Peaceful Parenting: The Rebuttal
Just a gentle reminder – a caution, to help you, which is my greatest goal.
If you have had power over children over the course of your life, please check with them. This is not just for parents, but also for aunts, uncles, grandparents, elder siblings and so on.
If the children you had power over have complaints, please listen to them before consuming this next chapter.
I have always strongly recommended talk therapy. If you have unresolved childhood or parenting traumas, please work to deal with them before continuing.
All right?
Good.
So – here is an interesting challenge.
If we say that children need to be spanked, we are saying that being hit prepares them for adulthood.
However, it is illegal to hit adults.
If we say that verbal abuse is necessary to prepare children for adulthood, we face the challenging problem of explaining why we generally tell people in verbally abusive relationships to get the hell out!
I mean, we don’t raise children speaking our native language – and then punish them for speaking that same language as adults.
We don’t spend countless hours teaching children how to read and do math – only to launch them into an adulthood where reading and doing math are illegal.
Parents are thrilled when they help their toddlers learn how to walk, because we walk for our entire lives – we don’t get thrown in jail for walking the moment we turn eighteen.
Try to think of teaching methods for children that are illegal for adults.
(I don’t mean teaching environments such as school, but teaching methods such as instruction, repetition and testing.)
We teach children to take care of their things, and put them away when done, and keep their environment clean – all these habits are praised in adults as well.
We teach children to brush their hair and teeth – we don’t throw them in jail for basic grooming and hygiene as adults.
If a boss verbally abuses his employees, he is not loved and respected as a great teacher.
If a boss hits his employees, we would be appalled, and he would be charged criminally.
It makes less than no sense to train children using violent and abusive methods – when those violent and abusive methods are illegal for adults.
Spanking
A child who is hit will change his behaviour in the short run, out of fear of violence and pain.
He has not internalized or learned the value of changing his behaviour – he has not learned the value of the new behaviour at all – he is only avoiding pain.
What does the parent who spanks really teach his child?
Well, he teaches his child that larger authorities can use violence to inflict pain on a whim, if they are disobeyed, or if the child displeases them in some important way.
He does not learn that the parent is bigger and stronger, because that is obvious to all children.
He learns that he has no physical boundaries or autonomy, and that his own nervous system can be hijacked to inflict pain against him if he displeases his parent.
He learns that “love” includes violence and pain.
Although spanking is often portrayed as an act of reason and self-control – give warnings, explain why the spanking is going to happen, never spank in anger, explain afterwards why it happened, etc – everyone knows that most spanking violates any and all of these supposed standards.
Most spanking is done in anger, out of a desire to punish – not in a state of calmness, and a desire to instruct. 
In other words, children are told to control themselves by parents who are out of control.
Verbal Abuse
Verbal abuse – raised voices, intimidating words, insulting phrases – is inflicted against children on a regular basis.
What does it teach those children?
Children are often verbally abused for “talking back,” or “defying orders,” or “not listening,” and so on.
In other words, they have verbally “misbehaved,” and their parental protectors then deploy an extreme form of verbal misbehaviour called abuse.
This is like hitting a child while yelling that hitting is always wrong – a not uncommon occurrence.
One essential aspect of peaceful parenting is that it is immoral and unjust to expect behaviours from children that you are not first consistently modelling yourself.
You would never punish a child for failing to learn a language he or she had never been exposed to – or if you did, you would be a complete monster!
If you want your child to know what a tree is, you must first point at trees and use the word repeatedly.
If you want children to listen, you must first model listening.
If you want the child to respect you, you must first respect the child.
If you want the child to reason, you must first reason with the child.
You are the cause of your child’s effects.
Your child’s choices are the shadows of your own prior decisions.
Tantrums
Parents often say: “Well, that is all well and good in theory, but what happens when my child throws a tantrum, and refuses to listen because of extreme emotional upset?”
The ubiquity of child abuse leads to the myth of natural tantrums. 
According to this myth, children are so prone to hyper-excitement and overstimulation that they just kind of “tip over” into wildly emotional meltdowns.
Childhood is perceived to start as a series of random emotional “seizures,” which can only be cured by steadfastly ignoring or punishing said “seizures.”
The mindset is:
“When contradicted, children escalate hysterical aggression and emotional upset to the point where they lose their minds completely, throwing themselves on the floor and kicking and screaming in loud spasms of hyper-emotional insanity. Patient parents must ride out this storm, without giving into this emotional bullying and manipulation. The children will calm down eventually – and over time, will learn that these meltdowns do not achieve the intended effect, and will stop having these silly tantrums.”
