This episode explores peaceful parenting, the drawbacks of physical punishment on children, understanding evildoers, and the cycle of justification. It emphasizes prevention over cure and advocates for virtuous parenting practices.
2024, Stefan Molyneux
Peaceful Parenting
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Brief Summary
In this episode, we discuss peaceful parenting, the challenges of dealing with evildoers, and the flaws of physical punishment on children. We emphasize the importance of understanding mechanisms of evildoers and the need for prevention rather than cure. We also explore the cycle of justification and question the purpose of homework. Ultimately, we advocate for peaceful parenting and promoting virtuous parenting practices.
Chapters
0:00:00 Peaceful Parenting and the Rejection of Immorality
0:01:42 Understanding the Power Dynamics of Evildoers
0:05:02 The Myth of Permanent Weight Loss
0:09:24 Ugly friends attack girl's transformation
0:15:10 The Importance of Prevention over Cure
0:22:40 Breaking the Cycle of Abuse
0:25:48 The Cycle of Violence: Justification and Moral Defenses
0:27:27 Women Justifying Going to Work as Empowerment
0:33:31 False Beliefs on Punishment and Badness
0:36:28 Homework Targets Those Who Challenge the System
0:38:47 The Flaw in Using Hitting as a Discipline Method
0:45:06 The Hypocrisy of Hitting Children
0:46:20 The Cycle of Spanking and Childhood Instincts
0:50:44 The Importance of Peaceful Parenting in Public
0:53:22 The Hypocrisy of Aggressive Parenting in Public and Private
Long Summary
In this episode of the podcast/show, we delve into the topic of peaceful parenting and the challenges of reconciling with individuals who engage in immoral behavior. We examine society's tendency to cast out and attack those deemed immoral, without attempting to negotiate or educate them. The main speaker highlights the prevalence of anger in the world, particularly directed towards unjust authority figures, and how this anger is redirected towards anyone who questions or opposes them.
We explore the importance of understanding the fundamental mechanisms of evildoers, who gain power by provoking needs in others and refusing to satisfy them. While appealing to their conscience or providing educational resources may seem like viable solutions, the speaker suggests that significant change is unlikely to occur. Drawing parallels to personal life changes such as losing weight or leaving dysfunctional relationships, the speaker emphasizes the difficulties in maintaining resolutions or reforming bad habits, even when the benefits are clear and the process is relatively simple.
The conversation also touches on the nature of peaceful parenting, which often draws attacks from aggressive parents. The speaker discusses how improving one's parenting skills can lead to criticism and opposition from others, and the importance of breaking the cycle of seeking approval from one's parents.
In another part of the conversation, the speaker discusses the concept of reforming evil and abusive behavior. They argue that evil cannot be reformed, as it lacks the ability to criticize itself and justifies its actions. Prevention is emphasized as a more effective approach than focusing on cure, and personal experiences are shared to highlight the need for confronting abusive parents and seeking therapy.
The discussion also delves into the cycle of justification, where children internalize the belief that they were punished because they were bad. The speaker argues that this perspective is false and destructive. The speaker also challenges the purpose of homework, asserting that it is meant to humiliate and punish students who refuse to comply with authority, rather than providing any educational benefit.
The flawed reasoning behind using physical punishment on children is also explored. The speaker emphasizes how relying on personal childhood experiences to justify hitting children neglects the fact that times have changed and new research shows the negative effects of physical punishment. The hypocrisy of punishing children for not thinking about consequences while failing to consider the consequences of hitting them is pointed out.
Furthermore, the inconsistency of punishing children based on parents' moods and the secrecy surrounding physical punishment are discussed. The speaker questions why parents hide their acts of hitting and yelling if they believe it to be a beneficial way of improving virtue.
The main speaker is an advocate for peaceful parenting and practices what they preach in public, engaging with and negotiating with their daughter peacefully. They promote the message of peaceful parenting through their actions, words, and lectures. The speaker believes that by advocating for peaceful parenting, they are creating a better world for their daughter and all children.
In conclusion, the conversation delves into the complexities of peaceful parenting, the challenges of reconciling with evildoers, the flaws in the reasoning behind physical punishment on children, and the importance of consistency in promoting virtuous parenting practices.
Tags
peaceful parenting, challenges, evildoers, flaws, physical punishment, children, understanding mechanisms, prevention, cycle of justification, homework, virtuous parenting
Transcript
Peaceful Parenting and the Rejection of Immorality
[0:00] Peaceful Parenting by Stefan Molyneux, Part 17, Peaceful Parenting and Reconciliation.
