The livestream Stefan mentions is My Experience with CHRISTIANS! Twitter/X Space.
In this episode, I explore my reflections on the dynamics between men and women in the context of meritocracy and inequality, drawing parallels to historical civilizations and discussing the underlying psychological and evolutionary motivations behind these interactions. Through my observations of societal patterns, particularly illustrated in my novel "The Future," I delve into the cyclical nature of civilization and how wealth and abundance can inadvertently lead to escalating inequality.
I begin by outlining the initial rise of scarcity elimination within societies, which allows meritocracy to thrive. However, this meritocracy often results in significant disparities in outcomes, creating a landscape where men celebrate excellence while women are more prone to lament the inequality that arises. I articulate the evolutionary differences in perspectives; men are wired to applaud top performers, believing that their successes benefit the tribe, while women instinctively react to inequality, feeling compelled to safeguard the vulnerable, especially children. This intrinsic response emphasizes the role of women as nurturers, driven to redistribute resources to ensure the survival of the least capable.
I further illustrate this point by recounting poignant examples from our collective human experience, emphasizing how these instincts manifest in widespread social issues. From an aggressive reaction to perceived unfairness to the need for intervention in resource distribution, I argue that women are often seen as “conveyor belts of egalitarianism,” a tendency that plays out in myriad ways in our society.
Transitioning into discussions about meritocracy beyond mere survival, I highlight the contrasting views on competition and success. For men, meritocracy grants the highest rewards to those most capable, fostering a culture that venerates skill and excellence. In contrast, women often experience this merit-based system as a loss, particularly when they perceive that their attractiveness or abilities are overshadowed by others. I delve into how this competition can shift the perception of self-worth among women, complicating social dynamics and leading to disenfranchisement, thus creating a rift in how gendered expectations shape society.
As I navigate through personal anecdotes and reflections, I illustrate the often humiliating nature of acknowledging one's mistakes. In recounting my own experiences, I underscore the importance of taking responsibility and the nuances of apology—how it can build trust and relationships in healthy environments while leading to vulnerability in dysfunctional ones. I dissect the implications of unwillingness to apologize and how power dynamics can impede genuine reconciliation, ultimately revealing the societal consequences of failing to hold ourselves accountable.
The discussion culminates in a broader critique of current cultural trends where forgiveness is sought without the necessity of contrition. I illuminate the role of institutions, particularly churches, in enabling this phenomenon, positing that they may contribute to a culture where harmful behaviors can proliferate unchecked. This framework reinforces the cycle of demand for forgiveness without the requisite moral accountability, perpetuating a troubling societal feedback loop that warrants deeper examination.
Throughout this episode, I aim to foster a deeper understanding of these intricate relationships and cultural patterns, encouraging listeners to reflect on our own roles within this complex tapestry of human interaction.
0:03 - Introduction to Civilization Cycles
1:23 - The Role of Inequality
3:30 - Women's Response to Inequality
6:13 - The Instincts of Mothers
8:23 - Perspectives on Meritocracy
13:27 - Men vs. Women's Views on Success
14:49 - The Hypocrisy Dilemma
19:22 - The Difficulty of Apologizing
22:47 - The Cycle of Apologies Without Contrition
[0:00] Hey, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain. Hope you're doing well.
[0:03] So, this is just a sort of couple of thoughty thoughts after the live stream today, my experience with Christians. And I kind of wanted to talk about this sort of cycle that civilizations tend to get stuck into. It's something that Roman talked about in my novel, The Future, about, you know, can civilizations survive their own success? And I think it kind of goes something like this. So when you get a lot of wealth in society, scarcity is lifted away. Now, when scarcity is lifted away, then meritocracy, well, you could say that scarcity is only, take it away, men, meritocracy reigns. When meritocracy reigns, there is significant inequality of outcome. When there is significant inequality of outcome, men cheer and women cry. So, when there is significant inequality of outcomes such as, you know, Bob is the best hunter, well, that means we get more food, yay. Bob is the best warrior, that means I'm more likely to survive a battle if I stick by Bob. Yay! You know, all of this sort of stuff.
