0:03 - Introduction to Single Sons' Challenges
2:15 - The Existential Question of Existence
8:46 - The Impact of Parental Absence
11:24 - Understanding the Value of Women
15:52 - The Dangers of Lust
18:01 - Breaking the Cycle of Dysfunction
27:50 - Free Will and Personal Responsibility
30:48 - Charting a Different Course
32:07 - Conclusion and Invitation for Discussion
In this lecture, Stefan Molyneux delves into the complex challenges faced by the single sons of single mothers, drawing from personal experiences to highlight emotional and psychological struggles that are often overlooked. He opens with a personal reflection on his unique childhood, characterized by significant periods spent without a father figure due to parental separation and his older brother's boarding school experience. This context sets the stage for discussing broader themes related to identity, paternal absence, and emotional injury.
Molyneux emphasizes the fundamental question that arises in the minds of sons raised in single-mother households: "Why am I here?" He posits that this inquiry is deeply rooted in human instinct, as individuals naturally seek to understand the factors that contributed to their existence. This quest for identity leads to reflections on paternal absence, with the painful realization that such absence often sparks feelings of rejection. He explores two potential narratives: either the father abandoned his responsibilities or he perceived the son as lacking masculinity. These formative experiences shape a young man's self-esteem and view of women, creating a critical examination of familial dynamics and their implications.
Continuing the exploration of identity, Molyneux addresses the existential implication behind the question of why one's father chose to reproduce with their mother, particularly when that relationship is fraught with dysfunction. This inquiry forces sons to grapple with uncomfortable truths about the seemingly transactional nature of their parents' relationship, where sexual access overshadows deeper emotional bonds. Molyneux warns about the hazards of interpreting women's value solely through the lens of sexual appeal, a viewpoint that can propagate harmful cycles of hypersexuality and emotional detachment.
The discussion further navigates the importance of recognizing the inherent dignity and value of individuals beyond mere physical attributes. Molyneux suggests that the normalization of viewing relationships as purely sexual undermines the potential for genuine connections founded on virtue and integrity. He stresses the necessity of developing a moral framework that distinguishes between transient lust and meaningful companionship. This shift in perspective is essential for breaking free from historical patterns of dysfunction that may permeate familial lines.
Molyneux advocates for a deeper understanding and acknowledgement of parents' choices, asserting that granting them moral responsibility is crucial for personal growth and healing. By reframing the narrative around parental decision-making, individuals can reclaim their agency and start making choices that align with virtuous living, distancing themselves from the destructive habits modeled by their parents. This critical self-reflection is integral to fostering healthier relationships in adulthood.
Ultimately, Molyneux concludes by encouraging listeners to pursue virtue over mere sexual gratification. He reinforces the argument that true fulfillment stems from an authentic connection rooted in respect and shared values, rather than a superficial engagement driven by hormonal impulses. Emphasizing the power of will and personal choice, Molyneux calls for breaking the cycle of dysfunction that may come from familial legacy, advocating for a conscious approach to relationships that prioritizes moral integrity and emotional health.
[0:00] Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
[0:04] Please help out the show at freedomain.com. All right. Big topic here. I will try to do it justice in a reasonable amount of time. I will fail in one of those counts. I guess it's up to you to figure out which one. Hello, Stef. You've spoken about the challenges faced by the single sons of single mothers. Would you please elaborate on the challenges they face?
[0:30] Their mental slash emotional blind spots and handicaps, and how to best navigate and understand the struggle they may not even know they have many things in advance? It's a great question, and I actually kind of have both in a way. I had a sort of odd pastiche or quilt of childhood in that, of course.
[0:53] My parents separated when I was a baby, and what happened was my brother went to boarding school for a year before I did. So I had a year as the, quote, single son, and then around the age of 12, my brother went to England for a couple of years, and it was just me, and my mother. And of course, when I was in boarding school, you know, for some older brothers, the younger brother is not particularly cool. And I was only six when I went to boarding school. So I was not quite emotionally ready for that kind of separation. A tad young. I was the youngest kid, I think, in the whole school, if I remember rightly, just based on my birthday. So I didn't spend much time with my brother over boarding school. So there were two spans of about three years where I didn't really have a brother for my childhood, but two of those years, of course, was not with my mother for the most part because I was in boarding school.
