0:03 - Introduction to Listener Mailbag
0:49 - The Five-Year Peaceful Society
4:10 - The Nature of Naivety
6:18 - Exploring Self-Knowledge
10:44 - The Future of Self-Understanding
15:02 - Brain Scanning for Child Development
17:56 - The Utopian Debate
22:05 - Justifying War and Self-Defense
25:44 - Closing Remarks and Donations
In this episode of Freedomain Radio, I delve into the complexity of raising children in a peaceful society and the implications of early childhood experiences on long-term behavior. I open the discussion by addressing a listener's inquiry regarding my assertion that we are only five years away from a society characterized by peace. I explain that in the crucial first five years of life, human brain development reaches approximately 90% of its capacity, heavily influenced by the surrounding environment. This foundational period extends back to the nine months of pregnancy, where a calm and nurturing atmosphere can foster resilient individuals capable of resisting authority and wrongdoing, contrasting sharply with those born into aggressive environments.
I illustrate this point by sharing personal anecdotes, such as my daughter's discerning ability to detect aggression in others, which reflects the effectiveness of peaceful upbringing. I assert that to be morally virtuous, one must recognize and confront the existence of immorality. Philosophy plays a critical role in this understanding, providing a framework for distinguishing right from wrong and developing a nuanced approach to morality—essentially understanding that ignorance of evil does not equate to virtue.
Transitioning to the topic of self-awareness, I equate self-knowledge to maintaining a vehicle. Just as one must learn the intricacies of their car to drive it effectively, one must explore their own psyche to navigate life. I emphasize that the aim of gaining self-knowledge is to identify and remove obstacles that cloud one's understanding of reality, enabling clearer perceptions guided by principles rather than subjective interpretations. Through this lens, I illustrate the necessity of confronting personal history, particularly traumatic experiences, and how these insights can propel us toward a more profound understanding of ourselves and the world.
We also explore the potential for advancements in technology to assist in identifying childhood trauma through brain scans—a concept I liken to routine dental check-ups. However, I delve into the complexities surrounding this idea, discussing the societal hesitation to adopt such practices. Many parents may fear the implications of discovering their errors in child-rearing and may resist the necessary changes out of discomfort, making the pursuit of optimal upbringing a potentially daunting task.
A listener's question prompts a deeper examination of the notion of utopia. I assert that the dismissal of utopian ideals naysayers often stems from personal guilt regarding their own ethical failures. Rather than engage with uncomfortable truths about their complicity in societal issues, many prefer to label visions of a virtuous society as unrealistic. This leads to a broader conversation about self-defense and the ethical dilemmas surrounding war. I articulate my belief in taking necessary measures to protect familial and societal well-being, discussing the moral responsibilities involved in confronting and neutralizing human predators.
Throughout the episode, I emphasize the importance of awareness, individual accountability, and the relentless pursuit of truth in one’s life. The aim is to foster a culture of discernment, approaching parenting, morality, and societal constructs with an unwavering commitment to justice and virtue.
[0:00] Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. Listener mailbag time.
[0:04] I hope you're doing well. Stef, why do you say that we're only five years away from a peaceful society? Everyone raises their kids peacefully for those first five years. Why five years? Why not 10 years? Wouldn't there be issues between those children raised peacefully and those who've been raised through aggression and further broken by culture?
[0:26] Well, the reason I say five years is the human brain develops to 90% capacity in the first five years of life. And the majority of that development occurs with reference to the environment, to what's going on. You know, if you grow up in a house speaking Spanish, you will speak Spanish. If you grow up in a Muslim household, you're most likely to be a Muslim and to imbibe or incorporate the cultural values of your environment.
[0:50] And so if everybody raises their child peacefully and then this is not just the first five years that's the first five years after being born it's a nine months prior to being born which also needs to be peaceful and calm and then we will simply develop for the most part bulletproof kids who won't be intimidated by authority who will now have no problem speaking back and so on and it's like my daughter, she lost her first tooth.
[1:17] And people are saying to her, oh, did you get any money from the tooth fairy? And she's like, seriously, why do you think the tooth fairy exists? She's great. And she's five, right? So she's just not intimidated by that kind of stuff. And I hope that remains her life personality. It's really tough to change what happens after the first five years. And in some ways, it's impossible. I mean, I guess so if you speak a language up until five years of age, I guess if you don't use it for 20 years, you probably will forget a good chunk of it, although it probably would be fairly easy to get back. Let me know. I've never tried this. But yeah, just five years. Now, would there be issues between children raised peacefully and those who've been raised through aggression and so on? Well, I'm not sure exactly what that means.