This is the complete opposite of the truth.
To understand tantrums, imagine that you are a diabetic, and you wake up naked in some strange cage in the middle of nowhere. There are people outside, but they do not speak your language, and don’t seem to understand anything that you say.
You have to get your insulin right now, or your health will be in grave danger.
When you try to indicate injecting something, they just laugh at you, or ignore you – or get strangely angry at you.
How would you react?
Your increasing panic will cause you to raise your voice, gesture more frantically, beg and plead and cajole.
However, the more desperate you become, the more people laugh at you, turn away, mock you, make silly faces, roll their eyes and indicate that you must be crazy!
Terrified, enraged, you try to break through their contemptuous, amused indifference by showing your emotional desperation.
They just walk away, into the darkness, leaving you alone, facing severe illness and death in your cage.
You scream, cry out for them, beg them to return and save your life – but they do not return, and you are left alone in your little pool of light, staring out into the blank darkness around you.
At some point, your emotions will fade as you accept your fate. You will become resigned, and swallow the grim facts of the situation.
Tantrums arise because children are unable to satisfy their own physical, mental and emotional requirements.
Children cannot get what they want – they are in a powerless cage of inability.
Childhood Paralysis
We have reformed society to allow people in wheelchairs far greater access to buildings and amenities – because we recognize that a person in a wheelchair cannot climb a set of stairs.
Young children are disabled in similar ways.
They cannot get their own drinks or snacks, or buy their own toys.
They cannot comprehend or deal with the aches and pains of their own bodies.
They cannot even comfort themselves when upset – they require their parents to comfort them, so that they learn how to do it over time.
Expecting a child to comfort his own unhappiness is like expecting him to invent his own language, or grow his own food.
When a child is upset, it is because she feels that she is in danger, or there is a barrier between what she needs and what she can achieve, or there is a discontent that only the parent can solve – which is a test of love, connection, bonding and devotion.
A baby in a high chair who drops a toy on his plate can pick it up himself, and so does not cry.
A baby in a high chair who drops his toy onto the floor cannot pick it up, and so cries for the parent to solve the problem – just as you would beg the people outside your cage to give you life-saving medicine.
Babies and toddlers are effectively disabled – and we so often ignore, mock and shame them for their disabilities.
Tantrums are the natural panic that arises when children are not listened to, and then mocked for their increasing desperation.
“Oh come on!” say many parents. “So a toy dropped off the high chair, it’s no big deal!”
These are the same parents who get enraged if someone cuts them off on the road, or their Internet goes down, or a crack forms on the screen of their cell phone.
Everything is a big deal to a toddler, because toddlers have not learned how to prioritize importance – as is also true of the majority of adults.
When the toy falls off the high chair, the baby cries, to signal to the parent to return the toy.
Babies are in a near-constant state of ferociously attentive learning – the toy is being explored so that the baby’s brain learns about the nature and facts of reality – which is essential for the baby’s survival over time.
The baby is not “playing with a toy” – the baby is studying the facts of reality, so that the baby doesn’t die.
Imagine being back in your cage, and your potentially cruel jailers give you two plates of food – one with red berries, one with blue berries. They point at each plate, shrug their shoulders, then draw their fingers across their necks, indicating that one of plates is fatally poisonous.
Naturally, you would be absolutely desperate to know whether the red berries or the blue berries were poisonous, because you are starving, but don’t want to die.
Oh look, you’re about to have another tantrum!
You see how this works?
Babies are desperate to learn about reality, but they need their parents help to achieve knowledge – and so survive.
If parents fail to fulfil the needs of their babies, then the babies panic, because without their parents, their chances of survival are slim to none.
Failing to attend to your baby is handing your baby a very legible death threat.
Without parental care, supervision and instruction, that baby is going to die.
Babies thus clamour for parental attention – in the same way that they clamour for breastmilk when they are hungry.
Parents often feel that a baby’s crying is difficult and unpleasant – which is very strange!
Of course, a toothache is very unpleasant – but your tooth is trying to save your life, because if you don’t deal with it, the infection can easily spread to your heart and kill you outright.
Both you and your tooth have the goal of your long-term survival – and your tooth is trying to help you achieve your goal.
A crying baby is trying to help you!
Of course you don’t want your baby to die, so when your baby needs something, and can only communicate by crying, your baby is trying to help you achieve your shared goal of keeping the baby alive!
People sometimes feel that babies who cry are being intrusive, or lack empathy – but imagine how horrified and appalled a mother would be if her baby decided to let her sleep late rather than cry out for breastmilk – then died of starvation before she woke up.