[2:00] And I can't remember, honestly, I can't remember if it was two or three years that he was in England, but I had sort of significant swaths of my childhood where I was the single son of a single mother.
[2:16] So some, I can't speak for everyone. Of course, I'll try to keep this as general as possible, because what's important is the principles I extract from my life to you, not my life in particular, which is important to me, but it's too personal to be translated to you. So I'll try and extract the general principles as I usually do. Sorry, you don't need to hear this. It's a general principle, but I will be talking about myself to some degree, but talking about principles in general. So I'll, So the first big challenge that the single son of the single mother has to answer, and this is true of sons of single mothers as a whole. Let's talk about them as a whole. The first question you have to answer is, why am I here? Why do I exist? What are the causal factors behind my existence? And the reason that we're programmed to think about that kind of stuff, of course, is because.
[3:08] We want to replicate the factors that led to our existence because the purpose of our DNA is to replicate, and so we have to recreate the conditions under which we exist. So, emotionally, conceptually, at the very sort of basic level of DNA, our entire being is calibrated to figure out why we exist, and then to do everything in our power to recreate those circumstances.
[3:36] Regardless of levels of happiness, regardless of levels of functionality, it's just the blind photocopier of history, right? Just copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste. So why do I exist? What are the circumstances which cause me to come into being, and I am then either blessed or doomed to recreate those circumstances? So, why do I exist and where is my father and why am I with my mother we don't know anything of course in our essential natures our unconscious our DNA our ancestral instincts and so on we don't know anything about family courts or alimony or child support or international money transfer for restrictions and so on, right? I say that because, of course, my father, being a geologist specializing in gold, went to Africa, not massive amounts of gold deposits in England outside of the war chests of the royal family. So he went to Africa and getting money out of Africa, South Africa to England was not the easiest thing in the world, as far as I understood it.
[4:56] So we of the problems that we have as sons of single mothers is, why am I with my mother and not my father? Why am I with my mother and not my father? Now, one of the most foundational, instincts that we have about that is, my father didn't want me. My father didn't want me. And that's a big challenge for a son. Because you would have to say, why didn't my father want me?
[5:34] Why did my father leave me with a woman rather than take me with him as a son? Now, there are really only two answers to that. Either A, my father is completely messed up and ran away from all of his responsibilities and so on, and there's that. Or B, my father found me too feminine or effeminate to take with him, and therefore felt it was best and most appropriate that I stayed with my mother, that I was not masculine enough to go with my father, that my father is one of these Norsemen, Viking, manly men, giant beard, sloping shoulders, mild potbelly, excellent hunter, manly men, and I was left with a female because I wasn't manly enough to go with my father. Now, fortunately for me, my father was kind of messed up, and so I never really got the sense that I was not with my father, and it never really even crossed my mind because I wasn't manly enough or anything, but I can certainly see that that happens. So if there is this concern or this fear, again, we're talking about ancestral instincts and so on, evolutionary instincts, why have I been left with the woman?
[7:04] Rather than taken with the man. Either my father's messed up, or there's something wrong with me, says a lot of, I assume at least some proportion of single sons, or any sons of single mothers. Why was I left behind? Because my father rejected me. Well, why did my father reject me? Well, either he's messed up, or there was something about me that he didn't like. Now, it could be a certain kind of effeminacy. It could be any number of things.
[7:34] But in general, I think the instinctual, the ancestral instincts are basically, well, I must be rejected because I'm not manly enough. And, I mean, I can think you can see this quite a bit in modern culture with the fairly... Not overly masculine young men, right? Now, either one of these forks in the road does not lead to a particularly ideal place, because if your father left you because he's messed up, well, you're half your father and more aligned with your father than your mother because you're both males, and so that doesn't lead to a particularly great place emotionally. My father is an irresponsible fornicator or philanderer, and that's half me, he broke my mother's heart, that's half me, or more than half me, and that's not great. Of course, you also do have the challenge of growing up looking like the man who abandoned the single mother, broke her heart. I mean, according to her narrative, right? I'm not saying it's always that way, but this is according to her narrative. And if you're raised by a single mother, you get her narrative, not the dad's for the most part, right?
