Wresting With the Dead: KIDS IN CAGES - Transcript

Video: https://dai.ly/k1bNeU199rHkiIAkeKW

Exploring Hume and Nietzsche's quotes on governance, the conversation delves into societal perceptions of discipline for children and advocates for autonomy and critical thinking over conformity in education for a liberated society.

Chapters

0:00 Essential Quotes for Understanding Authority and Obedience
1:15 Nietzsche's Insight on Self-Control and Authority
1:59 Multicultural Upbringing and Views on Childhood
24:55 The Battle Against Childhood Rebellion
28:51 The Value of a Piece of Paper
32:23 The Perception of Children as Chaotic and Dangerous
37:32 Commanding Children to Prevent Self-Control Development
41:33 Society's Pretense of Answers and Use of Power

Long Summary

In the conversation, we delve into two significant quotes by David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche that
shed light on governance and self-control. Hume highlights the reliance of rulers on the opinion of the
governed due to the inherent power of the masses. On the other hand, Nietzsche's quote emphasizes
the idea that whatever cannot control itself is subjected to external commands. This notion resonates
with the concept that lack of self-control leads to external imposition. Reflecting on my upbringing in
various countries like England, Ireland, Africa, and Canada, I recall a common thread of suspicion
surrounding the perception of children. Children were often viewed as wild and unruly, in need of
constant control and discipline. This societal approach instilled in me an understanding of how children
are often seen as disruptive and in need of taming. The discussion progresses into the treatment of
children in different cultural contexts, highlighting the pervasive skepticism and lack of respect towards
children. The societal fear of children stems from a belief that without strict control and authority,
chaos would ensue. This mentality perpetuates a cycle where children are conditioned to perceive
themselves as inherently flawed and in need of external governance. The conversation touches upon
the education system's role in enforcing conformity and stifling curiosity. Children are often
discouraged from questioning the status quo or challenging authority, leading to a lack of critical
thinking and individual agency. The narrative shifts to personal experiences of rebellion and resistance
against stringent rules and regulations imposed on children, showing how attempts at autonomy are
often met with punishment and suppression. Drawing parallels between societal structures and
individual behaviors, the conversation delves into the dynamics of power and control. The speaker
reflects on the impact of authoritarianism on shaping individuals' obedience and compliance. The
conversation underscores the detrimental effects of oppressive systems that prioritize conformity over
personal growth and critical thinking. In conclusion, the conversation emphasizes the importance of
fostering a culture that encourages individuality, autonomy, and critical inquiry. By challenging authoritarian norms and promoting self-control, society can move towards a more equitable and free
environment where individuals are empowered to question and think for themselves.

Transcript

[0:00] Two essential quotes for understanding the world and the work that I do, by the by.
The first is from David Hume and the second is from Friedrich Nietzsche.
The first from David Hume is, Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness by which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.
When we inquire by what means this wonder is affected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion.
It is therefore on opinion only that government is founded.
And this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.
And the second is from Nietzsche.
It says, whatever cannot obey itself is commanded.

[1:01] Whatever cannot obey itself is commanded.
I don't know about you, man. Kiss me, shivers. Whatever cannot obey itself is

[1:13] commanded. And this is something that I talked about before, of course.
I didn't know that Nietzsche had said it in this way, or that Nietzsche had said it at all. It's quite a lot of Nietzsche stuff.

[1:24] But I've said that if you can't control yourself, you end up having to control others.
If you can't manage your own reactions or responses, then you end up having to control the speech of others, right?
Don't say that. You can't say that, right? Because you can't control your own responses, right?
So let's dig in and put it all together. Let's dig in and put it all together, as we generally want to do on this beautiful Sunday morning.

[1:54] I hope you guys are having a good weekend, and let's get it on.
Now, one of the things that I remember very much about growing up, and this was true in the four major places that I grew up.
So, I grew up in England, I grew up in Ireland, I grew up in Africa, and I grew up in Canada.
So, from zero to eleven, I was in England, but I spent a lot of summers in Ireland.
I spent some time in Africa, not much, and from 11 to adulthood, I was in Canada.
So I have a fairly broad cross-section.
Of how countries treat their young.

