitting motivations hold no meaning
0:50:58 The Tough Question: Why Did You Hit Your Children?
0:54:13 Avoiding Accountability: Excuses and Post Hoc Fallacy
0:59:00 The Truth Behind Hitting Children
1:01:20 The Importance of Strength and Integrity in Speech
Long Summary
In this episode, we dive deep into the topic of peaceful parenting and the impact of childhood experiences on our perspective. We start by reflecting on our own upbringing and how it shaped our belief in the importance of peaceful parenting. We discuss how early exposure to literature such as Reader's Digest magazines had a profound impact on our lives.
Next, we explore the Scared Straight program, where troubled youths receive lectures from prisoners to deter them from a life of crime. We delve into the purpose of our book, which aims to reform aggressive parents and prevent future parents from becoming aggressive themselves. We emphasize that abusive parents use aggression to punish morally, corrupting their children's virtue in the process.
Drawing from personal experiences, we share an incident where we were bullied as children and the lack of protection we received from adults. We express our astonishment at the contradiction between moral lectures from teachers and the presence of bullies within school environments. This disconnect between words and actions led us to question traditional parenting approaches and advocate for peaceful parenting.
Continuing the conversation, we discuss the presence of evil in society and how adults often fail to address or protect children from it. We highlight the hypocrisy of morally sensitive children being lectured and punished while immoral individuals are enabled and ignored. We draw parallels to different scenarios, such as doctors ignoring obvious signs of illness in their own family members, to illustrate the lack of action in addressing evil.
Moving on, we stress the importance of moral knowledge and its impact on shaping our actions. We acknowledge that some people will appreciate this knowledge and use it to avoid committing acts of aggression towards their own children. However, we also recognize that there will be individuals who vehemently oppose this knowledge due to various reasons.
Emphasizing the significance of apologies, we discuss how trust can be restored through credible actions rather than empty words. We highlight the importance of consistency, measurable achievements, and restitution when making amends. We delve into the 7-to-1 ratio in relationships, where it takes seven good days to make up for one bad day, and caution against going to bed angry to avoid accumulating more deficits.
Wrapping up the conversation, we address apologies in the context of parenting. We stress the need for genuine apologies without excuses, breaking the cycle of abuse, and taking responsibility for our actions. We emphasize that hitting children is not justified by stress or a bad childhood and that the blame lies on us, not on them. We urge parents to apologize sincerely, without manipulation, and to be honest about their reasons for hitting their children, in order to regain their trust and make positive changes for the better.
Tags
peaceful parenting, childhood experiences, literature, Scared Straight program, genuine apologies, parenting, moral knowledge, trust, taking responsibility, perspective
Transcript
Reader's Digest Impact on Childhood
[0:00] Peaceful Parenting by Stéphane Molyneux, part 15. How to apologize.
When I was a little boy growing up in England, I found massive stacks of Reader's Digest magazines about to be thrown out.
I brought them to my room and read them voraciously. They actually had quite a big impact on my life.
Laughter, the best medicine taught me good humor. Drama in real life taught me physical courage. and I vividly remember a brutal series of articles about the Scared Straight program.
In this program, young urban at-risk youths received horrifying lectures from hardened criminals languishing in prison.
I remember one older, bald black man telling the young men that they maybe thought they were tough, but they wouldn't be so tough when they were forced to become someone's girlfriend in prison.
The older man also expressed the fervent desire that someone had told him when he was younger how terrible a life of crime was.
[1:15] Does this book aim to reform aggressive parents or prevent parents-to-be from becoming aggressive?
Is it punishment or reward?
All parents who have aggressed against their children will feel punished by this book.
All future parents inspired by this book to become peaceful will gain the enormous rewards of virtue.
In particular, abusive parents punish morally. orally.
The blows, yelling, and other punishments are designed to drive the nails of corrupted virtue deep into the flesh and minds of their children.
In the same way that a needle breaks skin as a delivery mechanism for the medicine, aggression against children breaks them as a delivery mechanism for corrupted morality.
The Trauma of Corrupted Morality
[2:22] Physical injuries are not traumatic.
Even child abuse is not eternally traumatic. It passes, like all pleasure and suffering.
The real trauma is the corrupted morality that infects the soul of the child and programs it for the remainder of life.
[2:50] When I was a child, a friend of mine and I were hiking in the woods, and we were captured by two boys in their late teens.
They forced us to stay with them, built a fire, and subjected us to various threats.
I was a fairly small boy, and my friend was even smaller, and also had asthma to boot.
The taller young man called him a sucky fag, and my helpless friend burst into tears.
