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Oct. 31, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:50
483 Saving Souls From Bears

It's my callin' to stop the maulin' ;)

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Good morning, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. Hey, it's the 31st.
Happy Halloween to you.
Let's do the Monster Mash.
I'm going to read two quick posts this morning before we start with a drive, because I'm going to put forward one of my irritating theses.
thesis, where I claim to know people better than they know themselves based on a couple of pieces of text.
So let's take a swing and see if we connect.
So the first one is from a gentleman I absolutely guarantee you is either British or of British heritage.
Listening to Greg and Nathan on the Sunday chat and taking in a number of their posts and others on the topic of women, marriage, and love, I can only think, there but for the grace of a lot of random shite go I.
If Steph had started his podcast, Cable Access Show, 15 years ago, it's possible I was ready then.
Right around the time I was first regularly around women, I wouldn't have rationally reasoned myself.
in quotes, out of the most important person in my life.
Sorry, Steph. If my future wife hadn't decided to accost the dork who just couldn't get up the nerve to make a move, well, I'd probably be unhappy about the whole women love marriage topic, so please understand I'm not belittling your predicament.
Okay, we'll get back to that.
I get the feeling that you're looking for someone to go down this journey to Libertopia with you, but you're expecting them all to be as far down the road as you are.
Sadly, the demographics are just not in your favor.
Look at Steph's tension, quote, due to the slow growth of libertarians, and he gets to count boys.
And in the other factors, age, preference, etc., and you're simply giving yourself asymptotically zero chance.
In many ways, you sound like 30-something women, because, of course, that's not belittling.
With the clocks ticking and that, quote, I want a husband and a baby in 12 months approach to partner selection, even a man who has similar goals or, say, a slightly different timeline is turned off by that.
You understand what you want, and you know it's limited, and you know you can't force someone to become it.
So you're round-filling all applicants before you get to know them.
The people who might be on the same road can't tell you for certain that they are, and you can't abide that.
So to further limit your odds, you're even knocking out those who have the potential to join you, if only on a slightly modified timeline.
To wrap this into the tension topic, you're pulling way too hard on that string.
So I do understand you're in a difficult position, one that is frankly rather new.
It's easy for me to say relax or ease the standards or whatever, but it's an admittedly fine line you're walking, one that I'm not sure a lot of men have traversed.
You can't go back and forget the fruits of a rational philosophy, yet you need to just let yourself get to know some women in a casual, non-directed manner.
I think it can be done, but I don't envy you the task, so that's sort of number one.
Now, the second post is from a fine gentleman.
This is no negativity.
I mean, in either of these, I'll sort of tell you what I'm going to talk about about these in a moment.
But this gentleman wrote a post, and he said this.
He said, this is regards to political topic.
He said, if you say government A doesn't work, you are really saying that the way that individuals in that society are interacting is lacking.
In some way. There are many threads in this forum that address the real debate.
This thread's counter-arguments all focus on government versus free market society.
The rules defining a free market are all agreed-upon interactions at some level, just as government is.
Don't debate that a government is using guns to force others when it is really individuals with guns.
Instead, show how the other way will have less guns forcing others, or how those guns could force others in a more beneficial way.
I have read some of your articles and seen some of your podcasts, Def, and you take this approach a lot, and it works well.
This is the approach I am advocating.
Now, one of the ways that you can tell that somebody is a little bit nervous about the position they're putting forward is because they say that you already agree with them, right?
That's a little clue right there.
And I respect these gentlemen.
I respect both these gentlemen. I certainly appreciate their posting.
You know, I really am always impressed with the high quality of writing on the post.
It's fantastic. Now, I wrote back to this gentleman, this can be a useful thing for you to do before we get back to the first gentleman, and to recognize that, you know, government is coercion, as I sort of pointed out.
So when he talks about the voluntarism and that government is just another form of voluntarism that just doesn't work as well as we'd like and we need to fix it or vote or whatever, which is not an uncommon opinion, of course, in society...
Then it does become a little bit confusing for me.
Government is defined as force, as violence, and so if you have a superset of concepts, then you should be able to substitute a smaller set, right?
So if you say, a forest is composed of trees, then you should also be logically able to say, a forest is composed of evergreens, or deciduous trees, or elms, or whatever.
So, in this case, rape is a subset of violence, right?
So the government is violence, and rape is a subset of violence, and therefore you should be able to substitute terms that are used with government to also subsume and include words like rape.
And so I rewrote his post, just sort of to say, here's where I get a little bit confused.
Perhaps you can help me. I rewrote his post, and I said in the following way.
I didn't change anything. I simply substituted the word rape for government.
And this is how the post reads, and see if you can just sort of see the difference.
And this can be a useful, though, of course, volatile approach, if you do it nicely, right?
If you say that rape doesn't work, you are really saying that the way that individuals in society are interacting is lacking in some way.
There are many threads in this forum that address the real debate.
This thread's Counter-arguments all focus on rape versus dating.
The rules defining dating are all agreed-upon interactions at some level, just as rapists.
Don't debate that a group of rapists is forcing others when really it's individual rapists.
Instead, show how the other way will have less rapists forcing others or how those rapists could force others in a more beneficial way.
And I know that this sounds a little bit perhaps hyperbolic or supercilious, but I would suggest that it is quite a valid approach, right?
If you are talking to somebody about government, and I'm not saying that this is the easiest sort of verbal thing to do, but if they're logical, I mean, if they claim that they're logical, then it should be entirely fair and valid to substitute the word rape or beatings or kidnapping Or shooting or murder or whatever.
