0:00 - Introduction to Philosophy
17:48 - The Horror of Enablers
19:08 - The Real Devil
26:58 - The Nature of Evil
35:20 - Consequences of Indifference
36:23 - Young and Abused
39:08 - Generational Reflections
46:37 - Free Speech and Generational Shifts
48:06 - Philosophical Audits
51:26 - The Role of Society
In this philosophical deep dive, we explore the essence of self-ownership, the implications of societal trends, and how empirical evidence shapes our understanding of personal agency. I kick off the dialogue by addressing a listener's query about the validity of self-ownership, emphasizing that instead of abstract reasoning, we should first look at the evidence of our interactions and decisions. Self-ownership cannot be debated without first experiencing it, as every inquiry carries the implicit exercise of that freedom.
Throughout the episode, I reflect on my past debates and personal experiences, illustrating the complexities of philosophy as they relate to everyday life. Using examples from my encounters with those advocating for communism, I show how those who stray from their ideological commitments tend to disregard the underlying principles of their arguments. This leads us into a broader discussion on how assumptions and beliefs shape our understanding of reality and morality.
We segue into a critical examination of societal norms and how they affect parenting practices. Drawing from my own experiences and observations, I discuss the alarming trends of child abuse and societal complicity in these acts. I highlight how the indifference of the adult population toward child victims fosters a culture of enabling and perpetuates cycles of abuse. The dialogue emphasizes the responsibility we all carry to protect the vulnerable and challenge the status quo that allows such behavior to persist unexamined.
The latter part of our discussion turns to generational analyses, examining the behaviors and values of different age cohorts, specifically focusing on GenX, Millennials, and Gen Z. I explore how childhood experiences influence adult behaviors and societal contributions, pointing out that while each generation might have distinct traits, the implications of their upbringing on their moral decisions are profound.
As I articulate what underpins a productive and ethical society, I reiterate that true philosophical inquiry requires challenging long-standing beliefs and societal norms. By embodying the principles of reason, humility, and evidence-based thinking, we can aspire toward a more just and compassionate world. The episode culminates in a poignant reminder that understanding our past and dissecting our societal frameworks are essential to cultivating personal responsibility and advocating for the change we wish to see.
Tune in for a thought-provoking exploration of how philosophy intersects with personal and societal dynamics, urging listeners to reflect on their own beliefs and the larger consequences of their actions.
[0:00] Well, well, well, good morning, everybody. 18th of August, 2024. We are going philosophy-centric. And it is Sunday morning, Church of the Human Brain congregation. Thank you for joining me on this fine, fine morning of intense, slurry, sludgy, British-style raininess in what should be a sunny day in August, 2024. I didn't really care about the weather that much until, until my daughter started working in ice cream. So, yeah, if you could like on the stream, tips, donations, support, freedomain.com slash donate, more than welcome, freedomain.com slash donate, and let's get to your comments and do our general greetings. Val started the chat today by saying, Balls! Excellent. Good to know. It's good to know what you're sitting on, or if you even notice them. All right, and let's get to your questions. Tell us how to solve all the world's problems in 10 words or less. Peaceful parenting, reason, evidence, humility.
[1:16] All right. Hello, Steph. I recently watched a video discussing self-ownership. Well, the host was acting Dave Smith. Well, I guess, oh, did you mean asking? Please check your typos. I recently watched a video discussing self-ownership, but the host was asking Dave Smith to prove that he owns himself and self-ownership exists. Dave did not have a great answer, and with my current level of study, neither do I. Would you be able to give an argument to this question? How do you own yourself, and how does self-ownership exist? Thank you, love the show. Sure. Well, the great thing, well, one of the many great things about being a bald-faced empiricist is that you look first not for theoretical arguments, but for evidence in the present. Let me say that again. Take it to the bridge. Tell me again. As an empiricist, in a debate, I look not to abstract arguments first and foremost, I look for the evidence embedded in the interaction.
[2:32] So, for instance, when I debated two communists who were cheering on my deplatforming, I pointed out that they were siding with multinational corporations against a working class hero who'd come from virtually nothing to fairly near the top of the intellectual profession. And they were siding, instead of siding with the working class proletariat guy, which would be me, they were siding with the giant multinational corporations, and they were the worst effing communists in the world, right? So that's not looking for abstract arguments, that's looking for the evidence in what's happening immediately. So if somebody says to you, language cannot convey any meaning, then rather than running into these abstract arguments, which is to eject from empiricism into the platonic realm of ideals and manipulating language, you simply take the evidence that's right there in front of you when you say, so you're using language to communicate that language cannot communicate meaning. So you then put the onus on the other person to say how what they're doing accords with what they're arguing. Communists are supposed to be supporting the proletariat against the capitalists. These two communists were supporting the multinational semi-fascistic corporations against the proletariat.