My gosh - the mother would be infinitely more miserable standing over a dead baby than she would have been being woken up for the second or third time overnight.
Crying babies are trying to help you!
Unless you are an outright sadist – and thus highly unlikely to be reading this book – you want your baby to be happy and healthy, right?
You cannot directly mind-meld with your baby, and so you need audio and visual cues as to what is best for your baby, what your baby needs to survive and thrive.
The audio cues can be crying or laughter – the visual cues are tears or smiles.
This is your baby trying to help you achieve your greatest goal, which is the survival and happiness of your child.
If you’ve ever been in a situation where you are desperately trying to help someone, but that person reacts with rage, hostility or indifference, you know how frustrating this can be.
A standard example is trying to help your father fix something in the darkness by holding a flashlight, or passing him tools.
You are really trying to help him, but he snaps and snarls at you for “getting it wrong!”
You want to please your mother by helping out in the kitchen, but she rolls her eyes and orders you away because you just don’t know how to do things properly.
As an adult, your friend asks you what you think of her new boyfriend – you think he is handsome but unintelligent, so you gently tell her that, “He seems like a nice fellow, but he does I think lack your level of insight…”
This is about as mild statement as you can make – but she takes great offense, shuts down the conversation, and never talks to you again.
If someone who has gained weight asks you if you think she has gained weight, and you answer honestly, and she storms out, this is not an overly pleasant experience.
Being attacked for trying to help can be kind of difficult – I can tell you this from significant lifelong personal experience.
Children who communicate their upsets to parents are trying to help their parents – but their parents so often react with impatience, hostility or indifference.
A tantrum is a child’s desperate attempt to break through the emotional hostility or indifference of his parents. The child cannot feel secure or safe – because the child is neither secure nor safe – if the parent remains unresponsive or hostile to the child’s emotional and physical needs.
If you can’t supply your own life-saving medicine, you desperately need your jailers to listen to you – otherwise, you die.
All who are trapped and tortured become desperate over time – the hysteria arises from the existential panic of realizing that you are going to have to find a way to survive a dangerous world without the help of your parents.
The rage element of tantrums arises from the hostility that children feel towards their parents, based on the simple, savage, instinctual question: If you didn’t want to take care of your children, why bother having them?
Or, more personally: Why have me – why keep me – if you don’t love me?
The dying down of the tantrum is the death knell of the connection – the abandonment of the need for support, and the ghastly, grim acceptance that you’re going to find some way to make it alone.
Tantrum Appeasement
Is the solution to a tantrum to appease the child?
Perhaps – but not always.
If a child feels listened to, and understood, the chances of a tantrum are very slim.
Tantrums occur when a child’s emotions are mocked and ignored – not when the child doesn’t get what he wants.
You know how frustrating it is when someone says ‘NO’ to you without even bothering to listen to what you want.
If you are listened to, and empathized with, the “no” becomes much less important.
When my daughter was little, and wanted candy at a store, I would tell her how much I wanted the candy too – that I would eat a whole row if I could – but I had to think of my teeth and my belly. I would mime my teeth falling out and my belly getting huge. I used one hand to grab at my other hand that was reaching for the candy, striving to pull it back and save myself.
We usually ended up laughing.
She has never ever had a tantrum.
“But My Childhood…”
Many – most – parents say that they raise children the way that they themselves were raised.
If adult children bring up childrearing deficiencies to their parents, after a suitable period of gaslighting, avoidance and denigration, those parents may eventually admit some problems, but then claim as their defense that they parented as they themselves were parented, and there was really no possibility of doing better.
That is a very interesting argument, and worth unpacking in detail.
Parents who claim that they had no choice but to parent as they themselves were parented face a fascinating objection, which goes something like this:
Are you still using the same phone or computer that you used forty years ago?
Do you have a car with air conditioning or a GPS?
You have new clothes, right? Have you adapted to any new fashions over the past few decades, mom?
Are you still doing the same job that you had as a teenager?
Hey - do you use any new words that you didn’t learn as a child?
Do you still have the same haircut?
These questions could continue almost to infinity – I’m sure the central point is very clear.
People have an endless ability to upgrade everything about their lives – technology, clothing, housing, jobs, education, contacts, language – so why on earth would parenting – the most important thing – be excluded from this universal pattern?
If your mother suffers from tinnitus, and a new miracle cure for the condition arrives, surely she would seize the opportunity, and put a final stop to the ringing in her ears.
Billions of people eagerly accept new treatments for illnesses – but they could never have read a few books to upgrade their parenting?
People upgrade everything in their lives, all the time.
Do you still have the same cell phone plan that you had ten years ago?
