Video: https://dai.ly/k61i9rNGqrcgoIA6eK4
Exploring human behavior, power dynamics, societal impacts like wealth distribution, childhood abuse effects, authoritarian influence, and COVID-19 consequences. Emphasizing responsibility, family values, critical thinking to resist manipulation.
Chapters
0:00:00 Introduction
0:00:50 Roger Scruton on Conservatism vs. Liberalism
0:01:17 Empirical Foundation of Conservatism
0:03:00 Accumulated Wisdom and Cultural Survival
0:03:38 Influence of Company on Personal Life
0:04:27 Principles vs. Charisma in Persuasion
0:05:14 Influence of Books on Moral Thinking
0:08:13 The Psychology of Diminishing Goals
0:08:53 The Cycle of Wealth Redistribution
0:11:32 The Rise of Aristocracy and Wealth
0:13:51 Resentment Towards the Wealthy
0:16:41 Perception of Wealth and Morality
0:20:06 Effects of Wealth on Social Resentment
0:21:41 Philanthropy as a Response to Resentment
0:25:47 Out-Group Preference and Liberation
0:26:55 Manipulation of Out-Group Preferences
0:34:29 Out-Group Preferences and Hopelessness
0:36:45 Ineffectiveness of Conservatism in Addressing Out-Group Preferences
0:42:29 Jesus and the Establishment of Christianity
0:44:25 In-Group vs. Out-Group Preferences in Family and Authority
In this conversation, we dive into the complexities of human nature, society, and the interplay between authority, power, and individual behavior. The discussion starts with a philosophical exploration of conservatism and liberalism, touching on themes like empirical approaches to life, societal experimentation, and accumulated wisdom passed through generations. We explore the concept of out-group preferences, where individuals align with groups outside their immediate circle due to perceived limitations or injustices within their existing society.
The speaker delves into historical examples, such as the dynamics of wealth distribution, philanthropy as a form of social compliance, and the cycle of rich-poor interactions within societies. They draw parallels between societal structures and family dynamics, emphasizing how power dynamics influence individual choices and behaviors. The impact of childhood experiences, especially abuse, on later life choices is examined, highlighting the potential for trauma to shape out-group preferences and societal engagement.
The discussion transitions into a psychological analysis of villain origin stories, examining how individuals can be swayed by authority figures to turn against their own families or inherent beliefs. The speaker touches on the influence of authority in societal decision-making, leading to the erosion of family bonds in favor of aligning with the perceived dominant forces. They explore the effects of recent events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, on family dynamics and societal allegiances, showcasing how power dynamics and fear can shape individual and collective behaviors.
The conversation concludes with a call to action for promoting responsibility, family values, and resistance to manipulative influences. By encouraging individuals to prioritize family connections, personal accountability, and critical thinking, the speaker aims to empower listeners to resist despair-inducing propaganda and make choices aligned with their values. The importance of understanding human behavior, power dynamics, and societal influences in shaping individual allegiances and actions is highlighted throughout the discourse, emphasizing the need for introspection and proactive engagement with one's environment.
human nature, society, authority, power, behavior, conservatism, liberalism, out-group preferences, wealth distribution dynamics, childhood abuse, villain origin stories, COVID-19 pandemic, responsibility, family values, critical thinking, manipulation, societal pressures
[0:00] Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
So, some good thought-provoking stuff from the late Roger Scruton.
He was a philosopher, writer, novelist, really a multi-talented fellow.
He also wrote musicals or operas. I mean, just a very multi-talented fellow.
And he specialized in political philosophy and aesthetics and so on.
And he came from a fairly hardscrabble background, which is neat and surprising, of course, in England.
Everyone thinks that the English classes are very rigid, but you can burrow through.
Well, you can burrow up and you can burrow down in many ways.
And he wrote some interesting stuff that I think is worth examining.
[0:50] And this question between conservatism and liberalism, he wrote, Quote, conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
And for those of you with hostility towards the modern left, I will hopefully make the case for them so that you can understand where they're coming from and what their complaints are.
[1:18] Are so conservatism is based on the premise that in a harsh evolutionary world that which has been massively experimented on and filtered whatever remains must have value even if we're not sure why right so conservatism is foundationally empirical in its approach to life and values and it says look we've tried all these things you know back and forth up and down we've tried all these things throughout society throughout history and that which remains must be a value.
[1:58] It's the hunter-gatherer aspect of life i mean i think everyone's had this thought at one time or another like think of how many people had to die in order for society to figure out what things could be eaten and what things couldn't be eaten.