[3:57] So if I were in Dave Smith's shoes, what I would say if somebody said to me, prove self-ownership, I would say, I want you to ask me that question without exercising self-ownership. Then you're done. It's really that simple. Ask me that question, but without exercising self-ownership. Of course, it is impossible to ask a question without exercising self-ownership. So you're done. You don't jump out of the empirical evidence of what's actually happening right there in front of you into some abstract arguments, well, the neurology this and the ontological that and the... No, don't care. Ask me the question without exercising self-ownership. And you'll realize it's just a bunch of sophist bullshit designed to waste time while political power flows over the remnants of your liberties. Ask me the question without exercising self-ownership. Another way of doing it is if somebody says to me, Steph, I need you to prove self-ownership.
[5:14] Then I would say, how do you know that it's me who's answering your question? How do you know to address the question to me? And how do you know that it's me answering your question? Well, because you're the one who's saying, right. So you are saying to me, Steph, there's an entity called you that I want you to exercise self-ownership, which I know is coming out of you because you're exercising self-ownership and I need you to disprove self-ownership. One of the big contributions, one of the major contributions I've made to philosophy, is that you do not argue the content of the argument without examining the form of the argument. Like 90% of philosophical problems. Prove to me that you exist. You're assuming I exist in order to talk to me. Done. Prove to me self-ownership. How can I do that without first exercising self-ownership? And how can you even ask the question without first exercising self-ownership?
[6:23] Prove to me that reason is superior to force. Well, you're asking me to prove something to you. You're not challenging me to a violent duel. Therefore, you already accept that reason is superior to force. Right? You understand, right? Forget about the content of the argument. what matters is all of the assumptions baked into the form and process of the argument, so just yeah prove to me self-ownership ask me that question again but without exercising any self-ownership and the moment the person someone says oh you're exercising self-ownership so if you're exercising self-ownership why would you need a proof of it that's bizarre, why would you need the proof of something you are manifesting in asking for the proof of something that's just completely bizarre so it'd be like somebody saying Stef i want you to make an oral argument that proves that my ears work it's like well the fact that you're asking for an argument you through sound means that you already accepted your ears work so what are you doing it's just a big waste of time.
[7:34] All right. I just started listening to your novel, Just Poor. Such great writing. Donation from me is incoming tonight. Well, thank you. I rewrote the entire second half of that book. It's one of the big rewrites I've ever done in my life. The first half of that book was an absolute joy and pleasure to write. And then I hit a giant wall of what on earth comes next. And I tried so many different things.
[8:03] So, yes, justpornnovel.com. It is certainly the opening of that book. I think the book as a whole is great. The opening, the first 10 to 12 chapters are about as good as anything I'm ever going to do. Thank you for the tip. Toss a lovely like on the stream if you would like. I appreciate that. Listening now to peaceful parenting can't say I am surprised by the content. Been listening for 10 years. All right. Steph emits an interesting vibe today. I wonder how this will play out. Autumn is here in Winnipeg, leaves falling, and yes, there is the distant buzzing of the insects as they gather their storms to strip the bones out of the flesh of the people.
[8:56] The year seems to have just flown by. Yeah, it does seem to be. Oh, was Dave Smith debating Andrew Wilson? Yes, I have answered the morality of brother-sister incest. Love catching you live, Stefan. Love your ass. I do give good donkey, what can I tell you? you. All right. Prove to me German exists without using German, written or spoken. I don't quite follow that one. Never finished just poor, I am afraid of the stick lady. Stick lady? I'm not sure who the stick lady is. That I cannot fathom, I cannot follow. I do not know.
[10:03] Thank you, James. I hope this donation could help lead to an intro to the conscience presentation. It is something I'm familiar with, but would love to have a single presentation to refer to it. I believe a lot of others will gain value from a presentation like this. Well, I could do it now. Now, main villain of the book, the stick lady. Do you mean Lady Barbara?
[10:41] Do you mean Lady Barbara? Yeah, see, philosophy is not so much examining others. Philosophy, at least for the first 20 years or 10 years or whatever, philosophy is about examining the premises of your own actions and saying, what do I have to accept to be true in order to act within the world? Because I am acting within the world, we all are. And what do I have to accept to be true in order to act within the world? What do I have to accept to be true in order to debate or argue within the world?
[11:23] World. It is about introspection, not cross-examination. So, in order to debate within the world, in order to argue and interact within the world, just think about something as simple as walking down to the street corner to get a coffee. I used to live many years ago on a street called Tecumseh and it had a baker's dozen, coffee on the corner, coffee shop on the corner, that just had god-tier caffeine experiences. Just fantastic. So you wake up and you're like, oh, I don't have any coffee. I really want a coffee. I'll walk to the corner store to get a coffee. All right. Great.
[12:15] So just to do something as simple as that, what do you have to accept? What do you have to believe? Well, you have to accept, number one, that you've woken up. You have to accept that you have an objective way of differentiating a dream state from a waking state. So you have to accept that you've woken up. You have to accept that you're in your bed. You have to accept that there's a spatial difference between your bed and the coffee shop. You have to accept that there's such a thing as gravity. You have to accept that there's no way to get to the coffee shop.