[1:24] So, when inequality allows for scarce resources to be handed to those with the best ability to multiply them, inequality allows for resources to get to the best place. The person who's best that farming gets the most land. So, the inequality ends up becoming greater and greater. Now, it's true that the poorest person alive today is better off than the richest person, I mean, in the West, right? The poorest person alive today, the person with the least income, is better off than the richest person throughout almost all of human history. But the inequality is painful. And then And what happens is, men tend to cheer excellence, but women tend to cry at inequality.
[2:20] So, men cheer on excellence, but women cry at inequality. And again, there's nothing negative towards women and nothing really positive towards men. It's just the evolutionary pressures. Men strive to excel and men like those who are really great at stuff. We admire, we look up to. I mean, there may be some jealousy and all of that, but nonetheless, we tend to admire those who are really excellent because it benefits us all. But because women are evolved to take care of little kids, inequality or the poor starving a child, that makes women upset because they feel that they have failed to equally distribute the resources that will keep that child alive. So a woman, of course, generally has a soft spot for the youngest kid, and that's evolutionarily developed because the youngest kid is the one least able to get resources in any kind of meritocracy, and therefore the mom has
[3:27] to forcefully intervene to get the kid resources.
[3:31] So, like 10 years ago, when the Turkish boy was drowned on the beach, men were like, well, that was stupid to take your kid on a boat like that. Men blamed the Turkish father.
[3:47] However, women looked at that and felt awful and horrible because they felt they had failed to watch a child and that child drowned on their what, right? They were supposed to take care. They were down with the kids at the beach and their kid drowned. That's how they sort of experienced it, that kind of horror, like this must never be allowed to happen again. This is the worst nightmare, blah, blah, blah. You could say, ah, well, but wouldn't men also be horrified if their child drowned? Well, of course they would, for sure. But men don't view all children as their children. Men are, you know, self and other, our tribe, their tribe. And women are less so that way because women were generally kept around the circle of protection. They were kept inwardly looking at their own people. And if there was another tribe that took over, well, they'd just have to, I mean, maybe even literally just suck it up and find a way to adapt to the new tribe.
[4:47] So, men look and say, that's a foreign tribe, that's a foreign kid, it's not my kid. Whereas all the women that were around kids and all the kids that were around women saw those kids as their own offspring, as genetically proximate, and therefore showing a female, a hungry child, programs her to get resources by whatever means necessary, bullying, yelling, pleading, crying, get that child resources because women evolved in such a context that all the children around them were related, were genetically related to them. And so when they see a kid, and this is so programmed that, you know, even when.
[5:31] When Sally Struthers used to have these commercials for starving kids in Africa and the kids with the bloated bellies because of the hunger and so on. And even when it's sort of clear that they're not genetically close to you, say in the West, the programming is still the same. There's a hungry child. Get that child resources by whatever means necessary. You don't worry about the cost. The kid has to eat.
[5:58] I mean, if you've ever been around a woman who's a really great hostess, and my wife is a fantastic hostess, I mean, the tables have to groan with food, right?
[6:08] So, as you get more resources as a result of meritocracy, there's more inequality.
[6:14] As there is more inequality, women's instincts are to close that inequality by taking resources of the powerful and giving them to the weak, because that's what women do. They take resources from their husbands and give them to their weakest children. They are conveyor belts of forceful egalitarianism. And of course, as I've mentioned before, if the older kids are, you know, grabbing at and snatching the food from the youngest kids, well, then that's what the mother has to forcefully intervene to redistribute these things. So egalitarianism is programmed into women. And of course, for women, for mothers, they see the youngest and the most helpless. It's not their fault. So my friend when I was younger, who later died, he and I went dirt biking around in the winter and in part because we had no money. And he had these big giant hockey gloves that kept his hands beautifully toasty warm. I had no gloves. And my hands were like, My fingers were like icicles. I could barely close them around the handlebars. It was so cold. And I would ask him, can I warm my hands up in your gloves? And he said, well, why didn't you bring your gloves?
