StevenFranssen.com

Tag: parenting

  • Bullying People Into Having Babies

    To breed or not to breed, that is the question.

    Stefan Molyneux has this aside he’s been saying for close to two decades, “I try to not tell people what to do because if I do that, in a person’s mind I own the effects if it goes badly for them – and I don’t want that.”

    Then he says stuff like this:

    He’s not telling you you should tell people to have children, he’s just saying that if you haven’t been cajoling them into having kids, he won’t listen to you. And you want the world’s best philosopher to listen to you, right? I do cause I’m a dork like that!

    I have a fun time with this stuff. Yes, I’ve been telling people to have children for years. Yes, I practice what I preach. I made more than one baby. Maybe or maybe not in several different countries.

    I haven’t bribed anyone to have kids. That would be an interesting but probably ultimately self-defeating prospect.

    Begged? I haven’t begged anyone to have kids, yet. Anyone who’d need to be begged wouldn’t make that good of a parent, I’d say. But beautiful people are going the way of the dodo. They get paid by modeling agencies to not have babies. J*wish daycare and all that.

    Shaming someone into having children? Some people believe in shame as a legitimate social tool of persuasion. Some people believe in it so much so that they will get angry with you if you do not shame them at some point. It’s a weird kind of fetish for some. “Treat me badly, Steve, or I will treat you even worse.” Yeesh, no thanks.

    Bullying people to have children? That’s getting into UPB-breaking territory. Bullying? As in…rape? That’s no good. How could we bully people into having children? We could verbally attack them for having pets but not children. I knew a couple like that in SLC. They were extremely weird, obese, and the moment my woman and I signaled we weren’t football-watching normies, they stopped answering their door when we’d pop by to visit. I guess it was to be expected.

    Apparently I have bullied people into having babies:

    That was from this Bitchute video nearly two and half years ago. Hard to believe I once was willing to appear on camera for longer than like 10 minutes at a time. Really? I used to do long-form videos? What for? Didn’t my body seize up?

    We should just attack whenever we see someone without a baby. Just go off, lunatic mode, and make a big scene. Why not? The whole world is on life support, anyway.

    I’m reminded of that scene in Independence Day where Jeff Goldblumstein’s character is complaining to his rabbi that we should just trash the planet so badly that the space aliens won’t want to take it over.

    That could be me but instead of kicking around some boxes at a military base in a drunken fashion, I could be kicking over grocery shelves and hollering at some unsuspecting, child-bearing age woman.

    After all, it would gain me the approval of Stefan Molyneux – something which is important if I want to be considered good at philosophy by the world’s best philosopher. He’d at least listen to me, so that’s good. It would be discrediting of philosophy on my part if I wasn’t concerned with his good opinion (which I am heheh).

    “Bullying for UPB” – I like how that sounds.

    I tried to go with the whole “killing people” angle (as a joke) and some of you saluted, telling me you took me seriously. Guys, I wasn’t serious about that one. I guess you couldn’t tell.

    I mess with the lines of reality a bit. Why not? I’ve got a bit of a bad boy streak in me. Remember the time I wanted to use the government to crush Communism in America but then everyone got mad at me because everyone’s kind of Communist?

    Learned my lesson on that one.

    Now I am totally zen.

    I live so peacefully.

    I only ever encourage people anymore and quite frankly, people are still finding reasons to get mad at me for running it that way. What if I just went buck-farkin’-wild again? At least I’d get some approval that way. It’s called, “We do a little fighting for UPB.”

    Should I play a role?

    Sounds fun.

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  • Nostalgia As Self-Erasure

    The truth about family stories…

    Parents will tell these pleasant stories about your childhood when so-and-so did this and it was just so funny.

    That’s the common view of what is happening here.

    Let’s break it down:
    –Pleasant stories – where is the empathy for whether the story was pleasant for you or not? Do your parents actually gauge your response to the story or just blab it out like NPC’s? Be honest.
    -Your childhood – the story is from a parental point of view and since parents aren’t philosophical and on principle, engaging with curiosity first, the story is often told to manage a difficult internal feeling on their part.
    -It’s just so funny – the funny haha stories are usually the ones where there was some sibling to sibling predation that resulted in someone’s embarrassment – yours.

    Haha Jimmy, you little butthole!

    Consider the basic attitude of parents to their children: I own my child, children are less intelligent therefore inferior, and my house, my rules.

    Let’s break it down again:
    -I own my child – parents err here. Yes, in a strict, legal sense, you own your child. We have to have it this way or the State will claim ownership, which leads to all manner of insanity. But the truth is that parents are stewards of their children. Says as much in the Bible. Susses out from a libertarian perspective, as well. Your work as a parent is to relinquish unto an 18 year-old a fully functioning body and brain, absent of damage due to your parenting style. Check out my book Peaceful Parenting for more on this.

