0:00 - Welcome to Keith Knight
8:39 - Wealth and Inequality
17:52 - Questioning Majorities
19:55 - The Illusion of Political Solutions
27:36 - The Power of Truth
42:20 - Making the Most of Our Time
49:57 - Lessons from History
56:33 - The Power of Lies
58:36 - Justifying Noble Lies
1:02:31 - What If We Just Told the Truth?
1:04:21 - Differentiating Good and Bad Philosophers
1:13:10 - Practical Application of Philosophy
1:15:30 - Addressing Child Abuse
1:19:13 - Measuring Intelligence and Wisdom
1:32:31 - Analyzing Propaganda in Society
1:54:08 - The Complexity of Agency
2:00:58 - Propaganda and Public Health
2:10:05 - The Nature of Evil
2:20:05 - Contradictions in High Places
2:31:56 - The Left vs. The Right
2:38:59 - The Survival of Contradictory Beliefs
2:47:28 - Evolutionary Survival Mechanisms
2:49:30 - The Power of Rhetoric
2:50:46 - Media and Intellectual Elites
2:52:08 - The Nature of Happiness
2:55:00 - Conscience and Propaganda
3:02:46 - The Importance of Historical Narratives
3:07:53 - The Nature of Deception
3:14:13 - The Dangers of Unreality
3:18:53 - The Case for Free Speech
3:30:42 - The Role of Education in Society
3:39:53 - The Radical Resentment of Work
3:45:00 - Exploitation and Work Ethics
3:57:13 - The Nature of Beauty
4:08:39 - Disassociating from Toxic Relationships
4:24:52 - Understanding Humility and Expertise
4:38:09 - Ethics and Avoidance
4:47:06 - The Rise of Political Correctness
4:56:42 - The Language of Shame
5:08:17 - Addressing Suicidal Thoughts
5:16:34 - Real-Time Relationships
5:23:18 - The Fear of Disapproval
In this episode, Knight engages in a deep exploration of the philosophy of anarchism with Stefan Molyneux, who articulates a framework built on fundamental principles of respect and property rights. We begin by examining the core tenets of anarchism, particularly the concepts of non-aggression and personal ownership, which Molyneux suggests are intrinsically tied to the values we teach children. While these principles may seem straightforward, their ramifications when applied to broader societal structures provoke profound philosophical discussions.
Our conversation transitions to the origins of wealth and the nuances of economic inequality. Molyneux asserts that true economic freedom naturally fosters wealth creation but acknowledges the resulting disparities that can arise. By sharing anecdotes about remarkable talent and productivity across various fields, he illustrates how individuals who effectively leverage their skills and resources, such as gifted farmers, become pivotal in advancing societal development. This discussion sets the stage for a critical analysis of the minimum wage, with Molyneux arguing that such interventions can unwittingly restrict opportunities for those they intend to support, particularly young and inexperienced workers.
As we deepen our inquiry into societal constructs, Molyneux sheds light on the challenge of confronting collective misconceptions and the often painful process of breaking free from societal conformity. Knight prompts him to share effective strategies for inspiring collective positive change, which leads to a discussion on the importance of confronting inconvenient truths. Molyneux candidly acknowledges the potential social alienation that can occur when individuals challenge widely accepted narratives.
Shifting our focus to historical perspectives, we discuss slavery and the often simplistic narratives surrounding it. Molyneux cautions that a narrow understanding of slavery—particularly in the context of American history—overlooks the complex realities and various forms that this atrocity has taken throughout time. He emphasizes how prevailing historical narratives can obscure moral progress, thereby distorting our comprehension of ethical frameworks in contemporary discussions.
Throughout our exchange, the significance of truth and morality emerges as a central theme. Molyneux underscores the importance of facing reality, even when it disrupts established relationships. He argues that authentic connections are cultivated through shared values, honesty, and an unwavering commitment to moral principles. We explore the devastating effects of lies on societal operations, particularly concerning education and public perceptions. Molyneux argues that when those in power manipulate narratives, it can foster a worldview that breeds hostility toward dissent and alternative viewpoints, a phenomenon exacerbated by social media's rapid dissemination of information.
Knight expresses his skepticism about commonly accepted historical narratives, suggesting that much of history serves as propaganda molded by the powerful to advance their interests. Molyneux echoes this sentiment by discussing the ethical implications of "noble lies," questioning whether certain deceptions can ever be justified for societal benefit. While acknowledging practical motives, Knight argues for the necessity of exposing such deceit to avert cycles of mistrust and societal decay.
As we transition to contemporary societal issues, we unpack arguments surrounding wage gaps and violent crime, advocating for a rigorous analytical approach. Real clarity, as Molyneux points out, must stem from a steadfast commitment to truth and rational inquiry rather than succumbing to emotionally charged rhetoric.
Our conversation further delves into the dynamics of social structures and cultural narratives. Knight stresses the significance of exploring personal agency within communities, especially regarding the historical contexts that inform contemporary issues like family structure and economic mobility. Molyneux suggests that government interventions have often perpetuated dependency rather than empowerment, a claim supported by historical data indicating marriage and mobility rates have shifted over time.
We explore the term "exploitative," particularly concerning labor dynamics, highlighting how feelings of resentment and misunderstanding can fracture relationships within the workforce. Molyneux illustrates that these feelings can stifle mentorship and development among workers, ultimately benefitting a disconnected upper class.
As relationships are pivotal to societal cohesion, Knight conveys the essential nature of dating and parenting, distilling the role of love and shared moral values in raising children. Drawing connections to contemporary challenges, we emphasize that interpersonal dynamics must prioritize respect and honesty over familial ties. If any relationship fosters emotional harm or fear, it becomes crucial to reevaluate its significance.
Towards the end of our dialogue, we confront the profound difficulties of establishing a moral framework devoid of reliance on authority figures. By distinguishing between aggressive action and permissible behavior through the lens of consent, particularly in personal interactions, Molyneux articulates the necessity of universal moral standards that validate property rights while condemning egregious acts.
As we navigate our understanding of morality, we reflect on the critical role of language and societal norms in shaping perceptions and responses. Molyneux calls for clear communication and emotional management in interpersonal relationships as fundamental to fostering productive dialogue. Ultimately, our discussion emphasizes that embracing truth, confronting historical narratives critically, and committing to moral integrity can catalyze the positive change we seek in both personal relationships and the broader societal discourse.
[0:00] Welcome to Keith Knight Don't Tread on Anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Today, I'm going to be discussing philosophy with my favorite philosopher, Stefan Molyneux of Free Domain Radio. Mr. Molyneux, where is the best place for people to find all of the excellent content you have provided?
[0:16] I'm available in your conscience. Just dig down to what you know is right, and my bald head will be smiling back at you. Failing that, you can just go to freedomain.com, and that's the best place to find me on the web.
[0:29] Links will be in the description below. Assume I have never heard of anarchy or anarchism before, or maybe I just associate it with chaos. How would you introduce me to the idea?
[0:42] Well, I think the first thing that I would do is say that the concept of anarchism or voluntarism is nothing different than anything you've ever been taught about in your life. When you were a kid in kindergarten, what were the two big rules? Number one, do not belt other kids. Do not hit other kids. Do not, now, if it's self-defense, you know, because that's what always happens if there's a fight. He started it, man. So it's that aspect of things is pretty simple, pretty clear, which is don't initiate the use of force against others.
[1:16] And, you know, don't lie in terms of like something substantial or fraudulent or whatever, right? That's number one. And number two is keep your mitts on your own stuff, right? Don't take other kids' toys, don't take other kids' lunch, and so on. Don't steal their underpants if you're a particularly creepy kid. So keep your word, don't use force, don't take other people's stuff. I wish it were more complicated than that, because then I could claim to be some kind of brilliant guy, but that's all it is. Now, the strange thing that happens in the world is we say, that's perfectly acceptable for kids. And that's perfectly acceptable for you in your private life. You know, if you've ever had a conversation with your girlfriend or your boyfriend or whatever, and you say, hey, we're a little short on funds this month, it's very rare that somebody will say, well, let's just go rob a convenience store. It's like, well, that's not on the table. Like, let's just go counterfeit, right? That's not on the table. And so we accept property rights and the non-aggression principle in our personal lives, we teach it to our children, we expect it from strangers, and so on, right? And so there's a funny thing that happens in philosophy, and it's actually a kind of similar thing that happens in physics, which is if you absolutely universalize the principles which everyone already claims are universal.
[2:39] Really weird and dizzying things happen to your brain right so of course you know we're on the earth we stand we look around it all looks kind of flat and it looks like the sun and the moon and everything else is sort of rotating around us and that's our perspective and we know that there's gravity and so on right and so we sort of understand we're constantly falling to the center of the earth but the earth is pushing back up with resistance and so that's what keeps us down and so we also know that if we throw a ball up you know it goes up in this parabolic arc it goes up slows down and eventually comes back down to the ground and so on so there's everything's falling all the time which is why we don't jump off the edge of a cliff because then we'll just continue our fall until we splatter right so everything's got gravity everything's falling and everything that we look at pretty much looks like a sphere right we look at the moon you look at Jupiter, you look at the Sun, and so on, and they're all spheres, right? So, we know that about physics. Now, if you take that principle of physics and you say, okay, everything's falling everywhere all the time, then you get the heliocentric system of how the planets and the Sun work together, you explain the retrograde motion of Mars and so on, and everything just kind of makes sense, but it freaks you out. I don't know if you remember when When you were a kid, I remember when I was first learning this as a kid, I'm like, no way.
[4:03] It's too weird. It's too bizarre. Like, how can everything be falling and we're falling? I don't feel like I'm, like the earth is falling around the sun. I don't feel like the sun is rocketing at massive velocities around the galaxy. None of this makes any sense. And once you understand, of course, you know, and I remember reading about Aristotle almost drove himself mad, as a lot of ancient philosophers did, trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the tides and they couldn't picture that the moon would have a gravitational pull on the earth's oceans and have them sort of slither back and forth. The same thing happened of course with the speed of light. When you view the speed of light as a constant, well the entire universe starts to become very bizarre and strange and you get the redshift and you also get time dilation at high speeds. Like if you just take one constant, everything about your life and your mind just gets really thrown out of place. So if you say to kids.
[4:56] Don't hit other kids, and they say, well, can I get a pass on Tuesdays? Just Tuesdays, that's all I need. I can wait till Tuesday, I can belt that bully, I can hit that kid, I can take his lunch money. You're like, no, no, no, no. Monday, Tuesday, like every day of the week, it's universal. Okay, what about if we're at the zoo, man? If we're at the zoo, and let's say we're in the monkey enclosure. I mean, the monkeys are hitting each other. Come on, man, let me go monkey at the zoo. No, no, no, doesn't matter. I don't care if you fall into the zoo enclosure, into the monkey enclosure, doesn't matter. You cannot pass. Be hitting people and it's universal well what if we're on vacation and what if it's it's really cloudy or what if i have a headache it's like no it's a universal rule everyone all the time no matter what you can't initiate the use of force you can't steal stuff and so you say okay so if that's what's claimed for moral rules and that's what we teach our children and that's what we accept ourselves what if that's just a universal rule what does that look like in society in the same way with the gravity and momentum and the speed of light, when it becomes a constant and a universal, it's really, really freaky. And I remember when I was originally, of course, an objectivist, I was a minarchist, which means the government that's only involved in the law courts and national defense and maybe some prisons as well, but, you know, just a government that's very small. And I remember when I first started working with the idea of, Okay, but if the non-aggression principle is universal.
[6:26] I mean, it sounds almost like a tautology, but it's like, what if what we claim to be universal is actually perceived of and accepted as universal? That means no initiation of the use of force.
[6:36] And that means that you can't wrap yourself in a concept that gives you the opposite morality from what is universal. Like, universal is universal, right? We don't say, well, mammals are warm-blooded, give birth to live young, they have hair on their bodies and so on. Asterisk, platypus is weird. go talk to a biologist it's not my deal it's not my area of expertise so we don't say well this is the definition of a mammal except from 2 to 4 a.m july 13th on the galapagos right it's it's universal it's it's everywhere all the time no matter what so what if we just say the initiation of the use of force and the taking of people's property and fraud are just immoral and that's universal well then our society begins to look a whole lot different and this is why for you know decades and decades now i got into philosophy over 40 years ago i've really been talking about the non-aggression principle property rights in a universal phenomenon what happens if nobody gets to initiate the use of force well we have to question everything about our society we have to question at a personal level uh spanking uh child abuse uh lying to children and manipulating children, defrauding children. We have to think about national debts. We have to think about all of the various initiations of the use of force that are currently justified in our society. And I would say, just to sort of wrap it up, that everywhere we look at where society really isn't working, it's because there are violations of moral rules.
[8:06] And people get, you know, kind of fussed and say, well, what if we just violated them different? What if we violated them better? What if really good people were violating moral rules? It's like, no, No, sorry, that's looking for healthy cancer. It's not a thing that we can accept. So I would say, what if the moral rules that you accept in your own life, that you call universal, that you teach your children, what if they are just universal? Well, society looks a whole lot different, and it is kind of dizzying, but it is in fact true.
[8:39] Why are some countries wealthy and others impoverished?
[8:44] So, wealth is something that happens in a state of economic freedom, but wealth brings inequality of outcome. So, I don't know if you've ever been in a garage band.
[8:56] I don't know if you've ever tried to play a musical instrument. I know I have, both guitar and myself. Self and i remember um it was called the bone scraping war cry when i attempted to sing the old police song roxanne uh it's not my voice at all the man's virtually a countertenor orchestrato and so um i i was not i wanted to be the lead guy i i you know i'm not exactly averse to being the center of attention think i can provide some value didn't have the voice didn't have the musical talent. So I nobly stepped back and deferred to somebody who could actually do the positive value of being able to sing well. So the lead singer goes to the guy who sings the best and who has the best stage presence and so on, right? Depending on the genre, right? I mean, there's Freddie Mercury and then there's Bob Dylan, but it's a different kind of genre. His voice is appropriate to the genre so value maximizes when we let those who can best increase the value get hold of the most resources so if you look at sort of what was the foundation of the industrial revolution which was the agricultural revolution uh which occurred before you in order to have a large urban workforce you have to have very efficient farms and so what happened was.
[10:14] You began to have a free market in farmland for a variety of reasons and so if you're going to go own beard on 10 acres of farmland, who can bid the most? Well, the person who can bid the most is the person who perceives at least that he can get the most value. So if you and I are up for bidding on the same land, and you can produce twice the crops, then you can afford to bid the most for that land, right? If you can produce twice the crops, get twice the profit.
[10:45] Then you can bid twice or even more for the land, which means that the most efficient farmers end up owning the most land. And because the most efficient farmers end up owning the most land, you get a massive increase in productivity. And this is what happened in the Middle Ages, early to middle of the Middle Ages.
[11:01] Was you got an increase in crop production that was not just double, it wasn't even quadruple, it was 5 to 15, sometimes even 20 times the production. Because, you know, they're just people in this life, who have freakish incomprehensible talents you meet these people i mean they're actually kind of annoying in a way because you know they give you your own humility right i mean i remember wrestling to try and learn guitar and a friend of mine was just like and it's like he just picked it up it's like oh this is easy and i'm like my hands are mangled and bleeding and and i have these like stubby little uh girl guide fingers so i couldn't you know play anything but a c or an f and it's just kind of annoying you know there are some people who just open their mouths and glorious sounds come out there are some people who look at math and it just makes sense to them and there's just these weird incomprehensible talents i mean they can't explain why some people are better at growing crops so they have this it's a green thumb it's it's magic it's elves it's communal but nature and it's just weird freaky talents that people have and some people have it they're obsessed with uh say animal husbandry like turning wolves into dogs that instead of eating your livestock, they guard your livestock, things like that. Just people with weird, bizarre, incomprehensible talents. I mean, some people that double-joint it and make me flinch every time they show that off. I'm like, ooh, that would break me in three, but apparently it's totally fine for you.
[12:25] So, when you let the people with these incomprehensible talents gain a hold of the most resources, then they maximize those resources. If you let the guy who's bad at farming get the farmland, you don't get much food. If you get the guy with the incomprehensible genius at growing food, if you let him get the farmland, then you get a whole lot of food. And then when you have a whole lot of food, then you need fewer people to be farmers, and they can then be released from doing dumb farm work, so to speak, and they can go off and do things in factories or being entrepreneurs. You know, at 1900, like 80 plus percent of Americans were involved in farming. Now it's two to three percent in America. That's released, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of people, certainly over the years to go off and do other things that aren't just farming the introduction of machinery you know some people are just obsessed with tinkering with machinery i mean i had a friend of mine when i was in a high school who was just obsessed with building robots and i i in more power to a man i i couldn't i couldn't do it you couldn't pay me enough to tinker with that stuff but he loved it and so those are the kind of guys who build labor-saving devices and And instead of having, you know, a hundred people in the field with scythes, you end up with one combine harvester that can do the job in an afternoon. Well, those hundred people are then released to do other things.
[13:51] And that gains the wealth in society. But the problem, of course, is that, as you know, it's called the Pareto principle, which is like the square root of any group of productive people in a meritocracy produces half the value. So if you've got a company of 10,000 people, 100 people of those are going to be producing half the value. Value and 10 of those are going to be doing half the value of that so you've got 10 people out of 10 000 who are producing fully 25 of the value and they need to get paid or they're not going to do it there's this weird if you just let the free market do its thing it unlocks this these bizarre freaky geniuses like the elon musks and the bezos and so on it unlocks this weird freaky genius where they just become these krakatoa volcano eruptions of productivity and wealth but they They also get all the cool mansions and the hot wives, and they gather a lot of resentment. And then people are saying, man, it's unfair. It's unfair that he gets all the land. This is what the, I did a whole documentary on Hong Kong and China, and this is what happened when the communists come along is they go to all the people who either through lack of talent or lack of ambition or lack of intelligence just aren't able to compete with these weird productive genius freaks and say, well, he's only got all that land because he stole from your forefathers and we're going to steal it back and give you stuff for free and then everybody.
[15:09] Who's an idiot rises up and takes stuff away from the productive people and gives it to the unproductive people and then everybody starves to death and this cycle generally repeats. So yeah, wealth, it comes out of freedom, it comes out of free trade, it comes out of allowing people to accumulate capital because they're the best ones at increasing it and you know, you obviously want to give the research equipment to the cancer researcher who's the very best in his field. You don't want to share it equally with all the people who are bad at doing that stuff.
[15:41] So you have to accept that inequality, and then that rising tide lifts all boats. If you don't accept that inequality out of resentment, you know, Nietzsche was very big on analyzing this, he used the French word, like resentment, of just, you know, people who are really good, like everyone who's in the audience at a rock concert wants to be the guys on stage. Everybody wants to be the guys on stage. age. Funnily enough, not that many people want to be prominent philosophers. I don't know why. It's such an easy gig and nobody ever has any problems with you. But everybody wants to be the rock star. But of course, if everyone gets to be the rock star, there are no rock stars. You know, if the Beatles had to cycle in everybody who wanted to be a Beatle, there'd be no Beatles. And nobody would have... So, you just have to find a way to manage your resentment, not envy too much and find whatever your weird freaky productivity thing is and work on that. But there are all of these you know fairly devilish intellectuals and and sophists who come along and say it's unfair that you're not getting what he's getting and we're going to take it from him and give it to you and everyone's like yeah i'm gonna get stuff and it's like no you're gonna get starvation and enslavement but it just seems to be a lesson that we keep having to learn in.
[16:48] 2012 i was very passionately uh supporting mitt romney and i went to the debates in Arizona. And we watched it on a big live, on a big screen outside. And they asked Ron Paul a question about the minimum wage. And he said, no, I wouldn't support any federal or state minimum wage. And I remember thinking, how could someone be so stupid and evil? And I said, I just have to look into the reasoning because I can't imagine how you could not support the minimum wage. And then it turns out that the minimum wage hurts the people with the least least amount of skills and the least amount of experience and creates oligopolies and helps bigger businesses, giving employees and consumers fewer choices than they previously would have had. And I remember sitting in my chair thinking, oh my God, I was so wrong about this. And I was so passionately wrong about it. And now I guess just everything is up for me to start to question when it comes to things that majority populations are very set in their ways about?
[17:53] What are some things that majorities are totally wrong about today?
[17:57] It's funny. Boy, Mitt Romney, I haven't thought about that. Greasy-haired Ken doll from hell. So yeah, Mitt Romney is quite the character. Nothing says political acumen like an acceptance of magic underpants. But yeah, the minimum wage, just to touch on that really, really briefly, the minimum Minimum wage is a band-aid that's thrown over the absolute cratering of young minds by the government, quote, educational system. It's like, can you imagine? You're in a training program to be economically productive and intelligent for 12 straight years. And you come out of that...
[18:35] And you ain't even worth five bucks an hour. I mean, that's just absolutely staggering. I mean, you know, it takes 12 years to become a neurosurgeon. Can you imagine after 12 years, you couldn't even cut an apple? I mean, it's just completely bizarre. I mean, so yeah, the minimum wage, and of course, raising the minimum wage to cover up for how bad the government schools are, just drives automation.
[18:55] And then, of course, the government likes that, because it gets to bribe people with imaginary wages, they then get replaced by machines, end up on welfare, and will vote for more and more government because they've adapted to live off the blood money of coerced redistribution of cash so uh there's a lot of fun stuff in there so it is it is very very tough and i got asked this question uh the other day like why is the west failing uh so badly i mean i think that what people don't see is and it always reminds me of that quote from the old monty python movie come see the violence inherent in the system and it's like so every time you are We're asking for a coercive political solution. And all political solutions that aren't around the direct support of self-defense are coercive. So every time you're asking, well, let's pass a law for this, or there ought to be a law for that, or we got to regulate this, or we got to control that, you are saying to people, if you don't do what we want, we will raise guns against you.
[19:56] If you don't comply with what we want, we will escalate until you comply or die. and we will throw you in jail where, you know, rape is common and other forms of violence and so on are common.
[20:07] So we will either torture you or kill you if you don't do what we want. Now, of course, if you were to try this in your personal life, if you were to try this in your business life, if you, heaven forbid, were to try this in your dating life, that would be recognized as assault, theft, rape, sexual assault, and so on.
[20:28] But people have this weird layer they go through where the opposite becomes true. So that which would be, sort of tying into the point I made at the beginning, that which would be abhorrent in your personal life becomes a social contract and totally justified and moral and good, right? I mean, we all accept that if, you know, three guys come across some woman in the woods and they vote to assault her, that that doesn't, the fact that they're in the majority doesn't make it right. You know, when I was a kid, that was a constant theme, and it changed from London Bridge to the CN Tower as I went from England to Canada as a kid. So in England, it was London Bridge. So say, well, why did you do this? Well, everyone else is doing it. Oh, and if everyone else was jumping off the London Bridge, would you do that too? And then, of course, it changed to the CN Tower. Well, if everybody was jumping off the CN Tower, would you do that too? So the majority had no sway on the moral choices of the individual. The majority could not overthrow morality.
[21:32] And we accept that, we teach our kids that, and we shame them for following the herd. You know, you got to resist peer pressure, but you also have to legally submit to a democracy of mostly programmed brain-dead people. So we don't like to really view and resolve these contradictions, but they seem somewhat important to me. So, there are a bunch of abstractions that people use to reverse morality, and it's very, very strange. So, one of my very first videos was about concepts, and, you know, hey, everybody, wake up, I know, it's concept formation, it seems really, really dull, but it's really, really essential. So.
[22:10] We have these concepts that overturn morality that are very, very strange when you really sort of think about them deeply, right?
[22:19] So, I cannot impose a contract on someone else, right? I can't sign up for you to buy a car and then drive the car myself, right? I mean, that would be fraud. I would be forging your signature and I would go to jail for that. I also can't go into debt on your behalf. I can't say hey man I got this really big coke habit uh it's either in a bottle or it's lines on a table I'm not sure what but you know just bill keith for my coke habit man just he he'll pay he's happy to pay he's a big enabler he never wants me to stop I'm fine right but that would be you know if I used your funds to fund my addiction that would be bad even if I used your funds to fund medical treatments for me that would be wrong and bad so the idea that you can sign a contract on behalf of other people is immoral the idea that you can fund your own habits or preferences by running other people into debt we all understand is immoral but then we create this thing called the social contract and then we create this thing called the national debt and somehow it becomes all right like i was i did i gripped my teeth i put in my mouth guards and uh and all of that went into the crash fetal suck in my thumb position and listened to the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the sort of quote debate.
[23:37] And as was the case with the previous debate in 2020, the national debt is never mentioned. Never mentioned. It's like the biggest single factor affecting American life at the moment.
[23:50] And it's just not mentioned because you can't talk about the elephant in the room because the elephant is going to trample all the math you throw at it and come out with a bunch of villages squeezed between its tusks. So you can't talk about these things. So what I would say to people is there's no magic in concepts that reverses morality.
[24:09] If, you know, three guys voting to assault a woman in the woods is not moral, then the majority is not moral. The majority wanting it so does not make it moral. Now, that's bad enough when the majority can think for itself. But when the majority is raised in, you know, control C, control P, copy paste, brain stamping, indoctrinated minds in these government education camps, the lack of concentration camps called government schools, and you either have to comply, nod and go along, or they will drug you. They will drug you. Like this is what the Soviets did to dissidents. Well communism you see is perfect communism is perfect therefore i mean if you don't like communism you're mentally ill and we need to stuff horse tranquilizers up your ass till you pass out on a park bench and then ship you off to siberia so the idea that the system is perfect and anybody who has a problem with the system is mentally ill and needs to be drugged is about as monstrous and evil as can be conceived of particularly with regards to children so.
[25:10] The idea that there are all of these concepts, the state, the social contract, and so on, that these things are justified by concepts, but are actually enacted by individuals, like all moral choices and all initiations of the use of force are enacted by individuals, and you can't wrap people in concepts and turn evil into good. And there's all of this baffle gap that goes along about wrapping concepts around immoral actions and then somehow magically transforming them into abstract virtues. It doesn't work.
[25:49] The beginning of wisdom, as the saying goes, is to call things by their proper names. If I have a weird lump on my arm and it's a tumor, but I call it a muscle, that doesn't transform it into a strength, right? It just means that I've mislabeled it and getting people to say, let's start locally. Let's start with what is moral for you. Let's test if it's universal to you and then let's apply it universally. Most philosophy goes from these weird abstractions inward, right? You've got the platonic forms, you've got Kant's new amenal realms, you've got the nirvana of the Buddhists, you've got these like weird spacey, up is down, black is white, cats and dogs living together in sin. You've got all of these abstractions that just baffle you into incomprehension, like Hegel's world spirit, you know? Boy, let's try talking to particular countries in Europe, say, oh yes, there's this world spirit, you see, that picks you to rule over every other nation at particular points in time. It's like, yeah, that's gonna go just swimmingly, isn't it? So you've got these weird abstractions that just baffle people into accepting clear immoralities. And as an empiricist, I say, well, let's start with what you accept locally. What do you believe locally?
[26:57] And let's work out from there. If you say, I accept this moral, and this moral is universal, I mean, you've actually solved it. And, you know, I mean, the work that I've done, rape, theft, assault, and murder are the two, sorry, the four major immoralities in the world. And if you accept that those are wrong, and they're always enacted by individuals, it doesn't matter whether the individuals have a funny hat or a costume or can do cartwheels or it's a Thursday or they happen to be sitting in a big white building. It doesn't matter. the morality is the morality the rules of physics don't bend around costumes and the rules of morality don't bend around peculiar rituals and once we start accepting that man we could just have a great world.
[27:37] If you were say the martin luther king jr of today and you were to give a speech in hopes of uniting the west but the genders the races people at different income levels what is something you would focus on in that speech to really give some people uh something to rally around.
[27:59] So, you know, just pull out of my armpit a Martin Luther King Jr. Speech. Yeah, that's totally fine. Totally valid. No problem. Hang on. I'm going to need a little more caffeine.
[28:10] Just as far as general topics go. No, no, no.
[28:13] I accept the challenge. I have a dream. Okay, I accept the challenge. I'm on it, man. I'm on it. Let me just limber up a little here and get myself all sinewy and ready to strike like a viper at the jugular of irrationality? So, what'd I say?
[28:33] It's hard to accept how much you've been lied to. When you have someone who genuinely and generally tells the truth, and there's a couple of white lies in there, we can accept that, right? I mean, yeah, my wife generally tells me the truth, and then she tells me that I look fine in the jeans that I used to wear 20 years ago. So, you know, a little white lie here and there, we can live. There's a general edifice of truth, you know, in the same way that you can see, even if you have a couple of those little weird hairy floaters in your eyes. You can generally see. Now, where things become really difficult in life is the big lie. When you have just about every major institution, just about every major media outlet, just about every major university and think tank and everything that you can imagine all parroting the same lies, that's really tough. Because most of us who are interested in morality have that wee little bugaboo called the conscience, where we don't like to lie, and if we have lied, we generally feel bad about it, and we'll often circle back and say, yeah, I kind of fell prey to that little satanic temptation of falsifying, so I'm sorry, here's the truth. And so we feel bad about it, we don't like it, and we assume, naively, and I put myself first and foremost with the least excuse into this category, we assume that there are people out there who feel bad about lying.
[30:00] But depending on how you measure it, 5, 10, 20% of people don't really have a conscience. And those people tend to float to the top because the people who have a conscience don't like to lie. And so the people who can lie without feeling bad about it tend to rise to the top and tend to dominate these institutions. So.
[30:26] Most deer would feel pretty bad about injuring another deer. I mean, unless it's the male deer's butting heads over females or whatever, but most deers would feel bad about that, right? Some mother deer steps on her baby deer, she's going to feel bad about that. But the wolves don't feel bad about it. In fact, the wolves really like it. I mean, because that's how they get their food. Lies are currency in a coercive system, because if you can get people to believe that the coercion is moral, and you can get them to believe that it's necessary, Or you can get them to believe Hobbes style that the absence of a coercive system is far worse, right? So this is the sort of Hobbesian argument that we start in a state of nature, bloody in tooth and claw, where life is nasty, brutish, violent, and short. And then we all surrender our rights to a central coercive agency so that we can have some rights protected, right? So we can't protect ourselves against warlords, but if we have a state, it will protect us against crime. This, of course, doesn't really happen on any sustained basis. For a short amount of time, it can seem the case. But, you know, the beginning of any addiction is more fun than not. Otherwise, there'd be no such thing as addiction.
[31:39] So, what happens is we say, well, we're going to surrender our rights in order to have our rights protected. We're going to surrender the right of the state to take our property virtually at will in order to protect our property rights. We're going to surrender the right of the state to start wars on our behalf, to conscript and draft us and send us into useless wars for nefarious purposes. And we're going to do that so we can protect life and property. That is absolutely, you know, cutting off your arm because you sprained a finger. Well, I guess you don't have to sprain finger anymore. Also, your minus one arm, which seems important. So the amount of lies that go on in society are staggering.
[32:20] The amount of falsehoods that go on in society are absolutely staggering.
[32:25] You see this, of course, in politics all the time. You see this in advertising. I mean, you see this even, you know, in the filters that people use on social media. I don't know if you've seen these videos where it's like, hey, this woman looks fantastic on social media, and here she is coming out of the swimming pool on a sunny day, and it ain't really the same. I mean, other than me, I'm actually 950 years old. I'm just very youthful looking, so this is how I've managed to gather so much wisdom and so little hair. So, the amount of falsehood in society is enormous, but falsehoods are incredibly profitable. So, the problem is that we generally base most of our relationships. The question is, why do people have such a tough time seeing the truth? I mean, one sort of simple example, which I talked about, I think back in 2015 or 2016, 2016, was the fine people hoax, right? This This is all the people saying that Trump said that neo-Nazis and white supremacists were very fine people. Of course, false. I've been lied about myself, so I sort of understand where this is coming from. It's false. Even the left-wing site Snopes has debunked it. The video has been played at press conferences to debunk it. And you can literally beam the truth into someone's ass on the cell phone, and they can take one minute to watch it. Like, you've never had anything like this. You know, it's like, well, in order to discover the truth about this, you need to learn ancient Aramaic, and you need to travel to Alexandria by camel and then you need to study for a year, it's like, no, no, no, I can beam the truth to your ass in 60 seconds.
