0:00 - Introduction to the Conversation
10:29 - The Ethics of Avoidance
23:13 - The Rise of Political Correctness
31:57 - Understanding Loneliness and Suicidal Thoughts
38:26 - Lessons from Freedomain
43:29 - The Nature of Relationships and Honesty
46:30 - The Contradictions of Government Standards
54:55 - The Fear of Disapproval and Its Origins
In this episode, I engage in a thought-provoking continuation of my dialogue with Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.com. We delve into complex philosophical topics surrounding ethics, aesthetics, and societal conventions, particularly focusing on key concepts from his book "Universally Preferable Behavior." I ask him to clarify his position on the differentiation of aesthetics from ethics, emphasizing his assertion on the significance of avoidability in moral discussions.
Molyneux offers a rich exploration of the evolution of moral philosophy devoid of external authority, whether divine or state-sanctioned. He illustrates his point through practical scenarios, demonstrating the concept of self-ownership and the importance of consent. Drawing attention to the ethics of personal responsibility, he elaborates on the necessary distinction between voluntary participation in certain behaviors and those that are profoundly coercive or non-consensual. He cleverly uses analogies from various contexts, such as sports and controversial cultural narratives, to shed light on the nuances of consent and moral judgments.
We transition into a discussion on the rise of political correctness as a byproduct of the welfare state, highlighting how societal norms have shifted. Molyneux recounts the language of disapproval used in historical contexts to navigate moral behavior and the implications of not confronting negative decisions. He discusses how the repercussions of such decisions have been obscured in contemporary discourse by the mechanisms of the welfare state, which create a disconnect between actions and accountability.
As our conversation progresses, I pose a question to Molyneux regarding societal pressures and the emotions surrounding vulnerability and disapproval. He frames it in an evolutionary context, suggesting that our ancestral need for social cohesion has left us with deep-rooted fears connected to disapproval, shaping our responses to negative feedback and societal expectations.
Molyneux compares this deeply ingrained reaction to disapproval with how we handle contemporary discussions about advocacy and personal choices. He argues that individuals often react defensively when faced with critiques that challenge their beliefs or behaviors, an instinct borne from centuries of social survival tactics.
Towards the conclusion, Molyneux shares insights on interpersonal relationships, emphasizing the importance of communicating emotions without assigning blame. He proposes a philosophy of "Real-Time Relationships," which advocates for honesty and clarity in our interactions—encouraging discussions that foster self-awareness rather than escalating conflict.
In summary, this episode unpacks significant issues pertaining to ethics, societal expectations, and personal accountability—inviting listeners to challenge their perspectives on morality and the implications of their choices, while also providing insights into cultivating healthier relationships and societal structures.
[0:00] Welcome to Keith and I 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.
[0:27] 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 gonna 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 turn to you and say stand in front of me so i can push you off the cliff, what would your response be? 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.
[1:52] 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.
[2:22] 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 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 and so people who are into to 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 the 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.
[3:51] 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.
[4:49] Your participation in their lateness is voluntary. They're not enforcing it on you. They're not inflicting it on you. 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 7, 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.
[5:10] 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?
[6:18] 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.
[6:41] 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 evil doing are all immoral, which is rape, 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 all of the t's i validated our personal or a sense of morality that occurs in the private sphere.
[7:42] The radical part about upb is the universal part which we talked about uh 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, 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.
[8:52] Our kid said, I beat that other kid because he was late showing up to the park. We'd say, well, 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.
[10:08] In your book art of the argument page 65 you say the rise of the welfare state coincided with the rise of political correctness when negative consequences for bad decisions are removed information is inevitably repressed please expand on this right.
[10:29] 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 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.
[11:17] 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.
[11:36] 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 if you 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 East. 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 of just 10 minutes of sex on society as a whole.
[12:54] 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 a 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 um 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.
[14:21] 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.
[14:46] 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.
[16:09] 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.
[16:28] 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 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 $600 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.
[17:22] 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 own husbands in a scant 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 in this data to back this up were perceived to be be doing enormously selfish behaviors that harmed their children.
[18:15] 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. 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 children went.
[18:56] 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 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. Political correctness came about because shaming language lost its power because 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 you can look up these statistics they're absolutely appalling but they're not immediate what happens is it has so 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.
[20:16] 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 eighty thousand dollars worth of benefits both direct subsidies subsidized housing free health care dental care and so on, so she got the equivalent of 80 000 and what that meant is that when she worked her her um.
[21:20] 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 make hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to make up to make more money than she was getting for free, 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?
[22:20] 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. It 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 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 100%, but it sure ain't zero.