    -Children are less intelligent and therefore inferior – this is where parents’ programming comes through. People come from a domination-submission background (aka the entirety of human history): where performative disadvantage on the part of another kicks online programming in us meant to seek an advantage. The tenderness of peaceful parenting can be seen when you take that disparity as all the more reason to equalize with the child. How else can they best learn?

    -My house, my rules – this is just impatient tyranny on the part of a parent, usually the father but more and more so the woman these days. This is communicating to the child that power is the adjudicating factor in human conflict, not reason, evidence, or truth. If you’re too lazy to try and universalize the rules in your home, to make them make sense for everyone – just admit it!

    What is really going on with these nostalgic stories?

    The older parent, now with adult children, is typically trying to put their adult children back into state dependence – to harken back to a time when the adult-child was dependent on them. This induces in the adult-child a sense that their parent still has the wisdom and authority now that they had then.

    Consider it – are you, as the adult-child, asking for stories from the childhood so you can get an honest perspective, some relevant feedback that you can use today? Or are these stories just kind of randomly offered up by nervous people with guilty consciences?

    There is a dominance that creeps into these stories, particularly when they’re at the expense of the adult-child present for the retelling. They’re little humiliation rituals meant to prop up the waning authority of the aged parents. Sometimes they’re told in exquisite detail but suddenly the aged parents practice selective memory if the adult-child asks for a painful memory – such as the time he was spanked or yelled at or degraded with some punishment in response to a transgression.

    One of the most common stories is the, “Remember your first day of school?”

    This story is told quite unconsciously by aged parents, oblivious in their certainty that the adult-child will simply buy into the bit and nod and smile.

    Remember your first day at school? You were so nervous! You cried but then, after a bit, you found it wasn’t so bad.

    There are people out there who will also quite unconsciously proclaim, “I was excited to be at school! See, I’m a winner. I ate school up and you can find no fault in what I’m saying. School was a great experience for me and you’re weird for taking issue with my enjoyment of what turned out to be something really great for me.

    This is a way of propping up their parents’ systematic breaking down of them before school happened so that they would be inured to its effects by the time its presence in their life became fact. People like this speak as puppets of their parents’ denial. The reason for this is because school is philosophically evil and retarded, done with stolen money and modeled after sociopathic “pedagogy” from the late 19th century.

    School is emasculating, people-breaking.

    But good luck arguing with people’s programming.

    The next time you hear a hardy-har-har Boomer story about the time you fell on your face or your sibling shit their pants on a beach trip or you were awkward with a girl or, “Remember the nickname we used to tease you with?” – consider the power dynamics at play.

    Consider empathizing with your younger self.

    Consider the philosophy of the scenario being presented, as opposed to the nostalgia programming welling up inside of you.

    Consider the limits in empathy of the adults in the memory.

    Consider saying what actually needed to be said then but couldn’t be said because you were a powerless, dependent child.

    Consider if that sovereign voice inside of you was sought out by your parents.

    Then sit with the answers you hear and feel your wisdom increase.

    Me at the Studio Ghibli Peaceful Parenting Denmark Conference 2025 – sorry to have missed you!

    Could use some empathy and feedback? Work with me professionally.

    Join me on X.

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  • The Cult of Forgetting

    Does time heal all wounds?

    To be timeless…

    There’s a clever trick that society plays on us.

    It’s called, “Why can’t you move on? I have!”

    The truth is that people don’t move on from their wrongs. They simply plow them under and move forward. But whatever you plow under will eventually spring up.

    In this way, people’s personalities become ugly, hardened, and embittered.

    This is why they have no problem asking you, rhetorically, why you can’t move on.

    That’s why they can stomach playing such a shitty trick on a person they’ve wronged.

    There’s a massive uptick in “nostalgia posting” on the timeline.

    As everything goes to utter hell and back, the worst demons among us unleashed, there is a growing contingent of people who long for when times were better.

    This phenomena is captured by this meme:

    These guys, at the time, had it so bad. Life was rough!

    But in hindsight, there’s an innocence they had that has since been spoiled.

    This is not unlike bad parenting’s effects on a person.

    Once upon a time, you were an untroubled, un-cudgeled, un-browbeaten individual who had a plucky enthusiasm and a zest for life. You have some go-off energy.

    This was ground out of you by unhappy, mean parents.

    Little by little, the light went out. The twinkle was snuffed out.

    And you’re not allowed to remember.

    The world is set up to grind you down. The world will remove from you your ability to empathize with previous mood and hormonal states where you were much brighter, more innocent, and alive.

    And if you spend any amount of time trying to remember or recapture these previous states, you will be treated as a kook.

    Abusive parents will edge away from you like you’ve done something wrong.

    An ax-murderer, establishmentarian society will call you sentimental, “conservative”, feckless, weak, cowardly, feminine, etc.

    All manner of abuse must be heaped on you to keep you from questioning why things went so wrong – or how they could be improved.

    Instead you’re supposed live in a highly reactive state of yowling at the latest outrage.

    Forever on a hamster wheel of escalation.

    Society heaps its greatest accolades on those who best help us forget.

    Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.