I cried out, why don't you pick on someone your own size, and got punched in the stomach as a result.
Eventually, they let us go, reminding us that if we told anyone or went to the police, they would find us and kill us.
I clearly remember the feeling of helplessness as we slowly shuffled our way home.
I had a deeply dismal sense that society was, in fact, utterly unable to protect us.
[3:58] It wasn't just about that endless afternoon. It was about how these teens had made their way through society and ended up as violent bullies preying on little children.
And no one and nothing had done anything to stop them or punish them or remove them from society.
These bullies were taking a fairly significant risk beating up little children, but they, being years older than me, had correctly assessed the society they lived in and had come to the conclusion that they could, in fact, get away with whatever they wanted.
These two brutal young men were actually giving us an essential education education about the true nature of the social world we lived in.
Society's Inability to Defend Against Violence
[5:22] Obviously, I was unable to effectively defend myself or do anything against these two young men, but they were also teaching me that society could not defend me either or do anything to restrain them.
The fact that they were willing to offer death threats against us was also very instructive.
These were two young men with nothing to lose.
No fear of prison, no concern for consequences.
I didn't actually think they would murder us, but I was apprehensive about the very real possibility of being repeatedly stalked and beaten up.
[6:14] These two bullies had existed in society for 18 or 19 years.
I knew their ages because they graduated that school year.
They were at my school and on the Monday morning after their violence in the woods one of them sneeringly asked me how was your weekend kiddo?
For 18 years, these violent boys had operated in society without fear without consequences without containment.
The school was perfectly happy to have them continue to attend, giving them access to countless victims over the years.
The police were either utterly unaware of their existence and immorality, or knew about it, but chose to do nothing.
[7:11] Let me tell you what was so utterly strange about all of this.
Here it is, plain and simple.
My school, like all schools, claimed to be a moral and educational institution.
My teachers constantly lectured me about morals, virtue, responsibility, altruism, you name it.
However, However, significant evil was in their midst.
[7:50] Isn't this a strange thing? I remember feeling how strange it was, even at the time, at the age of 11.
It was like having an uncle, who was a famous doctor, world regarded for his ability to spot incredibly subtle signs of illness, whose wife had a giant tumor growing out of her neck.
This doctor would give endless lectures to medical students about the need to identify the first incredibly subtle hints of illness, how a slight droop of the lip could indicate a hidden tumor in the neck.
And during his lectures, he would show a picture of himself and his wife.
And the whole class could see her enormous tumor, but would say nothing about it. Nothing at all.
Wouldn't this be a very strange kind of surreal pantomime?
All these students nodding along with this doctor taking copious notes about microscopic signs of sudden illness and completely ignoring the giant tumor on his wife's neck.
[8:58] Either the doctor did not see the tumor, which means he has no capacity to detect even the most obvious illness, or he did see the tumor but had no interest in fixing it.
You see the parallels? else.
Elders' Failure to Address Significant Evil in Schools
[9:17] Significant evil roamed the halls of my high school, preying upon helpless children in the wilderness.
My teachers and elders constantly lectured me about morals and virtue and warned me against little habits like laziness and tardiness that could potentially grow into really bad bad behavior.
You see, I had to do my homework, but they did not have to protect me.
[9:52] Our elders were constantly giving us endless sermons about the tiny, subtle signs of future immorality.
I vividly remember the vice-principal in my junior high school lecturing us for an hour on the need to improve our vocabulary, grandly gifting us each a thesaurus at the end of his speech.
I also remember our gym teacher giving us grueling lectures when some of the boys made fun of the wrist flip shown on a video on how to throw a basketball.
Boy, did we ever receive a lot of lectures about tiny negative habits and how they could lead to endless moral disasters over time.
These elders were experts in all the tiny signs of potential evil.
[10:45] However, still, great evil walked the halls of their institutions.
And no one, not one elder, did anything about it, or said anything about it, or protected the children, or seemed to recognize this evil at all.
They were like bloodhounds that claimed to be able to follow a tiny scent from miles away, but proved unable to sniff out rotting bodies right at their feet.
And it was then that I began to realize that society was, in fact, a kind of madhouse, where elders lectured and bullied morally sensitive children about virtue, while letting true evildoers roam the halls at will and prey on children whenever they felt like it.
[11:54] Another time when I was about the same age a boy unplugged a video game I was playing at a bowling alley and I called him a jerk, his cold-eyed older brother then chased me around the school for a week or two saying that he was going to kill me for hitting his brother he punched me on the shoulder one morning as I was climbing the stairs and he was descending them, I told him that I did not hit his brother but it didn't matter, I remember sitting on a green velour armchair in my apartment, playing taps on the harmonica, remembering the eighteen-year-old man jabbing his finger at me and saying, You're dead!