You read new books, articles, tweets – watch new movies, documentaries – sometimes take new courses, training, or pursue informal education.
When I was the Chief Technical Officer of a software company, I constantly had to learn new technology and tools – and encouraged my employees to learn with me.
Older parents had almost no access to credit cards when they were younger – I bet they have them now.
Do parents still do all their banking in a physical branch, or have they figured out how to bank online?
You get the picture.
When parents say that they had no choice but to parent as they themselves were parented, they are saying that they can upgrade everything in their lives – learn new tasks, new skills, new responsibilities – except for the most important thing, which is actually being a good parent.
But it gets even worse than that, as it usually does.
Spanking and Free Will
If your mother hits you, and later says that she had no real choice, because she was herself hit as a child – then she is saying that she had no capacity to be a peaceful parent at all.
All right – but the fact of the matter is that she upgraded her parenting every single time you were in public.
When you misbehaved or disobeyed her in public, maybe she shot you a venomous look, or maybe she pulled you aside and hissed that you were gonna pay for it later – but she probably didn’t haul off and belt you in front of everyone else – at the mall, at a friend’s house, at a parent-teacher conference, at church – or anywhere!
So, your mother later says that she had no choice but to hit you – but she constantly exercised that exact choice to not hit you – everywhere, all the time, whenever you were in public, or when the consequences of hitting you could be negative to her.
This would be like moving you to Japan when you were five years old, then later complaining that she didn’t know any Japanese, but fluently speaking Japanese at the time whenever you were in public.
I don’t speak Japanese, so I never have the option to speak Japanese – whether in public, private, on top of a mountain, in the subway, at a restaurant, or in my dreams.
If a parent says that she has no choice but to hit her children, because she was hit as a child, then the moment that she exercises her choice not to hit her children – anywhere, any time – then she reveals that she did have the choice, she always had the choice – and that she chose to hit her children every single time she did so!
If a father hits his son until the son hits puberty, and gets big and strong – then the father always had the choice to not hit his son.
We don’t blame parents because we are subjected to gravity, because neither the parents nor us have any choice to avoid gravity – it is a fact of life, a reality of physics, an inescapable force.
When parents say that they had no choice – finding even one counterexample destroys the entire defense!
If I say I cannot speak Japanese, one recording of me having a fluent conversation in Japanese destroys my claim.
A man with epilepsy cannot control his seizures – a man with Tourette syndrome cannot control his outbursts. A man with no arms cannot choose to clap.
A man who claims to be disabled only has to get out of his wheelchair and walk one time for his claim to be utterly debunked.
If your parents never hit you in public, or in front of authority figures, then they clearly had the capacity to refrain from hitting you.
That’s how they hid it from the world.
If your parents hit you – and then claim that they had no choice in the matter – then if they were never caught or seen hitting you, their claim is false.
It is not only false – it is a continuation of the abuse.
Childhood and Moral Free Will
But it gets even worse than that, as usual.
A thirty-year-old father who hits his five-year-old daughter has already assigned a moral will and philosophical free choice to his five-year-old daughter.
If he hits her for, say, sneaking candy, then he is saying the following:
I am hitting you because you are taking candy without permission – which you know is wrong, and have the full and free choice to refrain from doing!
You know where this is going by now, right?
Later, when the father is fifty, and his daughter is twenty-five, and she comes to him and complains that he hit her, and he says that he had no real choice in the matter, because he himself was hit as a child – then he is explicitly stating that she had full moral responsibility and free will at the age of five, but that he, at the age of thirty, had absolutely zero moral responsibility, and no free will at all!
This is morally insane and corrupt beyond words!
But – it gets even worse, as I warned you at the beginning of this book – and this chapter.
The fifty year old father says that he had no moral choice or free will at the age of thirty – and that this was the result of being hit when he was a boy.
In other words, he fully knows that the result of being hit as a child is the stripping of moral free will and responsibility – and then he goes and hits his daughter anyway – destroying her capacity for moral choice and free will, just as it was destroyed in him.
His equation is this:
“Children start with moral responsibility and free will – then you hit them and, over time, hitting them destroys their moral responsibility and free will. In other words, I hit you because you have moral choice and free will, with the certain knowledge that hitting you will destroy your moral choice and free will – just as it did to me!”
Also:
“I knew that I hit you because I was hit myself, but knowing why you are doing something does not give you any power to change what you are doing. Of course, you took candy without permission because you wanted the sweet taste – you knew that ahead of time. However, knowing why you were taking candy ahead of time does not give you any power to change your actions – any more than me knowing why I was hitting you ahead of time did not give me any power to stop hitting you. I will hit you when you are five, because knowing why I am doing something gives me no power to change it – even though I expect you to change your actions at the age of five – especially because you know why you are acting!”