[8:47] So, if you look like him, and this is really unfortunate in my family that I looked like my mother's father, and my brother looks like her ex-husband, and it was very, very unfair. She did not handle that well at all, much to my sympathy for my brother.
[9:05] So, either of these two forks in the road, I was rejected for not being good enough for my father, and that usually means not masculine enough for my father, or my father is a messed up philanderer who broke my mother's heart, and that's more than half me as the male. So, neither of those things lead to a good place. Now, another challenge, of course, is in the sort of existential, which is to say, biological question, why am I here and how do I recreate it? Right we only exist because we are expected to have babies right we only exist because we are expected to have babies that's why the people who don't want kids are just breaking a foundational contract that is the reason for their existence, Or to put it another way, how many people would choose to have children if they knew in advance those children would be sterile and never reproduce, like be unable to reproduce? Let's say that a couple get together, they get some genetic testing, and it is found that their offspring will be sterile. How many people would choose to have children knowing that their offspring would be sterile? I mean, obviously not zero, but it would be lower than the norm.
[10:21] And so that's why the people who don't want to have kids are kind of breaking that foundational social contract. You only exist because you're expected to have children. And if your parents knew ahead of time that you weren't going to have children, they probably wouldn't have you. So the deal for being alive is to reproduce. Because if it was known ahead of time that you wouldn't reproduce, you'd be much less likely to be alive, and so your existence is predicated on the deal to reproduce. I mean, obviously, there are some people who PCOS or endometriosis or sperm dysfunctions or whatever, but that's the deal, right? So then the question, the existential question of why am I here? Why do I exist? If you have a dysfunctional single mother, and for the most part, you do, for reasons I've gone into before, then the challenge you have with regards to your view of women is, why did my father choose to reproduce with this woman?
[11:24] Why did my father choose to reproduce with this woman? Why did my father choose to reproduce with this woman? That's the cause of your existence. It's a pretty important question to answer.
[11:37] Now, when you ask the question, which happens again at an instinctual level from a very early age, when you ask the question, why did my father choose to reproduce with this woman, then the answer is essentially, what is the value of women? What is the value of women? Why are women valuable? Now, to answer that question, we have to examine, again, at an instinctual level, the motives or motivations of our fathers, right? As the sons of single mothers, we have to examine the motivations of our fathers. Why did my father have sex with this woman? Well, it can't be because he truly loved her, because if he truly loved her, she would still be married to him, he would still be married to her, and I wouldn't be facing a father absence. Why did my father have sex with this woman? My mother.
[12:42] Questions that need to be asked and answered. And remember, of course, we grew up in tribal situations where future options and choice were not available, right? We grew up in tribal situations which for tens or hundreds of thousands of years were basically just the same day over and over again, right? So whatever your father did is what you would be doing. That the best reproductive strategy would be to replicate what your father did.
[13:07] So the question then is, what is the value of women. I mean, obviously, your father found a value in a woman, your mother, in that he had sex with her. But if he had sex with her and doesn't love her, then, unfortunately, for your mindset, although completely understandably from the evidence, if your father had sex with a woman that he does not love, then the value that women provide in this formulation, in this empirical example, the value that women provide is sex. The value that women provide is sex. And that's the great danger of the evidence and the instincts, right? The instincts trying to parse out the evidence to reproduce sexually successful strategies. Your mother will often complain about her ex-husband, your absent father. Your mother will often complain about him, saying he's this, he's that, negative, whatever. So then the question is, if my parents don't like each other, but had unprotected sex and produced a child, and in most cases, I don't know what the odds are these days, but in many cases, let's say...
[14:32] To make it work, right? I mean, my parents were married for a couple of years, and they obviously tried to make it work.