[0:14] Those whose society, deemed immoral, are attacked, castigated, and cast out.
If you are deemed a racist or misogynist or have a something phobia, almost no one tries to negotiate with you or instruct you or gently bring you into the fold of reasonable discourse.
You are attacked, destroyed, ostracized, cast out of society into the wilderness.
I think there is actually quite a lot of anger out there in the world.
Against unjust authority.
Said authority channels that anger into attacking anyone who questions or opposes authority.
People are very angry at the abuses they suffered as children.
Since they haven't made the connection or are too frightened to get angry at their abusers, they are easy to weaponize against those those inconvenient to current regimes, personal, economic, and political.
This has all happened a thousand times before. This book is my plea that it not happen a thousand times again.
Understanding the Power Dynamics of Evildoers
[1:42] You know evildoers in your life.
Are they to be cured or cast out?
There are a number of ways to try and establish that, and the stakes are incredibly high.
[2:03] Evildoers gain most of their power by provoking needs in others and then refusing to satisfy them.
A kidnapper knows his victim prefers freedom, so he denies that freedom.
A rapist knows that his victim does not want to be raped. Her revulsion and struggle is a sick excitement to him.
Abusive parents know that their children don't want to be confined, hit, yelled at, neglected.
That their children are desperate for love, interaction, and positive attention.
They then deny these needs in order to feel wanted, in control, powerful.
How does it generally work out for people to desperately need things from evildoers?
Badly.
Provoke a need, refuse to satisfy it. That is the modus operandi of immorality.
[3:20] If you need evildoers to give up their immorality, well, how do they respond to your need?
By refusing to satisfy it, which gives them power.
[3:38] Knowing this fundamental mechanism, how should one appeal to them?
Should we appeal to their conscience?
If they had a conscience, they would have already been horrified at their own aggressions against their children and would have already read books on how to parent better or gone to anger management or therapy.
[4:05] How often does this happen?
If a wife is being regularly assaulted by her husband, how often do such brutes reform themselves without a court order or their wife leaving them or hitting rock bottom in some other way?
[4:23] How many abusive parents would ever read a book with the title Peaceful Parenting?
How many feminists would read a book entitled titled You Too Can Learn to Love the Patriarchy.
How many socialists read Ludwig von Mises? Doesn't really happen.
95% of people who try to lose weight never keep it off and often gain even more weight back after dieting.
The diet industry is largely based on the myth of permanent weight loss.
The Myth of Permanent Weight Loss
[5:02] Dieting is not even a moral issue. And people who lose weight gain immediate and tangible benefits.
Endless praise, better health, better sleep, more energy, less pain, cheaper food costs, you name it.
The benefits are massive. The cost's relatively minor.
Yet only one in 20 people who lose weight actually keep it off.
And many of those do so because of surgical interventions like gastric bypass surgery or a significant health scare that shocks them into changing their lives.
Overweight people almost never lose and keep their weight off.
[5:45] Is it easier to lose weight, or confront your own evil actions?
[5:56] Is it easier to lose weight and keep it off or to turn away from a multi-decade path of evil to a life of humility, apology, and virtue.
Come on.
We all know the answer to that.
I have been working out regularly for over 40 years. At the gym, everyone knows what happens at the beginning of the year.
Everyone makes their resolutions, shows up for a few days or weeks, and then the place empties out again.
Everyone knows the cliché of the pear-shaped man who orders some exercise equipment in a fit of late-night consumer panic, uses it for a few days or weeks, then leaves it to gather dust under his bed.
[6:56] How many people keep their New Year's resolutions?
How many people keep getting involved in dysfunctional relationships despite knowing the red flags and exactly how bad they are?
Most people fail to reform their bad habits, even when they only suffer themselves, and everyone is encouraging them to do better, and they quickly reap the direct benefits, and the process is relatively easy and simple.
[7:29] Dieting is not that complicated. Eat less and exercise more.
You don't need to learn vector calculus or become a gymnast.
Just eat less and exercise more.
Quitting drinking is not that complicated. Don't pick up alcohol.
I get that the emotions are difficult, but why?
People, in general, are not addicted to substances, but relationships.
An obese person is not primarily addicted to food, but to the family and social circles that provoked and enabled her obesity. obesity.
If your family and friends encouraged and allowed you to become fat, then losing weight is a massive criticism of every single one of those relationships.
Most people who are fat became overweight as children when their parents were in charge of their diet and exercise.
If you became fat as a child, can you lose weight without criticizing your parents? Of course not.
[8:48] Obesity is generally compliance to dysfunctional relationships.
