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July 28, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:18:29
2441 Psychopaths Among Us - A Conversation with Michael Cross
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Hello, hello, everybody.
It's DeFan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I'm here for round two.
Not really that combative, but I'm here with Michael Cross, who is an international expert on teaching finance and psychopathy.
Who's got his second novel?
Is it out yet?
It's about to come out?
Imminent?
No, the second one is out.
The third one should be out sometime before Christmas.
Now, of course, the obvious question for me, at least, is if you are writing convincingly from the first-person perspective of a psychopath, where would you rate yourself on the continuum of, you know, Buddhist to psychopath?
I don't know what's on the other side of the psychopathy spectrum, but where would you rate yourself if you had to?
Well, just in defense there.
I had a...
I was in a conversation with two people that had read the book, and one of them, their mother, is a psychologist who also read the book, and she was just like, okay, he's got to be a psychopath if he writes this closely to how they really think.
The other person was a nurse and said, yeah, but it's written from the perspective of a female, and he's not a female, so therefore a person can… A person can be creative and not be that particular individual.
So...
Yeah, I mean, he didn't have to go and murder everything to have Raskolnikov kill someone in crime and punishment.
That's not...
You know, I don't think that...
Stephen King doesn't have to reincarnate children's dolls who return to your dreams as axe murderers or anything.
There is the aspect of imagination, but a convincing portrayal of character means a deep understanding of the driver.
Yeah, and to a certain degree, you have to – well, I guess you'd have to have a certain level of empathy in order to get into the mind of a psychopath.
Well, to do that, that means you would have one of the characteristics that does not fit psychopathy, and that's, well, a deeper empathy.
I mean I guess psychopaths have a certain level of empathy, but it's very minimal.
Well, they have the empathy.
I would assume that it's predatory in that the lion wishes to know which way the deer or the gazelle is going to jump.
They have to anticipate the moves as to somebody in a sword fight or a boxing match.
They have to anticipate.
They study their opponent.
They have to really get inside the opponent's head, but not because they want to make them feel better about their difficult childhoods, but because they want to win whatever battle is anticipated.
Oh, absolutely.
And on top of that, in the case of if you read up on certain serial killers and so forth, you find that they were very strongly – they loved their family but no one else.
And then using that analogy of the lion, well, you can go back a little further and deal with crocodiles and alligators.
You don't want to mess with their young crocodiles.
If they have a bunch of young around them, they do have a maternal instinct, which I guess you could say, well, that seems to sound all warm and cuddly, but it's in reality not so warm and cuddly if you in some way threaten that person.
It's your basic DNA propagating bond, right?
I mean, it's not exactly what we would refer to as Hallmark card elevated rose's love.
It is, you know, don't mess with the investment I put into my offspring or my blood clan or something like that.
It's a Hatfield and McCoy loyalty.
It is not what we would call, you know, elevated ego-based love.
Now, listen, I wanted to ask you a question before we talk a little bit about social control.
I'm going to assume that the listeners or watchers of the show have some familiarity with psychopathy.
The 1%, right?
So I've been reading some of Robert Hare's stuff recently and a great book, The Narcissist, sorry, The Sociopath Next Door, which estimates 1 in 25, right?
4% of the population are sociopaths.
Some people put the number of psychopaths at 1% and so on.
I personally, you know, with no expertise in the field, but I would rate those numbers higher because I particularly come from a philosophical position where the initiation of force is immoral, and there are so many people who are comfortable with the initiation of force in society, either through the compulsion of taxation Or people who cheer war, I would view as pretty sociopathic fundamentally.
You know, I mean, even if it's a just war, we view it with, I think, regret.
You know, like if you have to have a limb cut off because you have gangrene, you don't want people cheering the surgeon unless they really don't like you.
You want them to, you know, it's a regrettable necessity.
That's my perspective.
I think it's quite a lot higher than what shows up in the sort of clinical estimates because they assume that society is healthy, you know, and that's why the majority of society is not mentally ill.
Which, of course, they were saying the same thing 100 years ago, 300 years ago, 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago.
Well, society is healthy.
We just have a few deviants.