[12:54] Without getting out of bed. You have to be able to navigate the world, you have to be able to navigate your environment, you have to accept the objective definition of reality provided to your brain by the senses. You have to accept both internal stimuli, I would like a coffee, and external reality, I can't get it by lying in bed daydreaming. You have to get up, you have to accept certain social conventions interventions in that if you sleep in your underpants, you're going to have to throw on a piece of clothing or two, or hopefully three, in order to go to the coffee shop. You're going to have to accept that there's a such a thing as mathematics because the coffee costs $1.50 and you need $1.50 in order to pay for the coffee. You're going to have to protect yourself against the elements. If it's raining, you're going to probably take an umbrella. If it's really sunny, you might put on a hat or some sunglasses. All of these things you have to accept as real. You have to accept that the coffee is real. You have to accept that there's an economic self-interest for the coffee owner. You have to accept that you have to pay for it and therefore it's better than stealing. You have to accept that if there's a lineup you can't just elbow your way through in. You have to accept that a peace negotiation and economic exchange is better than violence because you're not crashing in through the plate glass window scattering everyone with your gunfire and grabbing a coffee from the container.
[14:13] You have to accept the social conventions of standing in line, of having clothes, of paying. You have to accept, even if you have an untoward thought, let's say there's some real sexy woman standing in line, that you don't grab her, that you don't comment loudly how sexy she is. You have an inner voice, you have an outer voice. You have to accept that language has meaning because you have to. You don't just grunt, scratch your ass, and point at coffee. What you do is you say, hey, could I get a medium coffee, please? One cream, no sugar. That's It's my particular drug of choice. You have to accept all of these things just to get some coffee in your belly.
[14:50] There's a certain amount of social trust you have to have that they're not just going to take your $1.50 and not give you a coffee, that the coffee is not going to be rancid, full of poison or rat feces. Just think of the incredible amount of assumptions that you have to make just to wake up and get a cup of coffee. And then you can choose to sit in the coffee shop and have your coffee, but there's a certain social convention, which is you don't sit there all day on one cup of coffee, because, you know, they've got to make money and they've got to cycle their tables and so on. And there'll be a sign there used to say, you can sit for 20 minutes if you have a coffee, which is, you know, randomly enforced depending on how busy it is. You have to accept that the coffee is going to be within a narrow Goldilocks band of temperature. It's not going to be so cold that it's gross. it's not going to be so hot that you burn yourself. Right, that was the McDonald's issue. Some woman spilled a coffee that was volcanic temperature and burned herself.
[15:49] Which was put off as a laughable lawsuit mostly because of marketing. So you just think of all of the objective, rational, mathematical, language-based, movement-based, social convention-based realities that you have to accept just to get out of bed and get a coffee. And then people are like, philosophy is really complicated. No, it's not. It's really not. just look at what you're doing look at what you're doing and all of the facts and realities that you have to accept in order to function within the day now let's say that you want to get on and debate with someone on x or facebook or wherever right if together okay again language has meaning there's objective reality uh the science works mathematics works engineering works because that's all reliant upon you trading digital insults back and forth so all of the things that you have to accept in order to just have a debate. Reason is superior to force. Language has meaning. Objectivity is of value. Objective truths are valuable than subjective impressions. It is false to claim that your subjective impressions are objective truths. Slander is a coward's way out of losing a debate. All of these things you have to accept. All of them. All of them.
[17:15] All of them. I will find her name. She was the one who was kicked out after confronting the rich guy. Mary, Mary O'Donnell, the villain. Interesting, interesting, interesting. She's a complex character. Is she more sinned against or more sinning?
[17:49] Steph, if you were to write a horror novel based on so many call-ins, what would be the main scary element? Oh, the main scary element in a horror story that I would write, and maybe you've got a very interesting idea, but the main horror element is not the people who do evil unto you, but all the people who enable the people who do evil unto you. The worst thing about my childhood wasn't my mother. The worst thing about my childhood was society as a whole and realizing that people like my mother run the show in society. My mother is the queen of the universe in which we exist. My mother runs the show. People like my mother, they run the show. They make it work. They do what they want. Everybody parts before them. Everybody appeases them. Everybody insults the victims and praises and appeases the abuser. The real horror of child abuse is not the abusers. It is all the people who enable, ignore, support, appease, prop up, and praise the abusers.
[19:09] So, the real horror is not the devil. But all the people who claim to be saints but worship the devil. My mother did not operate in a void. She did not operate in a singular will. I'll give you an example. So I did a call-in show yesterday with a fellow, whose mother is in her 50s and his mother has a boyfriend, also in his 50s. And his mother's boyfriend kind of creeped on his 18-year-old sister. And he was kind of appalled by this, of course, as he should be. So he went around to the family and said, can you believe that this guy, mom's boyfriend, creeped on the 18-year-old sister? My sister! And everybody appeased. Oh, he makes her happy. It's not great, but, you know, she just recovered from an illness. She deserves some happiness, blah, blah, blah.
[20:23] So I pointed out to him that, his mother's boyfriend, who had just recently come into the family structure a couple of months prior, had accurately sized up and assessed his family far better than he had.