The Failure of Adults to Address Immorality
[12:40] I never dreamt of going to a teacher or other adult for help.
Even then, I was an empiricist.
All the adults, hundreds of them, who knew about these brutal young men, either did not know that they were immoral, or chose not to do anything about that immorality.
Or, perhaps even worse, they knew about this evil, wanted to do something about it, but for some reason felt or knew that it could not be fixed.
Either they didn't know, or they knew but didn't care, or they knew and cared but also knew that it was impossible to fix.
[13:45] Morally sensitive children were lectured, threatened, punished.
Immoral children were enabled, ignored.
Punishments were only for those already good. Evil was allowed to grow without repercussions.
[14:12] In other words, diet books were only given to slender people.
The obese got endless buffets of their favorite foods.
I stopped believing in the virtue of society after that.
I didn't mind particularly that society was not virtuous.
I did mind that society was hypocritical.
[14:43] I viewed a mugger as more honest than my teachers.
A mugger doesn't give you moral lectures, he just threatens you and takes your money.
There is violence, but at least no hypocrisy.
It's actually almost refreshing. rushing.
Teachers, though, and parents, obviously, and priests, endlessly lecture you about virtue and good habits and morality.
But only if you are morally sensitive to begin with.
If you are a brutal, aggressive young person, they just kind of ignore you, veer away, avoid you, let you prey on the morally sensitive smaller children, and then go back to lecturing your victims about the need to be strong in the face of immorality.
[15:44] I initially thought that this was perhaps a smaller, more localized problem, but as I got older, I realized that no one could ever talk about this in society, anywhere at any time.
If no one ever talks about a problem, then that problem must be either non-existent or all-pervasive.
[16:14] People at dinner parties rarely discuss the dangers of alien abduction.
It's not really a big issue in society.
However, people would not tense up and get weird if the topic came up.
They would probably laugh about it, make a few jokes, and move on.
The Taboo of Moral Hypocrisy
[16:31] But the topic of moral hypocrisy is very different.
No one talks about it. and everyone gets deeply and eerily tense whenever the subject comes up.
It's the biggest secret we have as people and as a society the whole world over.
Of course, I don't know for certain what would have happened if I had gone to my mother, a teacher, a priest, or some other adult and told them about the danger I was in.
It certainly is possible that these violent young men would have been efficiently and effectively dealt with, removed from school or society, imprisoned or educated or fixed in some way so that they would not repeat their evils in the future, but it is extremely unlikely. likely.
Society's Education by Evildoers
[17:33] In their own way, evildoers educate the innocent on the true nature of society.
The young men who brutalized me did so because they had spent years learning, to their great relief and joy, no doubt, that they faced zero repercussions for their actions.
[18:01] I imagine the 18-year-olds who aggressed against me had been bullies for at least a decade, probably more.
In other words, they had 10 years of experience regarding the unwillingness or inability of society to deal with bullies.
I was being bullied for the first time, at least outside of my home, but they had 10 years of experience. experience.
They bullied because they knew society was impotent to deal with them.
If you had to place a bet on who would win a tennis match, would you bet on the person who was picking up a tennis racket for the first time, or someone who had been training hard for ten years straight? it.
We work the odds, right? I had no experience with bullies in the woods.
The bullies in the woods had ten years of experience in bullying.
Who knew more about how society dealt with bullies?
Who had explored, tentatively at first, then with increasing confidence, how easy it was to prey on the little children that society so loudly proclaims, that it lives to protect.
[19:26] Funny story. It turns out society is lying and the children are not only unprotected, they and their bullies are forced into the same buildings year after year like an innocent man tossed into prison.
This exact same society praises brave soldiers and courageous superheroes for standing tall and fighting evil but then cowers before teenage bullies feeding them their endless victims in bottomless cowardice and appeasement.
Society's collusion with bullies
[20:03] Society lectures the good and cowers before and colludes with the bullies.
The bullies and society are the same.
My teachers bullied me with moral lectures.
My bullies attacked me with their fists.
My bullies were infinitely more honest than my teachers.
The moral lectures last a lifetime. Being punched hurts only for a day or two, then disappears.
[20:52] My teachers, my elders, my parents and priests did me infinitely more damage than those who merely punched me in the woods.
I thought that my teachers were failing to protect me from the bullies.
I then began to understand that my bullies were trying to protect me from my teachers.