Because the government is violence, as we all know.
And thus it should be entirely valid to substitute alternative terms of force for the central force.
The term of force which is obscured by the term government.
So you should be able to drop any violent term that you want into the phraseology that somebody's putting together around government and you should logically be able to have the sentence be as morally pleasing as it would be in any other context.
If somebody tells the truth about a major thing, like if you say somebody is always honest, somebody always tells the truth, then it's perfectly valid to say that if they tell the truth about a major thing, then you can have them tell the truth about a minor thing, or you could substitute the term truth, you could say veracity or honesty or whatever it is that you would come up with.
It should be, and logically is, perfectly valid to include a minor subset in the lexical set of a major conceptual group.
Sorry, this is a horribly technical way of talking.
Let me try that again. If I say is big, should be small too, no problem.
So that's just a way of approaching it.
It does sort of bring out the problems involved in talking about things like the state and so on.
It does bring out all of these sorts of issues.
In a very concrete, I think, and positive way that really helps people to understand what's going on in their sort of thinking, in their political approach to philosophy.
Because people really love to use the term government and the social good and communal decision-making and unanimity and democracy, all these kinds of things.
People love to talk about that stuff.
Because that's a way of pretending that the violence that we know is occurring in a state situation, it's a way of pretending that it isn't occurring.
And if there is one thing that's really true about human beings who are up to no good, human beings who are doing nefarious things with language, they sure do love the euphemisms.
They sure do love that kind of stuff.
So I just sort of wanted to point out that it can be, you know, you have to do it very nicely, right?
I would suggest.
You can do it however you want.
But I think if you're going to use the more powerful debating technique that you use, the more nicely you have to use it.
In my humble opinion, I would really suggest that you do that.
So my approach is like, I'm confused because if we accept that the government is forced, then if I substitute terms that are subsumed under the conceptual aggregate of force, like rape or murder or whatever, then I don't, like, I'm having trouble understanding what it is that you're saying.
And it's just a way of getting people out of the soupy fog of euphemisms, right?
And rape, while of course perhaps one of the most violent terms, because murder is something that is horrible, but something that is a little bit more abstract to a lot of people than rape, which is sadly all too common, especially among children.
But it's just a way of taking the dreaminess, the platonic abstractions out of The whole situation and actually dealing with things as they are.
And rape is one of the ones that is particularly true and valid, I think, to talk about in terms of the state because, of course, the state has an enormous amount to do with rape, right?
I mean, the state is perpetually about rape, but the state is only tangentially about murder, right?
Because the The state doesn't have to be at war to rape, right?
The rape is a constant occurrence in the torture chambers known as state prisons, right?
Rape is simply rape and torture, and not just from prisoner to prisoner, but from guard to prisoner, is a clear and constant danger and situation, right?
The state is about getting millions of people raped on a regular basis, and that's part of the whole torture.
And it's so funny to me. I mean, funny in the way that, you know, I don't know, hell could be funny.
But it's so funny to me to think that We have all of these hearts aflutter about whether or not torture is acceptable or not acceptable in the American debate about torture and who defines it and do we do the Geneva Convention and this, that and the other. It's to me very funny that everybody is talking about whether or not torture is a valid device.
I mean, as if this kind of stuff has not been going on in prisons around the world, but in American prisons, I think Amnesty's even descended to talk about how wretched the conditions are in American prisons.
To me, it's just funny that everybody's talking about it like it's some new foreign phenomenon.
Like, oh my god, they're torturing people at Abu Ghraib!
They're flying people around to torture them in Saudi Arabia and Sudan and so on.
And it's all pure nonsense.
I mean, the rapes that we're so shocked about occurring and the tortures that we're so shocked about occurring in foreign countries are perpetually and regularly occurring.
In U.S. and Western prisons, and you don't have to be unjustly thrown into a Turkish prison to feel the sweaty love of your cellmate, right?
It is simply a...
And of course, it's used, the rapists, the male rapists who are in prison, and the female rapists too, I don't know much about that side.
But the male rapists who are in prison are used by the gods to threaten other prisoners, right?
So if you don't pay the gods off, they'll put you in with Uncle Spanky Fingers as your cellmate, and that's the punishment that you get for not conforming to the gods' behavior.
So rape and the threat of rape and beatings and so on, the gods are paid by prisoners to leave them alone with other prisoners so that they can have their way with them or stick a shiv up their innards or whatever.
So the idea that the government is somehow not associated with rape and with torture is a dream.
That's a dream, right? I mean, this is what you get when you just watch government ads and hear that tinkly piano music and see the concerned faces of actors they've hired to play concerned bureaucrats and doctors and nurses and so on.
I mean, that's not anything to do with reality.
It's trying to learn about Nazism by watching Hitler's speeches, right?
Not knowing the language. Wow, that's a passionate guy!
So I think that that can be a very useful approach.
And just in general, I mean, I'll get to this other British gentleman in just a moment.
But in general, I would say that there can be a productive approach that I believe in very strongly.
It's just my opinion, right?
It'll be a while until we get back to a syllogistic podcast.
But it is my opinion that when people post on the board or when people email to me, and certainly when they reference what it is that I'm thinking, I know that this sounds totally horrible, and I apologize for any aesthetic wraparound that may be unpleasant, but I view their posts as a cry to help.
What I view is that somebody is wrestling with a shark or a bear or something like that, and the shark or the bear is a kind of false self-illusion.
