Raising Children for a Peaceful World!

Stefan Molyneux

Listener Mailbag - Questions from June 2014!  In this episode of Freedomain, I discuss the critical role of early childhood experiences in shaping behavior and emphasize the importance of a nurturing environment during the first five years of life. I share personal insights on recognizing aggression and moral virtue while highlighting the need for self-awareness to navigate life's challenges.   We explore technology's potential to identify childhood trauma and the societal hesitance to embrace such advancements. Additionally, I address skepticism around utopia, linking it to personal ethical shortcomings, and advocate for a moral responsibility to protect our families and communities. The episode emphasizes awareness, personal accountability, and the pursuit of truth in fostering a just society.  GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK! https://peacefulparenting.com/  Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!  Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!  You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!  See you soon! https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2025

Transcript

00:00Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, listener mailbag time. I hope you're

00:04doing well.

00:05Steph, why do you say that we're only five years away from a peaceful society? Everyone

00:10raises their kids peacefully for those first five years. Why five years? Why not ten years?

00:15Wouldn't there be issues between those children raised peacefully and those who've been raised

00:20through aggression and further broken by culture?

00:25Well, the reason I say five years is the human brain develops to 90% capacity in the first

00:33five years of their life, and the majority of that development occurs with reference

00:37to the environment, to what's going on. You know, if you grow up in a house speaking Spanish,

00:42you will speak Spanish. If you grow up in a Muslim household, you're most likely to

00:45be a Muslim and to imbibe or incorporate the cultural values of your environment. And so

00:51if everybody raises their child peacefully, and then this is not just the first five years,

00:55that's the first five years after being born, it's the nine months prior to being born,

01:00which also needs to be peaceful and calm, and then we will simply develop, for the most

01:05part, bulletproof kids who won't be intimidated by authority, who will have no problem speaking

01:10back, and so on. And it's like my daughter, she lost her first tooth, and people are saying

01:19to her, oh, did you get any money from the tooth fairy? And she's like, seriously? Why

01:24do you think the tooth fairy exists? And she's five, right? So she's just not intimidated

01:30by that kind of stuff. And I hope that remains her life personality. It's really tough to

01:35change what happens after the first five years. And in some ways, it's impossible. I mean,

01:42I guess so if you speak a language up until five years of age, I guess if you don't use

01:47it for 20 years, you probably will forget a good chunk of it. Although probably would

01:51be fairly easy to get back. Let me know. I've never, I never tried this. But yeah, just

01:56five years. Now, would there be issues between children raised peacefully and those being

02:00raised through aggression, and so on? Well, I'm not sure exactly what that means. My daughter

02:09is very good at identifying aggressive people and steering clear of them. Not that she's

02:13exposed to a lot, but you know, occasionally at the playground or something like that,

02:16they'll be an aggressive or unpleasant child. And she gets it right away. And so I don't,

02:21this idea that if you're good, you're susceptible to being manipulated by evil people. That's

02:26true until you get philosophy, at which point you become both good at defense and offense.

02:35And so the sort of dreamy, even off from the Brothers Karamazov style, idealist who always

02:44sees the best that ends up being manipulated by everyone around him. That's not morality.

02:49That's just blindness. I mean, it's like a doctor who refuses to know that there's any

02:55such thing as illness. I mean, if you want to be virtuous, you have to recognize the

02:59existence and opposition of immorality. If you want to be a doctor, you have to recognize

03:04that there's illness and do your best to prevent or combat it. And if you want to be a moral

03:09human being in this world, then you must recognize the existence of immorality, evil,

03:15and to work to prevent or oppose it. You cannot be a moral human being without opposing evil.

03:21So anyone who claims to be moral without recognizing the existence and danger of human evil is

03:28a fool and is dispersing the value of philosophy. Again, imagine being a doctor and saying that

03:37there's no such thing as illness and so on. Illnesses, you are a dangerous human being

03:43in that. And if you claim to be a good person and you don't recognize, prevent and fight

03:47evil, you're not a good person. That's how you measure virtue at the moment. In the future,

03:52yes, it will be different. We won't need to be good in the same way when evil has been

03:56minimized to near inconsequentiality. But right now, we have to be some tough bastards

04:01with hides of armor and nails of adamantine in order to make a better world.

04:10All right. Next question.

