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Aug. 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:44
387 Are Relationships Corrupting? (New mike, a few audio problems, sorry!)

Do all relationships require compromises that harm us? Also, monogamy!

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
Look at that. We're back to just like a regular sort of kind of podcast.
It's the 28th of August 2006, and we are going to...
I am going to head to the gym, run a couple of errands.
I'm still, to some degree, a man of leisure.
And hopefully I'll be starting up this week or early next week, my new job.
But I wanted to give my old USB microphone a little bit of a test here, just to see whether it drains off too much of the notebook power, so blah blah blah blah blah.
Anyway, so I'd like to just chat about a couple of things that have been cooking on the boards, just because this is going to be a relatively short podcast, and I wanted to get some ideas across, so this will be a little medley.
And The first one is that we've had some posts which express some cynicism, I guess you could say, or more appropriately, It would be biological imperatism, inevitabilism, around the concept of monogamy.
And I find this quite interesting.
I certainly have had my fair share of non...
Well, I mean, I've always been monogamous.
I guess when I was 17 I cheated on a girl once, but we'll put that down to the folly of youth.
And it's something that I never did again.
But I certainly do understand that men have a biological imperative from a sort of seed-spreading standpoint to have sex with as many women as possible and wander off.
And that's certainly true when you look at the apes, that they're sort of in this hierarchical structure where the alpha male has sex with most of the women, women, female apes.
But that's sort of how it works in the ape kingdom, and so a lot of people translate this into a sort of theory that monogamy is something that's sort of invented by women to protect their own interests and is pounded into men as an ideal.
And yet it is actually bad for men, and men are sort of freewheeling, heavy metal thunder kind of guys who want to roll around dipping their wick into every inkwell that they can find.
And I certainly understand this from a...
From a biological argument, but I think there are certain flaws in it.
And again, I'm no biologist, but this is just the stuff that I've sort of read about and mulled over.
The difference between human beings and every other species, well, one of the many differences between human beings and every other species, is that human beings have a sort of...
A period of development when they're children that just goes on and on and on.
I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous how long it takes for the human child to achieve any kind of real maturity.
You know, it's like, basically, our brains finish growing when we're in our mid-twenties.
And physically, yes, we can have children in our early to mid-teens, but...
The physical development still continues on.
I had a growth spurt at 15 or 16, right?
So, I mean, it's really quite lunatic how long it takes for human children to achieve physical, emotional, and mental, well, let's just say physical and mental maturity.
Emotional maturity is a little bit more of a choice.
And that's something that is pretty unique in the animal kingdom.
And it's because we have this brain, right?
The whole latency period where growth doesn't really occur in a very sort of concentrated or solid fashion.
The whole latency period between the ages of five and six and puberty is all around laying the foundations for The intellectual development.
So, because we have this sort of extra period of sort of pause in our physical development, we should, I mean, theoretically, there's no huge reason why we shouldn't go from sort of six or seven years old to puberty.
Like, this is what most other species do, right?
To puberty. But we instead hang around for five years or six years or seven years and it's because the development part of our brain is going on.
And so the thing that's different about us is the amount of investment that is required in our offspring in order to make them successful.
Now, the one thing that is true because of that is that the females, the women, obviously have to put a lot more resources into the children in order to bring them to maturity, and the man also has to put a lot more resources into the children to bring them to maturity.
See, there's no point, I mean, if you're going to accept the biological argument of spreading the seed, which of course I'm not going to argue against, Then you do sort of have to understand that a man who's spending his time spreading his seed in order to procreate children who themselves either grow, like either don't make it sort of physically or mentally to puberty and post-puberty and have the chance to raise their own children.
Then this is not any sort of productive argument from a genetic standpoint.
In order for the genetics to work, it's not that you have to just spray your seed wildly.
I mean, you can masturbate into fruit if you want, and that's sort of spraying your seed wildly, but it's not going to do much to continue on the DNA, unless you're going to believe that you get some sort of mutated fruit person coming out of things, but...