I'm not saying that this was conscious or willed in any way, but this was the effect.
Do you see? That which hurts in the moment is trying to protect you from what will hurt you more in the future.
If you put your hand in a fire as a child, you pull it back because it hurts like crazy.
The pain in the moment is trying to protect you from greater pain in the future.
Bullies are trying to teach us that society is the real bully.
[22:06] Bullies reveal to us the moral hypocrisy of our moralizing elders. elders.
By physically attacking us, the bullies inoculate us against the moral attacks of our hypocritical elders.
All these people who loudly proclaim that they exist to serve and protect you, well, they actually serve and protect me, your bully.
I'm trying to wake you up to the truth of reality and plug you from the matrix.
And I know it hurts like crazy, but it would hurt a whole lot more if you continued to swallow the moral lies of your so-called superiors.
[22:51] Physical bullies are the inevitable antidote provoked by the hypocritical moral bullying of our social elders.
In their own way, they are desperately trying to help us.
They certainly helped me.
Tragic consequences of unchecked immorality
[23:17] I knew another boy in my early teens who bullied his single mother.
He would throw her against the wall and hold her there, threatening her with his fists.
He had a wildly self-destructive streak and was capable of great cruelty.
He got into wild fistfights with boys much bigger than him.
He ended up dying in a fiery motorcycle crash at the age of nineteen, He also sailed through school, church and society Without anyone noticing or doing anything about his obvious self-destruction Corruption and immorality.
[24:03] Either nobody noticed, nobody cared, or nobody believed it could be fixed, But if his immorality could not be fixed Then why was society pretending that it could fix immorality?
This would be like society morally shaming you for aging aging society cannot stop you from aging it cannot stop or fix the passage of time.
[24:35] There are books on how to lose weight, because weight can be controlled.
There aren't any books on how to reverse time, because time cannot be controlled.
[24:47] If, when confronted with evil, society recoils because evil cannot be fixed, then why does society lecture everyone about how to fix evil?
Oh, I suppose it's because everyone just likes talking about virtue to feel good, because actually being good often doesn't feel that good at all.
It's kind of like the famous champagne socialists who claim to love and care about the poor but never actually spend any time around poor people.
They say that they want to feed the hungry, but if you ever signed them up to spoon gruel at a local food kitchen, they would roll their eyes and jet off to Monaco.
Society is a giant conspiracy of pretend virtue.
Society is addicted to feelings of virtue, but determinedly avoids actual virtue. you.
Feeling virtuous feels good. Being virtuous often feels bad, at least in the short run.
Hedonism vs. the necessity of virtue
[26:08] Preferring to feel good rather than be good gives free reign to evildoers, because all they have to do is threaten you in order to get you to back off.
Since you are driven by hedonism rather than virtue, you will always give up virtue in the face of discomfort.
Virtue is required because it often feels bad, just as dieting is required because bad food tastes good, and exercise is required because inertia often feels better than strenuous movement.
We require discipline to do the things we don't want to do, which feels bad in the moment and perhaps for quite a while.
I was constantly lectured about discipline and homework and hard work and being on time and doing the right thing.
Things I didn't want to do as a child.
I was constantly lectured about the virtues of doing things that are difficult or unpleasant, practicing my violin, memorizing the times tables, getting up early by a society that enables bullies because dealing with them is difficult and unpleasant.
Society: A Dark Comedy of Self-Righteousness
[27:32] It's the darkest comedy known to man or God.
Once you realize that society is largely a run-down neighborhood populated by junkies addicted to the dopamine of self-righteousness, everything becomes bitterly clear, eye-wateringly illuminated.
You finally see, but it burns.
You can accurately predict outcomes that you desperately don't want to come true.
You're right, and you're depressed.
You're accurate and hate it, Well, as the good book says He who increases in wisdom also increases in sorrow.
[28:41] Drug addicts constantly lie and are emotional terrorists.
If you don't do what they want, they increase their aggression until you comply.
Drug addicts often deny their addiction, reserving their rage for anyone who points out the basic facts.
And drug addicts are defined by their terror of withdrawal.
They continue taking destructive drugs out of fear of the consequences of getting clean.
We all know that we are surrounded by bottomless moral hypocrites.
Dopamine drug addicts who get their fix by loudly proclaiming their dedication to virtue while betraying every value they claim to hold.
It's a scam, and a con, and a deadly betrayal of the young.
[29:51] Apologizing to Children, A fork in the road exists for every soul that encounters a credible new moral argument.
