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July 22, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:11
1110 Bringing Virtue to Families

Families, freedom and virtue - the theory.

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Good evening, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is Monday night, and I hope that you're doing very well.
I had a, just for those who are maybe up, maybe not, on the latest media doings at the Freedomain-ish radio, I had a nice chat today with a reporter from She works for a British newspaper called The Guardian, which is a fairly well-known newspaper.
And my understanding is that a parent of a listener who has separated, at least temporarily, from his or her family, she contacted this reporter.
And this reporter is pursuing or doing a story, or at least doing research for a story, on a free domain radio.
So... She called me today and we had a pleasant chat for about 30 or 35 minutes and she had a series of obviously good questions to ask about the show and the philosophy and so on and I gave her a few words on why I think What we're doing or what I'm doing here is so important and I thought I would expand on them and put them out in a bit more detail to make some sense,
at least from my perspective of what's going on here.
I'm afraid I'm going to start off the conversation here with the dangerous phrase in the big sweep of history, which is always a dangerous recipe for windbagging it to the nth dimension, but I'm going to do it anyway, because I think it's that.
That is certainly the way that I think about it.
In history, of course, there has been a general progression.
From less voluntary to more voluntary.
So, I mean, if we think back at the dawn of the species, or at least the dawn of recorded history, ancient Egyptians and so on, that these were entirely unchosen and non-voluntary societies.
And the growth of, the moral growth of the species, the intellectual, spiritual, scientific growth of the species, and, of course, the psychological growth of us, It has been to do with creating voluntarism, where before there was, if not necessarily specific coercion, then for sure involuntarism.
So, a lot of factors have contributed to this, and we don't really have to get into many, if any, of them, but I think we can all sort of understand if we look at three major areas that voluntarism imperfectly has replaced.
Involuntarism in the spheres, if you look at serfs and slaves and women.
Well, of course, slaves, we all go back to the South in the U.S. That was a comparatively civilized slave-owning society relative to more ancient cultures where murdering slaves was perfectly permissible, castrating slaves and torturing slaves was perfectly permissible, and they were less than livestock.
And, of course, the 17th, 18th century revolution And the 19th century in some places was to abolish slavery as best as they could with the institutions that they had and the statist societies that they lived in.
Of course, it wasn't like the slaves immediately vaulted into equality, but there was that commitment to end that.
With the serfs, of course, the idea that you were tied to your land and were a piece of property or resource of your land was The de facto social organization for certainly Europe and a lot of Asia and the Middle East throughout the Dark Ages, far after the fall of Rome and into the Renaissance.
But of course that all began to change when increased technology in agriculture allowed you to produce that much more.
And this created a surplus and there was an enclosure movement where these new techniques required or were much more efficient.
I mean, when everyone is hewing their land by hand, you know, with a scythe and a hoe, it doesn't really matter how big the lands are, but when you start to get, they started to figure out the, as I mentioned before, the harness that went around the horses no longer choked the windpipe when they pulled heavy loads, so they could make, they could get these big heavy plows around oxen and around Horses.
I mean, things that are this simple.
Some guy figures out how to put a harness on rather than just throwing a rope around a horse or an oxen's neck, and suddenly you've got a multiple of pulling power, which changes the world.
These are the little things that occur.
In history, so you got a big excess of crops.
I mean, it was 5, 10, sometimes even 20 times the productivity in terms of crops.
And you had bigger plows, which meant that having heavily subdivided land, because, of course, what had happened was people would have these families, and they'd have lots of kids, because a lot of them died.
And each one of the kids, then, would have to have his own plot of land.
So the land would constantly get subdivided, and then sometimes it would accumulate, and you'd end up with these crazy patchwork quilts of land holdings.
And when agricultural and technological improvements in the introduction of winter crops such as turnips came along, suddenly, because you had these big machines, it didn't make any sense to have the land subdivided in this way.
So, there was this big enclosure movement, which basically kicked a whole lot of people off the land, consolidated the land into larger holdings, where the technological improvements could be applied much more powerfully, much more forcefully.
It was, of course, difficult for people, but where do displaced rural people go?
Well, they go to the towns, right?
And so they went to the towns and provided a ready-made labor source, and, of course, the excess food production is what is required for supporting cities.
They were the excess labor force that drove down the price of labor, and, of course, they weren't unionized, and they didn't have a history of these, they were called guilds in the Middle Ages, these Absolutely terrifying state-supported unions that ran everything.
It was ridiculous.
It takes seven years to become a candle maker.
I mean, it makes modern government unions look like the Wild West of software entrepreneurs.
And so, with this ever-increasing flood of displaced Rural people, farmers, coming in, farmers' sons and daughters, coming into the towns where there was enough food to support them if they could find work, they broke apart.
I mean, they just wave after wave of these people smashed up against these medieval guilds and just broke them apart, because they're like, well, we'll just undercut you, and we outnumber you, right?
Are you kidding me?
It takes me about three minutes to figure out how to make a candle.
I'm not sitting around for seven years earning...
Barely enough to keep me alive while you pocket all the rest.