[2:08] My daughter is very good at identifying aggressive people and steering clear of them. Not that she's exposed to a lot, but, you know, occasionally at the playground or something like that, they'll be an aggressive or unpleasant child. And she gets it right away. And so I don't, this is the idea that if you're good, you're susceptible to being manipulated by evil people. That's true until you get philosophy, at which point you become both good at defense and offense. And so the sort of dreamy, even off from the Butler's Karamazov style idealist who always sees the best and ends up being manipulated by everyone around him, that's not morality.
[2:50] That's just blindness. I mean, it's like a doctor who refuses to know that there's any such thing as illness. I mean, if you want to be virtuous, you have to recognize the existence and opposition of immorality. If you want to be a doctor, you have to recognize that there's illness and do your best to prevent or combat it. And if you want to be a moral human being in this world, then you must recognize the existence of immorality, evil, and to work to prevent or oppose it. You cannot be a moral human being without opposing evil. So anyone who claims to be moral without recognizing the existence and danger of human evil is a fool and is dis-smershing. The value of philosophy. Again, imagine being a doctor and saying that there's no such thing as illness and so on. Illness is, you are a dangerous human being in that. And if you are a claim to be a good person and you don't recognize, prevent and fight evil, you're not a good person. That's how you measure virtue at the moment. In the future, yes, it will be different. We won't need to be good in the same way when evil has been minimized to near inconsequentiality. But right now, we have to be some tough bastards with hides of armor and nails of adamantine in order to make a better world.
[4:10] All right, next question.
[4:17] Naivety. I was always, and I'm still called naive. I was very shy about it. I was generally very, very shy. But now I think it was only a sort of mistuning with the world. I didn't or couldn't accept fundamental lies underlying our culture. Should we keep our naivety? Should we differentiate between healthy and unhealthy or real naivety? So naivete is a lack of knowledge about usually things that are uncomfortable. And again, you don't have to pursue the fight against evil. But if you don't, then you're just not a virtuous person. I mean, sorry, you may be a nice person, you may be helpful to people, people may like you a lot, but to be a virtuous person, you must fight against evil or work to prevent it. And this doesn't mean going out and doing what I'm doing. It can just mean raising your children peacefully and keeping aggressive or abusive people away from them, or it could be the case with your friends or with your spouse or whatever, or yourself for that matter. But to recognize and prevent or oppose evil is the essence of virtue as it stands. And so naivete is the rejection of very important truths for the sake of emotional comfort. I don't think that there really is a healthy way to reject essential aspects of reality. I just don't think it's valid.
[5:44] Does Izzy, my daughter, does she ever have imaginary friends? She does not. I mean, we do a lot of role plays where I play characters and she plays characters and we do adventures or she's into trying to convert bad people to good. Maybe it's genetic. I don't know. But I'm a character named Meany and she's a character named Jenna and I'm trying to get her to join my mean gang and she's trying to get me to join her good gang and we'll talk for like 20 minutes about the various reasons why you'd be one way or the other and she's great that way.
[6:19] So, no, no imaginary friends, but a lot of role play Five, how deep can you dive into yourself? I mean self-knowledge, In the process of self-knowledge, is there any sort of goal or is it only a journey? I personally feel a lot of tension in this process. I always think about it as a sort of repair, a fixing. That type of thinking makes it to the procedure with the goal of achieving something.
[6:47] So as far as self-knowledge goes, I think that you want to know yourself like you're the only person who can repair your car. You know that your car is going to break down, and you know that there's no one else in the world who can fundamentally repair your car, and therefore you have to learn about your car. You learn about your car with the purpose of driving it, with the purpose of getting somewhere. You don't just fix your car and then put it up on blocks. That would be sort of pointless. So the purpose of self-knowledge is to understand and overcome that which interferes with your rational understanding of the world, right? The emotional blocks, the barriers, the alter egos, the cultural or religious or nationalistic or racial countercurrents to your direct and easy perception of the world, or rational perception is not always easy. And so if you have some sort of cataract or something which is clouding your vision, then you would study the eye or you'd go to someone who studied the eye to the point where they will be able to clear whatever is blocking your vision. And the purpose of self-knowledge is to take the moat out of your own eye, the beam out of other people's eyes, if possible, and to be able to see reality clearly for what it is through principles rather than through our subjective appreciation or understanding of the world. I mean, if you stand on the world, you know, it looks flat. The sun and the moon, they look about the same size.