[7:38] I suddenly laughed out. I mean, gosh, it's almost well over 40 years and close to 50 years ago. So it no longer bothers me, as you can imagine. But it's fascinating that this is sort of the male perspective. That if you screwed up, it's your fault. That's the male perspective. If you threw the spear and missed the deer, you should have practiced more, you idiot, and you're not going to throw the spear again until you can prove that you've practiced. If you failed to study for the test, you failed, too bad, so sad, etc., etc.
[8:24] Men need a meritocracy so that we can figure out who gets the spear, the land, the sword, the shield, whatever, the armor, whatever.
[8:33] So, in a meritocracy, we need it so that we can give the most resources to the most skilled. But women feel acutely uncomfortable with meritocracy because they are dealing with children. And let's say you have a three-year-old and a nine-year-old, a three, a six, and a nine-year-old. The nine-year-old is going to be able to get all the food you put out, all of it. He's going to snatch it away, and the three-year-old is going to cry. And the crying is a signal for the mother that the nine-year-old is taking all the food and she better go and get food from the nine-year-old and give it to the three-year-old or the three-year-old is going to be sick, starving, hungry, dying, whatever, right? Going to be harmful, if that makes sense. So that's the problem. Men hunger for meritocracy.
[9:23] Women dislike meritocracy because for men, a meritocracy is win-win. Other than sort of your ego or whatever it is, right? But if you look at a band like Queen, I mean, three out of the four were competent singers. Well, one of the four was a fantastic singer, Freddie Mercury, but the drummer, Roger Taylor, had this dog whistle voice, Freddie called it, a very high voice, and he had a kind of bluesy, rocky voice, and Ryan May had a sort of soft, warm, Kenner, but Freddie Mercury had this sort of wildly powerful and rock and roll voice with an amazing falsetto. So John Deacon couldn't sing. So would they be successful if John Deacon was the front man? No, he was a bass player. So he was kind of shy and he couldn't sing. So John Deacon wins by not singing. So it's win-win for everyone in the band The Police. Andy Summers, the guitarist, was a wretched songwriter. He wrote the song Mother, which is a giant ass pimple on the glorious album Synchronicity.
[10:38] That song was so bad and so discordant and atonal. That song was so bad that everyone I knew immediately bought Synchronicity and bought a tape deck and recorded the album onto the tape deck while skipping that song. And it probably had a lot to do with why they broke up, is that that song was just wretched. Sting actually buried the audio tape for Behind My Camel, and they ended up rescuing it and putting it out. And it actually is pretty pretty good. Now, Stuart Copeland, the drummer, was also a pretty terrible songwriter. I don't want to be rich. I want to be rich. I don't want to work in a ditch. I mean, he's terrible. He had a solo project called Clark Kent with the song, so just ass, just absolute ass. Miss Gredenko is a pretty good song. I actually really, really like, I was actually just listening to it today, the song, I don't touch my clothes ten times before I take you on a date. I get the heebie-jeebies, my panic makes me late.
[11:41] Does everyone stare this way at you? Does everyone stare? Does everyone stare? From Riquetta de Blanc. Pretty good song. But he was not a very good songwriter. But Sting was a great songwriter. So the reason that they were all successful was that they let Sting's songs dominate the records. Because Sting writes very good songs and the other two don't. It's a win-win. And Sting, also a really good lyricist.
