Stefan Molyneux
Stefan Molyneux
  • 10 months ago
This episode explores sadism in children, discussing tribal loyalty, harmful education practices, and credentialism. The hosts advocate for curiosity-driven learning and highlight the suppression of children's skepticism.

Full series: https://rss.com/podcasts/sadism/

Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!

Get my new series on the Truth About the French Revolution, access to the audiobook for my new book 'Peaceful Parenting,' StefBOT-AI, private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and more!

See you soon!

https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022

Brief Summary

In this episode, we examine sadism, specifically in relation to children. We analyze the evolution of cruelty, emphasizing the role of tribal loyalty and nationalism. We discuss the harmful practices of education and punishment, advocating for a mindset that encourages curiosity and learning. Lastly, we critique credentialism in education and highlight the importance of engaging students. Throughout the episode, we share personal experiences and reflect on the societal suppression of children's skepticism and curiosity.

Chapters

0:00:00 Sadism Part 4: Exploring Sadism with regards to children
0:03:24 Evolution of cruelty and moral theories in human beings
0:06:01 Creating abstract values to enhance tribal unity and ferocity
0:09:59 Infusing children with a sense of tribal superiority
0:12:29 Loyalty to abstractions and the role of sports
0:20:01 The Time Spent on Sports: A Surprising Calculation
0:23:05 Breaking Children's Minds: The Role of Hatred and Loyalty
0:24:34 Breaking Children's Natural Empiricism
0:29:56 Prussian Education: Compliance and Conformity
0:34:05 The Importance of Understanding Opposing Beliefs
0:36:31 Indoctrination vs. Facilitation in Education
0:42:34 Catholic People's School: Resistance and Punishment
0:52:22 The Irrelevance of Credentialism
0:57:50 Credentialism Breeds Aggression and Sadism
Transcript
00:00:00 Welcome, of course, to sadism part 4. Now, of course, because this is a presentation
00:00:06 on sadism, it's always going to be just a little bit longer than feels comfortable.
00:00:10 That's you understand that's just kind of inevitable. So we're going to talk about sadism
00:00:15 with regards to children. A very, very misunderstood, unexplored topic. And I'll make a couple of
00:00:25 arguments here that may be a little bit surprising. Hopefully you'll forgive me for the surprise.
00:00:29 And understand that I'm simply doing an analysis of the evolution of cruelty rather than a
00:00:39 moral examination of its immorality. Right? So just talking about how it how it came about.
00:00:46 Right? I mean, the fact that we have cruel instincts is necessary for survival. That
00:00:51 doesn't mean it's moral in a civilizational way or from a civilizational standpoint. So
00:00:58 just understand we're talking about evolution, not moral justification here. So one of the
00:01:03 things that really characterizes the modern world is the centralization of child abuse
00:01:11 in the form of state education. And this was the case, of course, when I was growing up
00:01:17 more explicitly where children were allowed to be hit. The hitting as a mechanism of control
00:01:24 has largely been abandoned, but it's been replaced with increased propaganda and the
00:01:32 drugging of children. Right? So mere hitting has been replaced with drugging, which in
00:01:38 many cases, which is, I don't know, man, I wish we had neither. Right? But so I want
00:01:45 to make a case here about why cruelty towards children has evolved. Right? So, of course,
00:01:55 it's a war of all against all human beings evolved from prehistory, from pre-consciousness,
00:02:02 from superstition. So in animals, of course, cause and effect is not reasoned. It is immediate
00:02:12 and essential. It is to some degree programmed and to a large degree, it's experiential.
00:02:20 So if you think about animals, they don't care where the water comes from. They just
00:02:26 need to get to it when it's thirsty. Right? They don't care about irrigation. They don't
00:02:30 care about the cycle of evaporation and rain and so on. Right? They simply care about where
00:02:38 the water is so that they can drink some. So all they are is empiricists without theories.
00:02:44 Right? So the two empiricisms that animals deal with, number one, of course, is they're
00:02:50 thirsty and so they have a desire to seek out water. And then when they drink water,
00:02:55 their thirst goes away. So the empiricism is internal. I'm thirsty. External, there's
00:03:01 water and so on. Right? So animals don't care about cause and effect. They don't care about
00:03:10 theorizing outside of the satisfaction of immediate wants. They don't have rights. They
00:03:17 don't do much of their own irrigation. A little couple of animals here and there do, but again,
00:03:22 that's sort of largely instinctual. So animals don't have moral theories. They don't have
00:03:29 abstract explanations. A monkey might pick up a rock, but it doesn't care what kind of
00:03:34 rock it is. It doesn't care about the geology. It doesn't care about the formation. So human
00:03:38 beings, we have, of course, this amazing and unique ability, as far as we know, to look
00:03:45 for long-term cause and effect and not simply immediate satisfaction of wants and so on.
00:03:54 So what happens, evolutionarily speaking, is there's a lot of tribal conflict over resources.
00:04:02 And because there's not much technology in warfare, manpower becomes everything. There's
00:04:10 not much technology in warfare, therefore manpower becomes everything. I mean, if you
00:04:15 look at some horrendous incidents like the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima
00:04:19 and Nagasaki, I mean, as far as the delivery mechanisms go, you have a couple of guys in
00:04:25 what was it, a B-17 or something like that, some four-engined or warplane, and they can
00:04:31 go and wipe out like a hundred thousand people because of the technology of the bomb, right?
00:04:37 But in a place where it's rocks, sticks, stones, swords, even the bow and arrow, the manpower
00:04:45 becomes pretty decisive, whereas now technology tends to be more decisive in indirect sort
00:04:52 of open combat. So because manpower is essential for gaining and keeping resources in a tribal
00:05:02 situation, you need a unity, because everyone who doesn't participate in the war, everybody
00:05:10 who runs away, everybody who hides, everybody who joins the other side, well that's the
00:05:15 difference between life and death. So you need absolute, well, as close to absolute
00:05:22 unity as you can get. Now because there's no morality in early tribalism, there is simply
00:05:30 blood loyalty, as there is in most animals, right? Most animals will prefer their own
00:05:34 offspring to other animals' offspring, prefer their own kind to other animals, other species.
00:05:41 So there is simply blood loyalty. Now blood loyalty for human beings is enhanced if the
00:05:50 perception is that your own tribe is the best, that your own tribe is the best. Now how do
00:05:58 you get babies, toddlers, children to believe that your tribe is the best? And not like
00:06:09 we are the champions, we are the greatest, but like morally better, morally superior,
00:06:13 and it could be just in terms of some levels of aesthetics or some level like we're more
00:06:17 manly, we're more this way, we're better, we're just better. Well it's not usually an
00:06:22 objective reason. I mean I can't imagine for most of primitive tribal development that
00:06:26 there was a more moral or ethically better tribe. So how do you get unity in a situation
00:06:37 where you're not particularly better, but you know, you want to fight for your own tribe.
00:06:42 Who's going to fight harder? People who are focusing on mere blood loyalties? Well that's
00:06:46 equal, right? So how do you get the edge? How do you get greater unity? How do you get
00:06:50 greater participation? How do you get greater ferocity? How do you get youths, and in particular
00:06:57 of course we're talking about teenage warriors, how do you get youths to fight harder, to
00:07:01 fight better, to fight more devotedly, to fight to the death, to sacrifice themselves?