I'm just going to go and make candles, and if you don't like it, you know, me and my 20 brothers will take you on if you want.
So these medieval guilds got smashed up with this, and...
Then you have a big, blown-apart, open free market relative to the past.
This open free market in Europe, particularly in Western Europe, of course, and where this didn't happen, as in Russia, you could see that the serfdom lasted until close to the end of the Tsarist regime, almost to 1917.
And so here, instead of being owned, like you buy the land and you buy the trees that are on it, you buy the land and you buy the serfs, instead of It being, of you being a piece of resource on land, you actually became a free agent.
You could move, and then of course you would move to wherever the greatest demand was, and people would build factories where there were workers to employ them because the guilds had been broken and labor was cheap, and so you...
You start to get this excess, this accumulation of capital that, you know, this is how the whole thing started going.
One guy thinks of a good harness, right?
This is how the world has changed.
But here we go from You're a kind of embedded lawn ornament on your land.
It's sold with the land.
We go from that to this amazing situation where you're free of the land.
You can move wherever you want.
You can compete with other people for wages.
You can set up your own business.
You can... Undercut the local candlestick maker and the butcher and the baker and so on.
Now, this is not what we would necessarily call pure freedom today.
Not that we even know what that is.
Well, we know, but we don't experience it.
But compared to what came before, it was an amazing outburst and I mean, this all started in the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries, and it sort of grew from there.
So slavery, of course, is the replacement of voluntary relations to prior coercive involuntary relations.
Serfdom breaks down because of new technology renders labor less valuable on land, and the existing methods of organizing Land to be less valuable, and that creates this huge spillover into the cities, which smashes the protectionist guilds of the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and then begins to create a labor market.
It is a labor market, which then allows people to start hiring and so on.
And that is the replacement of you as a A piece of livestock attached to your land, to a free agent, using your hands and your wits to make a go of it in life.
And that's, of course, an amazing transition from essentially rural slavery to urban free market.
Laborer have wits and muscles will travel.
And, just by the by, in Thomas Hardy's book, The Mayor of Casterbridge, which is a wonderful book if you get a chance to read it.
It's a pretty good description of these two worlds, the old world and the new world.
It's well worth having a look at.
And, of course, with women.
And we could talk about children, but I've got a podcast coming up on that, so we won't talk about that just now, if that's all right, but...
With children, sorry, with women, we have, of course, the same thing, that women are essentially chattel and valuable for sex and procreation and so on, households and maids and whores and babysitters and so on,
that these women This really didn't occur until the 19th century, and really didn't bear fruition until the 20th century, and not early in the 20th century either.
But women had to wait for two things, I mean, in many ways.
They had to wait, I guess you could say, three.
The first thing in the 19th century was The introduction of factory work, which is, although taxing, of course, much less brutal than farm work, that allowed women to actually work and start to develop an economic presence in the landscape.
The second thing that they had to wait for was the First World War.
Of course, women inherited enormous, huge amounts of property from the 10 million men who were killed in the First World War.
I mean, Not all of them had male heirs, and of course a lot of them were married.
So what happened was the women inherited a huge amount of wealth from the absolutely unprecedented slaughters of the First World War.
I mean, we can't imagine what that looked like in the world that was.
It would be, I mean, this is all silly rule of thumb, but it would be like a war that killed about half a billion people in the modern world.
For two reasons. One, of course, the population of the world was much smaller, so 10 million casualties looms that much larger.
But second of all, Because there simply had been nothing like it before.
I mean, this wasn't a war that killed ten times more than any single previous war in the First World War.
The First World War was a war that killed more people than anybody could remember.
Certainly more British soldiers died in World War I than had died in any previous wars, all of the previous wars combined.
Combined. I'm sure for the French it was even worse.
So there's no way for us to comprehend, because we've heard of total war.
We've heard of the 10 million, 30 million Second World War famines in China and Russia, all of the other mass starvation and slaughters, the Holocaust and other genocides in Darfur.
We have some sense that this was unprecedented in human history before, this degree of slaughter.
So, the amount of property that passed into the hands of women as a result of the First World War, and of course, it was also, except for mostly France, it was a war that was fought not in civilian territories, right?
England and Germany were not invaded in the First World War.
And so the amount of...
A lot of bomb...
It's not like the women inherited a lot in Germany, because Germany was like rubble at the end of the Second World War.
But at the end of the First World War, women inherited a lot of property, so it's not entirely accidental or coincidental that a lot of countries gave women the vote within a decade or two after the end of the First World War.
And, of course, the third thing that women needed, or the third thing that helped propel women to what we would consider the best aspects of modern feminism, is the technology that freed women from the requirements of A full-time home labor position.
I mean, the basics, right?
Laundry, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, all of that kind of stuff.
All the modern conveniences, which left women with a lot of time on their hands.
And gave rise to, you know, what Jermaine Greer called the click moment, right?
You're suddenly driving your kids to their 12 millionth, it seems, hockey game or band practice, and you're like, duh, I could do so much more with my life.
