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May 3, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:32
742 It Really Matters Where You Point Your Dick...

Don't dump your swimmers in just any ole crick!

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Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well, Estef.
8.36. Ooh, already got a little late this morning.
On May the 3rd, I think, 2007.
And an interesting moral question posed by a listener, and I'm going to go out on a limb and make some guesses about said listener, because I think it's very instructive when we look at Why sort of obvious moral issues are completely missed by very intelligent and clearly morally concerned people.
I think that's a very interesting question, and I think we have a good example of it.
I'm sorry I can't read it.
I was running too late, but it wasn't a long post, so I think I can recall it mostly from memory.
The argument started, or the debate, it wasn't an argument, and it was a perfectly pleasant debate, and I certainly respect that.
But the debate started when this gentleman was talking about whether social ostracism was the same as abuse between a parent and a child.
And it was an excellent, excellent argument.
Insofar as he said, a child is dependent upon the parent.
So if the parent ostracizes the child, the child's survival is threatened.
But... We all depend upon others in society because we're not self-sufficient.
We can't grow our own food or we can't be our own doctors.
We can't be our own dentists or whatever.
So we're all dependent upon people in society.
And therefore, since we're dependent on society in the way that a child is dependent on his parents, is social ostracism from society not exactly the same as Ostracism from a parent.
Excellent, excellent argument.
It's not true, but it was a great argument, and that's exactly the kind of stuff that we should be debating and discussing because it's very, very important.
Briefly, it's not true because there's no such thing as society that will ostracize you.
There's always some place where you can go.
And of course, the difference is that you are dependent upon this thing called society.
And what that really means is that you benefit from trading with other people.
Of course, the people who involve themselves in trade are always better off.
But then if they don't, right? I mean, it's the old example that if I give you five bucks for a pen, for sure, if we're not coerced by the government or by a mugger into doing the trade, then we're both better off.
Because clearly, if you voluntarily give up your pen for my five dollars, you want my five dollars more Then you want your pen, and I want your pen more than I want my five dollars.
So we're both better off. It's total win-win, and that's the beauty of the free market.
The coerced market, which is not a market at all, not so much, right?
But the free market is definitely a win-win situation, and we know that objectively because we know we can read what people do.
So the difference when you're an adult is that there is no such thing called society that will shun you, and You are dependent upon other people, but of course other people are all dependent upon you.
It's an ecosystem of interdependence.
There's no one side of the line called society and another side called you as an individual.
And you are simply dependent upon society the way that a child is dependent upon a parent.
It's a complex web of interdependence.
And if you have something of value to bring to people, they will trade with you.
And if you don't, then they won't.
I mean, they may give you money through charity and so on, but it is not the same as aggressive.
We're not dependent upon society.
All human beings who are adults are interdependent upon one another for mutual trade, for mutual benefit.
I mean, that's just from an economic standpoint, which is primarily what this guy was talking about.
There's all this other juicy stuff, you know, love and all that kind of stuff as well, but just from a sort of material allocation standpoint, we are not dependent upon society.
We are all dependent upon one another, and what that means is that ostracism is not abuse.
For instance, I do not interact economically with the vast majority of mankind.
I have never engaged in trade with Mother Teresa when she was alive.
I don't think even indirectly.
Does that mean that I was ostracizing her and that everyone I do not trade with I am abusing?
Well, that wouldn't really stand to common sense, although it's a great argument, don't get me wrong.
It really is an excellent, sophisticated argument.
I do think it's false, and of course I'm certainly willing to be corrected.
To not trade with someone is not the same as abusing.
So if I have five job offers and I just take one and decide not to take the other four, it's not the same as if I go up and key the car of the other four guys I was interviewing with.
It's a big difference. Freedom of association means that not associating is not the same as abuse.
So ostracism is by far the...
I mean, if you want to call ostracism like not engaging with someone, ostracism is...