Improve my life or attack the messenger, If I somehow found out tomorrow that cows were highly intelligent beings, I would be appalled at the idea of eating them.
I wouldn't attack myself for eating them in the past, though, because there was no evidence that cows were highly intelligent.
In fact, there was evidence to the contrary.
I would be very surprised, and I would change my ways.
But I wouldn't condemn myself for my prior actions, because otherwise I would end up paranoid that every reasonable assumption of mine was wildly false.
And every morally neutral act was in fact stone evil, and I would become paralyzed, unable to trust any of my judgments or reasoning, which is no way to live.
Philosophy is designed to give you certainty through reason and evidence.
Philosophy cannot grant you omniscience because an omniscient mind would have no need for a methodology to distinguish truth from falsehood, no need for epistemology.
[31:15] However, if for decades I had publicly proclaimed that the cows were brilliant, noble, and deserving of full human rights, but I secretly ate them in private, and my secret was revealed, then I would want to shoot the messenger with every metaphorical bullet I had.
A lack of knowledge is forgivable. Rank hypocrisy is another matter.
An 18th century doctor who failed to prescribe antibiotics for a simple infection would not be a bad doctor because antibiotics had not been invented yet.
A doctor in the 21st century who claims to follow the Hippocratic Oath and loudly and publicly proclaims his unrelenting dedication to do all that is best for his patients, but fails to prescribe antibiotics for a simple infection, well, that is another matter.
Those dedicated to virtue, who merely lack knowledge, improve with new knowledge.
Those dedicated to hypocrisy attack new knowledge with everything they have.
[32:31] Those dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge receive new knowledge with great thanks.
Those dedicated to the cover-up of evil rail against clearer definitions of immorality.
If you want to visit a friend, you are happy when he is home.
If you want to rob his house, you are unhappy when he is home.
[33:03] What will the world do? with the moral knowledge contained in this book.
Many of you will hold on to it with great gratitude, since it encourages, perhaps even allows, you to avoid the great evil of terrorizing your own children.
Not all of you, though. Many out there will rage against this book for reasons too obvious to mention.
Some of you will hang in the balance, wanting to change, ashamed of what you have done.
And there's no shame in that. I'm ashamed of some of the things I've done as well.
You want to improve, but you don't know how to start.
Apologizing and Restoring Trust
[34:04] If you are convinced that you have wronged someone, the first thing you need to do is apologize.
If you publicly accuse an employee of stealing from you, but then video evidence proves him innocent, what do you do?
Apologize, of course. But what does that really mean? What is the purpose of an apology?
The purpose of an apology is to restore trust.
The purpose of a doctor is to restore health.
If you break your arm, the purpose of the doctor is to restore the functionality of your arm.
If you break trust, the purpose of an apology is to restore that trust.
Trust is empirical, not merely verbal.
[35:06] There's a funny meme on the internet where someone is challenged about his outlandish claim, and he replies, Source, trust me, bro.
Well, you have no reason to trust some random person on the internet, so why would you?
Sophists and manipulators have always wanted virtues to be verbal, not empirical, because language can be manipulated.
Facts, not so much.
[35:36] Credibility is empirical, not verbal.
It's not complicated. If you want people to lose weight, don't be fat.
If you want others to grow a six-pack, have a six-pack.
If you want people to have better skin, don't have a face full of pimples.
If you want to tell everyone how to be happier, don't be miserable.
One certain marker of sophist is someone who tries to instruct you in the absence of empirical evidence of their own success.
It's infinitely easier to say, trust me, bro, than it is to earn someone's trust through years of consistently positive behavior and measurable achievement.
[36:32] In the long-running show America's Got Talent, mediocre singers would sometimes get angry at Simon Cowell, a judge, because they claimed that they sang better than he does.
However, Simon Cowell never claimed to be a singer, but rather a good judge of musical talent, which is well established by his mentoring of wildly successful acts over many decades.
Oh, it's really tragic how many successful people are lectured on success Success by unsuccessful people.
Ah, vanity, one of the greatest sins.
[37:13] If you publicly accuse an employee of a crime and it turns out that she is innocent, you have done her a great harm. How do you fix that?
Apologies, actions designed to restore trust, require three components.
One, the apology itself, which is an admission of fault in the same scope and context as the accusation of wrongdoing.
If you accuse someone or wrong them publicly, then the apology must also be public.
[37:51] 2. Restitution for the wrongdoing. If your employee spends two weeks in agony because you accuse her of stealing, then give her at least a month's salary as a bonus as restitution.
Restitution needs to be empirical, not merely verbal, because the results of the accusation or wrongdoing were empirical, not merely verbal.