[33:51] I mean, it's two seconds to beam it to your ass, and then 58 seconds for you to see the truth. Literally, you can beam the truth to people's appendages and get them to see the truth in one minute. So there's no barrier to any of this, and people still continue to believe these ridiculous falsehoods. Well, that's because they're in a shared tribe of delusion, and most tribes around the world are shared tribes of delusion. So the reason why people, and this is what I would say to people, the reason why it's fine, you find it hard to get the truth, is that if you get the truth, people aren't going to like you.
[34:25] Now, that's really tough, because everyone says, well, I'm liked for who I am. I'm liked because of the magical pixie dust essence of me. I'm just all of that. Yay. What is that that people do, this thing that girls do? They do this, right? I'm sorry. Sorry, this is going to burn itself into everybody's brain like I'm some 14-year-old tween flipper merchant. But people do this, you know, rosy-cheeked. They think, I'm just loved for who I am. And I'm like, okay. So if you're loved for who you are, pretty easy test to figure out. If you're loved for who you are, think differently, tell the truth, and that's who you are. Are people still going to love you? And we had this with Trump, of course. Trump and COVID are the two big things that people have had problems with this, right? Right. So with Trump, if people say, no, look, what people say about the guy is not true. You know, it doesn't mean he's perfect, doesn't mean he's a great guy, doesn't even mean he's a good guy. But it does mean that what they're saying about him is actually false.
[35:23] And what happens if you tell the truth to people who claim to love you? Do they love you or your participation in their delusions? And most of us over the course of our life, you know, tragically, if it's your family, but of origin, but most of us over the course of our life have had someone around who's addicted to falsehood and claims to like you. And then what happens if you tell the truth? Well, if you tell the truth to people about things they don't want to accept, generally, they will drop you like yesterday's leftover fish and chips. They will just abandon you completely. And you are kept in pretend relationships only to the degree that you're willing to support the falsehoods that people believe. And that is a very, very tough thing for people. And that's really how power is maintained. Power is not vertical, generally. Power is horizontal. It's, you know, slave-on-slave violence, so to speak, right? So power is like, you think of censorship, right? Censorship, particularly in America, is not so much top-down. Censorship is horizontal. You know, the family dinners where you say, okay, so y'all got vaccinated and you said that the unvaccinated like me were really terrible people.
[36:35] But the vaccine doesn't last that long. You don't take any boosters. So now you're effectively unvaccinated. What do you think? Or, you know, y'all seem to be kind of baying for me to have my rights taken away because I didn't want to take this experimental whatever it is, right? And so, if you say any of that kind of stuff, people will get really tense, they'll get really upset, and they will attack, often ostracize and reject you. And then you have to wake up to the reality that you're not loved for who you are. You're loved or pretend loved for who you aren't. In other words, the thoughts that you don't have, the conformity that you're willing to embody, the lies that you're willing to repeat, the judgment that you're willing to suspend, the thought that you're willing to reject, Everything that you're not is what people claim to love about you, and the moment you show up with reason, thought, evidence, facts, reality, questions, curiosity, skepticism in particular, the moment you actually show up as a living, thinking human being.
[37:32] Ooh, well, a lot of people aren't so pleased. And so the reason why we tend to be so enslaved is because we are punished horizontally for thinking, not vertically. I mean, certainly that happens sometimes, but it's usually not a top-down thing. It's a horizontal thing. And this is the big challenge, is that are we loved for who we are, or are we accepted for who we aren't? And i myself i i can't live i just i can't live like that keith i just i can't live, smiling and npc-ing and pretending that i don't know what i know pretending i don't have access to the facts that i have access to that are very easy to share you know don't take my word for it i'll beam the truth to your behind right and i can't live like that i would strongly suggest people stop living like that stop living in the realm of pretend relationships based upon on conformity to mental slavery. Stop being absent and thinking you have a relationship.
[38:29] Stop not thinking and somehow thinking that that means that you're actually accepted. No, you are just voluntarily chaining yourself to the galley slave deck and that's about it. That's tough though, man, because you got to cross that desert, right? If you leave the desert of pretend relationships, it's a big ass stretch of sand you got to get to before you get to the tribe of people who actually think, right? So people just don't want to cross that desert. And I understand that. I didn't like crossing that desert either. What's on the other side is, you know, actually great people and wonderful love and friendship and people who genuinely care about you for who you are and what you know, rather than who you aren't and what you blindly parrot.
[39:13] But it is, I mean, every, and it's funny because every hero's journey has that time in the wilderness every hero's journey has that um crossing into danger and nothingness uh and everybody says who writes these stories and who consumes these stories everybody says and understands that there's wonderful stuff on the other side yet people would rather cling to the desperate non-relationships they have based on empty conformity than to strike out for better relationships if they can't bring real life to the people around them and that's a choice everyone has to make and i would just say make it a choice that's all i mean if you choose to stay in these empty relationships where you're chained by conformity, just accept that and say, well, I'm too fraidy cat to cross the desert, so I'm going to sit here and pretend that we all have this great relationship when all we are is united in enslaving error.
[40:01] Just be honest about it. And that's tough. That's tough for people to be that direct and honest. But I mean, if you can't be honest with yourself, this is an old quote from Hamlet, right? To then own self be true. It follows then as night follows day. You can't be false to anyone. But getting that level of reality and and truth in your own mind is it really is like.
[40:20] You know those those old videos of the nuclear tests right like this massive explosion and then the houses you know just oh that's that's thought man that's thought is this actually thinking for yourself going with reason and evidence is this light that half blinds people and then wipes out entire uh inhabited areas uh and uh that is.
[40:42] That is tough uh but the alternative is to do that mentally and socially or it's going to happen for real in the world i mean everybody knows that there's a massive push for war at the moment right there they're you know they're pushing nato east and east and east and now they're funding these um rapid rockets to go to moscow which can only be funded and manned and with nato and with the satellite data that only nato can provider they're pushing for this war so you either have this mental battle which leads you to a wonderful place and gets you out of corrupt non-relationships or if you stay in those corrupt non-relationships everybody ends up being pushed off the cliff of war by the fairly sociopathic elites so there is no good option like there's no option which is like well i'm just going to live in peace i'm just gonna i'm just going to conform and nothing bad's going to happen because conformity leads to war because when you conform then you uh hate whoever they point at whoever the media and elites point at whether it's the unvaccinated or uh republicans or russia or whoever like you'll just blindly hate whoever they point at and that leads directly to war your conformity does not keep you safe your conformity will get you shredded into by some drone in a remote country There is no safe option, so I say to people.
[42:03] Take the battle that is mental over the battle that will cost you your life or your limbs. The mental battle is far better and easier than the physical battle, and it is one or the other. So, not quite Martin Luther King Jr., but that's what I would say to people.
[42:20] I get that there might be a lot of overlap between that answer and this one but i'm curious uh assuming there is no afterlife how can humans make the most of their scarce time on this earth
[42:35] There is no afterlife assuming there is no afterlife, Well, let's say that it is a dead void that we fall into, and we have no more life after death than we had before birth. Let's just say that.
[42:54] Yet, as conceptual beings, we do partake of eternity and infinity, because we have the concepts eternity and infinity. So, while we ourselves physically and mentally may not be eternal and infinite, we do have the concepts, and therefore we partake of these things. beings. So, how is it that we can best spend our time in this world? Well, as human beings, the best use of our time must be that which is most quintessentially human.
[43:19] So, let's say we just say, oh, it's hedonism, man. We'll take a page out of Alcibiades from the old Platonic dialogues and say, the life of pleasure, man, orgasms and food and napping and exercise if you feel like it and sunlight and the life of physical pleasure is the best. It's like, well, that's not specifically human. Of course, right? Every organism that has any pain or pleasure receptors avoids pain and pursues pleasure. If you think that having sex is the best use of your time, well, then you're in good company with rabbits and frogs, which does not seem the most, you know, intellectually or spiritually elevated thing. If you enjoy a good meal and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a good meal but if you say well hedonism and eating as well then you're in good company with lions and anglerfish who also enjoy a good meal so it has to be something that is specific to humanity that is our highest calling and the best use of our time and it can't be something that is simply an old artifact of the lizard brain body and again i i don't do the mind body dichotomy i have no problem with physical pleasures. I think they're wonderful, and they are a lovely side dish on the main course of life. There's nothing wrong with that, but...
[44:34] What we are as human beings is partakers of and involved with eternity and infinity. So, if we say there's no afterlife, then we have to say that those of our thoughts, which are most combined with universality, are the most human thing about us and what is most likely to last. So if we think about all of the let's go back to the time of Archimedes right so we think of all of the mathematicians and people who weren't even that good at math who scribbled and dabbled and got things wrong we don't remember them because they were wrong however Pythagoras theorem Archimedes theorems and so on all of things like how do you measure an irregular shape nobody could figure that out and that oh well we'll put it in a bucket of water we'll measure the water rise we We know the volume of the irregular shape and so on, right? So the things that are true and universal last. And what we remember of the people in the past the most is those who got things right. So there were lots of prophets around, of course, in the time of Jesus.
[45:42] Even if we say outside of divine intervention and miracles, Jesus took morals and made them universal. They were no longer in group and tribal. You didn't just owe moral allegiance to people in your tribe. Morality was universal and absolute and that was his great revolution and of course he is remembered the uh argumentation style of skeptical questioning that characterized socrates inquisitions we remember in fact it's the essence of philosophy and of law school cross-examination at the moment right and the three laws of logic from aristotle we still remember and use to this day because they thought deeply on that which was most universal and thus their thoughts live on to this day as vividly as if not only were they in the room with us but we were actually them right when you incorporate somebody else's thoughts they live forever in your mind as the thoughts are passed down through the miracle of written language and now recordings, then we live forever so the closest you get to the universal and the true the more you will be remembered. And if you add in one other wee spicy ingredient, which has been the source of my greatest challenges and pleasures, universal, true, and moral. Ah, now then you're cooking with some real spicy gas, right? Because we want morals.
[47:07] To go forward in time as universally and as passionately and as powerfully as possible. So the Quakers and the Christians who worked to end slavery, not just within their own tribe or region or religion or countries, but worldwide. In fact, England only recently finished paying off the debts incurred to end slavery around the world. Well, the end of slavery and the people who worked to end slavery, which of course was a central evil and barrier to modern progress through all of human history. As far back as human history goes, we find slaves, and in fact, the majority of populations were often slaves. So, those who ended slavery have bequeathed us a universal value and virtue that we accept as self-evident and will, as far forward as time will go. There's no one, certainly in the West, who would ever get anywhere trying to talk about reintroducing slavery.
[47:55] So, if you go for what is true, you go for what is universal, and you go for what is moral. Now physicists can go for what is true and universal, as can biologists, geographers, mathematicians, geologists. It's true it's universal, but it's a moral philosopher who adds virtue to the mix. And if we can bequeath universal morals to those who come after us, that is the closest thing to immortality that we can possibly have. And that would be how I would suggest people do it. They don't have to be, you know, big public thinking giant thumb heads like me. They can be people who just advance morality in their own personal circle with their children. Of course, teaching your children what is true and right and good and being humble in your exposition of that is a good thing to do because then your children will have children and that will pass on and spread. Evil is constantly working to do its dirty, vicious, ugly human mind and body disassembling business. and evil, as the old saying goes, the only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing. Well, that's the same thing. Evil is constantly at work because it's addicted, and we have to be addicted to truth, reason, and virtue in order to have any chance of keeping the light of life alive.
[49:08] When I was in high school, I'm not saying that the teachers explicitly said America invented slavery in 1776, but they damn near almost explicitly said what made America's founding unique was the practice of slavery. And this original sin is very terrible, and it's something we all kind of need to have collective shame about. So I was quite surprised a few years later when I learned about the Code of Hammurabi, the Code of Ur-Nammu, legal texts going back 2,000 years, which discuss slavery. So it seems like when I was in school, all the history lessons were extremely shallow and very narrowly focused. Someone like you with a degree in history, what are some important lessons we can embrace today from the past?
[49:57] I mean, the slavery question is pretty wild, because white Christian Western Europeans practiced slavery the least for the shortest amount of time and ended the practice worldwide. Those are incontrovertible historical facts. And slavery in America did not last very long at all because of course when you think of America you're going to think of post-revolution slavery was inherited from the British system and so slavery lasted less than 100 years in America about five percent of people in America owned slaves so it was a minority position and it was ended around the world so again white Western European Christians practiced slavery the least in all of human history, had the fewest slaves, and burned immense amounts of blood and treasure to end slavery worldwide. Incontrovertible historical facts.
[51:01] Now, it's a funny thing in life that when you say you care about something, you get blamed for it, right? There's an old saying in business, if you want something done, give it to the busy guy. another saying in history that no good deed goes unpunished. So white Christian Western Europeans ended slavery and practiced slavery the least and for the shortest amount of time. And white Western European Christians are the only group blamed for slavery.
[51:33] You know, I get that there's a sort of sociopathic, ooh, that person really cares about something, so I'm going to stick it to them. White people really dislike slavery, so we're going to blame white people for slavery, and then they're going to feel bad, we're going to hammer that vending machine of resources and reparations and stuff. And it's like, okay, you can indulge yourself in that crap if you want. I say this to the world as a whole. You can indulge yourself in that. But the problem is everybody then sees that whoever does good in the world gets the most attacked and blamed and undermined and subverted for that. So what that means, of course, is that if you punish people for doing great good in the world, you're just going to end up with people not wanting to do great good in the world. I mean, if you look, and I used to tweet about this back in the day on Twitter, I pointed out the very obvious fact that 400,000 slaves came to America, but 20 million slaves went to the Middle East under the Ottomans, where there are very few blacks left because they were castrated.
[52:36] So, again, I'm no expert mathematician, but if memory serves me right, 20 million is quite a bit larger. Than 400,000, of whom the descendants are still alive. So that's much worse. Two million white Western European Christians were taken, often by the Saracens or the Muslims, in slavery, and were raped and murdered and worked to death and so on. So that's five times the amount of slaves that were taken to America. But there's no complaining, there's no historical record, there's no manipulation, there's no profit in it, So it just doesn't exist. It just doesn't exist in history. So accurate history is really, really tough.
[53:23] And it goes against a lot of the falsehoods that I mentioned earlier that gain people significant resources. So accurate history is very tough. I mean, I did a whole tour in Australia talking about the actual history of the Aborigines in Australia, and for my pleasures, you know, the venues were attacked, and listeners were attacked, and there were bomb threats and death threats and so on. For what? For telling the truth. And, you know, and the media seemed to be cheering this on with great and giddy abandon. And so, okay, so you can decide to say, well, somebody who's telling the truth, or even not telling the truth, but is holding a sincerely held belief, we're not going to debate them, we're not going to disprove them, we're just going to be violent and attack them and, you know, lie about them and so on. Okay, well, you can indulge yourself in that. But all that happens is the conflict shifts from the verbal to the physical. In other words, you don't eliminate conflict by destroying people's capacity to speak freely. all that happens is you move it from verbal debates to physical violence. And we really don't want that. I mean, I guess some people who are really good at, who are better at violence than thinking, maybe they want that for the whole, but yeah. So the big, the big lessons of history to me.
[54:42] Are just about how powerful lies are, how you don't ever want to give the powers that be control over the, quote, education of your children, because they will be taught to hate everything that interferes with the expansion of power. And we can see, of course, this happening at the moment. And the wild thing too, and I'll sort of close on this point, but the wild thing too Keith is that when you see what happens in politics and with the rise of social media and the internet you can see lies being dismantled in real time so people make false claims you know community notes is a great feature in in X so people are just lying compulsively all the time and then there's the truth is posted underneath so the lies you know lies like oh McCarthy was wrong and there were no communists it's like yes they were in fact he was way more right than even he thought and that's not even a an opinion that came out of the decommissioning of the decrypted soviet cables the venona papers and so on that that he was absolutely right and more right than even he imagined in his worst nightmares so what happens is in the past they used to be able to build these giant castles of lies with moats and boiling oil and and gators and archers and to To try and take on these lies was to try and take on a fortress that's been impregnated by reinforced falsehood for like 40, 50 years or 100 years or 200 years or whatever.
[56:08] And so now what the wild thing is, is they don't get to build the ballistas of bullcrap like the castles of calumny. They don't get to build this stuff and reinforce them because they're dismantled in real time. And when you see how many people have no conscience about lying, right? I mean, you saw this in the debate, just lies flying around and people with no conscience and so on, right?
[56:34] So you can see the lies being dismantled in real time. And what that means is that when you look back in history, I mean, I was fairly skeptical of the hagiography of history that, you know, it's that old Norm MacDonald quote. It's a great quote. He says, wow, it says right here in this history book that in every single war, the good guys have won every time. What are the odds? You know, and so I was pretty skeptical of history and popular narratives in the past. Popular narratives always serve a purpose. But now, when people can see the lies that are attempting to be built being dismantled in real time, for those who want to know and have eyes to see and a willingness to accept it, But when you can see that happening in real time, man, you see how many lives are trying to being erected and being pulled down in the here and now. And you look back at things 100 years ago or 500 years ago, it's like, man.
[57:27] There's nothing about this that I would accept as axiomatic or true. I mean, I would accept that the events happened. You know, one of my ancestors came over with William the Conqueror in 1066. That's why I have a French last name. Okay, I accept that that happened. So I'll accept that the physical things happened. The reasons behind them, though, almost all pure propaganda and almost all there to serve the needs and purposes and pleasures of those seeking eternal power over our tremulous souls. So, I think the biggest lesson of history as a whole, and you can see this even in family history, if there's some significant dysfunction in the family history, like people just lie about it all the time, that history is generally a lie inflicted on the credulous by the powerful in order to advance their own interests. And I believe very little of it at all anymore. And again, being skeptical going in, but also, you know, when you are prominent and you tell the truth and you're lied about yourself and you see how many people believe those lies, it's like, yeah, I don't really think. Things happened, absolutely. The reasons behind them though, I don't accept any particular narrative that I can think of.
[58:36] Do you think there's any justification for noble lies to either tell kids Santa and the Tooth Fairy are real or tell them that George Washington never told a lie and, you know, did all these terrific things and never was fallible? Is there any justification for noble lies, either to kids or adults?
[58:55] Well, I mean, tacking on a positive word to a false word, it's like, is there such a thing as benevolent rape? No, of course not, right? And so saying that something is false and then saying, no, but it has a noble purpose, is just telling you that evil can be good according to some unknown metric. Now, I mean, anyone can invent scenarios wherein I could see it would be a good thing to lie. Right? So, I mean, one that comes to mind is, you know, you're an EMT, right? And you come across some guy, he's in a terrible car crash, you know, the steering wheel has gone through his chest and he's like five minutes away from dying. And his family is dead in the backseat. Right? And it's a guy's dying and he says, did my family make it?
[59:51] Now, I personally, I'd be like, yes, they're fine. They sailed out, they were caught by angels, and I'm not going to tell the guy in his last five minutes of life that his family's also dead. So, I mean, everyone can come up with scenarios. I mean, the typical one that's referenced is people burst into your house and say, I want to kill your wife, where is she? And you know, well, I must tell these people where my wife is because I wouldn't want to tell a lie. Now, of course, Immanuel Kant says you tell them where your wife is because lying is without context. So you can always come up with these scenarios. You know, it's bad to break somebody's window and go into their apartment without their permission. But what if you're hanging from a flagpole and you're going to die?
[1:00:32] So you can always come up with these particular scenarios. But the noble lie is, I mean, this goes all the way back to Plato. And Plato was one of the ones who originated this, who said, but there aren't really gold, silver and bronze people. But what we're going to say that there are in order to stay away from the riffraff and have the intellectuals in charge of everything and um it's uh if it's a lie then it needs to be.
[1:00:56] Exposed as a lie and revealed as a lie you know we've we've tried lying or putting lying at the course of our societies we've tried this all the way back to the witch doctors afraid of the volcano gods you know there are no volcano gods and so we've tried for you know hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions of years, I don't know, to have these noble lies. And society, you know, keeps collapsing. You know, it does. I mean, the economy collapses, the fiat currency collapses, there's war, you know, communism killed 100 million people in the 20th century, a democide, there's a quarter of a billion people murdered by their own governments outside of war.
[1:01:37] I mean this is sorry to jump genre so much but in the movie aladdin with robin williams uh the prince is like he's lied to the princess and he's like oh what am i going to do how am i going to manipulate this how am i going to get her to believe this i'm going to change that how am i going to keep her love and the the genie's like i don't know here's a wild idea why don't you just tell the truth and this is a big sign the truth it's just what what if we just tried this as a radical experiment in the entire crap storm of human history, where people are constantly being slaughtered and maimed and murdered and buried and incarcerated and concentration camped and genocided. Like, what if we just tried this thing where we stop lying? What if we try this thing where we just tell the truth? What if we try this thing where the morals we claim to be universal, what if they are just accepted as, in fact, universal? I mean, we've tried everything else.
[1:02:31] We've tried lying. we've tried the noble lies, we've tried manipulation, we've tried debt, we've tried war, we've tried propaganda, what if we just, just, you know, give me one generation, half a generation, what if we tried...
[1:02:45] Not lying? What if we tried just looking at the world, building facts and reason up from the ground? What if we tried actual practical empirical philosophy? What if we tried reason rather than lies? We've given lies hundreds of thousands of years, and it's a constant crap fest of degradation and war and genocide and destruction and starvation. What if we tried not having the stupid cycle where a little bit of freedom gains a bunch of wealth, a bunch of wealth means that you can bribe everyone into a bill if the economy collapses again? What if counterfeiting is wrong for private individuals, and I don't care if they call themselves the Fed or Thanatos' anal army? I don't care what they call themselves. What if it is just wrong? What if the initiation of force is just wrong and it's not that complicated? What if property theft is wrong? What if signing contracts on other people's behalf is wrong? What if putting unborn children into endless debt to foreign bankstresses is wrong? Wrong what if we just try the universal morals what if we just try the rational thinking what if we just try telling the truth now i get that's going to harm the professional liars that have evolved to rule humanity but what if you know what if we just try it i mean why why why not we've tried everything else we've tried everything else and it constantly gets worse and worse why don't we just try telling the truth it's just an option i just like to put it out there is a possibility.
[1:04:06] Thanks to everyone for watching Keith Knight Don't Tread on Anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Check out freedomain.com. Link will be in the description below. That concludes one of my discussion with Mr. Molyneux. Thank you for your time, sir.
[1:04:20] Thank you. I appreciate the conversation.
[1:04:22] Welcome to Keith Knight Don't Tread on Anyone in the Libertarian Institute, part two of my interview with Mr. Molyneux. Check out his work at freedomain.com. Also, Also, if you subscribe to him on Odyssey, you could find his complete collection of videos going back more than a decade. That is where I watch them. Also available on podcast hosting sites as well. Check the link in the description below. Mr. Molyneux, what differentiates a good philosopher from a bad philosopher?
[1:04:55] Yes, great question. Good? Everyone else, no. No. So the good philosopher, bad philosopher, it's something I did a whole, it's a 22-part history of philosophers series for subscribers on the show. And one of the things, which seems like a fairly trivial insight in hindsight, but was kind of mind-blowing to me at the time, is that there is no history of philosophers objectively. In other words, there wasn't just this meritocracy of who was really good and who wasn't really good, and they just chose the very best, like everybody runs a race and whoever gets across the finish line. It's like philosophers Philosophers who were allowed to speak and philosophers who are allowed to be taught and philosophers who, to some degree or another, serve the powers that be. So one of the reasons I think that we know so much about Socrates is that Socrates was.
[1:05:45] Justified the power of the state by saying hey if the city decides to kill me well that's fine because the city i relied on the laws to survive i relied on the laws to get my food and my protection and the city has protected me from invasion and so if the government decides to kill me well i owe my government the life and therefore my life is for the governments to do as it pleases which i actually think was a complete curse i have a whole series of this from like 15 years ago this is a curse on humanity because Socrates says that most men are unwise most men are fools and people were voting for him and so he knew that the vote was not an act of wisdom but an act of prejudice and sophistry which he directly accused Miletus of inciting so he said as his curse kill me fine I'll just tell you to obey the state and everything's It's going to go great for you going forward. So Socrates is allowed because of that. So a good philosopher in general has to start with a completely blank slate and no assumptions whatsoever. You have to return to a state almost of infancy and say, okay, I have a whole bunch of assumptions based upon my empirical experience.
[1:07:03] I have been told a whole bunch of moral lessons by people who are probably corrupt to the core. So what happens if I completely wipe blank my preconceptions and start building from reason and evidence and first principles, accepting every step and having to validate every step? So, the general pattern is a sort of four-part series of dominoes in good philosophy is you start with metaphysics. Metaphysics is what is real. What is real, what is true, what is objective, what exists, what doesn't exist, and that's sort of what is. And then you have to go to epistemology, which is a fancy word for the theory of knowledge. So if I know what is real, then how do I know that and how do I differentiate what is real from the unreal, what is true from the false? From there, you have to go to ethics because the whole point of philosophy is ethics. There is philosophy of science, there's philosophy of mathematics.
[1:08:02] There's philosophy of religion, but the only thing that differentiates philosophy from all the other disciplines is morality. So if you're not doing morality, you're not doing philosophy. And then the big challenge is you have to overcome what Hume called the is-ought distinction, which is to say, and Andrew Wilson was talking about this in a recent podcast, you can't get an ought from an is. You can't get a should from a fact. You know, if a guy pushes a woman off a cliff, she falls to her death. Okay, that's a physical fact. That's a fact of physics and biology.
[1:08:35] Why should you or should you not do these things. And from there... In the current system that we have, you then have to go to politics, and politics is a study of the morally legitimated institutional use of coercion or violence in society. Now, of course, as a voluntarist or an anarchist, it is my goal in probably about half a millennia to have a society which is free of institutionalized coercion that is justified by the general population out of fear of a lack of safety. But that's not where we are so you kind of have to deal with politics to some degree or another so good philosophers start with the assumption of nothing and this comes straight out of rené descartes meditations which is okay what if i am in fact just a brain and a tank being wired up by a demon to like matrix style right what if everything is is just a fantasy and and nothing is real well that's an important question i mean every night we go to sleep and have these most.
[1:09:35] Amazing uh vivid dreams i won't even tell you the costume that you were wearing in my dream last night because it would probably get you banned from uh the planet as a whole but uh although the elephant head does look good on you but so every night we have these wild vivid dreams we wake up and we know for sure that they were dreams that were now awake and the philosophy good philosopher says well how do we know that assume nothing right the good physicist says well the world does look flat as we talked about last time and everything looks like it the stars look like they're rotating around us like some inverse halogen hollander or something but what if that's not true what if everything i perceive is incorrect and that way you can build a certain edifice of knowledge and many philosophers have tried this uh to varying degrees of success uh the most notable being i would say rennie descartes and uh emmanuel uh kant just said okay what if nothing is true and I have to build everything up from the ground up. And that's really been my process. I think it was about 15 or so, no, more, 17 or so years ago, I did a 17-part introduction to philosophy series where I said, you know, with a whiteboard and, you know, my primitive 240p camera, and I said, what if...
[1:10:45] What if we don't know anything? What if I don't know if I exist or you exist or the sense data is real or anything? How do we go from there to abstract universal moral philosophy? And it's a big challenge. So the philosophers that I like the most, who respect the most, are the ones who absolutely, like, you have to grit your teeth. It's like when I used to do long-distance running when I was in my teens and my 20s. Like when you start you feel like you're going to die after the first 10 minutes and then after you break through that you can run you know i ran 20 miles once and you just keep going and you just have to grit your teeth and say i'm not going to stop you know just keep swimming just keep swimming just going to keep going and keep going and not divert now to me the best philosophers are the ones who take that approach i know nothing i'm going to build these principles from the ground up, and it doesn't matter to me where they lead. I am not invested in the outcome. I am only invested in the process.
[1:11:42] So philosophers like Ayn Rand started with metaphysics and epistemology. There's a whole great book called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, and then she went through to ethics, which I think she failed at, and then she went through to politics, which she also failed at because she still justified the existence of institutionalized coercion such as statism but having staying on that ride is really tough and then the last thing not only but also you also get this free chamois cloth but not all not only that after you go through that process you then have the challenge of saying okay i've gone through metaphysics epistemology ethics politics i have a robust moral system now how does it get applied in people's actual lives that is the to me the biggest challenge of all and i think one of the things that differentiates what i do from what other philosophers do is i've now had over the last i mean it's close to 20 years now i started in 2005 so yeah it's almost 20 years i've had thousands and thousands of conversations with people about how to take abstract moral principles and apply them to their actual daily practical lives and so it's one thing to build this wonderful cathedral of thought, but people also have to come in and get some moral instructions and have their lives improved thereby.
[1:13:05] And so, a lot of philosophers aim for abstractions and just keep going.
[1:13:11] They don't return to earth with these abstractions and give practical utility to people. It's like people who study, you know, theories of diet and so on, but never write any diet books that can actually help people. So, I've done, you know, the theoretical work that I think is very important, and in terms of practical application. So, for instance, the non-aggression principle is very, very simple to defend and universalize.
[1:13:36] And then the question is, once you've done that, what happens? Well, what happens with most people, and this is particularly true in more liberty-minded circles, is they say, well, you know, the central banking is just counterfeiting. It's like, yes, yes, it is. And what are you going to do about it, right? And the what are you going to do about it is the question. Of course, we don't want to go and, you know, use violence ourselves. So what do you do? or you know foreign aid is is uh taking money from the rich of poor people of rich countries and sending it to the rich people of poor countries and it corrupts other countries and so on it's like yes that's true and and so what do you get a war is bad yes and so the yes and what do you do about it is the challenge so again i was like blank slating uh because that's my sort of every morning it's like grit your teeth and blank your slate right and so i was blank slating and saying, okay, so once we accept that the non-aggression principle, thou shalt not initiate the use of force, once we accept that that's a valid moral principle, what are we going to do? Well, I could complain about things I have no control over, but that doesn't seem to be like a very good idea at all. I mean, it is like a lecturing... A graveyard on how to take care of their health. I mean, it's a little bit past, the issue at hand, and you can't really affect the outcome because it's already in the past.
[1:14:58] So what I said was, okay, so violations of the non-aggression principle, what's the most widespread violation of the non-aggression principle that we can do the most about? What's the most widespread violation of the non-aggression principle that we can do the most about. Now, of course, I worked in a daycare as a kid, as a teenager for many years, and so on, and saw various negative outcomes. Of course, I had some negative outcomes myself as a child and saw other people with negative outcomes due to violence within the home. It's like, ah, okay, so what is the most common violation of the non-aggression principle?
[1:15:30] Well, spanking. I mean, 75, 80, 90% really depends on the ethnicity of parents that are still hitting their children. So that is the biggest violation and the most widespread violation of the moral of the non-aggression principle that we can do the most about yay philosopher has returned from the heavens with tablets of practical action sorry to put myself in rather illustrious and heavily bearded company so the idea then that we would say let's work on child abuse let's work on violations of the non-aggression principle against children, and so on, that was to me the most practical outcome. And so I made the case in many, many different venues and forums and PowerPoints and speeches and debates and all of that, and I recently of course finished my magnum opus on this called Peaceful Parenting, which people can get at peacefulparenting.com, it's free. There's even an AI you can ask parenting questions that will give you some pretty fantastic answers. So, I think good philosophers start with a blank slate, work their way to the most broad abstractions and then bring them back to earth in practical and actionable manners so that you can become a moral person. Because if the purpose of morality is to rail at the toenails of the gods you can do nothing about then it's simply an exercise in paralysis and futility.
[1:16:48] If you can, like, if you say, well, the purpose of moral philosophy is to end foreign aid, it's like, well, good luck with all of that, right? I mean, you can talk to people and you could, I guess, even run for office, but of course, we can see what's going on right now with people who run for office who aren't part of the elite who actually want to change things. They tend to get some fairly pretty ear clippings from time to time. But what you can do is you can talk within your family and friendships and social circle about not violating the non-aggression principle with regards to helpless and dependent children. That's something you can do. And that practical aspect is tricky, though. Because you know railing against the federal reserve and and foreign aid and the national debt gives you a certain amount of chest beating satisfaction but it doesn't actually really do much to achieve good in society but if you actually take on something like hitting children.