The true self is provoking the false self to speak to me or to others.
Let's talk about to me for the moment.
And the reason that the true self is provoking the false self to talk to me is because the true self needs an ally to be free.
So that, I think, is a very, very important thing.
What happens is the true self gains a momentary respite from the control and power of the false self, of conformity, which we're all subject to.
And the reason that people post in overtly or passive-aggressive ways, as these two examples are, I think, very strong examples of passive aggression, right?
Because if this person is saying that the person who talks about the government being...
You know, just it's a minor social dysfunction and so on, and it's just people not relating to each other in ways that we would prefer and so on.
And I'm not quite reading it correctly.
Let me just grab it here. Fortunately, traffic's low, and you don't have to worry about watching me drive while reading, where he says, The way that some individuals in that society are interacting is lacking in some way.
And then he says that that's my argument, right?
He's saying that my argument is that when people use violence, force, torture and rape to control and enslave other people, that they're just...
The way that they're interacting is lacking in some way.
Like, that's an opinion, but then he says that it's my opinion, which obviously is a fairly passive-aggressive thing to do, right?
To say that, Steph, you just view, you know, rape and torture and murder and war as minor dysfunctions in ways that people are interacting.
That's a pretty aggressive approach to take to a philosopher, right?
It's passive-aggressive, I got it.
But what I see, and rightly or wrongly, I see that deep down this person is struggling with a bear.
Right? Now, they have a gun, but they can't get the gun at the bear because the bear is all over them and is chewing at them and they're just, you know, they can't get the holster open and so on.
And I wander upon the scene and they say to the bear, look, a tasty forehead for you to nibble on.
It'll be like a big pink shiny apple.
Go for it. And the bear then looks up and snarls and jumps at me, and then they pull out the gun and they shoot the bear.
That's sort of the scenario that occurs for me when people post on the board.
And some people turn the bear on me and then join the bear in attacking me.
So we've had those situations before as well.
But for the most part, I would say that people post They're musings on the board with a fairly aggressive standpoint, often clouted in a kind of, you know, conciliatory and pleasant and I want to help kind of way.
And the reason that they're doing it is that they themselves need to see their own aggression, but they can't, right?
Because, you know, they haven't been taught how to be assertive, as I wasn't, as, you know, we all have to kind of learn and struggle to develop this kind of knowledge.
And so people will post stuff and say, well, Steph, you know, you just view rape as a minor dysfunction.
That's the sort of subtext. You know, I'm making this argument that violence is just a minor lack of social interaction polish, and that's your opinion too, Steph.
Well, the tendency there would be, you know, hey, don't tell me what my opinion is, and by the way, you're advocating rape, right?
But that wouldn't help the guy. Because what's happened is, it's like if you take the bear metaphor, he's struggling with this giant Kodiak grizzly bear that's chewing at him, and he then says, hey look, a big tasty shiny apple forehead, go chew on that nut for a while.
And the bear lets up and leaps at me, and then both I and the bear end up attacking him back.
I mean, how benevolent and nice and helpful would that be?
And to what degree could I say that I was really interested in the truth if I got offended at somebody turning their bear on me, so to speak?
So I would just sort of put it out there that when people are aggressive towards you, and it's something that's very easy to mistake, right?
We have aggression.
It's unmanaged within our personalities because most of us, a lot of us raised with our fathers, a lot of us raised with bad role models, bad parenting, bad teaching, bad philosophical explanations in terms of mystical nonsense and religion.
So we're really not taught how to handle assertiveness, and so what happens is we're all sitting here in a big amphitheater with a bunch of bears running around, huddling and hoping and occasionally joining the bears and occasionally fighting them back, but we haven't really done a lot positively to manage our...
Aggression. So, of course, when aggression is unmanaged in society, people tend to get beaten down, right?
So when people view children as hyper-aggressive and so on, then their tendency, and it's a natural human tendency, though, of course, completely the wrong one, just as it is a natural human tendency to look at the world and say it's round.
It's just completely wrong.
But it's a natural human tendency that when your child shows signs of aggression, that you simply clamp down on that child, right?
And so that usually is not a very good thing, right?
So again, to stretch the bear metaphor beyond all sense possibly, what you do is you say, hey, this kid's got a bear cub that's kind of messy and molly.
So what we're going to do is we're going to lock the kid and the bear cub up in a very, very small room and feed them through bars, right?
Because they're sort of crazy, out-of-control bear children or whatever.
And that doesn't really help, right?
Because then the bear grows and the child grows and they're uncomfortable and they're pressed up against each other and they've not integrated and so on.
That's not really a very good approach, but it is the normal instinctual thing that we want to do.
I'm not suggesting this would be a valid approach, and I'm sort of of two minds about this, but I'll certainly tell you a story that reminds me of this in some manner, that there was this guy...
Who was taking Taekwondo and he was a black belt or whatever it is that makes you hyper-advanced.
You know, he could do matrix moves, he could levitate, he could turn back time.
He was highly advanced in this art of attack and self-defense or whatever the hell it is.
And he's on a subway and there's this big drunken guy who comes lurching into the subway.
Who is insulting the women, who is high on something or other, who is abusive.
And so what he does is he says, finally, all of my training is going to come to the fore and I am going to beat down this crazy, aggressive, big guy.
And finally, I have a chance to use all of my martial arts skills to their full effect and so on and so on and so on.
And so his blood starts pumping, and his hands start sweating, and he loosens his tie, and he puts down his briefcase, and he starts stepping forward.