Fat children are being sabotaged by their parents.
To lose weight is to uncover that sabotage.
Everyone has been to a restaurant and seeing a fat family encouraging overweight children to eat more, eat less, and you offend your dysfunctional parents.
Ugly friends attack girl's transformation
[9:24] If a teenage girl is surrounded by ugly friends and she loses weight, exercises, and gets a great haircut, how do her ugly friends react?
They attack her, of course. They call her, usually not to her face though, vain, shallow, materialistic, boy crazy.
They complain that she thinks she is too good for them, that she's become just another plastic Barbie.
You all know how this goes. it's a force of nature a law of psychological physics.
[10:01] So if you improve your parenting around people who are not improving their parenting what will happen?
You know this you know exactly what will happen, peaceful parenting draws inevitable attacks direct or indirect explicit or implicit from aggressive parents, you cannot become a better person without drawing fire, you desperately need the approval of your parents we all do we're programmed that way and And abusive parents desperately need you to stop parenting peacefully.
Quick question. In general, throughout your life, have your parents mostly gotten their way?
Of course they have. That's true for all of us. That's how we survive.
If you have decades of compliance under your belt, how do you stop?
[11:24] You can't. That is the great secret that gives you great power.
If you grew up speaking Japanese and spoke it daily for decades, when do you stop understanding Japanese?
I don't know Japanese, so if someone speaks to me in that language, I don't have a clue what they're saying.
If you are fluent in Japanese and have been for decades, how long does it take for you to have no clue what people speaking Japanese are saying?
If you speak fluent Japanese, you only stop understanding Japanese when you are dead.
You have complied with your parents for decades. That compliance will never stop, even after they are dead. Their voices and arguments remain in your head, commanding your obedience.
A famous psychiatrist once reported that every single one of his suicidal patients heard parental voices in their heads commanding them to kill themselves.
[12:36] Can you cure multi-decade evils committed against the innocent?
Can you grow a conscience in a criminal?
We actually know the answers to this. it has been studied and examined and written about for centuries.
Recidivism rates for criminals are extraordinarily high.
People who commit crimes almost never reform themselves.
A thief remains a thief and will most likely return to stealing.
Pedophiles cannot be cured. word, rapists get out of prison still wanting to rape.
[13:30] Empathy requires the wiring together of 13 distinct parts of the brain from birth to three years of age.
[13:41] If you didn't get enough food when you were a child and grew up six inches shorter than you should have been, could you fix that by eating more as an adult? Of course not.
You won't get any taller, just wider.
If children do not learn language when they are young, they remain linguistically crippled for the rest of their lives.
The observing ego, the part of the mind that compares our proposed actions to ideal standards, is usually the first thing to go in situations of extreme trauma, violence, or after committing a series of evil actions, particularly against helpless and innocent children.
Evil cannot be reformed because it lacks the ego strength to criticize itself.
Evil cannot be fixed because it justifies every action it takes as necessary and virtuous.
How many times have you heard of abusive parents calling up their adult children, wracked with guilt and remorse, apologizing, making restitution, promising reform, going to therapy, finding their hearts and minds and souls, their consciences.
You won't hear of it, because it does not happen.
The Importance of Prevention over Cure
[15:10] If a disease is incurable, you can only focus on prevention.
If you refuse to focus on prevention in order to try to cure the incurable, it is because you prefer disease to health.
You are part of the problem.
I want parents-to-be to reject violent and aggressive parenting.
I want children to be born into homes of peace, reason, and negotiation.
I don't care about prior generations of abusers.
I only care about prevention because cure is impossible.
[16:00] When I was a child, I constantly heard that men are chauvinistic pigs, that I was part of a patriarchy, and that all men were oppressive and dictatorial.
Did that make men and boys feel good? Nope.
Should society have never discussed the link between smoking and lung cancer because that would upset long-term smokers?
I have been an entrepreneur for over 30 years.
I'm constantly told that as a boss, I am an evil guy who is exploiting my workers.
Every boss hears and knows all about this.
I'm not calling all parents evil, of course.
I'm a parent myself, more than most fathers since I have been a stay-at-home parent for 15 years straight.
I'm not painting with a wide brush here. It is very specific to the immoral actions I have detailed over the course of this book.
So, if your parents were abusive for decades, Can they reform?
[17:16] I don't know. I wouldn't bet a single thin dime on them becoming better, but so what?
I've always recommended talking to parents about prior abuses.
I also recommend engaging with a good talk therapist over the course of this process because it is so grueling.
If physically safe, it is important to confront those who did you wrong.