[12:09] Really good. Let me just listen to Under the Docks I Sail, Over the Reefs of Moonshine. Why Should I Cry for You? Lovely, lovely song. I think it's about the death of his father. So that's meritocracy, win-win. Everybody wins if the best hunter gets the spear. Now, for women, though, meritocracy, let's look at the meritocracy of prettiness, or charm or good humor or just general levels of attractiveness. So, prettiness is to attractiveness as IQ is to G. So, for women, a meritocracy means the other woman gets the great guy and you don't. The other woman gets the tall, dark, and handsome fellow and you get the short, bald, and pudgy fellow. Twin lose. Now, you could say, of course, well, the tribe overall, blah, blah, blah, but that's intergenerational. That's not immediate, right? So, when you get a free market, you get the meritocracy. The meritocracy allows society to allocate resources in a sort of free market way, to the most competent, which guarantees an increase in general wealth, and everybody wins. Even those who lose win, right? Just as John Deacon loses out to Freddie Mercury as the lead singer, and the band Queen wins. Not just a great singer, but a great front man and all that kind of stuff as well.
[13:27] So men like meritocracy, men hunger for meritocracy, men admire excellence.
[13:34] And women are anxious or negative around meritocracy because they generally lose for their lifetimes the quality man to the more attractive woman, and they have to enforce, anti-meritocracy, and they have to say, I have to violently intervene to get resources to those who are the least competent through no fault of their own, right? I mean, the three-year-old is not least competent. It's not less competent than the nine-year-old. he just happens to be born later. I mean, the eternal cry of the younger sibling is like, well, you're stronger, faster, taller, you get to stay up later, you get more pocket money, you hit puberty sooner, and you win games and so on. And the fact that a lot of elder siblings get as smug and feel superior for a mere accident of birth, I mean, it really is pretty pathetic, right? It really is pretty pathetic. It's like a man preening himself on being taller and stronger than women as a whole. It's like, that's just an accident of birth, bro. Certainly the height, you could say it'll work out or whatever, right? But even if men and women work out the same, men will be much stronger.
[14:50] So the reason I'm sort of going over this stuff, a little bit new, some of it you may have heard before, but the reason I'm going over all of this, is because the purpose of conscience is to avoid the charge of hypocrisy.
[15:08] For somebody who is verbally very aggressive, and then when somebody pushes back against them, they sort of cry, or they get upset, or huffy, or whatever it is. Oh, you can dish it out, but you can't take it. And one of the reasons why we want to avoid being hypocrites is it means that our high status is very tremulous, our high status, right? So if you're verbally aggressive and then somebody makes fun of you and you.
[15:40] Get upset and you get mad, you get huffy and you storm out and so on, then your status goes from higher to lower very quickly. In the same way that if you're very physically aggressive, you kind of go up and you throw chest at someone and then they smack you across the face and then you curl into a ball and cry. You go from higher status to lower status immediately. So you don't want to leave your flank open by hypocrisy. A man who rails against infidelity in another man's girlfriend, who then turns out to be cheating himself, goes from a moralist to a hypocrite, incredibly low status, very quickly. It is an exposure, it is a weakness by which you can be attacked if you are a hypocrite. It's just one of the many reasons why we have a conscience to avoid that flank attack of hypocrisy. So, when people do wrong, it is humiliating to have to apologize. I remember in a business meeting, I was just kind of on autopilot doing my sales pitch, and I promoted the services of a competitor, right? So, we had a relationship with ABC Company, I was with XYZ company, and I talked about ABC company. If using our software gave a 40% reduction in a service, if you used our software, which was not also matched by the XYZ company.
[17:04] And it did not cross my mind. I was kind of on autopilot. I was tired, whatever, right? And then the guy railed me out after the meeting and said, we don't come out to these meetings so that you can promote our competitors' products. And he was really mad. He called the CEO. and, you know, he was right. He was right. I was careless, I was thoughtless, and I was on autopilot.