[1:17:38] Then you can achieve some real good but the problem is of course when you when you achieve real good i can tell you this from some fairly vivid personal experience keith when you actually achieve some good uh you get that lovely little thing called blowback you know because you know If you're yelling about foreign aid and you don't shift where one dollar goes, you don't really bother anyone. But the moment you actually start to change the disposition of good and evil in society, well... It's funny, you know, one of my favorite books when I was younger is The Hobbit. And The Hobbit is a fantastic book because most fairy tales end, Oh, we've killed the dragon!
[1:18:13] Everything's fantastic! Yay, look at all this treasure! There's no more danger for Lake Town! And everyone's like dancing and singing, and that's usually the end of the movie. But the genius, one of the many aspects of genius of Tolkien is, well, after you kill the dragon, there's a war. It's a battle of the five armies. Everybody fights over the treasure. And so ending evil often creates a power vacuum, and that's a challenge. If you directly interfere with the intentions of evil people, they will attack you back. And because you're in the right and they're in the wrong, it'll usually be lie, slander, and reputational attack or physical violence. And so to do good means angering evil and they're going to have something to say about what you do and so i think the good philosopher gets people to enact virtue in their daily lives in measurable and objective ways and of course if we can do our part in ending child abuse most of the other evils in society will fall as well.
[1:19:13] How can we differentiate smart people from ignorant people?
[1:19:20] Well, so IQ is obviously an imperfect measure, but it's the best we've got. And it's the one that is by far the most correlated with success in the world. And of course, if people can come up with an intelligence test that better predicts outcomes than IQ does, I would be the first to sort of champion it. So IQ is kind of the best thing that we've got for intelligence at the moment. Now, IQ, and I did like a series of interviews with people.
[1:19:53] It was, gosh, what was it, 17 world experts in the field of IQ to sort of help understand this because I wanted to know how to be fair and how to be just, right? You want to know how to be fair and be just. So I don't want to blame people for things beyond their control. You don't want to blame people for being short or their eye color or things that are really beyond their control, because that would be unfair and unjust. That would be like blaming a kid for being lazy because he happened to be born into a poor family and he just didn't have much money. Now, if an adult doesn't have much money, maybe they're kind of lazy, but you wouldn't blame a kid for that, right? So, I wanted to figure out what was under people's control and what wasn't. And so, as a philosopher, your goal is to increase people's wisdom, because wisdom is somewhat of a choice. Now, in the research, it seems to be fairly clear IQ is about 80% genetic by your late teens. It even goes up somewhere from there, but let's sort of take the baseline of 80%.
[1:21:01] Now, that still gives you 20% to work with. That's a lot. That's more than a standard deviation of intelligence, like 100 to 85 or 100 to 115, give or take. Right so to determine whether somebody is intelligent or not there are a couple of tests that i use and again just because they're not intelligent doesn't mean they can't become wise although intelligence can help although the argument is as well that intelligent people can talk themselves in and out of 20 different positions in a day and i know i've certainly been in that camp as well. So there's a couple of things that I do. So when you make a generalized statement, and somebody comes back with a specific statement.
[1:21:49] Exception uh that generally is somebody who is not not thinking now just if somebody doesn't think there's two reasons either they can't think because they're just not smart or they can think but they've chosen not to which means they lack self-criticism so that's one thing and you know the typical example is uh women women are generally shorter than men it's like well i know a guy his girlfriend's taller than he is. And it's like, hmm, I'm afraid the giant addition that you are making to the conversation may be visible only to you. Or as the old saying, wisdom has constantly been chasing you, but you've always been slightly faster.
[1:22:32] So that's one example. Another example, of course, which is very common is the response of an ad hominem or a personal attack to a moral statement. Now this, I'm going to introduce this because nobody on the internet has ever seen this before. I'm one of those rare travelers who's seen this incredible resurrected dodo bird of the ad hominem. So if you say there's a general statement and somebody says, well, only an a-hole would say that, it's like, well, maybe, but that still doesn't deal with the facts of the issue. you. So when someone is triggered, intelligence gives you the option to intercept your lizard brain responses, right? So you have, depends on how you clock it, but generally you have about a quarter second to intercept an aggressive impulse and reason with it and so on. And for most people, whatever their mental reflexes are, it's somewhat longer than a quarter of a second because people just act out, they get aggressive, they get mad and so on, right? I mean, in a perverse way i was proud of what was voted of mine the the worst tweet in the history of twitter and in in the modern parlance uh being called the worst guy is uh um you know people we retweet stalin and hitler but no my tweet was voted uh and fairly overwhelmingly as the worst tweet in the history of twitter which was a little surprising to me uh it went something like uh.
[1:23:59] Ah campbell this is five years ago when i said wow taylor swift is turning 30 she's so young she looks so young. I hope that she'll think about having kids because by the time you're 30, like 90% of your eggs are dead as a woman. I hope she'll think about having kids. She looks like she'd be a fun mom.
[1:24:16] Now, that was actually very positive, I think, against Taylor Swift, well, except her politics, and her radiating childlessness to the NPC crowd. Well, okay, maybe I have a couple of things against Taylor Swift, and her fans. Wait, no, let's not get drawn down the Taylor Swift side quest. Side quest so um uh people went completely nuts it is a scientific fact that 90 of a woman's eggs are dead by the time she's 30 that doesn't mean she can't have kids she's still got five years until his geriatric pregnancy but people went um they're completely mental about and we're just you know nobody's gonna have sex with you in cell it's like okay i'm happily married for 22 years, but okay, and what am I going to do? I'm going to have sex with everyone but you, incel, you know, like this kind of stuff, right? It's like, oh, really? Bitter, angry, dangerous, sociopathic women might be withholding sex from me?
[1:25:14] Whatever am I going to do to get through the day? So, that's another example of people who who are just triggered are people who don't express doubt uh also a certainty is i used to call them the period people because i grew up in sort of a very poor welfare fairly crappy trashy neighborhood and it was full of people who were like you know it's just like this period you know and the the period was like blah blah blah period you know end of discussion it's like really for me the only end of discussion is probably about 15 to 20 minutes after I'm dead. I'm sure I'll have some, like, hey, you know how your fingernails grow after you die and your hair? Well, I will continue to have debates and discussions.
[1:25:58] There'll be some scratching on the coffin roof. I'll continue going on for a little while. So for me, the end of discussion is the end of life. But for these people, it's like, boom, period, end of discussion. And it's like, okay, so I just kind I kind of move on from that as a whole. People who don't expose themselves to contradictory opinions, you know, the echo chamber stuff. And this is why, like, people on the left have, you know, good and bad points. But in general, they tend to be less robust because they're exposed to far more echo chambers. Anybody who's not on the left is just, you're just swimming against the current. And you just get stronger. Like, you just get stronger swimming against the current. So, of course, I'm a, you know, very much a free market guy and a reason and evidence guy and objectivity guy and, um...
[1:26:45] So, I mean, in high school, it was fairly lefty in England and Canada and other places and in university and outright Marxist and so on. And so I've just, and then I was in the theater world. I went to the National Theater School. I wrote and directed plays. And I mean, in Canada, the man, the theater world is, I mean, it makes Lennon look like Ayn Rand. So because you know dependent on government money and and npcs that kind of way and they're not interested in exploring the human condition which is what good artists should do they're just interested in promoting division uh hatred and resentment so it is a monster so you're sailing against the currents you just end up kind of robust so when you hear people repeat npc talking points uh and they just don't have any idea that there's another perspective or opinion.
[1:27:41] Then they're just not intelligent because to be intelligent is to be skeptical right because if you haven't noticed if you haven't noticed that the world is full of pathological liars in power i don't even know what to tell you you know that is that is the old thing like one fish turns to the other and says uh there what is a little chilly today it's like water what water i just float right so if people haven't noticed that there are pathological liars in power and that there's a massive incentive for people in power to lie to them and therefore they should have skepticism you know what's the old thing about it's pretty easy for a woman to be attractive to man just put on a sundress and say you don't trust the government i mean you're sad right so anybody who hasn't noticed that like i really don't know hey mainstream media doesn't always tell the truth that they're not super objective and if you haven't noticed that i honestly i wouldn't even know it's it's like there's a cruel meme about the boom boomers where they say you You know, when you're arguing with a boomer, I can say this because I missed by one year, one year. I know I may look like the Crypt Keeper to your younger audience, but I missed by one year. I'm still pre-boomer by one year. But when you're arguing with the boomer, you're arguing with the television. The television can't hear you and it doesn't care.
[1:28:53] And so people who don't have inputs and people who get aggressive when contradicted or when counter information comes up, people who cite specific exemptions to general rules as some intellectual work of achievement and so on. And also, honestly, I view people who don't read fiction as a problem. Because one of the things that's highly correlated with the development of empathy is the reading of fiction.
[1:29:20] Because fiction is your chance to try on another person's life for a size, especially first-person fiction. I wrote a novel not too long ago.
[1:29:29] Where I switched between first and third person in a way to kind of disorient. This is how the person looks from the outside, but this is what they're thinking on the inside. And people who don't read fiction generally don't have as much empathy. And it's not just my opinion. Studies have been done that the reading of fiction generally helps foster empathy because you're then curious about how other people think and feel. And a lot of debate has to do with empathy. And because the opposite of debate is violence and violence is the opposite of empathy right so if you and i are debating we're negotiating to try and find the truth to the mutual benefit right if you you know if we're driving to vegas and i'm going the wrong way and you tell me to go the right way you haven't harmed me you've helped me i mean the purpose is truth so we empathize with each other with reasoning the people who use ad hominems and you know there's all these terrible stories online at the moment after the second uh what seems like an assassination against attempt against trump you know there's lots of people saying you know i had this friend of like 10 years or 20 years we were talking about the assassination and my friend said i can't it's a damn shame they didn't miss and it's like oh oh that's uh what's that uh knock knock at trump to Harris. Knock, knock. Who's there? Owen. Owen who? Owen too.
[1:30:52] So, that level of, to me, just straight up sociopathy. I wish that somebody I disagree with politically got killed. Well, of course, that's most of human history. Most of human history is killing people who disagreed with Ewing. Whether it's hitting them on the head with a club or the jawbone of an ass or it's putting them in concentration camps or sending them to war. I mean, a lot of Republicans in the South and so the wars wipe out the soldiers and and so on so you way to wipe out your political enemies so, empathy is that we are going to be happy to reason with each other because we know that the only only alternative to reasoning with each other the only alternative to reasoning with each other is outright violence and that will destroy society as a whole and so i look for people who are interested in fiction. And not just, you know, I have a prejudice more for 19th century fiction as sort of my favorite time, because there was genuine examination of the human condition and, you know, deep thoughts without the politics creeping in at all times and under all circumstances, no matter what. And so I look for people who are interested in fiction. Poetry as well is a way to enter somebody else's dream state and imagination to have a self and an other. So So there's lots of cool things that I use to try and figure out who's worth really talking to.
[1:32:18] I've already zoomed in your bookshelf to look for fiction in the back to make sure we can talk. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:32:23] You know what? Fiction is actually on this side. I promise it's here. Wait, is it on your left?
[1:32:28] Oh, no, it's left-wing fiction. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:32:32] So my favorite thing to do is to really get a quick idea of where someone stands on a given topic and ask them to steel man the opposition. And if they can't do it without straw manning, when I specifically ask for a steel man, I know that I'm wasting time with a person. So thank you so much for giving me those to add to the ideas of how I can communicate to people and find out who's worth spending time with. One of my favorite contributions you have given the world is your ability to analyze propaganda. I had never seen this before. Mr. Molyneux goes line by line in certain articles and really walks you through the manipulative language that's used. So I want to go through a couple of my favorite examples. In April of 2014, the sitting president and graduate from Harvard University, Barack Obama, said, it's not a myth, it's math, referring to the gender wage gap. Apparently, he actually believed this. So, women earn 77 cents on the dollar for every dollar a man makes. Therefore, there is a gender pay gap. This gap between the genders is proof of sexism. What if anything is wrong with that logic?
[1:33:50] Right. I'm going to zoom out for just a second about, because there's a couple of threads I want to talk about with regards to propaganda. And apparently, this is just all about me. So I'll do that. And I think it'll make sense. So let me ask you, where are you in the birth order of your family?
[1:34:06] I am the youngest. My brother is the oldest. My sister's older than I am. And I am the third child. We all share a father. My mother only has me.
[1:34:19] Okay, got it. Now, what's the age gap? This will make sense. Just bear with me for a sec.
[1:34:27] He is 37. She is 34. I'm 28.
[1:34:34] Okay. So when you were a kid, a little kid, and of course, that's quite a substantial age gap. I'm a younger sibling as well. My brother's two and a bit years, two and a couple of months older than me. So when you were a kid it was hard to get resources relative to your siblings right so so if they had the toy you couldn't if you had the toy they could get it from you if they had the toy you couldn't get it from them and so when you're a little kid you have to complain when you don't get your fair share right so there's there's older people that the parents get whatever they want the older siblings get whatever they want they have the cool toys they get to stay up later they get more allowance, they get more privileges, they get more freedom, and there's a certain amount of resentment. And it's not unhealthy. It's perfectly how we've evolved. There's nothing wrong with it. But there's a certain amount of resentment that comes from.
[1:35:29] Being a younger sibling, and mothers have to be very sensitive to this and equalize things. And they have to equalize things sometimes using force, right? They have to literally, if the older kid snatches the toy from the younger kid, the mother has to take it, pry it out of the hands maybe, and give it back. And of course, we don't say to kids, well, there's a whole bunch of food there, and you've got a one-year-old, a five-year-old, and a 10-year-old, well, you all just go and get as much food as you want, and we'll just let it be a meritocracy. It's like, no, no, you have to take food and make sure that the youngest kid gets it and and so on right so forced redistribution resentment of people who are doing better than you complaining and appealing to authority to get resources from the more competent and successful and give them to you is a childhood experience so propaganda i you won't believe how i'm going to bring this in for a landing nobody knows what the heck i'm talking about trust me or don't uh but i will bring it in for a landing right so what is it that politicians are continually saying to people. The rich aren't paying their fair share.
[1:36:31] Corporations don't pay enough in taxes. You're being ripped off. And what they're doing is they're trying to appeal to a childhood mindset where things are unfair. Through no fault of your own, you're not getting enough. It's not your fault that you happen to be born last. And there are all of these older siblings who are getting more and it's unfair and you need to appeal to authority to take from people who are more successful and more competent in your childhood, it would be your older siblings, and give to you. Without that, you just can't survive. What they're doing, this is so common in propaganda, it's one of the reasons why leftism and classism and this kind of division stuff works, is they're trying to get you to regress to a state of childhood which is envy, resentment, and helplessness.
[1:37:24] I mean, maybe I'm alone in this pettiness. I don't think I am, but I very clearly remember as a kid, my brother had the right to stay up five minutes later. I mean, this is sad. I'm not proud of this, but it's just the way that I was, and I've dealt with it completely. But i remember sitting in my bed and i knew i was probably about i don't know four or five years old and i knew that five minutes was me counting to 300 right this is how sad but you have to be this way as a younger sibling you have to because otherwise you don't get enough resources, and so oh five minutes is it fine one two i won't do the whole 300 for you but i would i would sit there and I'd have my covers off my toes to make sure I didn't miscount. And it would be like, it's been five minutes, it's bedtime. And like, this is how petty and right? Oh my gosh.
[1:38:30] Now, as a kid, you have to guide your interests that way. You have to say, look, there are people doing better through no fault of my own and no, you know, it bothered me that the older kids, you know, oh, you're just a little kid. It's like, oh, wow, you did the amazing moral task of having to drop out of Moms for JJ slightly earlier than I did. Wow, what a thing to be achieved, right? So as a kid, this resentment of people who are doing better and taking more and the appeal to authority to make things equal is how younger siblings survive. Now, I've only done a cursory examination of this, and you, of course, would be an exception here, but a lot of people on the left are younger siblings.
[1:39:14] And when the government comes to you and says, injustices are being done against you, those with more power are taking more, and we're here to make it equal. Well, why is that such a common experience for people? We all go through childhood, right? We all go through childhood. And all younger siblings have to fight like heck to make sure we get our fair share. Through no fault of our own, we happen to be smaller and weaker and younger and so on, right? And so... When the government comes along and says, there are people who are unjustly taking from you, and we're here to make it right.
[1:39:56] Well, that is men are stealing from you women, and we are here to make them give you back what they've taken from you. We're here to make sure you get your fair share, which through no fault of your own is being taken from you. Why is that so believable to everyone? Well, because it's an essential part of how siblings survive. And most people grow up with siblings, and there are a lot of younger siblings. So you see this all the time in election years, where it's like, the rich aren't paying their fair share. Well, why does that seem believable to people? Because one cursory look at the data is like, no, no, no. The rich aren't paying their fair share. They're paying way too much. You know, when the top 5% of earners are paying 50% of the income tax, that's ridiculously unfair.
[1:40:43] But why is it that people are, like, there is a greedy part, which is like, Like, ooh, I can resent people and get stuff for free. I get all of that. But why is it that it's so believable for people when the government comes along and says, and, you know, this is from as relatively mild a case as the gender pay gap to something that's completely egregious, which we talked about in the last conversation, which is, you know, the communists coming along and saying, that factory was stolen from your ancestors. We're going to go kill the factory owners and give it back to you. Well, that's appealing to a parent in a sibling dynamic on massive, you know, hyper-ideological steroids. But I think that when we have an incredibly common experience, like resentment of the successful and the appeal of authority to equalize, why is it? Because that's how most of us survive. You know, in human evolution, when people had no birth control and, you know, the same sex drives as we have now, well, what happened? Well, you had, you know, five, eight, 10, 12 kids. And so the majority, the vast majority of us are younger siblings, not youngest, but younger siblings. Right, the vast majority of us are younger siblings. And younger siblings, we have to appeal to authority, complain, be resentful, look for equalization, and be perfectly happy when force is used to get us resources.
[1:42:08] Because we don't survive. Otherwise, you think, of course, of limited food. There was limited food throughout most of our evolution. Things were touch and go for a lot of kids, and you really had to fight like hell, and you had to appeal to authority to take things away from the more powerful and give them to you. So, to me, a lot of propaganda is having people, through the language of parenting, regress into a helpless, resentful, and dependent upon authority state of mind, to get people to regress to childhood and it's very tempting because that is the mindset particularly for young people you know there's this idea that people become more free market and conservative as they age but that's because we get further away from childhood whereas when you're young getting you to regress to a childhood state of mind is pretty easy so when you go to women and you say uh well men are taking stuff from you and it's unequal and you're underpaid and so on There is a certain amount of greed for the unearned, for sure, but there's a lot of girls who had older brothers who just took stuff from them and got more time, attention, who had more privileges because they were older, and there's just this resentment. And I think it's pretty easy to strip mine. The numbers, of course, are easy to debunk, right? I mean, we can just touch on them briefly here. Women with the same amount of education who've been in the workforce for the same amount of time as men actually earn more than men. can.
[1:43:29] Women take less high-paying degrees and careers. The student loan debt crisis is largely women taking economically unproductive degrees. If you look at the highest-paid professions, like oil engineering, petroleum engineering is like the highest-paid profession. There's almost no women. Computer science for a long time there before AI was highly paid, very few women. And so women tend to go for lower-paying occupations. And it's not because of the patriarchy, because.
[1:43:57] When women get more economic and political freedom, they tend to go even more for traditionally female-based occupations. And if you look at the top 20 female occupations from 100 years ago, it's pretty much what women in a free society are going into now. Women prefer dealing with people, and men prefer dealing with things. And dealing with things tends to be more economically productive than dealing with people, which tends to be hourly, whereas if you deal with things and you manufacture stuff, you tend to get economies of scale, which you don't get for women. Men work longer hours. we have higher testosterone, we have generally more drive, and we can ignore our feelings in pursuit of an objective a little bit more than women. And of course, the other thing too is, well, you can get male and female economic equality for one generation, and one generation only, and then there's no people left. Yay!
[1:44:47] Equality followed by the extinction event. We've seen this a couple of times before, right? Because the only way that you can get men and women outside of just ordering women to do economically productive things and maybe hitting them with massive doses of testosterone is to give up on childbirth because childbirth and raising children i mean not only did i work at a daycare but my daughter is almost 16 i've been a stay-at-home dad for 16 years and that's just one kid and she's great and easy to get along with uh and not a boy so i get that's a little different too so uh childbirth and raising kids takes you out of the workforce.
[1:45:26] I mean, if you want to raise kids well, you've got to keep them out of government schools, you've got to spend all your day with them, and so you just can't be out there working and building some feminist empire if you want to raise kids. So that's another factor, too, that when women get pregnant and have kids, they have to take time off to give of birth that we we want the kids breastfeed because breastfed because that's the best for their health particularly their immune system it's also better for the mothers i mean the fetus leaves behind stem cells that help repair the damage and injury to the mother decades later so it's better for everyone's health and um a lot of women don't go back to their workforce because they want to stay home or they prefer staying home and so we can get i guess men and women to parity but only if we stop having kids and uh you know i mean i guess i'm somewhat of a fan of equality of opportunity equality of outcome leading to the end of the human race so that one set of women gets to taste pure economic equality and then there's no more people you know seems like a bit of a high price to pay.
[1:46:37] Next propaganda analysis. Men commit a disproportionate amount of crime because the patriarchy has entitled them to take whatever they want. Blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime because institutionalized racism has forced them into poverty and forced them to commit crimes. What, if anything, is wrong with that statement? Right.
[1:46:59] Well, I mean, I do think that men commit a disproportionate amount of crimes that are violent and obvious out there in society. But the big question is, if you include things like abortion as a crime, if you include abuse against children as a crime. Now, it's not just physical abuse. I mean, maybe this is slightly contentious to your audience, and I fully accept that, and slightly contentious to myself, if that helps at all. But verbal abuse against children is a violation of the non-aggression principle. In other words, if you keep telling a child you're stupid and selfish and an a-hole and a jerk and you just keep putting them down, well, verbal abuse against adults is not a violation of the non-aggression principle because you're talking to an already formed personality that's perfectly free to leave.
[1:47:53] But uh if you were to kidnap someone and brainwash them the brainwashing would be part like you you kept them up you know for three days straight and bombarded them with propaganda and so on well, that would not be violent abuse except for the confinement but children are confined by the state of nature by the fact that they're children so verbal abuse against children is a violation of the non-aggression principle so if you include uh spanking if you include other forms of coercive discipline such as confining to the room or even timeouts or using physical size and strength to confine children, if you include verbal abuse, then women commit more aggression than men. I mean, certainly in domestic violence cases, it's 50-50, even with the bias against men reporting against women. But if you include abortion and child abuse, women outstrip men with regards to violence by far. Like, it's not even close. It's not even close. The vast The vast majority of men will go through their life without committing a violent crime. But the significant majority of women will commit a violent crime against their children. And it's only by ignoring children that we can pretend that men are just more abusive. If you look at coercive transfers of resources, well, women pay about half into the state that they get in benefits. So, that's a coercive redistribution of resources from men to women.
[1:49:17] Men pay about half into the state as they get out in terms of benefits. And so, that's another. If you look at some of the family court systems and issues where women coercively transfer resources through the power of politics from...
[1:49:32] Um men to women at the aforementioned student loan crisis where women are forcing largely men to pay if you look at the fact that like 90 to 95 percent of the infrastructure maintenance is men which is a far more dangerous occupation than um taking complaints about racism in an hr department nice and air-conditioned slightly more i mean i've done you know difficult and dangerous physical labor over the course of my youth and uh that there weren't any women out there at all right so uh letting men, men are like, what, 95% of workplace deaths are men and so on, right? So letting men take on all of that burden is not particularly great as well. So, and of course, the other thing too, is that when men talk about this kind of stuff, they just get attacked and laughed down and aggressed against and so on. So, I think in particular, modern society has tempted women into a fair amount of aggression and corruption under the guise of, you know, once you can teach people to be resentful, the use of violence then becomes legitimate. With regards to blacks and violent crime, I would sort of refer you to the IQ interviews that I have done. It is common throughout black communities across the world, tragically, blacks have a very high incidence of child abuse. I actually was talking to a woman a black woman about this on a show recently and um she actually was so preyed upon by the black men in her community when she was a girl and a teenager that she actually um.
[1:51:01] Starved herself became anorexic in order to become less attractive and according to the reports that i've read and and uh interviews that i've perused a half of black women report being raped by black men before the age of 18. Now, saying that white people or other people are all responsible for that is bizarre to the point where I don't even know what to say, right? Because you can say people have agency, right? So, blaming everyone else is not great. So, you know, fixing the black family experience, fixing the three-quarters of black children who are born and raised without Without a father around or without married, parents would do a lot. And that used to be way better. Back in the days of Jim Crow and genuine segregated racism, institutionalized racism, government program called racism, blacks were married at a rate of 80%. And blacks were getting out of the poor and into the middle class at very, very high rates. And then the government comes along to help, which is to create a dependent underclass. And of course, you know, I think there's some fairly sinister people involved in pushing rap and nihilism and so on on the black community and so on. So it's not just white racism. And with regards to the pay gap, you know, it's a fairly traditional argument, but if women are just as productive as men, but you can get them for 77 cents on the dollar, then just build an entire corporation of women and you'll completely win in the marketplace. So all women need to do is...
[1:52:30] Just hire other women and they'll be fine. And the last thing I would sort of say, just in terms of credibility, is that I really don't generally take much advice from people on economics who've never created a single job. You know, I've interviewed a thousand people over the course of my career. I've hired over a hundred people and negotiated raises for people who work for me. And so I've actually gone out and created jobs and had to work with young, old, male, female, all racist and and so on and for the people who are complaining i would just be like okay well how many women have you hired how many jobs have you created and you know not counting a government grant and i hired some people uh in a non-profit like they're actually in the free market right and and if they haven't it's like you know it's it's cute it's it's nice it's like telling it's like a you know when my daughter was little she would talk about the restaurant she wanted to make i actually incorporated this into one of my novels you know wouldn't it be great to have a restaurant in a tree with birds flying around and so on. And it's like dinosaurs. And yes, it would be. I completely agree with you. And it's a sort of fun fantasy to talk about. And so, but you wouldn't go build that restaurant. You know, when I got older, I'd say, yeah, but the birds would poop on the food. I mean, we have ducks. I know what that's all about. So for most people, when they're talking about this stuff, it's a childhood regression stuff. They don't have any actual experience creating jobs and managing people.
[1:53:55] And they have no skin in the game, and it's all just theoretical. They've never actually done it. Honestly, it's like my daughter talking about her fantasy restaurant. It's fun, and it's cute, but nothing to do with reality.
[1:54:08] Next, the free market is inefficient and exploitative. We need to focus on people, not profit.
[1:54:17] Yeah, inefficient. Well, I mean, it is inefficient for thieves.
[1:54:23] It is inefficient for people who want something for nothing. So I get that. It is more efficient for people to steal a factory than to build a factory. So I get that it's inefficient for corrupt people who want something for nothing. But, you know, again, to me, this is all just incomplete childhood stuff because it's not reachable by reason.
[1:54:47] So when you're a baby and a toddler, people should be providing you resources. You should not have to provide any value or earn anything. Right. I mean, nobody says to an 18-month-year-old baby, well, you can have your lunch, but first you have to mow the lawn or you have to wash the dishes or like there's no so so this idea that there are these benevolent entities that just give you stuff and you don't have to provide value that's how we all start out in life and it's our first a couple of years you know arguably you could say up until the age of you know five or six so our first half decade and your first impressions count for quite a lot in life for a first half decade we do live in a socialist paradise like why is it that the old marxist statement from each according to their ability to each according to their needs. Why is it that that resonates so much with people? Because that's our childhood. From each according to their ability is the parents hunt and grow food. To each according to their need is the babies need resources, the toddlers need resources that they cannot earn themselves and should not try. I mean you don't take a two-year-old hunting and give him a bow and arrow because he's going to shoot himself or you in the leg, right? So.
[1:55:58] I just look back to people, and this is why I talk to people about their childhoods, because until you can resolve childhood trauma, you can't really reason. Your brain is too scarred and avoidant and tense and stressed, and you're in PTSD and so on, right? I mean, it's like trying to give someone a complex mathematical proof while they're running from a bear. Like, they just can't concentrate on it. They can't think in it. Or they're just, shut up, I'm running from the bear. Like, there's just this panic and stress and so on, right? So as far as efficiency goes, I mean, I don't particularly care about efficiency. I care about virtue. And virtue is not very efficient at times, right? I mean, so I focus more on virtue than efficiency. But well, for sure, the free market is efficient. And we touched on this last conversation. The people best able to maximize resources end up with most of the resources. The people who can put the best use of capital to increasing wealth tend to have the most capital. people want to invest in them and lend them money and so on. So, efficiency is important. Exploitive? Well, that's one of these subjective things. You know, I mean, I guess everybody would like to be paid a million dollars an hour, I suppose, and everybody would like to have all the hot men and women in the universe throw themselves at their feet. And, you know, what does it mean if that doesn't happen, right? The idea that there is an abstract value that exists outside of what you can negotiate is completely bizarre to me.
[1:57:24] Like, what am I worth? I'm worth what I can get people to pay me. I mean, there's no, yes, but in my mind, I, you know, I should be a movie star and the lead singer of the Rolling Stones. Well, I guess if I can get the Rolling Stones to put me up front as a lead singer, because they want to commit career suicide, I guess, you know, that I could be very, very briefly the lead singer for the Rolling Stones. Maybe I could do that opening part. if you can't always get what you want with the Alto Children's Choir. So you get what you negotiate. That's all. You know, I don't have a right to your time. I don't have a right to be on your show. You don't have a right. But we talk about it, we negotiate, and here we are.
[1:58:07] So it's called entitlement. It's a psychological, huge psychological problem. Entitlement is the belief that you are worth what you estimate yourself to be worth rather than what other people accept you to be worth. Right so you know like the obese women who say men should find me sexy it's like no that's not your call that's not your call at all right i mean it's what you can negotiate when i was in the free market i mean i'm still in the free market but when i was a corporate executive in the software field yeah we would try to get uh investment we would try to get people to buy our product we would hire people and it was all about what we could negotiate i mean i wanted to sell my software for $10 million a pop, but I could only get $1 million. Do I say, I've been ripped off for $9 million? It's like, no, the $10 million is a fantasy. What you think you're worth is a fantasy. Everybody's the main star in their own production, and we should be. But I, you know, how many eyeballs do I deserve? As many as I earn. How many donations am I worth? As many as I can earn. And this idea that there's this abstract value that you have that exists only in your own mind and people are ripping you off if they don't take it. Well, that's what rapists think. I'm not calling everyone who believes this a rapist, but the rapist is like, I deserve sex.
[1:59:30] Uh no you don't at all right you deserve what you if you can get a woman to have sex with you voluntarily fantastic if you can't leave them alone so uh this idea that capitalism is exploitive and it underpays people and it's like you are what you negotiate you're worth what you negotiate now as a kid that's a different matter right you don't negotiate as a kid you're just given resources so again it's all of this incomplete childhood stuff and this resentment and i i i should get more, more than I am contributing, which is exploitive, right? I mean, if you can contribute a million dollars to a business, you can ask for some portion of that in salary. But if you only give $50 worth of value to a business, you can't really ask for anything because they, right? So you have to provide value and you have to negotiate for it. And other people have to agree voluntarily with your assessment of your value. And you generally will meet somewhere in the middle, right? You want more, they want to pay you less, you meet somewhere in the middle, and that that's all you're worth and this is why this is not anything specific to me this is sort of a museum argument that there's no such thing as objective value value is always subjective so when people say i'm exploited and i'm underpaid and women should get paid more and these people should be paid this and these people it's like there's this abstract standard of fairness that exists independent of what people can negotiate and there just isn't it's just a fantasy and it's It's just a complaining bludgeon to try and get resources by nagging.