[17:41] But not forever.
You tell your parents what happened how it affected you and what you want them to do next this is no different from a generic intervention for addictive behavior, interventions with drug addicts follow this pattern everyone gets together with the addict informs him of how his behavior has negatively affected them demands that he get help and directly tells him that he will be ostracized if he continues down his destructive path.
This is not considered immoral or controversial or wrong or dysfunctional.
There are entire television series devoted to showing and promoting this practice.
If your parents are addicted to power and abuse, stage an intervention.
An intervention is a one-time thing, often managed by a therapist.
And there's nothing wrong with bringing your parents into a counseling session with a good psychologist.
[18:47] Hi there. Here is how you have hurt me.
Do better or I'm ending the relationship. And you have to decide now.
I'm only doing this once.
Perfectly sensible, perfectly natural, widely accepted as best practices in the realm of addiction.
Dr. Phil has this to say about abusive parents.
The emotional wounds caused by parental abuse can last long beyond childhood.
If you want to rebuild a relationship with your parent now that you are both adults, Dr. Phil has some advice.
Be heard. You won't be able to repair the relationship until your parent fully understands how the abuse has affected you.
He or she may feel guilty, but you're the one who needs to be helped.
[19:39] Redefine the relationship. relationship. It's up to you to express yourself.
Tell your parent what you need now that you're not getting.
Be honest and clear. This is your chance to say exactly what you need emotionally.
Nothing can change the past, but you can create a new history with your parent.
Treat each other as the people you are now.
Do what is best for you. Consider the possibility that it may not be healthy to have any sort of relationship with your parent.
It's a difficult pill to swallow and it should be used as the last option.
However, it may be the option that helps you the most. End quote.
[20:26] Tell them. Be honest. Be direct. Talk to them about what happened, how it affected you and what you need from them going forward.
Have a conversation. then have it end. See what they do.
Personally, I have a 24-hour rule when it comes to apologies.
If someone has wronged me and I tell him about it and I don't get an apology, within 24 hours, I know that I will never get one.
When people feel that they have done wrong, they either take responsibility and admit their fault, or they change whatever definitions they need to in order to feel that they were good and right and honorable and noble, and you are bad and immature and hypercritical for attacking them.
Without philosophy, people can convince themselves of just about anything, especially in the realm of morality.
[21:22] If 24 hours have passed without an apology, I know for absolute certain that the person who wronged me has now convinced himself that he is in the right and I am in the wrong and no apology will ever happen in this or any other lifetime.
It's very simple and has been 100% accurate over the course of my life.
One of the great values of certainty is you don't have to waste time.
If you spend the day fishing in the lake and catch nothing, that's really frustrating, right?
What if you were heading down to the lake at dawn and someone told you that there were no fish in the lake?
It just saved you a whole day, right? Knowledge of facts is conservation of resources.
Acceptance of facts saves time.
Talk to your parents, that's my advice. If they listen and reform fantastic, they are one in a thousand.
If they don't, they will continue to abuse you, and you can make your sensible choice with that certain knowledge.
Breaking the Cycle of Abuse
[22:40] Defining the Cycle of Abuse, To build a new house, you need to clear what came before.
Trees, rocks, an old house, or a prison, most likely.
To reshape your choices in the image of virtue, you need moral clarity.
Nothing else will do.
[23:09] Why does the cycle of abuse repeat?
[23:16] When asking why something happens in the human mind, we have to avoid any sense of inevitability.
Why do the victims of child abuse tend to become more aggressive, more promiscuous?
Human behavior is not like physics. The blind laws of matter and energy are inevitable.
They do not evolve or respond to any biological needs or preferences.
Life, and in particular human life, is shaped by the need to survive and reproduce.
Women raised by violent men are more likely to choose violent husbands.
Animals cannot evolve in a single generation. Human beings can. king.
If the oceans dried up very slowly, whales and dolphins could theoretically evolve to return to the land their ancestors originally came from, but this would take millions of years.
Some tribes living at high altitudes have adapted their lungs to an environment of lower oxygen.
Caucasians developed lighter skin in order to better process vitamin D in northern climates where sunlight was more scarce.
All blue-eyed people in the world can be traced back to one ancestor with a mutant gene.
[24:46] If you listen to people who hit their children, they tend to justify their actions as moral, as good, necessary, virtuous.
For them, it is good to hit your children and bad to refrain from hitting your children.
Can you perform an action you define as immoral? Of course.
But you don't brag about it. You don't justify it.
A man who cheats on his wife knows that what he is doing is wrong, and would never defend it as virtuous and good, but he does it anyway.
