Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Dec. 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:07:25

560 Call In Show Dec 17 2006 4pm

Universally preferable behavior and rating dating

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Thanks so much, everyone, for joining us on this incredibly warm Sunday afternoon up here in Canada.
	It's December 17, 2006, a few minutes after 4 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time. And it is, what, 12 degrees, you said?
	10? 10 degrees today?
	Madness. Madness.
	And we just went to Wii hunting, which is not quite as canine as it sounds, but we wanted to go and have a look at the Wii, which we think would be quite a bit of fun.
	I'm kind of a fairly good first-person shooter player now after a number of years of my wasted youth, but my wife is not so much, so we thought if we get a new kind of controller, we could both play the video games together, which would be good.
	So that much we are...
	Going to look forward to getting that.
	Unfortunately, we couldn't find it, so we're going to wait until after the holidays.
	Now, there is something that I'd sort of like to start with, and you can then let me know what you think about it.
	On the boards this week, it's been a very exciting week on the boards, and there is a continual challenge which I sort of would like to rise to try and meet.
	And the challenge is that this criteria that we work with at Free Domain Radio is that morality or ethics is...
	Any theory of universally preferred behavior.
	And there's quite a lot of confusion about this, and I understand it.
	It's a bit of a slippery eel concept to get a hold of, so I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about what it is and then talking about why it's so important and why I strenuously and to varying degrees of success oppose The people on the boards or the people who email me who talk about their hostility towards universally preferred behavior.
	Now, what universally preferred behavior is is simply the requirement that any theory that is put forward that attempts to say how human beings should behave How human beings should behave.
	I mean, obviously, ethics as a theory recognizes two things.
	It recognizes, A, that human beings do not always do what they should do, right?
	Or rather, they do things that they shouldn't do, right?
	It's much easier to work with a negative definition of morality, that thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet my wife, and so on.
	But there's people who get sort of a little wrapped up in this challenge.
	Obviously, human beings don't do what they're supposed to do or they do things that they're not supposed to do.
	They steal, they cheat, they lie, they vote, they contradict me, you know, all of the fundamental evils that you can imagine.
	And the fact that human beings are more than capable of not doing things that they should do or doing things they shouldn't do is the reason why we have ethical theories.
	And this is exactly the same reason why we have scientific theories, and in fact, why we have the scientific method.
	The reason we have the scientific method is you can't see atoms, and when you're standing on the surface of the world, you can't see that the world is round.
	And when you stand in the world and look at the skies, it looks like the sun is moving around you.
	So... There's a lot of truths about physical reality that are not available to our immediate mere perceptual sense evidence, the stuff that's just bombarding us through our senses.
	So we need a structure for determining truth from falsehood.
	We need a methodology for determining truth from falsehood.
	We need it in mathematics.
	We need it in physics.
	We need it in biology. We need it in geology.
	We need it in the social sciences.
	And most fundamentally, we need it in the realm of ethical theories.
	Now, you don't have to believe in ethical theories.
	Of course not. I mean, there's no question.
	Ethical theories and ethics is a completely optional...
	Approach to life. Just as you don't have to use the scientific method to try and figure out whether the world is round and flat.
	You could pray for that knowledge.
	You could blow up a chicken and see what marks the chicken entrails left on your wall and try and determine the answers from that.
	You could use voodoo.
	You could ask your cat.
	You could use a Ouija board.
	Or you could just sit home in a dark room and make up answers.
	So there's no reason that anyone has to use the scientific method at all.
	In fact, for a vast majority of human history, people didn't use the scientific method at all.
	They did even more absurd things than I just mentioned.
	But the scientific method is an objective and very strict methodology for determining truth from falsehood.
	And logic itself is a very strict and exacting methodology for determining truth from falsehood.
	So if you want to calculate the tensile strength of a steel cable to hold up an elevator, you can either just send people plummeting to their deaths repeatedly as you experiment to find the right weight, or you can do a mathematical calculation on the tensile strength of the twisted steel and the weight of the elevator and gravity and the number of people.
	Maybe you'd want to have a different calculation for your average American these days and Canadian.
	But you wouldn't just sort of randomly, you'd do the math, right?
	And if you're going to do the math, then there's objective rules about how math gets done and what's valid and what's not valid and so on.
	Now similarly, if you have any opinion about how a human being should do anything, yourself or other people, then you are sort of obligated to have a rational theory.
	If it's universally preferred behavior, the first universally preferred behavior is Is to be logical.
	If you're putting forward a theory, like if I come up to you and say, I like jazz, that's not a logical proposition.
	That's not universally preferred behavior.
	That's just me stating a preference.
	It's not binding upon you that you must then like jazz or not like jazz.
	It's just a statement of my preference.
	There's nothing to argue about, I guess, unless I don't have a single jazz album, and it's all as it is in my case, mostly Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, then maybe there'd be some evidence against it, but there's nothing to argue about, nothing to debate.
	The fact that I like jazz doesn't mean anything to you, other than, you know, maybe be sort of vaguely interesting.
	But when we start to talk about behavior that causes harm to others, that destroys the potentiality of others in terms of things like rape and murder and theft and the breaking of significant contracts and so on, and lying that has objectively material and negative consequences, Then we're starting to move into the realm of something called universally preferred behavior.
	In other words, it's not just I like jazz, you like country that we're talking about here.
	We're talking about moral standards and moral rules that would be binding on everyone.
	And by binding, it doesn't mean that everyone has to do it, right?
	The scientific method has value, even if you and I are the only people who practice it.
	It doesn't make any other process for achieving knowledge about the world around us any more valid if people stop using the scientific method.
	So universally preferred behavior is simply any ethical theory that says, here's how human beings should act or should not act.
	When you put it forward, the idea of the universality is exactly the same criteria for ethical theories as we would have for any other theory.
	Surely, ethical theories are the most important theories in the world.
	Ethical theories are the entire substance and value and foundation of all of the great things in society, all of the beautiful things in human relationships, love, trust, honor, decency, honesty, courage, all of these things. A benevolent and respectful interaction with your fellow human beings and so on.
	Virtue is much more important than mathematics.
	As a theory, virtue is much more important than physics.
	Virtue is more important than money.
	Virtue is more important than love.
	Because money and love, if it's to have of any value, flow from virtuous behavior.
	So, when I talk about universally preferred behavior, all that I'm really talking about is applying the same rigor To ethical theories that we apply, say, to calculating the tensile strength of a cable from which an elevator hangs.
	That's all I'm talking about.
	Can we not expect of ethical theories the same rigor, the same logic as a chess match?
	And that's really all that's meant.
	So if you say that stealing is wrong...
	Then stealing is wrong for everyone.
	If a behavior that you propose causes innate contradictions in a moral theory, then it's exactly the same as if you put forward a theory of mathematics or a mathematical proof or a mathematical proposition, which on page one you say two plus two is four, and on page two you say two plus two is five.
	Well, you have a contradiction.
	Because you have a contradiction, the theory is invalid.
	Nobody actually has to go beyond page 2.
	As soon as you say 2 plus 2 is 5, people are like, oh, yeah, sorry, you made a mistake here.
	You're going to have to go back and work on this, right?
	So that's all we're asking for, is that for any moral theory, and you don't have to put any forward and you don't have to believe anything, for any moral theory that you put forward, at least let's have the same degree of consistency and universality and reversibility and logic that As a crossword puzzle.
	That's really all it comes down to.
	So, if you say that stealing is wrong, and this is where the challenge comes in for a lot of people.
	If you say that stealing is wrong, which is surely, unless you're a dyed-of-the-wool Marxist, It's not too controversial a statement.
	Actually, even a Marxist would say that stealing is wrong.
	It's just that the capitalists steal from the workers and use the propaganda of the bourgeoisie.
	Everybody's going to say that stealing is wrong, and that's a proposition that you can put forward.
	But then, of course, if stealing, which is defined as either the fraudulent or violent or through threat of violence transfer of property from one person to another, if stealing is wrong, then it's wrong for everyone.
	It can't be wrong for me and right for you, because we're both human beings.
	And just as a physicist can't say that, according to his theory, one rock falls down and then another rock falls up, you cannot have a moral theory that says stealing is wrong for Bob, but stealing is great for Jane.
	I mean, all we're asking for is for the same basic level of consistency In a moral theory that we would have in any other proposition that would be put forward.
	So, if you say stealing is wrong, then obviously taxation is evil.
	I mean, I'm not saying it's easy to swallow, right?
	But it certainly is logically consistent.
	Because if you say that taking property under force or the threat of force is immoral, which of course we all recognize when somebody sticks a gun in your ribs and says, give me your wallet!
	Then, clearly, it doesn't matter whether somebody's wearing the costume of a cop or a soldier.
	It doesn't matter if a whole bunch of other people have voted to take away your property.
	It doesn't matter.
	Because we're talking about individual and specific human action.
	If we say that murder is wrong, murder being defined as the initiation process, A force resulting in the death of another human being.
	If murder is wrong, now forget self-defense, we'll just talk murder.
	If murder is wrong, then it doesn't matter if you go and put a uniform on and claim that some other guy in a suit told you to go and do it, be his name Bush or Blair or Al Sadr or Bin Laden.
	If murder is wrong, then the costume doesn't matter.
	Costumes do not change the moral nature of a human being.
	Costumes do not change the atomic structure of a human being.
	I don't know of any costume that doesn't involve significantly uncomfortable tights that I can put on that allows me to fly.
	I don't get to put on a soldier's uniform and get to walk on water.
	So a costume, a change in outfit, Does not alter your fundamental nature.
	So it is an inconsequential effect.
	It's like being tall or short.
	It has no effect on morality.
	So if murder is wrong, then war is the greatest evil.
	Again, forget self-defense just for the moment.
	I'm not saying it's not valid.
	I'm just saying that we're talking about murder.
	So when we are looking at moral theories...
	All that we're asking for, at least all that I'm asking for in this concept of universally preferred or preferable behavior, is this.
	If you're going to put forward a theory saying what human beings should do, then that theory should be at least, at least have the logical consistency of an instruction manual and how to set up your stereo system.
	At least. I think it's far more important than that, but let's at least ask for the basics.
	So if, in the theory of democracy, you say, well, if the majority wills it, then suddenly it becomes good.
	Well, then all you have to do is have three people stand in a room with two people, have the three people point at the two people and say, now you can fly, and see if they can magically change the properties of a human being by being in a majority.
	And if they can't, then clearly the majority has no capacity to change physics and to change biology and thus to change the moral nature of a human being.
	If 10 million people Stand in a room, concentrate on a rock, but cannot make it fly, then democracy as a political system is clearly ridiculous, which is, of course, why in the show that we have here, we generally talk about a stateless society, a society without a government, as being the only one that is consistent with any rational, objective, and scientific theory of ethics.
	So universally preferred behavior is simply that if you're going to put forward any theory that human beings should do X, then it's all people.
	And it's in all places.
	And it's in all times.
	And so the Christians have this theory that...
	Before Christ died on the cross, human beings could not be saved, right?
	They were in a state of being fallen because of Eve and the serpent and so on.
	So Christians say, well, before the time, I guess it's the moment that Christ's heart stopped beating and maybe beyond which he could not be revived.
	The moment before that, all human beings could not be saved.
	Bing! The moment that that happens.
	All human beings can now be saved.
	Well, that's quite a wild theory when you think about it.
	It's like saying that before Christ, everything floated in the air, and then the moment that Christ died, everything fell to the ground.