00:07:06 Well you have to create an abstract value that they're fighting for more than just red
00:07:16 shirts versus blue shirts, our tribe versus their tribe. Because of course the great danger
00:07:22 in terms of survival is that if the other tribe is perceived as winning, if the other
00:07:27 tribe is perceived as superior, then if the battle is going against the red shirts, the
00:07:34 blue shirts are winning, the red shirts are losing, then the temptation of course from
00:07:38 the red shirt members is to defect and join the blue shirts. And the blue shirts may or
00:07:43 may not welcome that depending on whether they think it's real or not. Because if the
00:07:48 blue shirts are winning and the red shirts join them and it's a genuine thing, then they
00:07:52 can go on and beat up the purple shirts because they have both, the blue and the red shirts
00:07:58 have joined forces. However of course the risk is that it's a pretend transfer and then
00:08:02 they murder you in your sleep or something like that. "We'll join you!" and then there's
00:08:06 betrayal and so on. So there's a lot of complex stuff that goes on here, but if a tribe has
00:08:12 a reputation of intense ferocity, of fighting for the death of no quarter and executing
00:08:18 then prisoners, then it's less likely that people will attack them. So there is a value,
00:08:28 evolutionarily speaking, in creating something which infuses with your tribe that makes it
00:08:35 more than mortal, that makes it more than a bunch of bipeds fighting for resources,
00:08:40 that makes it worth fighting to the death for, that makes a blood loyalty until the
00:08:45 end of your life, no possibility of switching to the other team. I mean of course in sports
00:08:53 it would be a funny thing, right? If a soccer team, like the blue shirts are playing the
00:08:58 red shirts and the red shirts are winning and then the blue team members start switching
00:09:02 their shirts and joining, it'd be kind of funny, right? But of course in sports you
00:09:06 play to the end and you don't switch teams, right? You play to the end, you keep trying
00:09:10 your best and you don't switch teams. So there has to be some abstraction that is infused
00:09:17 into your tribe that's more than material, that's more than, well, we're just two biped
00:09:24 somewhat post-apes fighting for resources. So this is where nationalism comes in, and
00:09:30 of course this is before the nation state as a whole, but this is where tribalism comes
00:09:34 in as in my tribe is the best, my tribe is superior, my tribe worships the best god,
00:09:41 my tribe has the best nature spirits that animate it, my tribe has the, we have the
00:09:49 markers for this territory given to us by the best wood nymphs or you know whatever
00:09:55 you're coming up with, but it has to be something more than material. So you have to get your
00:10:02 children to bond, and I remember going through this process as a kid. I remember quite clearly
00:10:08 going through this, you know, England is the best, you know, the Battle of Britain and
00:10:13 the few and all of the Churchill and I remember the St. George and the dragon and you're the
00:10:19 best, you're the best. I remember going through all of that. It's a little cringy, but I do
00:10:25 remember even in a football game shouting forward for St. George. I die a little inside
00:10:32 when I think of that, although of course it is 50 years ago, but I just forward for St.
00:10:37 George. I was very enthusiastic about England and its history and so on, right? That was
00:10:45 programmed into me in a wide variety of ways and the media and the stories and the myths
00:10:51 and the pride of the elders and all of that. You have this sense that you're superior and
00:10:56 that means that you are sacrificing yourself not for your leaders, but for an abstract
00:11:05 virtue. Of course, one of the ways that you see this manifesting is the concept of Valhalla,
00:11:09 right? That you know, the sort of Norse fighters, if they die in battle defending their leaders
00:11:16 or defending their land or defending their women, right? Then they go to paradise. The
00:11:22 fighters go to paradise. So then you're fighting for not just your leaders, you're fighting
00:11:26 for the gods and you're fighting for an eternity in paradise. And this happens with a wide
00:11:32 variety of religions and superstitions that the warriors are rewarded in eternity. So
00:11:40 in order to get this massive loyalty fight to the death forward for St. George stuff,
00:11:45 in children, well, you kind of have to break their brains, right? When you break the brains,
00:11:54 crazy abstractions are the blood ichor that seeps into the rest of the mind. When the
00:12:00 empiricism of the natural self is smashed, what bleeds out is loyalty to concepts, not
00:12:09 to mere tribe, to the mere tribal. So you have to reorient the natural empiricism of
00:12:17 the child into believing in things that aren't real, that don't exist, the superstitions
00:12:23 and so on, and the claimed superiority of your tribe. This is nothing too unusual if
00:12:31 you've ever known people who are sports obsessed, which is of course really, really pathetic.
00:12:36 But if you know people who are sports obsessed or sports focused, you can see of course that,
00:12:41 well, their team, my team, right? When I was growing up, it was the football team, Crystal
00:12:46 Palace. My team is the best and I would go and cheer for my team. And I don't mean to
00:12:52 sound overly precocious, but that just always struck me as supremely stupid. Like, why would
00:12:58 I cheer for some... Basically I'm cheering for a uniform. The people are people, right?
00:13:04 The team wants to win, your team wants to win. You're not cheering for a sports team,
00:13:08 you're cheering for tailors. See, they used red dye on this team, they used blue dye on
00:13:13 that team. So you're basically, you're cheering for coloring, you're cheering for dye, you're
00:13:19 not cheering for anything moral. It's just your team. And you have to break children's
00:13:27 brains because... And the whole thing is so delicate, right? Because all someone has to
00:13:32 do is point out, "Well, you just happen to be born there, I just happen to be born here,
00:13:38 why are we enemies?" But of course, governments love funding sports because sports creates
00:13:45 loyalty to abstractions that are anti-empirical, which gives people loyalty to the nation state
00:13:51 and all and then, you know, cannon fodder for wars and the sacrificial elements all
00:13:55 over the place. So there is an evolution, an evolutionary demand in a sense for breaking
00:14:06 the brains of children to rewire them to have loyalty to abstractions. And then the leaders
00:14:14 claim to represent these abstractions and therefore you're not just serving the leaders,
00:14:18 you're serving the abstractions which are perfect, universal and eternal. I made this
00:14:22 case many years ago, of course. One of the problems with being a sort of brutal young
00:14:27 man who dominates everyone around him is you're going to age and other people, you know, you're
00:14:32 going to age out and get old and brittle and wobbly and then other young men are going
00:14:35 to come along and overthrow you. So you have a problem. How do you deal with the fact that
00:14:40 if you live by the fist, your fist gets arthritis and you get beaten up by younger fists? Well,
00:14:46 you then create this abstraction that you represent. You create this abstraction that
00:14:53 you represent. I mean, the story of Macbeth is very powerful this way, right? Macbeth
00:14:57 is a young, healthy, brutal warrior who kills an old king in order to ascend to the throne.
00:15:07 And then, you see, what happens is because he has broken the order of royalty and he
00:15:12 has murdered the king, he is cursed and he is destroyed and other people rise up against
00:15:18 him. So there's like a supernatural response. Of course, the original king got that through,
00:15:25 I mean, his ancestors certainly got that through certain levels of brutality. And I remember,
00:15:29 of course, when I played Macbeth in my twenties, I remember having trouble with the character.