The argument from genetics means that you have to spread your seed in such a way that that seed can itself spread, which means that you have to get your children to maturity so that they themselves can reproduce and anything that's not that is a bad idea and a waste of time.
So, I think that the argument from the genetics standpoint has to take that into account.
And what that means is that It really is not such a good idea to just go spreading your seed wildly and sort of cross your fingers and hope that it all works out because that's not a very good strategy from the standpoint of getting your genes to reproduce, right?
One generation doesn't do it.
If I end up putting that forward, then it's not really going to help that much.
I'm going to need to actually get the generation that I create to actually create its own generation, otherwise it's a big waste of time.
Anyway, I think I sort of made that point.
Now, because of the amount of time and energy that's involved in raising human children...
Women, of course, if you have lots of children, as a woman you're disabled for significant portions.
You need food to be brought to you and so on.
And because of the length of time that it is involved, It's quite a chore to bring food, and we're talking about a tribal situation.
It's quite a chore to bring continual amounts of food to a continually pregnant human female, shelter, protection, and so on.
Because, of course, if you impregnate a woman and she starves, you're also not doing much from the biological reproduction, spread your seed kind of standpoint.
You're just impregnating a woman who dies.
Now, if you have a whole bunch of kids...
And this woman is, you know, breastfeeding or whatever, and then she dies, or at any time before they get to sexually reproduce themselves, then your kids are kind of in trouble too, right?
So basically what I'm saying is that because of the longevity of human children, in terms of their time frame for maturity, You have an enormous amount of resources that need to be put into place.
And certainly, if you could sort of wave the magic wand and be the alpha male who manages to impregnate all these women and have them raise your children for 15 years until they reach physical maturity and so on, then that would be great.
But that's not really how it works.
In the absence of a state, like I'm just sort of talking in a tribal situation.
In a tribal situation, You have all of these situations where, yeah, there are alpha males and beta males, but you do have this, I guess, challenge that you simply can't, of your own accord, provide for all of the children that you want to.
Now, you have a state, you have pharaohs and all this kind of stuff.
That's all very different. I understand that, and I got no problem with that.
But monogamy is not just a female invention.
It's something that's required by genetics in order to get you to...
Make sure that your children reach, say, to physical maturity.
So it's not just something invented by women to enslave men.
Now, certainly in the modern world, you could certainly make a stronger case for that, right?
Because in the modern world, you have these ridiculous laws that seem to put a fair amount of power in the hands of women, right?
And of course, women outnumber men in most societies, and women have a very...
You could say apolitical approach to feeding their children, which I certainly can't blame them for.
That's one of the reasons why I think men are more interested in politics than women, because women are just like, hey, whatever I've got to do to get my kids fed, that's my major thing.
And I certainly can't blame them for that.
I mean, that seems like a perfectly reasonable approach.
But... We have this sort of corruption of monogamy that has gone on in the modern world that's sort of corrupted by the state.
Now, from that standpoint, you definitely can make strong arguments against monogamy as it's practiced sort of in the modern West and, of course, as it would be practiced in theological societies like the Muslim societies and so on.
But you wouldn't want to mistake marriage for what the state has turned it into, any more than you'd want to mistake the free market for this mercantilist, protectionist, unionized nonsense that the state has corrupted the free market into being.
So, you want to look at things in their natural, original state.
And you also do want to look at things in their sort of corrupted state version.
Now, all of that having been said, I think that there is another strong argument to be made in regards to monogamy, which we'll get to sort of now, and that's the argument around longevity.
So, for our original way of getting together, I guess, and making babies, we had a lifespan not longer than twenty or thirty years.
Now, of course, that we have a lifespan that is far longer, there are certain arguments to be made for men to...
For serial monogamy, right?