The norm for mankind, that we don't trade with the vast majority of people directly, we just trade with a couple of people around us, or a couple of dozen.
So it's hard to see that ostracism would be the same as abuse because then the vast majority, well, everybody would be an abuser.
And then the term would sort of be meaningless.
And also we would call an abuser somebody who didn't take a job along with somebody who beat his wife.
So I just don't see those in the same moral categories.
But again, this is just my perspective on it.
I think it's a good argument. I think it's false.
But this is sort of where it started.
And then it moved on to something else.
Which was, and I'm not sure exactly why it moved on to this, other than for psychological reasons, but the next question was, if you're having sex with a woman and she lies to you about being on birth control and she gets pregnant,
And the man... I'm skipping a few steps here, so I apologize for that, but I think you'll see where this is going.
And the man doesn't want the child, doesn't want responsibility for the child, and wants the mother to have an abortion, and the mother chooses to have the child and to raise the child.
It's the man morally obligated to provide for said child.
It's the...
Gosh, what was it?
The... Fatal attraction scenario, right?
So, you're on a business trip, and you have sex with some woman, and she says, oh, I'm on the pill, and it turns out she gets pregnant.
Are you obligated?
This, that, and the other. Well...
Of course, this is something that society will just work out.
Oh, and just, sorry, just before we get to that...
Ostracism certainly is a powerful tool that society can use to deal with criminals or people who commit violent actions.
We've talked about this way back at the very beginning of this podcast series many moons ago that DROs could work to exclude people from the civilized economy if they were bad at their contracts or whatever.
I don't think that it's bad to ostracize Like, violent criminals or people who steal through contract or through force.
I don't think people would say, well, it's abusive to ostracize people, right?
That's like saying that it's abusive to not date your rapist, right?
I mean, not associating with a criminal seems to me like a very good thing to do.
That's why defooing is...
It's the cornerstone of what we do, and not that you must defoe, of course, but that you must rationally evaluate your parents according to objective moral standards, and that to continue to enable or support people who commit themselves to your destruction is not virtuous, in fact, it is cowardly and...
once you know, once you understand, right?
It's cowardly and corrupt.
So, of course, society will work this out, But I'll give you my opinion, and then you can let me know what you think.
This gentleman put forward this idea and said, well, if somebody's walking down the street and they get mugged, clearly they're not morally responsible for that.
If a woman lies to you about being on birth control and you have sex with her, is that not in some way similar to being mugged?
And therefore you're not morally responsible for it and therefore you should not have to support or pay for whatever said children.
Well, it's a mighty complex question, and I'm not sure how clear the answer can be totally.
Because he said, well, a man who, a woman who, let me see if I can remember this rightly, and I may or may not get it correct.
You know what, I'm not even going to bother because I'm not sure I can get that correct.
So I'm sorry, you can't find it on the board under social ostracism as the title of the thread.
Or is social ostracism abuse?
I think it's in response to Podcast 740.
So, basically, this man is highly concerned with the freedom that the man does not have.
If the woman lies about birth control, she gets pregnant, and she refuses to give up the child, this man is very concerned, and I can certainly understand why, that the gentleman in question Does not have any freedom.
His freedom is taken away by this lying, conniving woman and so on.
I can sort of understand that.
I can understand the concern, but let me tell you what I think, and then you can tell me how unjust I may be being.
First of all, I don't really believe that there's a similarity in ethical situations between being mugged and being hoodwinked I don't really believe that there's a similarity in ethical situations between being mugged and being hoodwinked into right? Certainly it's not a good woman who lies about being on birth control, and it can happen accidentally, but there's just never any way...
I guess you could do a hormone test and see if the pill hormones were there or whatever, right?
But... It can happen like the condom breaks.
It can happen the IUD doesn't work.
It can happen that you have sex with a woman and she gets pregnant and she won't have an abortion and then she has a baby and blah, blah, blah.
And so he's very concerned with the freedom of the man here.