[20:43] And my mother absolutely accurately assessed the nature of the world decades before I did. She was right, I was wrong. She was accurate, I was naive, Pollyanna-ish, and foolishly optimistic. My mother was a far better philosopher than I was for the first 30 to 35 years of my life. My mother had a more accurate understanding of the nature of society and of the cowardice of everyone than I did. I was shocked that my mother could get away with what she did. My mother was not. My mother understood it and knew it and relied upon it and knew that nobody would call for help, that nobody would come and intervene, that nobody would ever do anything. And it didn't matter where we went. It didn't matter if we lived in Ireland as we did. It didn't matter if we lived in England. It didn't matter if I lived in other places in England or in London. It didn't matter when we went to Africa. It didn't matter when we came to Canada. It didn't matter when we stayed in the States. It didn't matter when we went to Scotland, which we did. And I actually took entrance exams for schools in Scotland. It didn't matter. It It didn't matter where we went. People were all the same spineless fucking cowards.
[22:05] She knew. She, my mother, understood the nature of society far more accurately than I did for probably over 30 years. Just as the guy I talked to yesterday, today, his mother's boyfriend sized up the corruption within the family and knew that he could creep on the 18-year-old girl and would receive no pushback. So he comes bungeeing in, assesses the family in a very rapid manner, and has a more accurate view of the family than this guy is who's been in the family nigh on a quarter century. Learning to learn from evil is one of the most humbling experiences of the pursuit of virtue.
[23:01] Learning to learn from evil is one of the most humbling experiences in the path to virtue, because evil people have a lot to teach us about the nature of society, because they understand it in so many ways, better than we do. I was fueled by optimism of reason and virtue and passion and entertainment, being an effective block against the spread of evil.
[23:30] Evil people laughed at me and shut me down, knowing that 95% of people would forget about me like I'd never existed. I thought there was a little more loyalty. I thought there'd be a little bit more passion and compassion and so on. And they were like, no. They find you entertaining. Dance ball, spothead monkey. But when you're gone, one website over, they will forget about you like you were never there. And I was like, no, that won't be the case. Because everyone says they love me. I mean, I just did, what, eight and a half million views on Twitter with two people posting about me. Are many more people here? A few. Welcome. Nice to have you with us. So, I didn't think that deplatforming would work as well as it did. I was wrong. The bad people were right. Learning to kneel before the bitter instructions wielded like swords and whips from the corrupt is one of the most humbling processes of the pursuit of virtue. Never be afraid to learn from anyone and everyone. Am I re-watching Seinfeld at the moment? I am not.
[24:57] Do you think there is an issue with conservative-leaning music being too smiley and happy so that it non-explicitly encourages the audience to repress anger they have at abusive people? I've never really thought about it. I don't really think so.
[25:15] Try that nitro cold brew you talked about the other day. That thing hits you. It's a little concentrated. Are you still working on a true crime podcast? True crime podcast. I am, in fact, going to record this afternoon, I think. About the Turpin family. I jumped back and forth thinking Mary was a villain through that book. That was a great experience. I'd never read a book where I jumped all over like that before. Right. Right. You also have to assume that having a computer with access to all information known to man in your pocket, then the best use of the time is to argue with people online. Have you heard Tucker Carlson talk about the health benefits of nicotine? Have you looked into that at all? Doesn't it raise T, raise testosterone, stuff like that? I'm of two minds about supplements and aging. Part of me is like, embrace the aging process. Another part of me is, hey, if you can prop it up for a while, why not? Right. I saw a grandma at a coffee shop yesterday, verbally abusing and spanking her granddaughter. I knew I had to speak up and tell the grandmother what she was doing was wrong, and I failed to do so, feeling awful about my inaction. I'm not going to argue with you there.
[26:43] It seems that bonds between people are a lot weaker than you might think.
[26:58] Joker's argument in The Dark Knight is similar to that of evil people, that one will turn on one another without hesitation. Batman's belief is that good will shine through, I think. I don't know. Isn't Batman just a psycho using criminality as an excuse to beat the living hell out of people? The Batman is a manifestation of people's intense frustration, with the legal system, the legal system that benefits the rich, that stretches things out for years, where the process is the punishment, and where people who make false accusations are very rarely punished. People are incredibly frustrated with the legal system as a whole, and so they wish for the cities to be cleaned up through vigilante justice. The problem with vigilante justice is it often gets things wrong, and it's heavily susceptible to manipulation. population. This is sort of an example from Vietnam, that because the Viet Cong, the communists, were hiding among the general population, the US said, well, if you tell us who the Viet Cong are, we'll go and take them out. And they offered rewards and so on. And then people just, oh, this guy slept with my wife five years ago. Yeah, he's totally Viet Cong. And then they'd go kill the guy. And some aspects of the military became sort of paid for higher hitmen in a sort of analogous way.
[28:22] So, Batman is a giant manifestation of the hellish despair, that people have regarding the justice system, the quote justice system.
[28:37] But Batman, if he wanted to deal with crime, he returned to childhood. You can't deal with crime without dealing with childhood. At least not in, I mean, I get to, you've got to deal with it in the moment and so on, right?