[2:51] And the South African connection, of course, a lot of Dutch influence in South Africa.
The Irish is a Roman Catholic, although my family is Protestant.
And England was Anglican, and Canada was a moulage, and the specific Christianity of Canada was already beginning to dissolve when I came.
So i had a very multicultural upbringing and had a wide variety of cultures and i mean i lived in a french-speaking city for four years montreal with summers off to earn money back in canada so i say this because hopefully you'll understand that i had a pretty broad exposure to a variety of cultures when it came to how children were viewed.
And if there's one word that I would use to describe how children were perceived in all of these cultures, children were perceived with suspicion.

[3:56] There was great, endless, bottomless, cold-eyed, hard-handed suspicion suspicion, constantly surrounding the children, that we were wild beasts, constantly defying all that was good, noble, true, heroic, and dutiful in the universe.
And this was particularly the boys, right?
I went to a boarding school from the ages of six to eight.
I went to a variety of government schools, and it was always the same.
Doesn't matter public or private, doesn't matter which country the children were always, and I don't think I'm alone in this, of course, you can tell me in your responses to this, whether you had the same experience.
And as a boy, we were constantly viewed as on the verge of revolution, on the verge of disobedience, on the verge of corrosive skepticism.

[5:01] And the girls were viewed as chaotic and about to go wayward, just in a different kind of way.
Their waywardness had to do with verbal meanness and potential promiscuity and all these kinds of things.
But by God, we were feral, wild beasts of the jungle that had to be tamed by endless scorn and confinement and punishment and busy work.
And we were just quantum chaos that had to be restrained into German bland engineering.
Man, constant.
Haven't you experienced this war against childhood waged by society on a near continual basis?
And this skepticism, this indifference, this lack of respect, this boredom that children experience in society was something that was just bad.
The constant refrain, explicit or implicit, was we are good and responsible and dutiful and you are wild and selfish and thoughtless and careless and you are beasts of the jungle that have to be tamed by force.

[6:21] Disapproval, threats, threats, punishment, hitting.
I was caned in school. I was hit at home.
I was given massive, lashing, scornful heaps of disapproval and threatened ostracism and abandonment and condemnation.
Every country puts the nation in condemnation. Children, you see, are born bad. yet.
I mean, maybe there's a time of cutesy goggle-eyed innocence in infancy, but by God, we turn feral and bad and resistant and disobedient and ungrateful.
That. And so we are feared. And I didn't get society's fear of children until I got older.

[7:08] Society's fear of children. Now, why does society fear children so much?
I mean, that which we attack, we must also fear. I mean, the fact that I was attacked was because I frightened people.
Why did I frighten people? Because I asked questions that those in authority could not answer.
Power is when you don't have to answer essential questions that's what power is, when you attack instead of answer when the master asks the slaves a question the slave damn well has to answer when the slave asks the master a question the master does not have to answer so children of course are a threat to the existing structure of society with its good and its bad elements, but they certainly are a threat to its bad elements because children, are empirical and skeptical.
And we're taught to think, we're taught to reason, we're taught to be empirical.
We're taught that we're judged by empiricism, right?
If you say, I'm going to clean my room, and you haven't cleaned your room, you are judged as failing because the empirical evidence is you didn't clean the room.
If you're told to do a homework assignment and you don't do the homework assignment, you are judged by the empirical evidence of not having done your homework assignment.
So we're judged as children empirically all the time. Can we judge society empirically? No.

[8:36] No. No, we have to have loyalty to the ideals, not to what actually happens.
We have to have loyalty to the ideals, not to what actually happens in society.
But when we're children, our ideals don't matter.
So if you claim it was your noble intention to do your homework, nobody cares if you didn't do your homework.
Like you're punished for not doing your homework. If you claimed that you meant to study for the test, but you just didn't get around to it, then you are failed on the test, and this can steal a year or more of your life and provoke great social humiliation by being held back a year.
So your noble intentions as a child don't matter.

[9:23] But adults' noble intentions are all that matter so the welfare state is there to help people now I grew up in and around the welfare state doesn't help people in fact it traps them, talk about this, doesn't matter bring up physical evidence of this the goal of the welfare state, the ideals what is said matters what actually happens doesn't but it's the complete opposite for children And again, that's a marker of power.
A marker of power is that you don't care about other people's intentions, you only care about empirical evidence.