So you could, sort of theoretically, if you were Anthony Quinn, say, you could have a sequence of having a family when you were 20, having a family when you were 40, and having a family when you were 60, and that would be sort of three rounds of child-rearing and so on.
And that would be, I think, a fairly good...
You could make an argument for that from a biological standpoint.
And so you could sort of make those kinds of arguments and say that because of human longevity now, you have the potential for men to sort of have more and more kids and so on, because of course a man retains for the most part.
His reproductive vitality until like a day before he dies, and a woman does not.
Now, what this means, and I've sort of talked about this in my novel on the side, but what this means is that one of the things I think that women are sort of sadly discovering as they get older now, these sort of women who grew up in the 70s and 80s,
is that when they were the youngest and the most fertile that they sort of went out with himbos or boy toys or whatever you want to call them but not guys who were extraordinarily high quality and just for sort of funsies and the guys who were high quality who maybe didn't fit the standard model of attractiveness in one form or another not the club boys that those guys were sort of left to one side and what happens is that as a woman ages,
her desirability as a marital partner tends to decline, whereas as a man ages, his desirability as a marital partner tends to increase, and the fundamental reason, of course, is fertility or fecundity for having kids.
And, of course, as a man ages, he becomes sort of more mature.
He, of course, is further established in his career.
He's more solid in his income.
He has lots of attractive qualities that make him a better provider.
You know, I mean, a 40-year-old man is, in general, a better provider than a 20-year-old man, not just sort of from a financial standpoint, but also from an emotional standpoint.
So, that's, I think, something that's important to understand as well, that a woman who's 40 is less of a desirable marriage partner than a woman who is 30.
Not only because she's older, sort of physically, and this occurs for men as well, but it's a little less, it's much less relevant because of the sperm versus egg longevity.
But a woman who is 40 is a tricky marital partner unless somebody doesn't want to have kids, right?
If you don't want to have kids, then none of this stuff particularly matters other than sort of personal preference for age, for maturity versus physical attractiveness.
But a 40-year-old woman, and I remember this, I once dated a woman when I was in my early 30s.
I dated a woman who was in her late 30s.
And it was a significant issue for me to think about that I wanted to have kids And I was like, oh man, time's really ticking away here.
And so we've got to make a decision quick and then there's all this risk and blah, blah, blah.
So it became less of a sort of leisurely courtship and more a sort of race to save the eggs, which didn't end up working out.
So, I think one of the things that women should, you know, if I sort of throw some advice out there to women, don't waste your sexually fertile, sorry, your reproductively fertile years on idiots, right?
I mean, get yourself in a solid relationship with a man who's a good provider.
And don't wait until you're in your sort of mid-30s, this sort of Lisa Loeb syndrome, don't wait until you're in your mid-30s to say, ooh, you know what would be really good would be to actually have a guy around who wants to have kids, because then the men who are available and attractive who are in their 30s are looking for, generally looking for younger women, right?
So they don't have this sort of rush to the save the eggs situation.
So, from that standpoint, I think it's important for women to understand that their marketability goes down considerably, while a man's marketability goes up considerably.
I mean, if you're an attractive, single, successful man in your 30s, you're kind of like the local rock star when it comes to dating.
Although a lot of women still put a lot of...
I mean, this is sort of by the by, and I think this is a shame, because I think a lot of women have been betrayed by feminism in this area.
But, I guess, this is sort of personal, right?
This is not syllogistic. I guess not much of this is, but it's sort of just rambling opinions.
But, in my experience, I kind of had the feeling or the thought or the idea that when I got into my 30s, given that I was sort of a successful, healthy, mature guy, that...
Women would sort of go, oh, okay, well, the tide has sort of turned, right?
So in the same way that when I was a teenager, I was sort of desperately in pursuit of women who had lots of guys to choose from, and therefore I adapted my behavior to not be, you know, demanding and haughty and this kind of stuff.
But I think that women don't necessarily go through this phase, or not many women that I knew, and it's self-selecting, of course, so you can be as skeptical as you like.