[29:03] I would love to read a horror novel as Steph described just now. I wonder if you could do a podcast series about British elite public schools and their issues slash benefits. That would be interesting. I'm not sure how philosophical that would be. And I certainly did go to an elite British government. Public school means private school. It's kind of a nomenclature flip. Clip, but if you want to know about the elite private schools in England, the best person to go to is George Orwell. He wrote some amazing stuff about all of that. Is it that the average person lacks the courage to confront the bad people? I don't know what that means. What do you mean, lacks the courage? I mean, the entire purpose of courage is that you have to lack it in order to have it.
[30:13] The whole point of courage is its will against resistance. distance. I don't need courage to walk down the stairs in the morning. I would need courage to climb down a mountain because it would be scary. So it lacks the courage. The entire purpose of courage is you're supposed to lack it in order to do it. It's not courageous unless you lack courage. The whole purpose of courage is to backfill against fear and have you do something that's virtuous or good or positive against your own fear and anxiety. What do you mean lacks courage is a lack that's what we need the virtue i don't want to do it it's too scary courage is what tells you you have to do it even if it's scary there's no such thing as lacks the courage courage is a lack courage is what you use to overcome the lack, people don't lack courage that's a tautology courage is an absence, they lack the virtue to confront the bad people they lack the courage to confront the bad people sorry, they lack the virtue to confront the bad people, but courage is always about you need courage because you don't want to do it.
[31:42] The whole point of philosophy is to have you go against what is easier and destructive in the short run. It is easier to appease evildoers in the short run. The problem is, it costs you your entire fucking civilization in the long run. So, it was easier for people to forget me when I was deplatformed rather than say, gosh, this guy was treated badly. He did good things. He told difficult truths. He's been treated badly. Maybe I should spend five minutes going to.
[32:27] Sign up and support and send him a message of encouragement. But instead it was like, oh, okay, he's gone, he's gone. And it wasn't that people forgot me. That's not true If people had truly forgot me Then when stuff was posted on Twitter recently That got eight and a half million views People would be like Who? Right They didn't forget me at all They just found it easier, To watch me Be dragged out of the town square And thrown off a cliff Than to lift a finger to say Hey, maybe not Maybe we shouldn't Maybe we shouldn't.
[33:13] It's like people are, thousands of people are following me as I give a great speech down the road, and then I get jumped, beaten, thrown in a ditch, and everyone just keeps on walking like they were there for no other purpose.
[33:31] See, the problem with not protecting the victims of child abuse is that they grow up with no desire to save your ass against the evildoers. In other words, if you turn over the children through your indifference to the evildoers who are abusing them, when those children grow up, they will have no desire to risk their skin to save you from evildoers either, which is the whole boomer thing, right? The boomers did basically fuck all about child abuse. In fact, they added to it in general with crappy schools, with bad demographics, with national debts, with letting everything decay in front of them. So, what happens is the young then grow up with no desire to reciprocate, protect the boomers from evildoers. So, if bad things start happening to the boomers, and it will, then people will be like, eh, you failed to protect us. So, if let's say they start taxing unrealized capital gains, which is going to hit the boomers, or there are problems with paying out retirement benefits, people are like, eh.
[34:47] Right? I mean, you reap what you sow. If the older generation fails to lift a fucking finger to protect the younger generation from child abuse, then... The older generation will not be protected from the evildoers they nurtured and grew.
[35:21] So somebody says, I have read your novel, The Future. Great book. Freedomain.com slash books. Sure, we can, and I think rightfully, call the protagonist a villain. Though given his life history is he both victim and victimizer at the same time. Not an excuse because he could have chosen to live differently. Morality can be tricky to sort through. Do I need courage to take an afternoon nap in my own bed versus go march against a tyrannical government? Yeah. They stopped following you partly because they knew that listening would put them in a collision course with their families and society, so the deep platform became an easy excuse to jump ship.
[36:23] If you don't care about the young working poor, do not be shocked when cries of eat the rich ring out. The future is by far your best book. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. How should it be, in your view, if you hear a child being abused, what steps should be taken? Will interventions of a government agency be better or worse for the victim? That's an argument from consequences.
[36:51] So, the great challenge in intervening in situations of child abuse is to not surrender to rage. That's a great challenge. So, in situations where I've intervened, my approach has been to say to the parent, this is not how you want to parent, is it? I mean, this isn't what you dreamed about when you wanted to become a mother or a father. This is not how it should be. And listen, I sympathize, I understand, you experience a lot of frustration, and I'm sure it's getting kind of circular, like the more frustrated you get, the more aggressive you get, and therefore the more difficult your kids get, and so on, right?
[37:34] But this is not the way that you want to be as a parent, and it's going to cost you down the road, like you know you're going to get older and they're going to get bigger, right? So when the teenage years come, it's going to be really tough.