04:17Naivety. I was always and I'm still called naive. I was very shy about it. I was generally very,

04:23very shy. But now I think it was only a sort of mistuning with the world. I didn't or couldn't

04:28accept fundamental lies underlying our culture. Should we keep our naivety? Should we differentiate

04:34between healthy and unhealthy or real naivety? So, naivety is a lack of knowledge about usually

04:45things that are uncomfortable. And again, you don't have to pursue the fight against

04:51evil. But if you don't, then you're just not a virtuous person. I mean, sorry, you may

04:57be a nice person, you may be helpful to people, people may like you a lot. But to be a virtuous

05:02person, you must fight against evil or work to prevent it. And this doesn't mean going

05:07out and doing what I'm doing. It can just mean raising your children peacefully and

05:12keeping aggressive or abusive people away from them. Or it could be that the case with

05:17your friends or with your spouse or whatever, or yourself for that matter. But to recognize

05:22and prevent or oppose evil is the essence of virtue as it stands. And so, naivety is

05:30the rejection of very important truths for the sake of emotional comfort. I don't think

05:35that there really is a healthy way to reject essential aspects of reality. I just don't

05:40think it's valid. Does Izzy, my daughter, does she ever have imaginary friends? She

05:48does not. I mean, we do a lot of role plays where I play characters and she plays characters

05:53and we do adventures or she's into trying to convert bad people to good. Maybe it's

05:59genetic. I don't know. But I'm a character named Meanie and she's a character named Jenna

06:06and I'm trying to get her to join my mean gang. And she's trying to get me to join her

06:11good gang. And we'll talk for like 20 minutes about the various reasons why you'd be one

06:16way or the other. And she's great that way. So no, no imaginary friends, but a lot of

06:20role play. Five, how deep can you dive into yourself? I mean, self-knowledge. In the process

06:30of self-knowledge, is there any sort of goal or is it only a journey? I personally feel

06:34a lot of tension in this process. I always think about it as a sort of repair, a fixing.

06:40That type of thinking makes it to the procedure with the goal of achieving something. So as

06:48far as self-knowledge goes, I think that you want to know yourself like you're the only

06:55person who can repair your car. You know that your car is going to break down and you know

07:00that there's no one else in the world who can fundamentally repair your car and therefore

07:04you have to learn about your car. You learn about your car with the purpose of driving

07:09it, with the purpose of getting somewhere. You don't just fix your car and then put it

07:13up on blocks. That would be sort of pointless. So the purpose of self-knowledge is to understand

07:19and overcome that which interferes with your rational understanding of the world, right?

07:25The emotional blocks, the barriers, the alter egos, the cultural or religious or nationalistic

07:32or racial countercurrents to your direct and easy perception of the world, or rational

07:38perceptions, not always easy. And so if you have some sort of cataract or something which

07:42is clouding your vision, then you would study the eye or you'd go to someone who studied

07:48the eye to the point where they will be able to clear whatever is blocking your vision.

07:53And the purpose of self-knowledge is to take the moat out of your own eye, the beam out

07:58of other people's eyes if possible, and to be able to see reality clearly for what it

08:02is through principles rather than through our subjective appreciation or understanding

08:09of the world. I mean, if you stand on the world, you know, it looks flat. The sun and

08:13the moon, they look about the same size. The clouds look like they weigh nothing. Birds

08:18seem to float. I mean, lots of stuff falls down, but helium balloons fall up. There's

08:23lots of things that are confusing about the world if you only look at it from your perspective

08:27without any reference to principles, right? And once you understand principles, you understand

08:34that the moon is what, like two light seconds away, and the sun is like eight light minutes

08:39away or 93 million miles. The moon's like a quarter million miles or something like

08:42that. So they're not the same size. There's just various distances. Even though eclipses

08:46are confusing, you know the world is not flat. You know the clouds do weigh something. You

08:50know that helium balloons fall up because helium is lighter than air. There's lots of

08:53things that you will understand with reference to principles, with reference to physics or

08:58biology, rather than simply your own, you know, brain-in-the-box subjective experience

09:06of the world. And by subjective, I don't mean that it's not real. What you're seeing is

09:10tangible. I look like I'm in a little white box on your computer screen. Let me out! But

09:16the reality is that what we receive through our senses does not give us many principles.