But in the way that I had this sort of, I felt sort of lower on the hierarchy of value totem pole when I was pursuing women when I was much younger because they had lots of guys to choose from and they were all very, very hottie-von hotties.
And then I sort of thought that as the tide would reverse itself in my 30s that this would sort of change and that women would be more compromising and more blah blah blah.
I didn't really find that to be the case and there's lots of psychological reasons for that.
I would say that the most fundamental is that women think And this is true of men as well.
I'm just sort of talking about women, but women seem to think that they have value because they're sexually attractive.
Now, of course, a woman doesn't earn a man's sexual attraction, other than maybe by going to aerobics class, but a woman doesn't earn a man's sexual attraction.
It's biologically ingrained in men, and it doesn't give you...
It's like inheriting a bunch of money and thinking you're a great businessman is because men are physically attracted to you, thinking that it gives you some sort of value outside of sort of the mere biological, which is not value at all, but just...
Compulsion, hormonal compulsion.
But I would say that women put a lot of investment into their identity in conjunction with their physical attractiveness and the fact that men want them makes them feel valuable.
And therefore, when they get into their 30s and the situation is reversed, they've already invested too much into the false self of being sexually attractive and can't really reverse it because then they'd have to say, well, I guess I founded my value on something which I did not earn, which was the fact that men are attracted to me.
And again, I'm only speaking from a man's position.
I'm sure that the same thing can occur.
For men as well.
But I don't really have much knowledge of that.
So if you have more, feel free to tell me and I'll be happy to share it with the listeners.
But that's sort of something that I found, that women really had a tough time transitioning when the tide of value, as far as the reproductive market went, as the tide of value changed or turned, that they really had to adjust their behavior to be more accommodating and more pleasant, right? Less demanding and less sort of, you know, bring me flowers, take me for dinner, blah, blah, blah, because the transaction value had sort of changed, and I didn't notice that a lot of women really made that transition.
And we're able to provide a value that was over and above just sexual attraction, right?
So that was sort of my experience.
Again, you may have experienced something different.
We're able to provide a value that was over and above just sexual attraction, right?
So that was sort of my experience.
Again, you may have experienced something different.
Now, a final thing that was mentioned on the board, sorry if I skipped any ideas here, I just went to my book yet, is one gentleman who is talking about marriage says that there is an innate conflict in human beings between the need for acceptance or approval and the need for independence.
And he bases this on some arguments that have been floating around, some of which I've contributed to, around how we as children want to be approved of by our parents, because if we don't get approved of them fundamentally, if we disapprove of them in a fundamental sense, then we're abandoned and we're going to die.
So approval is a... A life mechanism for children, which seems to make sense to me.
It certainly would be biologically and psychologically, I think, the right thing to say.
That this continues as we move forward into our marital life and so on.
And he puts sort of examples forward like, you want the kids to be raised one way, your wife wants them to be raised another way, or vice versa, of course.
Or you want to go to the mountains for vacation and she wants to go to the seaside, and so on.
And... That there is going to be an inevitable series of conflicts within society that when you get involved with other people, that there's going to be an inevitable series of compromises that are deleterious to your true self.
And I asked him if he thought that the true self exists in complete isolation with others, and he did seem to be of the opinion, if I understand his response correctly, That our true self is a pristine thing that exists only in isolation, and whenever you come into contact with other people, the true self gets secluded or obscured or diminished or whittled away or compromised in a negative way in some fashion.
And I would say that that may be, at least in my experience, that may be a false dichotomy.
I have become more myself since I got married.
The true self...
In the right relationship, it's more discoverable.
If you're on a desert island, it's not necessarily your true self, because you don't get any other honest perspectives on yourself.
When you do get other honest perspectives on yourself, then it is entirely probable, in fact, it certainly has been my experience, that you become more yourself.
You learn more about yourself.
You learn more about your true nature.