And that, of course, is because there was all the labor-saving devices and technology and so on.
Increased wealth, which meant that you just weren't a...
No necessity to be a household dredge anymore.
So, this, of course, propelled women, wonderfully so, of course, into the ranks of equality, saying, look, we want to be equal with men, because now, except for our diminished capacities at certain points during pregnancy and thereafter, we are economically indistinguishable, and, of course, politically indistinguishable from men at all times.
So... Women and men could have a more voluntary relationship.
No longer does a man have to get married, and of course marriage rates and birth rates are declining enormously.
More industrially advanced countries, because it's become a choice, a lifestyle choice.
And so, women don't need men for economic protection, and because the demand to procreate has diminished as religion has diminished, except, of course, in the great exception of the Western countries, the United States, now we don't, you know, we don't just get married at 20 and have all the kids we can until we I have tooth decay at 50, right?
So, this creation of voluntarism in the world, of taking away the brutal necessities, not all of which are politically imposed, some just imposed by the technological limitations of the time.
I mean... The enclosure movement in the English Industrial Revolution, which you never hear about, no one's right.
You hear about the Industrial Revolution, you don't hear about the Agrarian Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution.
The enclosure movement would not have occurred without better farming methods.
It didn't really help.
And so, it's a complex soup that brings all of these things.
Obviously, I'm already touching on a tiny number of the most important ones, in my opinion, but...
This growth of voluntarism...
It's so important in the moral development and progression of the species.
Not being treated like chattel, livestock, But as a free and independent, worthy, respectful, and worthy of respect human being.
A woman is not sitting there saying, my family has given me the choices of two men to marry, which should it be?
The option of choosing your own spouse, or, heaven forbid, choosing no spouse for any lengthy period of time.
Well, it's... Unthinkable.
Which town do I want to move to?
Where do I want to work? Which occupation do I want to?
Well, when you're a gardener impaled to the land under the feudal system, that's not a choice.
So, this growth in voluntarism is really the growth of virtue, fundamentally.
Fundamentally, it is the growth of many beautiful and wonderful things, but most fundamentally it is the growth of virtue.
Because where there is no choice, there can be no virtue.
I mean, we recognize this as moralists, that if a man holds your gun to your head, that you are not morally responsible for the actions that he commands you to do.
I mean, yes, you can still choose to get shot, but we don't recognize that as the same choice.
That a man would have if nobody was holding a gun to his head, right?
I mean, if we say that a man has the same degree of choice when a gun is held to his head, then we eliminate the crime of rape and everything becomes lovemaking, right?
Even if the woman has a knife to her throat, right?
Well, it's obviously not the case.
So, where there is no choice, there really is no virtue.
Virtue is not something that has existed throughout history, like gravity or the spherical nature of the planet, or the fact that the world is round, if you're feeling slightly less pretentious than I was in that last sentence.
Virtue has not existed throughout history and is gradually being uncovered like the laws of physics, like quantum mechanics.
I mean... Virtue requires choice and responsibility.
A woman who is...
I mean, a grown woman who chooses an abusive husband is at least to some degree responsible for her choices, assuming she's not, like, 18 or something and just, like, half-imbedded in childhood habits.
But a woman who chooses a...
I mean, some responsibility in the matter, right?
But a woman who is...
Given or sold like chattel to a man who is abusive cannot be said to be responsible for that choice.
It's like, obey your parents or die or something, right?
Be beaten. I mean, having a book like Real Time Relationships come out in a culture where the women's marriages are arranged, it would be not entirely unhelpful, I'm sure, But there is no book like Real-Time Relationships in those sorts of cultures.
I mean, what would be the point?
It's like putting out a book on how to find the best career for you to a medieval serf.
I'm a garden gnome.
Right? I mean, it wouldn't make any sense.
Until the idea of voluntarism comes along, voluntarism itself as a virtue, as an ideal, all of the responsibilities that accrue to voluntarism, to the idea of free association, to the idea of no unchosen positive obligations.
If you've never heard of the idea that family relations are voluntary and everyone is telling you the complete opposite, Then you're kind of in a state of nature.
You're kind of in a state of pre-knowledge.
And you may dislike.
Your family, but your responsibility in terms of improving or leaving the relationship doesn't really exist.
It's sort of like some Borneo tribe that's never seen science thinking that the world is all forest and is completely flat.
I mean, are they wrong?
Well, it's kind of hard to say, right?
Compared to what? Compared to what would you call that wrong?
It's not wrong, because there's no possibility of being right.
There's a guy going by here on a motorcycle that is absolutely tiny.
It's really quite funny.
I'm waiting for a clown posse to follow him.
So prior to choice, prior to the possibility of knowledge, I mean, we can say of any reasonably educated Reasonably intelligent adult in the 21st century, we could say, look, if you don't know that the world is round, there's something wrong with you, right?
Or if you're either part of some jokey flat-earth society, but there's something not right with the way that you're approaching things.
We wouldn't take that approach to somebody who was living in a mud hut in Borneo or the Amazon.
They're not wrong, because there's no other possibility.