Your employee lost sleep, a peace of mind, her fight-or-flight amygdala response was activated, she experienced great upset.
If she was wearing a smartwatch, all this would be empirically recorded.
[39:00] These actions are all necessary, but not sufficient for the restoration of trust.
Your employee might choose to quit after your false accusation, even if you perform all these steps.
That's entirely her right, of course.
Restitution and Commitment for Restoring Trust
[39:20] If you have wronged someone and go through the above three steps, and she chooses to continue the relationship, trust is only restored after you have behaved honorably for a significant period of time.
[39:38] In general, there is a 7 to 1 ratio of good to bad in relationships.
If you have one bad day, you need seven good days to make up for it.
This is because we are generally hardwired to be more attentive to negative stimuli for obvious evolutionary reasons, when you understand this you will not let many bad days accumulate in your relationship because the debt quickly becomes unpayable and the relationship is doomed, a bad week in a relationship is only repaired after almost two months of great behavior, A bad year takes seven years to recover from, and a bad decade, well, recovery is impossible because you'll both be in the grave.
A bad hour can be fixed the same day.
A bad decade can never be fixed at all.
Imagine how attentive you would be to following directions in the woods if you knew that every every step you took in the wrong direction would take seven steps to correct.
[41:03] The seven-to-one ratio is just a rule of thumb, an average between extremes.
Mild grumpiness is different from vicious betrayal.
Distracted inattentiveness is different from a verbal assault.
The worse the accusation or wrongdoing, the more time is needed to restore trust.
How long does it take a wife to trust her husband after he has an affair?
If it was a brief emotional affair, that is one thing.
If he had another family for a decade, that is quite another.
This is why people tell you not to go to bed angry. You're just accumulating more deficits.
[41:50] People tend to end relationships when they instinctively recognize recognize that restitution has become impossible, either due to the severity or the longevity of the wrongdoing.
Apologizing to Children, Excuses, and Taking Responsibility
[42:07] If you have wronged your children, what does an apology look like?
Well, first of all, you have to apologize, and without excuses, which is very hard.
It's a well-known trope that if an apology contains the word but, then everything before that word can be discarded.
I'm sorry, but you provoked me just means you provoked me.
Excuses are promises of repetition. If you apologize for being angry but say that you were provoked, then you are just giving yourself permission to be angry again the next time you perceive provocation.
[42:57] Parental excuses repeat not just for the parents, but intergenerationally for the children as well.
If you regret hitting your children, and you say, I'm sorry I hit you, but I was hit myself as a child, then what if you told them that being hit as a child is a valid excuse for hitting your own children?
And thus the cycle repeats, because they were hit as children, now they have an excuse for hitting their own children, and it all starts up again because of your pride and your thirst for an excuse.
[43:39] Also, you can never claim an excuse that you have denied to your child.
If your boy hits another girl and says, I hit her because I've been hit as a child, would you accept that as an excuse? Of course not.
As an adult, you can't claim an excuse that you would deny to your own child.
If your boy hits the girl and then claims, but she made me really angry, would you accept that as an excuse? Of course not.
Therefore, you cannot claim any excuses when you apologize to your children or anyone else for that matter.
Apologies need to come without footnotes or asterisks.
[44:33] Excuses are abdications of responsibility.
I was angry because I was provoked. Well, provocation is a constant factor in life.
So you're just promising to do it again when the right circumstances inevitably present themselves.
If there are no excuses for your children, there are none for you.
You can't give more moral responsibility to your children than you take for yourself as an adult.
You also cannot inflict sudden moral condemnations for behaviors that you have modeled for years.
The irrationality of condemning after apologizing for hitting
[45:19] If you apologize for hitting your son when he is 8 years old and you are 40, then it's irrational and abusive to tell him that he must never hit anyone else ever again.
And if he does, he is totally morally responsible for that bad action.
[45:40] If you grew up speaking English, how long will it take for you to forget English?
If you hit children at the age of 40, how can you condemn them for hitting others when they are 32 years younger than you?
In other words, how can you blame them for their youthful mistakes when you continue to make those mistakes for 32 extra years? Thanks for watching!
If you hit your children for eight years, then they're going to continue their aggression for months or years after you reform and apologize.
And the blame for that lies on you, not them.
The captain of a super-tanker ship needs to start cutting his engines six hours before he wants to stop. The momentum is enormous.
It takes even longer to turn the ship around. The captain can change his mind in an instant, but it takes hours or days for the supertanker to follow his thoughts.
Parenting is momentum, for good or ill.