00:15:34 I mean, I had trouble with the whole story. The language is beautiful, of course, but
00:15:37 philosophically it's a complete mess. I had trouble with the story as a whole because
00:15:44 in the beginning of Macbeth, Macbeth is coming in from a battlefield where he's probably
00:15:50 killed like 20 guys, like 20 peasants or knights conscripts or, you know, even other people,
00:15:58 like other nobles maybe, but probably he would just go and wait around and there'd be a bunch
00:16:03 of farmhands with a hose and he would just smash them with his expertise, his armor and
00:16:07 his excellent sword and just slaughter people, right? So he's come in like a combine harvester
00:16:13 after slaughtering like 20 people and that's great. Everyone's cheering him. But then,
00:16:18 and this is the question of crime and punishment, right? So Macbeth strides in having just murdered
00:16:25 like 20 people or killed 20 people on the command of the king. He's a hitman. He's a
00:16:29 hitman. And so it's really great that he just murdered 20 peasants. Could be more. It's
00:16:37 not said. So he comes in and he's a great guy and everyone cheers him because he just
00:16:43 murdered 20 people. But then when he kills one old king, the guy who actually ordered
00:16:47 him to murder the 20 people, suddenly it's the worst thing in the world. He can't sleep
00:16:50 and he's an evil guy who has to be destroyed. Right? So you kill 20 people, that's great.
00:16:55 But then you kill the one old guy who ordered you to kill the 20 people, the mafia head
00:16:59 so to speak, and suddenly it's the worst thing in the world. You understand? It's there to
00:17:02 break your brain. It's a problem I had with the character. I wanted to play him as a mafioso.
00:17:09 As a hitman. The director and I had some vociferous disagreements about all of that. But I mean,
00:17:16 I wanted to be true to the ethics of the story, not just the surface level. Right? So he kills
00:17:22 like, Macbeth kills like 20 guys, but he's vastly superior in training and resources
00:17:29 and equipment. So Macbeth kills 20 guys, sleeps like a baby, but then he kills one old guy
00:17:34 who ordered him to kill 20 guys and suddenly it's the worst thing in the world. Like, see,
00:17:38 I understand. It's just programming. Now, of course, Shakespeare didn't have much choice
00:17:41 in the matter because he lived in a time of significant censorship and we wouldn't have
00:17:46 this wonderful poetry if he had approached things from an objective moral standpoint.
00:17:51 I get all of that. He probably would have just been killed by the king because his poetic
00:17:55 powers would be put towards the liberation of people from delusion. But instead he, in
00:18:01 order to write and survive, he had to serve the powers that be. So he had to say, it's
00:18:07 great to kill 20 guys, but when you kill the guy who told you to kill the 20 guys, it's
00:18:11 the worst evil in the world and you are cursed and will be destroyed and can't sleep. And
00:18:17 of course, I think that deep down, I couldn't know for sure, obviously, right? But I think
00:18:21 that deep down Shakespeare was aware of this contradiction and while he was writing Macbeth,
00:18:25 had insomnia because his conceptual capacities for language were probably never to be excelled
00:18:34 or certainly hadn't been excelled since he was around and the unification and conceptualization
00:18:39 abilities he had with language was tickling his brain deep down and saying, you can't
00:18:44 have been a bad guy here by making this play. You're kind of being a bad guy here. I mean,
00:18:49 you could easily set Macbeth in a soprano's universe and it would actually be very, very
00:18:53 accurate. So you have to assault empiricism in order to get fight to the death loyalty
00:19:04 to abstractions. You have to attack children's minds and get them to cheer that which does
00:19:12 not exist at the expense even of their own lives. I mean, honestly, I mean, the sports
00:19:18 stuff is crazy. The sports stuff is like beyond insane when you sort of deep down conceptualize
00:19:28 it or even if you just conceptualize it at the surface level, sports stuff is deranged.
00:19:36 I mean, it's for a lot of people, sports is like a part-time job. I remember, I was at
00:19:42 one of the Monty Python guys did these ripping yarns and there was one about a sports obsessed
00:19:46 guy and he just couldn't, he couldn't get to the truth of it. It was actually one of
00:19:49 the worst ones. Tomkinson's School Days was really good. A couple of other ones that were
00:19:53 really good, but the one about the sports nut was wrong because he just can't, it's
00:19:58 really hard to get there intellectually and emotionally. But you think about this, right?
00:20:07 I mean, a lot of people like eight hours a week on sports, it's like a part-time job.
00:20:11 Right? So eight hours on sports a week times 52 weeks is 416 hours. That's 10, over 10
00:20:19 weeks of work. That's like 11, it depends on how much you work, 11 or 12 weeks of work.
00:20:25 If you do this for 50 years, right? Then you've got 20,800 hours, 20,800 hours. You could
00:20:33 be an expert in two incredible things. You could be an expert in philosophy or piano
00:20:39 or guitar or anything, twice over. Right? 10,000 hours to be fantastic. So 20,800 hours,
00:20:47 let's divide that by 7.5 hours in a workday. That's 2,773 workdays. Right? That's wild.
00:20:59 2,773 workdays people are spending on the sports stuff. Right? So you divide that by
00:21:09 260 working days in a year. I mean, it's crazy just how much time people are spending on
00:21:19 sports. Like you won't believe it when I tell you, I just ran the numbers twice. So somebody
00:21:26 who's spending eight hours a week on sports and you know, this is watching sports. I'm
00:21:31 not counting playing sports, it's watching sports, talking about sports, getting ready
00:21:36 for sports, going to games, buying tickets, buying paraphernalia, all of that kind of
00:21:40 stuff. Somebody spending eight hours a week on sports over 50 years, that's 10 years of
00:21:47 working. Right? And it's funny because I had to like, that's way too high. I got to guess.
00:21:52 So I ran the numbers again, but then of course it makes sense. Right? If you're working 37
00:21:55 and a half hours a week, but you spend eight hours a week on sports, that's one fifth of
00:21:59 your working life. Right? It's an extra work day. So yeah, over 50 years, it could be longer.
00:22:06 Right? But give or take somebody spending 10 working years on sports. I mean, that obviously
00:22:12 is completely deranged. This is going with 260 working days in the common year, not counting
00:22:18 leap years. But you know, even if you're only spending four hours a week on sports, that's
00:22:25 still five years of work, five years of work, five working years of your life is being spent
00:22:32 on sports. I mean, that's completely mad. It's beyond deranged. Right? So you have to
00:22:39 break children's minds and reprogram them to have loyalty to abstractions and things
00:22:47 that don't exist rather than loyalty to truth, virtue, UPB, all of these things. They all
00:22:54 have to go. They all have to be destroyed. Now, how do you most effectively do this?
00:23:02 I mean, there's a certain drive to do this just to survive, but how do you do this? Well,
00:23:06 the most efficient way to break people's brains is to hate them. Is to hate them. So you're
00:23:12 right, you're good, you're virtuous. And the children who resist you are wrong, immoral,
00:23:19 arrogant, possessed, disobedient, talk back, defiant, like you just break them, right?
00:23:25 Oppositional defiant disorder and you smash them, you beat them, you abuse them, you drug
00:23:30 them, you yell at them. They have to be broken to break children. Now, if you hate something,
00:23:35 it's easier to break it. You have to kill your empathy. And so you have to hate children
00:23:40 in order to reprogram them to be loyal to abstractions rather than things that are.