So, Voluntarism requires...
I mean, it requires the absence of force, for sure.
I mean, if you're forced to do something, then voluntarism becomes meaningless.
But it also requires the absence of propaganda.
And, of course, we do receive a lot of propaganda.
About the family.
The family is automatic virtue.
The family will always be for you.
We fight, but we are together.
And if it is correct, and I've certainly, after doing this for, I guess, a number of years by now, I can lean on the withered stick of experience and say that most people that I've ever talked to or have written to me say that they...
They had no idea, fundamentally, that family relations were voluntary.
I mean, obviously they're involuntary when you're a kid, but involuntary doesn't mean bad.
As I said to this reporter, I mean, I am involuntarily subject to gravity.
That doesn't make gravity bad. So, even in the absence of coercion, and, of course, families don't beat people up for not coming over to Sunday.
I mean, they apply a lot of emotional pressure, sometimes in tricks and guilting and so on.
But, it's just propaganda.
And when we have been raised On this persistent propaganda, it becomes indistinguishable from fact.
It's sort of like the Cartesian thought experiment, right, from Discourse and Meditations, you know, this idea that we're a brain at a tank, and everything that we see and experience is being manipulated by some malevolent force.
I mean, it becomes as silly to question the virtue of the family Or it seems as silly to question the virtue of the family, the innate, automatic virtue of the family.
It seems as silly to question that as it would be to question that the world is round.
I mean, I don't know that the world is round.
I've never walked in one direction for as long as it takes to come back and meet up at the place where my ass left.
I've never seen it from space, right?
I've seen a very slight curve in intercontinental flights, but that might mean the Earth is banana-shaped, right?
I don't know. Maybe atoms are an elaborate...
Do you know what I mean? When everything is universally portrayed in a particular light, it's really hard.
And it feels a little crazy, of course, to say, well, I don't know if this is true.
That's why so many original thinkers tend not to do that well in society.
So, we don't have really choice when we get this enormous amount of propaganda.
Even, I mean, I've used this analogy before, and obviously we know the Jesuit dictum, right?
Give me a man before he is seven, and he is mine for life.
And we also can think of even a child who was not subject to direct coercion, but simply was indoctrinated, into becoming a communist in some Soviet-style indoctrination camp or public school that we would not say that such a man, when he grew up, was a communist.
I mean, we could describe that his beliefs were communist, but we certainly couldn't say he chose to become a communist.
He is responsible for his communism any more than a child who was raised as a Catholic has chosen his Catholicism.
This is why Richard Dawkins talks so much about how we can't say a Muslim child, a Christian child.
We can say a child of Muslim or Christian parents.
In the same way, of course, we can somewhat say a little more geographically accurately an American child, but we can't really say that because it's not made any choice.
Can't leave, right?
Child born of American parents, they've chosen to stay, we assume.
And so, where we don't have...
choice, either through direct coercion or through uniform propaganda, because we can't be skeptical of everything.
I've never been to Tibet.
It could be an elaborate hoax, but I really don't think so at all.
We can't be skeptical of everything.
Obviously, the amount of thought even the most original people contribute is tiny relative to the amount of thought that they inherit from other people.
Einstein did not invent the scientific method, or the equipment that he used, or writing, or pencils, right?
We understand this, right?
But where there is no choice, there's no virtue.
There's not an absence of virtue.
Virtue is created with choice, right?
It's not like we're...
It's not like a child is born missing a tail.
We've evolved that vestigial bone that annoys us when we try and sit down on concrete.
But we're not born missing a tail, right?
And virtue is created with choice.
I mean, that's why so many people avoid choice.
Because in so doing, they kind of do avoid virtue.
Now, they're responsible for that evasion of choice, but in a very real sense, if you, I don't know, glue yourself to Fox TV and only listen to the old-time preacher, or only read Al Franken and listen to George Carlin, whatever it is, if you stay within that biosphere, In a very real sense, if you're only getting back what's reflected to you and only staying within the propaganda bubble, you don't have choice.
And as a result, you kind of don't have even the capacity for virtue.
Now, you are responsible for staying in that bubble, but the practical result of it is that you don't have virtue.
Virtue does not exist within that sphere.
And so, where we begin to bring the light and the reality of voluntarism into the world, what we're not doing, we're not attempting to spread virtue, we're attempting to invent virtue.
We're not spreading choice, we're creating choice, where choice did not exist formally.
You know, when you teach someone that the world is round, and here's why, and here's how we know, and here's the experiments, and blah blah blah, we're creating knowledge that did not exist in that person's mind before.
Now, when we create knowledge in someone, we create a whole host of other things.
I mean, everybody wants the knowledge and everybody wants the virtue.
It makes you happy and smart or whatever.
But we don't want all of the attendant things, right?
We don't want the responsibility.
We don't want the alienation from the people who are ignorant or corrupt or nasty.
We don't want the guilt that comes from failing to achieve our ideals.
I mean, all of the stuff, right?
All the stuff that came out before the fairy at the bottom of Pandora's box.