[8:15] The clouds look like they weigh nothing.
[8:18] Birds seem to float. I mean, lots of stuff falls down, but helium balloons fall up. There's lots of things that are confusing about the world if you only look at it from your perspective without...
[8:29] Any reference to principles, right? And once you understand principles, you understand that the moon is what, like two light seconds away, and the sun is like eight light minutes away, or 93 million miles, and the moon's like a quarter million miles, or something like that. So they're not the same size, there's just various distances, even though eclipses are confusing. You know the world is not flat, you know that clouds do weigh something, you know that helium balloons fall up, because helium is lighter than air. There's lots of things that you will understand with reference to principles, with reference to physics or biology, rather than simply your own, you know, brain-in-the-box subjective experience of the world. And by subjective, I don't mean that it's not real. What you're seeing is tangible. I look like I'm in a little white box on your computer screen.
[9:14] Let me out! But the reality is that what we receive through our senses does not give us many principles. I mean, a dog can catch a frisbee. They understand the arc of a frisbee and all that. But they don't understand, you know, that objects fall to earth at 9.8 meters per second per second and that kind of stuff. So, in the way that science is supposed to replace our subjective experience of the world with objective principles, philosophy is supposed to replace our subjective experience of the world with objective principles. So, if you had parents who beat you, biologically you're going to be bonded to them, but it is an immoral thing to do to be a child and understanding your family with reference to principles is like understanding looking at the world with reference to gravity. It looks like the sun goes around the earth and the earth stays still. The reality is that the sun goes around the galaxy and the earth goes around the sun and so on. So it's replacing our immediate sense perception with objective and universal principles. That's really the purpose of philosophy.
[10:19] And, um, excuse me, everything that gets in the way of that is what we pursue self-knowledge in order to achieve. In the future, self-knowledge will be less of a demanding and stringent requirement because there will not be all of these, um, bombs and triggers and minds put into our minds in order to exploit us.
[10:45] And so it will be easier in the future.
[10:49] I overcame religious indoctrination for the first number of years of my life, my daughter will not have to, so she will not have the same challenges overcoming religion and superstition as I did. So for her, self-knowledge with regards to that will be largely unnecessary. Next question. Frequently, you talk about how easy and inexpensive it would be in a stateless society to scan kids' brains to detect damage caused by abuse and trauma. And therefore, this would allow caregivers to take corrective measures. This sounds like taking kids to the dentist every six months to get their teeth checked and catch cavities before they get bad. Therefore, we don't need to wait until governments quit or fail in the future to engage in the brain scanning practice. However, somehow the free market has not proven its value because it appears this is not widespread practice yet. How would you explain this? It's a fascinating question. So the argument is, and let's forget about the radiation or whatever. We're going to assume that the scans are safe. So as the child's brain develops, you can get scans of the brain to see how the brain is developing. And trauma has particular markers on the brain, an enlarged amygdala or fight or flight mechanism, a shrunken hippocampus, which is long-term emotional memories, a shrunken neofrontal cortex with a seed of reasoning and impulse control and so on.
[12:13] And, um, basically if the reptile brain is strong, but the human brain, human part of the brain is weak, then trauma has usually been occurred. And we revert to a more primitive state of win-lose and aggression and fighting and manipulation and so on. If we are raised in a traumatic environment, then we're less civilized. We're closer to, you know, ape on ape brutality. And therefore we activate the base monkey brain without the human 2.0 buggy as hell beta expansion pack. And so you can find this stuff in the brain through scans. And so if parents are concerned that their children may be undergoing trauma or may not be developing properly, then this would be the case. Now, in a future society, people would most likely take out insurance for their kids' actions. You know, if their kid does something that hurts or harms of someone on someone's property, then the insurance will cover it, and the insurance will be far cheaper if the kids get the scans, and if the parents go through good parental training, which again, they'll need to do in a diminishing way if they were raised that way, right? Like you don't need to go to ESL. English is a second language classes if you're raised speaking English, right? So you won't need to do that. If parents are raised well, then they really won't have to worry that much about taking a lot of parenting classes, won't do any harm to brush up. But um so the idea that kids would get scanned in order to find trauma well why is this uh not.