And of course, a good and positive and productive relationship is a fantastic lab through which to practice assertiveness.
And by practicing assertiveness, you then get to bring it to your external relationships where there's less stability and less commitment to each other.
So, Christina's feedback to me, based on my actions and thoughts and conversations, has resulted in me having a deeper and more accurate understanding of my true self, as the true self is not just something that you can look into the mirror and map through in isolation.
Now, it certainly is true.
That just about in every relationship where we give the power to heal, we give the power to hurt, right?
So when we say to a surgeon, sure, you can operate if he turns out to be some incompetent sociopath, then us being drugged and under the knife can result in extraordinary harm.
So, wherever we have the power to heal, we also have the power to hurt.
And it's certainly true that in just about all modern relationships, including state and private, that the power which we have, which we have involuntarily as children, the power that our parents have over us, which can be used for extraordinary growth and positive reinforcement, is used to damage, to harm, and to control.
And from that standpoint, I would say that our experience has been almost universally that where there is the power to heal, there is the power to hurt.
Public school education is a situation where the power to heal is usually transformed into hurting.
But I don't think that that's true inevitably.
I don't think it's true that of all relationships, that whenever you have a disagreement with people, that is going to require a compromise that is going to obscure or put down Or whittle away at your true self.
I think that in disagreements with people, certainly in disagreements that I've had with Christina, through working it out, I have become more myself.
I've learned more about myself and my blind spots and my weak spots and my irrationalities than I would have if I hadn't had those interactions.
It's sort of roughly akin to the idea that if you go sit cross-legged on a mountaintop for 20 years, you may learn something about yourself, but you're going to remain blind to the world and to other people.
And that since knowledge does involve the world and other people and not just ourselves, those who we interact with Who are honest and virtuous and kind and curious and so on.
Those people that we interact with can give us a far greater knowledge of our true self than we could ever have achieved in an isolated standpoint.
So I think that if you do isolate yourself...
You do not have the same difficulties with compromise that you're going to have if you're in any kind of relationship, by all relationships.
But the important thing is that sometimes the compromises that I want are irrational, and sometimes the compromises that Christina wants are irrational.
The first thing that you need to do is make sure that you base your relationships on a methodology of problem solving that is around rationality and consistency and so on.
And you don't have to be a philosopher to do that.
But if you don't have relationships that are based on rationality and consistency and so on, and evidence, then you're going to have real problems with your partner.
But the problem is then with the partner you've chosen, not with partnership itself.
So, for example, before Christina D. Food, we would go over to her parents' place, and then she would sort of sit there silently for a couple of hours, like talking a little bit, but not very much.
And it would kind of be up to me to keep things going from a social standpoint.
And of course, this I found to be not exactly where I wanted to be and not exactly what I wanted to be doing.
Because as I put it to her, I said, you know, it's kind of like I just get invited over to these Greek people's home and have to sit there for a couple of hours.
And of course, I barely know them and this, that and the other.
And so, for you to say, we have to go and see, you know, with, not have to, but, you know, I want to go and see my parents and then to sit there and not talk and let me do all the work for a couple of hours is not rational, right?
Because I want to spend time with you.
I don't want to spend time with your parents.
And if when I spend time with your parents, you're not invested in talking, if you sort of, if you invite me over to your parents' house and then vanish...
Then I am spending time with your parents, which is not what I'm really into.
Like, I'm not going to meet these Greek people at a store and say, hey, let me come over every month a couple of times for lunch or whatever.
And so, given that I don't really care about seeing your parents and I just enjoy spending time with you, if you invite me over to your parents and then you emotionally, psychologically vanish from the equation, then I don't want to go and see your parents, right?
I mean, that's a negative for me.
Now, she was at least, of course, able, because she's a very rational and kind woman, she was at least able to recognize that that is sort of a paradox, and to understand from a base calculation standpoint, that's not something that's going to be of interest to me.