So, families, to the degree that we're all propagandized as the virtue of the family and blah blah blah, but families exist as this prehistoric relic in a modern world.
These arranged and automatic relationships, which is really, as I would argue, the opposite of a relationship.
But families are like dark shards of history that have washed up On the beach of a shining city.
Dark shards of prehistory where myths and involuntarism held sway.
They're like these time machines.
We choose our spouse, we choose our job, we choose our home, we can choose our country, we can choose our political leaders to whatever degree we believe that we can.
We can choose our hairstyle.
We can choose our clothing. We can choose our hobbies.
We can choose our friends. We can choose all of these things.
Ah, but the family. There is no choice there.
Do you see what I mean? It's like this...
It's like this...
You know this horror movie where you walk away from the grave.
The hand comes out. The hand comes out and grabs you by the ankle or whatever.
There are these tunnels of time back into a place where everything was a cult and nothing was real.
And so, to this degree...
Where family relations are not voluntary, such families do not lack virtue.
They are, in fact, pre-virtuous.
Or you could say, non-knowledgeable.
Because, like the pig bee who doesn't know the world is around, he doesn't lack knowledge, because he's not lacking something that he can't possibly have.
Any more than I lack the ability to jump to the moon.
I can't possibly jump to the moon.
I don't have the ability, right?
So families are not families where there's just this automatic presumption of virtue and the involuntary nature of the relationship that it is not something that you earn.
It is not something that you strive to improve.
It is not something that you must win.
It is not like the affection of your children, the The companionship of your parents, or the companionship really of your children as they grow into adults.
If it is just there, automatic, to be taken for granted, like gravity, like sunshine, then there is no virtue in that environment, because there's no choice.
And as I say, where there's no choice, there's no virtue.
It's in a pre-virtuous state.
Virtue is a word that can't even be used to describe it.
Or non-virtue.
I mean, it's like trying to apply...
Sorry to use so many metaphors, but I just really want to circle this and try and get it from as many different directions.
It's kind of a trippy idea, at least to me, right?
So I'll try it from a couple of different directions just to cement it in.
People used to call slaves lazy and motivated.
And southerners, too, actually.
The lazy and unmotivated southerner actually comes from a parasite that came in It's a swamp parasite that came in from walking in muddy fields.
It was a parasite that entered the bloodstream and debilitated people, made them incredibly weak.
The lazy, slothful southerner largely comes out of Carnegie, I think, was the guy who finally funded a whole bunch of footwear for poor people.
Wiped out this curse in a generation.
But the lazy southerner as a stereotype comes from this parasitism.
But slaves were lazy, unmotivated, blah, blah, blah, dumb.
Well, of course that's quite silly, right?
I mean, if you make someone a slave, of course he's going to be unmotivated.
We would say of, I don't know, some rich kid who had all the opportunities in the world, if he just sat around, I don't know, smoking pot and picking his nose, you know, lazy, unmotivated, whatever we would say, but that would be because he has a choice, right? I mean, a lazy adult.
I forget the kid thing. He's a young adult.
But we wouldn't say that about a slave, not reasonably, because a slave doesn't have a choice.
There's no option, so applying the characteristics where there are options to a situation where there aren't options is one of the most fundamental moral misapprehensions that people make.
Applying the standards of choice To a situation of no choice is one of the most fundamental moral misapprehensions that people make, and it is used all the time in propaganda.
You choose your government.
No, we don't. We don't choose to have a government.
We don't need a government.
In fact, government is entirely counterproductive.
Government is inflicted upon us, but But then we say that we have a national identity, there's patriotism, there's virtue, I'm a proud this, I'm American, I'm British, Canadian, I'm a proud Botswana, I'm sure.
But these aren't choices.
But we are...
Oh, we're taught in Canada, you know, that...
Socialized medicine is a fundamental Canadian value.
In other words, a cause of value is, as Ayn Rand said, not what you act again or keep.
But it's not a value.
It certainly wasn't a value that I ever chose.
I was dragged here by my mom and I was never given a choice.
I'm not given a choice now!
So to call it a value when it's just inflicted upon me is a route of propaganda.
You don't apply value criteria to that where there is no choice.
You do not apply free will to essentially predetermined situations.
Propaganda and coercion are railroad tracks.
Gives people all the choice of a train, or all the choice that a train has.
So, when you look at your parents, or your brothers, your sisters, cousins, whatever, aunts and uncles, if you say, I love them, then you were saying, I choose them because of their value.
Their virtue, their courage, their nobility, their decency, their whatever, right?
Integrity. But you can't choose them if it's not a choice.
If there's no possibility of not choosing, then there's no possibility of choosing.
Just, I mean, this is elemental logic, right?
A choice indicates at least two potential states.
If there is only one potential state, family is value, I must love them, I must be with them, then there's no choice.
Where there's no choice, there's no value.
There's no virtue. If I am a robot programmed to have, quote, courage, then it's not courage, is it?
If I am a sociopath who is completely unable to feel fear, Then we cannot say that I am brave.
If somebody has Alzheimer's, we cannot say that they are forgetful.