It makes no sense for an adult with self-knowledge to make excuses for his behaviour – but punish a five-year-old for her behaviour, when her capacity for self-knowledge is far lower.
A father claims that he has no moral responsibility because he was hit as a child – but then claims that his five-year-old daughter has full moral responsibility, even though he is hitting her.
Does being hit remove someone’s moral responsibility?
Apparently – yes for the thirty-year-old, no for the five-year-old.
Does knowing why you want to do wrong prevent you from doing wrong?
Apparently – no for the thirty-year-old, yes for the five-year-old.
It’s almost impossible to imagine the moral viciousness and cowardice it takes to pretend that a five-year-old child has infinitely more moral responsibility and free will than a thirty-year-old adult.
The father says to his five year old: “You did wrong because you are bad – I wasn’t wrong because I was wronged!”
“You as a child are bad, and must be punished – I as an adult am a victim, and must be sympathized with!”
“Five-year-old children must be punished, not forgiven – but thirty-year-old men must be forgiven, and never punished!”
I hope you truly understand how repulsive this all is.
I have to take a break and get some air.
Humanity Versus Power
It is an old adage that human beings are corrupted by power.
The greater the power, the greater the corruption.
One of the paramount sleights-of-hand of human history has been distracting everyone from the chief power in human society – which they have the most control over – to a distant, lesser power, that they have no control over at all.
As the Biblical question goes – why do you focus on the speck of dust in your brother’s eye, while ignoring the log in your own?
Human beings – particularly males – are obsessed with controlling political power, because of its danger to us all.
Feminists are obsessed with controlling the supposed power of the patriarchy; economists of the Austrian school are almost solely focused on controlling the power of central bankers; political scientists focus on laws and constitutions designed to limit the power of the state; and lawsuits and courts often aim to limit the arbitrary powers of those in charge.
This is all largely nonsense – not because abuses of power by the powerful do not exist, but because it is all a distraction.
You and I will not be presidents or prime ministers or kings, or governors or members of Parliament – but most of us will be parents.
The most power we will ever experience over the course of our lives is our power over our own children.
In Western democracies, parents have almost infinitely more power over their own children than governments have over their citizens.
Laws certainly affect us – often negatively – but the lawmakers do not live in our own homes, and have no immediate power to control us in the form of spanking, physical restraint, hunger, time-outs, confiscation, confinement and so on.
As adults, we can often conform to unjust laws, and escape punishment.
Unjust parenting is designed to inflict punishment. “Rules” change constantly, so that the child can be perpetually aggressed against.
Citizens have legal remedies against governmental abuses – children have no such recourse.
Citizens can avoid becoming the focus of governmental attention, by avoiding contentious topics.
Citizens can move countries, go off the grid, live quietly and unobtrusively – and escape negative attention from state power.
Children have no such options.
Children have no legal standing, no ability to enter into contracts, no recourse against injustice, no capacity to live alone.
Arguably, even soldiers fare better than the victims of child abuse.
Some soldiers will face injury or death in combat – but most people in the military do not engage in direct combat.
Soldiers have companions – brothers in arms – uniforms, commendations, the support of the community, medals, pensions, tickertape parades and so on.
The trauma inflicted upon soldiers is inflicted on already-formed adult personalities.
Soldiers choose to enter their profession – children do not choose their families.
The soldier also has an entire regimen of support, therapy, medication – and friendship, which heals most wounds.
Combat soldiers usually spend only a few months fighting – and then have time off before returning to the fray. Most soldiers only fight for a few years, off and on.
This is not to say that soldiers have it easy, or that combat is not traumatic – they don’t, and it is.
However, the victims of child abuse are under the direct control of cruel people who manage and bully every aspect of their lives – and who terrify and abuse them constantly – and who live in the same house.
The victims of child abuse usually remain under the direct control of their abusers for at least eighteen years straight.
The victims of child abuse are often bathed in destructive stress hormones even in the womb, as their parents fight.
The victims of child abuse are isolated in society – in a way that soldiers could never imagine.
Many children are also maimed and killed by their parents, just as soldiers are by their enemies.
In the USA alone, more children are murdered by parents every 18 months (2,630) than soldiers were killed in the Afghanistan war over two decades (2,448). 
Soldiers are trained and equipped to fight back – children cannot resist.
Child abuse is inflicted on an unformed personality – it shapes and defines that personality, in a way that soldiers never experience.