[13:41] Why is this not occurring first of all i don't know that there's really a very good benchmark of healthy human functioning at the moment what is called normal you know is a sliding scale from like the insanity of the dark ages to the relative insanity of modern times so what would you compare, someone's deficiencies too in the realm of brain development. In other words, if you found a child, and I'm striving to raise my child this way, but of course I went through traumatic stuff as a child, so it's a step-by-step process. But if you were to take a child who has never been yelled at, who's never been aggressed against, who's never been hit, who's never been told superstitious nonsense, who's never been lied to, who's never been told about the virtue of the home sports well-armed team called the military or the government, or if they just didn't know or only knew these as false things, what would that child's brain look like? Well i would submit that the number of children being raised without aggression and without delusion maybe one in a million maybe one and a half a million that would be you know just a guess, and also what about government schools right government schools are i think pretty terrible and i think the statistics show that they're fairly terrible but um.
[15:02] So what would it mean to have a benchmark called you know one in a million or one and a half a million kids or one in a hundred thousand or one in ten thousand doesn't matter hugely i mean that would be the benchmark and then you take your kids in to get scanned and then you'd find out that as your child was not you know was not there was not at that place where optimal human functioning would be, which simply means non-traumatized human functioning. So how many parents would feel really comfortable or happy knowing where they ranked relative to ideal peaceful parenting? Probably they'd feel pretty bad.
[15:43] And bad parenting is an addiction, right? It's an addiction based on usually history of trauma that's been unexamined and undifferentiated and unrevealed to the psyche as trauma. And... What will happen, of course, is after you've had kids, let's say you take your kid in for a scan at two or three years old, well, a lot's going to have to change if your kid is below the norm, right? And there'll be specific recommendations, like you've got to be home with the kid, you've got to apologize, you've got to change your parenting completely, you can't send them to government schools, there'll just be lots of things that have to change. And how many people are comfortable making those sacrifices in order to raise children in the best way? How many people?
[16:33] What if it turns out that there's a study that came out recently that said that children who are told religious stories as truth have a great deal of difficulty differentiating fact from fiction, which is basically two ways of saying the same thing. And if this proves to be, yes, I can't imagine it doesn't, but if it proves to be negative for the brain development, that the kid takes, you know, kid goes for a scan, they say, listen, you've got to stop talking about the superstitious stuff as if it's true. It's harming reality processing centers within the brain. You can see here, there's a dark spot and blah, blah, blah. Compare this to the white spot on the rationally raised kid and so on. How many parents are going to want to know that? How many parents are going to want to reform that way? How many parents are going to want to change? You know, they might have to sell their house if they're going down to one income and one person stays home with the kid. And I mean, it's a huge change for people's life. And addicts, I mean, basically by definition, are people who are unable or unwilling to sacrifice short-term pain for the sake of long-term gain. And if bad parenting is like an addiction, almost by definition, people wouldn't take their kids in because they wouldn't want to know. And even if they did, they wouldn't want to change their behavior because it would be very disrupting and painful in the short run. while the benefits to the child would be many years down the road in the long run. And by the time you get to be a teenager, I mean, probably too late.
[17:56] All right. Let's see.
[18:06] I have a viewer question for Stef. And it was inspired by the impression that his views are quite often very utopian. For example, he is quick to bring up the atrocities of the Iraq war and label all supporters of that war as guilty as baby murderers. Well, that's not exactly what I said, but anyway.
[18:26] Well, he'd be putting the likes of Christopher Hitchens in that camp then too. Christopher Hitchens would quickly claim that Stefan has no idea what he is talking about. Okay, so I just want to talk about the utopian thing so far.
[18:42] Utopian is a rebuttal, and I put that in air quotes for those just listening. The word utopian is a, quote, rebuttal that is shit out from guilty and corrupted human beings who basically say, your vision of the good lights up too much evil in myself for me to accept it, so I'm going to reject it as unrealistic, right? So if you have been beating slaves for 20 years and then someone comes, you know, in the 17th century or 18th century and someone comes along and says, oh, we'll have a world without slavery, that would be very painful to you because a world without slavery would occur because slavery is immoral, which would put you in the role of a hideous, human, brutalizing, torturer for 20 years. And so if your soul has been so corrupted by compliance with evil, by sadism, by false accusations, by libel, by slander, by trawling, by just being a general all-around jerkwad, then when someone comes along who embodies or espouses a nobility of action, a rising light of virtue in the world, what it reveals within yourself is the deep and ugly scarring of your own complacency and compliance with immorality, with evil, that you become a foot soldier in the Dark Lord's journey towards the enslavement of the human race.