	Well, it'd be nice to see some evidence, wouldn't it?
	So there's a theory that is not consistent through time.
	They just cut the taxation here on goods that we buy by 1%.
	Does that mean that before it was wrong to charge 7% and now it's wrong.
	Sorry, before it was right to charge 7%.
	Now it's wrong to charge 7% but it's right to charge 6%.
	Well, it's all complete nonsense.
	It's all completely made up.
	So... That's all the idea of universally preferred behavior.
	Now, the last thing I'll say about this, bar one, is that people love to argue against the idea of universally preferred behavior.
	This is something that floats around in people's minds.
	They get a real bee in their bonnet when people talk about, when I talk about universally preferred behavior.
	Nobody has a problem with the scientific method.
	I've never seen anyone argue, except for a couple of Eastern mystics, I've never seen anyone argue against the scientific method.
	You will also never get anyone really arguing against the use of logic.
	But in the realm of ethics, suddenly we step into this crazy fog planet where up is down and black is white and there is no ground and trees grow from clouds and fish swim through the leaves and there is no reality.
	It's like a mad dream.
	And it's nonsense.
	It's nonsense. If you want to have a theory of ethics that's binding or that's valid, then it has to be universal, logical, and consistent.
	In the same way that if you wish to have a mathematical proposition that is proven, it has to be internally logically consistent and valid.
	If you have a physics theory, a theory in physics that proclaims to talk about reality in some manner, then that physics theory has to be universal and consistent with the additional bonus.
	Of having to be able to accurately predict and mirror the actual occurrences of atoms and energy in the real world.
	So people do love to argue against universally preferred behavior, which is completely impossible.
	It's like arguing against logic.
	It's like saying, I am now going to disprove that logic is valid.
	Well, by what criteria are you going to disprove that logic is valid?
	There is no conceivable criteria by which logic can be disproven.
	Because the only way that you can disprove logic is to use logic.
	Therefore, it is impossible to disprove logic.
	What you can say is, I don't believe in logic.
	But that's exactly the same as saying, I don't like jazz, or I don't believe that the world is round.
	It is a mere statement of personal preference.
	There's no binding value on anybody else.
	Nobody else needs to give you any kind of seriousness.
	Nobody else needs to spend a second conversing with you, because if you're simply going to state whims, I don't believe in logic.
	The world is round. God exists.
	Democracy is good. The war is just.
	If you're going to say mere assertions, then you're not a rational human being, not to be taken seriously.
	I don't mean any of these fine listeners here, but I think you know what I mean.
	Now, since you can't disprove logic, you can simply say, I don't believe in logic.
	Which, of course, is a silly statement as well, because in order for language to be meaningful, it has to follow the logic of language.
	It has to be syntactically correct.
	It has to have subjects and predicates and nouns and verbs and adjectives and all these kinds of things.
	So if you say, I don't believe in logic, you've used the logic of language to construct a sentence which says, I don't believe in logic.
	It's the same as me yelling into your ear that sound doesn't exist.
	Well, I'm using sound to tell you that sound doesn't exist.
	That's an innate self-contradiction.
	So, you can't argue that logic does not exist.
	I mean, you can, but it's just noise.
	It's just like, it is just the wind passing through the leaves.
	It doesn't mean anything. Similarly, you cannot argue against universally preferred behavior, because if you argue against universally preferred behavior, people will email me many times a week and post on the board many times a week, and I'm not expected to change anyone's mind who genuinely doesn't believe in logic.
	I'm talking here to all of the people who are sitting on the fence.
	I'm talking here to all the people whose certainty in universally preferred behavior or in logic or in reality gets sort of hit with a body blow.
	By people who come storming in saying, bam, there's no such thing as universal reality, Steph's a cult leader.
	Those are the people that I'm talking to.
	So one gentleman who is very much against universally preferred behavior, he wrote on the boards...
	That he says, okay, there is no such thing as universally preferred behavior.
	Steph says that in saying that, it breaks its own premise.
	I don't think it does. What behavior have I just prescribed by saying there is no such thing as universally preferred behavior?
	None. Not doing something is not an action.
	Not killing is not a behavior.
	Not stealing is not a behavior.
	Not eating shellfish is not a behavior even.
	Universally unpreferred behavior, yes.
	Universally preferred behavior, no.
	If I am not eating cake right now, what is the behavior that I am doing?
	Who knows? It's not prescribed anywhere.
	It could be anything that isn't eating cake.
	And so I had to write back, and I wrote back, here is the universally prescribed behavior you exhibit in the above post.
	One. It is universally preferred that truth is better than falsehood.
	Right? Because he's saying that my proposition is false and his proposition is true.
	It is universally preferred that truth is better than falsehood.
	It is universally preferred that people not argue for or believe in universally preferred behavior.
	It is universally preferred that the argument against universally preferred behavior be logical because he's using logic.
	It is universally preferred that sentence structures be coherent.
	It is universally preferred that if you wish to argue against someone's proposition that you bring your argument to their attention in some manner by posting on a board, say, and I can go on and on.
	And he wrote back and he said that it's not universally preferred that truth is better than falsehood.
	In a debating forum, I tell lies all day to get effects that are beneficial.
	And this is where the crux of the problem occurs for people.
	When I say that there is such a thing as universally preferred behavior and people say, what is it?
	And I say, well, say, stealing is wrong.
	Then people say, well, I know lots of people who steal.
	So it's not universally preferred.
	But that's not the argument, right?
	That's going from the concept to the instance.
	And that's why I'm sort of thinking of changing it to universally preferable behavior, but I don't think that's really going to help people who want to sort of swing at it in this way.
	If I say that throwing yourself off a cliff is not healthy, and somebody says, well, I know people who throw me.
	I got five cousins who threw themselves off a cliff.
	Well, so what? It doesn't mean that it makes it healthy.
	It just means that people do it.
	If I say being morbidly obese is not good for your health, and somebody else says, well, I know lots of people who are morbidly obese, well, that doesn't really have anything to do with anything, right?
	And if I say that stealing is wrong, saying I know lots of people who steal doesn't mean anything.
	It's universally preferred behavior.
	And in fact, the fact that people do steal is why we need ethics to begin with.
	If nobody stole, there would be no reason to have ethics, right?
	We don't have a whole lot of arguments out there in the world that says human beings really should be affected by gravity.
	You really shouldn't float around like that.
	It's wrong. You should keep your feet on the ground and you should age and have your skin hanging off your head like the rest of us.
	No more of this hedonistic kicking off the roof and flying across the treetops.
	It's wrong! Get down to ground, man!
	Because human beings are involuntarily affected by gravity, so...
	Of course, there's no reason why you would need a theory about that.
	I mean, you could do it, I guess, but it'd be kind of crazy, right?
	The fact that human beings can choose to ignore universally prescribed behavior, universally beneficial or moral behavior, is exactly why you need a science of ethics.
	So the fact that people steal, despite the fact that stealing is wrong, is far from a condemnation of morality, is in fact the very reason why we need morality to begin with.
	This is not people who are very interested in solving problems.
	These are people who are interested in attacking any kind of standards that are put forward for obvious personal reasons.
	So when he says that he lies all day to get effects that are beneficial, but he argues with me in a logical manner, then he doesn't get to say it's not universal.
	So, the fact that he disagrees with the fact that universally preferred behavior, or it's universally preferred that the argument against universally preferred behavior be logical, he says, well, in a debating forum, I could just pull a gun.
	Many people did. Again, it's exactly the same thing that people are saying, that people can choose to deviate from universally preferred behavior, therefore the behavior is not universally preferred, therefore there's no such thing as standards or morality.
	Again, I think you sort of get the idea, but the last thing that I'd like to say about this before turning the board over to questions is this.
	Look, the world is not getting better.
	The world is getting worse.
	I don't think that I could be counted a pessimist or a radical or some sort of dystopian, dyspeptic fear monger for saying that the world is not getting better but getting worse.
	The size of governments throughout the civilized world, throughout the Western world, is continuing to increase.
	Wars are continuing around the world.
	National debts are vast at expanding.
	The demographics of the more rational peoples in the world, the Western Europeans and the North Americans, are declining.
	And the Muslims are breeding like rabbits.
	And the Muslims, though I have great sympathy for the children, as adults, are a fairly explosive lot.
	The world... It's not getting better, the world is getting worse.
	I don't mean by that that we should despair at all.
	Because virtue triumphs, it just goes through some shadows and valleys first.
	And whatever we can do to minimize the length of those dark passages in history, we should do.
	I really am quite sure when I listen to the irrational and when I listen to the political and when I listen to the religious of the world I am quite sure that they all believe in right and wrong.
	They all believe in right and wrong.
	They don't say You should believe in the Prophet Muhammad, blessed be his name, because you get to wear this cool chick tent for the rest of your life.
	It's a fashion statement.
	The Christians don't say, you should accept the Lord Jesus as your Savior, because staring into his dewy, long-haired, hippie eyes is going to make your heart flutter.
	Politicians don't say, you should pay your taxes, Because I wear a very nice suit.
	Every argument in the world that is put forward of any consequence, every argument is put forward in a moral context, except for the libertarians and philosophers.
	Every argument that's out there about why people should do X, Y, or Z, or why they should not do A, B, and C is put forward As a moral argument.
	All the crazy, moronic, corrupt, lying, vicious, deluded, fantastical, paranoid people in the world have their moral arguments.
	You know the only people who don't have the moral arguments are the rationalists and the philosophers.
	And I'm painting with a broad brush and I know that there are lots of philosophers and rationalists and scientists out there who may For whom this is not true.
	I apologize for the rhetorical flourishes.
	I'm just painting with a bit of a white brush.
	All the crazy people in the world are shouting out and encroaching upon the virtuous people with guns and taxes and prisons and wars and mosques and churches.
	All of the crazy people in the world are encroaching And surrounding and creeping up and dominating and flying over and bombing all of the good people in the world.
	Because all the bad people in the world have their universal ethical theories.
	And all too often, what is our defense against these people who stride forward Kalashnikovs at the ready, eyes gleaming with fanatical and ideological hatred,
	hearts hammering for the virtue of gods and ghosts and devils and dictators, willing to wipe out those who disagree with them, certain in the virtue of their cause,
	a fire with false morality and unholy certainty that these people are surrounding us and encroaching us armed with irrational ethics armed with false arguments for morality And our response to this plague,
	to this cancer, to this invasion, to this overrunning, to this domination, to this increasing despotism, our response to those who say, God has given me certainty, is what?
	Is to say, oh, there's no such thing as certainty.
	How's that working out for us?
	How is withdrawing from the most essential battlefield in the history of mankind, the battlefield of moral ideals, how is withdrawing from that battlefield and scurrying away to our economics textbooks and our chat rooms and our enclaves and our libertarian parties, how is it That not going down in full sword and armor, how is that working out for us?
	Do we feel that we're turning this thing around at all?
	Do we feel that we're making progress?
	Who's winning? Who's winning?
	How do you disarm somebody bent on killing you by saying that swords don't exist?
	How do you will away increasing and encroaching ideological dangers, all of the growing and festering and increasing irrationalities, hostilities and hatreds in the world by saying not you're wrong to the people who believe false, crazy, brutal and dictatorial ideas.
	How do we win?
	Do we win not by saying you're wrong, but do we win by saying Or do we try to win by saying there's no such thing as right and wrong?