And so this was the process that we began working through in terms of getting her a little bit more clear on her family issues.
Now, if she just said, sucks, too bad, we go see my parents, I don't care if you like it or not, I'm going to dump on you.
If you don't come and I'm not going to hold it at all, required that I be emotionally present.
And besides, I am emotionally present.
And besides, you're bald.
And so, shut up.
I mean, of course, then you're going to end up in a situation where your compromises are going to be, well, I would say catastrophic from that standpoint.
And of course, that's going to you.
You're going to have kids with someone like that.
I mean, that's a bit of a parody, but that occurs to some degree with a lot of people.
You're going to have kids with that person, and then your kids are going to end up with this crushing sense of obligation, and then you're going to try and teach your kids about freedom, and then shuffle off like this deadhead zombie to see your wife's parents, which you dislike, and your kids are going to go and say, well, you don't seem to like it, and you're teaching me about freedom.
Why do you do this thing if you don't think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?
And then you say, well, there are no innate values in relationships that everything has to be earned.
And then you say, well, why do you go to mom's parents and, you know, you seem to disagree with mom a lot and blah, blah, blah, right?
So then your whole life is messed up.
And I totally agree that the risk of a negative reaction or a negative, horrible, compromised, hypocritical life is pretty high when it comes to understanding...
The values of your partner, right?
So if you end up with a partner and you don't have a lot of values that you share with them, then yeah, absolutely, you're going to end up with this horrible, empty, weird, compromised, bad life.
And I've got no problem with that.
That seems perfectly valid.
But I don't think that you want to end up in this situation where you equate that with...
All the possibilities of relationships.
So to take sort of one final metaphor in this area, in the Middle Ages, like when you look at theologians arguing with each other, sort of the scholastics of the Middle Ages, or even if you look at what's going on in the Muslim versus Christian world and so on, then you would say that all disagreements between people end in violence or emotional tension or hostility or indifference or minimization of the conflict or of the other person or whatever.
Then you're going to say that all human disagreements, blah, blah, blah.
However, if you then compare that to what goes on in the scientific community, and yes, I know that it's true to some degree there's a lot of prejudice in science, and I think it was, I can't remember who, Popper, I think, Karl Popper, who said that science advances one funeral at a time, right?
They have to wait for the old people to die off before you can get new and better ideas coming in.
But it certainly is the case that science has a methodology of dispute resolution that's diametrically opposed to what goes on in the theological or political worlds, right?
It's not win-lose, it's sort of win-win in that whoever's proven wrong then gets better knowledge and so on, whereas in the political world, if I lose, you get control of all of the police and military, and if I win, you lose control of all of that.
If I win, I get rich.
And if you lose, I take you through taxation for everything you've got.
And the same thing, of course, is true in the theological world.
So if you base your model of human relationships on politics or theology, then you would definitely say that all interactions are problematic and result in tension or violence of some kind, that compromises are always negative.
But if you then were to compare that with the free market or science, you would say that human interactions can be positive and arbitrated by third parties like reality and experimentation or price or value or voluntary trade and so on, that win-win negotiations are very possible.
Now, in most human relationships, we're in the political-slash-theological realm, and that's sort of a bad thing overall, and that's not going to be very helpful for very many people.
But if you look at the other kinds of relationships that are available to people, then I think we can say that we want to make sure we differentiate between the irrational, subjective, basically forced willpower dominant kind of relationships, and those relationships which are more voluntary and basically forced willpower dominant kind of relationships, and those relationships which are more voluntary and based on shared values, wherein these kinds of conflicts, which result in inevitable compromises that are to the detriment of the individual true self,
So I hope that that's somewhat helpful.
It certainly has been based on my experience of my marriage that there is no conflict between intimacy and authenticity.
In fact, the intimacy that I have with my wife fully promotes and expands upon the authenticity that I'm capable of.
So I hope that that helps.
I thank you so much for listening as always.
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