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April 25, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:37
209 Marriage and the State
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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is 5.30, 5.24 on April the 25th.
It's a Tuesday, 2006.
So, I just had an interesting MSN chat.
With a fine young lady who asked me an interesting question which I thought I would ramble on about.
Now this is a podcast that is going to be full of even more, even more.
Subjective opinions than usual.
So, if you're not feeling like a lot of subjective opinions, well, of course then you're in the wrong podcast element completely, but if you feel like you don't want a steady diet of them this afternoon, this may or may not be your cup of tea.
We shall see.
So, the question was very simple.
Are you married? And the answer, of course, is, of course.
And how? And the question then was, but doesn't that go against everything else that you believe?
A very interesting question.
And, of course, my answer was, I'd be curious to know how.
I really would like to know how.
And perhaps you could enlighten me.
And the fine young lady then replied, That it was going against my beliefs because it gave the government more power over me and it was just a piece of paper and so on and so on.
I have a guy ahead of me who is doing even more crazy things with his car than I am.
I think he's working on a PDA while driving.
You may have heard the screech as he almost hit the car in front of him.
Which is even worse than podcasting when you think about it.
Podcasting, I can turn my head around, I can keep my eyes on the road, I'm doing a familiar route, and I'm not going to be stymied by stop-and-go traffic in the way that somebody who's working on a PDA is, so please don't ever do that, especially if you're around me and you're in the car and I'm podcasting.
So it was an interesting question to me.
Now, the question of marriage is a complicated one, and I think marriage as a whole serves three basic functions.
And I know, I haven't talked about my opinions about marriage before, but frankly, are you really that surprised that I have an opinion about something so far removed from the realm of politics and economics?
Well, perhaps not economics. But remember, if it lives, breathes, has existed, will exist, or has a possibility of ever existing, I must have an opinion about it.
So, I just thought that I would make you aware of that up front.
So, the three purposes of marriage are the smudge.
Well, before you decide to get together with someone, you go through a period of dating.
And that's called, you know, being boyfriend, girlfriend, that kind of stuff.
And that's all hunky-dory well and good.
It's an exploratory phase where you're trying to figure out your levels of compatibility and how you resolve disputes and so on, and whether your naughty bits fit together well.
That phase can be relatively prolonged, I guess you could say.
But generally, it's not a good idea to have children in that phase.
And I'm simply talking from a biological and economic standpoint.
Because children require, you know, the old 20-plus year commitment, a vast amount of resources and energy and so on.
And I guess the sort of basic idea behind marriage is to say, if you can't commit to staying with someone for a pretty extended period of time, and if you're not sure about someone enough to enter into a sort of theoretically, at least at the beginning, lifelong relationship with that person, then you probably shouldn't all be having kids together.
You know, that's one of the theories.
And I think it's a relatively decent theory, as those theories go.
If you can't or don't want to get married to someone, in other words, and forget about the legal or state stuff, take a vow that says, we're together for the duration.
And I don't have any particular problem with divorce.
It's definitely a failure, but failure is certainly an acceptable part of life.
And so... If you don't stay together for your whole life, that's fine.
It's a dismal failure if you can't stay together while you have children.
As somebody who is the child of a single parent, who my father left when I was very young, it is devastating.
To the family as a whole, both economically and psychologically, to have only one parent raising the child.
And I don't know which one.
It's more devastating to have raised the child.
Definitely as a son, I would think I've preferred a father than a single mom, but that's really in the realm of wild speculation, so we won't go there just yet.
But soon, my brothers and sisters, soon we will get there.
So... If you can't commit to someone publicly and openly and so on to stay together...
And remember, marriage is invented when the average life expectancy was like 22 years old, if you were lucky.
And so people weren't really worrying that much about, of course, 60 or 70 year marriages.
But you definitely had to be there together until the children reached puberty, sort of back in those days, or at least shortly before, maybe around the age of 10 or so.
And that was simply because commitment is important to raising children, and if you can't commit to a marriage, then you can't commit to children, or at least you shouldn't, in my sort of humble opinion.
And so... That, I think, is one of the basic ideas behind marriage.
Now, the other basic idea, sort of the number one of three, the number two basic idea behind marriage is that marriage is a public ceremony.