Whereas, of course, if you take someone from the ancient world...
With their belief in slavery, with their belief in racial dominance, with their belief in the inferiority of women and the degree to which they were unbelievably harsh in the raising of their children, and you move them into the contemporary society, they would go almost straight to a psychiatric ward.
So every society says, well, we're pretty normal.
We got some outliers, you see, but we're, you know, the majority of us are pretty normal.
Again, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but do you agree with the sort of estimate of 4% approximately for sociopaths, 1% for psychopaths?
Do you think that that is true relative to society or relative to some sort of higher moral standard that we're hopefully marching towards?
Well, I'd put it this way.
First of all, I love your analogy of if you have gangrene and having to remove an arm or a leg or something, because I was reading that...
I can't remember who it was.
They put a list of the 10 most psychopathic occupations, where psychopaths seem to be drawn to, and then the 10 least.
And the interesting thing was...
Wait, you're not going to say internet podcast host, are you?
I just wonder if we're going to lead into that.
No, no, no.
I'm just kidding.
Go on.
No, that wasn't there.
What the interesting thing was, was emergency room surgeons...
We're within that 10 most psychopathic, but general care physicians were in the 10 least psychopathic.
So I guess in some sort of way, and we'll get into that later, but there are certain advantages if you go into a surgeon, and you're not really worried if they're all warm and cuddly, if their goal is to make sure.
You want a cold-hearted guy with a steady hand.
You don't want, like I'd have to take a sliffer out of my daughter's foot and my hand was shaking.
I'm like, oh, it's going to hurt so much.
You want some, but I don't want a lot of empathy if somebody has to do an emergency tracheotomy on me.
I want them to be a cold-ass robot who's going to go in there like a deli slicer and do what he needs to do.
Yeah.
Now, I would put it this way.
I think that there – I think it seems to be somewhat continual.
I have a radio program I do an hour each week, and I interviewed a woman who was a lawyer.
Well, she was a law professor and a psychopath, and she wrote a book about what it's like to see through the eyes, life through the eyes of a psychopath.
And – Her claim was that no matter what society you go to, it seems to fit that there's about, like you said, about 1% of the female population and around 3%-ish of the male population fits the criteria for psychopathy.
But – and her goal was it doesn't change.
It seems to be consistent throughout, and of course maybe – she said that maybe if you have too many, if that figure goes up, then society doesn't work.
If it goes lower than that, in some areas, it doesn't work if you have less.
I mean I guess you could say that the reason why we might live in countries like Canada and the United States is because there were some pretty – Adventurous, maybe to a larger degree psychopathic people who are saying, I just don't want anything to do with Europe.
I'm going to go over and just conquer the wilderness.
Well, that can mean that there were more – there's an advantage in some ways, even though it sounds terrible.
There's an advantage to having – Your pioneers were the early people that went out and really tamed things and had new battles and stuff like that.
Well, sorry, just to add to that too, I mean, they would have to have...
I would argue they would have to have less than average bonds with their family of origin because this isn't like go and come back.
Your six week journey to the new world, you're likely never going to come back.
So they have to walk away from their childhood friends, from their mother, from their father, from maybe their siblings.
So they have to have, I would argue, a reduced sense of familial obligation and also they must have an incredible sensitivity towards oppression, which I would assume people who are free of conscience are also pretty sensitive to being repressed, which is why they try to climb to the top of whatever social hierarchy they're in.
So again, diagnosing historically at a distance is always kind of tricky, but I certainly could see some traits fitting the bill.
Yeah, I think there's actually a – I was watching some documentary.
I think it was on History Channel.
There is actually such thing as psychohistory.
It sounds terrible.
No, no.
I'm a big fan.
You look at people like Nero or Rasputin or any of these kinds of individuals and try to figure out… Were they psychopaths and how did that affect the way that they functioned within and over society?
And again, going back to that idea that maybe there's an evolutionary psychology component that everything that we look at and say – from our contemporary eyes, we look at people who – That stereotypical hippie that's like, wow, man, I'm looking up in the sky and I can feel the spirit coming through me.
More likely than not, that person is what we call schizotypal.
Not schizophrenic, but schizotypal.