And then he notices, at the far end of the subway, his teacher, who is this sort of post-Miyago kind of fellow, Miyagi fellow, who is about 70, who teaches Taekwondo and is obviously an expert in martial arts.
And he goes up.
His teacher makes it to this big drunken oaf first and says, Oh, my friend, you seem to be very upset.
What is the matter?
And the guy's pretty aggressive, but this teacher is patient and keeps asking him questions.
And then eventually the guy just breaks down and it turns out that he's sobbing and his wife left him.
And he lost his job and he doesn't know what he's going to do and he can't see his kids and so on, right?
So this is how the situation is diffused.
Now, I'm not saying that that is a valid approach at all times, but it's certainly something worth pondering, since I have taken no martial arts, and unless somebody wants to, I don't know, bench press something with me, I'm not going to have much use.
I've never been in any kind of physical fight in my life, so I would be of no use, but I think that it is important and interesting To imagine that when people are aggressive against you, that there's a good soul trapped underneath a kind of predator.
And they're turning that predator on you.
And the reason that they're turning that predator on you is because they can't see it.
They've lived with this bear for so long that they don't see it anymore.
They just sort of notice that, I don't know, the bark is missing from trees and a few people get mauled around them from time to time, but they think that that's just a hefty wind or a buzzard or a cyclone or something like that.
So the reason that people get aggressive towards you is because they can't see their own hostility.
They can't see their own bear.
And so, if you get angry at the bear back, they still don't see the bear.
Because the bear, of course, is provoked from aggression to begin with.
The reason that we have aggression within our systems is not because we are innately aggressive as a species, but rather because we were aggressed against when we were children.
So, we all start off pure and gentle.
And then we are, I mean, outside of, you know, base neurological disorders, we all start out with the potential for kindness and gentleness, let's say, if you don't like the sort of angelic child metaphor to begin with.
We start out with that potential.
And if we're treated with love and respect and concern and with some discipline, of course, as well, then we grow into kind and loving, compassionate and strong and wise and brave people.
But people end up with aggression because they've been aggressed against, right?
So if you've ever woken somebody who is in the throes of a horrible nightmare...
So somebody is tossing and turning and crying out in their sleep and you wake them, you know, it's not that surprising if they pop you one, right?
Because they're currently undergoing extraordinarily violent stimuli and it's easy for them to integrate what you do into their dream, into their violent dream, right?
And for most people, their life is little more than a violent dream.
And so when you try to wake them, it's not that unlikely or not that impossible that they're going to pop you one.
But to look upon that as an act of premeditated aggression and to get angry back in return would be highly irrational and would indicate problems with aggression on your side.
That would sort of be logical.
If you wake somebody who's having a bad dream, And their flailing hands hit your cheek, and then you get really angry and clock them on, it could be said that you are the one who has the real problem with aggression, not the person who you're trying to wake from their dream.
And so when people who have had the normal kinds of brutal and repressed histories that we all have, or almost all of us have, Then they're living in a violent dream, and they have no capacity to manage aggression because they've been over-provoked and over-controlled, right? So that's the general way that you make somebody dysfunctional, right?
You continually provoke them, and then you continually repress them, right?
So this is the whole goal of passive aggression, and mothers are more masters of this than fathers.
You know what happens is You just provoke someone and provoke someone and provoke someone, and then when the child, you provoke your child, and then when your child gets angry, you act shocked and horrified and say, well, you're obviously just a bad kid, or, you know, I don't know what's making you so angry, you know, all these kinds of things.
Like, you're poking a dog gently with a sharp stick until it gets really angry, it bites at you, and then you say, oh my god, it's got rabies, let's get it some rabies shots, right?
I mean, well, obviously this is just sadism and so on, right?
But this is what we call...
So, I would sort of suggest that you look upon philosophical discourse with people who are being aggressive, either passive or overtly, as a form of waking them up from a violent dream, which is what most people are living in their life and so on.
Now, there is, of course, no reason for infinite patience, and that would be as irrational as instant retaliation to somebody who hit you while you were waking them from a violent dream.
There's also no reason for infinite patience, right?
So the way that you know whether somebody has responsibility for their aggression or is taking responsibility for their aggression or not is the following.
So you try to wake somebody from their violent dream and, you know, they hit you a glancing blow or even a solid blow.
They make your eyes water and so on.
They make your nose sting. And you still wrestle to try and wake them up, right?
And then they're awake.
They're sitting on the edge of the bed.
They're rubbing their eyes. They're fully awake.
They say, man, what a dream that was.
And then they reach over and they punch you in the stomach, right?
Well, that's where your level of compassion...
Can take just a little bit of a dip.
There was a gentleman named Thorfinn who was debating on the boards and putting a valiant effort into defending his own choices to marry into a Christian family by getting mad at atheists for disliking the threat of murder.
And, you know, I certainly started off quite gentle and was asking him questions, and, you know, he wouldn't answer them, but just go on other rampages about how crazy we all were.
And then, you know, you can get sort of, well, I just don't talk to people like that, right?
It's like, if I'm waking somebody, if somebody's on a train, right?
And let's say I don't know them, and I'm waking them, and they sort of hit me, and then after they're awoken...
They hit me again that I'm just going to change compartments, right?
I'm not going to do anything else.
I just thought, okay, good luck with all that.
You know, you are now no longer...
I mean, if you go to a doctor...
Okay, one more metaphor.
Just one. I seem to be on a roll this morning.