	Well, I don't think that is going to win, to be honest with you.
	I don't think that we're going to win, that science and reason is going to win out against democracy, collectivism, fascism, communism, socialism, religious theocracies, crazy cultists, however many there are.
	You don't win against irrationality by saying there's no such thing as either irrationality or rationality.
	If we, who I think reasonably put forward some claim to try and keep an enlightenment fire alive through some fairly challenging times, if we who have Taken on that mission to try and keep reason in the realm of ethics, not in the realm of science.
	It's doing relatively okay, despite government funding of science.
	In the realm of ethics and in the realm of moral philosophy, we who put ourselves forward as those who wish to debate these ideas in the world and amongst our fellow men We've taken on the title of elemental doctors, of essential doctors. We have said, yes, there is a plague and yes, I shall dedicate myself to healing.
	And the plague is continuing and the plague is escalating.
	And our solution to the plague, what we come up with, what we rummage around throughout reason and history and evidence and come up with, is we say, as people drop like flies around us, begging for doctors.
	We stand tall in our white coats with our self-appointed medals as the defenders of truth, rationality and freedom.
	We stand up and we cry with a loud voice.
	There's no such thing as illness or health.
	That is my contribution as a doctor.
	Can you imagine that in any other context as being anything other than the most shameful abandonment of responsibility?
	Can you imagine going to your doctor and your foot is black, two of your toes have fallen off, the rest have no nails, There is pus oozing from the blacked and cracked skin on your foot.
	You can't feel a damn thing.
	It's creeping up your leg.
	You stuff it into a ski boot and you hobble to your doctor.
	He cracks open your ski boot and the stench is unbelievable.
	And he pokes in there and another one of your toes falls off.
	And you say, God, doctor, what a nightmare.
	What am I going to do? He's like, do?
	What do you mean, do? You say, well, my foot is falling off.
	It stinks to high heaven.
	I've got no toes left.
	What am I going to do? And the doctor says, I don't know what you mean by do.
	I mean, why would you want to do anything?
	And you're like, because by foot.
	I mean, am I going to die? Isn't this gangrene?
	I've done some research. And he says, I'm sorry, I'm completely baffled.
	There's no such thing as health or illness, so I'm not sure what you mean when you say, what am I going to do?
	Would you not consider this doctor to be criminally and morally at least bankrupt, perhaps insane, and almost indubitably evil or corrupt?
	Because he's setting himself up as a doctor!
	He's hanging out his shingle and he's saying, if you have an ailment, come to me.
	I know something about health and I know something about illness and I can make you well.
	If you put yourself forward as somebody who debates moral ideas, as somebody who debates politics, as somebody who debates philosophy or economics, epistemology, metaphysics, you're setting up your shingle, like it or not, you're putting on the white coat and you're putting yourself forward as a doctor.
	And so people have some right to expect that you know something about health or illness.
	And if you then find a response to the question of right and wrong is to say there's no such thing.
	I think that's...
	I think that's pretty bad.
	I really do think that's pretty bad.
	I think that's not the way that the world is going to be saved and I think that's very corrupt.
	But enough from me. Did we have anything on the list yet?
	Excellent. Okay, well listen, thank you so much for letting me get this off my chest.
	It has been a rather intense week of debating this kind of stuff, so I hope you don't mind that I talked about it for 38 minutes.
	Now... Chris says I sound like a preacher at a pulpit.
	Absolutely, I'm sure that I do.
	I also don't believe that passion should be only the province of religion.
	I think that it's fine to be passionate about ethics and virtue.
	It doesn't mean that any of my arguments are correct, but it certainly is no...
	No harm to me, I think, to be passionate about these things.
	If you can't be passionate about virtue, gosh, what could you be passionate about?
	If anybody has questions or comments or issues, either about the topic that we've had or about anything else that might be on your minds, I would be more than happy to listen.
	If you can click on a request microphone, then I would be more than happy.
	Sorry, I asked to talk?
	Is that what it says? Oh, the new one says ask to talk.
	Then I would be more than happy to give you the airwaves.
	This show, I guess now, we're breaking, I think this month we're going to break 150,000 downloads.
	So you won't be speaking to me alone, but we'll be in fact talking to quite a few other people.
	So if you have any questions or comments, I would certainly be happy to...
	I would certainly be happy to entertain them.
	If you don't, no particular problemo.
	We can make it a short show today.
	I have a Christmas tree to decorate in a fine atheist tradition.
	So, no problem.
	If you don't have any questions, we can cut it at my rant.
	but if you do, feel free to click on request microphone or, and I propose not to yell at anyone, or you can click on, or you can type in the chat window.
	It's a quiet crowd today.
	No problemo.
	So we go on.
	You have a check mark? Let us see.
	Well, no problem.
	It looks like we have a bit of a quiet group.
	Joey. No, no.
	Joey's usually got questions that are far too challenging.
	Now, I'm so sorry.
	After just telling everyone that I want them to all chat, which I do...
	Ah, everyone's come back.
	Okay, good. So, sorry.
	If you could just click on request microphone if you have any questions.
	Oh, it goes under waiting.
	Okay. I don't see anyone at the moment having a list of questions.
	Yeah, so somebody is saying that it would be wise to change it to universally preferable behavior rather than universally preferred behavior.
	I think that that's an important difference, and I think that I will start to...
	I'm going to try and write an article this week and talk about that.
	So, yes, you are showing up as requesting a topic, but nobody else is showing up as requesting a topic.
	So we will give everyone another...
	30 to 35 seconds to see if they have any questions.
	Otherwise, we'll do an Ask a Therapist show instead.
	No, I don't mean live.
	I mean, we'll record it.
	So, just if you'd like to...
	If you have any questions, issues, comments, problems about this aspect of what we've talked about today, using the Royal We, or anything else that's come up in the Free Domain radio shows, zero to 560, I would be more than...
	Then happy to entertain them.
	But if people's comments are a tad on the slash side, I only prepared one topic today, so I'm not going to try and go madly extemporaneous on your philosophical loving heinies.
	But if you do have any questions, you can click on raise the microphone or you can type them in the chat window.
	I'd be more than happy to respond.
	But if not, then I might as well just continue this week with my regularly scheduled podcasts.
	So, ah, we have somebody who wants to chat with me.
	Hello, go ahead. Hello.
	Oh, good. Technical difficulties when somebody finally wants to chat.
	Can you try again?
	Yes. I'm sorry.
	You're going to have to come either into a chat window or something else like that.
	I'm sorry, but I can't hear you.
	Okay, we have somebody else who wishes to come in.
	One moment. I will have you in in just a second.
	Hello? Hello?
	Hello? Okay, good.
	Now... Karakurai, you have a question?
	Can you hear me? Yes, please go ahead.
	Go ahead.
	Hello? Hello, can you hear me?
	Hello. I wonder if the internet traffic is really busy at the moment.
	Can you hear me, sweetie?
	Yeah, okay. Hello.
	All right, so let me just...
	Sorry about that. We had some people who were practicing their hellos, which is nice, but not necessarily the content of what it is that we're trying to talk about.
	So if you have questions, just click on the request microphone or comments or issues or criticisms.
	No problem.
	Can you just check the chat window?
	Does he have a...
	Righty, righty, righty, von rightiness.
	Okay. Righty?
	Nate, are you there?
	Yes. All right, man.
	Go ahead. All right.
	Well, our friend H. Reardon on the boards had posted something about Dr.
	Laura and her...
	Opinions about feminism and how it affects relationships.
	I kind of thought it was funny how she wants to blame feminism when she comes out with the fact that she was never intimate with her parents.
	And I just think it's funny how many people take this little distraction, like, let's all blame feminism and, you know, when it comes to intimate relationships.
	What was her criticism of feminism?
	Well, that it's all about we hate men and, you know, and...
	It mainly came around to the subject of sex and how a woman feels like, oh no, my husband needs it all the time and I don't want to have sex with them, but yet she requires him to go see her mother or spend time with the mother-in-law or the grandparents or whatever.
	So then she should return the favor, you know, because it's just such a...
	So her basic premise is that women enjoy sex about as much as men enjoy going to see unpleasant mothers-in-law?
	Yes, that's it.
	Well, shouldn't her advice then not be that women should put out more even though it's unpleasant, but that the men should get themselves some fairly basic sexual education and maybe some Benoit balls?
	That's amazing. No, I mean, there really is, and this is not uncommon in the whole...
	I'm pretty sure she's a Christian, a fundamentalist Christian.
	There is this thing in Christianity that is quite common, and of course it is very common in most religions, Muslim being the most powerful example, of a completely distorted view of female sexuality.
	In the Christian mythology, women...
	Don't really want to have sex.
	It's a sort of duty for them and that they really shouldn't take pleasure in having sex, right?
	This is what the advice of, I think it was Queen Victoria or somebody in the Victorian age in England where she was saying something like, listen ladies, listen ladies, if you...
	If you are worried about your husband wanting to have sex all the time, just lie back and think of England.
	And the idea is really that you just have to keep procreating the island and creating for us fine sailors to send off and conquer the world.
	And so if your husband wants to insert his vile organ into you, lie back and suffer through it for the good of the culture as a whole.
	I don't think that Victorian men were all universally bad at sex, but There is this sort of idea that female sexuality is somehow magically and mysteriously different from male sexuality.
	And, of course, this rises to the heights of absurdity in the Muslim culture where there is no or almost no responsibility on the part of sexuality for the men and that women are always the tempters and always the female sexuality has to be rigidly controlled because otherwise women are just loose and amoral and so on.
	And I think that this all arises from a pretty distorted relationship sense, right?
	Generally, and I say this in very general terms with the hopes of being able to offend as many people as possible, But generally, you don't have to worry about your wife's fidelity or whether your wife enjoys sex if you're close and happy and intimate and, you know, basically in sexual matters if you ask what she likes, right? And, I mean, of course, if it's not a threesome, you have to obviously have some additional conversations.
	I'm just kidding. But if you ask what your partner likes and work assiduously to provide that, And this also, I think, you know, this is a bit of a slight off topic, but I still think it's interesting.
	I think that when men have this idea of female sexuality as being, you know, that women don't really want to have sex, they kind of roll their eyes and put up with it.
	Or, you know, that a woman who enjoys sex and is sort of earthy and lusty is somehow unbalanced.
	You know, this is a very sort of common thing.
	This distorted view of female sexuality that is very common in religious circles and in communist circles as well, of course, socialist circles, it leads men to be not as vocal or honest about what they want because they're afraid that they're going to be ridiculed or laughed at because the woman is not as reciprocal a relationship.
	And last but not least, I mean, If a woman or a man, and of course men don't put out sometimes as well, and this may of course happen here, it depends what I get for Christmas.
	Sorry, that's about the funniest joke I'll ever make.
	Whoever is not putting out in a sort of intimate relationship, either they have something biologically wrong with them, the first thing you always do is check out your health, But if you have something that somebody else wants and can't get from anywhere else, and you can convince that someone that they want it more than you do, then you have a basic, it's a power grab.
	It's a form of manipulation and control.
	So, if I want to have sex with my wife and then she can convince me that she doesn't want to have sex with me, then I'm automatically in a position of begging.
	And that is a real sort of fundamental power grab that occurs.
	I think it's pretty cold.
	I think it's really destructive.
	It's very, very bad for the children in many ways to grow up in a household where there's a lot of dysfunctional sexual relations.
	But yeah, there's just this idea that, I don't know, men and women are very different in very many ways.
