What is true child abuse? It’s the emotional outrage Stefan Molyneux himself repeatedly endured.

As you will have noticed, I consider internet talk show host Stefan Molyneux to be a menace. In order to avoid admitting that he has destroyed hundreds of lives through his advocacy of ‘defooing’ – unilaterally destroying all or many of your life-long storgic relationships on a whim and, plausibly, wholly on an exaggerated pretext – Molyneux and his minions have developed a sheaf of diversionary tactics.

You saw me dealing with one the other day, the claim that biological relationships are inferior to chosen ones. In fact, all storgic relationships are chosen by the persistent voluntary membership of the people making up those relationships, regardless of how they are related to each other. Moreover, newer relationships are generally more fragile and less durable than older ones, and it is not possible unilaterally to engender a new family just because you chose to betray the old one.

That is to say, this vain resort is gone from Molyneux’s bag of tricks.

The next dodge is to accuse opponents of child abuse. I wish I were making this up. It’s the Well-Poisoning Fallacy, if you didn’t know: I can’t answer you, so I’ll tell an outrageous lie about you in the hope that the mob will turn against you. You can imagine how well that stunt works on me.

So as to take away that scam, too, let’s learn something else Stefan Molyneux doesn’t know about the family.

So: While I abhor any sort of violence against anyone, I find Molyneux’s equation of spanking with child abuse to be absurd.

I will give you a bright-line standard for evaluating abuse, as distinguished from swatting a pre-conceptual child on the rear: Abuse has occurred when the victim is enduringly outraged.

Outrage is the emotional state where your rebellion against what is happening is so complete you are not doing anything else but being outraged. That event is easily measured from the outside by its externally-visible secondary physical consequences. For a child who has achieved the age of conceptual fluency, that outrage can endure in memory long after the event.

Note that children who are actually outraged in this way are generally damaged so consequentially that they don’t get anywhere near chummy professorial father-figures like Molyneux. The “abused” Molyneuxvians were almost certainly abused by bounteous middle-class values and virtues and minor, temporary restraints on their appetites. Most actually-outraged children don’t have the spare pecuniary and intellectual capital to claim, absurdly, that 80% of children are abused.

I’m linking to an essay about the inherently-coercive nature of parenting. If you actually outraged your child, he could be right to shun you. But if your adult child has a life that is organized well enough that he can complain to a therapist or a talk-show host about what you got wrong – you got everything that matters right. A parent’s job is to launch his child into orbit as an adult. Everything above that is gravy, and every child who misses that mark is not competent to be exploited by Stefan Molyneux.

That is to say, if you are a defooed parent, it is almost certainly the case that, whatever “abuse” you may have committed, you are guilty of no outrage, since the victims of true outrage are not normal enough, not middle-class enough to interact successfully with Molyneux.

I am making a distinction between the minor corporal punishment of pre-conceptual children – which I do not advocate or excuse, but I do understand in its actual proportionate importance in the fulfilled execution of a human life, which is none – and actual abusive outrage of the fully-conceptual emotional state of a child or adolescent – which would be the only activity appropriate to denominate as child abuse.

Conceptual fluency is required for the outrage to endure as a coherent abstract memory, but it is also required for the outrage to be an outrage: The pain chosen by the villain will be the one he believes to be of greatest value and importance to the victim. The act is conceptually chosen in anticipation of inducing a conceptually-experienced outrage, as distinguised from a pre-conceptual tantrum.

This is why love and malice stand back to back, because both proceed from the deep empathy required to know what will be most pleasing or most horrifying to the buyer in the transaction.

The bully is not without empathy. He’s much better at it that you are. He seems cruel because he uses his empathy for malice instead of love.

Destructive obsession is the red flag for past outrage. Molyneux’s endlessly repeated pantomime of parricide-by-proxy comes readily to mind – which is itself quite easy to understand, taking account of the vicious child abuse the man self-reports. He was beaten and brow-beaten by his mother, as well as being put through at least nine transitions – changes of homes and additions or subtractions of putative family members – where one is often sufficient to derail a child’s life. But that is why distinguishing actual outrage from paddling toddlers matters: Molyneux is obsessively living out a vengeance fantasy with other children’s parents for his own parents’ crimes.

Emphasize that: The purpose of defooing is not to induct the defooers into a cult but to inflict what Stefan Molyneux believes to be the most excruciating possible pain upon their parents. His motive is not to help anyone but to kill and re-kill his own parents infinitely in pantomime. The accusations of child abuse serve as camouflage for the actual horrifying parricide – the deliberate murder of one’s own parents – endlessly repeated.

What is the name we give to high-functioning adults who were egregiously outraged as a child? How much trust should we invest in people from schizophrenigenic backgrounds? What do we call it when a person is casually cruel and not only does not feel remorse for his offenses, he instead laughs boisterously at his victims’ pain?

Given that Stefan Molyneux is so blatantly a sick, sick, puppy, why does anyone listen to him? Knowing that he consistently displays tendencies we might otherwise leap to call sociopathic, why would it not be the default presumption that everything he says is in some unsuspected way manipulatively deceptive?

Note the absurdity: Putative lovers of liberty have surrendered every bit of their sovereignty to an obvious tyrant, thus short-circuiting entirely their own chance to form families, thus robbing the planet of a generation of ‘born’ hard libertarians. I believe this is the product of Molyneux’s madness, but it could not possibly be more to the Uber State’s advantage.

How did anyone miss all this from the outset?

Meanwhile, another arrow is gone from Molyneux’s quiver: Sliming his opponents as child abusers is exactly the kind of cruelly vicious appeal to the mob you would expect from damaged goods like Stefan Molyneux, but now you know why everything he has to say on this subject is also wrong.