The red berries will kill you, the blueberries are healthy, and of course, people experimented all the time.
And in general, when people were very hungry, they'd try eating just about anything.
I remember in the sort of terrifying accounts of Mao's Great Famine in the 1960s, people would eat onion peels or try to.
They would eat, they'd rip open the feathers of their pillows and try and eat, they'd rip open their pillows and try and eat the feathers.
They would try to eat the bark off trees. Of course, people try to eat insects like when you're hungry enough, right?
And there's an accumulated wisdom that has to be passed on.
[2:56] Down in order for a culture to survive and thrive.
[3:00] And all of the multifaceted myriad experimentation that goes on throughout human history has given us some pretty useful principles distilled obviously in religious principles, distilled in common law, in fables.
I mean, it's funny because of course, some of the morals that I'm considered quite controversial for, were literally common sayings when I was a kid.
[3:31] A man is known by the company he keeps. So you are judged by those you surround yourself with.
[3:38] So, of course, when I say to someone who's got a really messed up and destructive family that you're not going to be able to, or you're very unlikely to be able to woo and keep a good woman because she's not going to want to spend the rest of her life around really aggressive, messed up, dysfunctional people, what am I saying? I'm saying, well, a man is judged by the company he keeps.
[4:00] It's funny. I mean, it's so funny when the stuff that was commonplace when I was a kid and that few people would dispute now, but when you put it in sort of actionable, practical terms, people freak out, right?
I mean, it's like that speech in The Dark Knight, the joke he has, you know, that in war, when things get blown up, nobody's bothered, But then in peacetime, supposed peacetime, when things are blown up, everybody freaks out because it's not part of the plan.
[4:28] The most common sayings around when I was a kid, I have put into clear, concise and actionable arguments for adults.
[4:41] And people are not taught to think in principles so that they're easily programmed by charisma, right? Right?
Principles and charisma really are, in many ways, opposites.
You need charisma when you need people to believe what you're saying and you don't have a good argument.
If you have a good argument, people will accept the good argument, generally, whether or not there's all of this charisma mixed up into it or not.
Like, you don't need to be a charismatic salesman to sell a Lamborghini for $100.
You could be a really boring, dull salesman because the Lamborghini sells itself, and good arguments to the reasonable sell themselves.
[5:15] And so, it's just a kind of funny thing that When I was a kid, of course, I read, I mean, I got a hold of and read all the moral instructions that I could.
I even remember reading a very interesting book that influenced me quite a bit, and it was a theologian writing about the morals embedded in the theology.
[5:36] Young person's comic magazine, Mad Magazine, Alfred E.
Newman and all that, which I read quite a bit of when I could get a hold of it in the library or at friends' places.
And I remember the theologian was writing about the morals involved in that magazine.
And I remember thinking, how interesting.
And I read and reread that book, trying to sort of plumb and understand the arguments.
I must have been about 14. And you know, it's funny, I don't know if you have this experience as well, But like a lot of the things that highly influenced me when I was a kid, I had no idea where I got this book.
I mean, I used to go to secondhand bookstores all the time. I remember there was one down in Pape Village, on Pape, called the Purple Village Bookstore.
I used to go down there quite a bit and try and figure out what would be interesting to read.
[6:25] And I don't honestly have no clue where I got this book. book.
Naturally, I have no clue where it is now, but it was a very good book in terms of starting to get me to think.
And it was a explicitly Christian theological book.
And this is when I was in a state of agnosticism. And yes, great moral arguments were made.
I mean, I remember one of them, which was, thou shalt not is much less restrictive than thou shalt, right?
Don't go to to this house in philadelphia is infinitely almost infinitely less restrictive than is then then go to this house in philadelphia right one destination versus don't go so thou shalt not is actually quite liberating and there's just a bunch of arguments in it that were very good and taught me some initial processes of how to think and analyze larger themes in whatever i read so So, all of these commonplace aphorisms and arguments were all over the place when I was a kid.
Very commonplace. Of course, Aesop's Fables and so on.
Aesop's Fables are a good primer on human psychology, right?
[7:37] So, for instance, the fox and the grapes, right?
Where the fox is trying to get some grapes on a hot day, can't quite jump to reach them, and then walks away saying, well, those grapes were probably sour anyway.
If you aim at something and lose, the purpose to diminish the harm to the ego, the impulse is to diminish that for which you strove.
You try to do something, it fails, you say, well, probably wasn't worth it anyway, and that's not healthy.
Because by trying to minimize the harm to the ego, you're actually harming the ego, right? Yeah.
