0:00 - Introduction to Hedonism
2:12 - The Condemned Prisoner's Last Meal
6:25 - Prey Species and Short Time Preferences
7:59 - Turning Humans into Prey Mindset
11:32 - Hedonism and Prey Mindset
13:45 - Abusing Children and Changing Rules
18:41 - Real Abuse vs. Spartan Discipline
The lecture delves into the concept of hedonism, exploring the idea of organizing life around short-term pleasure without consideration for the future consequences. The speaker discusses how hedonism promotes instant gratification, ignoring long-term implications such as health, relationships, and personal growth. Hedonism is portrayed as both appealing and destructive, enticing individuals to prioritize immediate satisfaction over long-term well-being.
Furthermore, the speaker connects hedonism to the prey mentality, emphasizing that constant feelings of unease and danger can lead to a short-term focus on pleasure. By instilling fear and anxiety in individuals, societal structures can manipulate them into adopting a prey mindset, making them more susceptible to control and exploitation. The absence of fathers in households is highlighted as a contributing factor to the prevalence of a prey mentality and its negative effects on individuals and society.
The speaker expands on how raising children in an environment of unpredictability and changing rules can perpetuate the prey mindset, leading to a breakdown of internalized rules and values. This erosion of objective rules paves the way for hedonism to thrive, as individuals seek pleasure without a solid foundation of principles to guide their actions.
Moreover, the lecture touches on the impact of child abuse, emphasizing that true abuse lies in the destruction of consistent rules rather than physical punishment. By distorting rules to be subjective and unpredictable, abusers can push individuals towards hedonistic behaviors, further dismantling the structure of rules within their minds.
In conclusion, the lecture explores the intricate relationship between rules, hedonism, and societal power dynamics. By uncovering the interplay between fear, uncertainty, and pleasure-seeking behaviors, the speaker offers insights into how individuals can become trapped in a cycle of short-sighted decisions and diminished self-control. The audience is encouraged to reflect on their relationship with rules and how it influences their actions and perceptions.
[0:00] It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain. Hope you're doing well. I don't have my gorgeous audio set up here, but we'll find a way to survive. I wanted to get these thoughts down about hedonism.
[0:11] Hedonism. Now, it's both very fun and not fun to talk about hedonism. Hedonism is organizing your life according to the short-term pleasure principle. Do what feels good in the moment and drink today. Forget the hangover. Enjoy your drugs today. Forget about the brain rot. And enjoy your promiscuity today. Forget about the STDs, unwanted pregnancies, sexual assault allegations, and or, well, actually, and for sure, destruction of your potential capacity for solid pair bonding. So, pleasure today and heck with tomorrow. And, of course, it is clearly both seductive and satanic, right? So there's an entire industry of have fun today, forget tomorrow, because that produces the kind of chaos and disorganization and mess in society as a whole. That, you know, allows for the expansion of political power. So the sort of demonic impulse of enjoy today, enjoy today. That anybody who can't enjoy today is a highly repressed, anal, type A, kill joy, can't relax, can't have fun, you know, chill. Chill is the new thing, right? Chill, man, chill. It's like, well, why? Isn't there not stuff to be angry and upset about in life? No, chill.
[1:37] So hedonism is the opposite of just anger. Just anger is when you're outraged at violations of persons and or property, and you are angry at the people who are violating it. And hedonism says, forget it. It's not a big deal.
[1:57] Don't worry about encroaches upon your rights and principles and values and virtues, the important thing is to have fun. So hedonism, of course, arises from the destruction of long-term thinking, of a long-term time frame.
[2:13] The obvious example of what we would call hedonism, or would seem to be hedonistic, but which is perfectly rational, is the condemned prisoner's last meal, right? The condemned prisoner's last meal. I don't know what it would be for you. But my last meal, I don't know. I mean, it would be probably some juicy plump shrimp seafood pasta with Alfredo sauce and garlic bread with garlic toast with butter and carrot cake and all things that would be a good 2,000 or 2,500 calories, which I could not possibly sustain on any regular basis. I actually just weighed myself for the first time in a while, 188 pounds. And I've been doing some heavy muscle work lately, so I think the fat is even down more. So that's good. We're getting there. I like to get down to 180. But anyway.