Now, those kinds of people, of course, are very creative.
We see those people really overrepresented in the arts.
There's nothing – we don't want to get rid of that.
We don't want to do some sort of genetic engineering and say, okay, we're going to make sure – oh, this embryo has the makings of a schizotypal child, so let's abort it.
This child here has the makings of a psychopath.
Let's abort it.
Well, pretty soon we would just have a homogenized culture that might not have those variations that you could argue we need.
You need to have checks and balances.
I mean we look through history.
We see this really powerful king that expanded his empire at the cost, of course, of the people that were in those areas originally.
And that's who we admire in history.
But we don't want a society where everyone feels that way or else everyone is carrying guns in the streets and shooting each other and it would just be total chaos.
So… I would also argue that the demand for psychopathy within society has been diminishing to some degree over time.
I mean, so when you had a slave-based society, the degree of non-empathy you had to have for your slaves would be endemic throughout society.
And in fact, if you did empathize with the slaves, you had a pretty horrible time in that society because everywhere you look would just be human wretchedness.
And so on.
And of course, the psycho historians are very keen on pointing out how brutal childhood was for most people in the past.
And most parents were just, you know, they can't find anyone before the 18th or 19th century who wouldn't immediately be thrown in jail for child abuse in the modern world.
Yes, in the past, when you subjugated women, subjugated slaves, when all expansions of territory came at the rape, slaughter, and murder of innocents around you, and even, of course, the settling of North America and South America involved the death of tens of millions of indigent population.
And so we hope that over time, our need for psychopathy in society to even survive will diminish.
You know, certainly I think that it's diminished since at least the past couple of hundred years since the end of slavery.
It has diminished.
And instead of being sort of complete racial dominance, probably just retreated into a garden variety of racism.
So I hope, you know, in the future, could we end up with a society where this stuff would be almost non-racial.
I think that would be great.
I mean, you know, we can only hope, I guess.
Well, the thing is, though, how would you put it?
We would hope that that would be the case, you know, some sort of vestigial organ-type thing, you know, where we don't really need this anymore, and eventually, in theory, it just kind of fades away.
Like some people have said, the appendix will eventually just disappear in human beings.
Or hair, you know, for the least advanced among us.
Of course, they still have hair.
For the most advanced among us, of course, we will look like robots from the future, but go ahead.
Yeah, we go into transhumanism.
The interesting thing is, though, that while you might think that a psychopath would be – not have those familiar bonds that you've talked about, they might not be as likely to give birth to children.
On the other hand, you could have a situation in which – Well, because of their particularly promiscuous lifestyle, most of them, you might actually wind up with more children born that way.
In fact, I was reading an article that was dealing with the idea of all things sperm donation.
And I'm not going to disparage people who are going, wait a minute, my mother had a donor or something like that.
But the thing that this doctor brought out is when he was in college, some of his friends were doing donations in order to earn money.
This was like during the 1980s.
And they urged him to do it too, and he said he couldn't do that because he felt like he wouldn't want to have children that were out there that he never knew.
And he said some of his friends were kind of like, well, I don't care what – I don't care about these children.
And this doctor was actually saying that maybe there should be a review of laws in the present day because he was fearing that there could be a predisposition towards at worst narcissism or – well, at best narcissism and at worst psychopathy because the guy is like, OK, well, I don't really care.
He fathers 25 children.
If you go by the – I think it's Denmark where they allow that there was some article about some guy had a genetic defect they caught.
So it could go up or down, or it could be that if we – the more we go into this predatory capitalism or something that we see nowadays, you could actually see that these people rise to the top.
They make more money.
They have more kids because they have more opportunity to have kids.
Who knows?
There have been some that have speculated that this could actually increase in the future because of that.
The warm, caring person is – if you have economic downturns, is not going to make as much money.
And of course, if you look at it again from evolutionary psychology, if it's a man, a man who is – Really driven and he's just bringing in the money, he's going to be more likely to get more mates overall.
I mean there's even lots of research dealing with the idea that the more money a male makes, the more sexual partners over the lifetime he will have.
I mean how many partners would Bill Clinton have had if he had just been working at Walmart?