[8:14] So if I try to do X, I fail to do X, and then I diminish X.
And the urge to diminish X, the goal, is usually proportional to the effort expended to achieve it.
If the fox jumped once or twice, you'd be like, yeah, I guess, whatever. Or the fox might say, well, I guess I'm not that thirsty, which is diminish.
But if you spend a long time trying to achieve X, and then you say X isn't worth trying to achieve, what you're actually doing is you're disowning your own former self that wanted to achieve X.
And that's no good. And that's no good. You don't get anywhere in life by betraying your former preferences, impulses, goals, and desires.
[8:53] That's usually a pretty terrible thing. so I want to explain to you what happens in the traditional paradigms of the left and the right so that you understand the cycle of history that we are currently in which humanity as a whole has been in forever well I mean since we started developing any kind of excess wealth or currency or capital since we had the capacity to store labor to store value so what happens is this liberty brings unequal outcomes particularly in the realm of economics liberty brings unequal outcomes particularly in the realm of economics unequal outcomes provide the capacity for those doing poorly to play on the pity and sentimentality of those doing well and of course particularly through the agency of the state transfer resources from the more economically valuable to the less economically valuable so when there's particularly economic freedom some people end up very wealthy i mean most people's standards of living rise as a whole some people end up super wealthy this is perceived to be unfair and doing better in general provokes anxiety because doing better matter puts you in competition with the political leaders.
[10:20] It puts you in competition with the spiritual or religious or superstition leaders.
[10:25] And it is a problem.
[10:29] So a lot of people choose to avoid that kind of prominence because they view, and sort of rightly so, in a lot of cases they view that it's going to end badly for them if they get too wealthy and too, quote, powerful, if they have too much influence, then they will be targeted by the existing political and spiritual leaders.
So, they have an uneasy relationship with their own wealth, and they also...
[10:59] Have a fear of the mob. So, a lot of philanthropy, and not all of it, of course, right?
But a lot of philanthropy is based on bribing the mob to not run you out of town with pitchforks, right?
So, if you start to do really, really well, it provokes resentment, and it provokes sexual resentment.
This is sort of an under-realized aspect of these things.
It provokes sexual resentment because the big wealthy landowner is lusted after by all the women who want the the security of his resources, and all the other men can't compete.
[11:33] And this is particularly true when the wealthy landowners align with the state in order to maintain their own wealth.
[11:41] The aristocracy in most countries, of course I'm most familiar with it in England, started off as either really good warriors for the king and thus were granted lands, or they were really great farmers and thus created wealth to the point where they could bid more for land.
And normally that land would cycle in and out of other people.
It would be a meritocracy.
But of course, with the power of the state in England, we're sort of talking about the Middle Ages and onwards, with the power of the state in England, when you gained wealth, you could appeal to the state to keep and maintain that wealth.
[12:14] And titles in England are markers of, I have successfully appealed to the state to let me maintain my family's wealth and therefore you can't compete.
Now, again, I'm not saying that free market capital is the same as state-protected aristocracy, but there is a general pattern.
Now in a meritocracy the people who are doing really well economically out compete for the most attractive women it could happen with men too like if the women are making a lot of money but most women in the world make their money from inheritance or or divorce settlements or this sort of stuff so i'm gonna talk about the majority of wealth is generated by men in a free market i mean this testosterone thing it's a whatever you guys however you want to phrase it but this tends to be the case and men are more interested in things women more interested in people and things will make you a lot more money over time than people an entrepreneur who invents a widget that could be replicated a million times or a billion times is going to make a lot more money than a psychologist or a nurse who has who has paid for each patient or whatever they're They're limited in that sense.
[13:30] So the men band together in, and it's not just sexual, it's romantic and so on.
The men band together, and I remember this. I remember when I was in high school, you know, it's funny because it just sort of struck me that as I'm talking about this stuff, a lot of people might think that there was resentment to me towards the wealthy when I was younger.
[13:52] And yes, you would be entirely correct about that.
But i had the envy and the belief that i also could do well at points in life i had the capacity to do well in life so resentment is fine you know if you look down at your belly and you resent the big size of your belly and that gets you to lose weight and exercise then resentment is good, resentment is envious is one thing you envy someone so you'll try and achieve what you might envy some guy with a really good physique so maybe you'll work hard to try and gain that physique, or you resent someone.
Resentment is when you don't believe you can achieve it, or I guess in a more deeper sense, those around you will punish you for trying to achieve that goal.
So I remember in high school that there were kids there who were just staggeringly wealthy.