00:23:47 But the original state of children, which is skepticism towards things that don't exist,
00:23:51 obviously, skepticism towards things that don't exist, right? This is the story I read
00:23:57 when I managed to get a whole series of books that were being thrown out, which were Reader's
00:24:02 Digest condensed books. Reader's Digest used to put out these books where they took out
00:24:05 all the fat. And there was a book where a kid was poor and hungry and he said, "I'm
00:24:10 hungry." And the mother said, "Then go eat a cungry." K-U-N-G-R-Y. Go eat a cungry.
00:24:13 Of course, the kid was annoyed because there was no such thing as a cungry and couldn't
00:24:17 eat it. And so he couldn't eat that which does not exist. So you have to rip out the
00:24:22 wiring that ties children to things that are real, things that are true, things that are
00:24:27 valid. And you then have to replace that wiring with loyalty towards that which does not exist,
00:24:35 towards abstractions, towards the leader is towards red shirts, blue shirts, towards the
00:24:41 nation state. It's brutal. So you have to hate the natural empiricism of children and
00:24:46 you have to view them as resistant to that which is good and right and noble and true
00:24:51 and you have to break them. You have to view them like in the same way that you would view
00:24:56 an addict, that you may have to break them from the addiction, right? You might have
00:25:00 to put them in rehab, you might have to make sure that they don't get access to the drugs.
00:25:04 So you have to hate the addiction. Love the person, hate the addiction. So then you have
00:25:08 to view children's natural empiricism and reality focusing, which we're sort of all
00:25:12 born with, as an addiction that has to be broken. I mean, you can imagine, and I of
00:25:18 course had this as a kid, right? For whatever reason, I can't claim credit for it, it's
00:25:22 just the way my brain worked as a kid, but I remember being a very little kid and some
00:25:27 kid was taunting me about his sports team and mocking my sports team and I'm like, "Well
00:25:33 you just happen to be born over there, I'm born over here, like who cares? You're having
00:25:36 loyalty to something that's completely artificial and arbitrary and irrelevant." Of course I
00:25:41 didn't use those terms, I wasn't that precocious, but it just never made any sense to me. And
00:25:47 of course the society wasn't protecting me, so why on earth would I protect the fantasy
00:25:51 called society when society did nothing to protect me from the reality of being abused?
00:25:56 I have no loyalty, I have no loyalty, what am I going to protect? Why on earth? I had
00:26:00 the sense of reciprocity in relationships even back then. Society wasn't protecting
00:26:04 me at all, so why on earth would I feed the imaginary virtue called society? Like, no,
00:26:10 absolutely not. Why? Not a thing.
00:26:13 So the reason I'm giving you all this sort of background, that there's an evolutionary
00:26:17 pressure to hate the natural empiricism of children and to want to destroy it, rip out
00:26:22 the wiring of the natural self and replace it with loyalty to abstractions, and to do
00:26:28 that you have to hate children, you have to view them as - like this is what original
00:26:33 sin, right? What is original sin? The original sin is always one and the same. Like the original
00:26:38 sin is always, always one and the same thing. Original sin is skepticism. Original sin is
00:26:44 skepticism. I mean, look at Eve, right? Don't eat of this fruit. Well, why not? You made
00:26:49 it, you're perfect, you're all good, you made us, we're perfect, we're all good, the Garden
00:26:52 of Eden is all good, you wouldn't put evil in the Garden of Eden, you wouldn't create
00:26:55 evil, so why can't I eat this fruit? Skepticism, right? Skepticism is the original sin of predatory
00:27:03 delusion. How do you know? All differences in outcomes are the result of prejudice, bigotry,
00:27:10 right? Well, I'm skeptical. How do you know? How do you know that's true? I'd like to see
00:27:16 the evidence, I'd like to see the facts, how do you know? How do you know? And this of
00:27:20 course is - you can go too far in skepticism, like I know nothing, the Socratic thing, which
00:27:24 is more nihilism, Socrates was a nihilist, not a skeptic, because he claimed to know
00:27:30 nothing, right? The only thing I'm certain of is I know nothing, blah blah blah, right?
00:27:35 So he was a nihilist. And nihilists can be forgiven because they're too ridiculous and
00:27:38 the tribe can dismiss the nihilist, but if you are certain of true morality such as UPB,
00:27:45 then that's unforgivable, right? You can't be forgiven for that. So the skepticism - and
00:27:51 children are born skeptical, right? Of course they're born skeptical, because skepticism
00:27:55 is how we gain knowledge. Society is full of a bunch of predatory delusions and the
00:28:00 skepticism of the children comes crashing up against these predatory delusions and all
00:28:05 tribes that did not hate the skepticism of children tended to be outmanned on the battlefield
00:28:12 by those who had infected their children with concept-serving delusions. I'm sorry, I know
00:28:17 that's a real mouthful, but I'm sure you can get it. Right, so let's look at the sadism
00:28:22 of the modern world with regards to education. Of course, as you I'm sure know if you've
00:28:25 read any John Taylor Gatto, things like that, let's look at the Prussian system of education.
00:28:32 In the West, many schools across the world are based on this. So the Prussian system
00:28:36 began in 1810 with the establishment of a highly centralized educational structure under
00:28:39 state control, encompassing all facets of schooling, from the curriculum to the teaching
00:28:45 methodologies, overall administration, who got to become a teacher, you had to jump through
00:28:50 a whole bunch of hoops, improve your ideological purity, so to speak, in order to become a
00:28:53 teacher. The system mandated attendance in government schools for children and the children
00:28:58 were organized into distinct age groups, ensuring a standardized educational experience and
00:29:04 content delivery. Now, of course, you really, really want to destroy empathy for peers in
00:29:11 children, right? You want to destroy empathy for peers and you want to rewire that with
00:29:17 sensitivity to the commands of the elders. And one of the ways you do that is you segregate
00:29:21 children by age. And what this does, of course, is it breaks up family loyalties, because
00:29:27 then it becomes cool for the children who are older, the younger children want to hang
00:29:30 out with the cooler older children, the older siblings. The older siblings are like, "Oh,
00:29:33 you're just an annoying snot-nosed little brother. Why does your little brother have
00:29:36 to tag along?" And you then replace loyalty to family with loyalty to peers, right, by
00:29:42 age-segregating the children. And this, of course, takes away the empathy that the older
00:29:47 children would have in trying to teach the younger children. So one of the foundations
00:29:51 of the Prussian school system is to ensure that you bond with peers and reject your family.