I mean probably more than the average Walmart person but not as much as maybe if you're a powerful individual.
Hypogamy, I suppose, right?
The woman's desire to hook into a more powerful male to provide resources for her offspring.
Always looking to trade out biologically.
Do you find, in your research, have you found any variation on the prevalence of psychopathy by race?
Well, from what I've read, there is no difference.
The only thing that I have seen that seems to show a difference between psychopathy between groups, and it may just be what we perceive socially, is there seems to be more in Canada and America than there is in Britain and Scotland.
There's been some studies on that.
But that could just be the way it's measured.
Or it could go back to what I was talking about, the pioneer spirit.
The people that were like, well, I don't want to leave family and my comfortable surroundings and so forth and take all these risks.
They may have stayed home.
Could explain Scandinavia today.
Scandinavia is one of the most… Kind of – you find very much a feminist culture, somewhat of a passive culture when it comes to war and things like that.
You could argue maybe the first wave of really hardcore people were the Vikings, and they went off and colonized Britain and France and who knows where.
And then the second wave was, of course, the pioneer wave back in the early 1830s where – Many Scandinavians left Norway, Denmark, and Sweden and Finland and went off into the wilderness in the United States.
So that could explain it there, but it's no way you could really measure that ultimately.
It's just theoretical.
So I don't think there's any difference racially if we assume that all races have the same variations and so forth.
I'm just curious about that.
Now, of course, the...
The stereotype of psychopathy is, you know, the axe-wielding, leatherface murderer in the woods kind of thing.
And I find, like all stereotypes, it's actually probably put out by psychopaths in order to camouflage themselves.
You know, look for the guy with the pigskin on his face and don't worry about the guy in the suit at the podium, right?
I think that generally, the more extreme the stereotype is put out, the more it camouflages, the more common variation.
And one of the places I think that sociopathy in particular works very well is in the realm of language.
In the degree to which you can frame somebody else's experience and their emotional reactions and their entire world view.
According to language, and of course that gets us into the realm of something that's of interest to both of us, which is media control.
Do you think that elements of sociopathy can show up in language manipulation for the sake of resources?
A tiny example is, you know, be patriotic to your country, which means fundamentally pay your taxes.
There's a very material component to these kinds of allegiances, all the way down to be loyal to your local sports team, which means go and pay tickets to see them play, which translates into resources going to that.
And there's a lot of language that It's really, it strikes me as, you know, those, I don't know what they're called.
They're these things that the croupiers and the blackjack dealers use to move the money around when you go to Vegas.
You know, you've got the chips there and they use these little, they look like little sticks with these sort of flat things at the end.
They use them to move around the money.
It's always sort of struck me that the way that language is defined in society has a lot to do with appeals to emotion, but when you lift all of that up, We'll call it virtue.
We'll call it patriotism.
We'll call it team loyalty.
We'll call it being a team player or whatever.
We'll call it a commitment to excellence.
You hear this all the time in the business.
A commitment to excellence generally means I want overtime without having to pay you.
It always means the transfer of stuff, but it's always cloaked in language.
And it's always struck me that language is the fundamental predator of humankind.
Human beings are not that big.
I've never been mugged, but man, I get taxed to death, right?
That language is the fundamental tool of the predator.
Well, I mean it was Sigmund Freud who noted that the – I mean this is one of his famous quotes where the first two individuals back in the theoretical caveman situation who decided to use words instead of sticks to settle an argument were – That was when civilization started.
So yes, I would say that nowadays most of us don't go out and just beat someone over the head and say, buy this, do this, or something like that.
We have to use language.
We have to use more subtle means to convince people, and it's way more effective ultimately.
I mean we saw with the Soviet Union that there was this – oh, look at religion in the Soviet Union.
I mean if you were – If you were at least one of the educated people and you were secretly practicing religion, you could have some pretty major blowback from the authorities.
You might instead of being a college professor, you would be working in a coal mine somewhere in Kazakhstan or something during that era.
And when the Soviet Union collapsed, what happened?