They're not working too badly. And if you go to a doctor and the doctor says, you know, you need to, in order to avoid diabetes, you need to eat less and exercise, and you eat more and exercise less, and then you end up getting diabetes, and the doctor says, well, now you need to take your insulin shots, and then you don't take your insulin shots.
Like, at some point, the doctor's just going to say, you know, I'm not going to treat you because it's just a waste of time.
Like, it's me trying, it's like me trying to do psychology to a television set.
You're not listening to anything that I say, and you're simply continuing on, but you are wasting my time.
And time, of course, is the most finite resource for all of us.
I could be spending this time helping people who really do want to get better instead of talking at you, who simply ignores everything I say and, in fact, do sort of the opposite.
Coffee break. Ooh, that's good stuff.
Now, as to the first letter that I read, to me this is very, very fascinating.
And this is a peculiarly British disease, and I have some experience of this, of course, having grown up in England.
There is a very, very concentrated combination.
It could be other than Britain, but I simply talk about this in terms of my sensitivity to it from England.
And of course, I went through both sides of this equation, right?
So I was in boarding school, which was very upper crust, and then I was in public school, which was very lower crust.
And so I really did traverse the whole vertical core sample strata.
Of British society, so I have a sort of view from the top and a view from the bottom, so maybe that's what gave me some additional smacks of compassion.
But one thing that is very common in British society is self-deprecation followed by insults, self-deprecation followed by the deprecation of others.
And the helping hand that is actually a slap in the face, right?
That is very common. This is a very passive-aggressive society.
England, partly due to the fact that the upper classes hire sort of cold, Thatcher-ish kind of nannies, and also because...
So many British men got killed in wars in the 20th century.
England is essentially a matriarchal society, and you can see that very, very commonly in the same way that African Americans within or blacks within America are, to a large degree, a matriarchal society.
And you can see all of that in the instability of male acting out in hostility and self-deprecation and so on.
Matriarchal societies breed a lot of violence, and that is something that We don't hear a lot about from our good friends the feminists, but empirically there's simply no question about that.
The matriarchal societies, with the exception of Judaism, I do believe, and I'm sort of not going to even guess what the reasons are for that and make anything up.
I'll make something up later. How's that?
But by and large, matriarchal societies produce a fair amount of violence or a fair amount of either abuse of others or self-abuse, right?
So British men drink to extraordinary lengths, drink to just savage amounts of excess that I can barely even imagine.
I'm certainly no drinker myself.
I'm like a glass of wine a month maybe, but British men, they drink savagely.
It's called ladism.
They're hooligans, a good number of them, and it's a very matriarchal society, and...
So what happens is that men come up with aggression that would more properly, British men have an aggression that is more properly styled among women, right?
So in a conversation that I had with our good friend Michael from, oh, I wonder if me seeing our good friend when they may or may not be is feminine on my part.
Who knows? Anyway. Move on!
Ooh, self-examination question.
Drop that hot potato. Move, move, move.
It's time to bug out.
But let's try and keep the voices to a minimum, shall we?
Must stay on target.
Michael was talking to me after a show a couple of weeks ago, and he said, oh, you're not really an anarchist.
It's just a pose, right?
I mean, I went to your website.
You have a picture there.
You look like a normal businessman.
You're not an anarchist.
It's just a sort of pretension.
It's just a sort of pose. And I said, well, that's fascinating.
I said, I certainly would be interested to hear your theories about my psychology and why it is that I have a position that's anti-violence and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, oh, you know, this violence, you just exaggerated.
It's exciting. It's cool.
It's entertainment. It's thrilling and all of this kind of stuff, right?
And that, of course, is a ridiculous and frankly quite funny argument, especially from somebody who's a scientist, right?
Because, I mean, if somebody puts forward a theory, you know, like, I don't know, Newton's theory of gravitation, you don't say, well, Newton, you're only obsessed with gravity because you're overweight and you want to, you know, redefine things to make you appear lighter.
I mean, wouldn't that be a completely ridiculous response to have to a recent argument that was put forward in a public sphere?
Would be to simply start psychologizing about the motives behind why the person is putting forward a particular idea.
I do view that as a kind of femininity, but that may be incorrect on my part.
That's just sort of my gut sense about it.
So, the letter that the gentleman wrote, when he hears some genuine challenges from people who want...
To love, right? Who want to love.
I mean, what we were talking about on Sunday was the libertarian love.
And this doesn't mean, of course, that you have to fall in love with someone or the person that you fall in love with must be a philosopher.
Like, we can only love virtue.
But virtue can exist without philosophy, because if it couldn't, then there'd be no hope for the race.
The number of people who are philosophers are very few, but the number of people in society are very large.
So there would be no such thing as medicine if you had to be a doctor in order to be healthy, and it could not be communicated to others, the results of experimentation, thought, reasoning, empiricism, and so on.
There would be no such thing as science if you had to be a scientist or a computer engineer to work a computer.
There would be no such thing as medicine if you had to be a doctor in order to be healthy or a nutritionist in order to eat well.
It's nonsense, right? The whole point of these specialties is to transmit the information in more consumable formats so that people don't have to see the raw data, only the logical conclusions, and that they can organize their lives thereby, right?
So you have explorers who go out and map a continent, and then you have a map so that people can drive around in it after the interstate...
Interstate highways have been put in.
But you don't have to be...
If you want to go to San Francisco and you live in Boston, you don't have to set off on foot blindfolded with an Indian guide like Lewis and Clark and find your way across the continent.
You simply go, oh, this has been mapped before and this is where I need to go.