[14:39] So, if your parents don't like each other but had sex, then the value that men and women bring to each other is not virtue, not integrity, not moral courage, not consistency, not honesty, not affection, not support, not the hard work of running a household, both in terms of income and organization and child raising, the value that men and women have for each other is rutting, is mere sexual gratification. In this case, the primary value that the man brings is money, and the primary value the woman brings is sexual appeal. So, that's the danger for the boys, is to say, my father found the only valuable thing in my mother was sexual access because he does not like her as a person and she does not like him as a person. And there's a lot of retribution and wounded vanity and hostility and attack and all of that.
[15:45] So if my parents don't like each other, then the only reason they reproduced was because of lust.
[15:52] Now, what this means is that lust is a danger that brings great sorrow. Lust is a danger that brings great sorrow. Lust is not part of the pair bonding of a healthy relationship that shores up all of the golden virtues of love and integrity and honesty and courage and all of that.
[16:15] That love is not required. In fact, you can have sex with people you hate. Because remember, of course, when you are a kid and you're raised by a single mom, you're a son, son or daughter, we're just talking about sons today, and your mother is bitching and complaining about your dad, you don't know the courtship, right? You're not aware of the courtship. You're not aware of the positives they had to say about each other. You're not aware of any affection, really that they may have had in the past. I mean, all you're doing is you're seeing Hiroshima after the 45 bomb. You're not seeing it before. And so all you see is this negativity and hostility and aggression and impatience and anger, if not rage, and disappointment and bitterness. Like, that's all you see. So if the value that your father found in your mother was only sexual access, and in a sense, from your perspective, post-separation, abandonment, or divorce, if from your perspective, they basically had to hold their noses to be with each other. In other words, they had to pretend that they liked each other while secretly not liking each other just to get their rocks off, to chase the eternal O of orgasm.
[17:33] Of O is the story of life. So, if they don't like each other, then the only value they had in each other was sexual access. And what this does is it provokes in your hormones when you get older, or even when you're younger, it provokes in your mindset hypersexuality. Because the genes say, oh crap, people don't like each other, so I have to crank up the lust.
[18:01] Men and women don't like each other. They're not honorable, respectful, virtuous in this tribal environment. So I have to really crank up the lust. I have to make lust a kind of crazed hysteria that overcomes highly toxic emotional and moral traits, immoral traits. I mean, if the food is bad or questionable, you have to wait until you're really hungry to eat it, right? You have to wait until you're really hungry to eat it. And so if the personalities around are toxic and negative and dangerous, then the hormones say, well, in order to overcome the negatives of bad personalities, we have to crank up the lust to insane levels.
[18:46] So we are a lust and ruttings-based society, and the lust has to be so high that you're willing to have sex with people you don't respect or even despise just to get the relief from the crazed sexual hunger, which is why both males and females from single-mother households end up often hypersexual. That's the gene saying, well, people don't like each other, so how do babies get made if people don't like each other? If men and women don't like each other, how do babies get made? Well, babies get made because the lust levels have to be cranked up to insane levels, or I guess genetically sane levels, in order for people to reproduce. So that's the great danger, that your lust levels will crank up to the point where you only view the value of women as sexual objects.
[19:41] Of course, we could see this all over in the culture. I don't even need to list all of the examples. They're too obvious to mention. So, the challenge is to say, what is the value of women? Now, again, we're not designed to have different choices from our parents, because for 99.99999% of human history, you had no choice to act differently from your parents. This is what talked about. In Australia, with regards to the Aborigines of 40,000 years of copy-paste Groundhog Days, everybody was the same. The time slice was the same for tens of thousands of years. So you did not have the choice to be different from your parents. So the danger, of course, is that your lust leads you to overlook negative qualities of men and women and have sex with them to gain relief from the torture of sexual desire to eat the bad food just because you're hungry to the point of madness. You'll drink water in a moot track, as someone I knew working up north did. He was so thirsty. You'll drink bilge water if you're thirsty enough. Or after that, you can saw off a slice of Guinness.