But it's different because when you are walking down the street and get mugged, you are not doing any...
I mean, unless you're, I don't know, walking down the street of a really bad neighborhood with $100 bills pinned to the outside of your jacket and pretending to be drunk and basically just begging to be rolled, right?
Assuming that's not the case, assuming you're not out there just taunting and, I don't know, you're some wannabe vigilante who wants to get mugged so you can blow someone away.
I don't know, right? But if you're just sort of walking down the street and you're not exposing yourself to any significant danger and some guy pounces on you, it's the police.
Then you are not doing anything to bring harm upon yourself.
You're not taking any positive actions to bring harm upon yourself.
If you pin the $100 bills to your jacket, pretend to be drunk and roll around a bad neighborhood at 2 o'clock in the morning, Shouting, what am I going to do with all this high-grade quality crack in my pockets?
And you stumble past the crack house, well, then you are taking positive actions to bring harm upon yourself, and the resulting harm can scarcely be said to be entirely the other person's fault.
Of course, it is still wrong to mug someone, but there's things that you're doing to provoke the situation.
I mean, there's a difference between a woman who is sitting at home reading a book and some brutal thug comes in and rapes her, and a woman who is stone drunk at a frat party dancing topless on a table.
These situations are not morally the same.
The rapist is wrong in either case.
But to me, there's a difference between if you get mugged walking down the street in a nice neighborhood and it comes out of nowhere, or you leave your wallet for two days on a bench in Central Park in New York.
Yeah, whoever takes your wallet is wrong, but it's kind of stupid to leave your wallet on a bench in Central Park in New York for a couple of days, and then you come back and you're like, oh, shocked, oh, appalled, the world is so evil, somebody stole my wallet.
Well, there's quite a bit of difference between these things, right?
So, the question of the man's responsibility if he impregnates a woman is not the same as being mugged, because being mugged...
You're simply going about the normal course of your life and somebody intervenes in a way that does in fact make you helpless, right?
We assume that being mugged means having a knife to your throat or, I don't know, a gun to your chest or something like that.
Well, you're not doing anything to provoke the situation.
But if you have sex with a woman, well, that's quite a standard you're taking, right?
I mean, you're actually initiating action that if you did not initiate that action, the situation that resulted Would never occur.
Would never occur.
So by putting your dick in the fuzzy spot, you are initiating action without which, if you did not initiate that action, the resulting problems would never have occurred.
So you are a necessary but not sufficient cause of the resulting child.
Necessary in that without your sperm there's no kid, unless buddy Jesus is coming back.
But not sufficient insofar as the woman can have an abortion or maybe she wouldn't get pregnant or whatever.
But for sure, nothing's going to happen unless you put your swimmers in the ocean.
Canal? Canal.
Better metaphor.
If it's an ocean, it's probably not that good.
So, there's no question that the man is not helpless.
Okay.
I mean, you get raped while you're sitting at home reading a book, and you've locked your doors and whatever, right?
I mean, then you're kind of helpless.
To some degree. I mean, you can fight back and whatever.
Death before dishonor or whatever.
Not that I'd choose that, but that could be an option.
But if you go chat up a woman in a bar and you date her, or even if you just sort of do that Hollywood, like, you know, hi!
And it was in these movies and TV shows, right?
Hi! And then you just end up rolling around in bed.
It's ridiculous, right?
Maybe for the sociopaths who make these movies, this is the natural progression of human relationships, but I can see why Phil Spector ended up killing his wife.
But... If you are taking very positive steps to have sex with a woman, which men do, right?
I mean, we don't exactly get jumped on the subway, at least I never have.
If you're taking very positive steps to seduce and have sex with a woman, you are, without a doubt, the causal factor of the resulting disaster.
Because you can't be raped, right?
Men can't be raped, at least by women, at least I don't think so.
So at least I can't imagine it.
And it's probably so rare that whatever I know.
Unless you get a fear stiffy, I don't know.