[2:00:59] Two of the biggest propaganda, I guess you could say operations, that I have come across in my life are, one, the COVID narrative. Turns out that there was no correlation between states that had severe lockdown policies and mask mandates with states that had either no policy or those policies to a much lesser degree. So that COVID narrative was complete propaganda. Second is the food pyramid. In class, this would be elementary school in Arizona, you always had the Constitution on the wall, the American flag on the wall, the presidents on the wall, and the food pyramid, which said the primary thing that your diet should be surrounded on is bread, pasta, and grains. Of course, since this has been embraced, American obesity rates have skyrocketed. Check out the carnivore diet. Help me lose 110 pounds. So the question is, it's not that. Well, maybe the majorities are all wrong, but we don't have to worry about the majority. They're ignorant. The experts, the majority of the experts in these fields, at least the ones that we loudly heard from, were wrong on these issues primarily. How is it that so many experts could be so blatantly wrong about something?
[2:02:14] Yeah, I mean, I think in the future, they'll look back in our time and say, all the gravestones should have been pyramid shaped, because that's what's killing most people. It's absolutely appalling. And I mean, there's a lot of politics involved, as you know, in the food pyramid. I mean, there were a bunch of heart attacks in the 50s among people in political power, and they kind of freaked out. And they said oh it's uh you know the fats that are the problem and so they started stripping fat out of food but then it tasted like cardboard so they started adding sugar and uh of course women went to the workforce which meant that you couldn't make meals from scratch so processed food became.
[2:02:56] More uh valid and you know if you ever had one of those pizzas maybe before your carnivore thing you know those frozen pizzas that come on the cardboard it's like you might as well just leave the cardboard on it tastes about the same i mean just a little bit extra roughage so yeah food has become significantly poisoned in the modern realm. Of course, the sugar industry paid some scientists to say sugar is not the culprit and so on. So it's all completely corrupt. Of course, most of it has to do with government money and bad incentives. The whole COVID situation was a fiat currency situation. It was a debt and government money situation. COVID had nothing to do with medicine or health as far as that goes. Because if you were to go to people and you were to say, like, how much money did they spend developing the COVID vaccines or the mRNA technology over the past, you know, it's been 20 years or whatever, right? Well, I mean, it's hundreds of billions of dollars or I don't know, whatever it was, right? So if you were to go to people and you were to say, okay, there's this virus that's around, even if we kind of ignore the bioweapons lab origins of it, which to me is an open and shut case and i made this case years and years ago called the case against china so even if we were to just say oh it just it did come from bats it did come from a pangolin or whatever it is so we've got this virus here's the problem and the cure uh is going to cost you 150 000 or the the the um.
[2:04:19] Uh, the, the shot, right? The vaccine is going to cost you $150,000, which, you know, per person with all the debt and, you know, and so on, because not many people would, would pay that amount of money, right? They'd say, okay, are there any other alternative treatments, right? Now, of course, as you know, they had to suppress alternative treatments to get the emergency youth or use authorization, but they'd say, is there anything cheaper? Well, there's this ivermectin that won a Nobel prize and it's really only pennies a dose and blah, blah, blah. They'd look for alternatives right so how is it that they gave away this incredibly complicated and expensive technology for free it was government money government spending so and and what was the incentive to suppress alternative treatments or natural immunity or all the other things right well the incentive was that you didn't get access to hundreds of billions of dollars of quote free government money if there were alternative treatments.
[2:05:13] And of course, as we all know, the absolute horror shows that went on inside hospitals where hospitals were paid tens of thousands of dollars per COVID patient and COVID death, where hospitals were even further incentivized in some places to put people on ventilators and so on, with the idea of overcoming the cost, but it does create the ultimate perverse incentive, which is hospitals were in many cases paid for bad outcomes. And we all know that people respond to incentives. Of course, there were a lot of honorable and decent doctors who did the right thing. We also know, of course, that doctors were massively incentivized to have people take the vaccines. And like, not just all vaccines, but in particular, the mRNA vaccine to the tune of tens or sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, where's that money coming from? It's coming from the government.
[2:06:06] So the funding for these labs came from the government, which is, of course, where I'm fairly certain that the virus came from. So the money that came from these things only exists because of the government and the money for the medicines or the COVID shots came from the government. And then the government handed blanket immunity to the manufacturers and then the government at least until they were sued for the documents allowed for the some pharmaceutical companies to hide the data for 75 years and that to me was like come on i mean i hate to say iq test but you know it's novel technology they're not releasing the source data and the manufacturers are demanding immunity and they're saying they know that it's safe and effective with no long-term data i mean that to me i don't even know what to say like i can't i genuinely am baffled as to why people fell for this stuff so hard but obviously they did but then they also got hey you can feel like a really good person by obeying uh those in charge and hating your fellow citizen. And sadly, that is just a thing that human beings are very susceptible to.
[2:07:23] We're going to give you a gold sticker for obeying those in charge, and you get the moral joy of hating your fellow citizens who are not conforming. And sadly, that's just over and over. That's a copy-paste in history, which goes back to early childhood stuff, I think. So, the experts, I mean, people respond to incentives, and people who are not, you know, my moral tradition, of course, is Christianity, and so a lot of scientists are anti-theistic, right? And we'll just talk about Christianity as sort of the foundation of Western morals, the combo of Socrates and Jesus. So, why...
[2:08:04] Would people tell the truth when they're punished for it and they're rewarded for lying? Well, the only reason you would tell the truth when you're punished for telling the truth and rewarded for lying is you have an abstract moral principle that surmounts the hedonism of immediate material incentives.
[2:08:21] I mean, Jesus was offered the entire world under his dominion if he just worshipped Satan, and he's like, nope, not going to do it, right? So, in the absence of Christianity or in the absence of universal moral objective values and rules, people just respond to base mammal material immediate incentives. Oh, I get approval. Dopamine. Oh, I get money. Dopamine. Oh, I'm going to have disapproval and punishments for not doing what people say. Well, when you take away people's abstract morals, they just become basically frightened lemmings that are running from the dinosaurs and running towards the food. They become like, you know, when you're out in nature and you're walking through this lovely forest, you come across this beautiful meadow, and it's like, well, it's just full of animals trying to eat each other, not get eaten and reproduce in often violent ways. It just becomes a hedonistic treadmill.
[2:09:12] And so the experts were responding to all of the incentives, and I assume, absent any overarching moral rules, well, they just pretend to be moral and lie and take benefits and avoid punishments. When you get people to abandon morality, they become very easy to control, which is why the powers that be have a great hostility these days for Christianity and moral philosophers to some degree, because it's easy to control people without abstract moral values, because all you do is threaten them with punishment and bribe them with rewards. Oh you get 90 of people to comply without moral rules so um i assume that that's the x they were experts in maximizing benefits and minimizing discomfort so that's their expertise and i i take all of their statements through that filter do.
[2:09:58] You have time for two more or uh should i push these for tomorrow
[2:10:01] Let's do one more if that's all right absolutely.
[2:10:05] Oh no so no
[2:10:06] Wait there's one other option, I could be concise. No, no, let's be real. Okay, you know what? I will try to be concise because it's not your fault. I have, my daughter has this yapping. She just, this is yapping, right? Yap, yap, yap. And I disagree with her. Yap, yap, yap. I get this little Pac-Man thing come through. So, you know what? You had great questions. I have been fairly yappy. So, you know, I'll take on the challenge. Let's do two and I'll be concise. size.
[2:10:37] What criteria can we use to differentiate evil people from people who genuinely just have a different view of the world?
[2:10:45] Right. Are they villains or are they victims? This is a big question in life. So people who succumb to propaganda, are they driving propaganda because propaganda lets them do bad things, like hate their fellow citizens for private medical decisions, or Or are they victims in that they've been lied to and don't know about it? Well, there is a test, and we talked about this briefly, so I can talk about it even more briefly, which is people go from victimhood to villainy when they're given accurate information.
[2:11:19] Right, so when I talked to people about the COVID shots, I said, well, they can't possibly know the long-term effects because it's only been a couple of months. And they're not released into source data and they want to hide the documents for 75 years and they've demanded immunity from liability. Now, if people are like, yeah, you know what, that is interesting. I hadn't, you know, then that's fine. Then there are people who are looking for information. They don't have the information yet and they are good actors who lack information, which is true for all of us. We all lack information about, I mean, I know nothing about virtually anything because, you know, the sum total of human knowledge is virtually infinite and what I have is a tiny spot or slice of that. Hopefully the principles are overarching, but... So, for me, it's like when somebody lacks information, they are in a morally neutral place. But when you give them that information and they react with hostility, then they're revealed not as victims of a lack of information, which we all are to a large degree, but they're revealed as villains.
[2:12:24] And if they... There's this eerie, stunning silence in Canada at the moment, about the vaccines and what happened and the stripping of rights and travel and income and so on, right? And so if people were like, wow, you know, I really, I went, I fell for this stuff and, you know, there was some stuff that was kind of doubtful about it and so on, right? But if they don't talk about it afterwards, and they don't circle back and reflect and say, okay, well, what happened there? Was I a good guy? Was I a bad guy? At least have a conversation about it, right? Because certainly what people were told at the beginning is not what has played out. And so people who don't circle back and people who resist the topic, people who resist knowledge, or in the possession of knowledge, still believe things that are false and wrong. That to me is when they go from victim to villain.
[2:13:17] The Iron Law of Oligarchy states, All complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise. Does the existence of the iron law of oligarchy basically refute all of leftism that that all of us can be equally participants in society.
[2:13:52] So you know this old meme in Minecraft? I don't know if you know this old meme, where you say something that could get you in trouble with the authorities, and then you say, in Minecraft, right? And there's this meme, you know, like, we should do X, Y, and Z, terrible thing. In Minecraft, right? And it's the meme of the FBI agent ripping off his, oh, come on, he said in Minecraft, right? And so to me, like, all of these rules and these laws, It's like in-state-ism. You know, it's like if somebody's like, oh, I'm an expert biologist, I study all these animals, and then you look and I study all these animals and learn their nature and their properties and what they do and what they don't do and what they like and don't like and their habits, and then he never mentions to you that he only ever studies animals in a zoo. It's like that's not animals in their natural state, that's animals in a zoo.
[2:14:41] And so the iron law of oligarchy is like, that's in statism. Things get more and more complex and you have less and less impact and things get in statism. So it is certainly true that organizations get bigger and bigger and more complex and then become unwieldy. And then in a free market, they collapse into their constituent elements and the whole process starts again. In statism you can prop these companies up with preferential laws hiring policies government grants loans protection from foreign competition tariffs you name it right so i mean everybody knows in japan for like the last 40 years there have been these zombie corporations that are kept alive through government spending right i mean they have what the highest per capita national debt in the world right and so in statism yes oh gosh you know things get really complicated and corrupt and and bad and wrong and this and that and the other it's like yes in statism but that's like looking at animals in a zoo and think you understand something about the nature of animals human beings are in a human zoo we are in tax livestock farms called countries and we are constantly prodded and pushed and bullied and threatened and coerced and lied to, and we are in a state of anxiety and existential coercion, and sometimes direct coercion, right?
[2:16:09] So whatever we look at, when we are looking at human nature, or we are looking at social organization, or we are looking at corporations, corporations are legal fictions invented by the state so that rich people can pillage organizations for all the profits while accruing none of the liabilities, right? Because the corporation takes the liability, right? So if you are a bad guy and the corporation does some bad things, the corporation gets sued, you get to keep usually all the money. Occasionally if there's criminal things, that wouldn't be the case. But the corporation is a big magical shield wherein you say, oh, no, it's my invisible friend who committed all the crimes, so you can just throw him in jail. Oh, my invisible friend has been dissolved, therefore there's no wrongdoing. I mean, corporations are horrible legal fictions invented to bribe the elites to be enslaved and dependent upon and therefore praising of political power as a whole. So whenever people say, well, human beings are like this, and there's this inevitable cycle of civilization, and there's this corruption, and these organizations are too big to, and the corruption and politics gets in, it's like, in statism, why is art so much crap? Because lying to people through art is incredibly profitable, because every election in most Western democracies is responsible for the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of resources and people love political power.
[2:17:26] They're addicted to it, right? So, when we say, well, you know, art inevitably becomes politicized, in statism, and corporations inevitably become corrupt, in statism, well, there's regulatory capture in that the people, the government agencies that are supposed to regulate these industries always end up being controlled by those industries, in statism.
[2:17:47] So, yeah, there's all these national debts. In statism, you can't have a national debt without a statist society. So, as long as people say, in statism, right? I mean, it's sort of like saying, you know, all of the manual laborers are demotivated. And you're saying that in ancient Greece, right? It's like, well...
[2:18:09] Yes, but it's slavery, right? So, the problem with manual labor is that they're just unmotivated, and you have to keep prodding and pushing them, and they don't want to work, and this is the problem of human nature. And it's like, no, it's a problem of slavery. Now, once you free the slaves, then you get some pretty hard workers who are kind of entrepreneurial sometimes, and they don't resent as much, and productivity goes up, you get labor-saving devices, all you get the modern world. So, when slavery was foundational to all civilizations, as it was throughout all of human history until relatively recently, then you would say, well, I mean, of course, you have to whip your slaves, they have no motivation, they don't do anything unless you force them to. And it's like, in slavery! slavery. And so taking as axiomatic what organizations and human beings do in statism and saying that this is some sort of foundational existential thing, it's like, no, these are all just shadows cast by the system we choose to accept. And if we start to think of a different system, then we can have different outcomes. So I would not accept that as anything other than describing the actions of human beings trapped in a fairly hellish zoo, which we kind of are, And so when we start thinking outside the system, we don't have to look at these as iron laws, but simply the shadows cast by the coercion we accept in society.
[2:19:29] Thank you to everyone for watching. Keith and I don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Check out freedomain.com in the description below. Mr. Molyneux, thank you so much for your time.
[2:19:38] Thank you. I appreciate it. And thank you for access to your audience. We'll talk soon.
[2:19:41] This is part three of my discussion with Mr. Molyneux of freedomain.com. Steph, one of the most amazing things that I came across in my research was this claim that progressives have where they say monopolies are really bad. They lead to higher prices and lower quality that would otherwise exist under market conditions.
[2:20:05] They would then explain that the state needs to monopolize taxation a central bank compulsory education have a monopoly on guns and a long list of uh other things how is it that people especially people in high places professors experts politicians can hold such blatant contradictions without without it totally bugging them or ever uh getting addressed publicly
[2:20:32] Yeah, I mean, contradictions in my mind, they sit there like a splinter, you know, and if you've got a splinter in your finger and it's like, you've just got to get it out, you've got to deal with it. Now, I mean, Lord knows it has taken me a long time to deal with some contradictions, but I think they've always kind of been back there in an easy quagmire of my brain saying, needs to be resolved, needs to be resolved. The question of monopoly being frightening to people is something i've never really quite understood so generally when power aggregates and coercive power aggregates corruption follows all we talked about this at the end of the last conversation that the more complex organizations tend to get kind of corrupt and and it's true you get nepotism you get favoritism you get hire your buddies, you get wink, wink, nod, nod, money under the table to contractors where you give them deals and they give you some money back. It is an inevitable human desire to get something for nothing.
[2:21:33] And I have no problem with that. I mean, we want this conversation without having to fly out and sit in the same room. So we do that, right? When I was a kid, this is going to sound like ancient hieroglyphics to a younger audience. When I was a kid, you had to get up and change the channel, and you did it by spinning a dial. Tick, tick, tick, tick. And they were like, I don't know, when I grew up as a kid, there were like basically two channels in England. There was BBC One, which was nature documentaries. There was BBC Two, which was people sweating in incredibly intense kind of game shows. And then there was James Bond on ITV, and that was it. So you'd have to get up now, of course. You can just point and click. You can even voice say, go find me some show or whatever, and it'll figure out. So we like getting something for nothing, and that's great. When it's in the free market, it means things get progressively more efficient and wonderful.
[2:22:20] But there's a downside to that, of course, which is once you are willing to use force or fraud, then wanting something for nothing turns from efficiency to predation, right? And that's the big problem. So how do we counter the tendency for larger organizations to become more corrupt? Well, we have to do it through the free market.
[2:22:44] You can't say, well, the problem, as you point out, the problem is monopoly. Boy, you know, if somebody has a monopoly, if there's only one gas station in a small town, boy, they're just going to jack the prices through the roof because.
[2:22:57] No, it's not worth any other gas station coming there, and they'll just screw all their neighbors with their high gas prices. So a monopoly you see is really really bad when it comes to selling gas in a small town so what we want to do to counter that monopoly is create the most giant semi-fascistic organization with nukes and debt and money printing and and corrupt judges and all kinds of crazy stuff and the way that we deal with a small tiny mostly voluntary monopoly is with a giant predatory monopoly that you have no choice to participate in and that is completely bizarre oh do you have a slight headache well beheading will solve that problem and it's like well i suppose it's technically true i don't have the headache anymore but i'm also you know fading vision looking up marie antoinette styled from a basket so that doesn't seem to be the most productive way to solve things so frightening you with enemies and pretending to be your friend well that's the a good cop bad cop thing and that's the statist mentality as a whole now the problem of course is that the state is supposed to be there to solve problems like criminality but the more criminality there is the more you're willing to surrender your rights to the state so it really is it's like expecting uh mainstream sorry mainstream media to be objective about vaccines when brought to you by Pfizer it's like in every other frame it's probably subliminally put into Brian and Stelter's highly reflective forehead.
[2:24:24] So it's just not objective. It's not a solution. But if they can frighten you with enemies, pretend to be your friend.
[2:24:31] You'll give up all the rights in the known universe. And I mean, historically, we know, Complaints about monopolies are never brought by consumers, right? So let's say there's some, you know, you can say standard oil, which was broken up. And I remember explaining to my daughter, we could go past an ESSO gas station and say, why is it called ESSO? Because that's the acronym for standard oil. It was broken up and called ESSO for standard oil. So a monopoly, let's say that it's voluntarily chosen by consumers. Well, they choose it because it's really good and efficient at what it does. us. And that's a plus. So the consumers who are choosing a monopoly are not complaining.
[2:25:14] Who complains when there's a monopoly? Well, it's all the competitors who suck. The competitors who suck are the ones who complain about the monopoly. They run to the government and they say there's this evil monopoly. Now, one of the reasons why competitors suck and are inefficient is they bribe politicians a lot of times so if you have a large new company without some some new mammalian style versus the dinosaurs company comes into a marketplace well they don't they're not hooked into all of the bribery networks they're not hooked into all the corruption networks and they don't have to pay all that overhead of bribery and corruption so they just actually sell efficiently to the consumer and so the politicians when some new company comes along are out of the loop they're not embedded they don't have their vampiric proboscis into the arteries of the corporation so they want their old corporate buddies flinging them money under the table back in power so they start crippling the new company promoting the companies that are already corrupted and embedded with the politicians and complaining that they're price gouging the price gouging see you know it's really really important uh keith to remember that a price gouging.
[2:26:26] When the government complains that a corporation is price gouging, it's really, really important to listen to them. Now, the fact that the corporation can inflate your entire life savings away, raise taxes at will, and send you to war, which is not just price gouging, but shrapnel gouging, well, you really want to hear about them complain about a private corporation lowering prices. So, yeah, it's just generally a shakedown. People are very happy with, quote, monopolies because they're very efficient, and the complaints are brought by other companies that are probably better at bribing the politicians. So, yeah, it's all just corruption. And the only way you can solve the inevitable problem of corruption is through the free market. Corruption is inefficient. Corruption is overhead. Corruption makes the corporation produce less and have to charge more.
[2:27:13] And so you constantly need this churn. Everything is like the churn of the generations. You know, I remember when I became a father, oh, they're so cute, they're so wonderful. And then when she became better at video games than me, I'm like, oh, that's right. She's here to replace me. Yes, that's why she's here, because I won't be. And nature needs new bipeds. So you just you need that constant replenishment. everything that ages gets corrupt and in organizations and corporations so you constantly need a free market so that new corporations can come along and challenge the ossification and the sclerosis of the older corporation and without that well again you just look at the the japanese economy that we talked about last time and you can just see these zombie corporations that kill the birth rate by draining all the resources from society so yeah it's really really bad idea But yeah, the idea that you save yourself from a voluntary...
[2:28:11] Monopoly by in putting in a massive monopoly that has all the power of violence in the known universe is pretty wild and the last thing i'll say is you know i've had the fortune slash misfortune of spending a fair amount of time in small towns and let me tell you let's say that.
[2:28:28] There's only one gas station in a small town and people always forget this kind of stuff they think that it's all just dry calculations of mutual utility but human beings are social as well as economic animals. So if you're in a small town and you just decide to double the gas prices, right? And let's say for whatever reason, you're the only gig in town, it's not worth someone setting up a competitor and it's too far to drive to another town. Well, you live in that town and you got to socialize in that town. And if people say, well, you're just a complete jerk who has doubled gas prices because you basically want to just rip off your fellow towns members, as well, guess who ain't coming to the next 4th of July barbecue, or whose kids aren't going to be invited to the pool parties, who's not going to be invited to go hunting, whose wife is not going to be part of the church knitting group, right? So you're just simply going to be ostracized. And ostracism is an incredibly powerful mechanism of social control that entirely conforms with the non-aggression principle. It's just freedom of association. Of course, forced association is a a violation of freedom of association and we've lost our capacity to ostracize as societies the the price of having a kid out of wedlock in the past was ostracism from polite society and we don't have.
[2:29:44] Really the ability to ostracize people from an economic standpoint which is where really where it matters because the government just takes our money and gives it to them anyway with regards to you know who is what's going on in springfield who do you want to live in your community well you have a choice to rent to to hire to work with to to economically integrate or not but when the government does it on your behalf then the government decides who lives in your community and people have lost that control we've lost the social control mechanism of ostracism which is which would solve the high gas station prices. Everybody says, well, yeah, you've got to make a fair amount of money. We don't want you going out of business, but if you price gouge us, we just won't associate with you socially. It's a pretty lonely life in a small town if people won't socialize with you. So the problem with the government as well, it just takes away that ostracism ability by force-transferring resources from unwilling people to those they hugely disapprove of, and that just sets the stage for massive amounts of conflict. later.
[2:30:42] Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler wrote a book titled The Elephant in the Brain, where they have this interesting quote, political behavior is driven largely by coalition loyalty. Our hypothesis is that the political behavior of ordinary individual citizens is often better explained as an attempt to signal loyalty to our side, whatever side that happens to be in a particular situation, rather than as good faith attempts to improve outcomes. It's also in many ways a performance. I'm curious what you think about that when it comes to the concept of what really divides people on the left and people on the right. Is this a fake distinction that's just used to exploit us? Or is there a real, genuine principle difference between the mindset of someone on the left and someone on the right?
[2:31:35] So that's quite the star cluster of questions. They're absolutely perfectly reasonable. I'm just trying to sort them in my brain for a moment. So the general distinctions between people on the left and people on the right, let me do that first, and then I'll get to sort of the tribal loyalty, which I think is a fantastic question and really essential to what's going on in the world at the moment.
[2:31:57] So, on the left, they tend to value equality of outcome, and on the right, they tend to value equality of opportunity. On the left, they tend to have deep visceral sympathy for the underdog and are willing to use coercion to transfer resources from the successful to the less successful. Okay. On the right, it's a, tend to be a raw meritocracy with some charity, but they love the victor.
[2:32:28] And so these two approaches, right, equality of opportunity, raw meritocracy, loving the winner, versus equality of outcome, love for the underdog, generally translates into evolutionary evolutionary, male and female perspectives. So in the male perspective, you absolutely have to give the best weapons to the best fighters in a war. You have to give the few spears and arrows that you have, you have to give them to the best spear throwers and archers around. Because otherwise, you don't come back with the meat, you don't come back with the kill, and everyone starves to death. So that raw meritocracy really translates into the free market environment it tends to be a bit more of a male perspective um i'm not sure how it was when you were growing up but when i was growing up the phrase you suck was not unknown to guys so the sort of i mean they would encourage you for sure but mockery of failure uh was was rampant and whereas for the girls it's like Like, you got this, you can do this, it's going to be great, you're going to be fine. And we know this, when I grew up in England in the 70s, and I went to a boarding school, which was a raw meritocracy, and boy, if you made a mistake, you heard about it sometimes for weeks.
[2:33:53] And the difference is, of course, my friends who have kids in regular old schools, I mean, it's wild, man.
[2:34:02] When one of my friend's daughters was in a race, that was one of these days where they do the whole race, the track circuit, right, like running, jumping and relay races and so on. One of the girls, one of his daughter's friends was sick and still got a participation ribbon. Now, I can't even conceive of that as a guy. It's sort of like when I was in junior high school we divided the gyms we put a sort of barrier down the middle and the men, the boys we boys did.
[2:34:37] Wrestling and like hard wrestling you know face accidentally in some kid's groin attempt to pull his arm out from his socket and beat his leg to death with it kind of and i remember uh kids got injured on a regular basis you know elbow to the face and you had some whiskey voiced groundskeeper who would just ah walk it off kid you know you're fine you're fine and and no sympathy and and i remember being curious about the girls i would walk over to the gym look at the divider and There's a little bit that you could see through. And the girls were twirling and dancing and learning all of these wonderful things. And then one girl tripped and everyone was like, oh, are you okay? Do you need to go to the nurse? Whereas, you know, this sort of walk it off with bone fragments sticking out of your cheek was the male approach. It's just a different kind of planet.
[2:35:23] So then the question is, well, why would we evolve these things? Well, of course, women's sympathy for the underdog comes from the need to transfer resources from elder siblings to younger siblings to make sure that the younger siblings don't die, right? So equality of outcome is all my kids need to get food, sometimes the youngest need even more. Love of the underdog is sympathy for the younger kids who can't compete with the older kids. So all of these things are beautiful and and wonderful and fantastic and exactly why we've evolved to be the most successful species in the known universe which i love love women and men for doing that all of the stuff is beautiful but virtue plus force equals evil right i mean the desire to have sex is a good thing it's why we're all here you combine that with force you get sexual assault and rape which is stone evil right and so the desire to um to gain uh property Property is a good thing. It's why people clear forests and go hunting and plant crops. The desire to get property is great, but you combine that with force and fraud, then you get evil. You get theft, right?
[2:36:29] Uh virtues or things that are productive plus force becomes evil male nature plus force becomes evil uh female nature plus force becomes evil so i think that the left and the right there's lots of overlap of course they're not exactly you know they're concentric circles they overlap but in general it's the male female thing which is sort of why as women have gained political power um over uh the past sort of i don't know 100 years or so you've seen the rise of things like the welfare for a state and alimony and child support and palimony even you've seen old age pensions and all of this is about health you know socialized health care and massive sympathy for all the people on the known planet as long as they don't end up in your house apparently that's totally fine but all of that is just sympathy for the underdog and you see of course the political languages you know the excluded the marginalized the minorities the underdogs we've got to help them and and so on. And that's generally the case of single women. Like just because a woman doesn't have kids doesn't mean she loses her maternal instinct. It just gets manipulated politically into favored classes that vote for the left.
[2:37:35] And you'll notice of course that as women get married and have kids, they become more conservative. They become more skeptical of government power because single women often are receiving government benefits whereas for married women they're either themselves paying or their husbands are paying into government benefits. And of course, the sympathy for the underdog, which is designed for your own children, once you actually have your own children, that's where it goes and it's its proper home. But if a woman is single, she still has all that sympathy for the underdog and easily manipulated into taking resources to help the weaker, which is designed for her children, but...
[2:38:08] You end up having to treat adults like children and political power rises therein. The biggest single constituent for the left is unmarried women. And so this is another reason why they, you see all this media where women are taught to fear and hate men and there's a patriarchy and they just all rapists and abusers and what were they called? Male chauvinist pigs when I was a kid like this just make women afraid of men so they marry the government and totalitarian results is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It happened to even in ancient Rome with the welfare for a state and the easy uh divorce accessibility and so on so so i think the left on the right stuff is broadly speaking male and female nature plus the state um contradictions i want to make sure i get that because um we we go when should we talk about how people can hold these contradictions as sort of elephants in the room in their head oh.
[2:38:59] I'm happy to uh go over that uh now so what Well, the only reason I brought up the monopoly thing was to show that the same mind of people in very high places can hold blatant contradictions and not feel uncomfortable at all. So I'm happy to hear your thoughts on that now.
[2:39:17] So there's two general thoughts as to why people can hold these kinds of contradictions. And there is the corruption argument, and then there's the evolution argument. The corruption argument is people want something for nothing, often there's Satan or the devil or some nefarious instinct, propaganda, and people get tempted and they just choose evil, they choose contradiction, and so on. And I'm not going to argue against that from a moral standpoint. My big question is, why do we have this capacity at all?
[2:39:52] And that to me is really the interesting question. So, if we look at the evolutionary question, we would say, what survival purpose does contradictory thoughts or ignoring contradictory thoughts, what evolutionary purpose would that serve? Why are so many people like this? Because if it didn't serve evolution, it wouldn't be here. It's not like some weird appendix that we have kind of like a leftover monkey tail thing from our hominid phase. It's i would say virtually universal but it's pretty common so it has to serve some kind of survival purpose or to put it another way people who didn't hold these contradictions unconsciously and ignore them didn't make it so we can see that people are not comfortable with blatant contradictions because when you point out these contradictions they get very uneasy so they They ignore these contradictions. Like I saw a video the other day.
[2:40:56] Where a leftist pro-choice guy was pointed out to him, you know, like in California, if you murder a pregnant woman, you're charged with a double homicide because you've killed the woman and her baby, which would indicate that the baby is a human life that is worthy of legal protection.
[2:41:12] And, you know, sparks and short circuits and rebooting and era, era, 404 NPC response, not found stuff was going on, and he just pretended not to understand. But you could really see the discomfort. comfort.
[2:41:24] I'm sure you've seen the videos where people have done it in Sweden, they've done it in other places, where they say, should Sweden take in more refugees? And people are like, absolutely, you know, sure, yes, we should take in more refugees. And then they say, ah, well, I have Abdul over here, and he's looking for a place to stay, so tell me where you live, and he'll come and live with you. No, no, no, no, no, no, my place is too small. I have roommates. mates uh i have weird rituals i'm a furry i'm going out of town like people are just like, rather than live like have someone live so then it's all abstract right it's all abstract or people who say uh should america send reparations to the descendants of slavery yes absolutely okay well i have this guy here he's a descendant of slavery how much money you're going to give him and suddenly it goes from the abstract virtue signaling to direct action and people get very uncomfortable with that so how is it that people have evolved to be so comfortable with abstract virtues that cost them nothing and then so uncomfortable when they have to pay even a slight price for the virtues that they signal that's a tough question so let me give you tribe a and tribe b i was trying to think of cooler names but then i wasn't sure i'd remember them So let's say tribe A and tribe B.
[2:42:46] Now, we're going to talk about a state of nature where we evolved, where there's lots of violence and people are competing for hunting grounds. Even if they don't kill people directly, they can drive them away from the hunting grounds to where their survival chances go down and so on. So you have tribe A and tribe B. now tribe a are collectivists so they have a king and a witch doctor a chieftain let's say a chieftain king might be a bit too advanced for this sort of nation state concept they have a chieftain and they have a witch doctor now the witch doctor says the chieftain is placed there by god and has divine providence and also says that if you fight for the chief you get uh eternal paradise after you die. So the chief is infallible because of the stamp of approval of the witch doctor, and if you fight even to the death for the chief, you get paradise forever, and your children will be honored, and your wife will be elevated, and all these kinds of wonderful things. So then you have, People whose delusions serve them admirably in the competition for resources. Because if you say Tribe B, they're just a bunch of hyper-rationalists who don't believe any of this nonsense.
[2:43:56] They fear death more because there's no paradise on the other side. They don't have a central, infallible, organizing guy called the chieftain who's got a divine stamp of authority because an omniscient god whispers in his ear and tells him everything that's right. So who's going to win in a fight? Who's going to win in a combat? Who's going to win in a conflict? Well, I would argue, and we know this because men are expendable, right? Because one man can repopulate the tribe, but not one woman can't, right?