00:29:56 This, of course, is useful, more than useful. It's essential for warfare, right? It's essential
00:30:01 for warfare, because you need to bond with your soldiers, not with your family. If you
00:30:07 bond with your family, you don't want to go to war. If you bond with your peers, then
00:30:10 you'll be a good soldier and shoot whoever they point at, right? So the core of the Prussian
00:30:16 curriculum is designed to instill strict adherence to rules and authority. And it focused heavily
00:30:23 on memorization and discipline and obedience. The approach in the Prussian school is geared
00:30:31 towards grooming students to be compliant, follow orders without thought, and conforming
00:30:36 to societal expectations. I mean, it really dehumanizes you, as you know. The school system
00:30:44 has got bell-driven schedules, brring, right? And I hated that stuff, because you'd be in
00:30:47 the middle of thinking about something or working on something. Bell! Got to change
00:30:50 to something else. Reduces children to just cargs in a machine, and the children are expected
00:30:55 to respond mechanically to external cues. And of course, this method of conditioning,
00:31:00 which is right up there with Pavlovian training, strips away any semblance of autonomy or self-determination,
00:31:05 traits that are foundational to genuine learning and growth. And the last thing you'd ever
00:31:10 want to teach children is skepticism or critical thinking. So what you do, of course, and this
00:31:17 is typical, this is how you get children to abandon their own minds and simply become
00:31:23 cargs of social conformity, is you present facts as absolute. I mean, this is all off
00:31:31 the story of the Emperor's New Clothes. So you present facts as absolute, and then anyone
00:31:36 who has even the slightest doubt about these facts is foolish, immoral, ridiculous, and
00:31:43 must be punished, mocked, attacked. It's a grave moral error, and so on. I mean, you
00:31:48 think about this in terms of something like, I don't know, global warming or things like
00:31:51 that. You present it as an absolute and a fact and a reality and a truth, and anyone
00:31:56 who has even the slightest questions is immoral and wants to destroy the planet and doesn't
00:32:01 care about nature and is probably being infected by sinister minds on the internet. And so
00:32:08 you just mock. You mock, you attack, you punish, you degrade, you humiliate, and this inevitably
00:32:15 draws the other children into this net of anyone who has any questions is immoral, is
00:32:22 a bad person. And you can see this all over the place, and we all experience it, of course.
00:32:29 You see this all over the place. Anybody who has any questions about anything, you know,
00:32:35 like, "Well, hang on, so if England went to war in 1939 to protect Poland, then England
00:32:41 must have lost the war if Poland ended up under communism." Well, I mean, these are
00:32:47 interesting questions. I find myself in general, I just, I never get offended by questions
00:32:53 because they're interesting. The idea that you would get enraged at questions is, it's
00:32:59 just foreign to my entire mindset. It just seems bizarre to me. But again, it's sort
00:33:05 of been my nature and philosophy is helping with this kind of stuff. So yeah, you can't,
00:33:09 you present things as absolutes and then you just relentlessly attack and punish and mock
00:33:14 anyone who has any doubts about these answers. And this is straight up sophistry, right?
00:33:22 Sophistry is, I mean, the old thing, science is questions that must be asked, and sophistry
00:33:30 is answers that cannot be questioned, right? So, sophistry is, you are evil for even thinking
00:33:36 this might be a question, right? This is an absolute fact, and only evil people would
00:33:42 doubt this answer. And of course, this also relies with an appeal to authority, right?
00:33:50 All these scientists, all these doctors, all these all say the same thing. Who are you
00:33:54 to, don't do your own research, right? You can't think for yourself and all of that.
00:33:58 And this creates a lot of tension, right? Among anybody who's curious, it's like, well,
00:34:01 hang on, if you're presenting this as an absolute, then you must have really good reasons, right?
00:34:07 I mean, it's an absolute, and to even question it is immoral, therefore, it should be easy
00:34:12 to answer, right? And the way that you know if someone really understands something is
00:34:18 they can present the case against their beliefs, right? I mean, I did this in a variety of
00:34:23 ways and places. I do this when I roleplay a bad parent, I present the case for bad parenting.
00:34:28 I did a whole Steel Man case in both my book, Peaceful Parenting, and in my novel, The Future,
00:34:34 the Steel Man case for being aggressive towards children. So, yeah, I mean, of course, I mean,
00:34:40 you've got to understand the opposite position and argument in order to be certain and truthful.
00:34:44 So if somebody says to me, "Why is hitting children immoral?" It's like, "Hey, you know,
00:34:48 great question. Let's answer that. Let's explore that." As opposed to, "I'm going to punish
00:34:53 you for even thinking that this could ever be a question. That's really boring and dangerous,
00:34:58 and you end up really running blind in society."
00:35:02 So in order to attack a child for having questions, you have to really, really hate independent
00:35:11 thought. You have to really, really feel a cruelty and sadism towards the most natural
00:35:17 thing, right? Towards the most natural thing for kids is to ask questions. Of course it
00:35:22 is. It's healthy, it's good, it's right. Of course kids should ask questions. Of course
00:35:25 kids are born skeptical. And they should, I mean, kids should be the challenging new
00:35:31 perspectives that keeps society's ideas fresh and alive rather than stale and dominant and
00:35:36 brutal. But I mean, you can't have that in the world as it's currently constituted, but
00:35:40 I mean, that certainly is the ideal for the future. So you have to enjoy hurting children
00:35:47 by punishing them for asking questions.
00:35:51 So if you're a teacher, right? You sort of imagine this, right? So if you're a teacher
00:35:55 and you say to kids, "You can't use violence to get what you want. You can't use force
00:36:00 to get what you want. That's wrong. Don't push, don't hit, don't kick, don't whatever."
00:36:03 You can't, like that's immoral. And if some kid were to say, like say in front of the
00:36:07 whole school, "Well, wait a minute. My parents are forced to pay your salary by force." Right?
00:36:13 I mean, that's a very real question. That's a very, very real question. And can they answer
00:36:23 that? I mean, of course there are ways to answer it. We could get into that another
00:36:28 time. There are ways to answer it, but it's not simple. I'm not saying the answers are
00:36:32 good, but there certainly are ways to answer it. But it's not simple at all, right? Not
00:36:37 simple at all. So you have to have this rage against the natural skepticism of children
00:36:43 and view it as a demon to be exercised, as an immorality to be attacked and punished.
00:36:52 And of course, that's because you've been raised believing a bunch of lies. You've based
00:36:56 your entire personality on lies. And I don't mean necessarily things that are false. I
00:37:03 just mean things that you claim you know that you don't know. Right? So you may claim to
00:37:08 know something that is accidentally true, but you claim to know it according to some
00:37:12 rational methodology, which you haven't pursued. You've just conformed with the brutality of
00:37:16 your own childhood, which is understandable. Of course, it's very common. It works. People
00:37:19 do it because it works. And so you claim to be a teacher, but you're an indoctrinator.
00:37:24 And so the fact that you are a brutal, sadistic indoctrinator is revealed by the skepticism
00:37:30 of the children. And therefore, you think you're being a good person, you're actually
00:37:34 being an immoral person by harming children and ripping out their natural wiring and replacing
00:37:38 it with loyalty to abstractions and ruleless wiring. And that's hard for you, right? If
00:37:43 you've defined yourself as good, but what you're doing is actually evil, then, you know,
00:37:47 talk about the oppression system, you have to fight back against that knowledge. So you
00:37:54 have to hate the natural self of children, right? Education should be facilitation, not
00:37:58 indoctrination, right? "Oh, you want to do this? So let me help you figure out how to
00:38:01 get there. Oh, you want to learn this? Let's help you figure out how to get there. You
00:38:05 have questions? Let's explore them together." And it's around honesty, right? "Thou shalt
00:38:09 not bear false witness." When a child says, "How do you know?" If you don't know, you
00:38:13 have to be honest and say, "Well, I don't know." It's honesty, right? But if you lie
00:38:16 and say you do know, but you don't actually know, the kid keeps asking questions, and
00:38:21 then the limitations of your knowledge are revealed, the natural response for most people
00:38:25 is rage against the child. Like the child is showing you the hollowness of your own
00:38:29 lack of identity, your conformity, you're actually immoral when you think you're good.