Because there's no option, there's no choice, there's only one state, and it's determined by physical characteristics, by coercion, by propaganda.
You can't choose your family if it's not a choice.
And if you can't choose your family, there is no virtue in the family.
It doesn't make the family evil, Because there is no good and evil where there is no choice.
There is the corruption of avoiding choice.
But this is, I mean, people ask me, where does your patience come from?
Such as it is. Well, my patience comes from the fact that I know that deep down people know everything that I'm talking about.
I'm not inventing much.
I'm codifying some stuff.
I'm not inventing much. So I know that everybody knows this deep down, but I also know that this knowledge is not available to them consciously.
I don't think you can be a good philosopher if you don't understand psychology, if you don't understand the unconscious.
Because you say, well, how can people know it and yet not be responsible for it?
Well, that's called the unconscious, right?
We can't invent all the knowledge.
We have to take stuff at face value.
And we have to have reasonable criteria, but we can't review everything, right?
Hell, I don't even know if I have a spleen.
I mean, I've never seen it.
I'm not about to go looking.
But I gotta assume that there is one there, and I'm sure it's doing its spleeny thing as it needs to.
And so when you're told over and over, this is virtue, this is value, this is good, loyalty to the family, family is everything, your parents love you, they did the best they could, they cared, they would do anything for you, give you the shirt off their back.
All the endless myths and stories that we get about the family.
And it's a complete contradiction, and this is why the state and the family are so similar in this way.
We are... We're told it is virtue, and we are also told that there fundamentally is no choice, and these two things are completely contradictory.
With the family, sorry, with the state, we are told that we should be happy about our government, we should be patriotic, that the government is good, the government is founded upon the freedom and choice of the people, government by and for the people, say, okay, well, then I don't want the government, I want to live without the government.
No, no, that's not an option.
Well, if I can't choose the government, Then there's no virtue in the government.
Any more than there's an ignorant sinner savage who doesn't know the world is round.
It's just in a state of pre-knowledge.
You cannot judge him as ignorant because compared to what?
Compared to a state he can't possibly achieve?
Well, that's an unrealistic yardstick, right?
It's like saying a man is short because he's not a light year tall.
So, in the same way, when we look at the family and we are told, well...
Your parents love you.
They would do anything for you.
The family is virtuous.
You should be loyal. They care about you.
They're the only people who will always be there for you.
Friends come and go. Even lovers and spouses come and go, but your family isn't your parents.
I mean, how many people are going to say, let me examine this from first principles and see, right?
I mean, it's hellishly hard to examine all this stuff from first principles.
It can be extraordinarily alienating, as we all know.
From everyone around you.
You take the red pill, you pop out of the Matrix, and...
And then what?
Right? It's like Neo pops out and there's not even the Nebuchadnezzar sitting there to pick him up.
He's just...
Okay, now what?
Right? I'm at the Matrix, and I'm the first, so...
Where do we go from here? And...
So this is really what I'm focusing on as a communicator, as a philosopher.
I'm really focusing on this desire to, you know, to drag the fucking family into the 21st century.
Because I want families to love each other.
I want parents to love their children.
I want children to love their siblings.
I want children to love their aunts.
Big, fabulous, flesh-piled love fest.
That's what I want. For the family.
In the same way that, in my opinion, the best feminists wanted to bring men and women closer together.
And they recognized as long as there was, or to the degree that there was, a lack of choice in gender relations, there was a lack of quality and virtue and love in those relations.
And for me, in the same way, to the degree that there is no choice in family relations.
There is no quality.
There is no love. There is no intimacy.
There is no relationship where there is no choice.
Any more than it can be said that a slave has a relationship to his job or his master.
Well, there's no choice.
So... I mean, there's proximity, right?
And, all too sadly, for all too many families.
That's the best that can be said.
We are proximate, right?
We are in the neighborhood of nearby, right?
We ring the dinner table.
Worlds apart. Now, when you bring choice...
To any environment.
People get screwed. And everybody wants to shoot the messenger, but it's just a fact, right?
So, I mean, to take a silly example, which obviously wasn't silly to the guy at the time.
Let's say the other...
Medieval candlestick maker apprentice dude, and you're in the 14th or 15th century, and you've just finished, you know, a grueling apprenticeship of mind-saltifying boredom.
Ooh, a little frog.
Nice. Of mind-stultifying boredom and starvation wages and being regularly beaten through the drunken displeasure of your master.
And you're like, woohoo, I'm finally going to hit the big time and start making a relatively decent living because I'm just on the eve of my seventh year mind-numbing, beaten-up apprenticeship.
Well, What are you going to do and say when a horde of 500 hungry youths from the farms come and take up residence in your town who are willing to do anything for a penny a week?
You want to make a shilling a week and they'll do it for a...
You want to make a shilling a day and they'll do it for a...
And you've been sitting there for seven years hoping to cash in On your shilling a day, and then people come in and say, I work for a penny a week.
Candles? No problem.
I can learn it in an hour.
Well, you're screwed, right?
And this, of course, is the ugly realities of progress.