[2:44:24] So, the tribe with the chieftain and the witch doctor, who are collectivists and anti-rational, who can hold two simultaneous beliefs. A, the chief is just a guy, and B, he's surrounded by this penumbra of the divine, or the witch doctor is just some crazy guy who smokes a lot of peyote and makes up a whole bunch of crazy stuff. Good storyteller, but he's also, you know has a direct channel to the divine they can overcome their general fear of death to some degree they still don't want death but on the other side or all of this is paradise of milk and honey and so on so you have a very tightly organized fighting force that is going to battle to the death and then on the other side you have a bunch of people who are right technically they're absolutely right chieftain's just some big guy who's good at killing and the warlord is just a The guy who's drug-addled and really good at story, and sorry, the witch doctor is just a drug-addled guy who's really good at telling stories, and they don't believe any of it. So they can't be organized into a central fighting force that's willing to fight to the death. So who wins? The people who are willing to believe two things at the same time.
[2:45:36] That the chieftain and the witch doctor are just two guys, and that they're also holy warriors divinely ordained by X, Y, and Z, right? And we see this even playing out now, that, you know, the religions that tend to be more aggressive and promise and less in love with life and willing to die, they tend to spread fairly efficiently, and the rationalist cultures tend to sort of fade away. So I think that's just a lot of evolutionary pressure, that if you believe things that are opposite to the evidence of your senses, you become a much more efficient battle force and of course when force was the deciding factor, whenever tribes had sort of any interactions, those who were collectivists, those who were anti-rational.
[2:46:26] Just they do really well. And we can't see tribes around the world, and I'm no expert on this, so maybe there are. I've never heard of them. I think I would by now, but that's, you know, obviously not any kind of objective proof. But I've never heard of a tribe that hasn't evolved in this kind of fashion with a warlord, with a witch doctor, and with promises of life after death and eternal ancestry worship. And like that makes it incredibly powerful and efficient fighting forces and now with technology individualists can do better because you have a kill ratio with technology far better but of course throughout our evolution it was just a numbers game numbers and dedication numbers and willingness to die and so i think that why are people willing to accept these contradictions because i think those people who didn't accept these contradictions a didn't make it and b the tribes that they convinced to think more rationally also probably didn't make it because we don't see that happening anywhere in the world. It's like the matriarch, like the Amazon warriors. It's just a made-up bit of nonsense.
[2:47:29] So I think that it's just an evolutionary survival mechanism, and that's why people get so uneasy when these things are contradicted, because all those who said, yeah, you know, that is a contradiction. Maybe that guy is just a guy, not a king, and maybe that is just a witch doctor, not a witch doctor, just a guy who tells good stories.
[2:47:51] If they convince the tribe, maybe the tribe lost more battles. And it doesn't even need to be many. Maybe it only has to be 5%. Fewer battles they win, they're still going to get taken over. Maybe they're less good at defending their hunting territory or their farming lands and so on. So, I don't know. It's a tough call because, of course, I'm a big reason and evidence guy.
[2:48:13] But violence wins against reason. It's an old quote. It's the last sort of thing I'll say here. There's an old quote, which is, why are you quoting laws to men with swords? It's a very important question. I had a big speaking career. I'd go out and do all of this public speaking. And of course, I've been studying rhetoric since my mid-teens. I was on the debating team in high school. I traveled all across the country in university. I was the sixth best debater in Canada. when I first, the very first year I tried, I was only going to get better from that. Of course, negotiation in business is just another kind of debating, and I was a negotiator in business for many, many years. So I have like 40 years of experience in rhetoric, debate, negotiation, philosophy, and so on, which is a lot of work to try and accumulate, and it's a difficult skill to master, and so on. And how was I, and other people, it's obviously not just me, the cancel culture as a whole, well, somebody just phones in a bunch of bomb threats and death threats, it tells a bunch of lies, and then you can't speak. So who's winning, right? Who wins in terms of cost benefit?
[2:49:19] Who wins the people who study rhetoric and reason and evidence and thought and debate and so on, or the people who are willing to use or threaten violence?
[2:49:30] I mean, sadly, it is just a fact of life that the people who run the cancel culture metrics are winning against those who are really good at public speaking, really funny, really engaging, and the more good, the better you are at it, the more you're worth cancelling. So it is not just a theory, it is sort of a real thing. The solution, of course, is peaceful parenting, but that's a slow process.
[2:49:57] I was always curious how you could watch something like CNN or MSNBC or Fox for 24 hours straight and not really learn anything that was really productive. You wouldn't really be surprised by new primary sources or research they've done. This was summarized by Matt Taibbi in his book Hate Incorporated. He says, have you ever noticed that the most famous people in the media, The people with the most influential slots in top newspapers, primetime shows of their own, voices first heard by senators and CEOs and other key decision makers, tend not to be all that bright. They almost never say or write surprising things. They don't dazzle or amaze. Do you have a general theory as to why so many elites are so intellectually unimpressive?
[2:50:47] Of well it's the question is this is always the case with propaganda is it a pull market or is it a push market right so there's an economic law says sometimes supply creates its own demand which is nobody knew they needed an ipad until there was an ipad out there so the supply creates its own demand for other things of course it's not like you don't need food until somebody offers you food, right? Other times you need food. So that's a pull economy where people supply stuff that's already there. So the question is, what are the media personalities selling? Why do people tune in? Well, they're not tuning in for the truth. They're not tuning in for rigorous analysis. They're not tuning in for anything surprising. They're tuning in for what? Well, I think a fundamental aspect of the mind is if you believe things that are true, you don't need reinforcement, right? I don't need to listen to a lecture about how important gravity is. Every morning because I get up and gravity is just a fact of life. I accept it. I accept that sometimes it bends you to your will a little bit more when you get older. I accept all of that, right? So, because I accept things that are true, I don't need constant reminders. I don't need this drip, drip. It's like if you have genuine happiness as a whole in your life.
[2:52:09] That's just a self-sustaining thing based upon virtue and love and all these kinds of good, juicy things but if you have your happiness based upon a drug well then you have a problem so when your happiness is based not on things that are natural and organic like good eating good love and good good exercise and sunshine and all these kinds of things if your happiness is based on a drug then you need a drug dealer because you cannot sustain that happiness without that dealer If the source of your self-esteem, your security, your sense of virtue does not come from your adherence to moral values that are objective, but rather because you're being told pat, pat on the head, you're such a good person, then you constantly have to go back to the dealer because the dealer is telling you something or is giving you something that is necessary for your happiness that is not real. A cocaine happiness is not real. Drug happiness is not real. The happiness that somebody gets from gambling and winning once in a while is not real. And we know that because it comes at a long-term cost that is horrendous to see. A woman who gets lots of sexual attention because she shows a lot of skin is going to get excited and thrilled in the short run, but it's going to lead to a lot of unhappiness in the long run. So if you believe things that are false, you constantly need to go back to be convinced that they're true. Because reality is constantly undermining.
[2:53:34] Are a falseness, right? So, I think that their purpose is to act as drug dealers, in a sense, to maintain people's sense of virtue when they're actually quite corrupt and immoral. And so, I view evil as a kind of addiction, and propaganda is a drug that covers up the discomfort of evil by telling you that you're right and you're good, which actually makes the corruption go deeper. The analogy that I think is quite powerful is, you know, if you have a sore tooth, right? And tooth pain is like the most godforsaken things in the known universe, right?
[2:54:15] So if you have tooth pain, you have, I mean, three choices. One, you can ignore it, which generally is not really possible because it just gets worse. Or you can go and, you know, get your root canal or your extraction or whatever you need to do because the tooth is rotten. Or you can just take a bunch of drugs to cover up the pain. Now, if you take a bunch of drugs to cover up the pain, things get very bad, and often quite quickly, because you swallow all of those bacteria, they can go to your heart, and they can kill your heart, and it's really, really bad. You could have part of your jaw has to get removed. Things just get really, really bad, right? It's the old chiropractic statement. It's one thing that I saw hanging in a masseuse's office where there was a chiropractor, and it was like, the most common sentence the chiropractor will ever hear is, I thought it would just go away on its own.
[2:55:00] And we have all of that. I thought it would go away and you know if you're right about that good you save some money but often often it doesn't so when people are say cheering on violence against their political opponents which absolutely happens and it comes at this time it's happened the other way for sure but it happens more from the left to the right they are cheering on political violence which is defined as terrorism violence against their political opponents.
[2:55:30] Now, there's got to be a little part of their conscience that is like, ooh, you know, that meme of the Nazi soldier, are we the bad guys? You know, this dawning thing that, you know, maybe, just maybe, you're not a good person for wishing violence to be against people you disagree with, and so on. And so, the conscience is trying to rise up and say, this is not right. Like, wherever you've landed, wherever you've ended up, you've taken a wrong path. Like, this is not a good path. You're cheering on violence. You are, you know, baying for people making different medical decisions to lose their rights of travel and work. Like something has gone really awry and that conscience is kind of bubbling up is at war with the propaganda because the propaganda is no no no they are bad guys no no trump is an existential threat to whatever and he is hitler and right so that the um propaganda is constantly trying to beat down the unease of the conscience that you might be in fact the bad guy and so because the conscience is constantly making people uncomfortable you know that everybody has this I mean, everybody's had this, have got any kind of conscience. And most people do, of course, right?
[2:56:47] That 3 a.m. thing where you wake up and you're like, ooh, I'm suddenly getting this perspective on my life that's really kind of uncomfortable. Because, you know, the day's kind of hypnotic. There's a little bit of groundhog copy-paste. The day's kind of hypnotic. You've got a bunch of stuff to do. You've got things, errands and people and women to woo and money to earn and so on.
[2:57:07] But every now and then you get this zoom out where it's like, ooh, am I? Am i doing well in life what's the rather than the daily grind what's my general arc what's the big picture what's you know what's the view yeah i'm sure you had this when you i'd love to talk about this another time but you know when you went full carnivore and uh went to springfield for the pets and lost all of that weight like that's good for you man good for you i'd rather you know because i couldn't do this interview with a cat it would seem kind of awkward so if i have to choose um but no you you have to zoom out and and that conscious just it haunts you it just kind of gets at you and so and of course all addicts have this right and addicts to propaganda are to me at least pretty indistinguishable from other forms of addicts where you're like oh god i am drinking too much i gotta quit oh my god this gambling is gonna gonna destroy my family or like whatever addiction you have a sex addict you know like i'm uh so i'm gonna get some stalker i'm I'm going to get an STD. I'm going to have an unwanted pregnancy. Like some boyfriend is going to find out about me and beat the crap out of me. Like bad things are going to happen. No good woman or man is ever going to want to be like these rats.
[2:58:18] And then what do you do? Well, you have to run back to the drug. Either you listen to your conscience and start to reform for the better or you run back to the drug.
[2:58:29] To the drug dealers. And the drug dealers and the media have a lot to do with justifying violence. Let's be frank about it, right? That this person is so bad that violence is justified against them, and that is the initiation of the use of force, particularly in American culture that was founded on free speech. That is really appalling. And it is a way to say, your violence is actually self-defense. And that's the big thing that propaganda does, is they say, well, your violence is self-defense. Because if this person is allowed to speak, their words will create violence in the world. And therefore, by preventing that person from speaking, you are preventing violence in the world. It is a form of self-defense against the helpless, the underdogs, the this, the that, and he's inciting hatred. He's, you know, and we saw this recently, of course, where, you know, Trump was talking about eating cats and dogs. And then the media said, oh, but there have been all these threats because of that and that makes you a bad person. It turns out most of the threats came from overseas, which seems a little dubious, but so that's what they do is they get you to say, well, if this person gets their way, gets to say what they say, violence will result and therefore shutting them up is a form of, preventing violence. It is a form of rational self-defense. You are acting in defense of other people against imminent violence and therefore you're the good guy.
[2:59:51] When you're not. I mean, you're just initiating the use of force against people who are saying things you don't like, which is obviously not right and not fair and not good. But of course, and the last thing I'll say is back among the male-female divide, you know, there's this.
[3:00:07] General meme about, you know, men trash-talking each other and women being blindly encouraging, you know, yay, good job, and you suck, right? And so women tend to fight with language and men tend to fight with fists which is why men tend to say let's not like let's have laws against assault, because that's how men have their conflicts whereas women who are mean and bad or whatever right and they tend to spread rumors and lie and oh she's got an std or you know she's real slut you know like they tend to spread rumors and lie so because for women words tend to be weaponized whereas for men it's physical violence is the weapon men are more opposed to physical violence but women end up coming up with these concepts of hate speech and and so on and you you words are going to lead to to big problems and and therefore we have to stop it at the source because women tend to fight through language and therefore they view language as something that needs to be controlled whereas men tend to fight through violence therefore they use violence they view violence as something to be tightly controlled. And again, none of this is wrong. It's just when you combine it with the state, it gets pretty toxic.
[3:01:18] One of the responses I've gotten to my work at the Libertarian Institute is something to the extent of, if I had to summarize it, so what if only America had slavery or everyone did? Who cares what really caused the First World War, the Great Depression, the past is the past, just move on. Why do you think that historical narratives or prevailing interpretations of past events are important for us to understand today?
[3:01:46] Well, because the past is never about the past. The past is always and forever about the future. The past, nobody philosophically examines the past for the sake of the past because the past can't be changed. I mean, if you are a doctor and somebody fell out of a plane onto concrete and it's just like a bucket of smudge on the ground, you don't start doing CPR, right? You don't like, hey, I'm not going to call it, you know, I could revive this goo. Like, they're dead. They're dead. And, you know, there's always this cliched scene in every medical drama known to man, you know, the guy really cares about the patient and the patient is flatlined and he keeps trying and finally the nurse has to pull him. He's dead, Jim. Call it. You know, and then there's so the past is never about the past. I mean, let's say that you could figure out the exact causes of World War I. That's not going to save any of the 10 million people who were slaughtered in World War I, the purpose is not the past. The purpose is always and forever the future.
[3:02:47] People go back into the past in order to change the future.
[3:02:53] And so the idea, well, it's the past and the past, move on. It's like to where based on what?
[3:03:00] To where based on what? We have to accumulate the wisdom of the past. One of the brilliant things about language and writing is we don't have to reinvent the wheel every generation or just rely on verbal transmission so we can learn from the past in order to improve the future so i mean the question of slavery in america is important now the question is why is it still so important well because um resentment plus the state is highly profitable, right because if i can convince my neighbor that his father stole an acre from me.
[3:03:39] Then he's going to be much more likely to give me that acre voluntarily back right because if someone stole something from you then you have the right to get it back right when i was a kid if somebody took my bike and i saw them riding about i'd get the bike back right even if i had to push them off the bike. And if people came to complain, I'd say, nope, it's my bike. He took it and I'm just, I'm taking it back. Right? So if I can convince people that that bike is mine, then I get the bike back. So convincing people about something that happened in the past, he took my bike, gets me a bike. Now, if I lie about it and it's not my bike, but I can convince people that it was my bike, I get a free bike. And it's not even theft. It's It's just justice, right? So the reason why people muck about with the past so much is it changes the resource distribution in the future.
[3:04:36] So, why is it that women always claim to be victims when they end up as single mothers? Because we have sympathy for victims, and we have less sympathy for people who make really obvious bad decisions. You know, like, so, you know, well, this guy had a swastika carved in his forehead. He had five other baby mamas. He was on welfare and a drug addict. But there was no way to know at all that he wasn't going to be a great dad. There was just no way. I mean, I'm not psychic. I can't see the future. It's just impossible to know. Right? Right. Whereas all women, I don't know, they have this belief that their sons and daughters will never be hit by a false accusation of sexual assault or rape or bad behavior because they'll just teach their men how to avoid bad women. And it's like, OK, so if you can teach people to avoid bad people, then aren't women responsible for having children out of wedlock? Right well so what women have to do is to convince society that they're victims that the guy just changed there was no way for them to know it was an accident it wasn't my fault and so on because then we view them as victims and then we have sympathy for victims we have less sympathy for people who make really obvious bad decisions and the reason for we do that of course is.
[3:06:00] For conservation of resources and maximization of resources. Because if we give resources to people who make bad decisions, all we're doing is subsidizing bad decisions and we'll get more of them, as we can see, of course, happening with the decline of marriage.
[3:06:15] Whereas people can be legitimate victims and need our sympathy, help, and support, for sure. So the reason you would change your story about what happened in the past is so that you can get more resources in the future so if you made a bad decision but you can recast that decision as being a helpless victim of a bad guy you could never foresee him doing wrong then you get the resources normally reserved for victims and withheld often from people who just make really obvious bad choices so that way by rewriting the past you gain more resources in the future. Now, the reason why this has become so widespread, again, you know, charity is virtue, charity plus estate is corrupt, is because if you can as a whole say that, you know, single moms are, you know, heroic victims of bad men and they're just noble and doing the best they can and so on, well, then you can get a lot of resources for single moms and you can justify massive transfers of wealth to single moms. And, you know, the welfare state is pretty much the single mother state and it is the transfer of resources from more responsible men and to some degree women to less responsible women and to some degree men.
[3:07:36] So if you can convince people that you're a victim, you get the charity normally reserved for victims to, you know, to pretend to be something else is foundational to nature. I mean, it's how falsehood and lying in nature is everywhere, all the time, no matter what, right?
[3:07:53] I mean, the tiger stripes are so it can pretend to be grass, right? I mean, the zebra stripes are so it can pretend to be grass. Cookies will lay their eggs in some other bird's nest. lay their eggs in some other bird's nest. It's constant, like lying, falsed. The rabbit says, I'm going this way when being chased by a fox. Nope, just kidding. Going this way, going this way, going like they constantly, hey, choose a direction, man. It's like, I can't because then you're going to eat my ass, right? So even the foxes, they creep up and they pretend to not be there, just lying. I mean, the fox doesn't go, hey, hey, hey, hey, all the rabbits, I'm coming in, I'm hungry. If you could just, you know, raise your little paws or your ears or whatever, it'd be a lot easier like they just don't everything in nature is deception for the sake of gaining resources there's nothing wrong with that again it's why we're all here.
[3:08:39] But when you combine that with the state you get this pathological lying society where everybody is pretending to be a victim everybody's lying about everything that happened and unfortunately Unfortunately, this pathological falsehood becomes pretty much the most efficient way to get resources. And when pathological falsehood becomes the best way to gain resources, whether that's through propaganda or fake victimhood or just about anything else, oof, man, you know, like bad money drives out good money and lies drive out the truth. And then all the truth tellers are considered to be insane because, you know, we are very much standing against a reality that, you know, and this is the last thing I'll say about the media too.
[3:09:28] So normally when you're told a bunch of lies in history, those lies are kind of intermittent, right? So you're told lies about the king being divinely blah, blah, blah. Well, but you don't meet the king, really. You're just out there. So reality is just constantly reasserting itself. But, you know, with this glue-to-the-screen stuff, and you say the sort of 24-hour meadow and stelter show, it's like people can now spend more time in unreality than they can in reality. And that's a wild—we've never had that before, except for people who were schizophrenic or psychotic. Like, we've never had—this is a wild experiment that we're doing, in a way, which is, in the past, propaganda was very intermittent. Let's say that you went to some I don't know voodoo witch doctor sermon once a week for an hour okay so you spend an hour in unreality but then the rest of the time you got to deal with reality because you got to.
[3:10:19] Hunt or harvest crops or find berries or build a hut or what so you deal with reality and then there's this intermittent unreality but now oh my gosh the echo chambers the social media the 24 7 stuff you can dive into unreality and spend more time there and we can include the pornography video games like all these other stuff that's unreal it's unreal and you're training yourself to adapt to unreality and not deal in particular with reality. And you get the propaganda in schools and in the media and not just the news media, but all of the other media, which is constantly portraying reversals of the truth as an absolute.
[3:11:01] And so it's a wild thing that we are immersing people in unreality to a degree that has never existed before in human history. Anti-reality, really. And I think that there is a real danger that people are going to just lose touch with reality. And you can see that then when people have immersed themselves in this drug from which there is no particular withdrawal. You can just flip it on and get a new dose. And there's no down. There's no hangover. You just keep drinking. There's no crash. There's like, well, eventually there's a social crash, which we want to avoid. It but we've immersed people in unreality with no crash and that is just wild so people who you know in the past they would say well uh they tell me to pray for a good thing so i'm not going to plant any crops i'm just going to pray for good things well um god helps those who help themselves right the the food is not going to fall from the sky if you just pray for it you actually have to plant. So people who had bad beliefs faced a kind of brutal reality. You know, like all kids think that all animals can be their friends. And I really, really dislike all of these kids shows that like, oh, the lion, the tiger, the dragon, they're just going to love you. And it's like, what are you, just feeding everyone to the predators? That's crazy, right?
[3:12:23] But then kids, you know, maybe they try petting some dog. It's like, okay, okay, okay. Disney was lying to me. It's like, well, yes, yes, they are. So.
[3:12:34] You used to get these shocks of reality, right? Everybody thinks that they're the greatest thing since sliced bread, and then you go out into reality and you try to compete with others and you find out if you're any good or not. You've got to have confidence, but you've got to be tempered by reality. But we've got this thing now where we are putting people in a matrix of unreality from which they barely ever need to emerge.
[3:12:56] They get the same propaganda that the TV's always on, or they're scrolling through the same feeds, or listening to the same shows. Their friends are all the same. they don't meet counter narratives and it makes people insane. The mental health of adapting to lies, you really can't overestimate how much damage that is doing to society. Because then what happens is when people have adapted to insanity, they view truth as an assault. They view truth as something that is driving them crazy. They view truth as a violation of the the non-aggression principle because they founded their entire personality and worldview on falsehoods. They're addicts and don't even know it. Their relationships, as we talked about before, are just shared delusions. Somebody comes along with the truth and the longer you keep people away from the truth, the more hostile they are to it when it emerges. And this is why being a truth teller in an age of delusion is so dangerous and frankly quite exciting. Like it's the most extreme sport known to man because the same technology that allows us to have these conversations also allows people to be drawn into the psychosis of propaganda and deny reality to the point where their immune system of the mind fights almost to the death and sometimes to the death against any kind of truth in the vicinity.
[3:14:13] And that's a wild, wild, I love this ninja experience as a whole, but it can be challenging from time to time, as I think everybody who's listening and watching this has experienced.
[3:14:25] I wanted to put together my 92nd case or so on something that you and I do not see eye-to-eye on, and you could give me a propaganda analysis or logic analysis and grade my argument. Here is the case for the return of Stefan Molyneux to Twitter.
[3:14:46] Assume the human race has existed for 10,000 years. For 99.9% of human history, the opportunity cost and monetary cost of communicating information has been extraordinarily high. Today, thanks to Elon Musk, you, Mr. Molyneux, the most important philosopher in the English-speaking language, have been reinstated to Twitter, now X. Meaning, the site's 611 million monthly visitors could have access to free domain content. My small account with 14,000 followers received 73,000 impressions in the last three months. With your account at 380,000 followers, consider how many thirsty horses can be brought to the free domain well of truth. Even your most recent tweet has 520 likes. Considering my college history course had only 50 students in total, it's reasonable to believe that you're at least 10 times as influential as an Arizona State university professor.
[3:15:43] Yes, it's better to have 20 dedicated students than 10,000 uninterested students. The problem is, you don't know who these dedicated people are in advance. You could drastically increase your capacity to bring the very free education progressives pretend to offer and out-compete the psychopathic sophists, politicians, journalists, academics, and media elites. As Socrates was enlightening the common man in the Agora, X is the marketplace of today, where you can extend your global reach at a microscopic opportunity cost and zero monetary cost. I can see your return tweet now.
[3:16:21] Not sure if Taylor Swift has had any kids yet. If so, Taylor, along with all parents and future parents, can enjoy a free PDF of my new book at PeacefulParenting.com. The most important topics communicated to millions of people at your fingertips. Yes, the evil bastards of old Twitter owe you a sincere apology. I ask that you do not let Jack Dorsey, being a prick, stop you from communicating the importance of truth and voluntarism to your hundreds of thousands of ex-followers. They committed fraud by banning you. You never violated the terms of service. But ex could possibly be the best bulwark philosophers have against the psychopath class who is unapologetically provoking nuclear wars and inflating our currency wiping away our savings i ask that you take advantage of this technology something kings and queens of the past never could have imagined anyone would ever have access to and increase your unique capacity to improve the lives of millions of ex-users as you have mine
[3:17:24] Well, I would add to that beautiful case to say that if I'm not tweeting on X about peaceful parenting, how many hundreds of thousands of children are going to continue to experience violence because of what I don't do? And do I not have some responsibility for that? So listen, man, I think that's a great case. And I'm just going to pretend I'm having Internet difficulties because it's hard one to answer. So glitch, glitch, glitch.
[3:17:52] So no, it's a great case. And in fact, I happened to see somebody shared with me that people were tweeting about me. And I mean, combined, the tweets got like, I don't know, like two tweets about me got like 8 million views, which was, I mean, it's nice to see. It's nice to see that people still remember me. It's also not quite so nice to see. I actually got the website called One Website Over because that's sort of been my case that But people are like, hey, what in the heaven of that guy? Is he still alive? Is he still, what's he doing? And it's like, you know, I'm just one website over, right? So listen, I hear what you're saying and you are whispering sweet worm tongue sounds into my ear because it is very, very tempting. It is very tempting. I wrestle with this. I wouldn't say quite on a daily basis, but I would certainly say that the temptation is real. the temptation is real.
[3:18:54] So the counter arguments go something like this. So if I do have a fairly unique capacity to explain philosophy in practical ways to the world, I think that's fairly safe to say, then what I should do is aim for maximum philosophy. Now, the question is, do you do maximum philosophy in the here and now, or do you do maximum philosophy in the future? Now, if you do maximum philosophy in the here and now, you just get killed. Like, historically, this is sort of what happens, right?
[3:19:34] Or disabled in some manner, right? Right. So if I, the more traction I have in the present, the more risk there is, obviously we can, we can see that and we can see that all over the world. In the present, we can look at tons of examples in the past and that would minimize philosophy in the future. Right. So if I'm aiming for maximum philosophy, the question is a bird in the hand versus two in the bush. Right. So if I achieve maximum philosophy now, the blowback is obviously for high and I've experienced it to some degree, but more. So if I'm aiming for maximum philosophy, then I would put more of my thoughts down to help the future as a whole, rather than have a big series of changes towards philosophy in the present, because of the blowback associated with that. So that's sort of one argument. The second is, of course, what you're asking or what you're suggesting, which, again, I really appreciate you bringing up, is something that I have already done. And I've done that for 40 years, which is to go out with as much charm and positivity and facts and reason and evidence into the public square to talk.
[3:20:50] And the result of that was, you know, the destruction of significant portions of my life's work, lots of falsehoods around me, violence and so on. And...
[3:21:04] What would prevent that from reoccurring you say ah yes well but you know there's this new guy at the helm and you know i think elon is doing fantastic service to to the world and obviously he's a very uh a very principled man when it comes to free speech and boy talk about putting where your money where your mouth is that's that's something and a half and so i also recognize that i don't even believe it was jack dorsey in particular we can sort of go back into the the sort of actors behind this kind of stuff. But I don't think that, obviously, Elon Musk is not personally responsible for what people did prior. But the organization is the organization. And just as it inherits the users, and it inherits the assets, and it inherits the debt, it also inherits the moral choices made by those beforehand. So if I were to go back on Twitter, without any apologies, without any restitution, without any certainties that it wasn't going to happen, again then i would be re-entering into a abusive relationship with promises of change.
[3:22:09] But with no promises of change so what i do is i say to myself if somebody called into one of my shows and said you know i was in this really abusive relationship and um the guy has said he'll take me back you know he's gone to therapy let's say whatever analogy you want to use about the new ownership so i was in this relationship with this guy who you know set fire to my half my life's work or whatever and and uh but he said he'll he'll take me back and well he hasn't said so but i've heard through some friends that i can contact him why would i be in pursuit of that relationship well he's changed well okay but if he's changed there would be evidence of that in in the form of apologies and restitution. Now, I understand the legal system, I understand the complications involved with all of that, but nonetheless, would you counsel someone to go back into an abusive relationship with somebody who signaled that they were open to resuming that relationship, but who'd made no public apologies or withdrawal of prior insults?
[3:23:14] No.
[3:23:16] So, I can't, and listen, I, I, again, your temptation is, is, is great, and, and I really appreciate you bringing it up, but I can't, you know, and I'm not, I'm not suggesting, you're suggesting this, of course, but just in my own, in my own mind, if I, if I wouldn't give the advice, I can't take it. And the idea that i could do more in the here and now of course absolutely there there is would that cost me more in the future possibly possibly i mean we can see that we don't have to go through the list but everybody knows them the truth tellers who both in the past and in the present have come to very bad ends it's not it's not a very short list unfortunately it's a very long list so i'm aiming for maximum philosophy i am i have a standard of resuming relationships that does require restitution and apologies and some commitment as to it not happening again and those are not forthcoming for reasons that i can vaguely understand from a legal standpoint but but still are important. And so I just have to follow the advice that I've given others. I have to aim in a practical sense for maximum philosophy. And, and.
[3:24:39] I can't resume a relationship where there has been extreme levels of mistreatment without apologies, restitution, and certainties to a large degree that it's not going to happen again.
[3:24:52] So, and this is not even anything negative towards Elon Musk. I mean, I think that there are lots of pressures put on businesses regarding free speech that are hard to figure out and hard to know where they're originating from. but I don't think it's just internal.
[3:25:10] So they can't make that guarantee, right? Because if it's just a purely internal matter, that's one thing. But if there are other factors involved in these kinds of censorship things, then they can't make those guarantees. So I will continue to do maximum philosophy for the future. You know, I have, like all philosophers should have a 500-year business plan because if you don't um i think it keeps you away from the core truths that most influence the future it is you know there's the old saying no no profit is respected in his own country well philosophers are attacked by the culture that is and define positively the culture the culture to come and uh so recognizing that as a pattern if i the more i focus on the present the less I influence the future, the more I focus on the future, the less I need to influence in the present, and the more I can change the future. I think it's just a matter of patience for me. So again, it's a great case that you brought up and I am tempted by it on a regular basis, but I do have to sort of grit my teeth and focus on those aspects.
[3:26:23] Thank you to everyone for watching. Keith and I don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. This has been part three of my discussion with Stefan Molyneux of of freedomain.com. Mr. Molyneux, thank you as always.
[3:26:34] Great pleasure. Thanks, man.
[3:26:37] Welcome to Keith Knight Don't Tread on Anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Today, I am joined for part four of my discussion with Stefan Molyneux of freedomain.com. Links will be in the description below. Mr. Molyneux, of all the taboo topics, which one do you think is most important to discuss? us?
[3:26:58] Well, I think the most taboo topic at the moment is that if we don't reason with each other, violence ensues. I don't know why people don't get this connection. Maybe it's because of child abuse, maybe it's because of bad schooling, maybe it's because of the media, but we really only have the choice of reason or violence. And if we can't negotiate with each other according to some relatively objective rules, all that is left is bullying, manipulation, and escalation. If we can't find win-win situations, I mean, if you desperately need food and you can't trade or voluntarily beg and get resources that way, you have no choice but to steal. And everybody who says that oh reason is a prejudice and who is willing to escalate to character attacks and ad hominems of other kinds or escalation or abuse or like all those people are paving the road down to hell itself and i don't know why people don't see that maybe it's because their personal relationships are so crappy or something like that but the most taboo topic is shouting people down, getting them deplatformed.
[3:28:17] Saying that they should be unpersoned, saying that violence is an acceptable response to certain ideas or arguments, no matter how bad or terrible or horrible those arguments are. I mean, we as a society should be confident enough that even if some absolute corrupt lunatic comes along and says, oh, I think slavery is the most moral blah blah blah blah blah we should be like hey you know we've dealt with this a couple of hundred years ago here's all of the reasons as to why you're wrong and we should lay it out but censorship and deplatforming and aggression and escalation and mass flagging and all this kind of stuff is a confession that arguments are weak and you do not make an argument stronger by destroying its opponents you strengthen an argument by engaging in the public square and of course when you have bad arguments ideas or data sending it underground removing it from the public square where competent people can debate these lunatics sending it underground simply creates a parallel society of people who can't be corrected it's a terrible idea so everybody who has the impulse halls, oh, this idea is so terrible and offensive. I must shout it down. I must destroy it. I must get people out. You are absolutely.