[23:14] It's shifted to the future in terms of debt and so on. And so...
[23:21] 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 absolutely.
[24:03] 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.
[24:15] Yeah you know i was with you there because i get a lot of these calls in the call-ins um 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 uh tendencies so uh you know the usual caveats i'll say i'm obviously I'm a mental health professional, not a psychiatrist, not a psychologist, so I am a moral philosopher in particular. So 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.
[25:04] 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, or I could just jump off a cliff, right? 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 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 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.
[26:07] 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, KYS, 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.
[26:41] 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, There's 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.
[27:59] Will threaten you that if you go to the police, he'll kill you. 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 uh you're gonna get taken away and put into foster care which for a child is the equivalent of of death in terms of like like their stability and sense of survival and so on, and safety. So there is, or, you know, if you talk, a daddy or mommy's going to go to jail, and then what, right? And then the child feels that there's no protection, there's no security, there's no safety.
[29:10] 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. 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.
[29:55] 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. Is 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, 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...
[30:40] 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. 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.
[31:41] Yes, sir. So I would like to give Mr. Molyneux a break and just share some thoughts on Kamala Harris finally extended the webpage that she has and now actually lists the issues that she would would like to talk about.
[31:58] 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. 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 Thirty 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.
[33:08] So, lesson number one, the importance of free association, disassociation, and having your own standards. This applies to friends, family, commercial interactions, and politics. Ticks. 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.
[34:02] 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 uh which is uh in your control is really important the other really good one he had was um it 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 uh the next one use precise language Nikki Haley said the other day. I don't agree with the president on everything.
[34:48] 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 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 goalpost and it was like oh i never thought of of someone actually 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.
[36:02] 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? And they're like, well, you'll get a lot of eye rolls and people might raise their voice. And so that's what I 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 uh 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.
[37:08] 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 happened 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.
[37:34] Uh, freedomain.com really, uh, taught me that there was actually, uh, a, uh, 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 it, then it's worthless. If you're always angry, then you never know what's really important.
[38:03] Finally, this, 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.
[38:27] So I thought today would be a good day. Okay. 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?
[38:46] 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.
[39:27] 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, 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, right? 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, you know, 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.
[40:38] 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. 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.
[41:18] 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 behaviors 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 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. and 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.
[42:39] 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.
[42:52] And the more they get to exercise power over others, the more their lust for power increases. Like, power is an addiction.
[43:01] 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. 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.
[43:29] 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. You know, the wife says to the husband, well, why don't you ever put away the dishes from the dishwasher, right? And 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? 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 opened the dishwasher and the dishes are full, it bothers me, I'm angry at you, and then everyone...
[44:31] 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.
[44:53] 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.
[46:08] 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?
[46:18] 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?
[46:31] 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?
[46:58] 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, you know, there's this very uneasy relationship in people's minds, most people's minds, between their own conscience and an external truth.
[47:46] 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? 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 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 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.
[48:58] Their conscience is 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 could 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 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, People have terrible things they've done. They've 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.
[50:21] But that's how people experience it when you talk about virtues and values that make them feel bad.
[50:27] 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. all 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 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 other rent control departments uh cockroaches everywhere uh violence screaming uh you know we were gonna i remember we moved into one place and we were gonna go meet with the neighbors but then we couldn't because the guy got arrested because 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 the 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.
[51:55] 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. So then what happens is people then feel anxious because I'm bringing up the immorality and dysfunction of the welfare state.
[52:21] So the 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.
[52:32] And so it's the both. I think both the principles are following the same pattern, is that if you start talking about, you know, less government coercion, less government control.
[52:43] 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.
[54:07] 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 would you like to thank me oh i've never seen him so angry it is just unbelievable talk about burying something uh deep within your conscience and flipping out when the slightest uh thing speaking of um why people uh i'm sorry did you want to comment no no go ahead.
[54:55] I think you made the.
[54:56] Point 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, insert something that was on their mind that they wanted to get 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?
[55:26] 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.
[55:47] 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 the 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 have this sort of, we outsource a lot of our survival to others.
[56:12] 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.
[57:24] 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. 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 so i think that is.
[58:11] Really important it's hard for us to think now now we have all of this independence right like i can disagree with society uh you and i can have this conversation and you know our kids will flourish and 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. Back in the day of the last Ice Age, humanity was down to like 10,000 people. I mean, that's a small town. That's all that were. So survival was like a razor edge margin and anything that got you over that line was hugely positively selected for and.
[59:09] 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's best friends with John Locke, the philosopher.
[1:00:15] 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.
[1:01:03] 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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