[10:00] If you say to your slave, do X, and the slave doesn't do X, the slave gets punished.
It doesn't matter what the slave says or what the intentions were.
And sometimes it doesn't even matter whether there's a physical reason why X didn't happen.
And if you're supposed to mow the lawn as a teenager and you can't get the lawn mower to work, sometimes you're still punished.
When I was a kid, I sprained my wrist.
I was given lines because I was talking too much in class.
I was given lines to write out. I came in and didn't write the lines.
I came in literally bandaged with my wrist bandaged, didn't write the lines, and the teacher just assigned me double the lines, even though my writing hand, my wrist was sprained, and I couldn't write the lines. So it doesn't matter.
I think eventually she relented, but it was definitely her impulse to give me more lines.
I guess she said, this is the suspicion. You're lying. You're just faking putting something on your wrist because you just don't want to do the lines.
Bad kid. Disobedient kid.
So, asking questions is dangerous to those who don't have answers.
Not having to answer questions is foundational to the myth of power.
So we look at our teachers as authority figures and if we are to say to the teachers as we rarely ever if ever did why are we learning all of this why am i spending thousands of hours learning geometry.

[11:29] Am i spending thousands of hours learning geometry why aren't i learning how to pay my taxes why aren't i learning about the structure of money why aren't i learning about entrepreneurship why aren't i learning about the law especially since in our society ignorance of the law is no excuse why are you spending thousands of mindless goddamn hours drilling the opposite angle theorem of the triangle in equation the triangle inequality relation into my brain why there's so so many more important things to learn about life why am i not learning about the structure of government why am i not learning about interest rates why am i not learning about how to learn myself over the years like i mean it's all useless mindless grind your brain to dust busy work designed to display dominance not educate it indoctrinates you into submission to useless things and not questioning why you're doing what you're told to be doing.
So you can not ask questions of the teacher about the structure and content of the teaching.
You can ask questions about the details, right? How do I do this equation or whatever?
You can ask those questions, but you can't ask the why. And why not?
Well, because the teacher has no answer.

[12:50] And it is a mark of power to not have to answer questions.
Because your teacher is supposed to be an authority, supposed to be wise, supposed to be intelligent, supposed to be caring for the children and wanting you to learn and an excellent imparter of information.
And you say to your teacher, why are we studying this? And the teacher can't answer the question. The teacher can only say, fundamentally, it's in the curriculum.
You say, well, why are we studying geometry? Well, it's important for you to know. Why is it important for me to know?
I don't know a single adult who does geometry. Why is it important to you now?
So then they back into, well, it teaches you how to think.
It's like, okay, well, why not teach me how to think on something that I'm interested in and that I will use for the rest of my life?

[13:35] Answer those questions. So the teacher would then have to say, well, the reason that you have to study geometry is because it's in the curriculum.
You say, okay, well, why is it in the curriculum?
Why have they chosen geometry to be that which you receive education on for thousands of hours when no adult uses geometry?
I mean, no adult that you know uses geometry.
I mean, I remember when I worked up north with a bunch of geologists and engineers that I asked them about this, how much of your schooling do you use?
And I remember one guy said, well, once we had to bring up something from deep underground, it had a certain amount of radiation. I needed to calculate the decay.
And then I actually did use something from my education like one time.
And that was pretty striking to me, like even engineers.
Now, maybe that was an unusual situation, but most people learn on the job.
Most people learn on the job. So the teacher can't say why why you are learning whatever you're learning.

[14:39] And therefore, if the teacher says, well, it's in the curriculum, then the teacher is also revealed as a slave and no authority figure.
Well, I'm teaching geometry to you because I'm told to teach geometry to you.
I have no fundamental knowledge about why you are learning geometry. I have no idea.
Like, I can't answer that question. Why are you learning, you know, mitosis and meiosis and photosynthesis?
I mean, they're all okay. It's interesting stuff.
But the opportunity cost compared to what you could be learning, like really how to critically think, the real nature of your society, the true history of the world, like all things that would be interesting.
And of course, you are trained to be a passive consumer of inflicted instruction because nobody ever says to you, what are you interested in?
What would you like to study?
It's always, here's what's in the book. I'm going to read to you what's in the book.
And of course, we'd have these teachers who clearly were dysfunctional and had hangovers and would come into class and say, just read chapter 12 to yourself while they half put their head down on the desk and massaged their temples.