I mean, if you forget about the drunken hookups in Vegas under the Elvis impersonator slash priest, then we can generally say that marriage is a public event with friends and family.
Now, the reason that I think that marriage is a public event with friends and family is because If you go to someone, and you've had one date, and you go to your friend, and your friend says, well, how was the date?
Eh, you know, it was okay.
She was, you know, kind of persnickety.
She talked a lot.
She did this, that, and the other, and seemed very self-absorbed and kind of cold.
Then you say, oh, well, what a shame.
Yeah, move on, all right?
So that's sort of a one-date kind of option.
I'm sorry it didn't work out. It makes sense that you wouldn't necessarily start planning a life with this person, so stop seeing her.
Now, if you go back to someone after, like, I don't know, five or ten dates, and you're on the verge of, I don't know, boyfriend-dom, And your friend says, how's it going?
It's like, well, you know, I can't really decide.
She's fun, but she's also pretty volatile.
She's sexy, but she's got a temper, it seems like.
Whatever. You know, she's 12 cats, of which only 6 come on the date with us.
So, there may be warning signs, let's say.
And... So, that person might then say, well, if you're not over the moon at this point, you probably don't want to keep going, so stop seeing her, that kind of stuff.
So, I'm sure you get the gradation here.
If you have a two-year relationship, then your friend's going to say, well, you know, this is kind of serious.
If you were aiming at marriage, breaking up is a pretty, you know, you're losing a pretty significant investment in a relationship, assuming that marriage and kids is your goal, from either gender's perspective, then your friend is going to say, this is sort of a big deal, blah, blah, blah, right?
And so you're going to get that much more of people investing time into figuring out how or under what circumstances you might stay together.
And you also, of course, will have people who are saying, if you're not happy now, then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
The amount of social energy that people put into maintaining your relationship with someone or helping you to maintain it, it's to some degree proportional to the amount of time that you've spent.
And of course, if you have kids, even if you're not married, then people are going to spend a lot more time trying to help you work things out with that person or in the absence of at least being able to work things out with that person specifically, at least like romantically.
Or from a spousal situation, then if you get divorced, at least you can be effective co-parents for the next 10 years or 20 years or however long your kids have got to go before, given that you're going to have to have a relationship with that other parent of the child, how can you most effectively do it?
And so there are people who are then going to get heavily involved in trying to help you with that and take it very seriously.
If you say, I want to leave, and you've been going out with a girl three times, it's one thing you say when you've just had three children with the woman, and you say, I want to leave, then people take that a whole lot more differently.
I think that the reason that marriage is important as a public spectacle, I guess you could say, is it is a public announcement of we are taking this relationship as seriously as you can possibly take a relationship.
Our intention, publicly and openly spoken, is, I mean, assuming I wrote the vows for Christina and I, And so, whether you wrote them yourself, or you read them, or you're going to read them for somebody else's, then it would seem to me that that is your public declaration.
And as a public declaration of intent, it's not a contract or anything, but you're saying, I love this person more than anyone else in the world.
I don't anticipate ever loving anybody else as much as this person.
I want this person to be with me for the rest of my life.
I'm fully committed to You know, if you're straight, I guess, you know, aiming for kids or whatever, and you're not of a certain age, right?
Aiming for kids together, that I'm in for the long haul, it's a public declaration, and blah, blah, blah.
And I think that's important.
I really think that's important.
Because that way, if you then, six months from now, or two years from now, go and say, eh, it's not working out, I'm leaving, they're going to say, well, I don't think that...
That should be taken lightly.
And also, what happened to the whole public...
Like, I know how much you love this woman because you publicly declared it and vowed your intention to stay together forever or whatever.
And so people are just going to...
They're going to put the brakes on you bailing, I guess you could say.
They're going to put the brakes on you just vanishing and deciding to go off and, I don't know, become a chameleon charmer in Tijuana or something.
So I think that public declaration is important.
And the third reason, of course, is financial.
That if you have a business merger, let's say that you are 35 and you've got, I don't know, $500,000 in assets, and you are going to invest your $500,000 of assets into a business venture, you're not going to do that without a contract, right? Whether it's explicit or implicit, You're very unlikely to do that without a contract.