00:38:33 The child's curiosity begins to expose that in yourself, that self-contempt, that self-hatred,
00:38:38 that horror of your own trauma, and therefore, because you feel really bad because the child
00:38:42 is asking questions, the child is therefore bad for asking questions, right? So you feeling
00:38:46 bad makes the other person immoral, and this sort of translation of "I feel bad, therefore
00:38:52 you're immoral" isn't, it's not exactly, it's not exactly ended in the modern world.
00:38:58 So of course, along with wanting to reprogram children, harm children, comes physical violence,
00:39:04 right? They call it corporal punishment, it's just assault, assaulting children, right?
00:39:08 You can call it whatever you want, it's just assaulting children. Of course, this was embedded
00:39:12 into the Prussian system, and now they do it with humiliation and exclusion. And of
00:39:18 course, the other thing that they do in society as a whole at the moment is, people don't
00:39:23 want to hit children for a variety of reasons, we can sort of get into another time. So people
00:39:27 have recoiled from wanting to hit children, so all they do is they mock and exclude children
00:39:33 and let the bullies do the physical punishment, right? So the bullies are an integral part
00:39:38 of it. "Oh, why are there bullies in school?" Well, bullies are an integral part of school.
00:39:42 Bullies is getting the, in a sense, the trapped children to fight each other. And so the teachers
00:39:50 don't hit the children directly, but what they do is they provoke mockery and exclusion
00:39:54 of the children to the point where they are attacked, they are ostracized, they are excluded,
00:40:00 they are avoided, they are whatever, rejected. And so that's the pain now. They are provoking
00:40:07 the other children to join in the attack upon the questioners rather than attacking themselves
00:40:12 directly. And that actually is much more efficient, because if you attack the children directly,
00:40:16 like you hit the children directly, there's a great risk the children will unite against
00:40:20 you. But if you get the children to fight each other, right, if you basically say, "This
00:40:23 is the kid who it's good to mock, this is the kid who it's good to attack, this is the
00:40:27 bad kid who's good to ostracize," then that kid will be attacked, ostracized, and then
00:40:33 there's no unity against the abuser because everybody's attacking each other. So you splinter
00:40:39 and you fragment any possibility of unity. It's a much, much more efficient way to do
00:40:43 things. But back in the day, of course, child assault was essential to the Prussian system.
00:40:50 So it was really, really sadistic, right? And sadism is really against the original
00:40:55 sin of skepticism, right? So it wasn't a benign tool for maintaining order, it couldn't really
00:41:01 be defined that way, even in the abstraction. The practice was a clear manifestation of
00:41:05 cruelty, designed to instill fear rather than understanding. The infliction of physical
00:41:09 pain as a response to noncompliance or error or questions. It's not just morally reprehensible,
00:41:13 but of course psychologically damaging, fostering an environment of terror rather than trust.
00:41:19 There's an 1842 engraving of a teacher administering a beating, and of course the other children
00:41:24 are all there, the child is over a bench, there's some pretty brutal implement, and
00:41:31 it's bare buttocks, right? So it's bare buttocks. There is of course a sadistic, erotic, horrendous,
00:41:39 paraphilic or pedophilic impulse behind these kinds of bare-bottom beatings in public. I
00:41:43 mean the ritual humiliation on a zone which is erotic, like the buttocks are erotic, which
00:41:50 is why you can't show them in public. So yeah, it's really brutal and public, and of course
00:41:54 it is designed to frighten all of the other children. And yeah, there is a really bizarre
00:41:59 - and I remember this when I would get caned, it was like "well there's something really
00:42:03 bizarre about it, like why is there something so bizarre about this, something so not on
00:42:07 the surface and creepy and subterranean about all of this?" So we're going to talk about
00:42:12 the children's strike. So throughout Greater Poland, which was annexed by Germany in the
00:42:16 late 18th century, German became the primary language for school instruction starting from
00:42:20 1873. This shift was further enforced in March 1901 when German authorities mandated the
00:42:25 use of German in religious educational classes. In response, about 118 students in the Catholic
00:42:32 People's School - and I'm not even going to try and pronounce this, "Hreznia" or something
00:42:37 like that, but I'm sure it's some mouthful of marbles Polish pronunciation, which I can
00:42:42 say because my name is Polish, first name is Polish - but the Catholic People's School,
00:42:45 they resisted, about 118 students resisted this change. So the school's response to this
00:42:50 resistance involved detentions and physical punishment. So in a crowded first floor classroom
00:42:56 students were presented with a final opportunity to recite a German religious song by memory.
00:43:01 Those who succeeded were allowed to go home while the others were detained for severe
00:43:05 corporal punishment. Each student was individually escorted, the students who wouldn't recite
00:43:10 this German religious song, each student was individually escorted to a designated ground
00:43:15 floor room for the punishment. There, Johann Schulzen, a teacher known for his strict adherence
00:43:22 to Prussian discipline, was ready to administer the punishment. The punishment involved receiving
00:43:27 4 to 8 sharp strikes with a birch cane. Boys received the blows on their buttocks while
00:43:33 girls were struck on their open hands. The severity of the assault was so great that
00:43:38 one girl fainted from the pain and several others found themselves unable to hold their
00:43:42 books due to the swelling in their hands. The situation escalated over the following
00:43:47 weeks as parents protested the treatment of their children. On May 20th, a demonstration
00:43:51 comprising 100 to 200 individuals took place in front of the school, leading to police
00:43:56 intervention. The adults participating in these protests, the parents trying to protect
00:44:01 their children from these assaults, these abuses, faced legal repercussions for causing
00:44:06 public disturbance, obstructing official duties, trespassing and related offenses. A total
00:44:12 of 26 parents were formally accused and on November 19th, 1901, 20 of them received sentences
00:44:18 ranging from several weeks to over two years in prison. I mean, of course, the eradication
00:44:24 of a people's language is a part of a cultural attack that is brutal, of course, and often
00:44:30 quite successful, sadly. So, yeah, this is where the children were assaulted and the
00:44:35 parents who protested the assaults upon their children were jailed. This is how the system
00:44:41 works. You can't ask any questions, you can't have any skepticism, you can't have any doubt
00:44:46 about the inflicted conclusions of teachers and authorities. And of course, this is the
00:44:52 fragile nature, right? Fragility and violence are two sides of the same coin, right? So,
00:44:58 if you want to create violence in society, the first thing that you do is inflict answers
00:45:05 without reasons. You inflict answers without reasons and then you invite the children to
00:45:11 mock those who ask questions and that draws the children into the cycle and circle of
00:45:18 abuse and then the children are then inoculated against asking questions, right? So, once
00:45:24 you've abused and rejected and attacked a child for asking questions, then that's your
00:45:29 inoculation against asking questions because then you just have to swallow whatever the
00:45:34 people in authority tell you to because the moment you start asking questions, the guilt
00:45:37 about how you attacked a child who asks questions arises and you want to avoid that and the
00:45:41 best way to avoid that is mute, stupid, bovine, compliant to whatever people in authority
00:45:46 tell you, right? So, summoning children to attack other children and this, of course,
00:45:52 happened to me in boarding school. Why I got caned? Why did I get caned? Because I was
00:45:56 playing football and the ball went over a fence. I climbed the fence to get the ball
00:46:01 and another child ratted me out, right? Went and got the teacher who then dragged me up
00:46:07 to get caned, right? So, I mean, the caning wasn't particularly bad, honestly, I'm not
00:46:12 going to try and over-dramatize it, but that kid's soul would die that day, right? Like
00:46:18 I've now participated in getting a child beaten in innocuous action, right? I just climbed
00:46:23 a fence, right? So, yeah, it was very sad. Very sad for him. Very sad for him. I mean,
00:46:29 my life is great. I'm sure that his life is terrible. So, yeah, that's even if you try
00:46:35 to protect your children, right? I mean, you end up being thrown in jail for weeks to years,
00:46:40 right? So, in essence, the Prussian model and, of course, its reflections in certain
00:46:45 modern educational systems is a sadism disguised as pedagogy, disguised as education, right?