[15:55] It's all a big collusion. Nobody can ask, no child can ask why we're there.
And of course, these don't ask these questions was enforced a number of different ways with punishments, of course, with escalating punishments.
I mean, this is the tension between long-haired fellow and the teacher in the movie The Breakfast Club.
Why are you here? Why am I here? What's the purpose? Why do you have authority?
What do you know? more detention, more detention, more detention, punishment, punishment, punishment, control, control, control, you're a piece of crap.
I mean, the guy is obviously a dangerous guy, but he's heavily wounded by his family and nobody's giving him any compassion. It's just punishment.
He lives in a society that allows his father to put out cigarettes on his arm and beat him up.
But he's supposed to respect the society and its rules, you see, and its rules, right?
So the teacher can't say, listen, kids, I have no answer as to why you're learning geometry.
I'm just told to teach you geometry, and I like summers off.
I like working nine to three, and I like hanging out in the teacher's lounge.

[17:09] And I like having a pension. I like having health care, and I like being overpaid.
Oh, a teacher's so underpaid.
Loaded nonsense. So, they can't tell you that, because they're supposed to have authority, and if you ask them, why am I teaching you this?

[17:25] Answer. And they are revealed as people without knowledge as to why they're doing what they're doing, which means you can't respect them.
So you can't ask these questions because the teachers take it very personally.
Like the teacher who was so boring, I have passed out in class in history of all things. I love history.
I mean, my gosh, some of my greatest presentations have been about history, the truth about Rome and so on, right?
So I love history. And I had a history teacher who half put me to sleep.
And then when I went up to give a presentation, he screamed at everyone to put their heads down on the desk and pretend to be asleep and then screamed at me demanding, how do you feel about it? How do you feel? Huh?

[18:07] So he was enraged that I found him boring.
And that's how, you know, petty and touchy and sensitive and triggered and immature teachers are.
We all know this, right? Deep down that you can't question the teachers on anything, important?
I'm like, why? Why am I spending thousands of hours learning useless stuff that no adult ever uses?
Can't ask that question. Can't ask that question.
Because they'll F you up.
Everyone gets that, right? Like when you're a kid, if you ask like, why am I learning all this useless stuff?
Like I remember even in my boarding school, which was supposed to be a very good school, I suppose, right?
And at least, I guess, on the plus side, it did expose me to some male authority figures.
Alarming though they were, it was not the end of the world. But I very distinctly remember learning everything about medieval villages.

[18:59] And we had to memorize and draw the maps of the various medieval demands, or seniorships, or land-owning structures in the the Southeast UK, and we had to learn everything about the various types of people who typically lived in a medieval village.
And I remember I had to create a village and populate it, and I had to name it.
And I remember being so bored, I couldn't even think of a name for the village.
And I was a pretty creative kid, right?
Couldn't think of a name for the village, just looked over, and there was a shelf where the folders were, and it was labeled folder.
So I I said, okay, my village is called Folder.
And of the various types of villages, you had to choose which one you would be.
And I chose to be a freeman, of course, who could roam from village to village and wasn't tied to the land and so on because I was just desperate to get out of there.
And it was just really, really boring and useless and pointless and busy work and nothingness. And I enjoy the medieval world.
You know, I wrote post-medieval world in an entire novel called Just Poor, which you should check out at freedemand.com slash books. It's free.
So I love all of this stuff and yet it was just so boring it was just so boring, now if a teacher had pointed out the parallels between the medieval world and the modern world that would have been very interesting, but can't do that right.

[20:21] You're bored you're annoyed your time is wasted you're tested ferociously on useless stuff and you can't ask any questions and every child absolutely understood because i have a bit of a rebellious streak i didn't ask any questions no kid i ever knew asked questions you would see kids rebel in this torturous kind of manner but even that rebellion was pretty self-destructive so you You would see kids who hated school and they wouldn't come to school and there'd be this pitched battle between the administration and the parents and the cops would get involved and it just got worse and worse and worse.
So you'd see these reactionary beasts taken down by the endless blow darts and confinements and punishments of authority.
And you're like, okay, well, that's no good because they were rebelling in a way like they just wouldn't show up to school.
They might get involved in drinking or drugs or whatever.
They just were like ferociously rebelling against this useless pointless system and they were the examples used to keep everyone else in line as i'm the example used to keep others in line now life is the big circle so wait to see that but no kid i mean we would sometimes complain to ourselves like we knew it right i mean sometimes my friends and i'd be like oh this is so useless so pointless so boring right but you'd you'd never in a million years imagine bringing this up.