If you do get married and your parents die, then you're going to inherit a whole bunch of money.
And you need to have, I think, some sort of rough arrangement or agreement about how those things are going to be divided up if you receive those things and you're married and so on.
So a marriage is a merging relationship.
Of assets, and of resources, and so on, and it's a pretty significant business venture.
Because, of course, you also have, sort of, quote, high maintenance employees in the form of children.
So, it just seems to me that there's quite a lot of financial complication and asset complication that goes on.
In a marriage, and this can occur, of course, if you're very young as well.
You bring a car into the relationship, let's say that you're married and you split up after six months.
What happens to all of that?
Well, you need some methodology for resolving these disputes, especially because, as one book that I read when I was actually, my teens put it, Made in Heaven Settled in Court, you know, that there's no viciousness like a marriage going wrong with sort of two immature people and so on.
And so, to have some sort of explicit in the form of prenup or implicit in the form of whatever laws are currently governing marriage in your location, to have some kind of methodology for resolving disputes in marriage as it breaks up, seems to me to be pretty important.
The additional complication, of course, is that to take a sort of traditional environment, A woman will have children and sort of spit them out one after the other like a pellet gun.
And she, assuming that this is the choice that the couple makes, she is going to give up a fair amount of earning, independent earning, if not all of it.
Let's say she stays home with those kids for, I don't know, 10 years or whatever.
Then she's lost 10 years of income.
She's become completely dependent upon the man for financial support.
And she also has lost income because she's now behind the curve.
So even if she goes back and gets a job right away, she's lost 10 years of growth within her job and career and so on.
And so there's significant financial choices around having children, not just in terms of how much they cost, but in terms of who pays for them, who gives up income, who becomes dependent on whom, and so on.
And a lot of this, you know, just sort of by the by, I mean, this is where a lot of this deadbeat dad stuff is coming from, right?
That's currently all over the law, right?
Of course, the government doesn't want to pay for the welfare state.
It wants to tax us for the welfare state, but it doesn't actually pay for anything, right?
And so it wants to go and put all its money in law enforcement and getting deadbeat dads to pay and so on.
But a lot of this is based on this fundamental problem that when a woman decides to have your children, Or if you, you know, put a hole in the condom or something, you know, assuming she's having sex with you and there's some chance of her getting pregnant, if she's doing that, then if she has kids and decides to stay home, which is pretty much what marriage was about when it was invented, because there wasn't so much of the not being at home, you know, the work was in the home.
Then she does become completely dependent on you and ceases to have independent economic agency status.
And so what happens if you then yank the rug out from under her feet?
So basically you make $100,000 and so implicitly you've been paying her $50,000 a year to stay home and raise your kids.
And then you walk out and she's got no economic opportunities.
Maybe she was a high-powered lawyer or something and she gave it up to have kids.
Then there are problems associated with that.
There's a risk factor associated with that.
Now, I personally think that that risk factor is entirely uncalibrated at the moment.
It seems to me that in a DRO society, you would have...
For this kind of problem, you would have insurance.
Now, you can buy insurance for if your spouse or your husband gets accidentally killed, or you can get life insurance to take care of you in that situation, I mean, unless he offs himself.
And that's because those statistics can be measured in advance, and there are things which you can do to mediate the risks, right?
Like don't smoke and exercise, don't be overweight and have low blood pressure or at least average blood pressure and so on.
And so, that kind of situation is something that can be predicted.
Now, marriage and divorce can be predicted enormously as well, as we mentioned about when we were talking about the book Blink.
So people who exhibit certain characteristics have like a 95% likelihood of getting divorced within a couple of years or five years, I think, at the outside.
And so that kind of stuff is easily predicted and can be prevented by an appropriate DRO situation, right?
So just as you go for an annual physical, if you have a life insurance policy, Similarly, you would go for an annual marriage physical if you had a DRO policy, and if you didn't want to go, that would be fine.
They'd just drop the policy and so on.
Just so nobody slips into the, oh my god, the evil fascistic DROs.
My god, it's an Orwellian nightmare.
Like having a credit report, it oppresses you under the heel.
The black boot of the state is reproduced by DROs that keep files on you somewhere and so on.
Just so everyone knows, you don't have to show up.
But they also don't have to do business with you.