Thieves rarely defend their predations as noble and virtuous, Robin Hood style.
They know that what they are doing is wrong, but they do it anyway.
A murderer does not define killing as good moral. He might claim that he exists in a state of nature, like an animal, and that morality does not apply to him. But he will not.
Morally defend his actions.
The Cycle of Violence: Justification and Moral Defenses
[25:49] The cycle of violence is really the cycle of justification, moral justification.
[26:00] If your parents hit you because they say you are bad and you believe them, then you believe that children who act badly must be hit, should be hit.
It's good to do so because it trains them out of their badness, in this view children are born with a moral illness and spanking is a form of inoculation which prevents that moral illness from growing and spreading into rampant criminality, it doesn't feel good when a dentist scrapes at your gum line feels like it's doing you harm but it is in fact helping you by removing plaque lack.
Starting an exercise program feels terrible. Dieting causes discomfort, but they help you out in the long run.
Children are believed to be born selfish and irresponsible, malevolent even, and the only way to save them is through strict and often coercive discipline.
You're not hurting your children by hitting them. They might cry, but then they also cry when they I don't get chocolate for dinner.
It's not a cycle of abuse. It's not a cycle of violence.
It is a cycle of justification.
Women Justifying Going to Work as Empowerment
[27:27] Why do so many women abandon their children in order to go to work?
Because they never define it as abandoning their children.
[27:40] How do they define it? They say that they are being strong, independent women, modeling female workplace empowerment to their impressionable offspring, and becoming better mothers overall by not hanging around all the time feeling isolated, poor, and bored.
It's good for the children, don't you see?
If anyone talks about privatizing the educational system, making it responsive to both parents and children, he is immediately accused of somehow not wanting children to be educated?
Since the perception is that only the government can educate children, if the government doesn't educate children, those children will grow up as illiterate savages.
Government education is thus reframed as education. The word is entirely dropped from the phrase.
And so if you say that you don't want the government to educate children, then clearly you don't want children to be educated in any way. It's amazing.
The same arguments were used to oppose the end of slavery. Slaves picked crops, so if you wanted to end slavery, you obviously wanted all the crops to rot in the fields and everyone to starve to death.
Ah, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
[29:05] Humanity is still several brain cells short thought of learning a few basic principles.
Do you see the pattern? If I say, don't discipline your children by hitting them, what do people hear?
Well, you know, say it with me. They hear, don't discipline your children.
When I say, don't try to improve your children by yelling at them, they hear, don't try to improve your children.
When I say, your children are not born bad. Ooh, that's a big one.
[29:45] What do people hear? What do you hear when I say, your children are not born bad?
Because they weren't. I wasn't. You weren't.
What does that mean? well if you weren't born bad but your children hit you, then they were bad not you, how do you feel about the possibility that your parents were bad, pretty anxious I bet That's totally understandable.
I'd sympathize more deeply than you may ever know.
[30:39] If one man shoots another, either it is murder or self-defense.
Either the shooter is bad or the man he shoots is bad. Someone has to be in the wrong.
It was either you or your parents.
If you were not bad, then your parents were bad.
If you were not in the wrong, your parents were in the wrong.
[31:10] And we all know what happened to little children over the course of our evolution who morally condemned their own parents.
Bye-bye.
So, we feel very uncomfortable doing that for obvious evolutionary reasons.
But, so what? It feels weird to climb into a giant metal tube and be hurled across the sky using the explosive power of rescued dinosaur flesh.
We didn't evolve to do that, right?
It feels odd to look into a tiny, flat metal box and see another person on the other side of the world.
But hey, we've adapted, haven't we?
It's strange to walk into a cool room on a hot day and get ice in the heat of summer from a giant metal box.
Don't tell me we can't adapt, evolve, grow, embrace new ideas, experiences, and paradigms.
You're doing all that just by consuming this book.
The cycle of justification occurs when you internalize your parents' perspective that you were punished because you were bad.
[32:39] Your badness comes first.
Their punishment comes afterwards, just as in the law. The crime comes first, and the punishment comes afterwards.
A policeman who locks up a thief is not an abuser, and your parents who punish you for being bad are not abusive.
They are just necessary enforcers of the moral law.
They are good, because you were bad and the only moral response was to punish you.
A doctor who performs an emergency tracheotomy is not just randomly stabbing someone, he is acting decisively to save that person's life.
The woman is choking, for heaven's sake, cutting open her neck is the only way to save her.