[14:45] Staggeringly wealthy, like kids who would get very expensive convertible red sports sports cars like Corvettes on their 16th birthdays.
Now, honestly, I mean, it's a little tough to compete with those guys, at least for sort of interest from the women and so on.
And I remember this because I wrote a play in high school that we performed at a variety of different schools.
And to rehearse the play, we went over to one of these kids' houses.
And it was a house that was just staggering to me.
Like, you just, because you remember, I grew up in, like, these tiny shoebox apartments, and this kid's house, I think it was the biggest house I'd been in to that date.
[15:32] And the house, I mean, just went on and on. Like, I don't think I ever found the, I mean, went to look for a bathroom. I never found the end of the house.
Like, it just went on and on.
And I didn't, of course, I didn't hate him for having it. He was actually a pretty nice guy.
I had no problems with him. but it feels pretty damn unfair it feels pretty unfair that you know these guys are living in a some sort of dozen bedroom mansion and i'm coming home to intermittent eviction notices even in the winter you know it's mildly alarming when it's minus 20 and you get an eviction notice that feels it feels unfair right.
[16:12] But I think because I got into the free market, I was a socialist, of course, when I was younger, without any particular understanding of the term.
But as I got older and got into the free market economics, right, so socialism hardens the resentment because socialism says that the way, the reason that they're wealthy is that they exploit people, that they're exploiters of the working class and that they're thieves and cheats and so on, right?
And so if you want to be a good person, you can't be wealthy because all wealth is based upon predation, right? I'm taking the excess labor of the working classes.
[16:41] And so to be wealthy is to be evil.
And once I sort of understood about free market exchange, the accumulation of value, and so on, that having some money is not, is actually a good thing in society.
When I was an entrepreneur, I was proud to provide 20, 30 jobs to people.
I was proud to, you know, people would work at my company and they would get married. They'd have kids, they'd have an income, they'd have security.
I was proud of that. It was a very good thing. It was a very good thing.
So you can't compete when the average with the very wealthy.
So there's a resentment, a resentment towards it.
And the resentment is not just, oh, well, I can't get married or whatever it is. But even if you can get married, and of course, most people would, right, in some place where there's wealthy and poor people in the same environment, the poor people will still get married, but they will still resent.
[17:37] Because, you know, if you're a man of sort of lower middle class income and you come home and your daughter, sorry, your wife is flipping through magazines about the wealthy and the famous, you know, the rich, the famous, the beautiful, the talented, you know, or she's looking at Holmes Gone Wild or Zillow or sort of these endless shows on Home and Garden Television about, you know, we took this fairly crappy house. house and we turned it into paradise.
You feel sad and bad and mad that you can't provide these things for your wife, right?
What's that joke about some comedian who talks about when you get married and you want to have sex, like flowers and chocolates aren't enough.
It's got to be like, hey, it looks like we need some new kitchen flooring, which I think is terrible and it's false, but it's still kind of funny, right? I mean, that's sort of the point.
So you get mad. you get mad because you look at your wife and you know that your wife would rather be with the rich guy.
For a lot of people, right? I mean, if you marry for love and all of that, and for two, then that's less relevant. But...
[18:46] Look at your wife and you know she'd rather be with the rich guy and you feel humiliated and angry and then you want to destroy the rich guy because he's like a rival for your wife's affections and and all of that right so what happens well the sophists come along and start provoking the average against the wealthy and i talked about this in my documentary on hong kong you should really check it out it's more relevant now than ever free domain.com documentaries it's free so the suffers come along and start provoking resentment against the wealthy this is sort of the fifth generation warfare stuff that actually that's fourth generation warfare fifth generation is a little different but and then the wealthy realize that if they exercise property rights they'll lose their right to life so what they do is they say well i'm going to be a philanthropist and some philanthropy is is great and noble and and all of that but a lot of it is just, throwing some meat at the approaching lions so they won't take your leg off.
And it doesn't generally work insofar as if you look at the 19th century robber barons, a lot of them were fantastic philanthropists, but they're still demonized.
It didn't matter that they gave away so much of their wealth.
It didn't matter that they founded libraries and charitable organizations of every kind, gave books to the poor.
[20:07] It doesn't matter because they're still hated, right?
[20:11] But there's a cycle here, which I'm going to explicate, which will sort of blow wide your understanding of the modern world.
And the cycle is that the rich feel threatened by the poor.
And so the rich, either through the state or through their own charitable organizations, give money to the poor to appease them.
You know, I'm going to kill you because you're wealthier than me. Okay, here's $1,000.