That's what we call freedom.
And that kind of stuff can be predicted.
You get that kind of insurance and then if your husband just, I don't know, decides up in one day to go and chase some cocktail waitress from Brazil, then you're going to get income supplements and so on and the DRO might then apply penalties against it.
Skirt-chasing guy in South America or something, but you can get insurance for that kind of stuff.
But the insurance, of course, shouldn't be too high.
This is sort of your basic economic calibration.
Your insurance should not be too high at all, because nobody's dead, right?
So what you don't want, let's just say that for a buck a year, you get $10 million if your marriage doesn't work out.
Well, then it would seem to me that a whole bunch of people would get married and then break up to get the $10 million and then maybe live in sin or whatever, right?
So the payoff can't be too high relative to the price, and neither can it be too low.
If it's too high, then you're encouraging marriages that aren't going to work.
And if it's too low, then you're discouraging people from getting married and you kind of want the income from the marriage insurance.
And so right now, because you have the welfare state and you have alimony and you have all this kind of stuff, and I'm not saying alimony wouldn't be the way to go, but it's kind of weighted towards the woman these days.
It's one of the areas in which men have some work to do.
Of course, the ideal work being talking the state out of existence.
But while we're working on that, the woman generally gets the financial benefits of the situation and the woman generally gets custody in any questionable situations and so on.
And in my experience of the men I've known, I mean, the women know that the advantage is very much to them, which worsens their behavior in the marriage accordingly, right?
So right now, because a woman can survive quite neatly without a husband being around, women don't have to work as hard to make the man happy, right?
This is one of the main reasons why with the rise of these kinds of state programs, you get the rise of significant anti-male humor.
And this sort of rise of the idea that men are pigs and stupid and all that kind of stuff.
Stuff which feminists would find appalling, were it to be applied to women in a generic sense.
But, except attractive women, who feminists don't seem to have much sympathy for.
But, that's neither here nor there.
I just thought I'd throw that out as an inflaming little bob to our pear-shaped women sisters in comfortable shoes.
So... This idea that the risk and reward of marriage insurance should be balanced, I think, makes sense.
Right now it's not balanced, which is why the numbers of divorces are high.
I mean, obviously there's lots of reasons why divorces are high.
People don't know how to relate to each other.
They're not rational. They're not empirical.
They're not sensible. They're not...
Schooled in conflict resolution because they grow up in this sort of sickening, top-down, bullying, bureaucratic state system and have usually sickening, top-down, bureaucratic and bullying parenting and so on.
So they don't learn how to negotiate and they don't learn how to manage their own feelings in a productive way.
So that's a part of it.
But in the basic economics of it, right?
I mean, it is not an economic disaster for the woman.
And of course, as it's become less and less economically disastrous for women, the corresponding increases in divorce initiated by women have naturally gone ahead.
And what this means as a whole is that women are generally less picky about choosing their mates, right?
Let's just say you could not survive.
You were thrown in prison.
Let's take an extreme misogynistic society.
You are thrown in prison if your husband leaves you.
But you get to choose your husband perfectly.
Then it seems to me that women are...
But you don't have to get married, right?
You don't have to get married. Nobody's going to tell you who to marry.
But if your marriage doesn't work out, you're thrown in jail.
Well, women are going to be pretty picky about who they're going to marry.
And they're going to make sure that the values are all the same, that everyone gets along, that everyone's happy.
And they're also going to make sure, pretty continually, like...
You know, the sort of spousal satisfaction survey, you know.
How's the marriage for you overall?
Are you net positive? Are you net neutral?
Are you net negative? Let's have, you know, fill out this feedback form and I'll give you a coupon for some seriously demented and perhaps illegal in many states nookie time.
And that way, the women are going to be focusing very much on are you having a good time in the marriage?
Is there anything that I can do to improve your experience?
Anything that's missing for you?
And of course, this doesn't occur, right?
I mean, it's amazing to me that...
A company that sells you a vacuum cleaner will send you a follow-up survey to find out how well you like it.
But people who get married very rarely sit down with each other and say, so how's this whole deal working out for you?
Are you happy we did it?
Is there anything that could be improved?
I have surveys on my website trying to get people's feedback on how they're enjoying the show.