[20:59] Now, how do you escape this? Well, the way that you escape this is you say, my parents were dysfunctional, my parents were immature, my parents committed the sin of lust, which is to have sex with someone you do not respect and admire morally. And it is to denormalize what your parents did and say, they made bad choices, other choices can be made. But in order to do that, you have to give your parents moral responsibility and judge them negatively. And to give your parents moral responsibility and judge them negatively.
[21:35] Was not allowed and would often result in attack, ostracism, imprisonment, exile, death. If you judged your parents morally and said that they made bad, corrupt, immoral choices, well, I mean, let's play that out, right? So, throughout most of human history, if you say, you go out into the dating market and you say, well, and remember, we grew up in tribes where people's mindsets were essentially the same. So if you go out into society and you say, my parents made bad, corrupt choices, they were immoral.
[22:13] Go and try and date, well, remember, the girlfriends, your girlfriend's parents or your potential girlfriend's parents are kind of the same. Are you going to say the same thing to them? Well, if you say the same thing to them, they're not going to want their daughter to date you. If you say to a woman, your parents seem to be kind of corrupt and immoral, then those parents are not going to want that girl to date you. And remember, throughout most of human history, the approval of the parents was a pretty important ingredient in getting married. And the support of extended family was pretty important in getting employment, in raising your children, in security in your old age. And so the option to be morally objective and judge people according to universal standards, that's a pretty new phenomenon. And as you know, of course, history is replete with people who tried to judge people according to fairly objective moral standards, or even knowledge standards, as Socrates did. He was more of an epistemologist than a moralist, like what is true. So they, you know, got killed or crucified or exiled or cast out or couldn't find anyone to reproduce with them like Nietzsche, who I think went to a prostitute once and then got syphilis, if I remember the story correctly. Bad luck.
[23:21] But it was a genetic dead end to attempt to apply objective moral standards to the elders in your society because they controlled access to the next generation, they controlled access to resources. And if they disapproved of you, then you, in various levels of ostracism to, violence, to murder, you just didn't get to reproduce.
[23:49] It very much goes against our instincts. Like we have two separate instincts, right? One is to universalize. One is to universalize. And the other is to bow to power, right? So this is the tensions within the human mind, right? We have flourished as a species through our ability to conceptualize and universalize. And we are told that morals are universal when we were a kid, right? I was certainly raised. And maybe this was, obviously, this was a Christian thing. I doubt it's coming much from the atheist left these days, but I was raised that morals were universal.
[24:24] Morals were universal, and it didn't matter whether someone had power or not. I mean, I was raised in England, of course, and I was fascinated with World War II history, culminated in my novel called Almost, which you should definitely check out, freedomain.com slash books. And I remember being quite young and reading about the Nuremberg Trials. I read about the Holocaust, I read about the Nuremberg Trials. Of course, in the Nuremberg Trials, the fact that something was legal, that what the Nazis did was legal, didn't matter. This was a big swing between positive law and natural law. Positive law says that virtue or the right or the good is whatever the law says. Natural law says there's a standard by which you judge laws as moral or immoral, that is independent of legal statutes. And so the fact that the German government was voted in, the fact that the German government had power and, quote, democratic legitimacy based on the vote didn't matter. That there was a moral standard higher than all authority, right? And I mean, I accepted and absorbed that lesson, right?
[25:36] Germany was evil and totalitarian and murderous and so on. So a government could be judged according to an objective moral standard of virtue. And even though it was a government, even though it was voted in, it was utterly evil and immoral. And I accepted that lesson. Heck, I still accept that lesson. Nothing really has changed in the half a century since I first read about the Nuremberg trials. My mother had a bunch of World War II books floating around. So, I was raised to judge according to a universal standard that was larger even than governments and the law and the will of the people and so on, right? But that's new. That's new. That's new and fairly unprecedented in human history. So, if you want to get out of the trap of viewing the value of the opposite sex as sex objects, if you want to get out of that trap, then what you have to do is judge them morally to be wanting. You can't, if you make excuses for their behavior, then you will make excuses for your own behavior. Free will is a big giant lever, right? You raise it up and you lower it down. And if you lower free will for your parents, say they're victims of circumstances or history or their own bad parents or whatever, if you lower free will for your parents, then you lower free will for yourself.