Childhood is like a soft mixed concrete mush – by adulthood, it has hardened into immobility.
You can leave a handprint – a fist impact, in the case of child abuse – on soft concrete – but hardened concrete steadfastly resists your touch.
Every adult is called unpleasant names from time to time – a crazy person on the street yells a rude word at you – but we usually shrug it off, and move on.
Verbal abuse is unbelievably destructive to children, because the words sink into their core, shaping and defining their personalities irrevocably.
Children who resist being abused face escalation of that abuse – so they have to conform, swallow their resistance and go along with whatever the parent says and wants.
If the parent tells the child that she is lazy, selfish, careless, stupid, entitled, greedy, thoughtless – the list is endless – then the child has to accept and absorb these definitions of her personality.
It is impossible to push back against verbal abuse – at least until the teenage years – because the parent will escalate, perhaps even to the point of life-threatening violence or abandonment.
To put it another way, children who resisted abuse survived less, so those patterns of behaviour have been weeded out of the gene pool.
Verbal abuse is the implantation of the child’s passing negative actions into the root and definition of the entire personality.
“You did” is turned into “you are.”
When a child lies – as we all do – the abusive parent does not say that the child told a lie – the parent says that the child is a liar.
If an inattentive child knocks over a cup, the parent does not say that the child was momentarily distracted – no, the child is thoughtless and careless and clumsy and so on.
The redefinition of negative actions to include the entire personality is constant, when you see it clearly. It’s not great to say to your children, “Well, that was kind of dumb”– but it’s way better than saying: “You’re just stupid.”
If a parent says to a child: “I don’t feel I can reason with you right now” – that is an accurate statement.
If the parent says: “You can’t be reasoned with” – that is a very different statement, much more dishonest.
If the parent says: “You’re just irrational!” – that is even more dishonest.
If the parent hits the child, that is an implicit statement that the child is beyond reason, and must be punished for his “badness.”
The ability to define an entire personality by passing negative actions is a function of power.
The state has the capacity to brand you a “criminal.”
Government schools have the ability to brand you a “failure.”
The media has the ability to brand you a “hater.”
Religion has the power to brand you a “sinner.”
And parents have the ability to define you as “bad.”
The Restraint of Power
So – what restrains power?
This is the most essential question of moral philosophy – because if political power is unrestrained, morality becomes worse than useless – it becomes actively dangerous, and often violently attacked by those in power.
A man prepared for a verbal debate will always lose to a boxer.
What restrains parental power?
Think of a communist restaurant in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
The cooks, waiters and managers get paid whether they have any customers or not.
They get paid whether they serve good food or bad food.
You have no choice but to pay them, because they are paid by the State, which takes money from you by force.
What incentives do the people in this restaurant have to provide quality food and service?
They have no incentives – in fact, they have strong disincentives.
It’s more difficult to make good food than serve bad food.
It’s more pleasant to sit and play cards than to get up and serve customers.
Even if you want to serve good food – well, you’re in a centrally controlled economy, so none of your suppliers have any incentive to deliver quality ingredients – in fact, just like you, they have disincentives, because it’s harder to provide quality than it is to do the bare minimum.
The quality of goods and services under communism is a bitter joke to those who’ve lived under such despotism – there is an old Soviet joke, which goes something like this: “A man who arrives at work early is yelled at, because he makes the other workers look bad – the man who arrives at work late is yelled at, because he is being lazy – the man who arrives at work on time is sent to a Gulag, because he must own a foreign watch.”
The only cure for low-quality is voluntarism.
If you’re not forced to pay for the restaurant, then the restaurant has to earn your money by providing good food, good service and good prices.
The transition from force to choice is the transition from exploitation to service.
To take a brutal example, a man trailing a woman in the dark with the intention of raping her does not have to bring flowers and chocolates, and try to woo her with his charm and good humour.
No, he is going to force his evil will upon her, and therefore he does not have to bring any qualities of character or seduction to the scene of his crime.
Government-protected unions are notoriously inefficient. State-protected monopolies tend not to fire inefficient employees, or strive to reduce costs, or work hard to ensure that customers are satisfied.
Monopoly and exploitation go hand-in-hand.
Coercion and abuse are two sides of the same bloody coin.
How do we fix this with regards to parenting?
Well, imagine that you are a government worker, and have become lazy and inefficient over the years.
One morning, you find out that your entire industry is going to be privatized in six months.
What are you going to do?
Some hard-eyed capitalist entrepreneur is going to take over your department, look for any waste and inefficiency, and ruthlessly cut it.
Also, if you get fired, you get zero severance pay – and lose your entire pension!