	But I think in terms of the appreciation of sex, I mean, the major difference, of course, is that a healthy and mature woman It's a little bit more picky in terms of protection because she carries the risk of pregnancy, but I think aside from that, I don't know that there are these enormous differences, but it certainly does seem to be quite a common belief.
	Right. My ex used that position a lot, and I don't know how I fell for it.
	Sometimes I didn't most of the time, but I don't know why.
	It just seems to be common.
	It's not just her. It's a lot of women.
	That seem to use it as a way of leveraging or manipulation.
	You mean this position that you want sex more than I do?
	Right, exactly. Right.
	Well, I mean, I've never met you face to face, but I imagine you're pretty grabby.
	So, no, I'm just kidding. No, it is.
	It is very much. I mean, if you can, and of course it's the old thing, right?
	Whoever's negotiating only has to wait 30 seconds longer.
	So, if the woman does really want to have sex, let's just say, but she can convince the man that she doesn't, then the man only has to cave in whatever manner she wants him to 30 seconds or 5 seconds before she would have caved.
	I mean, if you're holding out for, you know, a $20,000 a year pay increase and you're negotiating with your boss, if he caves about giving you $20,000 more when you actually would have five seconds from now taken $10,000, then you get the $20,000, right?
	He has no way of knowing that you were about to cave.
	So this is one of the problems that occurs, right?
	It's that you don't know whether she actually does or doesn't want to have sex if these kinds of politics are being played.
	All you know is that she didn't want to have sex up to the moment that you caved in whatever way that she wanted or whatever.
	But yeah, no, it is a pretty unhealthy way to approach things in my view.
	What do you think brings that about, though?
	What brings that attitude about as far as Family and childhood and upbringing and culture and all that.
	Well, I hate to apply base economics to it, but the withholding of supply will increase the price.
	In a sexual relationship, assuming monogamy is the preferred method, which I think in general these days it still is, Sexuality, to me, it's a mark of low self-esteem for the woman to withhold sex because what she's doing is she's saying that I'm not bringing enough value to you, so I need to raise the price of what it is that I bring to you or raise the value of what it is that I bring to you by withholding something.
	And she's also saying that I don't find you as attractive as you find me, which is kind of like not a very high self-esteem thing to say.
	But when you're insecure around something, then you try to raise the value of what it is that you're bringing.
	So if you look at something like a union, and I hate to bring it into these kind of economic terms, but I think it's not too bad to look at it this way.
	If you look at a union, then a friend of mine had a job many years ago where he was supposed to do some calculations on a calculator, and he showed up at the job and The calculator wasn't plugged into the wall, so he's like, he reached down, he's going to plug in the calculator, and somebody in the next cubicle said, oh my god, do not do that.
	And he's like, what?
	Why? Doesn't this plug work?
	He's like, no, if you do that, the shit's going to hit the fan like you would not believe.
	You have to call down to the union and get the electrician to come up and plug the calculator in for you, because it's to do with the electrical outlets, right?
	Now, this is a clear indication of restricting supply in order to increase value.
	If only electricians are allowed to plug things in or unplug them, imagine if you couldn't even turn on your computer or your monitor without calling the union electrician.
	Well, clearly, the price of that person is going to go up.
	But it's going up through a kind of manipulative, and in this case, coercive kind of way.
	And so, in the same way that if a woman, it doesn't feel that she's really able to bring that much Of personal value through virtue and integrity and good humor and support and love and so on.
	If a woman doesn't feel that she's able to bring that much value to a relationship, then she's going to attempt to increase.
	And one of the ways that she can do it is to attempt to increase the value of what she brings to the relationship by withholding sex.
	By, in a sense, driving up the value of what it is that she can provide.
	But it's pretty manipulative, right?
	You couldn't imagine doing this with food, where you simply don't get fed.
	The only one who can cook for you is your girlfriend.
	You're not allowed to go to a restaurant, which is analogous to a monogamistic relationship.
	But your girlfriend simply won't give you food unless you do what she wants in some manner.
	So your choice is then to starve to death or to comply.
	I don't think that that would be a very healthy relationship in terms of food, and I don't think it's any more healthy in terms of sexuality.
	So you're saying it's like a projection of her self-value?
	Can you tell me a bit more what you mean by that?
	I want to make sure we're on the same definition here.
	Well, you're saying that maybe, well, you seem to be, I don't know, I'm guessing here, but I'm interpreting this as the girl doesn't have as much value or doesn't see as much value in herself, so she's trying to increase her value by making deals out of it, you know, like, if you do this, I'll have sex with you or whatever.
	Right. Right.
	Yeah. And fortunately, it's never put that baldly.
	But I know what you mean, right?
	I mean, what happens is if you don't do something that the woman wants you to do, then she's cold and upset.
	And she's like, I just don't feel close enough to have sex with you.
	And I know you've been waiting a long time to hear me say that to you.
	But yeah, I think definitely it is the case that if you know that you're a valuable employee, then you would never even dream of setting up a union, right?
	Right. If you are genuinely loved by your girlfriend and you have a genuinely healthy and satisfying sexual relationship, then I don't think you worry about her leaving you.
	The guys who worry about their wives or girlfriends leaving them are the guys who are bad husbands.
	Right? Just like the guys who worry, who want the union the most are the guys who are the worst workers.
	So, without a doubt, if she's manipulating you in terms of sexuality, rather than being upfront and honest about saying, you know, I'm not sort of feeling happy about this, could we try it that way?
	I mean, don't mean sexually, I mean just in the relationship as a whole.
	If it's gotten to the point where she's simply punishing you or withholding things through sexuality, there's either passive aggression or manipulation, neither of which is an indicator of decent self-esteem.
	One more thing. I know Chris wants to say something.
	What kind of reflection would that have on me?
	What kind of signals would I be giving off that would make her think that she can do that?
	You like that she was 19, right?
	Okay, well, maybe that was my thing.
	Just kidding. Well, it's...
	Let me ask you a question, if you don't mind, to back.
	Just think about when you were first going out with her.
	What was the first indication that you might have had that she didn't have a very good self-esteem or very good communication skills in terms of talking to you about things she liked or didn't like?
	That's hard to say.
	See, everyone loves to put me on the spot, but it's just so nice when it goes the other way.
	Okay.
	Yeah, exactly. When you first met, tell me a little bit about the first time that you met her.
	Maybe just step me through and I'll ask questions as you go along.
	Well, I guess it would have been the first time.
	I came to her place to pick her up.
	It was late at night on a weeknight.
	We first met kind of there...
	It's one of those internet things, but that's not a...
	Well, I don't know.
	Well, okay, sorry, just before you go on the date thing, so you met on the internet side, right?
	Right. It was actually a year before that we actually...
	Right, and you chatted and you emailed back and forth, right?
	Right, for about almost a year, and then I finally...
	We finally said, okay, well, let's meet up.
	Well, you had to wait for her to become legal, of course.
	Sorry, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
	Last joke I'll make about her age until the next joke.
	I'm just kidding. So when you were chatting back and forth, before you decided to go out with her, was there any indication about how she perceived herself?
	Did she think she was a value?
	Was she assertive? Was she confident?
	How was that sort of flavor of interaction?
	Actually, at first, I was very nervous about meeting her.
	I don't know why. I think she kind of shocked me in that she looked gorgeous.
	I guess that's kind of a reflection on how I felt about myself at the time.
	She calmed me down.
	She had this enormous calming effect on me, which is strange because that's the exact opposite of what she ended up being.
	That night, she just had this overwhelming, calming effect on me.
	I don't know if there was any indication at all about how she felt about herself through that whole time.
	You mean in the year that you emailed and chatted with her, you didn't get any sense of how she viewed herself?
	Oh, hey. I didn't think of that.
	Hold on. Yeah, she did give a couple of indications.
	She was worried about her weight at different times, and she was kind of upset that her relationships weren't going well.
	I guess that's some of the few things I can remember.
	So when you say her relationships weren't going well, what does that mean?
	Well, apparently she was going...
	Apparently there were a number of times, like, there were periods of time where we didn't talk, like maybe a couple of months or so, and then I would talk to her again, and then she would be upset about some guy she was dating, and I don't remember the specifics of it, but it apparently didn't go well, and she would say that she was lonely, And I guess that kind of...
	I don't know what that says, really.
	Oh, I think you do. I think it does what it does to any guy who's like, oh, a 19-year-old lonely girl.
	Well, there you go.
	My typing may slow down for a while, for about 30 or 40 seconds.
	Right, exactly. Anyway.
	So, okay, so I'm just off the top of my head, right?
	And it's important to be...
	And this is something that Christina has really taught me, which fundamentally, of course, I'm enormously grateful that she didn't apply when we first met.
	But there are some pretty significant clues, right?
	Even in just what you've told me, right?
	So she's on a dating site, and then she meets a guy, but she doesn't date him.
	She dates other guys, but continues an on-again, off-again chat with this guy.
	She complains about...
	Her relationships, her dating relationships with a guy that she's never met, right?
	So there's some indication of either boundary issues or sort of over-trust issues, which are kind of similar in that revealing lots of personal information over the Internet, except for my podcast.
	Well, it's not really a two-way thing so much, but that sort of may indicate some boundary issues.
	The fact that she has a series of failed relationships within the span of a year May indicate, well, does indicate that she has trouble choosing appropriate men, right?
	So she's choosing men based on some criteria that isn't working for her, right?
	Because nobody wants to go through a couple of relationships a year.
	Because, I mean, breakups are horrible, right?
	There's no way to make a breakup a good thing.
	So there's some indications there.
	Were there any... So it was just...
	Was it just romantic relationships she was talking about?
	Or were there other kinds of relationships that she was talking about as well?
	No, it was just romantic.
	And what about her family relations?
	Did you talk about those with her over the course of that year?
	Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's another indicator.
	Her mother, she did tell me pretty much right off the bat, I think the very first time we talked, that her mother, she wasn't living with her parents and that she was living with a friend and still going to school.
	So she had to eat food in a way, right?
	Kind of. Yeah, she wasn't talking to them at the time.
	And her mother was apparently manic depressive, and she still is.
	I mean, her mother's kind of a nut.
	And her father is kind of hardly ever around.
	He's kind of loud, abusive.
	He's alcoholic. So I didn't know that right away, but I did find that out later.
	What do you mean by later?
	Like much later, within the actual relationship when it started.
	But before you went out with her, you were aware that she'd had a number of failed relationships, that she had a highly turbulent and potentially abusive family situation, that she had moved out and was living with a friend, and so on, right?
	I mean, these things you were aware of before you began dating her, is that correct?
	Right, exactly.
	And, you know, back then, I didn't know what to...
	I didn't know that, you know...
	That's probably not a good idea.
	Back then, I didn't know, because I had the same problem.
	I mean, my parents were the same way, and I thought, well, that's just normal, you know?
	Right. Two wrongs can make a right, right?
	Exactly. And look, there's no reason why you would know, simply because these sort of elemental ways of being able to evaluate other people are just not taught to us, right?
	Obviously, you didn't learn it in your own chaotic background.
	I certainly didn't learn it in my chaotic background.
	In fact, I was very much taught the opposite, and this is one of the main problems of people who come from chaotic backgrounds, is we're taught to not judge other people, to give everyone a chance, to not look at the telltale signs Of significant problems within a personality, but just to sort of blindly go in and be optimistic, if that makes sense? Right.