[21:44] To a teacher, I remember when I first realized or found out, someone told me, I think, that if you found a movie, there was a rule, it's short, still around, that if you leave within the first 20 minutes or so of a movie, you can get your money back.
And I thought, wow, wow, that's interesting.
I think I did that with the movie snatch. But so if you leave within the first 20 minutes or half an hour, you get your money back. So you get to sample the movie.
If the movie is boring or whatever, then you get your money back. I'm like, holy crap.
So you can do that with a movie, but you can't do that with the entirety of your education, right?
So the movie makers will give you your money back if you're bored, but the teachers will scream at you if you're bored.
You get rewarded, in a sense, by getting your money back, or at least you're not punished. You lose 20 minutes of your time or whatever.
But if you're bored in school, they can confine you and take a year of your life by holding you back. Take a year of your life.
And more than just take a year of your life, but humiliate you because you're the big kid in the little class. So…

[22:53] And that was one of my sort of introductions to the free market.
So if I'm bored in a movie, I can get my money back.
But if I'm bored in school, I'll get screamed at, punished, and humiliated.
And so nobody had any skeptical, rational questions of the teacher about the nature of their education. We weren't consumers.
And, of course, I remember.
I remember there was, in the Don Mills Mall, there was a little store.
It was a little sandwich and salad place. And I was walking through there in my, I don't know, mid-teens or whatever.
And they said, hey, would you mind doing a survey?
And I was like, sure, I'll do a survey. So a woman sat down and asked me about the sandwich place and if I'd ever eaten there and what I liked and what I didn't like and so on.
And then afterwards, she gave me a $2 coupon. Now, that doesn't sound like much now, but this is back in the day where at the pizza place, you could get a pizza and a Coke for $1.
The pizza was $0.75 and the Coke was $0.25 for $1 plus some tax.
So, you know, that was not a bad thing. And I remember thinking even at the time, oh, so they really care about my opinion. Why has that never happened in school? And of course, everybody knows the answer.
That school is there to grind and humiliate you into conformity, not to educate you about anything of note, consequence, interest, depth, or virtue.

[24:17] So you see these things, right? I mean, even as a kid, you see these ads for cool toys, but you never see ads for school.
Why? Because you've got to go. and the volatility and aggression and contempt and hard-eyed suspicious nature of the teachers towards the children.

[24:37] I remember there was a big lecture the vice principal gave the school about, you know, it's always the same, be responsible, be diligent, be dutiful, be hardworking, all this sort of crap, right?
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're a government employee. Don't talk to me about being hardworking.

[24:55] And I remember he's, oh, I'm going to give you a present.
And I was like, really? Are we going to get a candy bar or something?
That'd be cool. I was like, no, here's a thesaurus.
Thesaurus and then it was always they'd give you this present like they were giving you something but of course it's just taxpayer money and probably a kickback to the publisher of the thesaurus and it was always like here's your thesaurus now don't deface it this is valuable property don't tear it don't do this don't do that you know like if we care about something we're just going to what destroy it but it was always this suspicion right i mean i remember in boarding school we would have these wild rebellions against the you know pretty fascistic nature of the school as far as i perceived it not using those words but and we would have these rebellions and sometimes the two that i remember one was a conquerors as a form of chestnuts and we would put a string through a chestnut and we would hold up a chestnut and you'd whack back and forth and see who broke whose was chestnut and who had the strongest chestnut.
And this became like kind of an obsession because we were desperate for any scraps of happiness and all of that.
So we had the whole chestnut thing until, of course, everybody knows how this plays out. Chestnuts had to be banned.

[26:12] You can't have any happiness with your conquerors.
Oh, we were conquered. I get it. So that was what happened. We got too into something that made us happy.

[26:26] It was taking our time and attention away from studying the various lines in 12th century English maps. It had to be banned.
Okay. So another rebellion we had was everybody got into paper airplanes.