That when you begin to bring voluntarism into a pre-voluntary environment, an involuntary environment, although pre-voluntary is better, when you begin to bring voluntarism into that environment, the lazy habits of inertia that have accumulated because of the involuntary nature of the prior interactions, they suddenly become exposed, right?
And people get left...
Well, entirely high and dry, to say the least, right?
To take a similar example, I hope you don't mind the length of this podcast, but it's very important to me.
But to take a similar example, some guy who, you know, wasn't raised the best and has turned into a bit of a Neanderthal husband man-pig, you know, scratches himself, demands his beer, yells at the TV... Well,
he has developed these habits, certain in the belief, however unconscious this may be, but certain in the belief that his wife can't leave him.
Why? She got no skills.
She got nowhere to go. And so certain in the fact that his wife is not with him voluntarily, because there's no other possibility for her, He can indulge all of his worst and least respectful and possibly abusive habits.
She can't leave.
And so quality is not required.
And therefore there can be no love, no intimacy, no relaxing.
It's all involuntary or pre-voluntary.
Now, in the same way, this myth of family virtue has been so deeply embedded.
And I have some premium podcasts why there is a God that talk about the causality of this cult, how it came about.
But we don't have to talk about that right now.
113 and 114, I think.
There is...
Because this cult of the family has been so deeply embedded, families...
Have accumulated a lot of bad habits.
Because this involuntary nature of the relationship, or the belief of the reality...
If the belief is strong enough, it is a reality.
The reality of the fact that these relationships are...
They're not even involuntary, they just are.
They're not subject, they're not open to choice.
I mean, a man locked in a basement...
Or a man locked in prison is going to say, well, this is involuntary because he knows he's in prison.
But in families, it's not even like that.
This is why I'm saying this is morbid prism of prehistory that washes up on a modern shore.
People don't say, my family life is coerced.
That's the whole point of propaganda, to make it unconscious.
They just say, well, it is what it is.
We have to go. I remember this when I first got married.
Well, we have to go. It's not even like, well, of course I don't want to go, but they've got my cat hostage, right?
And they'll kill my cat. It's nothing like that.
A prisoner will say, well, of course I want to get out of here, but these cages are locked.
But that's not how it is with family.
It's just, well, you have to. There's no choice, right?
Why do I stay with my abusive husband in the year 1482?
Where am I going to go?
There's nowhere else to go. Can't have a job, can't own property, can't go anywhere, right?
So the involuntariness, or the pre-voluntariness, it simply breeds bad habits for everyone involved.
You know, arranged marriages does not create good husbands.
I mean, this much we know. Or good wives, for that matter.
Although, more sympathy for the women.
So, this transition point, when the slaves get freed, well, the slave owner who just sunk his life savings into a bunch of slaves, he's kind of screwed, right?
Not to mention, in a more subtle but more pervasive way, The brutal foreman who is used to cracking the whip and beating up on the slaves if they don't do what he wants.
Well, that guy, let's say he's 40, which is, I guess, old in those days, or 30.
Well, maybe he's been doing this for 10 or 15 years, and this is all he knows how to do.
And it looked like it was going to last forever, so why would he develop alternate habits or practices?
So his whole approach to, quote, managing other human beings is to scream, beat, and whip them, right?
So let's say the slaves all get freed, and Joe Whack-a-Slave is wandering around and saying, okay, well, here's a factory where some of the blacks have been hired.
I'll go for a job as a foreman there.
And let's say he gets the job well.
He hasn't developed any motivational or negotiation skills because he's been Joe Wackerslave, right?
He can't do it.
So he's going to beat the slaves, or if he's not allowed to beat the slaves, he's going to start to feel guilt and remorse and shame in his conscience.
He's going to drink. Those people are toast.
They can't go back and not be who they are, and they can't move forward in this new world.
They're Detritus, I mean, with some sympathy, but the world has to improve.
The world has to improve.
And it is terrible that people are exposed to the badness that they have done, through the world improving, and in a sense their crimes are invented with the progress of the world, and that is terrible for them.
But what is the alternative?
What is the alternative?
A cure for cancer will put oncologists out of business.
Does that mean we'll let people suffer and die to keep them in a job?
Of course not. Of course not.
So, there is a time of transition that is very difficult.
It's a little different with parents.
And I won't go into the thesis that I put forward in the book on truth.
It's a little different with parents, of course.
Because, I mean, they fail the very ethics that they themselves profess.
Like, at least Joe Whack a Slave doesn't sit there and say, I think that slavery is a moral evil and slaves are equals, and then go whack the slaves in secret.
And he openly professes his hideous ideals of racism and dominance.
But parents are not like that.
It's not quite the same.
But in the transition of...
Live what you say like you mean it, which is sort of what we're all about.
Well, yeah, there are casualties, and the only alternative is to not progress as a species, which is entirely intolerable.
I mean, to go to a feminist in 1950 and say, well...
You know, Joe beat his wife over there.
He's gonna be really unhappy because his wife's gonna leave him if you continue talking about equality and the need for respect.
What's she gonna say? Oh shit, sorry.
