Peaceful Parenting

Long SummaryIn this lecture, we explore the evolutionary factors that shape our behaviors in dating and mating. We begin by acknowledging that our templates for sexual success are our parents, as they have successfully reproduced. Throughout history, it has been crucial for individuals to follow the parenting practices of their parents, even if they were not always pleasant. Our genes prioritize reproduction over personal happiness or morality, and love and pair bonding exist to increase the chances of our offspring reaching reproductive age.During childhood, it is essential to submit to our parents' authority, as disobeying them decreases our odds of survival. However, upon reaching sexual maturity, it becomes vital to rebel and become aggressive ourselves, especially for males. Women are attracted to aggressive males based on their upbringing, and remaining submissive to parents after sexual maturity is seen as unattractive. This pattern of aggression during and after puberty is deeply ingrained in our evolutionary history.The ability to negotiate rather than resort to violence is a recent development in human society, and trade and property rights have become crucial for peace and prosperity. Parents need to adjust their parenting styles based on prevailing societal conditions. In more trade-based societies, raising children less violently is necessary for stability and a culture of negotiation.Eliminating violence from society is important for resource acquisition and overall well-being. Raising children with better negotiating skills and reduced capacity for violence is essential in such societies. Throughout history, societies that eliminated violent individuals evolved into polite societies that enforced moral standards through social ostracism rather than violence. In contrast, violent societies tend to be dominated by bullies. Boys raised by violent parents assume that their entire society is violent, and they submit to their parents before rebelling against them to attract a woman who prefers aggression. This cycle of submission and rebellion has been a survival strategy throughout history.However, the speaker highlights the hypocrisy in abusive parenting, where parents claim to protect their children while engaging in abuse. They emphasize the importance of knowledge and instruction to help those who genuinely want to be good parents. Individuals who pretend to be good but willingly do evil are seen as irredeemable, as they possess the knowledge of virtue but choose to act against it.The lecture also delves into the topic of discipline in parenting and the potential consequences of neglecting it. The speaker argues that allowing children to make their own decisions without guidance can lead to negative outcomes, such as poor health and lack of success. They stress the importance of teaching discipline at a young age, as it becomes harder to learn as adults. Examples of language learning and sleep habits are provided to support this point.

PART 1: THEORY

Peaceful Parenting: What Is It?The strangest thing about peaceful parenting is that it is nothing other than what we all accept and practice in the vast majority of our daily lives.Peaceful parenting is nothing alien or foreign or revolutionary or contradictory.Peaceful parenting is exactly what you teach your children – how you live your life – what you praise and want and prefer in almost everything you do.Is this incomprehensible to you?Let’s look at the larger picture. The historical picture, if you like.Peaceful parenting is the greatest moral revolution in the history of the world.It is the greatest progress that can be imagined.It both falls in line with – and extends – all prior moral progress.What do I mean?Well – science, technology and morality all progress when exceptions are eliminated.The more that local principles can be distilled into simple universals, the more power we gather over knowledge, nature – and ourselves.Early moral commandments forbade stealing – but only from one’s own tribe.It was fine to steal from those outside your tribe, but you should respect the property of your fellow cultists.Every planet and sun is a sphere – imagining that the Earth is flat creates an exception to a universal rule – and an exception to the physical laws which cause large masses of matter to collapse into spherical shapes.In ancient societies – and even in some contemporary ones – human rights and privileges are reserved for only some people – while those in the lower castes – as well as women and slaves – remain largely unprotected.Why do we allow these complications?Why do we invent rules – and then immediately start creating exceptions?Well, that is all about power.That which is complicated is almost certainly corrupt.Sometimes, changing a single variable can simplify the entire system – transforming it from corrupt to moral, from convoluted to correct.In the ancient world, when the Earth was considered the center of the universe, the retrograde motion of Mars – the fact that Mars seems to move backwards in the sky at times – was “explained” using the Ptolemaic system. This system was based on the belief that the Earth was at the center of the universe, and all orbits were perfect circles. Thus, in order to calculate the position of Mars, hundreds of calculations were required.After the early Middle Ages, when astronomers began to toy with the idea that the sun was the center of the solar system, the movement of Mars became enormously simple – the fact was that the Earth sometimes moves faster around the sun than Mars, because the Earth is closer – which makes Mars appear to move backwards in the sky.Simple.One of Isaac Newton’s greatest insights was the theory of gravity, which states that everything falls. An apple falls to the ground – the Earth falls around the sun, the moon falls around the Earth, and so on.Einstein also vastly simplified our understanding of the universe by rejecting the 19th-century theory of ether, and substituting the theory of relativity, and the famous equation E = MC squared...

Do We Love Our Children?

Love and violence are opposites.