[26:40] Everyone got into paper airplanes. And trying to get a hold of paper to make your paper airplanes, who could make the coolest, whose could fly the highest, who could fly as the longest, I guess it just became this obsession because it gave us a pleasure and it allowed us to compete rather than just sit in endless rows and be lectured at.
And so we got into paper airplanes. Next thing you know, paper airplanes are banned.
You can't fold paper and make it go fly because.

[27:13] Reason was because it gave us happiness. And of course, if you're a teacher and the kids are all itching and staring out the window and trying to get little pieces of paper and talking about paper airplanes and figuring out the best way to make them and what to do, I'm still pretty good at making paper airplanes 50 years later.
But if you're a teacher, everybody knows what's going on emotionally. You're angry.
You're angry that the kids care care more about paper airplanes than what you're talking about.
You take it as a personal insult and you can't sit there and say, gee, maybe I can use paper airplanes to teach the children something about physics, right?
No, ban the paper airplanes.
The children are enjoying something. I take that as a personal insult and rejection, which is a consequence but not the cause.
Was therefore the paper airplanes must be banned now before they got banned though the school tried to restrict the paper right so everybody was trying to get a hold of paper to make paper airplanes.

[28:23] And the school tried to restrict and there was this you know that war of attrition against you only get one piece of paper and and now you can't make paper airplanes on paper that's been written from.
And then, oh, you can't take, you can't make paper airplanes out of lined paper because that comes from your notebooks, which are expensive.
Right? So it's, you know, and then banned, banned, banned, banned, banned. Can't have paper airplanes. Sorry, kids.

[28:52] Sorry, kids. The gulags are real. And I remember getting a very stern and lengthy lecture.
I was actually drank up in front of the entire class. I still remember the name of the teacher.
And he was this sandy-haired guy who constantly wore these big brown sunglasses, because I guess that was cool in the 70s. But.

[29:20] Me up and the reason was because my mother had given me a book of guinness book of world records and i had taken out because you know they were starving us of paper and i wanted to make my paper airplane so i had used the ruler there was a bit in dead poet society about this which always made me laugh i used the ruler to tear out the piece of paper so i could make a a paper airplane, right because they were starving us of paper this is when they were starving us of paper but we We hadn't been banned yet. They hadn't been banned yet.

[29:48] But I had taken this, and I remember it was some of the oldest Roman coins or something. It was something I didn't care about.
I cared more about the paper airplanes than some ancient Roman coins in my book.
And so what happened was I had torn out the piece of paper to make a paper airplane. This had been found.
I'm sure it wasn't quite as dramatic as the teacher snatched the paper airplane out of the sky.
Right? I think I'll buy me a football team. Rubbish.
And it had been traced back to me. I don't really remember how.
And then I got, you know, I was dragged up in front of the class and I got this incredibly long lecture on you mustn't destroy valuable property and your mother paid good money for this.
And, you know, this is just a passing fad and it's immature and blah, blah, blah, blah, Now, I didn't get caned for that particular infraction, but I do just remember being, you know, the worst combo, frightened and bored, right?
Like, frightened of punishment because I could have gotten beaten, but also bored with the entire charade, right? The entire nonsense.
Because, I mean, I think everyone got this. I think I was seven or whatever at this point. I think everyone kind of got this deep down that…

[31:05] A piece of paper is super valuable a piece of paper in a book which has 500 pages you took one page of something you're not interested in and that is despicable and that shows a deep disregard for both your own property and your mother's property because she paid good money for this book right so a piece of paper was infinitely fucking important whereas actually caring about children was not right humiliate children over a stupid fucking piece of paper no curiosity no hey you know you're not interested in coins or tell me more about it or whatever and of course me tearing out the page of the book was because they wouldn't give us any paper they used to give us more paper used to be able to just go and get paper but because people were making too too many airplanes.
The paper was restricted under lock and key. And then if you found substitutes, you were punished.
So, okay. So what's really important is a piece of paper.
What's not important is children. You will humiliate a child over a literal fucking piece of paper.

[32:16] Sounds like I'm still mad about it. I am mad. I am mad about it.
I don't think about it. I haven't thought about this for years, but I'm mad about it.