False Beliefs on Punishment and Badness
[33:32] It is easy to believe this causality, because cause and effect are lost in the foggy depths of early memories, and because we are constantly told that we are being punished because we are bad.
You get humiliated by a teacher because you did not do your homework.
You have to stay for detention because you were talking in class.
You fail a class because you did not pass the exams.
You did something wrong, and then you were punished. This is how we were raised, right?
It's incontrovertible in our minds.
Also, it is utterly and completely false.
It is an active, malevolent lie.
One that is destroying the world if you really want to know the truth.
[34:32] You were not punished because you were bad.
You were called bad so you could be punished.
[34:46] You did not get humiliated by the teacher because you did not do your homework.
Homework is assigned so that teachers can humiliate students. students.
You don't believe me? It's easy to prove.
Homework provides little to no educational benefit to students.
This has been well proven many times.
So, if homework has nothing to do with educating you, then what is it for?
It is to humiliate the students who refuse refused to do it.
This conditions the class to obey authority without any proof, without any benefit, without any improvement, just because those in authority can punish kids for non-compliance.
Homework is assigned to punish those who disobey ridiculous commands from those in authority.
Homework doesn't Teach anyone anything except fear, subjugation, and compliance.
That is the purpose of homework. That is the one constant.
[36:12] If the goal of the educational system was to improve the knowledge of students, then it would try out homework as a theory, measure its progress, and then abandon it when it failed to achieve the goal of improving the knowledge of the students.
Homework Targets Those Who Challenge the System
[36:28] But it is even more sinister than that, as it always is.
Because homework is specifically designed to humiliate and punish those most likely to change the system.
Those at the bottom of society have little stake in its continuance, at least in its current form.
Who doesn't do homework? The unprotected victims of abuse and chaos.
Who does the homework? Comfortable middle-class kids with significant parental involvement.
Who else doesn't do homework? Kids so poor that they need to have one or more jobs just to stay afloat.
Not those comfortable kids whose parents pay for everything.
Who else doesn't do homework?
Kids who find homework useless and boring.
In other words, those children who have an entirely accurate view of homework.
[37:40] The kids who instinctively understand that homework is useless, busy work designed to crush resistance in the young.
How do those in power view such children?
As enemies to be destroyed. And destroy them, they do.
Or at least try.
As I said, you were not punished because you failed to do your homework.
Homework is assigned so that children can be punished.
This cause and effect is everywhere in childhood.
You were not hit because you were bad.
Your badness was invented so that you could be hit.
The evidence was planted. it. The witnesses paid off.
The judge bought and bribed. The fix was in.
The verdict was preordained. The kangaroo court was and is eternally in session.
The Flaw in Using Hitting as a Discipline Method
[38:47] How do I know that you were not hit because you were bad?
Brace yourself. I can prove it very easily.
You were hit so that you would not become more bad, right? Being hit was to prevent you from becoming a really bad person, right?
But if hitting children prevented them from becoming bad, Why did they then grow up to be adults who hit children?
[39:24] Violence is just about the worst form of immorality, and children are hit so that they don't become more violent.
But the most widespread use of violence is parents hitting their own children, so clearly hitting children does not prevent them from becoming more violent, since parents who hit their children are the most violent of all.
Syllogistically, 1. Violence is the worst form of immorality.
[40:51] This argument says that hitting children falls into the Aristotelian mean, like the narrow vertical inner bell curve, like eating, for instance.
If you don't eat at all, you die prematurely.
If you eat too much, you also die prematurely. You have to eat just the right amount.
Thus, hitting children is very complicated. Too little is extremely dangerous. Too much is deadly.
Gosh, that to find this narrow happy medium between two absolute disasters parents must have studied and read and researched corporal punishment in great depth and detail to make sure that they did not hit just a little bit, too much or just a bit too little.
[41:39] Oh, wait, hang on a second If your parents did an enormous amount of research to find out how to hit children in just the right way so as to prevent disaster.
And they absolutely would have come across the basic moral and empirical arguments against hitting children.
I can't study physics for years, then claim to have no idea who Albert Einstein is.
Ah, comes the inevitable reply, but you don't need to study how much or how little to hit children when you have a good instinct for it because of how you were raised.
You don't need to become a professor of English literature to teach your children how to read. because your parents taught you how to read, and so you know enough to teach your own kids at least.
But you can't solve this problem by lowering the stakes.
[42:29] The theory of hitting children is that it has to be just right.
Not too little, not too much.
Otherwise children turn into rampantly selfish criminals.
Therefore comparisons with being slightly better or worse at teaching their children how to read are ridiculous.