	Exactly. Exactly.
	And there's also a lot of nonsense about how love conquers all, and that two people, no matter how flawed, if they meet, it can just be a yin and a yang, and no matter what our histories and no matter what happened in the past, we can join together in a blissful union, drink champagne from a glass slipper, and live happily ever after, right?
	That was pretty much the idea, but it kind of didn't pan out that way.
	No, and there's no reason why it would.
	In fact, there's every reason why it wouldn't.
	The idea that love conquers all or that a willingness or desire to have a relationship work out, it has absolutely nothing to do with whether that relationship works out, right?
	I mean, there are very particular signs that you can look for in a potential partner and signs to be completely wary of In a particular or potential partner.
	So a woman that I went out with before I got married was a stewardess, or she liked to be called a purser because I guess stewardess sounded too much like an air waitress or something.
	And she was a little bit older than I was and was still a stewardess despite the fact she's a little older than most stewardesses and so on.
	And there were signs.
	There were signs. She was a very attractive and personable woman, still single at that time as an older woman, and had no particular plans in her life other than Going and being on call as a stewardess.
	And she also, I think on her very first date, she went into a long story about how she'd been vindicated about something at work and so on, and thus, you know, revealed certain other aspects of herself.
	So there are definitely really particular clues that you can look for in a potential romantic partner that are absolute indicators.
	Love does not conquer all.
	The willingness to work things out doesn't conquer all, right?
	Honey, do you want to say anything about this?
	Well, that fantasy that you were talking about, the fantasy that's supposed to get created when you unite together, and that fantasy just got enshrouded in a whole dripping with sentimentalism and memories and things like that.
	Oh, you remember this?
	She became this idea to me that was a fantasy in my head.
	It wasn't her.
	It was the idea of her in my mind.
	It was kind of like my mom treats me.
	Same thing. Hi, it's Christina talking.
	Sorry, I had to turn my headphones down.
	It's very interesting in relationships how people sort of merge together and there's a fusion and they feel that they have all these things in common and like Steph was saying, that they can conquer all and they just have to sort of weather the storm.
	But when people come From very chaotic and dysfunctional backgrounds, they don't know how to really accept love and how to express love.
	There is a fundamental part of their character structure that is so defended against intimacy and closeness and real love, trust, that they're constantly going to be, in ways that they don't know, in some unconscious ways, But definitely visible through behavior, going to be challenging and testing their partner.
	That makes it very, very difficult.
	Usually there's a history for each individual of low self-esteem or difficulty within their own self-worth.
	And the healthier you are, the healthier the partner you will choose.
	People who are not healthy end up choosing other people who are not healthy.
	So the key to a healthy and happy successful relationship is to get your own act together, to figure yourself out, to figure out your own weaknesses, to figure out your own What are some signs to look for?
	Some warning signs? Yeah, Steph just asked a question, like, what are some warning signs?
	What are some of the things that people need to look out for when they're meeting new people?
	God, that's, you know, a lot of, you know, people don't ask questions when they meet new people.
	They don't, you know, they're obviously, you know, when we meet someone, it's their physical attractiveness that we are Or the physical appearance that we're attracted to.
	And there's something that has to be said for chemistry and sexuality.
	I mean, romantic or these intimate relationships, sex is a very, very important part of it.
	I think this whole conversation started off around the issue of sex.
	Sex is really important, a really important part of a romantic relationship.
	It is the one thing that is unique to the two people who are involved.
	Monogamy. So we are definitely attracted to someone because of their physical appearance.
	But, you know, there are a lot of attractive people out there.
	And we need to...
	Steph's giving me all sorts of wonderful faces.
	I've never seen any of them.
	But we need to ask a lot of questions about, you know, what are your values?
	People think, oh, it's not the right time.
	We need to wait until I get to know the person more before I can start asking these questions.
	And my philosophy and belief about that is...
	If you're really looking for a long-term committed relationship, you don't want to waste your time or the other person's time by not asking the important questions.
	Things like, what are your thoughts on family?
	What are your thoughts on religion? What are your thoughts on politics?
	Not just things like, what's your favorite color?
	Or the classic one, what's your sign?
	But really asking difficult questions and not saying, oh, that's okay.
	If there's a difference in a belief with the person that you're talking to, and not just sort of minimizing it and saying, oh, that's unimportant, we'll deal with that when...
	I'll give you an example, you know, just around children.
	When two people get together, somebody wants kids, somebody says, I don't know, we'll see.
	Well, that's a huge issue in a relationship.
	If you're getting together with someone and you want children, make sure that you find someone or you meet someone who definitely knows they want children because it ends up being an area of conflict.
	There are a lot of little things that people can tell us about themselves.
	For instance, like this young girl or this young woman, this 19-year-old woman, over the course of a year, she had many relationships, she was online, she was disclosing all this personal information, and she was eliciting sympathy and pity for her situation.
	I get that sense.
	I don't know if that's true or not.
	But things that they can actually tell you, and just pay attention to your emotions, because they're your guides and your instincts.
	Right. I totally agree with the whole love does not conquer all thing.
	I think that ends up like going back to Steph's art podcast.
	In the movies, there's so many TV shows and movies where, in the end, their love breaks the spell or breaks the curse or whatever, or defeats everybody, defeats all the bad guys, or something happens just because they hug.
	Right. Which is kind of funny.
	No, I mean, certainly when...
	I think it was on our very second date, Christina said, I really want a child.
	And I said, well, I think I fit the bill.
	But then she had to clarify things a little bit further.
	I'm very glad we had that conversation.
	Now... Rene Zellweger and Kenny Chesney or some, I don't know, some guy with a 10-gallon hat.
	The story is apparently, I was just talking about this with some friends last night, the story is apparently that they got together and I think she's 38 or 39 or 40 or something like that and they got together and they got married and then he said, great, let's start having babies and she's like, huh?
	You know what's amazing, really, when you think about it?
	This is just an important sort of analogy.
	We've all been through job interviews and maybe you've interviewed other people.
	When you're a manager and you're hiring someone, you'll go through lots of questions.
	You don't sort of chit-chat about the weather and about bands that you like and places that you've been, whether you know anybody in common.
	I mean, you may do that for a minute or two just to test their general social skills, but when you're interviewing someone, you kind of dive into it, right?
	What's your experience? Tell me about something that worked well for you.
	Tell me what you learned from your worst experience in your career.
	Tell me about a big mistake you made.
	Tell me about a big success you've had.
	How would you deal with this situation?
	How would you deal with that situation?
	You're really grilling someone.
	And of course, I'm not saying that you sort of corner and shine a bright light and a rubber hose on someone when you're dating them for the first date, but you've got to ask those qualifying questions.
	You know, there's that old Seinfeld line that says that a date is a job interview that lasts all night.
	Well, it should be. Because if you hire someone into your business that is bad or destructive, obviously that hears negative consequences.
	But if you invite someone into your heart and into your bed who's negative and destructive, those consequences are far more serious than anything that occurs in terms of your business life.
	So... I think that people should just be a whole lot more rigorous and look at, and just, you know, there's no sort of magic in relationships.
	There's no, well, okay, so occasionally she does like to bite the head off a bat, but overall she's a good cook, so I can balance these things out, right?
	I mean, there are certain signs that are pretty significant.
	Now, I'm going to ask you sort of one other thing.
	You don't have to answer it, of course, but...
	During the time that she was chatting with you online or emailing back and forth, and then sort of saying that she was lonely and so on, was there any sort of sexual innuendo or stuff like that that went on in your conversations?
	Yeah, there was.
	Was any of it coming from her?
	No, I'm kidding. So you guys did a fair amount of sexual, I mean, some degree of sexual flirting online as well, right?
	Not so much.
	I mean, there was, coming from her, and some from me, too, but it wasn't like, you know, cybering or anything like that.
	There was never any of that.
	Sorry, it wasn't, I just missed that word, it wasn't...
	Cybering, that's the term, it's the same thing as...
	Oh, cyber sex or whatever, right?
	Yeah. But basically there was a sexually charged atmosphere before you met, right?
	Right, right. Which is yet another indication...
	Well, yeah, I mean, and again, there's nothing wrong with sexy, fun, flatty, churdy stuff, flirty stuff, but again, maybe this is why some people on the board will label me a conservative, and maybe this is, but I would say that for a woman to use sexuality early on in the relationship as an enticement is also not a very high self-esteem act.
	To go through. And there's nothing wrong with the woman dressing up and looking great, and there's nothing like that.
	But a woman who uses sexual lures, and a man, of course, too.
	This is not specific to women, but a woman who uses sexual lures is sort of holding out merely the flesh as a kind of bait, and that's usually not a sign of high self-esteem, right?
	I mean, it's the old question that women used to have.
	I don't know if they still do have. If there are any women listening, perhaps you could let us know.
	And the old woman's dilemma is, well, if I put out too early, then he's not going to respect me.
	But if I don't put out at all, he's going to think I'm a prude.
	But if a woman feels that she's genuinely delightful company, those aren't really questions or issues that come up.
	Because it's like any man is going to be lucky to spend time with me because I'm a great person.
	And the issue of sexuality isn't really core.
	But if a woman puts sexuality out there very early on, then...
	To me, it's saying, I now have value because of your hormones and my equipment.
	And that's not really quite the same, I think, as saying, I have value because I'm a very smart, virtuous, funny, whatever, right?
	But this is a sign that I would just be careful of.
	Men in particular, we lose our brains completely over this kind of stuff.
	So it's a very big flashing red button on men's Four heads?
	Some sort of appendage.
	So this is just a thing to be careful of, right?
	Right. So when interviewing, you know, I've tried to steer clear of just drilling with questions and stuff like that.
	I try to mix in, you know, lighthearted conversation about music and stuff like that.
	I mean, I haven't really been on many dates lately.
	I've been on one yesterday.
	It was the first one in a long time.
	An actual date.
	What is a non-actual date?
	Is that like with a hand puppet and a goat?
	Yes. Okay, got it.
	A sort of don't-leave-home-surf-the-net kind of date.
	Right, okay. Right, right.
	Well, there's a book, I'm sorry to interrupt, but there's a book that's actually not too bad for this kind of stuff, which you might want to have a look at if it's available where you are.
	It's called Love Smart by Dr.
	Phil, where he talks about ways...
	You don't have to sort of cross-examine someone, but there are ways of getting answers out of people that's not manipulative, and it's genuinely sort of get a sense of their mental map.
	Of their values and so on.
	There's lots of ways to ask questions of people that is sort of pleasant and conversational but gets an enormous amount of information.
	So, I mean, Dr.
	Phil, you know, with all due caveats, right?
	I mean, he's a Christian and he sings Christmas carols with George Bush, but in this particular area of eliciting value responses from potential partners, it's well worth it.
	And, you know, when we're young, We throw our hearts down any alley to see what might pick it up or whatever might pick it up.
	And I think that you have, I mean, you're certainly of an age now, I know that you're in your early 30s, that you want to sort of start seriously thinking about, if you do want this, to sort of start seriously thinking about settling down.
	And you're not going to do that by just dating randomly, right?
	It's like just picking somebody off the street and trying to form a business partnership with them.
	It's not going to work.
	In a romantic relationship leading to marriage and kids, or kids if you don't want to get married, you're merging a lot more than mere finances and business, right?
	You're merging your heart, your soul, you're sleeping together, you're sleeping in the same bed, you're merging everything, and you're creating the most intimate partnership that human beings are capable of, and in the same way that you would not...