I mean all of a sudden – well, now we see Russia is probably – if you're going to look at countries in Europe, is probably the most hardcore when it comes to trying to combine Christianity with government because you no longer have that baseball bat over people's heads.
And so, yeah, I think ultimately – I mean if you look at some of the – If you read anything from Chomsky or someone like that, the propaganda that you see in the democracies like the United States, Europe, Canada is going to be way more advanced because in order to control these societies, you don't have the baseball bat usually.
But in – It can be just as effective to know how to word things and so forth.
If you look at the mainstream media nowadays, I mean we have the big issues.
Don't need to concentrate really.
It's more of a comedy in regards to Mr.
Wiener in New York, although I think that a lot of journalists are having a – I've seen articles saying he's having a really hard time.
In New York, they've got Eliot Spitzer, the guy who was thrown out of office for the hookers and cocaine scandals.
And you have this wiener guy who's been, you know, don't tweet your meat, right?
He's been sexting his penis all over God's green acre.
And this is the choice that you have in the 21st century democracy.
I mean, hookers and blow or here are my genitals.
Yeah, what was his stage name?
Or was he using Carlos Danger or something like this?
You couldn't make this up in a porn movie.
Biffy McRockhard.
I mean, it's just embarrassing.
But the thing is that if we – that's got to take our attention.
Right now it's the Royal Baby or Anthony Weiner.
But ultimately, if we take a look at the Zimmerman trial, if we take a look at Edward Snowden, I mean you can see how you can change the whole context with just the words you use in a headline.
Did you know that the Associated Press instructed all of its members and writers to refer to Snowden as a leaker and not as a whistleblower?
I didn't know that.
Yeah, they need to define it in that way.
It is truly Orwellian because, of course, he has a great claim to not only be called a whistleblower but to have protection under the law as a whistleblower because he exposed acts which are pretty patently illegal even under the Patriot Act.
He exposed acts which are pretty illegal by the U.S. government and, of course, the Whistleblower Act in the U.S. government is supposed to protect any government worker who shows any illegal actions on the part of the agency that he's working for.
So not only is he a whistleblower in the colloquial sense, but even in the legal sense, you know, I'm no lawyer, but he has a great case to make for protection from any retaliations whatsoever because the prison program is illegal.
But you can't even call him that.
You can't call him a whistleblower because that is taking a stand or giving him some sort of sympathy that, of course, would get you in trouble with the U.S. government.
So they just couldn't even use that word.
I mean, it's how powerful language is.
Yeah, yeah, and that's because language is ultimately an abstract concept.
If we, oh gosh, I don't want to get into Freudian psychology, but just the term mother conjures up a certain image in almost all people's minds.
It's an archetype.
I may not have the typical reaction.
I may not have the typical reaction, but sorry, go on.
Yeah, and if you say the word whistleblower, the image that comes up is in the movies, the heroic person who is working at a – I can't remember the name of the movie, but they're working at a nuclear power plant, and they find out things are going wrong, and so he or she goes out with the information while there's people chasing him.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's the image you get when you use the word whistleblower.
But if you use the word leaker, I get, I mean, my mental image is this kind of maybe loner, creepy type guy who, oh, I'm going to tell a secret that I have.
Psychologically, a leak is a bad thing.
Yeah, I got a leak in my boat.
I got a leak in my underpants.
I mean, there's a bad thing all around.
So it just has negative connotations to begin with.
Frank Luntz has made a fortune off of using words and changing the words.
For instance, I think he was the one that did the global warming.
He changed it to global climate change.
And that creates a whole different message in people's minds.
Global climate change, well, we know the seasons change, the weather changes.
We can find fossils of palm trees out in the middle of the desert.
We know that things change.
But if you say global warming, you get this image of some sort of dystopian, soylent green future.
You know why they changed that.
Of course, in the 70s, they predicted global cooling, and then the 80s and 90s, they predicted global warming, but there's been no global warming for 17 years or 16 years.
And so they have to change it now because then you have a thesis that can be disproven.
So now it's climate change, and given that climate is a word that is synonymous with change, it's like saying, change, change, disprove that if you can.
Well, no, it's a tautology, so we can't.
But anyway, I just want to point that out.