You don't need to be a cartographer to use a highway.
So when...
People are talking about their challenges in finding a love relationship.
They're not talking about, I can't find a libertarian philosopher with which to bed and with which to make the beast with two backs.
And that's, of course, looking for a libertarian philosopher that's a similar age and who finds you attractive and is of the gender that you prefer.
All of that would be tiny, tiny chances, and I've got that, right?
And, of course, a lot of philosophers make this mistake, too, right?
Like Schopenhauer and Spencer and Plato, and, well, I guess not Plato was gay, but a lot of them don't get married, right?
They view women as, I don't know, a vague threat or something like that, but...
But you don't need to find a philosopher in order to find love, but you do need to find virtue, right?
So if this guy is saying, and this is the argument that is constantly made to people who say, well, I refuse to have sort of fake relationships, right?
I refuse to have relationships with somebody who's not a good person.
Or at least who is not striving for goodness, even if they don't know all of the philosophical ramifications and requirements, that they're interested in goodness and strive for goodness and accept that goodness is a value.
Accept that goodness is a value and that there's some sensible, common sense way to approach virtue.
And basically what we're saying is, of course, we're just asking for people to live by what their virtues already are.
Libertarianism is not about inventing virtue any more than science is about inventing gravity.
It's just about systematizing and extending the logical properties of virtue.
Libertarianism is not about inventing virtue.
That's sort of a basic premise that I've always held.
I've talked about this before.
Because you don't argue with somebody who's a sociopathic murderer.
You don't argue ethics with that.
You argue ethics with somebody who's willing to debate.
And you argue ethics with somebody who's not currently on the run for first-degree murder or something like that.
You may argue philosophy with somebody who is a drug dealer because they're not evil or anything like that.
But only people you argue with are with people who are willing to use peaceful reason to resolve disputes.
You don't argue with people who've got the laser beam on your forehead.
So the people that you're debating with, and this is the basis of argumentation ethics, and Hans Hoppe has talked a lot about this, but you only argue with people who are willing to accept that rational debate is the best way of solving problems rather than pulling guns out and pointing them at people and threatening to pull the trigger.
And so because you're only going to be willing to debate with people who accept the peaceful resolution of disputes as the ideal model, then everyone you're debating with is already an anarchist, right?
They just don't know it. I mean, this is a very fundamental thing to understand.
Everyone you're debating with is already an anarchist.
They just don't know it. So with the guy who was talking about the government as a suboptimal interaction paradigm or whatever...
It's like, well, would you accept that rape is a suboptimal interaction paradigm?
It's like, well, no, of course not.
It's like, well, then you don't believe that with the government either, since the government is even worse than rape, right?
I mean, an individual rapist is evil enough, but you give that person a huge military budget and a whole Middle Eastern country to invade, say, and two million people in kidnapped rape room prisons, then that person is going to be a whole lot worse, right?
I mean, and so if he doesn't like it with rape, he's not going to like it with the government.
And so he already is an anarchist, right?
He just doesn't know it yet. He's lost in language, right?
The bear of dissociation and propaganda and foggy obscurantism has his head in its jaws and is masticating with great vigor, which is not what you think or my primary teenage activity.
Everybody sort of already agrees with you.
They just don't know it, right?
And... So I would say that it's sort of very important to understand that when people say, I'm having trouble finding a virtuous woman, they don't mean, you know, where is the libertarian combination of Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and George Eliot, who was a woman, just for those of you who are confused.
The ultimate moral high priestess of rationality.
Well, of course, that would be a silly thing to look for.
But let's have a look at...
And I did sort of post this back, so this isn't sort of coming out of left field.
And, you know, I appreciate this post.
I just think it's an important way to look at how people are asking for your help.
So what this person is saying is that I'm lucky.
And here's my advice to you people.
So this guy obviously says, you know, I was a dork.
I didn't have the courage to approach a woman.
But my wife took pity on me and approached me.
And here you can see the matriarchism.
Within British society, right?
That I'm just lucky to have such a great woman around me and women are, you know, considered to be these goddesses that you have to continually praise and sort of demote yourself to a species of vermin scarcely above, you know, toilet bacteria in order to be worthy of them and she's my better half and how did I get so lucky and why does she put up with me and blah blah blah.
This is absolutely common within England and it's very common within Within matriarchal societies.
And it is a form of sub sublimated hostility towards women.
To put women on a pedestal is a form of sublimated hostility because it makes their world unreal.
It pumps up their ego to unsustainable levels.
It destabilizes them.
It doesn't check them. It spoils them.
To spoil a child is sublimated hostility towards that child.
Not impose any reciprocal rules or standards to let the child eat whatever he wants and so the kid gets fat and is unhealthy and so on.
It's a form of assault upon that child.
It's a form of abuse. So to be lazy and to let people get away with anything and not to rationally talk about standards that you both adhere to that are reciprocal, but simply to praise people to the skies is a real form of hostility.
And putting women on a pedestal is real hostility towards women.
And it's a little bit more subtle than most of the forms of hostility towards women, but it sure as heck.
It does create a vain and inconsequential and fundamentally broken and hyperinflated femininity, which is very, very hostile.
And you see this is what patriarchs do, or sort of, I guess, thwarted patriarchs.
To me, the ideal combination is matriarchy and patriarchy together, but when you have a very strong matriarchy that breaks men, which is the British system, I mean, geez, look who's at the center of it, the queen, right?
And look at Charles, right?
Poor... Broken, emasculated bastard.