[42:50] Parents who hit their children are administering a very dangerous medicine that has to be in just the right dose at just the right time because too little or too much medicine will destroy their children.
Parents who give medicine to their children at least read the directions, right?
I mean, we don't consider parents any good if they just jam pills down the throats of their children without any knowledge as to dosage.
No, no, hitting children is a delicate balance that has to be just right in order to avoid absolute disaster.
[43:35] Parents who say that they hit in the right way because they themselves were hit in the right way are like people who say that they can give the same medicine and doses to their own children that they were given by their parents when they themselves were children.
[43:51] How do you know?
You were a child. How do you know what the right dose was?
Things have changed since you were a kid. Maybe your kid has an allergy, or the dose has new ingredients, or you were older or younger when you got your dose, or maybe there is an alternate treatment now, and you don't need to give this medicine to your children at all.
Children's medicines used to contain powerful opiates cocaine marijuana you name it would we consider parents responsible if they gave their children these drugs now of course not things change we have to do our research if parents do the research they will quickly find out that but spanking has negative effects, as we have discussed above.
Not only does spanking harm children, but it is completely unnecessary.
Parents hit their children to teach them consequences so that the children will consider the effects of their actions in the future and make better decisions.
The Hypocrisy of Hitting Children
[45:06] But this is a complete lie.
If you hit children for failing to think of the consequences of their actions, have you researched the consequences of hitting children?
Of course not.
You are hitting helpless children for a sin that you are in fact committing by hitting them.
How dare you fail to consider the consequences of your actions, shouts the spanking parent who has utterly failed to research the consequences of spanking.
Do you see?
The parent is not hitting the child to make the child better, because being hit as a child did not make the parent better.
In fact, it made him worse.
The parent is not hitting the child to teach the child to think of the consequences of his actions.
Because the parent has never thought of the consequences of spanking, one of which is unjustly and hypocritically hitting your own children.
The Cycle of Spanking and Childhood Instincts
[46:20] But there is more, as there always is.
The mother hits the child because she herself was hit as a child.
She claims to know exactly the right dose of spanking to apply.
Not too much or too little, which turns the child evil.
In other words, she has an automatic instinct for spanking based upon her own childhood experiences.
Since she has not studied parenting as an adult, it is her childhood instincts that control her spanking.
However, she is punishing her children for their own childhood instincts, which she calls bad.
So her childhood instincts about spanking are good and must be used to punish her children for their childhood instincts, which are bad.
[47:23] Childhood instincts are both bad and good at the same time, don't you know?
If she wants to claim that her instincts for spanking are different because she is an adult, then she has an adult's responsibility to do research, to find out exactly the right dose of spanking to prevent evil and to figure out the long-term consequences of spanking, In which case, she will encounter the arguments against spanking.
No, she is using her own childhood instincts to punish her children's own childhood instincts.
[48:02] Also, almost every child who has been hit is perfectly aware that sometimes parents hit, and sometimes they don't.
If the parent is in a really good mood, the chances of punishment are low.
If the parent is in a foul mood, you're almost certain to be punished.
This would be considered utterly corrupt in any other authority figure.
If it could be definitively proven that a judge let criminals go when he had a pretty girlfriend and threw criminals in jail when he was single, we would throw that judge in jail, right?
If you are punished because you are bad, then what does it mean to escape punishment when you are bad because your parent is in a good mood?
Well, it means that you are not being punished because you are bad.
You are being punished because your parents are in a bad mood.
In other words, your badness is invented so that your parents can punish you so that they can feel better.
[49:16] Let me ask you something. If you sympathize with the plight of a homeless man, and want to give him some money, do you always wait until there is no one else around?
Do you lead him into an alley where you are alone and more likely to be unobserved by people or cameras?
Do you always make sure that no one else can see your kind and noble deed? Of course not.
Does a woman who spends thousands of hours perfecting her figure always wear baggy clothing in public to make sure no one knows how attractive her physique is? Please.
Does a man with great hair always wear a baseball cap? Nope.
Hitting children is a good deed, apparently, so why do parents hide it?
Yelling at children and calling them names is the best way to teach them about virtue and the value of considering consequences, So why do parents so often wait until they get home or are in the car and do it in secret and in private and out of hearing?
Why do aggressive parents Hide their own good deeds.
The Importance of Peaceful Parenting in Public
[50:44] Don't they want to help society by showing all the other children what happens to bad children, how children are improved by good parents who hit them and yell at them?
Why would they withhold such benevolent examples of the improvement of virtue from other children and society everywhere?