Okay, good. good, go and go and drink it up or do whatever you're going to do, gamble. They'll often waste it, right?
Giving money to the poor. I mean, I've seen this directly, having grown up poor.
Giving money to the poor is usually a pretty terrible, terrible idea.
If it's an emergency, absolutely, you know, give food, shelter and all that.
Just giving money to the poor tends to go through there.
I mean, I've been around poor people who've come into windfalls, like either insurance things or some sort of inheritance, and it's pretty bad, pretty wasteful. I mean, you just look at the histories of the people who win the lotteries, and it's pretty disastrous if they're poor.
Poverty is most often a mindset and not a money issue.
So the rich people are targeted by the poor, and you can see this, you know, tax the rich and make the rich pay their fair share, and you can see this resentment going on.
It's very common. I mean, it's really foundational.
[21:33] Communism did not create this, it just formalized it and made it into a virtue and a system and put the word scientific in front of it as a falsehood.
[21:42] So, the wealthy then give to the poor, or the state takes from the wealthy and gives to the poor.
And when it starts to become the latter, as it usually does, right?
I mean, the rich have more access to political power than you and I will ever have.
They can get their meetings. And so the rich would rather the state give money to the poor than the rich be extorted out of fear to give money to the poor.
And so the state starts a system like a welfare state that starts transferring money to the poor.
But then what happens is the poor lose the opportunities to escape poverty.
I mean, this is the great challenge. I've talked about this for many years, the great challenge of charity. The great challenge of charity is you want to save people, but you don't want to bribe people to stay poor, right?
So you want to save people from being poor, and sometimes that means giving them resources, but at the same time, if you give them too many resources, they have an incentive to stay poor to gain those resources, right?
I mean, I was at a playground when my daughter was little, and there were these women talking about how they wanted to have another kid so that they could access this benefit and this bonus and this grant and all of this from the state, but only if there's no father in the house, right?
[23:03] So what happens then is instead of there being a temporary underclass where people cycle in and out, which is the story of a free market, rags to riches to rags, in three generations, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, we all know this story.
[23:17] Is when the state redistributes they harden the wealthy tend to remain wealthy and the poor tend to remain poor and social mobility declines and what that means is that the ambitious.
[23:32] And resentful poor start to develop an out group preference right and out you so you've got a country country a doesn't matter what country it is country a and you have young people and we'll We'll just talk about young men in general.
It happens with women too, but we'll talk about young men. It's a little more prevalent.
So the young men want to get ahead, right? They want to compete.
They want to have the ritual economic fights of competition. They want to achieve.
They want to gain resources. They want to found families. They want to, you know, be tamed by a family and children, as young men have always been tamed by family and children, right?
A man's testosterone often goes down significantly when he gets married, And then again, when he becomes children, which is exactly what you want, you don't want a man who's 30, who's got three kids to have the same levels of aggression as a man who's 18 and battling for prominence in the sexual and economic marketplace. place.
So in the past, male ambition and aggression could be used to move ahead in the existing country, in the existing system, in the existing society or tribe or whatever, in the existing group.
But when what is fundamentally sexual competition provokes the poor to aggress against the rich, provokes the rich to use social resources to bribe the poor into letting them be, then the class is hardened and what happens is.
[24:59] Young men grow up without fathers because women can get resources without a man so they you know they all think get married to the state and there's no fathers.
[25:08] And father absence provokes more aggression among young men because society, like your genetics assumes that it's a time of war, conflict, combat, or whatever, right?
Father absence would be the result of combat, usually, or extremely harsh conditions, so you'd need more aggression to survive.
And so the young men grow up, and they can't get ahead in society because the classes have hardened, right? They can't get ahead in society. society.
Now, when you can't get ahead in society as a young man, and it happens with women too, you start to develop out-group preferences.
[25:48] So, I'll give you an extreme example. I mean, extreme to the modern world, they're very common throughout history.
So, if you are a member of the slave class, ancient Rome could be, if you're a member of the slave class, how do you feel about a foreign army invading, promising to liberate you from slavery.
[26:06] Well, won't you want to help them? Won't you want to get behind them and support their cause?
Because you can't get ahead and you're enslaved in your current society.
So if there's some foreign invader and you believe, it could be true, but you believe that the foreign invader will liberate you from slavery, then you now have an out-group preference.
Well, because you're being oppressed by the in-group, so you have an out-group preference.
[26:35] You have an out-group preference. And one of the things that we know about conservatives is that they have in-group preferences.
And one of the things we know about liberals or the left is that they often have an out-group preference.