I think it's important to sit down with Christina and say, How's this whole thing working out for you?
Are you pleased with it?
Are you happy? I mean, and do this when you're boyfriend-girlfriend, too.
Check in with the cost-benefit analysis from time to time.
It can be an enormously beneficial thing, right?
You don't want someone's dissatisfaction with you as a romantic partner to be expressed with, I don't know, a note stabbed to your fridge with a knife with your picture in the blade through your picture as well.
That might be a little late to get the clue about things not working out as well as you'd like.
So basically, if there were huge negative consequences for women, thrown in jail, children are taken away from them, whatever, then they're going to be very picky about who they marry, and they choose not to get married if they can't find the right guy.
So naturally, the marriages that did work out, sorry, the people who did get married, the marriages would work out at a far higher rate than 50%.
Now, of course, you wouldn't know if it was because the women liked being married or were afraid of being thrown in jail or whatever, but just at a theoretical level, the numbers would be better.
Now, if both people, if whoever initiated the leaving of the marriage was thrown in jail, then that would go down, which means people would just be that much more picky.
I mean, if you weren't allowed to quit your job, the next job that you took, you'd be pretty darn picky about choosing that job.
I mean, that sort of makes sense.
I mean, that would be fairly important, I think.
And that would be a whole lot better marriages and would encourage better presentation and better participation in marriages.
So if women knew that they were thrown in jail for initiating divorce proceedings, therefore they had to be really picky about the men, then the men would have to improve their behavior in the day.
I mean, you would see the rise of such gentlemanly behavior.
It would make, you know, Rhett Butler look like Steve Buscemi.
So, I think that you can absolutely be sure that, you know, courteous and kind and beneficial behavior would be pretty much undergone.
It would be pretty much taken out of its dusty historical cabinet case and put out in full display.
And if either party to a divorce was thrown in jail, then you bet they'd be working like hell to make those marriages work.
And they'd be picking people where it wouldn't be working like hell to make that marriage work.
I mean, there are times when Christine and I have to have conversations about conflicts for hours, but those conversations aren't unpleasant.
They're difficult at times just in terms of figuring out what the problem is and navigating it.
It can be challenging, but I don't hate those conversations.
And the marriage is a...
You know, a blissful lake of joy.
I mean, so that's fine, too.
So, overall, that's something I think that would be fairly important in a DRO society.
And so, to return to this as a whole, marriage seems to me to make sense.
If you're going to have kids or you're going to bring assets, just at that practical economic level, marriage as a system of implicit contract.
And Christina and I talked about this before we got married, that if it didn't work out, then...
We would split whatever we brought in and split whatever proceeds we had on the house, whatever, and part our way.
That was something we talked about beforehand and were quite comfortable with.
But I had no doubt the marriage was going to work, and so I didn't bother with any kind of prenup or anything like that.
So, that seems to me to make sense from an economic standpoint.
And I like the public proclamation of devotion to your spouse.
I like the feeling...
I mean, this is really getting subjective, right?
So, excuse me for sharing this level.
But I really like the feeling of commitment.
I really like the feeling of knowing that we're there for the long haul.
I really like the feeling... It allows us to be more free within our relationship.
To know that we are totally committed to each other forever.
It allows you to be less tentative.
It allows you to be less constrained with the fear that the other person is going to leave you if you say this or that or the other.
And it also means that you are going to, if you know you're going to live in the house for the next 50 years, then you're going to take great pains in your decoration.
You're really going to choose your colors.
Everything that you do within that relationship when you're married, because you know it's going to be around for the long haul, you're very careful about what you do in the marriage.
I mean, anything that I do that makes Christina angry with me is something that she's going to have to remember, and she won't, she's not that kind of person, but it's something that's going to come to mind.
Let's say we have a fight in a grocery store about something, then every time we go grocery shopping for the next, like an unpleasant one, every time we go grocery shopping for the next 50 years, I'm going to have to recognize that she's going to remember that, and I don't want that to happen, right?
So I'm very careful about what I do and very positive about the way that we solve issues, and I also can be more myself.
I don't have to think that, oh, well, if I, I don't know, do a naked marambo on the roof, which I haven't done for weeks because it's a cold snap.