That would be like me yelling at my daughter in public, hitting her only when other people were around, and then sweetly, peacefully, and reasonably negotiating with her when we got home.
[51:16] I'm a dedicated advocate for peaceful parenting so what do I do in public? Why?
I parent peacefully I chat with negotiate with and engage with my daughter, When people inevitably tell me how fun and charming my daughter is what do I say?
I say that her family does not believe in punishment and that I have never yelled at her or raised my voice at her or called her names or punished her in any way whatsoever.
Also that she is homeschooled. I constantly spread the message of peaceful parenting in public by word, deed, and lectures.
I don't do the opposite in private that I do in public because I'm proud of my parenting.
I am a peaceful parent, which is to say, a moral parent.
So why would I not do everything I can to spread virtue in the world?
I mean, my daughter has to grow up and live in the world of the future, so the more children who are parented peacefully, the better the world my daughter will live in will be.
It would be immensely cruel to my daughter to be aggressive in public while parenting peacefully in private.
[52:33] Imagine if I wrote a book advocating spanking, yelling, name-calling, aggressive parenting of any and every kind, while parenting peacefully at home.
Wouldn't that be rather insane?
How can something be good in one place, but bad in another?
Let us just rank moral relativism, which is, to say, formalized hypocrisy.
I am a peaceful parent everywhere I go, proudly, loudly.
So why are aggressive parents peaceful in public but violent in private?
Doesn't make any sense.
The Hypocrisy of Aggressive Parenting in Public and Private
[53:22] Why would they hide all their necessary virtues from the world, making the world much worse thereby? by.
They say hitting children is the most essential ingredient for a moral world, but then they don't hit their own children in public, thus depriving everyone of essential moral improvement.
It's incomprehensible, really.
[53:47] Look, children know this deep down.
They know exactly how revolting this all is.
Their parents tell them that spanking is good, but almost never spank them in public.
Of course, I'm talking about spanking in situations where it is legal.
In other situations, you can substitute yelling or name-calling or threatening abandonment.
[54:18] Imagine a lifeguard trained to rescue drowning people who stood by and watched a child die by drowning.
Why the hell didn't you do anything, you would demand. That kid is now dead.
Oh, the lifeguard smiles, I decided not to rescue him because people were watching and filming.
Would that make any sense?
Saving a child from drowning, particularly if that is your job, is a good thing, right?
Why would the lifeguard not do a good deed just because there were other people around?
More importantly, why is he taking money for a job he never actually plans to do? Would you fire that lifeguard if he worked for you?
Interesting, right? If aggressing against children is moral and good and right, why do you never see it in public?
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have seen a parent aggressing against her child in public.
If you believe that you were hit because you were bad, why were you not hit in public when you were bad?
This simple question breaks the equation. It shatters the cause and effect.
[55:41] If you were hit because you were bad, then you would be hit in public.
So why were you not hit in public?
Ah, because hitting you in public would make your parent feel bad because there would be negative consequences for your mother.
Someone might intervene. She would get dirty looks. She would feel humiliated. embarrassed, judged.
Interesting, right? Your parents did not hit you in public.
They refused to do and demonstrate the right thing because it didn't serve their immediate self-interest.
[56:30] Ah.
Refusing to do the right thing, because you don't feel like it. Wait a minute.
Isn't that kind of what you were hit for? You were hit because you put immediate self-interest above moral principles and long-term positive consequences.
But your parents did not hit you in public, despite hitting you being the right thing to do, because they put their immediate self-interest above moral principles and long-term positive consequences.
[57:13] In other words, your parents were bad for not hitting you.
Also, punishment for children is supposed to happen as close as possible to the misdeed.
Waiting until later, at home, is punishing badly, which is to say, doing wrong.
If you defer punishment for children, punishment becomes unjust, immoral, bad.
Even by the standards of aggressive parenting, punishing a three-year-old child hours after the misdeed is totally wrong, because the child can no longer associate the action with the punishment.
But your parents deferred your punishment all the time.
[57:59] Now, the parents might say that they punished the child in private because they didn't want to humiliate the child by punishing him in public.
But that makes less than no sense. If the parents are so sensitive to the humiliation of the child, then why did they humiliate the child by punishing him at home?
Do you see what I mean? Do you see why I say that you were not punished because you were bad?
You were punished so that your parents could feel better.
But they can't feel better if their cruelty is clear to them.
So they have to invent your badness so that they can feel better about hurting you.
That way, they get to hurt you twice, by punishing you and by implanting in you the permanent evil ghost of your badness.
It's a terrible lie, and if you continue to believe it, The cycle of violence will continue.
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