	You would not enter into a business arrangement with someone without thoroughly going over all of the things that might go wrong and being absolutely sure that you had the same values and the same set of problem-solving approaches and so on.
	And of course, making sure that you were somebody that would be a good person to be in business with through your own integrity and so on.
	We should apply far higher standards to those we date than to those that we would go into business with.
	And none of us would think of going into business without a thorough evaluation and merging our fortunes financially with someone and professionally.
	But people do this with marriage, which is a far more serious commitment, without going over any of those basics.
	Yeah, I'll check out that book.
	What was it again? It's called Love Smart.
	Okay. Dr.
	Phil McGraw, M-C-G-R-A-W. Yeah, I've never watched him.
	Okay, was there anything else?
	We've had a couple of other people who wanted to ask a question or two, so if you would like to ask anything else or I'll let some other people talk.
	No, I think Chris wants to talk.
	He's been waiting forever. All right.
	Thanks. I really appreciate that.
	That was very honest.
	I hugely respect that, and thank you so much for doing that.
	So who was next? Tabris.
	Tabris. Go ahead, man. Hello.
	Hello. Hello.
	Hello. I'm locked now.
	Can you hear me? Yes, I can certainly hear you.
	Go ahead. Well, fantastic.
	I just wanted to make a comment about Christmas.
	I've been joking with my friends about this.
	A while ago, in the first earliest podcast, you renamed Christmas the Winter Solstice Exchange of Property Rights.
	Right, I think there's a good song in there somewhere.
	I actually took that and made it into a word.
	Whisper, the Winter Solstice Exchange of Property Rights.
	Whisper, oh, I love it.
	That's great. You know, I think now I'm thinking of it more as a rap song.
	That's great. Do you mind if I steal that from you and post it on the board?
	Go right ahead. Since it is about the exchange of property rights, perhaps you wouldn't mind giving up at that point.
	That's great. Thank you so much.
	What a wonderful idea. Next year we'll do some carols.
	I actually have more to give you.
	I'm planning on having the remix I'm doing of your quotes done by Christmas.
	Oh, yes, yes. Do you know when that's going to be done?
	Hopefully by Christmas. Oh, that would be fantastic.
	Well, I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance or didn't get around to playing your last one on the air, but I absolutely promise you this one will get its own lead-in, and I'm sure we'll shoot right to the top of iTunes.
	Right now, I'm calling stage three.
	I have three minutes and 15 seconds out of 540 seconds complete.
	Wow. Well, that's fantastic.
	I think that's going to be great.
	Did you happen to catch Neil's remix of Major General so-and-so?
	I did. I was going to try and put that into the song, but you just couldn't hear it over what I had.
	Right, right. Well, I did post the original WAV file of that imitation that I did of the 19th century British major, so if you wanted to mix that in.
	If you need any original clips from the WAV files, because they'll sound a lot better than the compressed MP3s, just let me know, and I'd be certainly happy to snip and send whatever I can.
	I'll go through and see if I need any, but so far it sounds fantastic.
	Well, that's great, and I think that's wonderful.
	I hope that you're enjoying it, because I can't wait.
	I think it's going to be great. For those who don't know, this is a gentleman, Grandmaster Wizard Flash, I think, who is doing a remix of some fairly shrieky, semi-gay, high-pitched, dramatic quotes from the podcast series, and I just think it's going to be great.
	I'm really looking forward to it.
	I'm looking to have it done.
	Well, thank you very much.
	It's a wonderful thing. Alright, but did you have any other questions that you wanted to ask?
	Not that I can think of right now, but if I do, well, you know.
	Okay, thanks so much again. Thank you.
	And what's his next?
	We are getting to the next listener.
	Does he have his... Chris A, you say?
	Why can I not see him?
	Blind. Oh, he's under Joey.
	He's what? What?
	Oh, the technology.
	I see him not.
	Oh, wait. No, no.
	Welcome, Zorko87.
	All right. Fascinating.
	I'm sorry, Chris.
	You're just not showing up on my list of people who are in.
	So... Where's he under you?
	Yes, fascinating.
	I'm so sorry, how terrible.
	He's been waiting for so long to talk, and I've been wanting to hear, but he's not showing up.
	Sorry, sorry. These names are just sort of random.
	There's quite a few people in there, so I'm just scanning through to look for.
	And he's not around.
	Okay. So we have another gentleman who wishes to chat.
	Shall I be royal?
	I think you're alive.
	Can you hear him?
	Let me... Sorry, I'm now lost about who's muted and who's not, so let me just wait for Skype to catch up.
	But yeah, just while we're waiting for that, certainly one of the most interesting, one of the greatest things that I learned was around looking for the details of who somebody is.
	In the beginning of the interactions or in the early parts of the interactions that you have with them, it can be incredibly powerful and a very, very useful way of saving time.
	You don't want to start ending up getting involved with people, either in a professional or a personal in terms of friendship, but particularly in a romantic relationship.
	You have to guard your heart and you have to guard your penis.
	I hate to put it that bluntly to the men, but don't use your penis as the plumb line to nothing.
	You have to guard all of this kind of stuff.
	And for women, I know it sounds particularly ridiculous to say guard your virtue, but it is a very, very important aspect of life.
	One of the most important, if not the most important aspect of life.
	And I really think that it's very important to make sure that you bestow your favors on those who are worthy and not just sort of hand it out like candy.
	And as somebody who's occasionally been on the candy side, I can tell you.
	Oh, interesting.
	Showing up as someone different here.
	I don't see him either. I do not.
	Oh, here he is. I'm so sorry.
	Okay. Mr.
	L, are you up? Hello?
	Hello, go ahead. How are you doing?
	Fine, thanks. Just a question in reference to what you said earlier about...
	Well, not earlier today.
	It was a podcast you did.
	I think 555.
	It was about...
	Not saying or not using authority as a means to justify your points or something.
	Well, okay. Well, I've never really studied logic or debate before, and I was just wondering, what's the basis for saying that you should really use authority as a means of debating?
	Well, the basic idea, logic...
	Internal consistency of logic is not about evidence, right?
	So the theory of relativity is not true because Einstein said it was true, right?
	The theory of relativity is true because it passes the first test of a logical theory, which is that it's internally consistent.
	The first test of a logical theory is, is it internally consistent?
	The second test, particularly the scientific theory, is does it also conform with the nature of reality, the behavior of matter and energy and so on?
	So the argument from authority, the reason why it's illogical, is that you're saying that something is true because someone says it's true, right?
	So people say, well, there is such a thing as God because a priest has told me so.
	Well, a priest telling you so, the Bible telling you so, does not prove anything.
	All it does is it says that somebody has said something.
	It doesn't prove anything logically.
	So it may be true that if I say, well, my math teacher said that 2 plus 2 is 4, it may be correct, but it's not a logically valid thing to say that something is true because an authority has said so.
	So, you know, like people quote Einstein on everything, right?
	God does not play dice to dismiss quantum physics.
	And people quote Einstein on things like socialism and religion and so on.
	And yeah, he was a smart guy, no question, right?
	I mean, I totally get that, but the fact of the matter is that nothing is true because Einstein says it's true.
	Things are only true because of internal consistency and conformity with empirical evidence.
	Okay, so in the context of logical debate, you have to rationally state your case, not just say, well, X said so, so therefore it is so.
	Yes, and what I was also trying to get at there, which was a bit more of a subtle shading, is that I do think that it's worthwhile for...
	And I use myself as an example here, so I'll just go over the argument very briefly, which is to say, if somebody is consistently right...
	And shows intellectual integrity, a willingness to be corrected, shows evidence for his or her viewpoints, and so on.
	At some point, I think that it's fair to give that person the benefit of the doubt in certain situations, right?
	I obviously use myself that I like to think that I try and stick pretty closely to logic and evidence, and where I don't have logic and evidence, I try not to have an opinion, or if I do have an opinion, I try to say that this is just an opinion, and so on.
	So I try to sort of keep clear what it is that I'm talking about, and I'm certainly willing to be corrected, and my ego is pretty unimportant.
	The only important thing is the truth and the evidence and the reason of the position.
	So I think that after, as you say, 555 podcasts, Where I've tried to walk a pretty narrow line around presenting very new ideas for a lot of people and very unsettling ideas for a lot of people in a way that's sort of pleasant and positive and proven and open to correction and so on.
	That if on podcast 556, if you sort of have, I don't know if you've listened to that many, but if you have, or even if you've listened to just a couple of dozen...
	And you say, well, that Steph seems to have a fairly logical head on his shoulders.
	Then I think if you go through 555 podcasts and then you get really upset about something I say on podcast 556, that it may not be the most fair thing in the world to just suddenly say, well, Steph's just lost it.
	He's gone crazy. He's been rational for 555 podcasts, but boy, that must have been a strain for him because on 556, he's just gone nuts.
	So while it's certainly true that an argument from authority is not a valid argument, I think that credibility, like if somebody has been right a lot, if you go to a doctor for 20 years, and every time you go to the doctor, the doctor accurately cures the diagnosis and cures your ailments, Then, you know, on your 21st year, I don't think it makes sense to say, my doctor is now trying to kill me, if that sort of makes any sense.
	I think credibility and trust can be established and that can be a kind of shorthand, but even that doesn't make something true.
	It just means that when someone has established a kind of intellectual consistency, you may not necessarily need to go and check absolutely everything out that they're saying.
	Okay, but even if someone is consistent, doesn't that mean...
	That on some occasions they could be wrong, or does the consistency mean they always will be right?
	Well, no. The consistency of methodology is sort of more what I mean than, yeah, everybody makes errors, and errors are no problem.
	If you're terrified of error, then you're intellectually paralyzed and can't do anything.
	So I certainly agree with you that even if I've been right for 555 podcasts, which I would never claim, but it doesn't mean that all of the rest of the podcasts are going to be right.
	But what I find, what I was sort of talking about in that podcast was people who just kind of turned on me, right?
	There's been a couple of debates lately.
	I don't know if you've been visiting the board, but the debate about prostitution and the more recent one on universally preferred behavior have been pretty aggressive and sometimes verging on abusive.
	And people, you know, calling me names and so on.
	And what I find about that is that there's no need to get mad at me if I'm incorrect because I'm pretty consistent with the methodology.
	And if I'm incorrect, I'll always thank the person who is correcting me and be enormously relieved that I can go out and put something out that's more true rather than less true.
	So, that's sort of what I mean.
	It's not that I'm right or anything like that because I've been right before, but when people get sort of really aggressive with me, and then when I say, well, I think I've earned your trust, they say, ah, that's an argument from authority.
	I'm not saying that's what you're saying, but I think that there is something around sort of winning trust from people over time, and I think that I've...
	I've got sort of enough material out there that people who've plowed their way through a good deal of it might be unjust if they just sort of turn on me and call me crazy or culty or whatever.
	So that's sort of what I meant about that.
	I don't believe that's what you're saying, but that's what I meant there.
	Okay. Yeah, and also in the podcast, you mentioned that you believed that if someone was criticizing you in an angry fashion, then That indicates some sort of past history or abuse or something.
	Can you just clarify what you mean by that?
	Well, sure. And I mean, this is obviously a bit of a fine line for me to walk because I have certainly raised my voice in podcasts and been angry at people.
	So, you know, I'm aware that this could come across as completely hypocritical, but I'll sort of try and put sort of what I mean in front of it.