[3:29:38] Confessing that you don't have a good answer. Now then, of course, people also have a funny thing where they say, well, there are so many people in society with really, really bad ideas. You know, there's these far right extremists or whatever you want to say. There's, you know, a huge half of America are the deplorables and have these terrible ideas of racists and someone. And it's like, well, who's been responsible for educating these people? And it's funny, funny i don't know why people don't see this connection but maybe it's just me but it's like if you're saying half the country is full of the minds of half the country are full of absolutely terrible appalling wrong ideas well y'all had them as kids for 12 years straight thousands and thousands and thousands you can't teach them how to think better you can't teach them how to reason well there's all these people in society they won't listen to reason they're just prejudiced and bigoted. It's like, y'all educated them.
[3:30:34] So what you should do if you genuinely think that people just have terrible, terrible, terrible ideas, is you should completely change your educational system.
[3:30:43] Because if it's just cranking out people who are just bigots and appalling and unthinking and uncaring and selfish, it's like, well, y'all educated. And it's not like it's reading, writing, and arithmetic these days. It's foundational moral education that occurs in schools so all of the taboo the most taboo idea is that if you won't reason with people you are setting the stage for violence and everybody who contributes to that you know everybody's got to put a log on that fire to burn down the whole world and i don't know why we have such a passive acceptance of people who reject reason because we know we absolutely know every single factor of history and philosophy and morality tells us where this goes we either reason with each other or we come to blows, and blows were bad enough in the past, now we've got weapons of mass destructions, you know, those blows could be fatal to the planet as a whole, and I don't know why people don't see that this escalation is almost inevitable if we don't find a way to reason with each other.
[3:31:42] What actions can people directly take in their personal lives to increase their income and overall standard of living?
[3:31:50] Well, in most things, there's theory and there's practice. Like there's the hypothesis, there's the business plan, and then there's the execution.
[3:32:00] So there's two things that you need to, say, increase income or gain more value in a relationship of some kind. Number one is you have to have a way of making the case that you provide more value so if you're a salesman and you have doubled your sales from last year you can go to your manager and say hey man i'm assuming you're not on pure commission hey man i've doubled my sales i should get a raise.
[3:32:29] So the first thing you have to have is some reasonable proof or at least a compelling case that your value is increased and what that means is you actually have to increase your value right I'm like, you actually have to increase your value. So when I first was in the business world, I spent countless hours reading, you know, Harvard Business Review, reading books on business, reading books on sales, on marketing, on management, because I kind of came in from academia with a graduate degree in the history of philosophy to growing and running a software business in the 90s. I ended up with like, I don't know, 35 employees or something like that. So there was a lot for me to learn. I'm a little bit of a loner when it comes to thinking and acting so learning to work and manage people was a real challenge so I actually had to increase my value with knowledge and skills and then I had to make a case as to why I should be paid more and then I actually had to ask for it so you have to increase your value, find a way to measure that because everybody's a million dollars an hour in their own heads so you have to increase your value.
[3:33:35] And then you have to make that case. And if you can find someone who agrees with you, then you can get more income, you can get more pay. And it's the same thing when it comes to, you know, if there's some woman that you like and you want to ask out, then you have to find a way to be valuable to her. And then you actually have to ask her out and see if she agrees with your assessment of your value to her, right? That's like that old song says, I'm not perfect, but I'm perfect for you. And so you have to actually increase your value and then you have to validate it find a way to prove it make your case and then you have to have a belief if you've convinced yourself that your own value has increased like you have doubled your sales output and if somebody says well i'm not going to pay you more then you have to have the confidence to start looking elsewhere because without competition there really is no such thing as quality you don't know who the fastest runner is unless everybody gets to run the race then you'll find out who the fastest runner is and so if you have empirically and genuinely increased the value of whatever it is you have to offer and people in particular niche fields i mean i know this in managing a bunch of tech people.
[3:34:49] There are people who just they go in with their horse blinders on i was like well i have this code to complete and i have this project to do and i have this report to write and and this PowerPoint to produce, and they just do that, and it's just input-output, and they just focus on a particular task. You are never going to add that much value to a company doing that. What you want to do as an employee is you want to understand the business, understand the value of what the business is providing, and then work with your boss to make sure you're not performing specific tasks, but you are...
[3:35:26] Is serving the customers by maximizing the value that the business is providing. So when I had people who were working for me as programmers, some of them, you just give them a task, give them a task, they grind through it. Others would be like, well, what's this for? And what is the customer looking for? And I even had a couple of people who I mentored who came along with me on sales calls, who came along on service calls so that they could meet the customer, understand what the customer is looking for, and understand the value proposition of the business Rather than just doing your tasks like you're just eating chocolates on a conveyor belt or something, you want to actually figure out what the business is doing and what the value proposition is. And that way, you can ask yourself the most fundamental question, which is, how am I serving the customer? How am I adding value to the customer? I always used to say to my employees, don't come to me for a raise. I'm not paying you. I'm not digging into my bank account and paying you out of my own cash.
[3:36:23] Right? Who is paying you? And it took a depressing amount of time for some people to get this. It's like, who's paying you? The customer is paying you. And so if what you're doing is serving the customer, right, because we're not taking money from the customer, we're handing money back. So, you know, briefly, one of the value propositions was there's a particular business task that was about $3,000 and using our software, and it happened hundreds of times a year in a business, using our software, it cut the cost 40%. And we validated that and we'd got the, so we had the spreadsheet, the whole presentation. So, you know, give me, you know, $200,000 for my software and I'll give you $300,000 back this year and the rest of it is all profit, right? So we're not taking money from the customers, we're giving money to the customers by reducing their costs. And the way in which we're saving money for the customers, the delta for that is what you get paid from.
[3:37:20] So getting to understand the big purpose, don't just be like this hamster wheel person who's just like, oh, I got a task, I got a task, but figure out how the task helps the customers. Because of course, if you help the customers, your boss looks good, the company makes more money, and then you can legitimately ask for that. So understand the larger context of what you're doing in the business world. And that way, you can also be in a partnership with your boss. Your boss says, well, I think this will help the customers the most. And you can say, well, that certainly will help the customers. Here's another thought. Let's run it through the metrics. Let's figure out what can happen. And that way you can be a participant. And it's much more fun that way. It's much more creative. The hamster wheel, eating chocolates on a conveyor belt stuff is why people get depressed and feel alienated from their labor. You know, the old Marxist criticism that you're alienated from your labor, that in the past you used to make a whole chair. Now you just bolt on one leg, you know, a hundred times a day. But one of the reasons people feel alienated from their own labor is they don't know what it's for. What are you doing this project for? What is this piece of code for? What is this PowerPoint for?
[3:38:22] What is the goal? and if you are just doing this hamster wheel chocolate on a conveyor belt stuff then you can't add that much value and your life becomes progressively more meaningless because you're doing a series of incomprehensible tasks because you're ordered to it's like being a well paid surf so figure out the purpose of what you're doing figure out how you can add value to customers and document document record record record because your boss is not psychic he doesn't know everything you're doing record stuff and then continually check in with your boss is this actually adding value to the customers is this valuable is this the maximum value that i can provide and if your boss is constantly agreeing with you that you are providing maximum value or the most value that anyone can think of then when it comes to a raise you say hey man you keep telling me i'm providing maximum value which means the customers are paying you more for my time i'd like a little taste of that my friend right so you've got to just make a case but just going and feeling like well i i i deserve more money i want more money that's all very petty petty, and childish. You need to make a business case and you need to sell yourself in this life. And you don't want to be a fraud, right? You don't want to say, well, I deserve more money when you're not actually verifiably adding more value because that's going to be non-sustainable, to put it mildly. But yeah, add value, make the case, have the documentation, and be willing to walk if people won't recognize your value.
[3:39:42] Yeah, it's important because you see that, well, businesses will just pay the least amount of money, and that's why we need a minimum wage. Turns out a microscopic percentage of workers actually earn the minimum wage.
[3:39:53] So how do you explain all these people getting paid more? And this was such an important lesson for me because the first time in an early job that I asked for a raise, it was, I have a lot of bills. Can you guys please give me more money? And recently, when I asked for a raise, I said, here's where I was when I started. Here are things I have now that I didn't previously have. Here's the value I could add to the company. I didn't say customer, but I should have said customer. Here's the value I could add to the company. If I stay on, could I please get this raise? And then it was fortunately accepted. So that is just so, so important for people to have. The amazing thing is that the last two jobs that I worked, the number one reason people lost their job was because of attendance. So, so much of this is actually within our grasp, people showing up late, people not showing up at all. So, I had just previously had this idea that while the poor stay poor and the rich get rich in society and there's not much you can do, you could, you know, have a revolution and change the system. But other than that, your hands are just tied. The fact that I thought that was just so unproductive for so long that I think that these messages are so vitally important.
[3:41:09] Well, sorry, just to interrupt this for a second, because people don't understand how radical resentment of work is, and resentment of bosses is. How is it that I was able to succeed in the software field, even though mega, mega corporations were doing the same thing? Well, because I was broke.
[3:41:29] And I know this sounds kind of odd, but there's this constant churn in society. So many people, when they get money, they just increase their spend, right? It used to drive me crazy with people that I worked with. They'd get their hands on some cash, and they'd just immediately buy more stuff. And I'm like, no, freedom is a buffer. You've got to have some savings, otherwise you don't really have anything to negotiate from because you've got to eat what you kill in the moment. There's no storage, right?
[3:41:54] So when you have a bunch of rich people, they can't compete with the talented poor. Because when i first started my software company my my rent was 275 dollars a month i mean i was living in one room in a house with five other people in a pretty rough section of town next to an abattoir i mean i had no car uh i had uh i mean i've never been a big one for clothing or sort of ostentatious spending or something. So I could live on less. And when you can live on less, you can sell your product for less. If you've got to pay someone $150,000, then you have to pass that cost along to the customer. So poor people are a constant threat to the wealthy because the wealthy get comfortable, they get complacent, they get lazy, and there is a churn in a free market because the wealthy have particular talents, Once their kids are unlikely to inherit all of those talents, you know, like the kid of a great singer is probably going to be a better singer than average, but not as great as the great singer. It's just a regression to the mean, it's called, right?
[3:43:05] So rich people who become wealthy, they want to hang on to that privilege. And in a free market, the best way to hang on to that privilege is to make money. Poor people resent working, resent bosses, feel exploited, you know, because resentful workers are not very productive. They don't like coming into work. They don't want to understand the business. They dislike their boss. They're obstructive. They're difficult. They spread negative rumors. They don't do a, they're not focusing on productivity. They just kind of hate being there. So this propaganda, and it's a kind of funny thing that the people who are doing well in a relative free market have a huge incentive to sow the seeds of resentment among the poor. And I saw this because I grew up in a very, very poor environment, you know, like welfare, really the bottom and dregs of society. And you could see this resentment was just being sown all the time.
[3:43:58] You're just being exploited, man. The boss makes 10 times what you make, but you're the one who actually produces the goods, right? There's a line from an old police song, which is, I work all day in the factory making a machine, but not for me. There must be a reason that I can't see, right? So this idea that you're the ones doing the real work, man, the bosses are just parasites and then you don't like the bosses, you don't learn, you don't get mentored by the bosses and it's a way for the wealthy people to stay wealthy is just sow all of these seeds of resentment among the poor because they know the poor can radically outwork and outcompete them because the poor are hungry and lean as hell. And that is a thing that, you know, the mammals overtake the dinosaurs, there's a constant and churn in the free market but if you can convince all the poor people who have low overhead and a huge work ethic that they're just being exploited and they should resent their bosses and hate going to work and it's all terrible and and so on man you're crippling a lot of people who would outcompete you and uh it's a it's a beautiful thing for the wealthy but a terrible thing for society as a whole you.
[3:45:01] Had an excellent video called the best dating advice 29 minutes long worth every second. What is the best dating advice you have? Could you please summarize it for us?
[3:45:12] Well, I won't just summarize the video. People should go and watch it. Maybe put the link in below. So the best dating advice is... What do we date for? We date for love. Dating exists because pair bonding is needed to best raise children, right? We have these children that just take a ridiculous amount of time to grow up. I mean, it's completely mad. You know, you see these videos of like these foals a day or two after they get born with these long wobbly stick legs, they can get up and walk around. You know, It takes human babies an average of a year to be able to walk, even though we've got these sturdy trunk legs.
[3:45:55] And it takes the male brain about a quarter of a century to reach full maturity. Women, it's a couple of years less. I mean, it is completely mad. And I've been a stay-at-home dad, and I've seen this progress and process going on. It's absolutely wild. So the reason why we're able to develop so slowly, and that's because we have this giant brain, like that which in nature ends up more complex, takes longer to evolve or longer to grow. So we have this amazing, wonderful, incredible brain. And the reason we have that is because we have pair bonding and romantic love. So we date for the sake of pair bonding, marriage, whether you consider it legal, which I don't, but I do consider it a public declaration of we're going to stay together no matter what, so that your family and friends keep you together should should you run into trouble. So we date for those reasons. And so what we want to do is date with the greatest pair bonding we have. Now, love, of course, is admiration. It has to have. I mean, it's not that all admiration and love, but all love has to involve admiration. What is most admirable about people? What do we most admire about people? Well, we admire moral qualities. That is the most admirable. I mean, we can have some respect and admiration for certain athletic skill, and so on. But what we absolutely fall in love with is virtue. So I've defined, and I've got a whole book about this called Real-Time Relationships. People can get it for free at freedomain.com slash books.
[3:47:24] Love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous. So if we, and virtuous just means striving for virtue and having objective standards. It doesn't mean being perfectly virtuous because then we all fall short.
[3:47:36] But if you have objective, decent moral standards, and you know, nonviolence, moral courage, telling the truth, standing up for what you believe in, promoting virtue, opposing evil where reasonably safe, all of these things are things that we admire. And so love involves virtue. you. So the best love involves the greatest virtues. So what you want to do when you're dating is you want to find someone whose morals, whose virtues you admire. The other thing too is that, you know, a lot of people base, and Lord knows I've been guilty of this myself on more than one occasion with very little excuse, but a lot of people base their attraction simply on looks. Now, it's complicated, like, because it's easy to dismiss looks, but looks and our attraction to looks exist for a reason, right? I sort of, I demonstrate here on my own face, like I'm the best looking guy on the planet, which is nonsense, but just to sort of give an example, evenness of features, symmetry between the features, and so on, indicate healthy genetics, good genetics, right? There is a very, very fascinating study that correlates objective measures of intelligence with how good-looking someone is, and between reasonably good-looking and not very good-looking, you can get up to a standard deviation of intelligence data difference. So it's quite important.
[3:48:57] Good-looking people tend to have higher verbal skills, they tend to be better at negotiating, which is very important for marriage, they tend to be healthier, they tend to live longer, and they tend to make more money. Now some of that's the halo effect that people just like having good-looking people around, so maybe they'll pay them a little bit more, but given that it also correlates with intelligence to some degree, which correlates with income. It's interesting. So if you want to know.
[3:49:21] How intelligent someone is you could either and you had to choose between two metrics just see how good looking they are or know their educational attainment those two things are about equal in predicting somebody's intelligence so it's not that looks or come oh looks are so shallow they mean nothing no no no they do they do mean something i mean obesity is negatively correlated with intelligence and again of course there are very smart people who are very fat and And there are not so smart people who are very lean, but in general, it's a proxy. So a lot of the things that we find attractive are proxies for, you know, healthy genes and intelligence and so on. So it's not like looks are completely unimportant, but if you are not focusing on the person's virtue, then you are not focusing on that which will foundationally cement your pair bond. And of course, I think most of us have known people over the course of our lives who've had children with somebody who's corrupt or immoral or shallow or selfish or narcissistic and man it's a brutal life it's a i just had dinner the other day with a friend of mine i've had for like over 30 years and we were just talking about this man and we all know people who've just they just had kids with the wrong person and it is an absolutely brutal life and it's even worse for the kids which is the they are the real victims because they didn't have have a choice about it at all.
[3:50:44] So, if you're just somebody sexy, somebody sexy, again, nothing wrong with sexy. That's a good thing, but it's.
[3:50:53] You will spend a fairly significant time over the course of a marriage. You'll spend a fair amount of time not having sex. I mean, it's, you know, you can say, I don't know, half an hour, three times a week. That's an hour and a half of having sex.
[3:51:07] That's a, what, 1% of your week, less than 1% of your week. So you're going to spend a whole lot of time not having sex and a whole lot of time having conversations. And so you want someone good conversationalist, good at negotiating. If they've had childhood trauma, they've found a way to deal with it. They've done therapy or something that's helped them deal with that. Childhood trauma, somebody with a good sense of humor, somebody who doesn't flip out, somebody who's not overly triggered by things and can talk through their emotions, somebody who can interrupt their impulses to act out aggression and say, instead of saying, you're an a-hole, they say, I feel really angry at the moment, I'm not sure why, but let's talk about it so that you can have a reasonable conversation. And last thing I'll say is, the reason I think it's so important to focus on virtue over the course of a marriage, which hopefully lasts from 25 to 75 or 20 to 80 or something like that, like that's 50, 60 years, right? Is that you ever look at old people and say, well, nobody wants to make out with them. She's 80, he's 78 or whatever it is. but what it is that keeps old people together is if you found your attraction and your love and your commitment on virtue.
[3:52:24] Virtue tends to increase over the course of lifespan. If you just base it on looks, well, you know, I'm going to be 58 now. I don't look like I did when I was 18, right? So if you base your attraction on looks.
[3:52:40] Looks are going to fade. They just do. I mean, just a fact of life. And nobody ever believes it when they're young, and neither did I.
[3:52:47] But it is a fact. If you base, oh, he's so athletic, well, athleticism declines over time. And you could say, well, I base it on his wealth. And it's like, yeah, and wealth can increase over the course of a life, but then you retire and income goes down and all of that, right? So what is the one thing that you can hook your heart into to that is going to grow and swell over the course of life. Well, that's virtue, because we can always be better, we can always have more integrity and apply ourself to spreading virtue and opposing immorality even more. And so if you look at moral qualities, and moral qualities don't have to fully manifest when you're young, but you do have to have the principles in general. So does the person believe in morality? Do they believe in objective principles? Do they have good verbal skills? Because good verbal skills means that you can negotiate, which is very, very important. Marriage is a lot of negotiation. And if you marry a woman, say, with good verbal skills, then she will negotiate with your children rather than yell at them or hit them or punish them, confine them, take away their dinner or jam them down on stairs for these fairly aggressive timeouts and so on. Just negotiate with your kids. So somebody with morality, good verbal skills, that is who you want to get involved with. You know, if you, you know, my wife and I go for these, like, I don't know, two-hour hikes and just yammer and chat the whole way, and it's just absolute, it's an absolute joy. And you have that as the basis of your relationship.
[3:54:17] Man, you're doing well. And beauty, the last thing I'll say is, like, physical beauty, I mean, it's a wonderful thing. I have no particular issue with physical beauty. It's a wonderful thing. But man alive, it is so out of bounds at the moment. You know, when you think about our evolution, you know, let's just say girls over the course of our evolution would get married in their teens, right? I mean, in general, right?
[3:54:42] And so, physical beauty was supposed to be at its maximum coinage or of significant import for maybe 6 to 18 months, right? So, a woman is of marriable age in her evolution, whatever that was in the tribe, and then she'd get picked fairly quickly. And I guess the most beautiful or most attractive woman would get picked more quickly. So, you'd be out of the marketplace in 6 months, 12 months, maximum 18 months. And you'd probably be out of the marketplace by the time you hit 20. And then what happens? Well, then you have this endless conveyor belt of kids and all of the ravages that that does. You're out in the sun with no sunscreen. You know, you just, you get kind of cryptkeeper. You get kind of cryptkeeper pretty quickly over the course of, so beauty is like supposed to be this eclipse. It's not supposed to just last and last and last. And so one of the reasons why beauty is such an intense draw is because it's supposed to be a very short-lived flame. I mean, that's how we evolved. But now... Oh, and also, sorry, not only, but also, also a woman's beauty in a relatively small tribe of 100 or 200 people or maybe a small village of up to 500 people or whatever, there'd only be a couple of dozen young men who would really be interested in your beauty from a wooing and marriage standpoint. So...
[3:56:05] The woman's beauty was very short-lived and of importance to a very small number of people, again, for a very short amount of time. And that's one of the reasons why it burned so brightly and why we're so immeasurably drawn to physical beauty. But now two things have happened. Number one, of course, is that with social media, a woman's beauty can be available both in I'm pretty and here's me topless in a pretty sordid manner to hundreds of millions of men around the world. Like that that's not what we're designed for that's like straight up sugar to the eyeballs.
[3:56:39] And also a woman's beauty now instead of it being a short flame that draws a man for pair bonding so that you can start with the real business of beauty which is the having and raising of children now beauty just goes on and on and on and on and i mean wow look at salma hayek in her like mid late 50s and she's you know cryogenically preserved every night or whatever she does or J-Lo, or Jennifer Aniston, and so on. They just have all this wild technology, and these diets, and this Botox, or whatever it is that they're doing to create this youthful skin, and figures, and so on.
[3:57:13] And so we've taken this immense power that's supposed to be a flash in the pan for a very small number of people, and we've made it a multi-decade, semi-exploitation available to hundreds of millions or billions of people. And uh i think that's driven a lot of beautiful people kind of crazy because it's just way too much power and it's not really what beauty was designed for which was very short and limited in scope and duration and it just goes on and on and that i think that just drives people kind of kind of crazy and it's no longer to me as much of a mark of attractiveness especially sort of post social media but rather the mark of somebody who can't pair bond because they have option paralysis.
[3:57:55] What differentiates good parents from bad parents?
[3:58:01] Well, what differentiates good parents from bad parents? I like to pause to prioritize, not because I, huh, interesting question. I've never thought of that before. I wonder what it could be. So, I think the best parents, you know, you wake up in the morning and you're not a parent yet. Is that right?
[3:58:22] Oh, no. Okay.
[3:58:23] So, if you're not a parent yet, it's wild, man. Again, I was just talking about this with my wife the other day. You become a parent, your old life is gone, man. Like, it's gone. And it's not even gone like the stage of a rocket where you still have something that's part of it that's kind of the same. When you become a parent, you're never the same again. And you can never just think for yourself again. And it's sort of like when you get married, when you get married, you become one flesh and you can't think of your own pleasure without thinking of your partner's happiness and what is best for both of you in the long run, you become one flesh, right? I mean, you don't work out saying this is really good for my left arm, but I could care less about my right arm, like working out is good for all of you as a whole, right? So you just become one flesh. And then when you add a kid to that mix, I mean, it's just, it's kind of a cliched thing, but it's really true. Like I wake up in the morning, I'm like, okay, what can I do today that's going to be best for my family as a whole? And you can turn it down a little bit, like a dimmer switch that doesn't go off, but you just, you can't turn it off. So if you wake up in the morning and you say, okay, what's best for my kids? What's best for my kids?
[3:59:27] Well, you have to study, you have to do your research, you have to read, you have to read books on parenting, you have to read some maybe some science books, you have to figure out what is best for your kids. And the studies are very clear. And as far as correlations in the social sciences, it's about as good as you can get. In terms of like spanking is bad for your kids verbal abuse escalation is bad for your kids not breastfeeding is not great for your kids putting your kids in daycare is very bad for your children in in many ways i think that modern government education with the propaganda and all the creepy sex stuff for kids is really toxic so you have to say okay what's best for my kids well what's best for my kids is having the mom stay home breastfeed for about a year and a half enough on average and not put them in daycare. So what's best for my kids is to have the mom stay home. And you could say the dad, and that could happen if that's what's absolutely necessary. But you know, mom's got the breastfeeding equipment. We're all taps and no plumbing. So you have the mom stay home and raise the kids, right?
[4:00:36] Even nannies are tough, man, because nannies, they come and go. And the better the nanny is, the more the kid's heart's going to get broken when the nanny inevitably leaves to go do something else or have her own kids or something like that so a pair bond um skin contact eye on eye contact you know kissing and and hugging and singing and language and so on just i was reading i was reading stories to my daughter when she was still in the womb because especially male voices which are deeper they transmit fairly well through the placenta and the studies show that women the babies who are read to in the womb recognize their father's voices when they come out. So there's a continuity there that's really nice. So focusing on what's best for your kids...
[4:01:21] And getting the data to find out that what you're doing is, in fact, best for your kids is really great. And people who refuse to upgrade their parenting, well, I parent the way that I was parented. It's like, but that's not just how people live. I mean, the people who say, well, I just parent the way I was parented. I bet you they don't have rotary dial phones and still a little modem going when they want to connect to the Internet. Right. They they've upgraded their cell phones. They've upgraded their cars. They've upgraded their Internet access. They've upgraded their computers. So yeah, we just need to upgrade. So focusing on what's best for your kids and getting the data to recognize it, and then just doing that. Just doing that. That's, I think, the basic thing. You really have to, I say you have to enjoy your kid's company, but if your kids know that you really enjoy their company, that gives them a great sense of security. And if your kids know that the dysfunctions that they may have in their personalities, are your fault as the parent, then there's a real pair bond. Because for children to grow up happy, they need to feel secure and they need to experience their parents' devotion is absolute. Now, that doesn't mean never correct your child or never suggest, hey, no more candy today, or we got to go to the dentist, right? Because that is helping your child in the long run.
[4:02:42] But if your kids know that you love them, you enjoy their company, you're always focusing on what's best for them, and that you're not going to blame them for personality dysfunctions because you as the parent are responsible for how your children develop to some degree. I mean, you obviously can't really control their height except by who you choose to marry. But the in terms of the moral contents of your child's mind that's that's your deal so if your kids know that they really enjoy you you really enjoy their company then they will of course warm to you and they kids love to please their parents we evolve that way and so you don't have this conditional thing where you say well i like you when you do this but i don't like you when you disobey or you don't do this or you don't do that that's man that's real conditional and that's very very tough kids because they can't be secure, that kind of conditional approval. For parents to take responsibility for their own lives is really, really important. If parents play the victim, that's going to transmit to the kids and paralyze them in terms of self-ownership.
[4:03:39] And I would also say that whatever you want your kids to do, you have to first consistently model yourself for years. I mean, if you want your kids to identify the difference between a tree and a driveway, you have to consistently use the right word for tree and driveway for quite a long time for them to get that. If you want your kids to tell the truth, then you have to consistently model telling the truth for years. If you want your kids to have integrity, if you want your kids to talk about their feelings, then you have to do the same in sort of age-appropriate ways. So whatever you want in your kids, while you want your kids to respect you, it's like, okay, well, have you respected them for years? And if you understand that that your kids are a reflection of your own consistency and integrity then rather than trying to fix your kids or change your kids you focus really on changing your own behavior and modeling that which it is that you want in your kids and then the last thing i would say is of course like no violence no aggression i think that's sort of taken for granted but try not to live automatically and that's why i was saying figure out what's best for your kids uh sorry have Have the dedication for what's best for your kids and then figure it out through research.
[4:04:51] Because, you know, so many parents are like, well, people, okay, I graduated from high school. I guess I got to go to college. Okay, then I've got to try and I got a job, I got to date, I got to get married. And then, you know, we're going to have some kids. And then I got to get back to work because I only have this long a maternity leave. And I got to get my kids in daycare. Like you're just living automatically.
[4:05:11] And the problem with that is, if you live according to society's blind habits, then you are, as a parent, succumbing to peer pressure. Well, all my friends put their kids in daycare and went back to work, so that's what you do. And the problem is, like, all parenting comes down to the teen storms, right? When the hormones hit, you know, 12, 13, 14, whenever it is the hormones hit and the focus of the child naturally, evolutionarily, biologically shifts from parents to peers because parents are the past and peers are the future. Peers are where you find your partner, your person, your love interest, your future family. So kids are going to switch in their teens, not 100%, but their focus is going to switch from parents to peers. And you want your kids to not be susceptible to peer pressure for negative outcomes. comes, right? Some peer pressure is fine. You know, don't look weird. Don't, you know, don't be weird. Like, I get there's some peer pressure that's fine, but it, you know, what's not fine is, hey, I found these pills under the couch. Let's take, you know, that's not the peer pressure you want your kids being susceptible to. So the way that you protect.
[4:06:27] Your kids from negative peer pressure is you think for yourself as a parent and you don't just follow society's blind habits and say well we have to do this because other people do this so what's the justification well i parent the way i was parented well that means you're not thinking for yourself and you're just copy pasting the past well don't do that because if and also you know it's kind of funny that parents it's funny like sad funny that parents say about their kids oh you know they're just so susceptible to peer pressure and those same parents put their kids in daycare when the kid was a baby, like a year old or 18 months or two. And it's like, but when you put your kids in daycare, their primary contact is with peers, not with adults. I mean, I worked in a daycare for many years, as I mentioned before, so I know this one very well. There were two of us and 25 to 30 kids. They spent way more time interacting with each other than interacting with the adults.
[4:07:19] And so if you're going to put your kids in a situation where peers dominate their life because of daycare or school for that matter, then if they let their peers dominate their lives as teenagers, it's really hard to find a rational reason why the parents can complain about that. That's just reaping what you sow. So live consciously, have good values, model those values, those kids, those values then flow down to your kids. And it's just so much more fun. You know, I mean, I grew up with a fairly aggressive parent. And I do think it's one of the things that's actually kind of sad about all of that is how much fun aggressive parents give up on with their kids. You know, having a kid you get along well with is such a pleasure. There's such an ease and sense of fun and joy in the family. I mean, particularly when your kids become teenagers. My daughter's impression of me or impersonation of me has me literally rolling on the ground with tears coming out of my eyes and laughter sometimes. The way she ramps up the British accent and complains, it is just absolutely hilarious. And what a huge amount of joy to have in your life and boy, what a bad deal it is being aggressive.
[4:08:33] Yes, I have unfortunately, reluctantly kicked my dad out of my life.
[4:08:40] And I was wondering, what criteria should I use when deciding whether or not to disassociate from a friend or family member?
[4:08:49] I'm sorry to hear about that. It is a very, very sad thing. And I often think about how much harm has to be done in the parent-child relationship by the parent in order for that most primary relationship to be expendable. Now, I mean, this is something, I started talking about this, the voluntary family, that morals are higher than blood relations. And it's a funny thing because, you know, I got into a lot of trouble. People got really mad at me about this. Well, not the people I was helping, but the people who were, in general, I would consider abusive, got mad at me about this. Which, again, is one of these things that's like, but if a woman's in an abusive marriage, we will tell her she doesn't have to stay. In fact, we might even encourage her to leave. Now, that's a relationship she chose voluntarily. We didn't choose our parents. So it's saying, well, people in abusive relationships that they voluntarily chose, maybe it's a good idea for them to get out. But people in involuntary relationships that they never chose just have to stay forever and ever, amen. And that just doesn't make any sense. We know for a simple fact that moral standards are higher than blood relations because family members go to jail, Even though it breaks up the family. Like if they do something deeply immoral, like the dad is a bank robber, then we arrest the dad and we put him in jail, even though that quote breaks up the family. So we know that moral rules are higher than family relations.
[4:10:17] But then when I talk about it as a philosopher, well, I don't know. I have this special ability, I don't exactly know where it comes from, to generate maximum love and maximum hatred. It's like everybody has their special superpower. It's both my massive loyalty. I either have people who think I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread or people who want to chase me off a cliff with pitchforks. I just have that kind of personality. And so the question of like whether you dissociate from a friend or family member, my own particular experience has been this. And I don't want to make it anecdotal, but I want to start with something that's more empirical. My own particular experience has been this. The people who I've ended up not being in contact with, I did not have any big stormy, you know, you are dead to me. I see you no more, like, I have no father. And, you know, whether you did that or not, it's totally fine. I'm just telling you my own particular experience.