[37:50] So you know try and find a deep breath there's lots of resources out there i recommend parent effectiveness training of course peaceful parenting.com and so on so this isn't how you want things to go it isn't going to pay off for you in the long run at all i understand the frustration but there are ways to cool the temperature so the problem is of course if you you go up and say you know what kind of jerk hits their kids what's the matter with you right then you escalate then you are provoking the same humiliation that the abusive parents experience as children which will then cause them to further humiliate their own children right so when it comes to intervening in situations of child abuse your sole focus is what is best for the children and if you approach the parents who are abusive with aggression then they will later take that aggression out on their children. You were behaving so badly that some guy came up and talked trash to me and like, right? So you want to be as peaceful and reasonable as possible.
[39:09] All right, let's see here. What sin did Gen X commit with regards to society? Did we carry on in the same footsteps as the boomers, i.e. kept on working without looking up to see society failing, or did we miss something else entirely? Somebody replied and says we never engaged we were the dropout generation.
[39:47] I think that Gen X was slightly better at processing, child abuse is that true? because I mean I'm Gen X, what's interesting so i think gen x is i'm just sort of thinking about my friends when i was younger the people i grew up with and stayed with into my early 30s mid-30s really so So I think with regards to Gen X, the pattern that I've noticed is that Gen X overtly abuse their children less than boomers, but still don't acknowledge child abuse. So of the people I grew up with, not one person ever gave me a shred of sympathy for the abuse I suffered as a child. out. However, as far as I know, they did not abuse their own children, certainly not to the same degree as a lot of the boomer parents.
[41:00] So maybe it's a transitional thing. But the next generation, millennials, the Gen A, they're also not acknowledging child abuse, really. You know, you see... When you see somebody with tattoos online, most of it Lauren Boebert posted a picture of herself. Boy, it doesn't take much to get conservative Christian women into their bikinis posting thirst pics online, right? And you see that she's got these sort of half-Aztec flame racing stripe tattoos all over her side. You see a woman with tattoos in society as a whole, and people are like, trashy, bad, wrong, right?
[41:57] But it's just, they're branded. as people easy to victimize by their child abusers, right? They're just branded. The cattle that is branded by its owner has said, this is mine and belongs to me, and if you find it, return it. It's not your cattle, it's not loose, right? So they're branded. They're branded in the same way that thieves have a secret handshake. Tattoos are victim of child abuse, easy to exploit. It's just branding. It's a sign for other people to come and exploit and manipulate and control and bully.
[42:40] What do you think of avoiding talking about political opinions until old age and focusing on self-improvement instead in the meantime? Well, the 10 years, 06 to 2016, were the absolute glory peaks of free speech in the history of the world. But you see, once free speech began to actually have an effect, so people would say, well, you can have free speech, but we'll gatekeep the magazines, the movies, the TV shows, the books, the publishing, whatever, the universities. So you can have free speech but you can't have a platform because in order for your free speech to have an effect it has to be broadcast in a wider medium. So we gatekeep and control the broadcast to a wider medium. No problem. Have all the free speech you want. You just can't get your free speech out to the world else because we control the pathways, the avenues, and the gatekeeping for that. Now, of course, the internet removed the gatekeepers, and we can have this conversation, you and I, without gatekeepers, without somebody saying, no, no, no, can't do it, deplatformed. I mean, as far as that goes, I mean, it still happens and all of that, but I'm talking 2006 to 2016.
[44:06] You could finally exercise free speech. Free speech was largely illusory as long as bad people control the means of production. As long as bad people control theaters and book publishers and movie studios and television studios and universities and so on, you can have all this free speech in the world, you can't add to anything. So free speech was safe to give to people when you could gatekeep and control all, the only way to really effectively manifest free speech, which is to talk to a wider group.
[44:44] So there was a 10-year window where the powers that be were shocked and surprised and did not process. And I did everything I could over those 10 years to get as much suppressed facts out to the world as humanly possible. Because I knew it wasn't going to last. I talked about it not lasting. I was almost amazed that people got away with it, that we the people got away with that much free speech for ten glorious years. It was amazing. What a ride. What a ride. This is why I wouldn't want to be born any other time in history. We had these ten glorious years where we could pump out the facts while everybody was still gatekeeping the decaying institutions. We were out there in the new world of the human mind, getting ideas out that had been suppressed for centuries or millennia. It was glorious, amazing. I half burnt myself out, shooting the flares of truth up into the sky, suddenly unstormed with censorship.
[46:00] And then the powers that be recognized that free speech was actually manifesting for the first time in human history, and they moved to shut it down. Oh, are you talking to people? No, no, we can't have that. Oh, are you actually changing things? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Thank you very much. We can't have a political candidate who actually reflects the will of the people. That's not how this works. We choose figureheads.
[46:37] Bitcoin will bring back free speech better than the 2016 era. Maybe. What do you think about millennials? Gen X starts after 1975. Is that right? All right. So boomers are to 65, right? So I'm 66. So, what's between 65 and 75? Yeah, Generation X, the generation generally defined as people born from 1965 to 1980. So, you're wrong. Gen X starts after 1975? I think you are incorrect. Britannica says Generation X born between 1965 and 1980 although some sources use slightly different ranges so after baby boomers before millennials.