Then if she sees that, she's not going to go, well, you're just weird, and leave, right?
So I can sort of be myself, I can be more free, and that is beneficial to her because she gets to see, I guess, who I really am, the naked, roof-dancing marimbo guy.
And it's just a freeing situation.
It's a freeing situation.
And so, for instance, if you know that it's going to be very hard to fire you, but you love your job...
Then if you're on a board of directors and you have tenure or you have some way that it's going to be very hard to fire you, then you're going to be more free in your self-expression if you feel that something's going wrong or something's going right or whatever.
If you can be sort of fired without any warning at the drop of a hat, which is really the situation when you're dating, Then it seems pretty unlikely that you are going to be as free or as self-expressed.
If you have some sort of tenure or some sort of permanency or at least a high barrier to exit for your relationship, then you're going to be more free to say what it is that you feel, to be open, to be honest, and that is going to improve your relationship thereby.
Now, this is sort of the tip of the iceberg of my case for marriage.
There's a lot more to it. Anyway, so the last issue that I'll talk about here is that I wanted to get married for all of the reasons that I talked about, not least because if you are aiming at marriage, you stop wasting your time with people who aren't compatible.
And I think that's fairly important.
If you're just going to date for the rest of your life, yeah, you can go out with a bunch of people that you don't share the same values with, because, you know, at some point it's going to collapse or whatever, but you can have some fun and go out or whatever, so you're going to have shallower standards, and I certainly know that was the case for me when I was in my 20s, and...
And if you get further along in The God of Atheists, and remember, if you've donated $50 or more, send me an email.
I'll send you a copy of The God of Atheists, and if you've donated $50 or less, or $49.99 or less, send me an email.
I'll be happy to send you a pretty excellent thesis, I think, that you'll enjoy reading.
But the character of Rudy is somewhat based on me in my 20s when I had much shallower standards in regards to women.
But you'll do that. If you're not aiming at marriage or whatever, then you'll just date with shallower standards and waste time.
I'd much rather be married in my 20s if I could have had as great a marriage now.
But who knows? I mean, that's a chicken and an egg situation.
But I wanted to get married, and this young lady's question about, well...
Is it hypocritical?
You don't enjoy giving the state power over you and so on?
Well, I think that the final sort of level of freedom is that you don't care about the state.
I mean, I think that's sort of important.
You don't care. So the government has done this or that with regards to marriage, and they say this or that with regards to marriage.
Well, I don't care. I want to get married.
And the fact that there are state laws around getting married, I gotta tell you, I just don't really care.
I mean, it's amazing to me.
It never even crossed my mind whether it was hypocritical to get married and sign government documents or whatever, right?
Yeah, so they want me to sign a document.
I don't care. I mean, what does the signature matter, right?
I mean, I want to get married if the government wants me to sign something, whatever, right?
I mean, I wanted to own a house, so the government makes me pay taxes.
I mean, so I'll pay the taxes.
I mean, I don't care about, I mean, I care, don't get me wrong, I care about the government's existence and its violence and so on, but I really don't care about, like, I'm not going to make decisions based on the existence of regulations or not.
If I want to do something, then I'll just make it happen.
And if the government says, well, you have to pay me 50 bucks to get married and sign this people, I'm not going to say, well, no, I no longer am free to get married.
I mean, that would not be free, I think.
That would not be free at all.
And I think that would be a real shame.
That would be a terrible shame to not get married because you didn't want to sign a piece of paper that the government had.
I mean, if you don't want to get married, don't get married.
If you want to get married, then get married.
But don't do either one because of the presence or absence of government documents because that's, to me, not a valid reason for doing or not doing anything.
It just doesn't make any sense.
So that's not free to me.
You don't set up a look at a structure that other people have created and say, my choice is going to be this or that based on the existence of that structure.
That's allowing the government to impinge upon your freedom pretty significantly, I think.
And I love being married. I wanted to be married for all the reasons that I've described, very little of which has anything to do with the state, if anything.
And... So for me to say, well, then I'm not going to get married because the state has a monopoly on marriage, I think would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as the old phrase goes.
So I hope that at least makes some sense.
There's a lot of places that you can apply this particular theory.
So just let me know if it makes sense to you, and I look forward to hearing your response.
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