To listen to the podcast, click here.
June 25th 2019
So a guy on Twitter had an interesting, common, but important question today. He said, “Is the fact we don’t spank our children the reason why there are so many unruly children these days?”
Now, spanking is a violation of the nonaggression principle: it is the initiation of force against another human being, and a human being who did not choose to be with you, who has no usual legal recourse or independence. It’s way worse than hitting a woman – a woman is there usually by choice. If she’s in a voluntary relationship, she can get up, she can leave, she can call the cops, she’s got independence, and she’s got lots of support out there if she needs it, shelters and so on. So hitting a child is far worse than hitting a woman, but of course society in general allows us to hit children, or at least turns the other cheek if it happens.
So is it the case that children are – if we accept the conjecture – more unruly because of a lack of violations of the nonaggression principle? Well, no. No, that’s not the reason at all. It’s quite the opposite of the reason; the reason why children are unruly these days is because of much larger violations of the nonaggression principle even than spanking.
Culture is what restrains us: cultural rules, the capacity to be ostracized by our peers and by our superiors, our bosses, or whatever. Culture is what shapes us, and what restrains us from unruly behavior. Culture can take tens of thousands of years to develop. Of course, right? I mean, it takes an enormous amount of blood sacrifice, of survival, of censorship, and book burnings, and people burnings, and wars, and you name it. And then you get this culture that has evolved.
How is the culture transmitted? Culture is transmitted when children bond with the mother, and then the mother is the pipeline, that bond is the conduit through which culture is transmitted to the child. So of course if you wish to destroy the tens of thousands of years of accumulated value and sacrifice of the development of a culture, all you have to do is break the bond between mother and child. Once the bond between mother and child is broken, then the child looks at the parents with great skepticism and cynicism. (This is the root of the famous grumble brain of the teenage years.)
To break the bond between mother and child has proven to be astonishingly easy. It is the great weak link in the transmission of culture in our civilization, because all you had to do was give half a decade’s worth of propaganda to women about how raising children is as silly and foolish and and beneath your abilities, beneath your capacities, and you need to be strong and independent, and go out of work… and that transforms you from someone who didn’t pay taxes to someone who does pay taxes and scrape for the rulers that be. It weakens the family bond, it destroys the transmission of culture that not only restrains individuals but restrains the expansion of government power as well. So just tell women that they should go out and work, and women basically punch their kids off to daycare, and go out and work. And that’s terrible, because it breaks the bond between mother and child, and thus breaks the conduit through which culture is transmitted from generation to generation.
I worked in a day care for years when I was a teenager. You simply can’t expect all the complexities of your culture to be transmitted by people often without a firm grasp of English, and with no particular history with your culture, and with way too many kids. It was myself and one other adult; I was not a teacher, I was sort of an aide; there was a daycare person and me, and we had like 15 to 20 5- to 10-year olds. There was simply very little chance for any kind of individual monitoring.
So what happens then? If you don’t have the parent-child bond, then children rely on their peers, and peers are naturally left-leaning. Young people are naturally left-leaning, at least under the current indoctrination camps of our government schools, they are naturally left-leaning, which is why the left wants to lower the voting age continually. By cutting off conduits to the parents, you end up with an overwhelmingly leftist sentimental peer influence, and that’s a great way to program kids into bigger government, more censorship, and so on.
So is daycare a violation of the nonaggression principle? Well, in general, where daycare is subsidized and funded by the government instead of private charity, yes. Also, when the government interferes with the free contracts between employers and women to artificially raise the wages of women, then that’s a violation of the nonaggression principle. I want everyone to be equal under the law, which means everybody should negotiate without anyone’s government gun pointed at their head. Artificially raising women’s wages is definitely a violation of the nonaggression principle. Forced government programs like maternity leave and so on also violate the nonaggression principle. It’s a wretched and coercive environment all around.