[48:06] All right i'm proud kakistani veteran of the great meme wars yeah they were amazing right just amazing Stef how do we do a philosophical audit on our lives and relationships i want to know if i'm living my values what do you mean a philosophical audit i don't know what that means you want to know if you're living your values how would you not how would you not know if you're living your values. If your values are truth, how often do you lie, avoid and dissemble? Right? If your values are honesty, how often do you misrepresent yourself in your relations with others? It's not complicated, is it?
[48:52] If your value is courage, how often do you fail and quail before necessary conversations? How often do you avoid? How often do you distract rather than speak openly and honestly to people? How often do you punk out when it comes to, and we all do from time to time, right? But how often do you punk out when it comes to necessary conversations in the pursuit of virtue, in the spread of virtue? If you know people in your life who've done immoral things, particularly against children, are you honest and direct in your calling out of them? I'm not sure, like this. It's like somebody saying, Steph I'm I'm a vegan how do I do a nutritional audit on my life and eating I want to know if I'm actually a vegan I don't understand what that would even mean just look at what you're putting in your mouth, is it vegan then you're a vegan if it's not vegan you're not a vegan it's not that complicated.
[50:03] We got to see in real time how all the institutions teamed up to oppose Trump at every turn. Oh, yeah, was it the view? You get an old, when Trump used to go on the view, oh, my friend, and now he's just this evil Nazi, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's all very boring. And what's very sad about all of this is it works. That's what's very sad about it, is it all works beautifully.
[50:26] But if the general population does not protect its philosophers, then the philosophers in general will not protect the general population.
[50:37] And in terms of not protecting your philosophers, there's two things, right? I mean, you don't have to, you know, go and get into trouble by protecting philosophers, But, you know, an encouraging note, signing up for a free membership at a website, speaking positively in public or in private, and so on. These are things, right? But if, and it's a very deep question that I ask myself all the time, all the time, like probably every second day. I ask myself this sort of big and deep question, which is, do we say, you reap what you sow, or do we say, forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do?
[51:26] Do we look at people as full adults who are responsible for every one of their choices or as programmed toddlers who don't have any particular free will because they've never been taught to think for themselves are people who do wrong in society as a whole on average conscious or or unconscious perpetrators, or relatively innocent victims of mass propaganda.
[51:58] Yeah, if you call out the child abusers, you will immediately get the same treatment as death. Yeah, I was reading this woman on Twitter the other night. I had one of these odd donut sleep nights. You get those every once in a while. You go to bed, you wake up a couple hours later, like, bing! And I'm like, why? Why am I awake? I kind of lie there half-sodden, and then I suddenly realize, hey, I've been awake for a while. And then I'll sort of turn over and try to get back to sleep. But anyway, I couldn't get back to sleep. It turned out I forgot to eat dinner, so I was kind of hungry. So I went down, had a little food, and I was reading, and I was reading about this woman on Twitter. And she's a researcher in narcissists, psychopaths, sociopaths, and other forms of dominant, controlling, and abusive personalities. And she puts the numbers at about 10%, but higher in positions of power. And she was relatively innocuous although very powerful and a great read until, she pointed out that one of those positions of power could include the mental health professions and then right so.
[53:03] My values were defined by all the videos i watch i have not taken the time to outline my actual values. What? My values are defined by all the videos I watch. I have not taken the time to outline my actual values. I don't even know what that means. So you want to say, how do I do an audit on something I haven't defined? How do I audit the process known as flibbity-jibbit. Well, what is flibbity-jibbit? Don't know. Well, then how on earth are you asking me to audit something? I don't know what that means. Oh, funny. You're just avoiding. You're avoiding morality. All right. All right. Gen Z is born between 97 and 2012. Is that right?
[54:07] So millennials, I think, would be the first generation. I have this vague theory. There's no proof to it, anything. There's this vague theory that video games are significantly responsible for the collapse in testosterone. You know, 45% of young men, 18 to 24, have never approached a woman. I find this completely incomprehensible. I can't even tell you. I find this completely incomprehensible. that almost half of young men have never approached a girl. I don't mean a cold approach in a grocery store like they've never gone up and talked to a girl and asked her out.
[54:51] So everything is mis-styled in the young man's brain and body. Everything is mis-styled. Of course you have anxiety about asking girls out. That's inevitable. And your desire for a girlfriend, is supposed to overcome that so why isn't it? why isn't it? why isn't it? I don't know I mean but one of the things I think is happening is video games now, it's a fairly lengthy discussion I'll just boil it down real briefly here maybe we can talk about it more We're going to go donor-only in a few minutes. You can go to freedomain.locals.com, sign up for a subscription. You can join us for the donor-only part. But video games, I think, create a lot of stress with physical immobility. And I think stress is a known suppressor of testosterone, and stress is supposed to get bled off with physical activity, right? Fight or flight, right? Right? So I think video games, by creating stress, with no physical release, I think have created a lower testosterone situation.