So why? Why do they have an, oh, are they just terrible? No, they're not terrible.
They're simply responding to the incentives in the system in which they live.
[26:56] Now, of course, anybody who wants to invade a country or take over a tribe, particularly in the modern world, what they do is they provide propaganda that says, you're being enslaved by your society we will come and liberate you and that provokes outgroup allegiances outgroup preferences that causes an attack upon the existing culture and listen the attack upon the existing culture might be warranted might be justified i'm not talking about the ethics of it i'm simply talking about the historical socio-political and evolutionary revolutionary realities of this so and this is obviously referred to as subversion or something like that of course classic example would be a France under the Vichy regime right so France when the north of France was taken over by the Nazis and France.
[27:57] Suffering under National Socialist occupation.
And so you had a resistance and you then had people cheering the advance of the Allies after D-Day.
[28:12] We're being liberated. Now, of course, I understand that people didn't have much sympathy to the Nazi regime, and rightly so, that they were perceived as an out-group and we were trying to restore the in-group and so on.
But in terms of the people currently in charge, I'm giving you sort of an extreme example of the people currently in charge, if they're viewed as illegitimate or oppressive by people, then they will have an out-group preference.
Come and liberate me from this, right?
If you look at the American Revolution, it was a British colony, America's British colony.
I know, bought from Mexico and bought from France and so on, but it was a British colony, and that was the group.
And then when King George became oppressive and started taxing and so on, bunking his soldiers in American households, then the in-group preference of we're British or we're a British colony turned to an out-group preference of the revolutionaries.
[29:14] So the out-group preference usually is an indication that there's a lack of opportunity, in particular for young men in the society.
If you look at someone like Trump, Trump was an expression of an out-group preference because he was outside the existing political establishment, and it came out of a lot of frustration about American politics.
Again, it's not a moral judgment. I'm simply talking about the analytics of it.
If there's no path to advancement, if there's no path...
[29:46] Want to reproduce i mean it's just go right down to the dna of it right so the genes want to reproduce and if your odds of reproducing in the existing system fall too low then you will take the risk of an outgroup preference in the hopes that you might get a chance to reproduce you might get a chance to have a system where you might be able to reproduce so if you look at russia Soviet Union under communism it provided a certain amount of economic security for some time obviously mass murder and starvation and gulags I get all of that but when the system could no longer provide enough opportunities for people then the system collapsed because an out-group preference being away from communism and towards some aspects of the free market it people switch to that and if you think of the slave situation let's say that the slaves are.
[30:46] Banned from reproducing right the slave's not allowed to have a family and so on well genetically the slave will always throw his lot in with an outgroup that might invade or take over or and they say well what's the worst that could happen the worst that could happen is i end up as a slave again but i'm already a slave right so i might as well roll the dice right i mean if you're a prisoner in a jail cell and you find a key and you're able to get a hold of a key you'll try it in the lock so what's the worst that can happen well you end up in the same position you were already but at least you might be able to get out if the key if the key works so the maintenance of of opportunities in particular for young men is essential for the continuation of society.
Otherwise, outgroup preferences will inevitably develop.
And this is one of the reasons why some of the harshest cultures in history would castrate their slaves.
[31:45] Because a slave who is castrated, well, is not going to reproduce even if somebody else comes in and takes over.
Even if someone invades and liberates him, he's still not going to be able to reproduce or have a family. So the chance of a slave rebellion or of slaves aligning with an out group virtually vanish if you castrate your slaves.
This is another reason why, of course, the heads of harems, right, the pashas or the sultans or whatever, would castrate their guards.
I mean, in part to obviously stop the guards from having sex with the women, but also there's no value in liberating.
For your genes, there's no value in rebellion if.
Being liberated doesn't give you any more chance to reproduce because you've been castrated.
[32:32] Group preference comes about because opportunities have diminished and the out group preference is, anything's better than this and it comes in a sense i think when people get a you know people have a pretty good instinct for sustainability you know something sustainable they're not people have a pretty good instinct for sustainability and when people start to get the instinct that their society is unsustainable, then they want, some people will want, or certainly their personal lives, if there's no future for themselves, then they will start to look outside of their society for salvation.
Because again, the genes, like you're just looking at the genes, the genes care, can you reproduce and do you have enough money to provide a family? Do you have enough resources to to provide a family.
And if your existing society is not providing you, and it's not just resources, I mean, quality mates and so on, right?
So if your existing society is not providing you the opportunity to gather resources, if everywhere you turn is like licenses and you can't poach on.