When you apologize for hitting your children, you also have to apologize for lying to them.
[47:07] It's a pretty horrible situation, actually.
If you hit your children for eight years, you constantly lied to them about why you were hitting them.
You told them that you were hitting them because they were bad and deserved it and you were being a good parent by punishing them.
[47:30] However, it turns out that you were bad for hitting them and they did not deserve it.
And you were being a bad parent by assaulting them.
Apologizing for actions is usually easier than admitting motivations, but without admitting motivations, apologies mean less than nothing.
Apologies without admitting motivations hold no meaning
[47:52] They're just traps designed to pretend to restore trust while continuing the exploitation.
[48:00] You will be very tempted to say to yourself and your children the following.
I'm sorry for hitting you. That was wrong. But it's how I was raised, and it's how everyone in my family deals with their children, and everyone I know.
And I did get angry when you didn't listen or do the right thing, which doesn't make what I did right.
But I'm just trying to help you understand why it happened.
Parenting turned out to be way more difficult than I anticipated and I did lose my temper but my work life can be really crazy and your mom was going through that health scare and we were really tight on money it's a lot of unexpected bills and then my car broke down and I was biting my nails until they hurt every day it was just a really really bad time look I'm not saying I handled it super well but there was a lot that was going on that you guys didn't know about that that made it harder for me to keep my temper.
Again, I'm not blaming you. I'm just trying to give you the circumstances so it makes a bit more sense.
Oh, I wasn't just this random mean ogre who woke up in the morning looking forward to doing what I did.
There were reasons which you wouldn't know about and shouldn't know about.
And I'm telling you now so you don't take it so personally.
[49:19] Right.
That is all total crap.
If you say that you didn't really want to hit your children, but habits and circumstances conspired to make you do it, you're just telling them that they can expect to be hit again when the habits and circumstances re-emerge.
Also, believe it or not, children who are trapped at home with parents who hit them also experience significant stress, fear, and anger.
Did you, as a parent, ever excuse their bad behavior because they were stressed, frightened, angry, and upset?
Of course you didn't. That's why you hit them.
So, you are saying that stress is a justification for bad behavior. Ah, but only for adults.
Only for 40-year-olds facing stress at work. Never for 8-year-olds facing violence at home.
[50:25] After you apologize, you will now ask them to be good, while showing them that they can create endless justifications for bad behavior, so it isn't really their fault at all.
Also, you were saying that they can behave badly, at least up until the age of 40 or so, and it's not really important, as long as they can find some external pretend justifications to excuse themselves.
The Tough Question: Why Did You Hit Your Children?
[50:58] So, what do you say?
In other words, why did you hit your children?
It's a very tough question, and perhaps you are feeling some shame. Maybe a lot.
It's hard, but necessary, I'm afraid.
You must accept the shame so you can change for the better, if you tell your children that you hit them because you were hit yourself as a child then you are teaching them that human beings have no free will that we are all just a series of dominoes that get knocked over from the beginning of time, and that you hit them for acting badly as children while also knowing that children who are hit act badly, This is the moral equivalent of slipping alcohol into their hot chocolate then punishing them for being drunk.
[52:03] Why did you hit your children?
You can't say that you hit them because of external circumstances.
Because you did not hit them in public, or in front of a policeman, or at a parent-teacher conference, or at church, or the mall.
You were perfectly able to refrain from hitting your children.
So you cannot blame external circumstances for causing you to hit your children.
Since you clearly exercised total control over hitting them, and could stop for long periods at will.
If you claim that you hit your children because of stress at work, well, the stress you feel at work doesn't vanish the moment you step out in public, right?
Going to the mall doesn't magically erase all of your external stressors.
But you didn't hit your children at the mall, even though you still felt stressed.
[53:06] Stress does not cause you to hit your children.
Your bad childhood does not cause you to hit your children.
As an adult, you did not have a bad childhood when you were sitting at home, but a really great childhood when you take your children to the mall.
You were not beaten as a child when you yelled at your children in the backyard, yard, but peacefully reasoned with as a child when you took your children to church.
If, as a parent, you ever hissed at your children, just wait till we get home, then you did not hit your children for any external reason.
[53:53] You hit your children because you could get away with it.
You hit your children because you were bigger and they were smaller and dependent on you.
Avoiding Accountability: Excuses and Post Hoc Fallacy
[54:13] Why did you hit your children?
Because you wanted to.
And you could.
I can feel the moral conscience of the world, billions of souls, recoiling from this simple statement of obvious fact.
[54:37] Everyone who does wrong wants to create a complicated series of domino-style causalities so they can somehow live with having done wrong.