	So... I mean, the most recent podcast that I got angry on, and just for those who are new to listening to this show, it's not like every week I'm going horse, but, you know, the one on prostitution where I sort of clearly posted statistics about the sexual abuse history of prostitutes and where we posted my wife, who's a psychological associate, had worked with prostitutes, Prostitutes for many years.
	But we put this evidence forward and people continue to still say that pretty abusive things about my position and so on.
	And I posted more statistics and then posted more references and made the argument another different way.
	So after I had put, I don't know, a dozen posts in with statistics and information and facts, and after I had spent I think it was about 45 minutes to an hour going over my position in a podcast and then in an article and,
	you know, once you've gone through the argument a number of times with people, if people still continue to sort of insult your integrity and continue to ignore the facts and statistics and direct experience that you put forward, then to me it's perfectly okay to lose your temper.
	Especially if you're defending people who are, I think, being abused, like in the realm of prostitution.
	So I think that it's for me, and this is, you know, anger is a tricky topic, right?
	Because it gets abused quite a lot.
	And so I've put forward the argument for universally preferred behavior in an article called Proving Libertarian Morality, which is on Lou Rockwell and also on my blog, and it's also a podcast, I think.
	And I've done at least...
	Three or maybe four podcasts explaining the concept in more detail.
	Now, if people just jump in and start saying, well, you're stupid, there's no such thing as universally preferred behavior, and they haven't taken the time to read a two-and-a-half-page article where I've clearly laid out all of the syllogisms, the arguments step by step.
	They don't even have to unravel it from a paragraph.
	It's bullet form.
	If they don't take the time but just sort of jump in and start attacking, then yeah, I think it's okay to get angry.
	But if somebody puts forward an argument that I've never heard before and I just immediately get angry and start attacking that person, that would be because of my own history.
	So if there's no context for it, if there's been no patience on the part of the other person, if I haven't been abusive despite facts and evidence for quite some time, if somebody posts something and I just get immediately angry at them, Then I would say that that comes out of a past wherein I've either been exposed to a lot of either overt aggression or passive aggression, wherein a difference of opinion simply must be attacked and that usually comes from a family history.
	Okay.
	Yeah, okay.
	I've also got another question.
	Well, within the last week I wrote something on Strike the Root, just a basic article saying, or trying to describe how freedom of association leads on from self ownership.
	I just want to know, what's your opinion on that?
	You know, basically when trying to describe the concept of freedom of association with people is basically just sort of them saying, oh well, you're defending bigotry or something, which isn't really the case as such.
	I just want to know, how would you sort of describe how freedom of association would work?
	Well, it depends on your stomach for brutal metaphors.
	And I'm not one for the sort of shock value of metaphors.
	So, you know, my general approach would be, and I mean, I haven't read your article, but I'm from what you say, and I'd like to, so I'm sorry if I have missed it, if you posted it.
	But I think that we're of entirely the same opinion there, which is that if you own yourself, then surely you own what it is that you do, where it is that you go, who it is that you talk to, and so on.
	So, when people say that it's bigotry to assert freedom of association, you can try explaining it in more gentle manners around property rights and getting into business with people and so on, but if they remain sort of resolutely obtuse, then it would simply be a rough way of putting it, but I think an effective way of putting it would be to say...
	If a woman is on a date and the guy wants to have sex and the woman doesn't, is she obligated to have sex with him?
	Right? And of course, nobody in their right mind would say, yes.
	You know, if he's bought her dinner, then he's bought the use of her body for as long as he wants.
	I mean, that would be a form of slavery, right?
	So if a woman has the right to deny sexual intercourse to anyone at any time, then clearly she has the right to freedom of association.
	Right? And if she has the right of freedom of association, then surely, by the argument for morality, everyone does.
	You can't just have a right for one person or one sex and not for others, right?
	So if a woman has the right to say no to sexual advances, then everyone has the right of freedom of association simply by deduction.
	I hope that was your argument anyway, otherwise we're going to have another discussion completely.
	Does that sort of make sense? Well, I didn't really use the argument for morality.
	I just sort of basically said, as you said initially, that if you own yourself, then you own your values and how you would apply those values.
	Right. And of course, if there is a violation of freedom of association, if one person can be forced, this is another way that you can approach the topic using the...
	I don't want to push the argument for morality, but I do find it a pretty efficient way of looking at these things.
	If, let's say, there's yourself, myself, and my wife...
	And you have the right to go on a date with my wife and I can't say no because you can violate her freedom of association.
	Then, of course, you're saying that it's possible to violate freedom of association and force people to interact.
	But then it's true of everyone, right?
	So it becomes a self-contradictory proposition.
	If you're allowed to violate freedom of association by forcing my wife to go out with you, then my wife has the right to violate freedom of association by forcing you to go out with someone else.
	And I have the right to violate freedom of association by forcing you not to spend time with my wife, but rather with somebody else.
	So it's one of these rules that if it exists, it can only exist for a small number of people.
	Otherwise, it becomes entirely self-defeating.
	It's like saying that a man has the right to have sexual intercourse with a woman, but a woman has the right to deny him.
	Well, it's a contradictory premise, right?
	So the freedom of association thing, if one person is allowed to violate it, then everyone must be allowed to violate it, because you can't just make up different moral rules for different people with no reason.
	And so it could never actually work to have...
	It requires a government which is above the law and this and that, or some group that's above the law.
	So it's an innately self-contradictory idea.
	Yeah, okay. Yeah, I can't think of anything else to say now.
	Well, thanks very much. I appreciate it.
	Excellent, excellent questions, as always.
	It all depends.
	It all depends. Hello?
	Did somebody show me here?
	Yes, yes, it's me.
	And who is me?
	I'm Ahmed. Ah, pleased to chat with you.
	How are you doing? Yeah, fine.
	Thank you. So, what were you talking about?
	Sorry, what was I talking about?
	When? No.
	I'm sorry, were you listening to the show or not?
	I just want to make sure where you're coming from.
	No, no, no, I'm not.
	Okay. We were talking about freedom of association and the moral philosophy behind justifying freedom from association and so on.
	This is a show on ethics and philosophy and all that kind of good juicy stuff.
	So that's the sort of premise behind the show.
	If you haven't been listening, then it's probably not going to be too helpful for you to jump in with a question unless you have something around general ethics that you'd like to talk about.
	No?
	Well, I guess you lost that one.
	This is Dan Bender.
	I'm on the list there.
	Do you hear me? Yes, I certainly can.
	How are you doing? Okay, and yourself?
	Good. I was hoping for a really energetic discussion with somebody named Ahmed, but maybe it won't happen this week.
	Well, maybe I can stir something up.
	First of all, I'm a first-time listener to your podcast.
	I kind of discovered you through the Skypecast system and was listening to...
	Some of the conversations over the past hour, I suppose it is now.
	Well, thank you. By the way, you have a great way of speaking and a very enjoyable to listen to.
	Many of us have dating experiences that have gone both ways, good, bad, and every which way.
	One of the experiences I've had was where people had the push-pull syndrome.
	And that is where if you're interested in someone, you're pursuing them, they run.
	The moment you stop pursuing them, they chase you.
	Then you say, oh, well, I guess there is something there.
	Then you pursue them again, then they run.
	What are your thoughts on this?
	Hi, this is Christina speaking, Steph's wife.
	My thoughts about this, I'm the professional here in mental health.
	I'd say run. If you're pursuing someone and you're interested in that person, that person pulls away from you, and the moment that you realize, or you think, oh, that person's no longer interested in me, and then that person comes chasing after you, there's definitely a problem.
	I'd say that this is going to be, you know, everybody tells you what you need to know about them from the very beginning, so As soon as you show interest, they run away.
	As soon as you pull off, pull away, they come running after you.
	This is going to be a pattern in the relationship from here to eternity unless the person gets some help to try and figure it out.
	So I would say don't even engage.
	And I sort of add to that, I like to put some icing on Christina's cake, although it's perfectly palatable without it.
	I would say, we technically call this the Pepe Le Pure syndrome, if you've ever seen that old cartoon, you know, ah, chérie, you know, this, oh my God, you're a skunk, you know, this kind of stuff, ah, chérie.
	So this often has its roots in...
	How people relate romantically is often how they've related within their families.
	This is not any particular revelation.
	They've learned this sort of push-pull mechanism from parents, and it's been from day one.
	It's probably been from breastfeeding.
	So if you dress up as a giant breast and they start drooling, that's an indication.
	You want to do this testable.
	If you dress up as a giant breast and they still want to keep going out with you, Man, there's someone to hang on to.
	So that's another piece of advice.
	What's that old line from Woody Allen?
	I think it's a Midsummer Night's sex comedy.
	It's an old Woody Allen film where this giant breast is roaming the countryside and somebody who's chasing after is staring at it going, if I remember rightly, these things come in pairs.
	Then another one comes over the hill behind them.
	This is right back to the very beginning of life when we're learning what it means to interact with other people through our families.
	This kind of push-pull mechanism is not something that people are just going to be able to dry off themselves.
	They can't just wash it off and move on.
	These are deeply embedded personality traits.
	My wife sometimes calls them character logic, which means that they're not like a quirk, you know, like, I'm a nice guy and a good guy and I have a hobby called bird watching, right?
	That's like, you know, you could maybe talk someone out of bird watching if you didn't find it interesting.
	This is really embedded in the personality about how it is that you relate at a very fundamental level.
	You can't cure that kind of stuff.
	I mean, somebody can cure it themselves if they want to spend years in therapy, but you can't just sort of bungee in and fix people.
	The human personality is extraordinarily inert.
	It only changes under great stresses and provocations or under a great commitment to change.
	So this idea that love conquers all is really just a big excuse for people not to grow.
	I'm not saying you. I'm just sort of saying in general.
	Right. One thought I've always had is that there is a need in our school systems, and I'm not talking about just the U.S. or Canada, but pretty much in all school systems, that there should be a class that really deals with human interaction in the dating arena because people are not really educated.
	They end up growing out of puberty and then having to just kind of fumble around trying to figure out what's the right way or how to behave under dating circumstances and hence From that, all of this whole industry has grown up of dating books and shows about it and everybody's talking about it.
	But I think some of the fundamentals of dating and how to interact, the sexist, how they should interact with each other.
	I suppose there's going to be different cultures that are going to say, well, no, we believe this way and another culture believes that way.
	But perhaps some of the basics could be taught in a class, just like you go ahead and have a driver's ed class in school or in a high school or something along those lines.
	I mean, I remember when I was in high school, it was a strange combination.
	I had driver's ed and BED all in the steps taught by the same teacher.
	I think in the same way there should be a class that teaches interaction.
	You had driver's ed.
	What was the second one? VV, venereal disease.
	Oh, yes, human sexuality.
	But there's some real practicality in that approach because most teenagers do have their first sexual experiences in a car.
	So putting those two together, I can certainly see the logic behind that.
	Again, one more line from a Kevin Smith movie.
	They're talking about...
	Oh, she had sex in a really uncomfortable place.
	Talking about some sexual practice that we don't need to get into here.
	And the answer was always, what, the backseat of a Volkswagen?
	And that was their approach.
	But I absolutely agree with you that, ideally, people should be raised by families that are healthy and positive and so on, which is going to teach them a lot about this kind of stuff.
	But again, even people that I've known who've come from these kinds of families still have problems in the dating arena because this stuff's just not obvious, right?