[33:39] The aristocrat's land, and by the way, the aristocrat owns most of the good land, and you need permission from the government to do X, Y, and Z, like, as I mentioned before, the medieval economy in England was so tightly regulated that you weren't even allowed, If you had a stall in like a farmer's market, you weren't allowed to sneeze.
Because if you sneeze and someone says, God bless you, you could enter into conversation with that. And that's unfair competition to everyone else.
So when things get more tightly regulated and you can't start a business and you can't sustain a business and there's too many requirements and threats and lawsuits and problems and escalations and bureaucracy and paperwork, it just becomes unsustainable, then you start to develop an out-group preference.
If you can't reform the system from within.
And again, just want to be clear, this is not a moral analysis.
I'm just talking about the way that things work.
[34:29] So when I look at somebody with an out-group preference, what I do is I look at somebody who has despaired of his or her ability to progress in a sustainable manner in the society in which they live.
[34:46] If you tell people that they're slaves, you provoke the out-group response.
So if you tell people you can't get ahead, you're a slave, you're a proletariat, you are a serf, and the rich have all the power and you can never get ahead.
And the reason that people do that, the reason that you get this propaganda, is to stimulate the out-group preference so that other people can can gain sway over a population, a domestic population.
[35:16] Because the more you inflict hopelessness on people, the more you provoke outgroup preferences.
So when I see people on the left, I see, and you know, whether I'm right or wrong, I mean, I'm just making the case here, you can obviously evaluate and let me know if there's counter evidence.
I'm sure there is. So, you know, this is a very provisional thesis.
But when I look at people on the left, I look at people who despair that they're going to be able to survive and flourish in their existing society.
Now, whether they can or they can't is in a sense somewhat irrelevant.
Because if you believe, I mean, a lot of times in life, if you believe you can, or you believe you can't, you're right.
[35:56] If I don't believe I can do X, I can't do X, or I won't do X.
So an inability and a lack of belief in inability fundamentally becomes the same thing in terms of motivation.
If I'm hungry, but I genuinely believe that the fruit in the bowl is fake, it's just plastic, then I'm not going to eat it.
So whether I can or can't eat it, if I believe that it's plastic, I won't eat it.
Now, maybe in a desperate extremity, I'll claw at it or something like that.
So this is why why the sophists will try and always convince people that they're helpless in the current system and they can't get ahead.
It provokes an out-group response which allows them to affect the local population in ways negative to the existing system.
[36:45] And I don't think conservatism solves this problem.
[36:50] Can see around the world conservatism does not solve this problem because it continues to recur i mean the solutions to this problem are always property rights the non-aggression principle and so on and if you look at families you can see that our children that are wildly oppressed and abused by their own parents will often develop outgroup preferences they don't want to be like like their parents, and they will develop out-group preferences.
I was watching a documentary on what was called the Pizza Bomber.
It's sort of a long and involved story, but it has to do with a group of criminals who seemed to have waylaid a guy that they somewhat knew, but doesn't seem to have been part of the case.
They waylaid a guy, and they strapped a bomb to his neck and forced him to rob a bank with a cane gun.
[37:44] Cane shotgun? Cane gun. and I don't think anyone knows for sure because two of the primary criminals have since died one shortly after the crime was committed and the woman in 2017 she died after a long battle with breast cancer in prison of course she was serving life plus 30, but one of the reasons that they wanted to rob the bank apparently was that the woman wanted $250,000 because she wanted to pay a guy to kill her father so that he would stop spending what she viewed as her inheritance, right?
So her father was worth $2 million, but he kept buying things for other people, and she was really angry at this, and it was at the very bank where her father had withdrawn stuff from the safety deposit box that she aimed, if it's true, right?
I mean, this is what the theory is, that she aimed the neck bomb robber guy at. Now, she claimed in a later trial to have been viciously abused by her parents.
She claimed to have been psychologically abused, emotionally abused, and sexually abused by her own father.
[38:53] So here's an example of a massive out-group preference.
Preference and the outgroup preference is my father my father my parents have treated me so badly i mean if it's true and you know who will ever know if there's no drone that follows us around and records what actually happens for the most part i guess now there kind of is but, who knows if it's true but the reality is that she perceived it to be true or she i mean it's certainly her behavior would be the case of somebody who'd been incredibly cruelly violated They call mental illness, well, to me, mental illness has a lot to do with rage over abuse, particularly sexual abuse, particularly for women.
[39:37] Abused women can get their vengeance on men. Abused men get their vengeance on society.
So she had a stronger pair bond.