[27:03] Willpower is the most important thing in life, right? Because without willpower, you can't get to virtue. It's necessary, of course, though not sufficient. So with willpower, you say, I can choose my fate. I can choose my circumstances. I can choose the contents of my mind, I can choose my actions. And through that, through that responsibility of choice, then you have the responsibility, through the capacity of choice, you have the responsibility to pursue virtue. Nobody says of a prisoner in a gulag, or Solzhenitsyn, or Dostoevsky, nobody says of a prisoner in a gulag, you should have eaten better. There was no eating better. You eat whatever slop they put in front of you. There's no diet in prison, no diet choices in prison.
[27:50] Certainly not back then, right? Maybe now you can get some lactose-free stuff or I don't know, but you eat what they put in front of you. So there's no choice there, right? So when you dial up choice, you dial up willpower, the value of willpower. And if you dial down choice, you castrate yourself with the capacity for willpower. If you say your parents couldn't choose any better, then you can't choose any better. So you have to, the only way out of it is you have to dial up the choices for your parents. And, you know, self-know thyself, Socrates' commandment, the child is the father of the men, even the Freudian, Jungian stuff, which, although horribly imperfect in many ways, did.
[28:28] Towards self-knowledge and the value of the unconscious and understanding yourself. Of course, Christianity has set itself against the baser instincts since time immemorial, or I guess 2024 years and a couple of days. So we have this tradition. Parenting books, self-help books, therapy, these have all been around for many decades, arguably a century and a half. Oh, arguably going even further back to know thyself, right? I mean, Hamlet's soliloquies are an attempt to understand himself. So that's all part of our tradition, certainly in the West, of self-knowledge and the tension between instincts and ideals. Mind-body dichotomy has been talked about and discussed fairly endlessly in philosophy and psychology, of course, right? Although psychology has become progressively more amoral and conformist.
[29:28] So you have to denormalize what your parents did. You said they had choices. They chose wrong. They should have chosen better. They could have chosen better. And that liberates your free will from the unconscious hamster wheel of history, just round and round, copy-paste, Groundhog Day. You have to assign free will to your parents and your grandparents. And you have to, then you get to wear the medal of free will yourself. And then you can choose differently. And then you can say the value that I should look for in a partner is not sex, but virtue. Sex, in the absence of virtue, which is the presence of corruption, right? The absence of health is the presence of disease or dysfunction. He's not healthy means that there's something wrong with him. So, if you're not virtuous, then corruption or immorality or evil is inevitable. So, you have to say that I will pursue virtue as my parents should have. I reject base mammalian rutting as the foundation of a pretend relationship. I reject the sin of lust. I look for the good. I pursue the good. I'm not going to be ruled by hormones and testicles. I'm going to be ruled by a conscience, a courageous heart, and a virtuous willpower.
[30:48] Is a break with the copy-paste of history and that allows you to chart a different course. But if you say people can't chart their courses, which is the fundamentals of, quote, forgiving your parents without apologies and restitution, then you're saying people can't choose. Like, whatever you say about your parents, you say about yourself. Whatever you say about your parents, you say about yourself in terms of their choices. If they couldn't choose, you can't choose. If you can choose, they could choose. If you can do better, they should have done better and they're responsible for not doing better. And of course, you say, well, they didn't know how to do better. Well, of course they did, right? You've heard me say this a million times in call-in shows that abusive parents almost never abuse their children in public or where they would suffer negative consequences for abusing their children so they know exactly what the right thing to do is. And they do it on a regular basis. They just indulge themselves, right? Corruption is really just a form of indulgence. It's giving yourself permission to do something. Willpower is when you get to decide what you do. I mean, you can't diet if you give yourself permission to eat crap, right? So, I think that's the most important thing that I would talk about, or I have talked about in this kind of conversation. So, I hope that helps and I would love to hear what your thoughts are. I'm happy to make this a series if you think there's more value that I could offer, but I think that foundational aspect is the most important stuff to look at.
[32:07] So, lots of love from up here, freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show. Love you guys. Thanks for the great questions. I'm going to talk to you soon. Bye.
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