[4:11:17] What I did was I just said, you know, I don't want to lie anymore. I don't want to pretend to be someone other than who I am. You know, like every time I would get together with my mother, who I have not seen in, I don't know, 25 years or so. So whenever I'd get together with my mother, she would talk to me about topic X. It doesn't really matter what it was. And it was just obsessive. Like an hour or two, I'd just be like sitting there kind of trapped like a sailboat trying to attack against the wind of her words.
[4:11:50] And I didn't like it. I didn't like that it was so one-sided. I didn't like it that it was her obsession. I didn't like that I couldn't get a word in edgewise. I didn't like that I felt invisible. I didn't like that. And of course when I was a kid I had to put up with it because that's the only home I had, but as an adult I didn't have to and I did for a while you know you like you try to be nice right you try to be reasonable and or at least try to you know everyone's got their little quirks and you try to indulge them as if reasonable but after a while I was like I don't want to do this anymore, I don't want to just sit and pretend to listen to something that I find creepy unsettling boring and weird.
[4:12:29] And so, I said, hey, you know, I know you're really interested in this topic. I appreciate that. I'm sure there's stuff that I talk about that maybe isn't always super interesting to you, but I just, you know, my experience has been that it's like 100% of the time we get together, you talk about this topic, and I kind of space out. And I don't want that anymore. I want to have more involved and back and forth, blah, blah, blah, right? So I had that sort of speech, and boy, did it ever not go well. And then, of course, the next time I saw my mother, she pretended nothing happened, and I said, well, you know, we did have that last conversation that didn't go particularly well.
[4:13:03] So what happened was I simply stopped lying, and then people stopped wanting to have anything to do with me. I mean, so it wasn't some big thing where I, you know, kicked people off the plane or off the island and flew on or, you know, went on alone. Alone it was well look i have some criticisms i have some issues i have some problems i have some things that i want to talk about that maybe aren't super comfortable for you and i found out very quickly that if i was honest uh people didn't really want to spend time with me some people i mean obviously i have people now who do uh my hand puppets of course and my uh inflatable friend but But if you're just honest and tell people what you think and feel, do they actually want to spend time with you? Are you in a quote relationship that is only acceptable to the other person because you don't speak your mind? You don't, you're not honest about your experience of the relationship, right? So there's a couple, I wrote down a couple of things here to sort of summarize it. one of the things is that is this person going to block me from having a quality person in my life? My mom has some positive qualities but on the balance the negatives are a little more. And so I.
[4:14:22] If I, you know, when I meet a really great quality moral woman and then I'm like, here's your mother-in-law for the next 50 years, is that going to have her run for the hills? Well, I can't sacrifice my future for the sake of my past. I can't sacrifice love for the sake of history and I can't sacrifice a chosen relationship for the sake of an unchosen relationship. So, if, say, my mother being in my life is going to prevent me from having a quality wife, sorry, that's not even a close choice for me. You can do a search at fdrpodcast.com for the against me argument, which is more around politics and statism. Of course, if there's violence, aggression, coldness, a lack of empathy, a lack of curiosity about you, that's not a very good thing at all. If people have destructive addictions, and politics can be a very destructive addiction, but if people have destructive addictions, obviously, if they're sex addicts, gambling addicts, drug addicts, alcoholics, and so on, that's probably not particularly wise. I think it's worth putting it on the line and saying, look, you've got to go get help. Like the intervention thing, there's this whole show about that. Everyone gets together with the addict and says, you've got to get help or you're out of our lives. That can help.
[4:15:35] Is it a one-way relationship overall? I mean, relationships have, you know, tide comes in, tide comes out. Sometimes you focus more on what your partner needs. Sometimes they'll focus more on what you need for various reasons. You know, your partner has some big upset. You'll spend a couple of days talking to them at the exclusion of your own thoughts and feelings. But does it balance out overall? I think that's important.
[4:15:57] And can they accept you for who you are? You know, when I was younger, I don't know. I mean, I think it's true for most people. Like, you've got to fake a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, even if you have a good family at school, you have to fake it. You have to fake being interested in all of the nonsense that they're talking about. And school's way worse now than it was when I was a kid. When I was a kid, it was just boring. Now it's, like, mentally dangerous. It's, like, toxic. and so you've got to pretend to be interested in school and care about it as opposed to rolling your eyes and saying to the teacher you're really boring and this stuff means nothing to me, so you've got to lie that if you have families sometimes you have to pretend things that you don't particularly believe or want or like and so on and so at some point in your life and this This happened to me, I think it was in my late 20s or so, where I was just like, I don't want to spend the rest of my life not telling the truth.
[4:16:52] And some of the greatest highs and some of the lowest lows have come out of that sort of just basic decision. Like when I was a kid, I had to falsify things because telling the truth is pretty volatile when you're a kid, right? Especially if you have aggressive parents. And in university, I was pretty good at being honest, but you still had to not talk about a whole bunch of things. And so at some point, I was just like, what's that line from Risky Business? Sometimes you just got to say, what the heck or heck it. So at some point i was just like you know what there's billions of people around the world who don't tell the truth i for various reasons could not tell the truth when i was younger.
[4:17:38] I'm just going to try this telling the truth thing i'm just going to try being honest about what i think and feel the research that i have the conclusions that i've come to i'm just gonna tell the truth and this was like this like you know when they test some nuclear weapon and you You can feel the tremors in like half a world away. It was kind of like that. Telling the truth is just like this radical thing that sets off these weird, secret, hidden detonations. Nothing's obvious. No house falls down. The clouds don't vanish. The seas don't part in front of you. People don't burst into flames. So there's nothing real obvious and visible, but there's like this hidden earthquake that goes through your life like this subtle shockwave where people's neurons just get rearranged in one way or the other and through the process of just telling the truth it it acts as an a-hole repellent and a signal to bring virtuous people to you and it is really the greatest decision that you can make it's straight out of hamlet right above above all to then own self be true and then it follows as night follows day you can't be false to anyone just tell the truth and be honest and that will drive the bad people away it will win the good people close to you and it will draw virtuous people to you. And there's a lot of volatility in that process. But I tell you, man, I would not have it any other way.
[4:19:00] Absolutely. And that's why I think this topic is so important to discuss. My dad once asked me, is there something I could do differently as a dad? And I stupidly answered this question accurately.
[4:19:12] Oh, no. Wait, you took him at face value?
[4:19:15] I don't know why I did that. I want to say I was 16. It led to another rageaholic episode. And at first it was really scary, but it was so clarifying. I go, oh, this is why my sister doesn't talk to you anymore. More because unfortunately for my dad i came across uh henry hazlitt's book economics in one lesson so i learned about opportunity cost and i go this is a 30 minute rant what could i be doing with my other 30 minutes of this scarce time that i have on this earth so my things were the opportunity cost of being around the person second thing was have i clarified my criticisms to this person in the past. Hey, I drive all the way up here and I walk on eggshells for 16 hours straight. And then I run to my car, start it.
[4:20:06] I'd like to jump in the window like Starsky and Hutch to get the hell out of there right when I'm like, I'm off the clock. I got to go. And then the third thing was how much time they had to process the criticisms. It's not like change right now. Here are my criticisms of you. All right. It's now dinner time. I'm out of here. It was, I think, 14 years from the day I was real clear with my first criticism, his other child, my sister had stopped speaking to him, and I just lost all the energy. And I said, I don't ever want to talk to him again. But let me wait 24 hours before really telling him. I ended up waiting a month before saying it, from the day I made that decision officially to when I actually told him. So So it has been so liberating. It might have been too liberating because I've done it to like six other people in my life since then. I'm just like, it keeps freeing up time. I'm like, more books to read. I might have to kick out that guy who was a prick to me. I'm kidding, of course. But that was my thought process behind the whole thing. It took a lot of time.
[4:21:11] Yeah, I've just had an urge to be a lot nicer to you. So excellent. No, and I'm really, I mean, obviously, kudos to having these standards, but As a parent, like, you have your voice right up against your kids' ears. And so, to me, parents who yell, scream, and so on, it's absolutely overwhelming to the nervous system because we desperately want to please our parents. I mean, evolutionarily speaking, kids who didn't please their parents didn't tend to do very well over the course of protection and food and so on. So we are very desperate to...
[4:21:52] To please our parents, and one of the things I really got as a parent, was you need such a light touch. Because we're so close. Like if you've got your lips right against someone's ear, you've got to whisper. Otherwise you're going to hurt them. And this screaming stuff when people, it's so overwhelming. And it comes from such a sense of helplessness and lack of self-control that it is just dangerous. But that level of parental hostility and anger is just, it just short circuits the emotional system to the point where you kind of have to retreat just so you can gain the ability to feel normally. Like, you know, if you go to a concert, you get that ringing in your ears, you got to treat your ears well for a while so you don't damage them in any permanent way. So I really, that's a very, very sad story. But I mean, really, what are your options? What are your options? is you imagine you meet some wonderful woman and if your dad was still in your life and, this wonderful woman you take her over to your dad's place and your dad yells at you and you gotta i'm so sorry like you gotta fold and be and what's going to happen to her level of respect for you and when she sees what you're going to take or you take you have kids you take your kids over to somebody who treats you badly your kids are going to see that and lose respect for you and what are you going to say you got to have standards and values in your life when you You let someone treat you badly that you don't have to.
[4:23:13] It's bad for everyone. And it is really sad that people take that choice. And I mean, the other thing too, like in relationships, you constantly got to ask people how you're doing. You don't just leave it life fallow. You shouldn't have to wait to 16 for your dad to say how I'm doing. Like every couple of weeks with my family, I'm like, hey, what have I been doing good? What could I improve? I mean, you go order a slice of pizza on the receipt. Eat it'll be like give us your feedback and we'll give you a dollar off your next pizza like they'll the pizza place will ask people but people actually who are parents providing the most essential service to their children they don't ask how they're doing what the children like or don't like what's been good and bad what could be improved my gosh we do this all the time in life and to not do it with your own children is foundationally incomprehensible to me and that you would then your father would have to wait until you were 16 to try and get even any pretend 10 feedback. It's like, no, that should happen all the way along. It should happen all the way along. It's not that hard to have good relationships. You just need to be reasonably virtuous.
[4:24:17] And ask people how you're doing, and get feedback. And if you're not getting feedback, you are undermining the entire relationship. Because people who aren't giving you feedback are not giving you feedback because they're scared of you. And if people are scared of you, they can't love you. And your relationship is being eaten out from the inside. So, I mean, massive sympathies, but it sounds like a very wise decision to get that level of aggression and abuse out of your life.
[4:24:47] Absolutely. We're almost at time. Do you have time for one more topic?
[4:24:51] Do it.
[4:24:52] Why are people humble in general when you ask them, how do I build a car? How do I build a house? They tend to respond with, I don't know, haven't studied it. But they seem to have no humility when it comes to politics, economics, history, foreign policy, labor markets, etc. Why is there such a disparity in what people are humble about?
[4:25:13] I think it has to do with whether things are testable or not right so if somebody says here's how you build a wall you can say oh what's your experience and and where did you learn this and and so on right now if they say well i don't have any experience but i saw a wall once on cnn you'd be.
[4:25:34] Like well you know so stuff which people can have personal experience with uh they tend to tell you about that experience and they tend to to have credibility because they've done that right so you know i could talk a little bit about how to have a reasonably successful podcast i could talk a little bit about how to run i've been an entrepreneur for like 30 years i could talk a little bit of how to how to start and run a business how to manage people i can talk a little bit about marriage and success i've been very happily married for like 22 years and this coming from a parents who divorced when i was a baby that's you know fairly decent improvement i can talk a little bit about some parenting stuff because I mean I've been a stay-at-home dad and my daughter and I get along very well people can hear her from time to time on my show so this is not you know I'm not claiming something without any evidence so when people have personal skills then they have to have some credibility with it but people can have all of this windbaggery nonsense about stuff that doesn't have any verifiability to it well I think that the Fed should raise interest rates okay have you ever been in charge of an institution that can raise or lower interest rates and been personally responsible for the consequences?
[4:26:44] Well, no, but someone on CNN who was standing on a wall told me that the Fed should raise interest rates or something like that, right?
[4:26:50] So the more abstract and the less personal and the less consequential, right? This is the skin in the game argument, is that if people don't have skin in the game.
[4:27:03] I don't particularly care what they have to say about a topic. It's just noise. So if, you know, somebody says, and you've seen these videos, right? We should take migrants. Oh, here's a migrant to come to your house. Well, I can't, right? If people say, we should do more to help the poor, right? I'd be like, okay, so what have you done?
[4:27:23] Because the poor is not some weird abstract category. They're actual people with virtues and flaws. Laws and one of the people the only people who genuinely think that the government can help the poor are people who've never really really tried to help the poor i mean i grew up poor and i created companies and created jobs and i hired some of my some of the people i grew up with.
[4:27:47] Because i was able to give them jobs and i helped the poor you know by by i've you know created like like a hundred jobs over the course of my entrepreneurial existence. I mean, it's not massive, but it's not nothing. And so there are people who have gotten jobs and income because I started and ran companies. I got raises for people when I worked for other companies, got some people 30% raises, 40% raises, which takes them out of lower middle class to middle class.
[4:28:18] I've put a lot of time and effort and energy into people who call in in shows and say, you know, I'm 25 or 30 and I don't make any money and I sort of tell them the ways that they can do to improve their income and their potential. So, you know, I've done a lot to help the poor. And so when I say the government can't help the poor and somebody says, no, no, no, the government should help the poor, my question is, okay, tell me your history of actually helping the poor. Tell me about the neighborhoods you went to, the people you talked to, and their success or failure based upon following your advice. And it's a great clarifying bar for people to get over and it's not that complicated i mean we do this all the time right i mean if somebody says uh they send in a resume i i want to be a surgeon right do they just say sounds good you know uh i've seen you cut an apple off you go go and take somebody's appendix out no they'd verify it they'd say okay what's your education we need to talk to your previous boss we need to verify your education we need to see your statistics on success or failure in your surgeries and so on, people ask for verification before they let people know.
[4:29:26] Be surgeons. And before I take any advice from someone, you know, you don't take diet advice from the fat guy, and I would not give advice on how to seamlessly regrow your hair, right? So you just look for personal experience. And if people are talking about, you know, history, or as you say, foreign policy, the economy as a whole, I'm like, okay, if you really, really understand the economy, then you should be an incredible investor. Like wow like the people who have these global warming models it's like well we know what the the temperature is going to be worldwide in a hundred years and i'm like wow if you're able to model the future that accurately you must be a zillionaire because you should be able to model the short-term stock market i mean if you know what the temperature is going to be in a hundred years surely you know what the price of apple stock is going to be five minutes from now.
[4:30:19] So let's take your predictive models that go out to massive complex systems i mean the weather's more complicated than the economy certainly more complicated than the stock market and if you can project the weather 100 years out i want to see how your model predicts the price of apple stock five minutes from now because you can make a zillion dollars longing or shorting going long or short on apple stock five minutes from now so let's see your model work and if they can't predict the price of apple stock five minutes from now why on earth would i listen to them about the temperature 100 years from now so it's just a matter of testability if you're wrong what happens like what negative thing happens to you if you're wrong right so you know if you say well i'm a big fan of the you know we the war in ukraine is is a positive right okay well you're not going to get drafted so what's your skin in the game right you're not personally paying right you're not going to get drafted. No one you know is going to get drafted. So what is your what skin in the game do you have? And if people don't have skin in the game, they generally don't listen to what it is. So you have to have direct experience. You have to have skin in the game. Otherwise, it is what they call virtue signaling, right? So we've got to do more to help the homeless. Okay, how many homeless people have you taken into your house or allowed to camp in your garden?
[4:31:42] If the answer is none, then, then it's just noise. Because if you know, specifically, I got this straight out of the trial and death of Socrates, right? So Socrates, of course, is brought in trial for impiety and corrupting the youth, right? Meletus says, you corrupt the youth. And Socrates says to him, oh, so if you know that I corrupt the youth, you must know what ennobles the youth. What is it that's the opposite of corrupting the youth? And he doesn't answer, because he doesn't no because he's just using this word as slander you know it's funny because let's let's go to puff daddy because you knew that was going to be the next topic right so puff daddy the notorious rapper who allegedly even though there seems to be recordings allegedly has been hosting these absolutely vile sex slash exploitation slash potential rape allegedly uh parties for like 15 years, right? And you can see Puff Daddy, if these allegations are true, you can see Puff Daddy in pictures with just about every famous person known to man, right? Some of whom have called me a really bad guy, right?
[4:32:50] So all of these really, really famous people don't have any idea if this guy turns out, even if 10% of what he's accused of is true, then he's, you know, really, really evil guy so all of these people are like shaking his hands and and taking his money and and not just you know in passing at one party but you know like heavily involved with the guy so they can't tell this kind of guy but boy they know i'm a bad guy you know and again it's just like if if you have a stone evil person in your environment i don't care what you say morally about anyone ever again, and this lack, like this credibility, right? I mean, like the Epstein thing or, you know, the Puff Daddy thing, or it's just a variety of other things is like.
[4:33:40] If you don't know that this guy is corrupt and evil, why would I care about your opinion? That's the Bill Gates question, right? Which is maybe why Melinda kicked him to the curb, right? It's like, well, you're just so interested and dedicated in the virtue and positive, blah, blah, blah. The guy had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that went a long time even after the guy was, you know, anyway. So I just look at, do you have direct experience? Do you have any skin in the game? And have you made terrible decisions in the past? and have you figured out why you made those bad decisions? You know, I can't imagine this would ever be the case, but let's say I've been friends with someone for like 15 years who turned out to be absolutely stone evil.
[4:34:23] I think I'd shut up about moral choices, like for a long, long, long time, and I'd have to sit there and say, oh my gosh, how could I fail to see this? My gosh, I mean, the guy literally rapped about abusing people. People how could i have missed that he was an abuser you know like i would have some humility but people don't man this is what you're saying they're just like just move on right and and the you know all of the people who were hanging with with puff daddy and so on if it turns out that he's guilty of what he's accused of and you know they're not even giving the guy bail although i think he offered 50 mil so i assume that they have a fairly solid case and apparently the whole house was miked and had camera footage and all that like Epstein's. So I assume that the proof is fairly incontrovertible if they've got a hold of this kind of stuff. So then all the people who were friendly with this guy, and I don't just mean, you know, met him at a party and there's a picture of them together, right?
[4:35:19] But all the people who hung with the guy, who were relatively friendly with the guy, and the rumors have been around forever and ever. I mean, I'm nobody in in this music rap circle but i even i've heard the rumors years ago so in any sane universe we'd look at those people and say so you have no moral credibility at all you can't tell a bad guy when he's right in your face and rapping about what he's doing so why would i listen to you about anything moral ever again maybe you can shake your booty and maybe you can uh rhyme well but in terms of moral issues and questions you have no credibility and uh because the big question is like if this guy's been doing this stuff for 15 years well it's like the bbc with jimmy, seville like a an absolute horrendous pedophile who operated in fairly plain sight for decades and the bbc has the nerve to lecture people about moral values and this is who they covered up for and protected in many ways so yeah i mean it's credibility you got to be really skeptical about most people's credibility. Be skeptical about mine, be skeptical about yours, because you've really got to have some skin in the game, and you really, really have to have some direct experience that can be verified. That's for me before I listen to anyone.
[4:36:39] Thanks to everyone for watching Keith Knight Don't Tread on Anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Mr. Molyneux, thank you so much for your time.
[4:36:46] You're welcome.
[4:36:47] Welcome to Keith Knight Don't Tread on Anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Here is part five of my discussion with Stefan Molyneux of freedomain.com. Check out the link in the description below. Mr. Molyneux, page 43 of your book, Universally Preferable Behavior, says, this question of avoidance is the key to differentiating aesthetics from ethics. Please expand on this.
[4:37:15] Well, I think it's completely self-contained, self-referential, and there's absolutely nothing. I can repeat it in the Latin. That's the best I can do. So this is my book on secular ethics, which is the great challenge of trying to find a way to establish morality without either the commandments of a deity or the coercion of the state, right? Because if we can't find out what morality is without an appeal to authority, either the authority of a god or the power of a state, it's pretty hard to become a free society. So this question of avoidance is really, really important. I'm going to just read the little bit that is to do with that. And we'll talk about it in more detail. So I write, if you and I were standing at the top of a cliff, and I turned to you and say, stand in front of me so I can push you off the cliff, what would your response be?
[4:38:09] Well, if you do voluntarily stand in front of me, and I then push you off the cliff, this would more likely be considered a form of suicide on your part rather than murder on my part. The reason for this is that you can very easily avoid being pushed off the cliff simply by refusing to stand in front of me. And a somewhat coarse phrase came into my mind with regards to, you know, for purely professional and philosophical reasons, I both read and watched the movie Fifty Shades of Grey.
[4:38:40] And in Fifty Shades of Grey, there's a man who beats a woman, but she agrees to do it, apparently because he has abs, a helicopter, and can play the piano. I really lost some of the details about all of this. And they have these, I don't know, weirdly sexy contracts. You know, they sit across from the table. Am I allowed to do this? What's her safe word? And so I was thinking, big contracts, tiny boobs. And so she's not a victim if a man just beats up a woman. Who doesn't consent and is not it's not part of her kink or whatever then he's not initiating the use of force any more than a boxer who beats up another boxer is guilty of assault because they're both in the ring and they know what it's there for so if you agree to something you know i don't know if you've ever watched or played hockey but there's an old joke in canada that i went to a fight in a hockey game broke out right because it's so central to uh the game to have all of of this fighting. So you accept that you're going to get face mashed up against the plexiglass from time to time, same thing with rugby, other kinds of things, right? And or the same thing that if you're playing doubles tennis, sometimes when the serve comes fast, it hits you in the back of the head because you're kind of diagonal to the serving path. So if you voluntarily choose to participate in something, it cannot be said to be inflicted upon you.
[4:40:02] And so people who are into BDSM or some sort of weird hot wax on the nipples kind of kink, well, it's not assault because they're agreeing to it. So then, I think that's fairly clear. So then I said in the book, similarly, if I meet you in a bar and I say, I want you to come back to my place so I can tie you to the bed and starve you to death. If you do, in fact, come back to my place, it is with the reasonable knowledge that your longevity will not be enhanced by your decision. On the other hand, if I or someone slips a date rape drug into your drink and you wake up tied to my bed, it's clear that there's little you could have done to avoid the situation.
[4:40:39] So the difference between ethics and aesthetics is this question of avoidance. So you and I have had a date to meet up and talk. One of us could have not shown up, but we're not inflicting that coercively on the other. And so this question of avoidance, this is a question of politeness or aesthetics versus morality or good and evil. So if when I was a kid, you know, be on time. Be on time is important. And being on time is a positive attribute. It's being polite. It's being thoughtful of the other person, being considerate and so on. And it is a kind of virtue but it's not the same virtue as don't rape people don't murder people don't steal from people or assault them it's a different kind of thing so if somebody is consistently late you can simply choose to stop meeting with that person your participation in their lateness is voluntary they're not enforcing it on you they're not inflicting it on you they're They're not kidnapping you or holding a gun to your head or threatening you or defrauding you. I guess you could say, well, they said they'd be there on seven. But, you know, things happen and people make mistakes. And some people are just chronically late. Lord knows I've been in that situation once or twice in my life.
[4:41:58] So, this question of avoidability is really key to the question of ethics, because I needed to find a way to differentiate commonly accepted aesthetic politeness and moral standards. I'm a big one for something that Aristotle said, of course, thousands of years ago. He said, I don't care what your system of ethics is, but if it can be used to prove that murder is good, then there's something wrong with it. Like we have these instincts and we know that it's rude to be late, but you can't shoot someone for being late, right? Because there's a different situation there. If somebody's running at you with a chainsaw saying they're going to cut your head off, yes, you can shoot them, but you can't shoot them for being late. You can't shoot them for being rude. You can't shoot them for insulting you. You can't shoot them for calling you fat. You can't shoot them for all the kinds of abrasiveness that can happen in life, but you can shoot them if they're about to kill you or give you grievous bodily harm, I think is the legal phrase. So I had to have a way of explaining these moral instincts that we have, because moral instincts, they just can't be overturned by reason and evidence, right?
[4:43:06] Because we have these gut senses and we need to find a way to validate them. Like if I defined love as revulsion towards someone, I mean, that would just be an inversion. So, trying to find a way to differentiate aesthetics, which is nice behavior, from ethics, which is required behavior. It's nice to be on time. It's nice to be diplomatic and polite.
[4:43:29] It's more than not nice to try and choke someone to death, right? So, I really, really wanted to work with those moral instincts. And the good thing about guiding myself by that is that, at least in the personal sphere, universally preferable behavior doesn't overturn anything we already know to be true. It validates property rights, and it shows why the big four of evil, the big four of evildoing are all immoral, which is rape, theft, theft, assault, and murder. And so if it validates property rights, it validates bodily sanctity, and it justifies self-defense, and it shows why you can't shoot someone just for being rude or late or inconsiderate, well, that's a pretty good job if I do say so. I pat myself on the back, but I don't want to dislodge my microphone. Like, that's a pretty good job. I've crossed all of the I's. I've dotted all of the I's. I've crossed all of the T's. I've validated our personal or a sense of morality that occurs in the private sphere. The radical part about UPB is the universal part, which we talked about at some point in the past. So that is the part where you say, okay, so if rape, theft, assault and murder are universally banned behaviors, in other words, if universally preferable behavior is to respect persons and property and not violate persons and property against their will.
[4:44:53] How far does that go? Well, it's the universal part that really messes people up. It goes all the way to war. It goes all the way to the state. It goes all the way because it's universal. And it doesn't matter if you have a costume on or a hat on or you're doing a funny dance. The universals apply. And so, we all accept it. Yes, that's what the law should be. Yes, that's what morality is. Of course, rape, theft, assault, and murder are immoral. Of course self-defense should be justified in situations of an extremity of course you can't shoot people for being late we all understand that's what we teach our kids i mean if our kid said i hit that kid because he was beating me right and your kid has like i don't know a black eye and a cut lip and so on we'd say well i'm sorry that happened but good job right whereas if.
[4:45:40] Our kid said i beat that other kid because he was late showing up to the park we'd say well that no No, that's not a thing. Like, you can't do that, right? So validating these morals at the personal level, which we all understand and want the law to respect as well, but then going all the way out into society horizontally, vertically to parenting, right? The violation of the non-aggression principles such as spanking and so on. That's where people have a tough time. In other words, it takes what they accept at a personal level and want enacted at a legal level and transmits it all the way through human society and that's where people get messed up it's kind of like like even dogs know how to catch a ball or you throw a frisbee they can catch the frisbee we all know how to throw and catch we all understand physics at a personal level right we don't try and levitate i saw this funny video of this couple who thinks they have telekinesis powers because they keep pushing their hands at little pieces of thin tinfoil and of course the air waves make the tinfoil move and they think they have telekinesis so we all understand physics at a personal level, it's when you take those same principles and apply them universally that people get kind of disoriented. And it's the same thing with morality. So that's really the issue that I was trying to deal with in this part of the book.
[4:46:57] In your book, Art of the Argument, page 65, you say, The rise of the welfare state coincided with the rise of political correctness.
[4:47:07] When negative consequences for bad decisions are removed, information is inevitably repressed. Please expand on this.
[4:47:17] Right. So, I'll try to be concise. I'll fail, but I want everyone to know that I'm at least trying to make the effort. however well it might go. So why do we have negative language? Let's take some negative language that comes out of, let's say, 19th century Victorian literature. I took a whole course on this Victorian literature. It was really eye-opening. So in 19th century literature prior to the welfare state, when there was a lot of charity, Christian charity and so on, but prior Prior to the rise of the welfare state, you had terms like a loose woman, a cad, a rake, a strumpet. And these were people who had sex, particularly procreative sex, outside the confines of marriage.
[4:48:05] So why did these words exist? Because women who had sex, particularly procreative sex, outside the confines of marriage back in the day when they had to use, what, a sheep's bladder as a condom? Not only is that gross. But I assume not massively efficient or safe.
[4:48:24] So you'd have a lot of kids out of wedlock. When a woman had a child out of wedlock, no man would marry her. And thus she would often be reduced to prostitution. Prostitution caused further dissolution of the bonds within society because easy access to prostitutes is pretty bad for a lot of shaky marriages. You would also have the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, Which, of course, in the 19th century, prior to the rise of antibiotics, were terrible. I mean, there's a sort of theory that Friedrich Nietzsche died because he had one sexual encounter with a prostitute, and then he got syphilis, which is a horrifying disease. Henri Gibson writes about it in his play Ghosts, that the progress of syphilis, a brain-rotting disease, was just appalling. And so one woman deciding to have you know 10 minutes of pleasure outside of the marital bond well she falls into prostitution that has a ripple effect on other marriages you spread diseases which also wrecks marriages some guy goes and gets syphilis his whole family is destroyed his finances are destroyed and then of course you have a child who's being brought up in a criminal element who himself is probably going to end up turning out to be a criminal so the ripple effects facts of just 10 minutes of sex on society as a whole.
[4:49:42] Were absolutely catastrophic. And so you had, which would be at the time, some very strong language to both shame women for having sex outside of marriage and shame men for pursuing sex outside of marriage. And of course, there are endless novels written in both the 18th and the 19th century, really designed to help women figure out which man wants to marry them and which man just wants to sleep with them and abandon them. And so the rake literature, the cad literature, the harlot, the strumpet and so on was all very, very clear because the negative consequences of single motherhood were so destructive and so corrosive to society as a whole that you had to use some pretty strong language to prevent people from doing this. And there had to be a kind of cold-hearted in a way fairly relentless punishment of people who stepped out of line in order to prevent other people from stepping out of line like there was a poster i actually had it with my.
[4:50:45] Wallpaper many years ago when i was in the business world which was there were these motivational posters like the kittens saying you know hang in there it's only it's only wednesday or whatever and there was a demotivational posters which i thought were very funny and one of them was a ship going straight down like a tanker just going straight down and it said it was um it could It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others. That really struck me. And so when people make bad decisions and there are bad outcomes, the temptation on the male part is to say, that's why you don't do this stuff. The temptation on the female part is a little bit like, well, she made a mistake. Should she suffer forever? We've got to help her. You know, that kind of stuff, which is why when women get political power, you get the welfare state as we've sort of talked about before.
[4:51:34] So, you had this very strong language. Another word that was used, which we don't really hear of much anymore, was spinster. And spinster, when I was growing up, was sort of a very sad, tragic word. And Amanda talks about this in the Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie, about these women who, they're mousy women, they just hide in attics in houses, they get shuffled from place to place because nobody wants to deal with them, but they've got no husband, they've got no savings, they've got no life of their own. And so, Spencer was a warning for women that, particularly because women live longer than men on average, that you should get a man, you should get some savings, you should set yourself up for your old age. And, you know, it's a long way from the heady beauty of youth to the, you know, 40 to 85 desert of invisibility that happens to women if they age without a partner. So, we had all of this language that was quite strong. Now, enter the welfare state, children have now turned from a liability to an asset. That is one of the biggest reversals in all of human history, and we're still reeling from the shock of this. Because since children are objectively a liability, they consume time, energy, sleep, money, other kinds of resources. You need somebody to provide those resources in a private charity state. State, that person who provides those resources is a loving, pair-bonded, married husband for women as a whole.
[4:52:57] So the welfare state by turning children from liabilities to assets meant that a woman could get a good income by having children and not having the father around. One of the standards that was brought in fairly quickly with the welfare state is you can't have a man in the house. And I remember many years ago, I was at a park with my daughter when she was quite little. And I heard these women chatting with each other. It was sort of two o'clock in the afternoon. So the workday for most people. But I do philosophy on philosophies and inspirations hours. And these women were like, oh, yes, you know, well, if you have another kid, you can apply for this program and this benefit. And then there's this housing vouchers you can get. And they knew the whole labyrinth and maze of the welfare state. Oh and then of course if you have a kid and he's on disability and that can just be something as ADHD you get an extra six hundred dollars a month and they were just calmly discussing the best ways to milk the system by having children without a husband around and that is a big problem now so the reason we have this negative language is to steer people away from decisions that are bad for society as a whole.