09:23I mean, a dog can catch a frisbee. They understand the arc of a frisbee and all that. But they

09:27don't understand, you know, that objects fall to earth at 9.8 meters per second per second

09:32and that kind of stuff. So in the way that science is supposed to replace our subjective

09:38experience of the world with objective principles, philosophy is supposed to replace our subjective

09:42experience of the world with objective principles. So if you had parents who beat you, biologically

09:48you're going to be bonded to them. But it is an immoral thing to do to beat a child

09:52and understanding your family with reference to principles is like understanding looking

09:56at the world with reference to gravity. It looks like the sun goes around the earth and

10:03the earth stays still. The reality is that the sun goes around the galaxy and the earth

10:08goes around the sun and so on. So it's replacing our immediate sense perception with objective

10:14and universal principles. That's really the purpose of philosophy. And everything that

10:21gets in the way of that is what we pursue self-knowledge in order to achieve. In the

10:26future self-knowledge will be less of a demanding and stringent requirement because there will

10:34not be all of these bombs and triggers and minds put into our minds in order to exploit

10:45us. So it will be easier in the future. I overcame religious indoctrination for the

10:53first number of years of my life. My daughter will not have to so she will not have the

10:58same challenges overcoming religion and superstition as I did. So for her self-knowledge with regards

11:07to that will be largely unnecessary. Next question, frequently you talk about how easy

11:12and inexpensive it would be in a stateless society to scan kids brains to detect damage

11:17caused by abuse and trauma and therefore this would allow caregivers to take corrective

11:21measures. This sounds like taking kids to the dentist every six months to get their

11:25teeth checked and catch cavities before they get bad. Therefore we don't need to wait until

11:30governments quit or fail in the future to engage in the brain scanning practice. However

11:35somehow the free market has not proven its value because it appears this is not widespread

11:39practice yet. How would you explain this? It's a fascinating question. So the argument

11:46is and let's forget about the radiation or whatever we're going to assume that the scans

11:50are safe. So as the child's brain develops you can get scans of the brain to see how

11:56the brain is developing and trauma has particular markers on the brain, an enlarged amygdala

12:04or fight-or-flight mechanism, a shrunken hippocampus which is long-term emotional memories, a shrunken

12:09neofrontal cortex with a seat of reasoning and impulse control and so on. And basically

12:16if the reptile brain is strong but the human brain, human part of the brain is weak then

12:24trauma has usually been occurred and we revert to a more primitive state of win-lose and

12:28aggression and fighting and manipulation and so on. If we are raised in a traumatic environment

12:35then we're less civilized, we're closer to you know ape-on-ape brutality and therefore

12:40we activate the base monkey brain without the human 2.0 buggy as hell beta expansion

12:46pack and so you can find this stuff in the brain through scans. And so if parents are

12:53concerned that their children may be undergoing trauma or may not be developing properly then

12:59this would be the case. Now in a future society people would most likely take out insurance

13:04for their kid's actions, you know if their kid does something that hurts or harms of

13:07someone or someone's property then the insurance cover it and the insurance would be far cheaper

13:11if the kids get the scans and if the parents go through good parental training which again

13:15they'll need to do in a diminishing way if they were raised that way, right? Like you

13:19don't need to go to ESL, English as a second language classes if you're raised speaking

13:24English, right? So you won't need to do that. If parents are raised well then they really

13:28won't have to worry that much about taking a lot of parenting classes, won't do any harm

13:31to brush up. So the idea that kids would get scanned in order to find trauma, well

13:39why is this not occurring? First of all I don't know that there's really a very good

13:45benchmark of healthy human functioning at the moment. What is called normal is a sliding

13:52scale from like the insanity of the dark ages to the relative insanity of modern times.

13:57So what would you compare someone's deficiencies to in the realm of brain development? In other

14:03words if you found a child, and I'm striving to raise my child this way but of course I

14:08went through traumatic stuff as a child so it's a step-by-step process, but if you were

14:16to take a child who has never been yelled at, who's never been aggressed against, who's

14:20never been hit, who's never been told superstitious nonsense, who's never been lied to, who's

14:25never been told about the virtue of the home sports well-armed team called the military

14:30or the government, if they just didn't know or only knew these as false things, what would

14:37that child's brain look like? Well I would submit that the number of children being raised

14:42without aggression and without delusion may be one in a million, maybe one in half a million.

14:49That would be just a guess. And also what about government schools? Government schools

14:54are I think pretty terrible and I think the statistics show that they're fairly terrible.