[32:24] The idea that I would humiliate my child in public for what felt like forever but it's probably like 15 minutes but this is like endless grinding lecture about how bad i was for for using a piece of paper to make a paper air oh okay so here's the real ethics or oh man that piece of paper is super important it's a humiliation ritual right you're unimportant you can be humiliated and bullied bullied and controlled.
But the piece of paper is super important.
I think I actually had to tape it back into the book. It was something completely mental.
It was a whole humiliation ritual, like a whole struggle session about the piece of paper.
That's what matters in life is a piece of paper. But of course, it was designed to punish me, to punish others.
How dare we try, Ivan Denisovich style, to try and get a scrap of food in a time of starvation?
How dare we try to to get a scrap of happiness in a time of control and humiliation, right?

[33:26] So, let's get back to our quotes.
Let's get back to our quotes, because these combos, these sort of one-two punches of Hume and Nietzsche are really quite important, if not downright essential.
Why am I saying all of this? Well, I think it's interesting. I remember it well.
Whatever cannot obey itself is commanded. And there's this mystery of like, how come everyone's so easy to rule?
Well, whoever cannot obey himself is commanded. Nope.

[34:01] Blaming the victim, right? That is blaming the victim.
The purpose of indoctrination regarding children is, it is not that children will not restrain themselves and therefore they need to be commanded.
It is that children are commanded so they do not learn how to restrain themselves and thus feel the endless need for authority.

[34:26] And that's Hume's like, why is it authority is just an opinion.
No. Children are commanded, controlled, instructed, bullied, confined, punished, so that they do not develop internal self-control, but merely conform to the brutal enforcements of external authorities, so that children and society is given the constant impression that without authority, all will be chaos and violence and so on, right?
And of course, you know if you've ever argued for a truly free society like a society that recognizes the non aggression principle oh it's because they're boring right so all you hear is the same well warlords will take off well there'll be chaos well it'll be a war of all against all well there'll be you know violent gangs roaming the street like without authority right so it's not that well the people just mysteriously don't control themselves and therefore they need to be controlled by external authority. No, no, no.
The way it works is external authority rigidly controls the children so the children don't learn how to control themselves and therefore the children perceive an endless need for external authority to hold the chaos and evil of bad people at bay.

[35:40] If the world is full of chaos and evil and bad people, then centralized authority gives them a giant lever with which to control and bully mankind.
So it's not an answer, but it feels like an answer. Now, why does it feel like an answer?
Children, I mean, I've raised a whole kid now, right? And I was in daycare, interacted with hundreds of kids over the course of a couple of years of working in a daycare as a teenager.
I've had family members I've helped to raise, extended family back in the day.
I've got some experience in these matters.
Children really want to please children really want to emulate their parents and internalization of self-control is modeled by parents internalizing self-control, not losing their tempers not being pulled around like a kite's tail by their own emotions, you know, you model self-control and self-restraint and the children will grow to develop self-control and self-restraint my daughter is better than me in some ways, so So, yeah, that's how you get a civilized society.
The whole experiment is absolutely validated.

[36:45] So, yeah. But no, if you rigidly control children, and you rigidly control children, and when you do that, you give the children the direct impression that their natures are corrupt and immoral.
If you see two dogs, one is roaming free, The other one is chained up with five chains and has a muzzle on it.
Which dog are you more nervous about, right?
The dog who's allowed to roam free, you say, okay, well, it must be a pretty friendly dog, right?
But the dog that's got, you know, Cerberus-style five chains and a muzzle, you're like, well, that dog's got to be super aggressive, right?

[37:24] If you keep chaining up the dog and putting a muzzle on it, guess what?
It's going to become aggressive because it's going to be frustrated, especially when it sees the other dog running around free.

[37:33] So when children are treated with this hard-eyed suspicion and controlled and, brutalized and bored and tested and like on useless stuff and all of that, then children internalize the perception that they're bad, the authority figures are good, and if the authority already figures don't control them, they'll just chaos, right?