I guess it happened on Desperate Housewives, Viagra and wine.
But that's pretty rare, I've got to assume.
So you're taking totally active steps to impregnate the woman.
Now, there's a sort of fundamental thing that...
It's not really talked about that much in society.
At least I don't think it is.
At least maybe it is only by the Christians, which I think is really sad.
But who you have sex with is actually pretty important.
Who you have sex with is actually pretty important.
Your dick is like a compass.
Thank you.
Pointing you at a different future.
At the same future, a better future, or a worse future.
Actually, you never get the same future.
It's always better or worse. And if you follow your dick down, so to speak, then you will have a very unhappy life.
And if you try and point your dick at virtuous people, then your soul and yourself will realign to have a much better life.
People want men...
I'm talking to the dudes here, right?
I mean, we want... First of all, there's something that's sexy about the bad girls.
We might as well be honest about that, right?
The bad, neurotic, uptight girls, or not so much the uptight girls, but the bad, neurotic, crazy girls, it's easy to get them into bed, frankly.
You can get them into bed, and you can have sex relatively quickly.
The problem is, if you stay in the relationship, the sex dries up also pretty quickly.
It's like heroin. You're happy for a while, and then you're not happy for a long time.
So everybody wants the quick stuff.
The virtuous girls don't give it up so easy, because they've got some self-respect, and they want to evaluate you.
Measure the dick, so to speak.
Is he worthy of playing hide the sausage with me?
That's an important question for women.
So the women who have no self-esteem or who are rancid or corrupt or...
I mean, yeah, they'll give it up quickly because they don't want you to find out who they are and they don't want to find out who you are.
And the fact that you're willing to have sex with them without knowing them tells them all that they need to know about you, which is that you're not really a very...
A very refined or judgmental person, you don't have a whole deal of self-esteem, and you're sort of like a kid in a candy store.
You'll just grab whatever you want and to hell with losing my teeth.
So you're their kind of guy, right?
So if you haven't done the work to sort of evaluate where your dick is pointing you, figure out what virtue is and how to be a good person, That's your responsibility.
If you decide not to learn about nutrition and you eat bags of refined sugar all day and you get diabetes, well, you decided not to learn about nutrition.
And there's a price for that, right?
And these days, you have to studiously avoid learning anything about nutrition.
You're going to have to blindfold yourself.
So if you decide not to do the work, and if you're raised badly and you're into sort of short-term gains, long-term pains, which is what happens when you're raised badly...
And you don't do the work to become a better person and point your dick in the right direction, then that's your issue, right?
So you've decided to go and have sex with women who are not good women, right?
Bad women. Corrupt, evil, self-hating women.
That's your choice. And everyone, what the hell?
It's your life. Your choice.
Your choice, though, my brother, your consequences.
Your choice, your consequences.
A virtuous woman will not lie about being on birth control.
A virtuous woman will not have an affair and then try and pass the kid off as yours.
A virtuous woman will not, I don't know, trick you into having sex.
Say, oh, don't worry, you can pull out and then clamp down if she's on top and, you know, grab your seed and farm herself and then say, well, sucks to be you.
You now owe me three grand a month for the rest of the kids' youth.
So good women don't do that.
A good woman would never do that.
Would never do that.
So... If you're going to dip your wick in a corrupt container, then that's your deal, right?
If you're going to go to the Amazon and you're not going to get any shots and you get sick, well, you went to the Amazon, you didn't get any shots.
That's your choice. Take what you want and pay for it.
If you don't end up trying to be a good person and point your dick towards good women, then that's your choice.
And you get to avoid all of the pain of self-growth and really evaluating yourself, as we've talked about recently.
That's fine. Then you can avoid that pain.
And I've got no problem with people who avoid that pain.
I think it's a really bad idea.
But I sure as Sherlock don't want to pay for the consequences of that.
I'm not going to monitor what you eat.
If you get diabetes, well...
Because you ate badly or didn't exercise, that's your deal.