[56:19] Well, there's a huge amount of profit in avoiding parental abuse. There's a huge amount of profit. It's not just psychological, like defending bad parents and so on. There's a massive amount of profit in avoiding dealing with child abuse. Because then you get to medicate kids, you get to prison industrial complex, You get to have a criminal class that you can use to frighten the general population into believing that the only solutions are political solutions and more power and so on. So unfortunately, there's just way too much profit because largely of government money. There's way too much profit in avoiding child abuse. So if you actually start to talk about solving real problems in society by dealing with child abuse and holding parents accountable, massive multi-trillion dollar power structures oppose everything you're doing.
[57:24] Is that why I've never been asked out? I have to ask boys out. What the heck? Yeah, that's why. Well, I mean, good Lord. Have you read about this testosterone level thing? Good Lord. Let me see. I remember the number vaguely, but I don't want to get it wrong. The young men today have a fairly small percentage, of the testosterone that their grandparents had. So, I want to see, what are the latest? Yeah, average testosterone level of American men has been dropping as much as 1% per year.
[58:24] A 65-year-old man in 1987 had about 17% more testosterone than a 65-year-old man in 2004. This isn't just Americans. An increasing number of young men are complaining of sexual concerns, diminished libido, erectile problems, more commonly seen in older men. Testosterone promotes attention, memory, spatial reasoning, and energy. Essentially, it makes you sharper. It increases libido and muscle mass. When testosterone levels get too low, men can begin to feel fatigued, lose sexual interest, gain weight, and lose muscle mass. There's a link between low testosterone levels and depression. There's also a wide association between low testosterone levels and disease. One study found that people with a testosterone deficiency, less than 300 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter, were at greater risk for obesity, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, and other diseases. It's correlation, not causation. Nobody knows. People smoke fewer cigarettes. Smoking raises testosterone levels, for sure. Obesity and testosterone create a vicious circle. Obese men tend to have lower testosterone, and men with lower testosterone tend to become obese.
[59:53] So, with regards to boys and video games, low testosterone is an adaptation to enslavement, in my view. It's just my opinion. No proof, no science, just my opinion. Low testosterone is a physiological adaptation to being enslaved. Oh yeah, young men these days, this sort of poofy broccoli hair and none of them can grow a beard at all. And they are more obsessed with video games than and talking to girls. I mean, it's wild. It's wild. Yeah, body fat generates estrogen. That's right. Young men today seem to me almost like alien lifeforms.
[1:00:49] Somebody says, I didn't know it was almost 50%. One of the reasons I never asked anyone out was that it was too dangerous to ask girls out. Nope. Nope. You perceived it as too dangerous. But what is the danger of asking a girl out?
[1:01:06] Asking a girl out on a date isn't going to get you me-too'd. I mean, maybe she'll laugh at you. What's the worst thing she can say? No, no, she could say, ew, you give me the ick. Right? Okay, but then you just If you ask a girl out and she treats you badly, it's because you're making stupid decisions about who to ask out. It means you're asking out the girl only based on looks and lust, which is stupid. Understandable. Understandable. I've made those mistakes myself. But it's stupid. If you ask a girl out and she's like, ill as if, never. You've got to be kidding. Who do you think you are? Then you just asked out a shallow, cruel woman.
[1:01:51] Right so the video game thing is interesting because one of the things that happens with direct slaves like roman slaves and all of that roman slaves what happens is they're stressed and they can't act right so they're mad at their slave owner but they can't ever act they can't do anything they can't run away they can't fight so they're both stressed and physically paralyzed at the same time and that is what video games do is they stress you while you're physically paralyzed I mean, little mouse movements don't count, right? So I think it recreates stress and physical inactivity, stress and inability to fight or flight that reproduces the physiology of slavery in young men.
[1:02:41] All right uh so yeah maybe we'll do the conscience stuff, let's see here yeah eat a healthy diet exercise more get a good night's sleep, avoid eating or drinking from plastic containers and so on right so, uh sorry i will uh this is from bigthink.com and there's tons of articles about this But, you know, if I were a man who was young, I would certainly get my testosterone levels checked. All right, so I'm going to try this. There's a way. I do believe. I do believe. When I'm not with you, I lose my mind. All right, so there is a way to get to.
[1:03:32] There is a way to get to. There we go. So we are going to Locals Supporters Only. Locals Supporters Only. So freedomand.locals.com. You can sign up there. That's going to be in 30 seconds. I'll give you a link. So you can even sign up for free. You can sign up for free and I'll put the link in here. You also get The Truth About the French Revolution, AIs all over the place, private live streams, premium call-in shows, 22-part History of Philosophers series, all kinds of amazing, juicy, tasty stuff. So we'll get on to that for sure.
[1:04:27] All right. Easy access to pornography. If you watch that, you don't need to go out and find women. I don't know. That's saying that the only value that women have is sex, and that's unfair and wrong and disrespectful and terrible. Right? So it's not that. You want a girlfriend for cuddling, for chats, for walks, for watching movies, for exercising together, for playing sports, you know, lots of things, right? I don't believe pornography can do much of that, right? I will add more philosophers. I was actually just reading this morning about Immanuel Kant. But the next one is the Everest known as Immanuel Kant, so that's just a giant one as a whole. All right, so let's see. I think we have gone...
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