00:46:53 It glorifies obedience at the expense of critical thinking and human dignity using fear and
00:46:58 force and ridicule and ostracism and rejection as its primary tools. It doesn't create disciplined
00:47:05 individuals, right? It's all about discipline. No, it's about subjugation. It's about the
00:47:09 abandonment of your mind and getting the wiring of your soul ripped out and replaced with
00:47:14 NPC programming that serves those in power. And, of course, the purpose of the Prussian
00:47:20 system, and this is not my theory, this is openly stated, the purpose of the Prussian
00:47:23 system was to create what? Two things, to create passive urban workers and soldiers,
00:47:30 right? People who would just sit there on the line and make widgets all day and never
00:47:34 complain and never question and never oppose and soldiers who will obey without question.
00:47:40 Now, of course, the Prussian educational system started in the early 19th century, profoundly
00:47:45 influenced the development of modern schooling in the Western world, especially in the United
00:47:49 States, right? So, I mean, government schooling was sold in America in the mid-19th century
00:47:55 as, well, you have all of these non-Protestants coming in, you need to have government schools
00:47:59 in order to preserve your culture. Now, of course, government schools are used to undo
00:48:03 a lot of cultural stuff. So this system, Prussian system, what is it? Structured hierarchical
00:48:09 format, mandatory curriculum, fixed grades based on age, and a professional class of
00:48:13 trained teachers, right? So, of course, in the free market, who should teach your children?
00:48:19 Well, the person who has the greatest knowledge that your children like the most, right? That's
00:48:25 who should teach your children, the person with the greatest knowledge that your children
00:48:29 like the most. Now, of course, we assume that the children like the person because he's
00:48:33 able to productively engage with them in the transfer of knowledge, right? So, but your
00:48:38 children liking the teacher is essential to education, because if your children don't
00:48:43 like the teacher, the teacher can't be effective, right? The teacher, the kids don't want to
00:48:49 be there, they don't respect the teacher, they don't want to learn from the teacher.
00:48:52 And so, enthusiasm for knowledge, enthusiasm for children, love of knowledge, love of knowledge
00:48:57 transfer, love of children's potential, all of this stuff, children respond very warmly
00:49:01 to people who really like them, right, as a whole, right? I know this from my time as
00:49:07 a daycare teacher's aide, and I did this for years. And so, in a free market, it should
00:49:14 be that the kids want to go to school, they want to learn, or they want to be educated,
00:49:19 they want to, they're excited to do it. And of course, children do love to learn and all
00:49:23 of that. So, I mean, I taught my daughter a lot of math through Dungeons and Dragons,
00:49:29 right, through probabilities and odds and all of that kind of stuff, right? And percentages,
00:49:35 oh, you have to roll a 20, what percentage is that? Oh, 5%, right? You know, so you get
00:49:40 all of that, right? So, yeah, and of course, I love you guys, and I love talking about
00:49:45 philosophy and so this is why this show has done so well. And of course, you know, we're
00:49:51 in a little bit of a jazz club scenario, but that just means it's better later on, right,
00:49:56 because this stuff is more relevant to the future.
00:49:58 So the idea that you have passed a test set by the rulers, therefore you are now a teacher
00:50:07 is incomprehensible to a free market environment or scenario. Like that just, it absolutely
00:50:12 makes zero sense whatsoever. I remember watching a movie called, I think it was called Hollywood
00:50:18 Shuffle about the difficulties of black actors. And there was one guy, he was auditioning,
00:50:24 and he's like, oh, well, I've completed Rada and I've completed this course and I've completed
00:50:29 that, I've got a master's degree in performance art and blah, blah, blah. And then he started
00:50:34 doing the reading and the directors were like, you're like the worst actor we've ever seen.
00:50:39 No, no, no, but I have all these credentials, right? So the idea that you don't have auditions
00:50:45 for the lead in your movie or significant roles in your movie, the idea that you don't
00:50:51 have auditions, but what you do is simply ask for people's credentials would be incomprehensible,
00:50:56 right? I mean, maybe the credentials help a little bit, maybe they help get you in the
00:51:01 door or whatever, but you still have to audition, right? So the idea that credentials make a
00:51:06 teacher is completely incomprehensible in any free market scenario. What makes a teacher
00:51:13 is the audition, right? What makes a teacher is, can you engage and interest children in
00:51:20 the subject matter? Do they want you to be the teacher? Do they want you to be the teacher?
00:51:26 Do they want to come to your class? Do they want to learn? Are they enthusiastic? Like
00:51:29 that. So credentialism, it's so incomprehensible in a free market scenario or environment that,
00:51:38 I mean, of course we have credentialism all over the place, right? In healthcare in particular.
00:51:42 So I mean, to me, the best healers are those who inspire people towards healthy lifestyles,
00:51:49 right? So does your doctor inspire you towards a healthy lifestyle? Do they educate you on
00:51:53 prevention? Do they educate you on exercise, on vitamin D, on good diets, all these kinds
00:51:59 of things? It's not my health advice, I'm just saying what I think a good doctor should
00:52:02 be working on. Of course, this used to be the case, right? As I've talked about before
00:52:07 in China prior to communism, you would pay your doctor every month until you got sick
00:52:10 and then he'd have to treat you for free. So his whole incentive was to keep you healthy
00:52:14 so that he could make money, right? So the idea that, well, you've just, you've passed
00:52:19 a bunch of tests, therefore you are a good healer. I mean, of course healers need knowledge.