15:03So what would it mean to have a benchmark called one in a million or one and a half

15:09a million kids or one in a hundred thousand or one in ten thousand, doesn't matter, hugely

15:14I mean that would be the benchmark and then you take your kids in to get scanned and then

15:20you find out that as your child was not there, was not at that place where optimal human

15:29functioning would be, which simply means non-traumatized human functioning. So how many parents would

15:34feel really comfortable or happy knowing where they ranked relative to ideal peaceful parenting?

15:41Probably they'd feel pretty bad. And bad parenting is an addiction, it's an addiction based on

15:48usually a history of trauma that's been unexamined and undifferentiated and unrevealed to the

15:54psyche as trauma. And what will happen of course is after you've had kids, let's say

16:02you take your kid in for a scan at two or three years old, well a lot's going to have

16:07to change if your kid is below the norm, right? And there'll be specific recommendations like

16:12you've got to be home with the kid, you've got to apologize, you've got to change your

16:15parenting completely, you can't send them to government schools, like there'll just

16:19be lots of things that have to change. And how many people are comfortable making those

16:25sacrifices in order to raise children in the best way? How many people? What if it turns

16:34out that there's a study that came out recently that said that children who are told religious

16:39stories as truth have a great deal of difficulty differentiating fact from fiction, which is

16:44basically two ways of saying the same thing. And if this proves to be, yes I can't imagine

16:50it doesn't, but if it proves to be negative for the brain development, then the kid goes

16:56for a scan and they say, listen you've got to stop talking about the superstitious stuff

16:59as if it's true. It's harming reality processing centers within the brain. You can see here

17:02there's a dark spot and blah blah blah, compare this to the white spot on the rationally raised

17:07kid and so on. How many parents are going to want to know that? How many parents are going

17:10to want to reform that way? How many parents are going to want to change, you know, they

17:14might have to sell their house if they're going down to one income and one person stays

17:18home with the kid. I mean, it's a huge change for people's life. And addicts, I mean, basically

17:24by definition are people who are unable or unwilling to sacrifice short-term pain for

17:33the sake of long-term gain. And if bad parenting is like an addiction, almost by definition

17:38people wouldn't take their kids in because they wouldn't want to know. And even if they did,

17:41they wouldn't want to change their behavior because it would be a very disrupting and

17:44painful in the short run, while the benefits to the child would be many years down the

17:50road in the long run. And by the time you get to be a teenager, I mean, probably too late.

17:54All right, let's see. I have a viewer question for Steph and it was inspired by the impression

18:13that his views are quite often very utopian. For example, he is quick to bring up the atrocities

18:18of the Iraq war and label all supporters of that war as guilty as baby murderers. Well,

18:22that's not exactly what I said, but anyway. Well, he'd be putting the likes of Christopher

18:28Hitchens in that camp then too. Christopher Hitchens would quickly claim that Steph has

18:32no idea what he is talking about. Okay, so I just want to talk about the utopian thing

18:40so far. Utopian is a rebuttal, and I put that in air quotes for those just listening.

18:48The word utopian is a, quote, rebuttal that is shit out from guilty and corrupted human beings

18:58who basically say, your vision of the good lights up too much evil in myself for me to accept it,

19:05so I'm going to reject it as unrealistic, right? So if you have been beating slaves for 20 years,

19:11and then someone comes in the 17th century or 18th century, and someone comes along and says,

19:16oh, we'll have a world without slavery, that would be very painful to you because a world

19:19without slavery would occur because slavery is immoral, which would put you in the role of hideous

19:26human brutalizing torturer for 20 years. And so if your soul has been so corrupted by compliance

19:35with evil, by sadism, by false accusations, by libel, by slander, by trolling, by just being

19:42a general all around jerkwad, then when someone comes along who embodies or espouses a nobility

19:51of action, a rising light of virtue in the world, what it reveals within yourself is the deep and

19:59ugly scarring of your own complacency and compliance with immorality, with evil, that you become a foot

20:04soldier in the dark Lord's journey towards the enslavement of the human race. And so then you

20:12must psychologically either deal with your own immorality, which is very painful, or you must

20:20then say that this vision is ridiculous, naive, utopian, human nature is not like that. In other

20:26words, you must say that your own corruption is normal and universal and irreversible,

20:32unchangeable, and practical. You must adapt to the immoralities of the world. That's practical

20:38because it's impossible not to. Immorality is just a subjective opinion. I pay my bills. I'm a decent

20:44guy. I have nice barbecues. You must do everything that is necessary to maintain the illusion that

20:50you're not an orc. Basically, you're not just a foot soldier in the dark Lord's army. And therefore,

20:58you must get angry, contemptuous. You must bring all of the abusive and contemptuous and hostile

21:05and degrading emotional manipulative tactics to bear. And you must not, of course, accept,

21:11understand, or rebut any rational piece of arguments or evidence in the situation. You must

21:17simply take a deep, giant acid dump on the smiling, happy face of a potential human future.