She's not going to say that. She's not going to say, oh, well, let me crawl back into my little beady hole for the rest of my short and only life in order not to disturb the patriarchal majesties of the world who might be offended at the requirement and be unable to provide the requirement for quality as a result of their prior destructive habits.
Well, nobody's going to say that.
I mean, nobody said slavery should continue because of the capital investment by the slave owners.
No, that was immoral, and, you know, overtime, and blacks can't manage themselves, and all this nonsense, right?
So, that's for me why I have patience.
That's, for me, why I don't try to get people to focus on the anger.
I mean, there is anger in these kinds of histories, for us, for the people who've gone through this, and for others as well.
There is anger, but it's not like the world is even hypocritical.
It's just that we're just in a pre-moral state.
We're bringing the light of morality into these...
Dark tunnels of history that lead back to a past that's pre-Egyptian, pre-written language almost, where the involuntarism is not even conscious, where in the same way that the serfs were embedded in their land, we are embedded in our families without even the concept of choice.
Without choice there cannot be equality, there cannot be improvement, there cannot be love.
There cannot be relations, there cannot be intimacy, there cannot be growth, there cannot be joy, and there cannot be progress.
And it is a deep shock to parents when their children say, this is not positive for me, because they have lived their lives as parents have for generations before them, millennia before them, with the assumption that they don't really need to be that good.
In fact, they can be pretty bad.
They can just rely on this propaganda to keep their kids around them.
And so, it's really unfortunate that these parents happen to be born in a time where these ideas are beginning to bubble up and children are demanding that their parents live up to their values of honesty and virtue and So on, and all the things that they require from their kids, right?
And this is unprecedented, at least to my knowledge.
And it sucks, and the parents are going to complain.
Some of them will step up and improve and grow with the world, and some of them will go down kicking and screaming.
Resentful, angry, bitter, negative, hostile, vicious.
And that's a matter of choice in history for everyone.
You know, this is not the first time, nor is it the last time that this will occur.
In history, I mean, when...
I mean, the daughters of feminist moms who grew up with patriarchal dads, well, that wasn't fun, right?
This goes even more to the core, because we're not talking about sexism, we're talking about ethics fundamentally, choice fundamentally.
It's more encompassing.
There were... People who owned slaves whose children were abolitionists.
This is...
Some of the parents made that transition and some of them didn't.
It'd be great if they all did, but that's certainly not up to anyone else to command or expect.
Rationally, some will, some won't.
Some are too far gone.
Some will fight to grow with every ounce of energy in their being.
So my goal, such as it is, megalomaniac though it might be, is to...
To create virtue in the family by bringing the involuntary nature of family relations to consciousness, to our consciousness, by saying, why is it involuntary?
Why is it an absolute? Why is the family virtue?
If the family is automatically virtue, how can it be virtuous?
If the computer is programmed to play the piano piece, can we say that it is a good or a bad pianist?
Of course not. If there is No choice, there is no quality, there is no intimacy.
So either the family results from choice, family relations result, I'm talking about adults, adult relations, they result from choice, in which case they can be virtuous, because there's choice involved.
Or, family relations do not result from choice, in which case they can be virtuous.
Because nothing that is involuntary, where there is no choice, can be virtuous, or have quality, or anything like that.
The standards simply don't apply.
Compared to what? Well, you can't compare it to anything.
There's no standard. Therefore, there's no possibility of judgment or evaluation of any kind.
It's like saying a boulder bouncing down a hill is bouncing in a virtuous manner or a non-virtuous manner.
Well, there's no choice.
There's no alternative. Therefore, it's just doing what it's doing.
You can't say it's good or bad or right or wrong.
It just is what it is. And that's the fundamental paradox that we bring up with regards to religion, with regards to the state, with regards to the family, all these things.
If there is no choice, there is no virtue, there is no quality, there is no love.
And thus, an absence of choice is an absence of virtue.
It is non-virtue.
And the family is the most primitive of all.
Because it exists in a pre-choice state, and therefore it is pre-virtuous.
Virtue does not apply, because there is no compared to what that you can work with.
So, I hope that this makes some sense.
I do understand the magnitude of what we're up to here.
I hope that this makes some sense to you.
This may bear listening to you more than once.
It's a distillation of a lot of stuff, and I talked about it with this reporter for, I mean, just a minute or and a half, and I don't know if you ever listen to this, you'll now know why there are so many podcasts.
But anyway, I just wanted to go into a little bit more detail about that, that the creation of virtue results in the expansion of voluntarism in relations.
And it is coming very late to the deepest, darkest, and potentially Without a doubt, the most beautiful of human institutions, which is the family.
And that's certainly my goal.
And it is my goal in participation with my listeners, because it is, as I've always said, a conversation.
So thank you so much, as always, for listening.
If you have a few shekels rolling around your Pants on your couch if you could throw them my way.
I think that would be wonderful.
And for those who've been inquiring, Christina is doing very well.
And in fact, I must say that today I felt the first baby movement.
I don't think it was gas.
So thank you very much.
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