00:52:25 I get all of that for sure. But I mean, do you listen to me because I have a graduate
00:52:32 degree focusing on the history of philosophy? Do you listen to me because of that? Do I
00:52:36 ever talk about credentialism? Do I ever say you should listen to me because I did a really
00:52:40 tough graduate degree in a pretty hostile academic environment but then pulled off an
00:52:45 A? No, you shouldn't listen to me because of that. Have I ever claimed to be right because
00:52:50 of credentials? Nope. I love philosophy, I love talking about philosophy, I love the
00:52:55 curiosity of the audience and you're all willing to join me on this very challenging journey
00:52:58 which I hugely appreciate. But the idea that I should be allowed to do what I do because
00:53:04 of credentialism is completely incomprehensible. Completely incomprehensible. I mean, there
00:53:09 are many, many famous actors who have little to no training at all. There are many, many
00:53:16 famous artists who never went to art school. There are many, many famous thinkers. Not
00:53:22 so much anymore because credentialism has become such a big thing. But if you strip
00:53:27 - credentialism is in general for insecure people. So anyway, the idea that you are a
00:53:37 teacher if you pass a test is like saying you are an actor if you graduated from acting
00:53:43 school. Lots of people who graduate from acting school aren't particularly good and lots of
00:53:47 people are fantastic who never graduated from acting school. Credentialism is just a way
00:53:51 of - it's ensuring that teachers believe - like to believe that you're a teacher because you
00:53:57 are credentialed is automatically saying that you don't know what a teacher is. Now again,
00:54:03 there are lots of teachers who are very good out there who happen to be credentialed. They
00:54:07 kind of jump through the hoops and I'm not sort of complaining about that kind of thing.
00:54:10 But anyone who says I'm a teacher because a bureaucrat has told me that I am a teacher.
00:54:19 I've jumped through these hoops. I am now a teacher because - like no, you're a teacher
00:54:22 if people want to learn from you. That's when you're a teacher when people want to learn
00:54:26 from you. That's it. That makes you a teacher. Now of course you have to have the knowledge
00:54:30 and all of that but people generally don't want to learn from you if you don't have the
00:54:34 knowledge. You are a teacher if people want to learn from you. You are an actor if people
00:54:41 pay to watch you act. You are a singer if people pay to listen to you sing. I mean,
00:54:48 has Taylor Swift taken massive amounts of singing lessons? I don't know. I'm sure she's
00:54:53 taken some but just to really to preserve her voice, Freddie Mercury never took a singing
00:54:57 lesson in his whole life, considered to be one of the greatest vocalists in human history.
00:55:01 So yes, credentialism is part of sadism. I know that sounds kind of odd. Credentialism
00:55:08 is part of sadism. But credentialism is a way of ensuring that people are going to demand
00:55:17 respect and obedience without being good at what they do, which is going to promote cruelty.
00:55:26 Like why? Wasn't this a question? I think we all had this, those of us who think, right?
00:55:31 Why am I listening to this person? Why is this person in charge of my education? Why
00:55:37 am I spending all this time listening to this person? Well, because you're kind of forced
00:55:41 to be there because there's all this credentialism and so on. And didn't you always have teachers
00:55:46 who just demanded respect and who demanded subjugation and who demanded that you listen
00:55:52 and who demanded that you do your homework? So credentialism leads to aggression because
00:55:57 it puts entitled people in charge of children. They haven't earned the respect of their children
00:56:04 by being productive and positive and loving the kids and loving knowledge and being excited
00:56:09 and enthusiastic. Okay, then you get some respect out of that, or at least listening.
00:56:14 But credentialism breeds sadism because it puts entitled people who haven't earned respect
00:56:21 and obedience in charge of children and therefore the fact that the children don't respect or
00:56:28 want to obey them means that they end up feeling enraged at the children for not giving them
00:56:34 what they damn well deserve apparently, which is respect and obedience, but they haven't
00:56:38 earned it. So then they have to become aggressive. So credentialism puts people in charge of
00:56:42 children who inevitably end up being aggressive because the children... You know, like I kind
00:56:47 of give homework sometimes to people, right? You hear this in call-in shows, right? You
00:56:51 know, I certainly give the homework of go to therapy and I've sent people significant
00:56:55 amounts of money to help them with their therapy costs and all of that, or I say, you know,
00:56:59 if I were in your shoes I'd go talk to my parents and try and work things out and all
00:57:03 of this. So I kind of give homework. I've never had anybody resent me for it. Whether
00:57:06 people do it or not, sometimes I hear about it, sometimes I don't, but the idea that I'm
00:57:13 giving homework... Or, you know, say if you want to debate UPB with me, then read the
00:57:16 book UPB. It's kind of like homework, right? People do debate with me and they usually
00:57:21 have read UPB, but nobody gets mad at me. They say, "How dare you give me homework?"
00:57:28 And if people don't do it, I mean, I think it's a good idea, but if people don't do what
00:57:34 I recommend, that's on them. I'm not going to chase them down and humiliate them and
00:57:38 so on, right? So credentialism says you're now a teacher and the children should damn
00:57:43 well listen to you because I gave you this piece of paper and then you go in and the
00:57:46 children don't like you, so you just get angry at them and you get aggressive, right?
00:57:49 But of course, if teachers are chosen by their ability to inspire and excite children, you
00:57:55 know, the amount of loss, oh, the amount of loss, like how much fun school could have
00:57:58 been compared to how it was, just terrible. All right, so, sorry, I said it's going to
00:58:03 go too long. Maybe I will. So what is the purpose? Well, the primary goal of the Prussian
00:58:09 system is to instill a sense of obedience, discipline and punctuality in students, which
00:58:13 of course is the needs of the emerging proto-capitalist or capitalist or crony capitalist industrial
00:58:21 society growing bureaucratic state and the need for more and more soldiers in a wartime.
00:58:29 So this approach to education emphasizes uniformity and conformity and subjugation was seen as
00:58:33 highly efficient, became a model for public educational systems worldwide. In the US,
00:58:37 the Prussian system inspired key educational changes in the 19th and 20th centuries, leading
00:58:41 to the establishment of compulsory schooling laws and the graded class structure that are
00:58:45 familiar in schools today. This legacy of the Prussian model is evident in the emphasis
00:58:50 on standardized testing, regimented class schedules and a focus on core subjects, often
00:58:56 irrelevant to the children, that are still prevalent in American education. I mean, this
00:59:00 is the sad thing. I mean, I'll just end here, right? But this is a really sad thing. You
00:59:04 think about all the problems that we face in the West and in society, and so many of
00:59:08 them, I mean, you're probably younger than me, but so many of them occurred or were set
00:59:14 in motion before you were born and before I was born. You know, the downfall of the
00:59:19 West was the government takeover of the educational system, which is like 150, 160 years ago in
00:59:27 say, in America, right? So we didn't make the problems. We didn't have a choice about
00:59:34 the problems. We just inherited the problems. And when you look at the massive escalation
00:59:45 of sadism, that is, you know, say, civil war or rampant child abuse, or of course, genocide
00:59:52 in its final form, we really, really want to stop this ball rolling sooner rather than
00:59:57 later. And understanding the origins of sadism is really, really important in trying to avert
01:00:03 the escalations of cruelty that seem to be occurring in the modern world. Thank you so
01:00:08 much for listening, of course. I really, really appreciate it. And your support, which makes
01:00:12 all of this possible, is more valuable to me than I'll ever, ever be able to express.
01:00:16 I just consider it such an enormous privilege to be at the center of this conversation.
01:00:21 And I always hope that I'm doing you proud with your support and your listening. freedomain.com/donate.
01:00:28 If you'd like to help out the show, I would really, really appreciate that. freedomain.com/donate.
01:00:32 I look forward to your feedback. Thank you so much, as always, for listening. Lots of
01:00:36 love from up here. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.