21:24And so, utopian is something which basically says, if your world exists,

21:30if the world of virtue exists, I will have no place and will most likely kill myself.

21:35So, I must say that your vision of a peaceful, happy, virtuous, cooperative world is a utopian,

21:43dangerous, ugly, deluded fantasy because if that world comes into being, the light will burn me

21:52into ash like the vampire that I am. So, I just want to mention that a lot, because you get a lot

21:57of this kind of stuff. It's utopia, and you're a dreamer, and so on. It's like, well, I may be a

22:03dreamer, but you're a nightmare. Under what circumstances would you endorse a declaration

22:08of war? What methods and weapons would you support the use of, and how effective do you

22:12think they would be? Okay, so this is all, of course, very theoretical. But yeah, if there

22:21was a gathering for an invasion, if there was any particular credible documented threat

22:27of some sort of dirty bomb or some sort of poisoning of the water system or whatever,

22:32I would fully support whatever means necessary in order to protect the society that I lived in.

22:40That would be targeted assassinations. That would be very specific drones with DNA-coded

22:45information that would hopefully disable, or if not disable, then kill. My particular view is,

22:51I don't view humanity as any kind of common herd at all, in any way, shape, or form.

22:58Human society is like an ecosystem of predators and prey, of farmers and livestock. But the

23:03predator and prey analogy in the form of war is very important. The most dangerous human predator,

23:07sorry, the most dangerous predator is a human being, because a human being, you know, like that

23:13cylons in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, look like people, except without the cool,

23:17glowing, orgasm backbones. And so, the most dangerous predator I will ever face is a human

23:23being. And if a tiger is advancing on my family and I have to call in an airstrike to take out

23:32the tiger, I will do so, right? I mean, because I don't want my family to get eaten or killed by a

23:37tiger. And the greatest tigers are the sociopaths, the monsters, the wolves in sheep's clothing that

23:44are human beings. The most dangerous predators you'll ever meet will be human beings, bipeds.

23:48We can protect ourselves from animal predators. It's very hard to protect yourself from human

23:53predators, given their incredible proliferation in the modern world. So, if a set of human predators

24:00was looking to take over, or poison, or damage the society, or my family, then I would take

24:05whatever means necessary and sleep like a baby that night. I would take whatever means necessary

24:10to eradicate that threat. This is fundamental to self-defense. You would target as much as possible

24:18the people who were responsible, but you would do whatever was necessary to prevent that threat.

24:24And I would support and fight and do whatever was necessary to protect that. And, you know,

24:30if people died who were planning some sort of attack upon my society or my home, then I would

24:36consider that a wonderful cleansing of a human stain and a dangerous predation. I mean, the

24:43human predators are worse than rabid animals, and we generally will try and shoot rabid animals

24:48because they're incurable and incurably dangerous. The same thing is true of human predators. There's

24:53nobody that I know who's been able to cure sociopathy, or psychopathy, or a lack of empathy,

24:58or sadism. These kinds of human characteristics are incurable and relentless. This is how the

25:04brain is formed, and human beings split into predators and prey, and I guess the beautiful

25:10ones, if you know anything about the mouse utopia experiments, who observe and in some cases try to

25:15intervene and improve. So, yeah, I mean, if there are human predators who are attacking a good

25:22civilization, I believe that that civilization hopefully can enclose them, hopefully can disable

25:27them and keep them separate from that human civilization, either on an island or even some

25:32sort of enclosure. But if those people end up being killed as a result of preemptive self-defense,

25:38I consider that a highly virtuous action and extremely necessary for the continued success

25:42of virtue in the world. So, I hope that helps. Please continue to send in your questions,

25:47mailbag at freedomainradio.com. If you find these conversations useful, we are below last month's

25:55donation. So, if you could help out, I would hugely and massively appreciate it. You can do so

26:01at fdrurl.com slash donate. And once again, thank you everyone so much for watching. Remember to

26:09listen to or call into the call-in shows, Wednesday nights, 8 p.m. and Saturday nights,

26:138 p.m. Eastern Standard. We look forward to talking to you. All the best.

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