A man cannot justly claim to love a woman if he also beats her.A woman cannot claim to have great affection for her cat if she starves it.A bully who abuses his victim cannot claim to love that victim as well.What about love and exploitation?Can a boyfriend claim to love his girlfriend while surreptitiously running up massive bills on her credit cards?Enslaving others through debt is the opposite of love.It is time for a thought experiment.I want you to imagine a purple-skinned race of people.Society claims to love and value “the purples” – but what does that mean?Claims of affection are not proof of love – abusers usually claim to love their victims – stalkers terrify those they claim to treasure, exploitive corporations often refer to employees as being part of a loyal company “family.”Cults regularly engage in “love bombing” – the practice of showering affection on lonely people in order to stimulate a bond to an exploitive gang.It is true that society claims to love and treasure “the purples” – but as sensible, rational individuals, we should compare society’s ideals to the actual facts.How would we judge society’s proclaimed “love” for “the purples” if we found out the following:1. It is illegal to hit anyone in society – except the purples. You can hit the purples without repercussion. In fact, those who hit the purples are generally praised for “maintaining social order.”2. It is illegal to perform genital mutilation on anyone – except the purples. Carving up the genitalia of male purples is encouraged and praised.3. It is both legal and encouraged to use the future earnings of even the unborn purples as collateral for government spending.4. It is illegal to run up debt and force others to pay – except the purples. It is both legal and praised to greedily dump about a million dollars worth of debt on the newborn purples, who must submit to this enslavement and pay for this debt for the rest of their lives.5. Purples are regularly sexually assaulted. It happens to about one in three females, and about one in five males. Although this is technically illegal, prosecutions are exceedingly rare.6. Bad behaviours which are absolutely unacceptable in general society are accepted – and often praised – when inflicted against the purples. If a waiter gets your order wrong, it is absolutely unacceptable to yell insults at him – however, if a purple does something wrong, it is good to raise your voice at him or her.7. Those who verbally intimidate anonymous retail workers are scorned and insulted as “Karens” – those who verbally intimidate the purples are praised as good and noble people.8. In non-purple society, it is absolutely unacceptable – and often illegal – to physically punish or traumatize people who disappoint you, or disagree with you – or make mistakes. When dealing with purples, however, you are allowed to physically restrain them, hit them, scream at them, verbally abuse them, withhold necessary food, shake them and so on. As long as there is no permanent obvious injury afterwards, you’re fine!

Prologue

I am fully aware that it seems melodramatic and precious to write an introduction that is basically a giant trigger warning – but it needs to be done.

This book is the culmination of forty years work in the field of philosophy, self-knowledge, parenting and ethics. Through my show Freedomain, I have had the privilege of having in-depth conversations with thousands of people about their early childhood experiences, and the effects that trauma has had over the course of their adult lives. They contact me in the hope that my training and experience in self-knowledge and moral philosophy will help them untangle the problems in their lives – I hope that I have served him well. These conversations are all available on my website. I have interviewed many experts in the field of parenting, child abuse, family structures, therapy and self-knowledge – these interviews are also available on my website. I myself experienced significant levels of child abuse. I was raised by a violent and crazy single mother, who ended up being institutionalized when I was in my early teens. I did talk therapy for three hours a week, for almost 2 years. At the end of my therapeutic process, and after months of trying to repair my relationship with my family, I decided to separate from them. I have not talked to my mother for twenty-five years. My father left when I was a baby, and I have had little contact with him since – he died a few years ago. I have been happily married for over twenty years, and have been a stay-at-home father for the past fifteen years to my wonderful daughter. My wife is a licensed mental health professional who practices psychology. Her training is in early childhood education, and we both decided to parent without aggression, violence, name-calling, raised voices – or punishment of any kind. My daughter is homeschooled, and we are part of a wonderful community of like-minded parents. My daughter and I do comedy shows together - mostly movie reviews - these are also available on my website. Now for the trigger warning. This is a very intense book. I have tried to write it twice before, but faltered at the depth and enormity of the task. My experience as a child was a deep and genuine bewilderment. I was surrounded by people who claimed to be good – many of them Christians – and who also claimed to be experts at identifying and punishing immorality. My relatives, my teachers, my boarding school masters, the priests who instructed me – they all claimed to have the ability to accurately identify immorality and take strong steps to contain and punish it. I was punished in school – caned in boarding school – and in church, and by relatives – all because they said that I had behaved badly, and deserved to be punished. But it was most strange… None of the hundreds of adults who judged and punished me over the course of my young life ever recognized that my mother was an evildoer who violently beat her own children. They were able to detect subtle signs of rebellion or disobedience in my demeanour, and sharply or aggressively punish me – but they were utterly unable to identify my mother’s obvious mental and moral dysfunctions – or ask me how I was doing, and take action to protect me, and oppose the violence I was subjected to. I have been wrestling with this massive issue for over half a century. How is it possible that adults can punish children for minor transgressions – I was once caned for climbing over a fence to go and get a soccer ball – but are utterly blind and helpless in the face of adult abusers of helpless, dependent and innocent children?