[20:09] And so then you must psychologically either deal with your own immorality, which is very painful, or you must then say that this vision is ridiculous, naive, utopian, human nature is not like that. In other words, you must say that your own corruption is normal and universal and irreversible, unchangeable, and practical.
[20:35] You must adapt to the immoralities of the world. That's practical because it's impossible not to. Immorality is just a subjective opinion. I pay my bills. I'm a decent guy. I have nice barbecues. You must do everything that is necessary to maintain the illusion that you're not an orc. Basically, you're not just a foot soldier in the Dark Lord's army.
[20:57] And therefore, you must say that these are, you must get angry, contemptuous. you must bring all of the abusive and contemptuous and hostile and degrading emotional manipulative tactics to bear. And you must not, of course, accept, understand, or rebut any rational piece of argument or evidence in the situation. You must simply take a deep, giant acid dump on the smiling, happy face of a potential human future. And so utopian is something which basically says, if your world exists, if the world of virtue exists, I will have no place and will most likely kill myself. So I must say that your vision of a peaceful, happy, virtuous, cooperative world is a utopian, dangerous, ugly, deluded fantasy, because if that world comes into being, the light will burn me into ash, like the vampire that I am. So, I just want to mention that a lot, because you get a lot of this kind of stuff, oh, it's utopia, and you're a dreamer, and so on. It's like, well, I may be a dreamer, but you're a nightmare.
[22:06] Under what circumstances would you endorse a declaration of war? What methods and weapons would you support the use of, and how effective do you think they would be? Okay, so this is all, of course, very theoretical, but... Yeah, if there was a gathering for an invasion, if there was any particular credible documented threat of some sort of dirty bomb or some sort of poisoning of the water system or whatever, I would fully support whatever means necessary in order to protect the society that I lived in. That would be targeted assassinations, that would be very specific drones with DNA-coded information that would hopefully disable, or if not disable, then kill. My particular view is I don't view humanity as any kind of common herd at all, in any way, shape, or form.
[22:57] A human society is like an ecosystem of predators and prey, of farmers and livestock. But the predator and prey analogy in the form of war is very important. The most dangerous human predator, sorry, the most dangerous predator is a human being. Because a human being, you know, like the Cylons in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, look like people except without the cool glowing orgasm backbones. And so the most dangerous predator I will ever face is a human being. And if a tiger is advancing on my family and I have to call in an airstrike to take out the tiger, I will do so, right? I mean, because I don't want my family to get eaten or killed by a tiger. And the greatest tigers are the sociopaths, the monsters, the wolves in sheep's clothing that are human beings. The most dangerous predators you'll ever meet will be human beings, bipeds. We can protect ourselves from animal predators. It's very hard to protect yourself from human predators given their incredible proliferation in the modern world. So if a set of human predators was looking to take over or poison or damage to society or my family, then I would take whatever means necessary and sleep like a baby that night. I would take whatever means necessary to eradicate that threat.
[24:13] This is fundamental to self-defense. You would target as much as possible the people who were responsible, but you would do whatever was necessary to prevent that threat. And I would support and fight and do whatever was necessary to protect that. And if people died who were planning some sort of attack upon my society or my home, then I would consider that a wonderful cleansing of a human stain and a dangerous predation. I mean, the human predators are worse than rabid animals, and we generally will try and shoot rabid animals because they're incurable and incurably dangerous. The same thing is true of human predators. There's nobody that I know who's been able to cure sociopathy or psychopathy or a lack of empathy or sadism. These kinds of human characteristics are incurable and relentless. This is how the brain is formed, and human beings split into predators and prey, and I guess the beautiful ones, if you know anything about the mouse utopia experiments, who observe and in some cases try to intervene and improve.
[25:17] So yeah, I mean, if there are human predators who are attacking a good civilization, I believe that that civilization hopefully can enclose them, hopefully can disable them and keep them separate from that human civilization, either on an island or even some sort of enclosure. But if those people end up being killed as the result of preemptive self-defense, I consider that a highly virtuous action and extremely necessary for the continued success of virtue in the world. So I hope that helps.
[25:45] Please continue to send in your questions, mailbag at freedomainradio.com. If you find these conversations useful, we are below last month's donation. So if you could help out, I would hugely and massively appreciate it. You can do so at fdrurl.com slash donate. And once again, thank you everyone so much for watching. Remember to listen to or call into the call-in shows Wednesday nights 8 p.m. And Saturday nights 8 p.m. Eastern Standard. We look forward to talking to you. All the best.
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