Like there was a fellow that Rothstein, I think his name was, who she dated off and on for years, and she claimed that he forced her into oral sex, anal sex, all kinds of perverted sex. But she had a real bond with this guy.
[40:02] And the guy she wanted to pay a quarter million dollars to to kill her father, that's an example of an out-group preference, right?
So her crime gang was her out-group preference against her own father because her own father had, according to her reports, again, not the most reliable witness in the world.
But again, you've got to think this behavior comes... And one of the frustrations I had about the documentary was that the documentary, well, she was just born weird and, you know, kids didn't like her and they only came over to play when her father built her a lifestyle dollhouse.
Holy Ibsen, Batman. I mean, but there was no explanation other than people did mention that she talked about her abuse in a subsequent trial, but the abuse was never detailed.
I tried looking it up and I couldn't, other than allegations of emotional and sexual abuse, I couldn't find much.
But yeah, how much mental illness is simply the result of childhood sexual abuse and how how much of that, quote, mental illness could be alleviated by an acknowledgement of and punishment of the realities of childhood sexual abuse and the punishment of the perpetrators.
[41:12] Of course, this woman would have seen her father, who, as she claims, sexually abused her, be left in the neighborhood for handing out money, right? When he got older, he's like, well, I don't have much to do, so I might as well try and do some good deeds.
So he would give money to his neighbors to buy cars or pay off debt or whatever.
And he bled his $2 million down to, I don't know, virtually nothing.
[41:35] And so watching the neighborhood praise the guy she claims to have sexually abused her would have made her pretty angry.
And so you can be evil. So she would say, I assume in her mind, you can be evil. But as long as you have money, you're good. Society will love you.
So then she spent her life in pursuit of money. she scammed government welfare, she went to, had a whole bunch of frivolous lawsuits and so on, and accumulated a lot of cash, and didn't do her any good, of course.
So, obviously, a tortured soul, and turned into an evil person, but if you look at the sort of villain origin story, which very few people want to do, at least until I came along, looking at the villain origin story is pretty essential, because philosophy is about prevention, not cure.
And if you see someone like Jesus, who came along and wanted people to have an out-group preference because he was creating a new religion.
He was creating Christianity.
[42:30] People to have an out-group preference to choose the new group, which would be Christianity over the old existing groups, the religion and the Roman Empire and so on.
And so he came and said, I've come to set son against father and father against son and family member against family member.
And it's actually quite easy. It's quite shockingly easy, really, for those in authority to provoke an out-group preference So the people bond with authority and turn against their own family members, because authority determines who reproduces in the future, whereas family members don't.
So you don't obviously date and mate within your own family structure.
So if authority says to you, turn against your family, your family, the enemies, well, authority controls who breeds in the future, because they, especially a totalitarian authority, controls who breeds in the future.
Because they give you praise or punishment good social credit bad social credit gulags murder right concentration camps wars who gets drafted right so if authority tells you to turn against your family most people will do it family bonds tend to be weaker than the bonds of or the fear of authoritarianism and again we can think of very much evolutionary reasons for that.
[43:45] If authority if the authorities control who breeds then your genetic allegiance would be be to the authorities, not to your own family.
And I mean, if you doubt this, you could just look at what happened to families under COVID.
If someone was skeptical of the vaccine and other people were pro the vaccine, you could see what happened with families.
I mean, I don't know what percentage is, but it seems like a whole lot of families went with the authorities against their own family members.
And again, we can understand that, but that is an out-group preference which which facilitates genetic reproduction.
If you align with the authorities, you are more likely to reproduce in the future.
[44:25] If you align with your family against the authorities, you are less likely to reproduce in the future, which again is another way of saying that those who had more in-group preference of the family than out-group preference for authority reproduce less.
[44:39] It's yet another reason why people can't handle power. And power should always be reduced as much as humanly possible because power makes people inhuman. Thank you.
Look at the left and the right that's that's what i see despair particularly despair over a genetic future over family and kids leads to outgrew preferences which is why the provocation of despair by those seeking to exploit the local population is constantly used so it may be a useful way to look at the left and the right and so for me you know encouraging people to to work and take responsibility and have families and so on, I think is a good way of trying to make people resistant to this kind of propaganda.
Talk about the wonders and the beauties of family life and so on could be very helpful in this kind of way.
So I hope I've been doing my part in helping to heal the world.
Thank you. Thank you so much for listening.
Freedomain.com slash donate to help the show out. Really would appreciate that.
Lots of love from up here. Take care, my brothers and sisters.
I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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