[3:10] So hedonism is, it's your last meal. What are you going to eat? Well, you're going to eat whatever tastes the best because there literally is no tomorrow, right? There is no tomorrow, right? It's like, what's the old joke about, like, why do they put alcohol swabs on the injection site of a fatal injection? It's like, what are they concerned? You're going to get an infection. But of course, the answer is that if there's a last minute reprieve, or if you survive the injection for some reason, then you can't get an infection. So it's the last meal scenario, right? It's the last meal scenario.
[3:43] Why would you worry? You know, you don't brush your teeth after your last meal. You don't exercise the day before your destruction and so on, right? So a hedonism. So the way that you shrink people's time preferences to the here and now is you raise them in a constant sense of unease and danger. Are you just right? So it is our selected to feel uneasy, right? It's a prey species. The prey species always feel uneasy, right? You know, when you have kids, right? Every kid, myself included, right? Every kid, myself included, has fantasy that animals in the wild will see how special, kind, and precious you are and will come and eat out of your hand because they just trust you and they love you and they want to do right by you and they sense your sensitive soul and all kinds of good, juicy, and wonderful things.
[4:44] And so that's the fantasy, right? That is the fantasy, that all of these wonderful things are going to happen because you are just so special and precious and the animals will understand that and beautiful things will occur, right? Right. So that is because we only want the prey species to eat out of our hands. Right. That's all. We only want the prey species to be eating out of our hands because if it's not a prey species, it's a predator species and it probably won't eat out of our hands. It will, in fact, eat our hands. Right. So we don't we don't like, hey, I got a big I got a big hunk of meat. It would be super cool if a bear would eat that out of my hand. Like we don't, we don't want that, right? That's not a thing. So we are hoping that a prey species will trust us. We'll like us. We'll love us because we're just wonderful. And, and everybody has this, right? Everybody has this, this fantasy when you're kids and, you know, trying to get something to feed out of your hand is, is interesting, right?
[5:51] So to, to, and prey species, of course, have a constant sense of unease and danger. Right? It's inevitable, right? Constantly. Then they should. They're right. Right? When we have our ducks out, when we have our ducks out and an airplane goes by, they cock their heads to the sky. They cock their heads to the sky because they are frightened that the airplane is a hawk or an eagle or something that's going to, you know, rip their fluffy little heads off. So prey species are constantly nervous and they have no time preference.
[6:26] Sorry, the time preference is very short, short time preference.
[6:30] There's no investment in their young because they don't have to train their young to eat and reproduce like rabbits don't need to train their young to eat and reproduce. That's all instinctual and so on, right? I mean, ducklings will follow their ducks, the duck mothers, but the duck mothers don't teach them anything, right? They don't instruct them in anything, right? I mean, I saw a video the other day of two cranes, I assume it was Florida or something, right? So two cranes that were teaching their baby crane how to fly. I mean, maybe there's a little bit of mimicking and so on, but it's not like how lions play with their cubs to teach them how to hunt and spring and all of that.
[7:14] And ducks that are raised in isolation, the males learn how to mate and the females learn how to submit. It's instinctual. They're not taught how to do that. They learn that independent of being taught.
[7:25] So prey species don't invest in their young. Prey species grow up with a constant sense of unease and danger. And prey species have very short time preferences. So of Of course, if you want to prey on human beings, you try to turn them into the prey mindset, right? Human beings are both predator and prey, right? You understand that. So we both hunt and we are hunted, right? So there are lots of things that will eat human beings or bears and sharks and tigers and lions and all other kinds of creatures will eat human beings.
[8:00] And I guess the worms when we're all done with our bodies. but that is a basic reality of life that we are both predator and prey and what that means is that we can go both ways and of course the greatest predator of human beings is other human beings right attack war enslave rape subjugate exploit that kind of stuff right so of course the purpose of power is to trigger the prey mentality in human beings. And the prey mentality is designed to survive, right? A significant proportion of human beings, at least half in many of the ancient empires and sometimes much higher, a significant proportion of human beings, a significant portion of human beings were slaves and they only survived by adopting a prey mentality, right? Because they were preyed upon by the slave owners, sometimes within their own race, sometimes other races and so on.
[8:55] If you want to gain power over human beings, the best thing that you can do is raise children in a constant sense of unease and danger, right? Which is why, you know, you have this racial animosity, why you have global warming or climate change or the end of the world stuff. You raise children, and also this is why it's very important to drive fathers out of the home, right? If you drive fathers out of the home, you end up with our selected prey mentality human beings. And that's because of course fathers are there designed to provide and protect and when there's fathers absent that is a signal that the children are in danger why because they are father absence is highly correlated with massive increases in child abuse particularly sexual abuse so you are more abused in the absence of a father and so to drive fathers out of the home is foundational to expanding political power.