[37:54] Conquerors, there'll be a lot of paper airplanes, right?
So children just want to smash chestnuts and make paper airplanes rather than learn about geometry or whatever, right?
But of course, paper airplanes, we were learning, right? That's the funny thing.
I mean, you can really tell these days the kids who didn't grow up with sports, right?
They don't know how to lose gracefully. They don't know how to admit defeat. feet they don't know how to be friends with someone they disagree with because you have to be friends with all my friends and i used to get together a couple of times a week sometimes to play football and we just randomly divvy up the teams and we'd play hard and then we'd be friends afterwards and it was to friends during all that how to compete and how to disagree and have a win lose situation and not become enemies blah blah blah like the sports thing is all all gone out out the window because now it's all screens and stuff so yeah you perceive yourself as as bad as dangerous as as as you're born sinful or whatever and you need to be trained and bullied into a remote semblance of of decency and so on and decency is brutalizing children for their natures and viewing them as revolutionaries that need to be thrown into endless struggle in order to conform to the dominating hierarchy of nonsense beliefs.
Anyway, so, yeah, that's, you know, you bully children so that they…

[39:17] As evil, as corrupt, as wrong, as bad, as disobedient, as ungrateful, undutiful, uncivilized, especially the boys, right?
You bully them, thus giving them that perception.
And because they perceive themselves and then the next generation as chaotic and dangerous and rebellious and ungrateful and uncivilized and violent and without significant restraint, well, they then believe that you need external authority in order to tame the wild jackals of childhood.
Children are born feral and it is only through strict and disciplined training that they become even remotely civilized.
It's like, okay, just say a broken society needs to break children.
Yeah, okay, I get it. I mean, let's just be honest about it.
The society has so few answers that it needs to brutalize children into never asking questions.
You understand that's the deal, right?
The society is so fake and false and built on such a festering foundation of lies, that it needs to bully children into never asking questions because the whole thing is a house of cards that comes down with three or four well-aimed questions.
Why are we doing this? What is the truth? What is morality? What is virtue?
A society that had answers to these questions would just answer the questions.

[40:38] How dare you ask this question? We're going to punish you. Why are we learning this? How dare you?
We're going to take a year of your life, right? We're going to gulag you by making you repeat a grade or whatever, right?
How dare you ask this question? Well, just don't punish me. Just answer the question.
Why are we doing this? Why do you have authority?

[41:01] I don't go to my dentist. I've got a good dentist. I don't go to my dentist and say, why do you have authority?
Why am I doing this? It's like, she can explain it and doesn't get aggressive, right?
Oh, you need to make sure you get a water pick and do your wisdom teeth and blah, blah, blah. Here's why.
No, I can't live with that. Great, she's got answers. Doesn't need to bully me. Doesn't need to get aggressive. You better or else, right?
I'm going to drill through your tongue, right? I mean, she doesn't need to because she's got actual answers.
And people who have actual answers don't need to be aggressive.
But society doesn't have any actual answers. All it has is power.

[41:34] And power is the pretense of an answer.
And you know it's a pretense of an answer because children get wildly punished for asking any basic questions.
And a kid who's, I don't know, 12, who loses a year of his life, I mean, that's almost 10% of his life.
For a kid to be held back a year is like an adult losing seven years.

[42:01] Can you imagine being in some boring class in university and if you didn't pass, you'd have to take the same year over for seven years straight?
I mean, do you understand that that would be a brutal sentence?
Well, that's what was threatened against kids when I was a kid.
And we saw those kids. It was not pretty.
So why is it so easy to rule people?
People because we've taught them that their essential natural natures are corrupt and ungrateful and disobedient and immoral and skeptical and that's bad and we have to punish them and so okay so people are like okay well gee my whole society couldn't be corrupt it must be that i'm corrupt and the society is just trying to help me right a doctor who operates on a gangrenous limb is saving your life a doctor who amputates a healthy foot is just a mangali style Alsatist, right?
So if society is performing all these brutalities on children who are born naturally good and decent and as children are, well, if society is brutalizing children and the children are born decent and good and wanted to be pleased well, then society is just cruel.
But you can't accept that, right? Because that's really painful and your parents participated and probably enacted it too and extended family and everyone around you and so So you've got to, I guess, march in with a zombie horde of broken people, right?

[43:26] So it's rough, man. It's rough to see these things.
It's essential to see these things. But yeah, I'd just like to extend a hearty fuck you to all of the semi-fascistic assholes who brutalize children and hollow out their hearts to the point where it gets filled with the endless interstellar voids of dark-hearted power. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, the society that you've created is mathematically unsustainable, and you have participated in the demise of all that is bright and noble in thousands of helpless children's souls and that's a real sin.
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Guess I've got a little bit of time before my 11 o'clock show.
Have yourself a great, great weekend. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.