The other ways in which the violations of the nonaggression principle end up wrecking family life are… I mean, you name it, right? Family courts are very gynocentric and very anti-male, which means that they will force the transfer of resources from an ex-husband to an ex-wife. And that’s pretty terrible, because if a woman gets alimony – child support is another matter – then she was a wife, and if she stayed home, then she was well paid for being a wife, because her husband paid the bills. So if she gets alimony after quitting or being fired from her job as a wife… Well, I’ve never had a job in my life where I quit or got fired and I still could continue to collect a paycheck for years or decades. I mean, that makes no sense at all. This destabilizes the family.
There’s a wide variety of other mechanisms by which family is destabilized. Forced government pensions do this as well: women are less reliant upon their family and their children and their husband for succor and support in their old age. Again, these are all violations of the nonaggression principle.
Another way by which children become unruly is in government schools. Government schools are violations of the nonaggression principle. They propagandize children, they drug unruly boys, and some girls, which is to me a violation of the nonaggression principle, and particularly not just in how it’s implemented, but in how it’s funded and paid for. It’s all wretched violations of the nonaggression principle, just terrible, terrible stuff.
This problem with the breaking of the conduit of the transmission of culture occurs within the families of single mothers as well. By single mothers, I mean women who had a partner, had a father, and the father is still alive, because if the father had died they would be called widows, not single mothers. So the father is still alive, but the mom is no longer with him.
There’s really only a couple of logical possibilities as to why a woman would be raising a child without a father. The first, of course, is that he was a good guy, but she drove him away, like she was mean or nasty or impossible or aggressive or violent, and she drove a good guy away. Well, good luck getting the respect of your children necessary for the transmission of culture if your children perceive that Dad was a great guy but you drove him away. You simply cannot tell your children anything then about how to live.
Or, maybe she was a fairly good woman, but she chose a bad boy, an irresponsible man, an abusive or alcoholic or drunk or or other form of addicted man to be the father of her children. Maybe she did this when she was like, 20. Okay, well, good luck telling your kids how to live when you made terrible, terrible decisions when you were even older than they were. Now you can say, ‘well, learn from my mistakes and don’t do what I did,’ and that’s barely going to work, at best.
Or, maybe everyone was just terrible. Maybe the mom was bad, the dad was bad, it was just really irresponsibly done all round. Again, in which case, if you don’t have the respect of your children, they won’t listen to your moral instructions. This is why, when you can get adults to behave in a hedonistic and wasteful and promiscuous and irresponsible manner, you break the transmission of culture. Because if children don’t respect their parents, if children don’t respect their teachers, children won’t listen to culture.
And of course if that is your goal, you want to keep kids out of churches, because they may respect the priest, in which case the priest would be the transmitter of the culture. So make them atheists, put them in terrible government schools where they can’t respect their teachers, make sure you do whatever you can to disrupt and destroy their family life, and then children grow up with nothing to respect.
And when children don’t have any reason to restrain their behavior, because don’t they have better moral examples to follow, what do they do? Well, they follow their peers, they follow popularity, they follow sexual impulses, they follow the hedonism of the moment. And lo and behold, they are unruly!
But if you look at the backdrop of what makes them unruly, it’s not because the nonaggression principle has not been violated, but because it has been violated.
It’s been violated in artificially raising the wages of women.
It’s been violated in terrible government schools.
It’s been violated in government-funded daycares.
It’s been violated in terrible divorce laws.
It’s been violated in just about every conceivable manner that you can imagine.
How can you respect the teacher who says, ‘don’t use violence to get what you want,’ but also, ‘Oh, by the way, don’t come to school next week because we’re going on strike with our government enforced coercive monopoly because we want more money extracted from taxpayers at the point of a gun.’ ‘And by the way, the reason that we are paid so much as teachers is because we have shifted the burden onto you, the tax slaves of the future, based upon the national debt.’ How on earth are children going to respect that?
If you put coercion at the center of your social interactions, the entire society becomes predatory, immoral, coercive, violent, and then children won’t respect it. And then you say, ‘Well, you see, the reason why they’re becoming unruly is because they’re not being hit enough.’ No no no. It’s WAY too much violence, WAY too much violence. (Not that any violence except in an extremity of self-defense is acceptable.) Children are surrounded by way too much violence, and hitting them is simply adding fuel to the fire. Whatever the problem is, the solution is true equality before the law, and a reduction in the initiation of force.
Read Freedomain Radio 