I've got better things to do than to monitor what people eat, but I sure as hell don't want to pay for their treatments.
Choices and consequences, my friends.
You make the choice. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
Ironic with Robert Blake, right?
I don't want to do the time.
So the last thing that I sort of mentioned about this...
Yeah, so, I mean, my DRO would be like, hey, if the kid's yours, you pay.
I don't care what happened. You raped her, she fooled you.
Doesn't matter. The kid's yours, you pay.
Because you voluntarily impregnated a woman.
And whether she lied to you or this or that, who cares?
Who knows? Plus, you'd never...
You'd never find out anyway.
There's a lot of quantum physics in ethical questions, and you have to be practical about this kind of stuff.
We'll talk more about this another time.
But here's the basic situation.
In quantum mechanics, you can measure either the direction or the place of an electron, but the moment you try and measure it, you change its position.
It's the same thing with the welfare state, right?
Gee, there's not a lot of poor people.
Let's give the remaining poor a lot of money so that poverty disappears.
But the problem is then you subsidize poverty, which means it increases.
And the moment you touch it, you change the factors, you change the direction, you change everything.
So let's say that a DRO had a rule that said, oh, if you get a woman pregnant and you say that she lied to you about being on birth control, then you're not financially responsible for the resulting kid.
But it's a meaningless thing to say.
It's a meaningless thing to say.
Because you'll never know.
You'll never know. Because then all the jerks in the world who get bad women pregnant will say, oh, she lied to me about birth control, and all the women who lied about birth control will say, I told him the truth.
He accepted the risk with full knowledge.
So it doesn't matter what rule you'll make up, people will just lie.
They'll just lie. So, it doesn't matter what rule you make up, whether it's she lied or she didn't lie.
This is sex, people. People will just lie about it.
This is sex and money, the things that people lie about the most.
So, you can make up all the rules that you want, but the moment you make up a rule, everybody will change their story.
You'll never know the truth.
I guess you could have tape recordings and contracts, but that's never going to happen.
So, it doesn't matter, right?
I mean... You'll never know.
These are rules in a vacuum, a vacuum of truth, a vacuum of honesty.
So here's the last thing that I'll sort of say about this, because this gentleman is very concerned about the freedom of the man who's been hoodwinked by the woman and she now wants to have his baby and he's maybe on the hook or whatever, right?
He's very concerned about the man.
So he has no freedom, she says.
He says, this man has no freedom.
Well, that's nonsense. You've got oral sex.
You've got restoration.
You've got anal sex.
You've got hand jobs.
You've got double condom penetration, if you want.
You've got lots of, I don't know, foot jobs.
You've got lots of things that can get your rocks off without having them swim upstream to fertility central.
And you've got masturbation for yourself, like not having sex with bad women to begin with, right?
I don't know. You got internet porn.
It's not like every hotel on the planet has porn, right?
It's not like you've got to look at a picture of the Virgin Mary and get all conflicted trying to get off, right?
I mean, you don't have to crack the Encyclopedia Britannica and use those clear pages and try and get to some skin so you don't imagine having sex with organs or something, right?
You don't have to find a National Geographic with those pendulous African breasts, right?
It's not like it's that hard to get off these days, right?
You don't have to do all these things, right?
You don't have to heat up a watermelon or any of these things, right?
So, yeah, you've got tons of choices.
Tons of choices. But once you've made...
Once you've eliminated all those other choices and you've ejaculated inside a woman and she happens to be on her cycle and she's pregnant and she doesn't want to have the...
Well, then, my friend, you've created life.
You have created life.
Now, let's forget about the whole abortion thing just for now, and I've talked about it before, and I don't want this to get sidetracked by that.
But life comes to turn, right?
Oh, he says, and I totally understand why, and he says, you know, the guy has no freedom in this situation.
Well, sure, he has no freedom, but that's because he's already exercised freedom.
I'm free to sign a contract.