In a few short months, no one is going to be forced to pay you, or forced to accept your indifferent “service” – and since it is your whole industry that is moving to the free market, you can’t even jump ship to another cushy government job.
What will you do?
Assuming that early retirement is not on the table – and rioting and striking will not help you – you have only one choice.
You will start coming to work early, doing your job with blinding efficiency, stay late, and keep close tabs on any and all metrics that will prove to your incoming employer how incredibly valuable – indeed, irreplaceable – you are.
You will improve, stop being lazy, work hard and do better.
The difference will be night and day.
I’m sure you see the parallel.
Why do parents so often fail to improve?
Parents provide services to their children – but nature puts parents in a monopoly position.
Children are not consumers, who can choose from different parents in the same way that they can choose which games to play at an arcade, or which videos to watch online.
Parents fail to improve for the same reason that the communist restaurant workers fail to improve.
The communist restaurant workers fail to improve because they get the all benefits of improvement – job security, salaries, pensions – without the effort required to actually improve.
It’s the same with parents.
Parents fail to improve because they get all the benefits of parenthood, without the effort required to actually improve.
What are the benefits of parenthood?
The lifelong devotion of their children.
In the realm of relationships, practically, legally and morally, children inevitably move from a coercive monopoly to the voluntary free-market.
When they are young, children have to go home – and stay home.
Children have to interact with their parents, have to obey their parents, have to submit to their parents, have to agree with their parents, have to eat the food their parents provide, and submit to any abuse and violence that may be inflicted.
When children reach adulthood, they don’t have to do any of that!
The coercive monopoly inevitably gets privatized.
Communism turns into capitalism.
Fascism turns into the free-market.
Violence becomes voluntarism.
And voluntarism is quality.
That which is coerced is always the opposite of quality – because if it was quality, it would not need to be coerced.
If somebody wants to sell you a brand-new Lamborghini for twenty dollars, they don’t have to threaten, bully or manipulate you to make the purchase.
A convenience store owner who sells a winning lottery ticket does not have to lock the door, pull out his gun and force the winner to cash it in.
A beautiful woman comes up to a young single man and asks him to go out for coffee, she does not need to chloroform him, put a bag over his head and drag him into her windowless van in order to get him to the coffee shop.
Parenthood starts with monopoly – and ends with voluntarism.
In the example above, the lazy government employee starts working as if her job was immediately subject to strict free-market reviews – because it very soon will be.
Good parents look at their children every single day and say: “I am going to parent as if you could choose from any parents in the world – even in your own imagination – or have no parents at all.”
Parenthood starts with power, and ends with pleading.
You are everything when your children are young – they don’t have to call you when they get older.
Imagine the thoughts of a man whose wife was forced to marry him – but the laws are changing, so that she can divorce him at will in the very near future.
Will he change his behaviour at all?
Of course he will – he will become more thoughtful, more loving, more attentive – a better husband overall.
Both the government worker and the entitled husband might in fact be far happier working harder and doing better.
They might look back at this transition in their lives and thank their lucky stars that they were dragged out of their quicksand of laziness, hostility and entitlement – and moved into the quicksilver light of actual love and productivity.
Most parents parent as if their children will never have a choice about spending time with them.
So many parents start off with aggression, and end up with guilt trips, continued verbal abuse and play-the-victim manipulations.
But the simple fact of the matter is that adult children do not have to see their abusive parents.
If adult children continue to see and provide resources to relentlessly abusive parents, they are rewarding their parents for deeply immoral behaviour.
They are ensuring the continuation of abuse in this darkening world – in the same way that the new owner of the government industry who never fired any unproductive employees would continue to support and reward laziness.
The Most Hidden Secrets
There are a number of secrets in the world that are kept amazingly well-hidden.
The propaganda – across much of the world – has been that it is right and good and proper and virtuous and noble and admirable to get out of an abusive relationship that you voluntarily chose – but that it is ungrateful and evil and wrong and cruel and selfish to escape an abusive relationship that you never ever chose!
Who runs the world?
The people who make up and propagate these contradictory tangles of moral horrors.
Parents abuse their children because they never expect to suffer any negative consequences for their abuse.
Politicians start useless wars because they never expect to suffer any negative consequences for their evils.
We can’t do much about the military-industrial complex, but we damn well can do something about our own parents – and our own parenting.
There are truly grand souls in this world who do the right thing no matter what. Even if it costs them everything, they will stand up for what is right and good and true and noble.
We cannot build society on these wild exceptions to the general rule.
Most people respond to incentives.
They do not do what is right, they do what benefits them.