	Plus, hormones tend to overwash at a lot of her better judgment.
	But you're right. The problem would be, you know, it's like, why are you teaching my children?
	Put them in a burqa! They are not to have sex until their father tells them to on their wedding night or something.
	So the problem is, you know, in general, this is a show about...
	Ostensibly not about sex in the backseat of Voxwagons, but about anarchistic philosophy.
	And the general purpose would be we'd all be a lot better off if we didn't have a public school system so that we could actually get values taught in a school, right?
	Right now, values in any public school system are radioactive, right?
	Because no matter what values you come up with, you're going to offend some people to the point where they'll be storming Capitol Hill or the Houses of Parliament or something.
	So we end up with this incredibly neutral education in terms of values where you learn stuff like Uncontroversial history.
	You learn calculus.
	You learn certain aspects of science, but nothing to do with the philosophy of science, which would offend religious people.
	So there's a very...
	Well, you could probably solve the problem by having the teacher send home a notice with the student saying that at a certain time we're going to be going through this or that a certain class is being offered and this is an optional class.
	As a result, the parent has to sign off that the student is permitted to take this class, but it is a class that is offered to all students in high school, let's say, in the sophomore year or something like that.
	This way they have this exposure.
	If it's something that, due to cultural or religious reasons, they don't believe, This material should be coming from the school, then the parent can decide not to allow the student to go in there.
	Well, I think that's a very, very interesting idea.
	In the entire history of public schools, which I guess has been running for about 135 years now, this has never occurred.
	Can you think why?
	Because they want to just run it a certain way, and that's that.
	Right. So, I mean, I don't mean to sound disrespectful, and I certainly do respect your desire to have children exposed to more sensible values, which I completely share with you.
	But I think that the problem with theories about how government-run, coercively-based school systems could run better is that nobody has any incentive to take that on, right?
	I mean, it's not like there's any competition or they're going to lose students if they don't provide a good service to the parents.
	They're really just, you know, protecting their political turf, and there are some well-meaning people within the system and so on, but nobody's going to take that on because no politician would ever want to lose the votes.
	Because the people who agree with a certain policy like that never go out and protest, but everybody who disagrees, and there would be lots of people, why is my funding, why are my taxes going to fund this immoral education or whatever, right?
	That would go out and cause a lot of violence.
	If they are catch-22, yet, you know, you find society spending so much time on trying to figure out the dating game.
	Especially in those early years and then often they end up having dreadful relationships because they don't recognize a bad apple when they start dating one and next thing you know they have a pregnancy and they have a marriage and it's just not a good combination and what ends up happening is the child that comes from that relationship is harmed and here you have a cycle that continues because people just really didn't have The basics that probably their parents didn't have or if they had it and had learned it through the hard way,
	weren't willing to go ahead and teach it to their kids.
	No, I think you're absolutely right.
	This cycle of family problems, without a doubt, continues until someone in some generation steps up and says, enough.
	And that is the person usually castigated by everybody else in the family, so it's a very tough role to take, right?
	It's like, whoa, what do you mean you're not going to take it anymore?
	Out of here! You're not invited for Christmas or whatever, right?
	So it's a tough role to take for sure.
	Did you have another question?
	No, not at this point. Just one other suggestion I would like to pass on regarding this Skypecast system, which is part of the reason why I was playing it as I was trying to figure it out.
	But since you do have the control of removing people who you've already spoken to, I believe if you take the ones off that you've already spoken to, then you don't have the chance of getting their background noise.
	So always just keep one on from what I can tell and how the system works.
	I think that you're absolutely right.
	Thank you for that tip. And the last thing I'll do is invite you, if you'd like to drop by, this show is sort of an outgrowth of some number that I won't get into with you right now, of podcasts that are available at freedomainradio.com.
	You might want to check that out. Actually, I'll have your website up and enjoy looking at it, and I'll be listening to some of your other podcasts.
	I hope you don't mind if I push a podcast myself a little bit, one that actually is in the genre of what we've been talking about, known as the Singles Podcasting Network, where we have about 30 shows up there now where we interview experts in the dating industry.
	I brought up this topic because I don't think we've ever really talked about that one in the show that I've been producing.
	But certainly the push-pull concept is one that has been near and dear to my heart from a past experience, shall we say.
	But anyway, it's been a pleasure talking to you and I appreciate for you taking my call.
	Thanks so much. If you'd like to send me an email, there's a form on the website.
	I'd be more than happy to post your site on the board, so feel free to send that in, and I'd be happy to do that, because it's a very, very essential topic.
	I mean, we can't save everyone, and if we're going to focus our efforts on trying to promote mental health, we definitely want to get people as young as possible before they have kids, for sure.
	All right. Thank you so much.
	Very nice to chat with you. Now, do we have anybody else?
	The board is open.
	The mics are open if you would like to chat.
	You feel free to click on the request mic button.
	And what will happen when you click on that button, actually, a small electrical shock goes through Christina's chair.
	She rises up and attempts to grapple the mic from me with a cattle prod, a stun gun, and again, the ever-present baby oil.
	And if she is able to wrestle the microphone from me, no easy task, as you can well imagine, then there is a possibility that you might get a couple of words in Edgewise before I tackle her again.
	So if you have anything to chat about, feel free to raise this as just click on Request Mike.
	I'd be certainly happy to.
	Steph, the interrupter.
	John E. wanted to talk, but he is gone.
	Gone. Gone from us.
	Ahmed says, F you.
	But I guess that's not exactly an argument from authority, but argument from profanity.
	All right, we had that.
	Gentlemen. Zayan El-Baghdadi says hi, but he's no longer around.
	I can just keep reading my chats, which I haven't gotten around to.
	Jovan Joaquik says this call will be recorded.
	If you decline to be recorded, please end the call.
	Well, I think I mentioned that at the beginning.
	And one last person has sent me a message.
	May I ask what podcast is the guy doing?
	Too bad we didn't hear from him.
	That would have been quite interesting to try and pass that.
	So, all right.
	He said the same to me too, whoever that was.
	Well, he may have been...
	Ah, Daniel Bender, this is the website.
	He says singlespodcastingnetwork.com.
	Singlespodcastingnetwork.com.
	They have about 30 podcasts, as he mentioned, so if they have any dating advice up there, very, very, very important.
	The hell that I have seen, the radioactive wasteland that people's lives turn into when they get married to the wrong person, Oh, my God.
	I mean, you just want to see living and livid human misery.
	You know, when I was earlier on the show making the metaphor come alive with my artistic abilities such as they are, when I was making the metaphor of the black foot come alive, Christina was turning a few shades of green.
	That hell of having a foot rotting and toes falling off is as nothing compared to what happens to your heart and soul if you get married to the wrong person and if you get...
	If you have children with the wrong person.
	I almost married the wrong person.
	And I bought the ring, I proposed, and then I took the ring back and left the relationship.
	And I consider that even if I had never met Christina and never known the bliss of an enormously happy married life, I would have considered that an enormous bullet to have dodged.
	But it is, and of course all the signs that were there, and I try not to sort of say, ah, you know, this is all obvious.
	This stuff is very hard to figure out.
	All the signs that were there that I was asking our earlier caller about were there for me as well, and I just wasn't tuned into looking out for them, right?
	And this is another way in which we try to bring more virtue into the world, right?
	If we end up As virtuous men and women going out with non-virtuous men and women, then we're not exactly that interested in virtue, right?
	I mean, we're sort of not, we don't really believe in it, right?
	I mean, and that's really a bad place to be.
	If you're going to believe in virtue, then believe in virtue, but then the first place you need to bring it outside of your own life is into your romantic relationships, much more important even than your friend's relationship, a relationship with your friends and family, because you don't raise children with your friends.
	If we really want to inculcate virtue in people, then we really should only put out for goodness.
	I put out for goodness.
	Maybe that should be a... I put out for virtue.
	It should be the t-shirt and bumper sticker that we put together.
	But it is a very serious issue, I think, a very important issue.
	If virtue and courage and honor and decency and self-respect are things that you value or claim to value in your philosophy, then the first place, and it was the last place that I got it going in my life, but not quite the last, it was more, I think with my family it was the last, or my family of origin, but... If you're interested in virtue, then the place that you need to bring it first and foremost is to your romantic relationships.
	And the only way that you can do that is, well, I guess we won't go into the whole process because there's a lot of podcasts on it, but to bring virtue to life, we really do need to bring it into our romantic relationships.
	No, Greg did mention that he didn't have the stomach for politics this weekend, so we will chat with him, I'm sure, next weekend.
	We will decide.
	Sorry? Yes.
	Is anyone going to be around next weekend?
	What's the 24th? The 24th, what I would suggest, because there's really nothing better than a free domain radio Christmas, what I would suggest is we'll get the Whisper Wrap worked out.
	We'll get a bunch of freedom elves to get to work for us to create a massive choral masterpiece of freedom-loving statements.
	Gather the kids, gather the family around, get some chestnuts roasting on an open fire, some marshmallows, and a couple of...
	Of Santa suits. Sit around and throw on the old Freedom Aid radio show, and we'll rant about politics and relationships, and it'll be a heartwarming family Christmas, and the children will be asleep by 6 p.m., and that's surely a pretty good Christmas for everyone.
	So is there anyone who's going to be around next weekend, just out of curiosity?
	Anyone, anyone, want to do a show next Sunday?
	Okay, wait, we've got somebody responding.
	Might be, won't be able to.
	Yeah, because, I mean, there's some people who have tried to work things out with their family, haven't had much luck.
	They are going to have a challenging Christmas.
	That first Christmas, you know, it's like, as I was saying to Christina when we were first dating, it's like that first Christmas off crack that's hard, right?
	Because you have so many positive memories associated with crack and Christmas that the first Christmas you're without the crack, it's...
	Well, it's tough, I remember.
	All right. So maybe we'll have a short chat, a fireside free-domain radio chat Christmas of next week.
	So, all right.
	Well, we've been going for just a little over two hours.
	If anybody has any last sort of questions, comments, issues, problems, feel free to click on Request Mike.
	And otherwise, we will close down for the week and resume our regularly scheduled Eat Fest, known as December.
	So I'll just give people a second to see if they wish to join or wish to have anything else that they wish to add to the topics of this show, which has been everything under the sun and a few things interstellar.
	Anyone? No.
	All right. Well, listen, thank you so much for everyone for listening.
	I really appreciate it.
	It's been a wonderful chat, and I certainly appreciate, as I mentioned last week, the growth in the shows has been quite exciting.
	And are you going to do Ask the Therapist today, or is this being pushed later?
	I think we'll do it later. We've got to eat, and we've actually got to – we just bought a Christmas tree because we enjoy killing vegetation.
	And so we are going to hang the ornaments on our dead wood.
	So we've still got that to do and so on.
	So I hope that everyone has a wonderful week.
	I will post on the boards about whether we'll be doing a show next weekend, and it will only happen if Christina gets seriously swastled on eggnog and falls asleep.
	So that will depend on what we can mix into her.
	Sorry? Yeah. Oh yeah, sorry, lactose intolerant, no eggnog for her.
	All right. Well, thanks, everyone.
	I'll leave this running in case anybody wants to chat with each other, but ask a drug therapist, right?
	Excellent. Excellent.
	Oh, stop your whining!
	You think you've got problems?
	Okay. Well, thanks very much, everyone.
	Again, I really appreciate your time, and have yourselves a great week.
	We might chat with you next weekend.

▲