[4:54:09] But they can't just be idle and empty threats. So in the past, before divorce became normalized through the media, if a woman left a man, or if a man left a woman, they would be kicked out of their social circle. Because, I mean, divorce is spread, right? If a woman is going through a divorce, all of her friends are going to start looking at their their own husbands in an askance way because the woman's going to justify it and usually with regards to male chauvinist pig ideology paranoia. So if a woman was getting a divorce or got a divorce, she would no longer be welcome in her friend's house because she hadn't stuck it through. She'd chosen a man and particularly if there were children involved because couples who broke up were doing, were perceived to be, and there's data to back this up, were perceived to be doing enormously selfish behaviours that harmed their children.
[4:55:03] And they were shunned. And they were shunned because people didn't want the divorces to spread as a social contagion. And also because their children were likely to be dysfunctional both at the time and possibly in the future because of the trauma and upset of their parents going through a divorce. So you wouldn't necessarily want your kids playing with a kid who was going through some horrendous, stressful divorce from his parents because there may be aggression or dysfunction involved in that. So there were lots of and so people stuck together because there were hugely negative consequences for breaking up and of course in the states prior to the 1940s the the children went with, the husband went with the father and the mother basically got nothing so there was a big incentive to stay together now did that mean some people stayed in abusive relationships well sure well sure and is that good no that's really not good but what's the alternative you have a massive of ugly, brutal divorce. Kids get kicked out of their social circles. The parents can't socialize. There's a huge amount of trauma to the kids. All you're doing is shifting the abuse from parents who chose each other to children who didn't choose the situation at all, and that scarcely seems fair. So political correctness then came about because, I mean, in part, this is sort of one of the major factors.
[4:56:20] Political correctness came about because shaming language lost its power because the The negative outcomes were buried under money printing in debt. So there are massive negative outcomes for the children of single mothers. And I've got a whole presentation, The Truth About Single Mothers, which you can peruse at your leisure. But I won't get into the details here.
[4:56:43] You can look up the statistics. They're absolutely appalling. But they're not immediate. What happens is it has some woman becomes a single mother or is a single mother, which is not the same as a widow. A widow is a divorcee is a woman who was married. A widow is a woman whose husband died, a single mother is unmarried at the time of birth.
[4:57:04] So, the negative effects of children who grew up in single mother households from female promiscuity to male aggression are legion, but they're diffused and they only happen later, right? The seen versus the unseen, one of the basic principles of economics. And so, if you criticized single mothers in the past, it made perfect sense because they were massively dysfunctional, their kids were going through hell, they had often become prostitutes, they weren't welcome in a polite society and so on. So you would criticize that and be like, well, yeah, that makes sense. That's exactly the way things are playing out. And so you'd warn people away. But when single mothers get, and I did a show on this many years ago, it's called The Welfare Cliff, which is a woman with two children in America at the time, this is many years ago, got the equivalent of $80,000 worth of benefits, both direct subsidies, subsidized housing, free healthcare, dental care, and so on. So she got the equivalent of eighty thousand dollars and what that meant is that when she worked her her um benefits would be deducted right so she made ten thousand dollars her benefits would be reduced by ten thousand dollars and what that meant was that she effectively faced 100 tax rate until she made 80 000 right and if she makes 85 000 it's like a 98 tax rate so she would have to to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to make up, to make more money than she was getting for free.
[4:58:31] And that keeps people trapped in poverty. And now we have three or four generations in the West of people, their entire clan has basically never had jobs. They don't know much about the workplace and they've adapted to that way of living. And so if you criticize single mothers or loose behavior, at a time when the negative consequences of that behavior is completely obvious to society, it's a reasonable criticism. But if everybody seems to be doing fine, then you just hate single moms, you're just prejudiced, you're just uneasy, you're just insecure, you're just a misogynist, right?
[4:59:08] Because it seems to be okay. And it seems to be okay because taxation, money printing and borrowing is wallpapering up the giant holes in the future in temporarily doesn't make the structure anymore sound. In fact, it weakens it even more. But then what happens is, because the problems are covered up through debt and deferred down to the future where it becomes more diffuse and hard to figure out.
[4:59:35] Then it looks like you're just hostile you're just negative uh to to people and you just hate people and therefore you can't use this term and you can't use that term because it's offensive and it's upsetting and it's negative and so this whole political correctness comes out because the negative effects of bad decisions are shifted to the future right shifted to people who are going to be preyed upon by criminals coming out of the single mother households which is of course not a hundred percent but it sure ain't zero it's shifted to the future in terms of debt uh and so on and so we can't say negative things about negative decisions because those negative decisions are wallpapered over by debt and money printing theft really and diffused down to the future and so now you're just prejudiced and you just don't like and so all of this stuff came about in a way to this sort of language policing is because the language policing was for disasters that are now invisible to most people and therefore the language appears to be just hostile or prejudicial or misogynistic or something like that it's like well no we're actually desperately trying to save society from some very bad outcomes but those bad outcomes are only visible to the knowledgeable and perceptive not to the average person if that makes sense.
[5:00:50] Absolutely what would you say to a guy who says i'm lonely i've never had a girlfriend i feel like my life has no purpose nobody loves me and i just want to kill myself
[5:01:04] Yeah you know i was with you there because i get a lot of these calls in the call-ins just for the record if somebody says to me that they're suicidal i will tell them to call a hotline to get a therapist to you know go to emerge if they're feeling suicidal however you know, it does sometimes come up over the course of a conversation that somebody has, self-destructive tendencies. So, you know, the usual caveats I'll say, I'm obviously not a mental health professional, not a psychiatrist, not a psychologist, so I am a moral philosopher in in particular. So, you know, I don't have any subject matter expertise in this, so these are just my amateur opinions with some reinforcement of a lot of conversations I've had over the years in the show and privately.
[5:01:53] So people don't want to kill themselves. This is not something that generates spontaneously within the mind of someone. Can you imagine, evolutionarily speaking? It's like, well, I could eat and exercise and reproduce produce and or i could just jump off a cliff right there there isn't really a jump off the cliff evolutionary pressure because those who had spontaneously internally developed suicidal ideation well they wouldn't reproduce or if they did reproduce their children it wouldn't do very well so there'd be a downward drag on that and that would be weeded out so then the question is okay if it doesn't evolve in an evolutionary standpoint he said somewhat repetitively but But if it doesn't arise out of evolution, where does it come from? Now, I remember reading a psychiatrist many years ago, his anecdotes and so on, so all the caveats in the world, but he said in his decades of practicing, suicidal people are.
[5:02:54] Every single person he met who was suicidal, who he treated, had internal parental voices telling them to kill themselves. And you've seen this on the internet, K-Y-S, right? I mean, it's one of the things that people constantly trying to, like weird voodoo, cast a bad spell on people. So, why is it that somebody would have in their mind the completely anti-evolutionary, anti-happiness thought of killing themselves? themselves. So, I'll tell you what I think. Obvious nonsense. I don't have any proof. Just an amateur opinion.
[5:03:29] There are a lot of crimes that go on in a family. There are a lot of crimes that go on in families. I mean, pedophilia is one in three girls and one in five boys, and the number could be even higher. Now, this is not one in three families because pedophiles often have hundreds of victims. So there's pedophilia, there is drug use, of course, even drunk driving, which is criminal. There is violence against children, more so than just the spanking, violence and beatings against spouses. There is theft, there is fraud, and all kinds of terrible things that happen. There are children who've witnessed direct violent crimes such as assault, murder, and rape. So there are crimes in a lot of families. Now, if we look at the criminal paradigm, let's say that you are unfortunate enough to witness a crime by an organized crime gang, so the mafia or something like that, and they know that you've seen it, right? They know that you are a witness to a crime. So what do they do? Well, if you are the witness to, I mean, it could be any criminal, but organized crime is the one we'd probably be most familiar with. If you're a witness to a crime, the perpetrator.
[5:04:47] Will threaten you that if you go to the police, he'll kill you.
[5:04:51] And your family and whatever, right? So, if you witness a crime, you are threatened with death, should you talk? So, if we look at the fact that there are a substantial number of crimes occurring within families, and the children are the witnesses to those crimes, and often, of course, the victims, what are they told? They're told, if you talk, what do they say? I mean, I've heard this from a number of people, right? So, what are the criminal perpetrators of these crimes, if they're parents? It could be other people in the family who just talk about parents for now. What do they say to the children? They say, well, if you talk, you're dead. If you talk, you're going to get taken away and put into foster care, which for a child is the equivalent of death, in terms of like their stability and sense of survival and so on and safety um so there is or you know if if if you talk uh daddy or mommy's going to go to jail and then what's right and then the child feels that there's no protection there's no security there's no safety so there are a lot of threats made against children by criminals within a family structure it could be elsewhere right but most commonly it would be within the family structure that doesn't always mean parents It could be extended family, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, but, you know, we sort of understand we don't have to go through all the radiating levels of genetic proximity.
[5:06:17] So if there are a lot of crimes in families and the general methodology of dealing with a witness to a crime is to threaten them with death if they talk, then what happens is people get into adulthood and they want to talk about the pain that they've suffered. They want to share with others the horrors of their childhood.
[5:06:43] But then what happens is when they want to talk, because one of the ways that you keep people quiet is you isolate them, right? This is why you say, I'm lonely. This is the quote you gave, right? I'm lonely. I've never had a girlfriend. Well, if you are witness to a crime and your parents are criminals, they don't want you getting close to anyone. They don't want you having friends. They don't want you having sleepovers. They don't want you having a girlfriend because you might talk. So I view, in general, right, tons of exceptions, but I view people with this kind of loneliness, isolation.
[5:07:15] And suicidality, I would assume, my first assumption doesn't mean it's accurate all the time, of course, but my first assumption is they witnessed or were, the victims of genuine crimes that everybody would accept would be illegal and would deserve jail time i don't just mean like spanking and stuff like that which i consider wrong but most people would say or you know like the genuine like if if it was on video the parent would go to jail so i think that that is what is probably occurring at least that's the first, thing that I would go to as a methodology to trying to figure out why. It's not that you just want to kill yourself, it's that you have a problem. Your life is horrifying because you're isolated, but in order to break that isolation, it brings up death threats in your mind. And so, I think that's a lot of the torture that people are going through. And again, I don't want to over-caviate this, but this is just my opinion.
[5:08:17] I've certainly had some conversations along these lines and that would be my first port of call if i was talking to someone about this just sort of in my personal life but that would be my first approach if that makes sense yes.
[5:08:29] Sir so um i would like to give mr molyneux a break and just share some thoughts on kamala harris finally extended uh the web page that she has and now actually lists the issues that she would like to talk about. Now, I'm not going to get into the specifics, but here are the major takeaways to save the audience some time. Voluntary contracts are exploitative, but the state imposing unilateral obligations on millions of people by legal fiat is a totally valid social contract. Forced cotton picking is inherently immoral, but forced military conscription for for Vladimir Zelensky, is totally good. We want to empower the working class, but school choice should be illegal.
[5:09:16] You might owe reparations for something you never engaged in, but violent criminals today are really just victims of past injustice. Riots are the voice of the unheard, but January 6th was the worst thing since the 30 Years' War. So, when you are faced with all of these contradictions, the best thing that I think people could do is check out two websites. One is libertarianinstitute.org. Two is freedomain.com. I want to give 10 lessons I have learned from freedomain.com, along with these books, On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, Everyday Anarchy, and Practical Anarchy. So, lesson number one, the importance of free association, disassociation, and having your own standards. This applies to friends, family, family, commercial interactions, and politics.
[5:10:09] Free Domain really gave me the confidence to not have double standards, whether it's for my neighbor or for someone like Lindsey Graham. Number two, taking the implications of arguments. I had this pink-haired Bolshevik the other day tell me, you shouldn't tell people what to do. And I had to just pause and laugh, asking her, did you just tell me not to do something in the form of telling me to tell Tell other people not what to do and what not to do. Having this confidence really allowed me to discuss political issues without a heightened sense of insecurity.
[5:10:50] Number three, start small with what you can control. One of my favorite Molyneux rants ever was, he goes, If you can't lift a cup of coffee, please don't pretend to tell me that you can lift a building. So starting with something small that which is in your control is really important the other really good one he had was before you try and change the world and or change the political system and turn it against its own interests could you take a Jane Austen book club and turn that book club against Jane Austen start small start local the next one use precise language Nikki Haley said the other day I don't agree with the president on everything.
[5:11:36] Well, of course, no one agrees with everyone on everything. This was something Mr. Molyneux would constantly point out to us. And once you see the imprecise language that morons use to arouse the passions of the feeble-minded and keep them asleep, it's just everywhere. Next one, holding people accountable to their face. There was a guy, well.
[5:11:58] Remotely but in a conversation the gentleman was asked by mr molyneux um so at this point what would it take for you to break up with your girlfriend he goes well if she ever really violated my trust to which step on said well she cheated on you and gave you an std so are you gonna break up with her or just move the goal post and it was like oh i never thought of someone actually, you know, holding someone accountable like that. This is something I'd only say a day later to someone else in the confidence of my own home. That is really important. Next, the importance of analogies. Isolating variables, allowing people to extract a principle under circumstances which they don't have emotional connections to. This is why I use the example of the Catholic Church doing everything the state does in my book, Domestic Imperialism. Very important. Next, the importance of social ostracism and public declarations of disapproval. It was just amazing hearing adults that I know say things like, well, you can't say X. When you say you can't, do you mean the words don't actually exit your mouth?
[5:13:10] And they're like, well.
[5:13:11] You'll get a lot of eye rolls and people might raise their voice. And so that's what I mean by can't. So they put this on the same level as like, you can't flap your arms and fly and you can't address issues like, hey, you shouldn't hit your kids to one of your friends who is an abusive parent. Next, the against me argument, raising the emotional opportunity cost of holding an immoral belief decreases the person's confidence in it, thus they're less likely to passionately spread it, decreasing its power of social proof. This against me argument is very important. It gets people out of the realm of hypothetically, theoretically, I think things like taxation and conscription are okay. OK, asking people you want me to be enslaved, forced labor to go to Ukraine to keep Zelensky on the throne. That's what you think should happen. And I should be caged for not doing this. If I like Yanukovych more, that's what should happen to me. You're advocating that very powerful stuff. Next, selective anger as a litmus test. Growing up, I thought there were two types of people, people who got angry and people who didn't.
[5:14:22] Uh free domain.com.
[5:14:24] Really uh taught me that there was actually uh a standard that you should have for things that should make you angry and things that you should first talk through or just uh constantly remain calm on so the ability to properly discriminate a uh good time for when anger uh should be used because if you use it all the time it's like inflation if you print a ton of
[5:14:46] It then it's.
[5:14:47] Worthless if you're always angry then you never know what's really important finally Finally, I had to choose one of my favorite quotes. This one might be the best. Death is coming either way. Living small ain't gonna save you from death. It just makes every day a little more like dying. That is a number of lessons I've learned as a student of Mr. Molyneux for these years. Been waiting maybe six years or so to tell him that, so I thought today would be Today would be a good day. Next question for Mr. Molyneux. We're running low on time, so I just want to keep going. You have the ability to send every person on earth a free copy of one book. Which book would you choose and why?
[5:15:33] Well, first of all, I appreciate you summing up so beautifully a lot of great lessons. Thank you. Thank you. That's very, very kind. So I was obviously it's going to be one of my books, because if I thought there was another better book, I wouldn't have written stuff. So I was like, oh, it should be UPB, universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics. But instead, I ended up settling on my book, Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love. Because real-time relationships is about how to be honest and direct and clear, in relationships in real time, right? So if you get angry with someone, you don't say, well, you're just an a-hole and you just did bad things and you're just terrible. And right, You say, I feel angry at you.
[5:16:15] I'm not saying I know why, I don't, maybe don't know why, but I have this experience of emotion towards you, I'm angry at you, because people always jump into, I'm angry at you, therefore you did something wrong, therefore you did something bad or rude or immoral, in the same way people will say, well, I'm offended, therefore you're offensive.
[5:16:35] And it's like, no, that's not logically what follows. Your emotions are not mind-reading, omniscient scans of other people. There are people who annoy me, and sometimes it's because they have a bad habit that I have, and I'm actually annoyed at my own bad habit, right? So there are people who annoy me or anger me because they remind me of someone in the past who did something negative, and therefore I'm doing it to do with that. Somebody could annoy me because they have been annoying me for a while, and I haven't said anything about it. In other words, I've lied by omission, and therefore they do one little thing, and I just blow up. And that's the result of prior dishonesty. So, being honest with people in real time, really honest, which is to not jump to conclusions.
[5:17:25] Not jumping to conclusions is really, really key in relationships. So, if something my daughter is doing bothers me, I'll say, what you're doing is bothering me. I don't know you're doing anything wrong, but I actually do feel kind of bothered. I wonder why, right? And that's important, right? That's important. So, honesty and humility, honesty and accuracy, honesty and not jumping to conclusions.
[5:17:50] Jumping to conclusions is demanding that other people manage your own emotions. So people who get triggered or offended or upset, they're openly saying, I can't manage my emotions, therefore it's your job to change your behavior.
[5:18:06] I don't like this argument. It makes me feel anxious and uncomfortable. So you need to stop making this argument. This data bothers me deeply. So stop bothering me with your data and shut up. This is censorship. So, if you can't manage your own emotions, which means have them but don't expect them to be tyrant demands on other people's behaviours, if you can't manage your own emotions, you end up having to be tyrannical to everyone around you. And that is really terrible. Where does the real tyranny come from? And the real tyranny doesn't usually come down from the state to the individual, at least on a free speech sense. The most tyranny comes from not wanting to upset those around you. And it's not that we are too bothered by upsetting people around us it's because the people around us often if we upset them they will absolutely demand that we change our behavior and as we can see from censorship that is a pattern that grows and grows and grows until it eclipses the very heavens itself and turns our entire social discourse into silent darkness because it doesn't stop if somebody says well it bothers me when you make this argument so you better stop making this argument. You're like, okay, I'll stop making this argument. You've weakened them. You haven't strengthened them. You haven't taught them anything about how to deal with their own emotions. All you've done is you've taught them that if anybody makes them uncomfortable, it's not their job to deal with their own discomfort.
[5:19:27] It's the other person's job to change their behavior. That's never going to end. It always, always, always escalates because people who don't have power over themselves desperately want power over others.
[5:19:40] And the more they get to exercise power over others, the more their lust for power increases. Like, power is an addiction. It's not like food. It's like bulimia, right? It's not like exercise. It's like anorexia. And there is no particular limit to an addiction other than death, absolutely hitting bottom, or having some kind of self-knowledge journey where you get to the root of the issue. You so i would say to people real-time relationships tells you how to be honest with your own thoughts and feelings how to genuinely connect with other people without being aggressive towards them and in this way you lose the desire to control other people because you actually have management over yourself so you know how it works in relationships we can go a little bit over i know i'm talking a lot, but you know how it works in relationships.
[5:20:34] You know, the wife says to the husband, well, why don't you ever put away the dishes from the dishwasher, right? She gets really, really angry. We know it's not about the dishwasher, but she's pretending that it is. And the level of emotional upset is way too high because of the dishwasher. And so they end up arguing about the dishwasher. She has to escalate to hide the fact that it's crazy to argue this much about the dishwasher, and they end up arguing about something that's not the real issue. What is the real issue? you. I mean, it could be any number of things, but it ain't the dishwasher. So Real-Time Relationships is a book that, again, it's free at freedomand.com slash books. Real-Time Relationships will teach you how to be honest. When I open the dishwasher and the dishes are full, it bothers me. I'm angry. I'm.
[5:21:19] Normally interprets I'm angry at you as I did something wrong or you're being irrationally angry at me right so you either apologize which doesn't solve the problem because it's not about the dishwasher or you get mad back because like oh come on I did this I mowed the lawn yesterday and you didn't do this the other day right I mean you've probably seen these videos of a um.
[5:21:41] A woman complaining about a man's clutter uh somewhere in the house and then he goes up to to the sink where there's like six million voodoo bottles of eternal youth and so on so just to get people to talk about the actual issues i'm upset i'm upset you did this and then i got upset not even i'm upset with you you did this and it bothered me you got you did this and i felt angry you did this and i got anxious i don't know why and then you can explore it together without blame without attack and you can actually build that bond because that's where trust is trust exists this where you're not blamed for other people's moods maybe you just need a snickers bar i don't know it could be any number of things so i think when you have honesty in that kind of relationship and this is particularly true parents to children when you have honesty in your relationships and you lose the thirst to control dominate bully and blame others for your emotional states, then you begin to undo the sort of tightly wound escalating tyranny that goes on in people's hearts when they blame other people for what they themselves feel and believe genuinely that the best way to manage their own feelings is to order other people around like the Wehrmacht. And that's just escalating tyranny, which happens at a personal level, and then people accept it more at a social and political level.
[5:22:55] That is such a great lesson, initiating humility. This is bothering me. I don't know why. Can we talk about it versus you're wrong and I'm right?
[5:23:06] You're the reason I feel this way. You have to change your behavior because what you're doing is upsetting and offensive to me. And it's like, whoa, I thought we were supposed to be in love. Why are you blaming me for feeling bad?
[5:23:19] Next topic, people who advocate the government coercibly running every aspect of everyone's life will frequently tell me, it's wrong to just walk up to people and tell them about the keto diet or the non-aggression principle. Why do you think so many people blatantly hold this specific contradiction? It's good for authorities to have violently imposed standards, and they shame other people for having voluntary standards. standards?
[5:23:46] Well, I think it's related to the thing we talked about before. So if you go up to talk to people about the keto diet, then they assume that you're calling them fat. They get upset. They call you rude. And maybe they do eat badly. Maybe they don't exercise. Maybe they are overweight, but they don't want to feel bad about it. And so you are making them feel bad. So they have to tell you to stop doing that. If you talk about the non-aggression principle, most parents 80%, 90% depends on the ethnicity, 70 to 90% of parents hit their children. So when you start talking about the non-aggression principle.
[5:24:24] You know, there's this very uneasy relationship in people's minds, most people's minds, between their own conscience and an external truth.
[5:24:33] Because the conscience is buried down by lies, justifications, propaganda. This is how you have to raise kids. They turn into brats if you don't hit them or whatever, right? So the conscience gets buried. But the conscience is like a little gopher. It's always sticking its head up and sniffing the wind and looking for other gophers. Is there anything out there that I can use to gain some authority back in the mind?
[5:24:54] So the number of people who are floating around or storming around, stomping around with a bad conscience can scarcely be overestimated. And so when you start talking about the keto diet, people who've been neglecting their health, their conscience is like, oh, wait, wait, somebody's helping. Oh my gosh, can I get somebody out there? Can I get an amen? Is somebody out there talking about this? Maybe I can get some traction. And they're like, uh-oh, conscience rising. Shut up, right? And the non-aggression principle, well, people have been abusive in their relationships. They've yelled and called each other, you know, like one of the things when couples call me and they've got problems with their marriage, I'm like, well, what words have you used against each other? And some of the words are pretty horrific, right? So, people have been really aggressive. They've hit their children. They've bullied their employees. They've bullied people around them. They've called people terrible names, maybe even their children as well. So, when you start talking about the non-aggression principle, their conscience is like, Like, whoa, hey, there's a way out of this rubble that I've been buried under, this rubble of justifications and habits and history. I can get up. There's somebody out there talking about it. And their conscience begins to rise into them because it senses an external ally, which they can join hands with to rescue the personality from evil.
[5:26:06] And so what happens is when you start talking about truth, virtue, better behavior, any kind of thing, the same thing happens when I talk about universally preferable behavior. Universally preferable behavior is just another name for the conscience. And people's relationship to my theory of ethics is always their relationship to their own conscience. And so.
[5:26:23] People have terrible things they've done. They buried it under justifications. You start talking about better principles, higher standards. The conscience gets roused and they freak out. It feels like an assault. You know, if there was some remote control thing that could, you pushed a button and people got like some crazy adrenaline dump or some, you just, you got a dial, you crank it up and they just freak out and they have a panic attack, right? I mean, that would be assault. Assault. Like if you wired up someone's brain and you had a remote control anxiety, you just dialed up their anxiety, that would be considered assault. But that's how people experience it when you talk about virtues and values that make them feel bad. They view you as assaulting them. They don't say, well, gee, I guess I've been ignoring this issue. I've done some bad things. I should probably listen to this guy and become a better person. No, they experience it as assault. You're making me feel terrible. You're a bad person. Shut up. And so that is um i think one of the things that's happening and so they feel.
[5:27:38] Anxiety when you talk about the non-aggression principle but then if you start talking about i mean just to circle back on the welfare state if you say you know the welfare state is is toxic and bad and listen man i mean i'm not sure where you grew up i certainly grew up in what i called the matriarchal manners which was a single mother rent control departments of cockroaches everywhere uh violence screaming uh you know we were gonna i remember we moved into one place and we were going to go meet with the neighbors but then we couldn't because the guy got arrested because he he shot a bullet into a wall during a fight with his wife he was actually a cop so this is the kind of hellscape you know screaming violence like just just awful awful stuff and so and this is all the welfare state now i'm not saying it's 100 of their behavior was defined by other welfare state but there are a lot of people who were on quote disability while still able to move their own furniture and they just didn't have to go out in the world and deal with people and suffer any negative consequences for bad behavior so they tended to rot on the inside and decay in terms of their standards so if i say well the welfare state is coercive the welfare state is debt-based the welfare state makes people worse and we need private charity where we actually go in and help people with usually emotional issues or maybe mental health issues, but don't just give them money and leave them to rot in their own little apartments.
[5:28:59] So then what happens is people then feel anxious because I'm bringing up the immorality and dysfunction of the welfare state.
[5:29:09] So both are the same things. If someone says, oh, you're calling me fat because you're talking about the keto diet, they feel anxious. If you start talking about the immorality of the welfare state, then they feel anxious.
[5:29:20] And so I think both the principles are following the same pattern, is that if you start talking about less government coercion, less government control.
[5:29:31] Voluntary charity and private education and so on, then people get really anxious. And you know now i understand it like now we're in a situation where the welfare state has gone on for so long that it's really really hard you know outside of some massive extremity like some crazy military thing it's really hard to think how the welfare state can be wound down without a lot of rioting or violence so people just oh we can't talk about the welfare state and they may know people on the welfare state they may themselves be on the welfare state uh and so on or if you you start talking about you know social security i mean people are taking out way more than they ever paid in and that's literally stealing from the younger generation they're like eternal boomer vampires who on the jugular of the younger generation the younger generation can't get their start because of all this money going to the elderly and then people are like oh but if let's say that there's some diminishment in in benefits for old age pensions because we can't afford them and then people are like, oh, that might mean that my mom comes to live with me and so they feel anxious about that. So people are just managing their own anxieties by having people not say things and language is just, for a lot of people, it's this dial-up, feels like assault and so people freak out because of that stuff and I think that's the general pattern that we see, this sort of triggered thing.
[5:30:55] Definitely. I love the line by Antonin Scalia. I think he said, the welfare state has created donors without love and recipients without gratitude. I once found out that this guy who would never tell me what he does for a living, turns out he was a welfare recipient making quite a bit of money. I said, you know, every day in the private sector, I'm thanked for the little bit of money I give even to Starbucks, Planet Fitness, any of these places. I've never been thanked by a welfare recipient for all the taxes I've paid. I go, would you like to thank me? Oh, I've never seen him so angry. It is just unbelievable. Talk about burying something deep within your conscience and flipping out when the slightest thing. thing speaking of um why people uh i'm sorry did you want to comment no no go
[5:31:43] Ahead i think you made the point.
[5:31:44] Okay uh why are so many people myself included so terrified of the smallest amount of disapproval as i said earlier i was talking to grown adults who were saying you can't say x
[5:31:58] Insert something that was on their mind that they wanted to get.
[5:32:01] Off their chest that they thought would be met with some social disapproval by either maybe customers or bosses, but even just at a dinner party. Why are so many people so terrified of the smallest amount of disapproval?
[5:32:14] I think there's an evolutionary reason behind this. And this is not an answer in terms of a moral sense, but my question is always, why is it this way? Like, why is it that boys in particular who are beaten grow up to be violent? There's nothing in physics that says this, right? So there has to be some evolutionary adaptation.
[5:32:35] So we are a social species, we are a tribal species, we can't survive on our own. I mean, there are lots of creatures out there, they just get together to mate, they go off on their way, a lot of the big cats are kind of like that. But we are social tribal animals, and that's why we have got these giant brains, is because we outsource a lot of our survival to others.
[5:32:59] So because our children develop so slowly, they need a huge amount of resources and pair bonding and commitment and time. And what that means is that people have to care about us. They have to approve of us. Our tribe has to approve of us. If our tribe does not approve of us, a couple of things are going to happen. We might get ostracized, in which case we're banished from the tribe and our genes don't reproduce and we die alone in the wilderness at some point. Or maybe we stay in the tribe but the women won't mate with us which is why there tends to be a bit of a hive mind among women about bad things and the withholding of sex is very powerful and it is, because that is genetic death you have no offspring or let's say that we somehow do manage to not get ostracized not get kicked out and we find a woman who will sleep with us and we have kids but then if we lose approval then Then we lose status, our kids lose status, nobody wants to hang with us, and our kids are less likely to survive because the other tribal members are not as diligent in feeding them or taking care of them because, again, we're sort of raised in this somewhat collective situation.
[5:34:12] So, if we think of the mindset that happened to be born, I'm sure it was born countless times, I've written an entire novel about this called Just Poor, the mindset of somebody who grows up who just doesn't give a rat's behind about other people's opinions. They think for themselves, they go with reason and evidence as best they can, and they just don't care about the opinions of others. Okay, does that gene set get selected for survival? And the answer is no. No. So, we are the descendants of people who were terrified of disapproval, because if they weren't terrified of disapproval, they wouldn't have made it. We wouldn't be descended from them.
[5:34:56] So I think that is really important. It's hard for us to think now. Now we have all of this independence, right? Like I can disagree with society. You and I can have this conversation and, you know, our kids will flourish and we can have a good life and all of that. But that's not how we evolved. We evolved in a time of massive predation, right? The predators are wolves and lions and jackals and you name it, right? There were predators everywhere and food was scarce and disease was rampant and if you were starving and you got sick your body might not have the energy to fight off the infection and so on and so survival was like razor thin you know back in the day um of the last ice age humanity was down to like 10 000 people i mean that's a small town that that's all that were so survival was It was like a razor edge margin and anything that got you over that line was hugely positively selected for.
[5:35:56] The tribe, the women, the men, the elders, the witch doctors, they just did not like people who were immune to disapproval, because you couldn't get people in line, and their kids would not survive. So we've evolved this way, which doesn't make as much sense now, because we can be independent, we can go against social approval, we can disregard, to some degree, the opinions of others, and we can do well. Well, but throughout most of human history, and certainly during the course of our evolution, that was not at all the case. You needed every tiny scrap of survivability and positive reproductive selection that you could get. So we've evolved that way because there was no other way for us to survive. And so now we have the challenge in that our environment is something where we can have more free thought and free speech, but our emotional apparatus was evolved to be uncomfortable with that. And that's a challenge I think that most free thinkers have had to face throughout human history. And we are in a situation now in the modern world where, you know, I have an ancestor, William Molyneux, who was best friends with John Locke, the philosopher.
[5:37:03] And they criticized the king and they ended up being chased by the king's soldiers through Ireland and, you know, sleeping in barns and drinking from ditches. And, you know, so there's a lot of challenges to having creative, rational thought and going with the evidence and so on. We are in a situation where it is more a matter of emotional management than actual physical danger. Like we're not getting chased by the King's soldiers usually through the Irish countryside and having to lay down with the goats. So our emotional nature is developed for scarcity where disapproval meant death but we can actually do well in society by telling the truth which goes against our emotional instincts if that makes sense yes.
[5:37:51] Sir thank you so much everyone for watching keith and i don't tread on anyone please visit libertarianinstitute.org and freedomain.com mr molyneux thank you so much for your time appreciate the conversation
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