[9:51] Children are then raised in a situation of unease and danger. And the dangers have to be ideological because there's not scarcity danger. We're not out of food. In fact, the poorer you are, generally the fatter you tend to be these days. So scarcity is not the danger. And so the danger has to be existential. It has to be danger of propaganda, that you're going to get attacked, you're going to get deplatformed, you're going to get you the world is going to end and you're guilty for your gender or your race or your sex or your race or something like is it just praise and the fathers are absent and right female dominated societies raise uneasy children as a whole right because of reasons i've sort of gone into this a million times before i won't repeat myself well at least not this time so you have to get dads out of the home and you have to program children to be uneasy all the time uh so yeah Yeah, provoking in-group, out-group tensions and programming them with end-of-the-world anxiety and that kind of stuff. That's essential, right, for this kind of stuff.
[10:52] So what you need is to provoke our selected prey-based behavior, and that shortens the timeframe of the mindset, right? So the mindset then becomes short-term pleasures. Rabbits, there's no point deferring pleasure, right? If you're hungry, you eat. you eat. If you're horny, you mate, right? And this is, you know, screwing like rabbits is kind of a cliche, right? So hedonism results from prey-selected mindset, which results from specific familial structures and ideological existential dangers programmed into the minds of children.
[11:33] You are in the process of turning human beings from animals. Dominant to submissive right from k selected to r selected and if you don't know what these terms means look at my immortal presentation gene wars three parts g e n e wars gene wars so, and and you can see this in left versus right left is generally r selected right is k selected the left doesn't invest in their kids other than propaganda which is investing in political power and the right does invest in their kids the left constantly feels like a prey species while using it to dominate, right? The cry-bully stuff at the K selected in modern society, which actually are in fact prey, generally have K selected mentalities and ideas.
[12:20] So, and of course the whole purpose of heaven is, well, I shouldn't say the sole purpose, a significant purpose of heaven, the concept of heaven and God's rewards, is to have you stretch, to be as K selected and as dominant as possible by stretching your time preferences to infinity, right? The shorter the time preference, the more the prey mentality. So that's the basic issue. So hedonism is do what thou wilt, though it harm no others. Although though it harm no others generally doesn't ever really kick in. But it's do what you want in the moment with no time preference that results from being a prey species. And the reason we know this, at least allegorically, is if you look at the example of the guy with his last meal. Last meal before dying, before being murdered or being killed or being executed, right?
[13:10] His last meal is whatever he wants to eat, regardless of the future, because he is, in fact, the ultimate prey species, which is he is confined and he's going to be killed, right? That's an ultimate prey species, right? He's caged and he's going to be killed. So he's the ultimate prey and his time preference is zero. He has no time preferences whatsoever. He'll just eat whatever feels good. In fact, he'd probably would like to eat. Why not shoot up heroin? Why not do whatever you want, right? Because you're going to be killed the next day or that night. Right. So you're the ultimate prey species. And therefore, the more you dial up the prey species, the more you dial down time preferences.
[13:45] So another way, of course, that families serve political power and the interests of parents in the moment by turning children into a prey species is by constantly changing rules and constantly attacking them while blaming them, of course. So when you abuse children and change the rules and it's the moodiness of the parents and the children can't plan they can't protect themselves like everybody knows if you've had a volatile parent your punishment is called some kind of justice but it utterly depends upon the mood of the parent right if you're if your parent is in a good mood uh you can get away with just about anything if your parent is in a bad mood you can't get away with anything in fact stuff will just be invented. And there's this meme of this woman, you know, drinking wine, staring angrily in his face saying, well, I want more glass of wine and I'm going to go and pick a fight with my husband, right? If she's in a bad mood and she wants to discharge probably sexual frustration, through interpersonal aggression. So if you grow up in a situation like the abuse in childhood, sorry, the abuse in childhood is not the abuse of children. It's the abuse of rules. This is an old objectivist argument, which is that a tyranny is not harsh rules. A tyranny is no rules.