I mean, he might as well be a eunuch.
But old no-balls, jug-ears.
But when you have men who are raised by women, and you can see this, there's a British show, How Clean Is Your House?, or whatever it is, where these two, you know, funny but ball-busting and dominant women come in, and one of them more so than the other.
I mean, this is a British show, because this is how men are just sort of vaguely incompetent and idiots, and women sort of roll their eyes and put up with them, because they're like little puppies.
They pee everywhere, but they're cute.
And sweet and so on.
So this gentleman is saying, well, I was a total dork and a real loser, but my wife took pity on me and approached me.
My former, who became my wife, right?
And so obviously this guy had very little value, very little self-esteem.
Because if you say, I mean, there's nothing wrong with, and I make jokes, self-deprecating jokes and so on, but fundamentally, if you say, my wife took pity on me and approached me and I was a total dork, then you're insulting your wife enormously, right?
I mean, obviously you're insulting yourself, but, you know, you're really insulting your wife because you're saying that my wife is such a pathetic human being.
And I'm not saying this is true or this guy actually believes it.
I'm just saying this is what comes across in the post.
But you're saying my wife is so pathetic that she could not find a man she respected, so instead she took pity on a dork who was not worthy of anybody's respect.
And I'm not making anything up. This is just what the guy is saying openly in his letter.
So my wife took pity on me.
I was a total idiot, and that's how we ended up getting married.
I mean, that's pretty pitiful, right?
I mean, why wouldn't she go for somebody who was strong and noble and secure and happy and confident and so on, right?
Well, obviously she, if this letter is to be believed, has her own pathologies and wishes to have an artificial dominance over a broken and self-doubting and corrosively self-doubting man.
Well, that does not speak to her self-confidence at all, right?
So here you can see this passive aggression showing up Pretty rapidly and pretty solidly in this letter.
The aggression towards the wife is very strong.
I was a dork. She took pity on me, which means she's like the enabler for the dork.
She's the dork enabler, I guess you could say.
And he admits, of course, fully and freely and openly that he did nothing to win his wife, that she just sort of picked him off the refuse heap of self-loathing, you know, cleaned him up and took him to the altar, right?
So this is a very passive sort of bouncing along like a balloon after a string kind of guy.
And that is his sort of approach to how it is he was sort of wooed and won, I guess you could say.
And... That is, again, very, very illuminating.
So he basically inherited money, right?
So let's just say, here's a final metaphor for the moment.
He inherited money, you know, millions of dollars, and he's looking across this forum of people who are having trouble finding a job because there's a real slump in the economy.
Now, of course, a slump in the economy means maybe he doesn't get as much interest to live on, he's got to work a little bonus capital, but it's going to come back.
Like, he's got no worries financially.
And so around the people who weren't fortunate enough to inherit this kind of money are looking for jobs and are worried and find themselves having trouble keeping jobs, not because they're incompetent, but because the economy is bad and so on.
And this guy's saying, oh man, you guys are trying too hard.
You don't really have to try that hard.
You don't have to be so desperate.
If you go to a job interview and you're desperate, people sense that.
And they don't like it. They don't respect that.
So you've got to not be desperate, and so on, right?
And of course, the funny thing about this is like, you know, and this guy admits it to his credit, of course, right?
But of course, the natural response is like, but you're not going on any job interviews, right?
You inherited your money, and now you're saying that you have some advice on how to become wealthy.
Right? I mean, you weren't even expecting to inherit the money.
Like a great aunt died you'd never even heard of and left you a couple of million dollars or pounds.
And now you're giving advice to people on how to work their career when you've never worked a day in your life because your wife just kind of picked you off this rubbish heap and put you in a tux and married you.
And now you're talking to people about how to meet women, right?
I mean, that's just kind of funny.
But this is the sort of chilling lack of empathy that British society has.
I mean, of course, in British society, you still have the aristocracy, as I've talked about before.
So people don't like talking a whole lot about unearned virtue and money, right?
Because the foundation of all aristocratic wealth is genocide, right?
So people don't want to think that the descendants of Hitler are living on the blood and gold teeth of the Jews, which is the fundamental situation in England with regards to the highest social ideal of aristocracy.
And so there's not a whole lot of empathy towards the earned, right?
Empathy towards the earned would be pretty dangerous for British society as a whole, right?
In the same way that empathy for the earned is becoming rather dangerous in American society, right?
Where people say, ooh, look, it's a democracy because in the last election I got to choose between two guys who are the same age, the same race, who went to the same secret society, who came from Harvard, who came from moneyed people, who came from political families.
And so choice, choice, choice is nothing but choice in that kind of environment, right?
Coke or Pepsi is not freedom in beverages.
Anyway, so I just sort of wanted to talk about that because it is something that is very, very important to understand that giving people advice to a situation that you caved in.
This guy did not define himself by going out and winning a woman.
This guy did not define himself by defining his values, finding somebody who matched to some degree.
He was asking women or men or whoever you're dating to be a philosopher, but at least don't be mean or cold or vicious or cruel.
Or anything like that, right?
Don't be a bad person, right?
It's better to be a single than to be married to a bad person.
I absolutely guarantee that.
At every single conceivable level, a bad marriage is a complete disaster.
And it's an even greater disaster for men because they get the additional financial burden than it is for women.
So to not be married is far, far better than to have a bad marriage, right?
So that's something I just sort of wanted to point out as a very important thing.
To keep thinking about and to sort of understand.
And this guy didn't go out and sort of win his way and figure out his values and choose a woman who met his values.