If abusive parents never suffer any negative consequences for their abuse, then their abuse remains a net positive to them.
How do we know what people want to do?
We look at what they actually do – particularly when no one forces them to do it.
A man who has an affair cannot reasonably claim that he never wanted to have that affair – because he had it. The proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes.
A man who goes to the beach instead of writing an exam cannot reasonably claim that all he wanted to do was write the exam!
Abusers prefer to abuse – how do we know this?
Because they choose to abuse.
Contrary to popular belief, child abusers do not have a gun to their heads, forcing them to abuse their children.
There are in fact no laws compelling people to abuse their children.
You don’t go to jail for not hitting your children – you don’t get fined for failing to verbally abuse them – you don’t receive twenty lashes for refusing to confine them to their rooms or jam them down on the stairs.
Not abusing children is perfectly legal – at least in the West.
You don’t even go to jail for failing to genitally mutilate your sons.
If a woman is not compelled to do something, but chooses to do that thing, then clearly she prefers to do that thing.
She may have regrets, but that is a different matter.
A man who smokes for forty years obviously prefers smoking to not smoking – when he gets sick, he may bitterly regret smoking, but he can’t say that he never wanted to smoke in the past.
A sober woman who voluntarily sleeps with a man may regret it the next day, but it makes little moral sense to say that she never wanted to sleep with him at all.
We know she wanted to sleep with him because she did in fact sleep with him!
We know that abusive parents want to abuse their children, because they do in fact abuse their children.
If someone wants to do X – and will never experience any negative repercussions from doing X – and continually does X – then we know for a certain fact that that the person prefers doing X – and will probably never stop doing X.
If parents who abuse their children can convince their adult children to continue to see them, provide for them, give them time, energy, money and resources – and comfort in their old age, and endless visits when they get sick – then why on earth would parents who prefer to abuse their children ever refrain from abusing their children?
You can’t stop evil without consequences.
You can’t reform coercion without voluntarism.
You can’t reform parenting without choice.
Parents will never do better until they face consequences for doing worse.
If you have relentlessly abusive parents, and as an adult you continue to provide them time, energy, money, resources, “respect,” and “love,” then you have zero cause to complain about the terrible state of the world.
You are providing massive positive incentives to evildoers – and thus have no cause to complain about the evils that surround you.
You’re like a woman paying $100,000 a year to a conman, who then complains about the existence of conmen.
Whatever you subsidize, you get more of.
If you subsidize evil, you get more evil.
Lotteries would collapse overnight if they stopped paying out winnings – you keep paying your abusive parents, and then complain that the world is full of corrupt people who abuse power.
Human beings are always corrupted by power.
As a parent, you resist this corruption by remembering the voluntary nature of parent/adult child relationships.
Parents have power while their children are young – if they continue to retain all that power, and all those benefits, when their children grow up, then yet another log is thrown on the bonfire that burns down the world.
Now, if you were abused as a child, as an adult I think it’s worth talking to your parents, explaining the wrongs they did, and telling them your own thoughts, experiences and feelings.
You can ask for acknowledgement, apologies and restitution.
The best-case scenario is that they admit fault, take responsibility, go to therapy, make restitution – and who knows, that might be enough to convince you to continue the relationship.
There is no worst-case scenario.
If they escalate and abuse and attack and gaslight – then you know for a fact that the abuse will never end, and you have just saved yourself decades of continued horror.
If your parents double down on their abusive habits, then you know for certain that they will abuse your own children – either directly, or indirectly, by undermining and abusing you.
It’s painful, of course – but so what?
Pain is often the price of progress.
This kind of conversation is painful for your abusive parents – but that’s all right, you can just tell them this:
“I’m sorry that it’s so painful for you, but if there’s one thing you taught me by hitting me, it’s that it’s essential to experience negative consequences for your bad deeds.”
I mean, if they hit you for talking back when you were five, surely they accept that bad behaviour can only be solved by negative consequences – and so you holding them to account as adults falls entirely in line with their entire moral philosophy!
Either they accept their “punishment” – or they rail against you, thus proving that they were utterly wrong and immoral to hit you, or call you names, since bad behaviour should apparently never be punished!
Also, I’m sure that you were punished as a child for lying – now, as an adult, when you tell the truth about your experiences as a child, your parents punish you for telling the truth!
The punishment is the constant – the abuse is the goal. The “morals” are just the gas-lighting excuse, which is as vile a set of justifications as can possibly be imagined.
Parenting will improve when parents understand that they have no guarantees that their adult children will never confront them, tell the truth, and hold them to account.
Knowing that parenting is going to get privatized is the only chance that parenting will improve.