Once I sign a contract, I'm bound by the contract.
I can try and negotiate my way out of it, but I'm bound by the contract.
If I take the goods, if I eat the meal, I'm now bound to pay it.
I don't owe a restaurant 50 bucks just by walking past it, but the moment I sit down and eat the meal, I owe a restaurant 50 bucks.
I mean, it's not that complicated, right?
So once you do the stuff, you then have the obligation.
So you're totally free to not have sex with women, but once you have sex with a woman, she gets pregnant, baby, you're not free anymore.
But I'll tell you who's not free.
In this situation. And it's not unimportant that this gentleman did not think about this.
That he's only concerned with the freedom of the man.
It's important.
I'll tell you who's not free in this situation.
And who's not free is the baby.
the child is not free how would we feel about a guy who sold his baby to white slavers so that that baby would then be a slave for 20 years
Probably not that good. We'd probably say, you know, I gotta tell you, selling your kid into white slavery so the kid can be tortured and abused for 20 years, not really such a good action, my friend.
And I don't really see how it's fundamentally different.
To have a child with a bad woman who is going to torture and abuse that child for 20 years, I don't see how it's any better to give a bad woman a child as it is to take a child and sell it into slavery.
You are giving a child to an abuser, my friend, if you have sex with a bad woman and she gets pregnant and she has the kid than you have created life and handed it over to a torture chamber.
I don't really think that's so good, and I would say that you have all the choice in the world as far as impregnating a woman goes, but the child who has resulted from that impregnation, who has no choice in the matter, who just gets born in Nature's blind photocopy shop, that child has no choice in the matter,
right? That child is delivered up to a life of horrendous abuse, and it may not be horrendous, it may just be run-of-the-mill abuse, but still, Maybe the person you're selling your kid to in terms of slavery is not a bad master.
But who has no choice in the matter, who I have sympathy for, is not the father who banged a bad woman.
Who I have sympathy for is the child who results from that.
Who has no choice in the matter.
And I think that the man should worry just a little bit less about his own, quote, freedom, and just a little bit more about the child that he has delivered unto slavery and torture.
Because a woman who lies about being on birth control, has a kid, and uses that kid as leverage to get money, this is a bad woman.
This is a badass, stinking corrupt woman.
This is a woman whose estrogen runneth red with evil.
Because she's using a child as leverage.
What's going to happen when she's a mom?
She's going to use that child. Use and abuse that child.
So I guess I would say that, I would guess that this gentleman has, if not something similar, knows, has had something similar or knows somebody who's had something similar, or maybe it was his own parents.
But listen, it's really important where you point your dick.
It's really, really important where you point your dick.
It would be a great thing for the virtue of women if men stopped having sex with bad women.
Supply and demand would change people's behavior, just as it would be a great thing for women if they stopped having kids or stopped having sex with guys who were assholes.
If we cut off the supply of sex, we will change people's behavior fairly rapidly, much more rapidly even than defooing.
Defooing is generational, right?
This is much more rapid. So when you have sex with a bad person, you're just encouraging evil, right?
You can do it. Do whatever you want, right?
But I'm just telling you, if you have sex with a bad person, you're just rewarding evil.
You're saying evil, yeah, I'm great.
I'm good with that. I'm good with evil.
I'm good with corruption. I'm good with low self-esteem, self-hatred manipulation, control, abuse.
I'm good with it. You're just encouraging.
You're subsidizing. Right?
It's the sperm subsidy, right?
So, yeah, I would say don't have sex with bad people.
I mean, for yourself, of course, it lowers your own self-esteem and doesn't make you exactly proud to look in the mirror.
Right? Both for men and women, of course, and you're really subsidizing bad people and saying that bad people can have great sex, which is not a good thing to do.
And if you get caught in a trap that results from that, I don't have much sympathy for you, but I sure as hell do for your kid.
All right, we're stopped at a light.
It's safe for me to stop this podcast.
Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it.
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