You know, a woman just sort of basically yanked his coat at a party and said, all right, loser, you're pulled, right?
You're coming with me, right?
It was this very sort of Mrs.
Robinson kind of moment, if he's describing it correctly.
I'm sure that he is, right?
So why did this guy post this?
Well, he posted this because he's trapped under his own lack of empathy, right?
He's trapped under his own hypocrisy.
And, you know, again, this is not me.
Oh, I'm a perfect, I have no hypocrisy and so on or anything like that.
It's just I can see it very clearly because I've done a fair amount of proactive work to try and deal with my own hypocrisy.
So, you know, when you've sort of worked through your own issues, you can see them much more clearly in others.
It doesn't mean that you're, you know, I'm perfect or anything, but this guy is trapped, right?
The bear that's mauling him is his own hypocrisy.
And so he puts out a statement that is blatantly silly, right, about how his wife just chose him, and so this is how other people should approach women.
I mean, it's funny, right?
It's one of these things that...
I mean, he can't even remotely be expected to be taken seriously.
This is obviously an intelligent fellow, and I don't mean to sort of laugh at him because, you know, I have empathy for the mauling that he's experiencing, right, in his own sort of illusions, right?
But it is kind of funny.
And because he knows that I'm perceptive and he knows that I'm not going to buckle under this sort of nonsense, then I'm not just going to sort of nod and agree with him and say, oh, yeah, those guys are losers, right?
So I did sort of ask him in the post, I did say, well, is your wife a moral person, like a good person, or is she, you know, I assume that your wife is not like a corrupt and nasty person.
And so that's sort of all these people are talking about, is that they'd like to find a woman who, you know, doesn't immediately start lying about everything, and doesn't immediately start justifying her own behavior based on reference to very silly standards that she won't admit to or false.
And All you're looking for is somebody who's just basically got some basic common sense and who's a good person.
They don't have to be a philosopher, but they have to be a moral person at some level, right?
Again, you don't have to be a doctor to be healthy.
But if you can only love people who are physically healthy and you're sort of in a leper colony, then saying to people, well, you just have to approach the lepers in a less judgmental way.
It's like, well, you know, I can't love somebody who's not moral.
They don't have to be a philosopher, but they sure as heck have to be an ethical person.
And that doesn't mean an anarchist or anything like that, of course, but it certainly does mean that they do have some sort of sense of goodness and so on, are willing to sort of learn in the same way that we may be willing to learn and so on.
And then, of course, the final thing, of course, and this is where the self-loathing comes out, is that he then compares these men to 30-year-old women who want to sort of have kids right away and who are desperate and so on, right?
Now, there's nothing wrong with women at all, but I tell you, my brother, when you start comparing men to desperate women, That's pretty cold, right?
That's pretty cold. You have people who are bravely and honestly and openly talking about the challenges and difficulties that they have in dating in a world where they're striving for ethics and there are a lot of people out there who really aren't so much with the goodness and they have to try and they want love, right? That's a pretty... That's a hard situation.
I lived there for many years dating the wrong women and so on.
It's a tough situation to be in.
Now... These are, you know, your brothers, so to speak.
I mean, they're certainly your brothers in philosophy.
And what you're doing is saying, you guys are like desperate, clingy women.
And that's pretty cold, right?
And this is what this guy's being mauled by, right?
He's being mauled by a kind of hypocrisy, a pompous kind of, well, I'm lucky.
I inherited some money, but now I'm going to lecture you about job interviews, although I've never had to work a day in my life.
I mean, that's really passive-aggressive.
That's going to make other people angry.
And that's because you're angry.
And the reason that you're angry is because you've been passive.
My wife just chose me and I didn't do anything and I have no responsibility.
And so because you're passive, when the question of people who are struggling for virtue comes up, and I'm not saying you're not struggling for virtue, but in terms of love, you just got picked up.
You just got picked up by some woman.
And she may be a great woman and this and that, although it would not be likely, given that your own sense of self is very diminished and you don't have a lot of respect for yourself, so of course it's not likely that your wife is the most virtuous woman on the planet or the woman with the most self-esteem.
But basically you just let yourself get picked up.
And now you are then concerned when you see people struggling to achieve a value that you totally bypassed, you are now concerned that you may have missed something rather important.
And because you can't admit that to yourself in the same way that Thorfinn couldn't admit that he might have made a mistake by marrying into a Christian family...
Because you can't admit that you might have made a mistake, not in getting married, I'm not talking about your marriage or anything like that, but you certainly didn't struggle or strive to achieve this kind of value in your life, right?
You just let yourself get picked up by a woman who then married you.
It was very passive. And that may have been the right thing.
There's nothing wrong with it. I don't know your wife or anything, but I would say that you're not comfortable with that choice and you're not comfortable with your role as a man.
And I would say that what you need to do is not pick on people who are struggling to achieve a virtue that you totally failed to struggle to achieve and bypass and let yourself get chosen, but you might want to look at your own relationship and try and figure out if that same passivity is showing up in your own relationship and whether or not you feel comfortable with the equalization of authority and power within your own relationship.
Rather than picking on people who are trying to find love in a difficult world.
So I hope that that helps.
I hope that you know that I'm aiming for the bear and not for you.
And I will talk to you soon.
Thank you so much. Ooh, dry donation time.
I'm going to ask people to send in donations if they have been thinking about it.
It's been about four or five days since I've received a donation other than a couple of subscription payments.
So I would appreciate it if you would send something in.
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