[15:06] Tyranny is not the inflicting of harsh punishments for harsh rules. It is no rules. It depends on the mood. It depends, we can sort of see this taking its unholy flower at the West these days, right? So the way that you create prey mentality in children is you treat them to random dangers. So for instance, when a rabbit is in its warren, right, it's deep in its burrow, it can relax relaxed because you know there's virtually no creatures that can get in and harm it right certainly once the rabbit is deep underground uh it's it's safer in the birds right the birds aren't gonna burrow in and and eat the rabbit right it's you know as foxes if they hear the fox digging they can they have lots of warning and so on so they can relax to some degree right, so the way that you create the ultimate prey species is you make sure that you raise children in a situation where they cannot protect themselves and they cannot rely on the protection of any objective rules. They cannot rely. Now, when I was in boarding school, the rules were harsh, but they weren't random, right? I mean, well, I shouldn't say that. It felt a little random, I suppose, because I got beaten with a cane by climbing over a fence to get a ball back that we had kicked over and there was nobody there to get me the ball back, right?
[16:34] So I wasn't aware that that was a rule. I knew that maybe it wasn't totally great, but I didn't know that I could not climb. This was actually into the site area of the sanatorium. The sanatorium, because there were, I don't know, 500, 600 boys and an equal number of girls, there's always a kid who was ill, and so you had a couple of beds in a fairly decent-sized house, I assume it was used for other things, but it was called the sanatorium because there was always some kid who needed medical care and medical treatment, medical help. So I climbed up to get the football, soccer ball, I guess, soccer ball. And I was ratted on by some snot-nosed son of a bitch. And then I got caned. But I didn't know that the result of climbing the fence was to be caned. I was like, it wasn't ideal. I was like, it wasn't ideal.
[17:18] I knew it probably was frowned upon, but I didn't know I'd get caged, right? So, and I don't remember the going over all the rules. Of course, I was six. Maybe they did, but I don't remember them. And I don't remember climbing the, it was sort of an iron railing. And I don't remember climbing that thinking like, well, if I get caught, I'll be caged. I don't have, I didn't even know that at all, right? And so that rule felt random to me because I was not at all aware of it. And, you know, maybe when you're six, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Excuse you know just just maybe maybe maybe maybe ignorance of the law is no excuse in that situation that would be nice right so that was a real thing and a real issue so then when you are growing up in a situation of random rules of no rules of random punishments then you're in a truly prey species because there aren't rules the predator prey relationship there are no rules There are no rules that you have to follow. You don't have to give a warning, right? The hawk just drops from the sky and tears off the head of the rabbit, right? And in fact, the hawk wants to hide, the hawk wants to not be visible, all this kind of stuff, right? Oh, I just realized that I may in fact not be using the microphone of the phone, but instead the car. Anyway, we'll figure it out. Maybe this sounds absolutely terrible, but the idea is I wanted to get down anyway. So...
[18:41] Real abuse is the abuse of the rules not the abuse of the child if the child has strict rules, and in conformity with those rules can be certain to escape punishment then the child is not being raised as a prey species so you think this is a spartan thing right sparta is but you've got to get up at five in the morning you've got to do your exercises you've got to do this you've You've got to do that. And if you do all of that, you won't get punished. So there's predictability and certainty. And people confuse the Spartan thing with abuse. Now, of course, the punishments are harsh and the rules are, you know, obviously fairly strict, but there is, in general, utter predictability. Utter predictability. That lack of predictability is what produces the prey species and what produces the hedonism that political power so desperately needs in order to maintain its grip on the throat of humanity.
[19:41] So the effects of child abuse is not the punishments or the beatings or even the yellings that you experienced. The true effects of child abuse are the destruction of rules within your mind.
[19:58] When the rules are destroyed, the hedonism emerges And you destroy the rules by claiming their objective and applying them subjectively. You claim that their objective, which is supposed to make them, quote, fair, but then what you do is you apply them harshly, brutally, and randomly. Now that's really, really important and really, really essential. Tension if you can do that then you produce the hedonism and the hedonism is also the destruction of the rules because your rules are pleasure but hedonism over time destroys pleasure and therefore you are following a rule that is destroyed in the following right we all know that the promiscuity loses its pleasures drug abuse loses its pleasures alcoholism loses its pleasures and becomes pain and so because the rule you're following destroys itself in the act of following it you are continuing the destruction of rules through hedonism and it is just wretched all around so that's really really important what is your relationship to rules right what is your and we can see people's relationship to rules in their responses to UPB so i hope this helps hope this makes sense love to know what you think freedomain.com/donate take care everyone bye.
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