[17:30] Was humiliating and I was mad. And of course, you know, because I was being yelled at or I was being chewed out. And I love that. I mean, it's not a great movie in Glorious Bastards, but when Brad Pitt's character is like, I've been chewed out before, it just like, it just takes it, you know, just the way it is, not a big deal. But it was unpleasant. And I, of course, felt humiliated. And therefore, I wished to find a way in which I was actually in the right. And this other person, gosh, I still remember his name. This other person was unreasonable, Right. So when you're in the wrong, when you've done something wrong, I remember when I was getting a million and a half dollars worth of raises from my employees, I made a mistake. And I made a mistake in my calculations. And they ended up being $10,000 off. I needed $10,000 more to make to fulfill the promises I'd make to my employees. And I said, and now you say $10,000 out of $1.5 million, not a huge amount.
[18:28] But 1.501. Anyway, it's a lot of money. So what is that? It's not much. 10%? No, 1%. Sorry, 1%. So 1% calculation on a million dollars. I mean, that's not massive, but it's also $10,000, which is a lot of money. So I went to the board and I said, I messed up. Here's how I messed up. I really need this $10,000. I did make my promises to my employees. And if this is an issue, please take it out of my salary. And I will give it to the employees because I did make that commitment. And fortunately, they said, it's fine. No big deal. And because I'd already made the case about how much we were going to lose if we didn't raise people's pay. We didn't raise people's pay.
[19:11] Was embarrassed at having made that kind of mistake. And of course, if you've been operating at any level in the business world or just about any job, everybody makes mistakes, right? Everybody has these errors and these issues.
[19:22] So it's humiliating to have to apologize. It's humiliating to be in the wrong. And when you apologize, if you are around healthy people, then they appreciate the apology and they respect you more for it. If you're around dysfunctional people, they will grind your gears, they will bust your balls, they will break your balls, they will, hold it over you forever and ever, amen, because you now have power over them, which is why it's so hard for so many people to apologize. You know, I've always made a point of if I've done something that's embarrassed or done something that's been annoying or negative towards my daughter, that I'll apologize. And one of the reasons I do that is, A, is the right thing to do, and B, I want her to see that you can apologize and be fine. And then when she is in the wrong, she generally apologizes, and it's no big deal. And I say, thanks, we have a hug, and I don't think of it any further.
[20:22] So, it's humiliating. So, those who are around dysfunctional people don't want to apologize. So, then, of course, what happens is if you wrong someone, then they are annoyed and hurt and upset or if you do something negative or harmful or bad to someone they're hurt, they're upset. And then you should apologize. You should earn their forgiveness. However, if you have power over someone.
[20:52] You do is you don't earn forgiveness, but you demand it anyway. So what you do is you gaslight and you postpone and you delay the conversation until a week or two later. And then you say, what, are you still bothered by that? God, let it go. It was like two weeks ago. God, it'd be ridiculous, right? You humiliate them for still being stuck on this issue. You got to let it go. You got to move on, forgive and forget. Put it in the past, put it behind us, move on. You just humiliate people for daring to bring it up. That's one way that you get them to no longer request or require an apology. The second thing, of course, is you wait until, again, you delay these conversations until it has become so in the past that you have plausible deniability. Oh, that didn't happen. It didn't happen in the way that you think it did. I have a different memory of the events. Sort of Justin Trudeau's famous statement, I'm sure, from his lawyer. I have a different memory of the events, not you were lying or you were wrong. And so there's a huge market for getting the benefits of an apology without actually having to go through the humiliating process of apologizing.
[22:01] And because churches are the major machinery by which apologies are affected, then churches have become an epicenter for the rewards of forgiveness without the pain of contrition, right? And I think that's one of the reasons why it has become this. And of course, the more that you can get people to demand forgiveness without contrition, then the less negative impact bad behavior has, and therefore, the more bad behavior there is, and therefore the greater demand for apologies without contrition, and therefore the worse the behavior, and therefore the greater the demand.
[22:44] And I think that's kind of the vortex or the whirlpool that we're stuck in now.
[22:47] Hope that helps, freedomain.com/donate. Thanks a mil. I will talk to you soon. Bye.
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