Certainly when we see people who've done very bad things we almost always see a bad childhood, this is a basic logical error post hoc ergo propter hoc after this therefore because of this, sure sometimes it makes sense people open their umbrellas after It starts raining, therefore they open their umbrellas because it is raining.
Makes sense, but not always.
People sometimes receive a cancer diagnosis after they get a test.
Does that mean that they receive their cancer diagnosis because they got tested?
Therefore, no one should ever get tested because testing causes cancer? Of course not.
[55:45] The problem with seeing bad childhoods behind adult immorality is that it avoids the rather essential fact that many people become better because of their bad childhoods.
Saying that Bob became an alcoholic because his father was an alcoholic does not explain why his brother never touched alcohol because his father was an alcoholic.
[56:12] Saying that you hit your children with a belt because your father did that to you, is not rational or causal.
It is an excuse, a pathetic excuse, plain and simple.
You have less excuse to hit your children with a belt if your father did it to you because you know exactly how much it hurts, how terrifying and painful it is.
It's literally like saying that you have no idea how painful sunburns are when you have repeatedly experienced painful sunburns.
Those who have experienced abuse have the least justification for inflicting abuse because they know exactly how terrifying and painful and destructive it is.
It's like a torturer claiming that he has no idea what causes pain, despite targeting the most sensitive areas of the human body in his victims.
[57:25] It's beyond ridiculous, beyond contemptible.
Why did you hit your children?
Because you wanted to, and you could.
But what about the causality of a bad childhood, of neglect, of the cycle of abuse? Total crap.
If you say that you hit your children because you were hit as a child, now then you are saying that being hit as a child produces evil outcomes.
If you admit that hitting children produces evil outcomes, then why did you hit your children?
If you say that you hit your children because you thought you were doing the right thing, who can disprove you?
Everyone charged with a crime could claim that they had no idea that what they did was illegal.
[58:27] If an adult hits a 12-year-old for his carelessness and then the 12-year-old hits a 5-year-old for her carelessness the adult generally punishes the 12-year-old again, It's the same moral rule though Hit those younger than you for their carelessness, Why does the adult punish the 12-year-old for enforcing the exact same moral rule on the 5-year-old? It makes no sense.
The Truth Behind Hitting Children
[59:00] An adult may punish a child for forgetting something, but the adult will never be punished for forgetting something.
You have to be honest about why you hit your children if you ever wish to regain their trust.
You say, day.
[59:25] I'm incredibly sorry that I hit you guys. It was wrong. And I have absolutely no excuse.
I did it because I was bigger. And I knew I could get away with it.
And I knew you guys couldn't leave or fight back.
Hitting you made me feel better. Stronger.
It was really pathetic. I have absolutely no justification.
And I've taught you guys exactly the wrong thing. and many wrong things.
I've taught you that it's good to use violence against smaller and more helpless people.
I lied to you about why I hit you. I told you it's because you were bad or disobedient or you didn't listen or you broke something.
Those were all total lies.
I just made stuff up in my head so that I would feel better about hitting you.
You weren't wrong, you weren't bad. I was wrong and I was bad.
And not just for hitting you, but for lying about why.
I don't want you to feel bad about yourself because I lied to you about why I hit you.
It's not your fault that I hit you. It's my fault entirely. You weren't bad, I was.
[1:00:52] And the worst thing I did was not just hitting you, it was telling you that I did it because you were bad.
You don't have any marks on you because I hit you, but I put thoughts in your head that are going to be very hard for you to get rid of.
And that's all on me. It was me being mean and cruel and nasty. Okay.
The Importance of Strength and Integrity in Speech
[1:01:20] Do you have the strength and integrity for that kind of speech?
Because I'm telling you, that is what is needed.
And you only get one shot, one chance.
If you violate the moral standards you have inflicted on your children, while apologizing for violating the moral standards you have inflicted on your children, children, they will never trust you again.
They may go through the motions, they may pretend, they even may laugh and joke with you, but they won't trust you.
If you punished your children for dishonesty, and then you are dishonest in your apology, You will never escape your maze of corruption.
[1:02:24] Honesty requires the absolute rejection of manipulation.
If you falsely accuse an employee and then apologize while laughing and asserting that, well, you were acting really suspiciously, then she will quit, if she has any sense or integrity at all.
If you punished your children, denying them any excuses for their childish actions, and then claim excuses for your own adult punitive immorality, you are lost for all time.
Sometimes, life really does come down to you.
One shot, one moment, one speech.
Don't screw it up.
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