And here's another thing you can look at that's really interesting.
If, oh gosh, now I forgot his first name, Zimmerman.
Oh, George.
Oh, wow.
George Zimmerman.
Isn't that what they named the new baby over in England?
Is his name George?
George Zimmerman?
No, I don't think they would be named George Zimmerman.
That would be quite a political statement if they did name him George Zimmerman Windsor or whatever the hell their last name is.
I just glanced at some headlines.
I thought they were thinking of naming him George, and someone said something about George III. I just hope that the peasants are celebrating that the prince's penis works, because what else could make your day better than knowing that your overlord's genitals are actually functioning?
I say, let off all the fireworks you can.
But don't let me interrupt your thought.
Sorry, go on.
But the interesting thing is, going back to the Zimmerman thing, is that if Zimmerman had been running for office or doing some – or had won, I don't know, the Nobel Peace Prize or something, the media, the headlines would have been Hispanic Man Wins.
George Zimmerman of Peruvian ancestry.
Also, I think – what was it?
His – Well, in the same way that Obama, who's mixed race, is always referred to as black.
Yeah, yeah.
How is he black?
Yeah, and if you look at his Kenyan roots, I mean some of that's mixed with Arab, so he's actually less black than Zimmerman is Hispanic.
But it helps in the media to portray him as white because then you have something to work with.
Then you have the white guy kills black guy.
No, no, no.
White guy kills black child.
You have to get these memes right, of course, Mike.
You can't refer to Trayvon Martin as a person or an adult.
He always has to refer to as a kid or a child.
You know, sucking on a bag of skittles, minding his own business when descended upon by the black angel of death known as George Zimmerman for no reason whatsoever.
This is generally after a mysterious altercation, that and so on, right?
So I just want to, this is the way that it has to be portrayed in order to stoke this racial fire as a patriot and further destabilize the sheep.
But sorry, go on.
But it's interesting that in the story, the way it's presented through the media, I think there was only – well, it was the alternative press, and some media referred to it.
What was it?
Was it CNN? It said that he's a white Hispanic or something like this.
White Hispanic, yeah.
Yeah, and a lot of people, that changes the whole context, and so therefore – and the media knows the context, that if they present this as the white-black, then it – I don't know.
The old phrase sells newspapers, but it also creates a different story than if you presented this as Hispanic versus black.
And so then you can do headlines about, oh, the racism in America and at the same time politicians… Obama and Harry Reid and so forth can make this into a racial issue and try getting more votes for it.
The ultimate is how after Zimmerman saved some people in a car recently that… You all of a sudden had people who were – I'm not going to name stations, but were questioning not only saying this was a conspiracy but also saying that, well, maybe he did a bad thing.
Maybe we should bring him up on charges because what if one of these people had had a back injury and him pulling them out of the conversation?
I mean, just a total hatred, essentially.
I mean, it does go down to a hatred to the point that I guess the family that he helped, they're worried about their safety.
Oh, can you imagine?
So, you know, some guy comes and pulls you from a truck and, you know, and I don't know what the circumstances, truck overturned or something like that.
Some guy pulls you out and you're like, oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.
What?
It's you?
Oh shit.
Put us back in.
Put us back in.
We can wait for the next guy because, I mean, how terrible is that?
Ah, it's wretched.
Yeah, but you don't see the media coming out and saying something about, okay, everyone needs to sit back and relax and try to work together.
I mean, it'd be great if you did have Harry Reid and Obama come out and say, this should give us time to pause and reflect over race and crime and how we get along with each other.
And, you know, they could word it any way, but instead they try to keep that...
They try to keep that racial issue involved, and to me – I mean this is not just accidental.
When someone – well, Harry Reid, we can argue about just how smart he is, but when we have Obama… You know that they get together.
They have their little – it's not really a focus group, but they get together and try to figure out, okay, how do we play on this?
How do we present this to the public?
How do we deal with it?
And this goes back to what you said about language.
I mean if instead of trying to really convey true meaning, we're trying to manipulate people, it works much better than the baseball bat or the spear from the knights or something like this.
It is something that – It will sell an idea, and an idea is way more powerful than a weapon.
Yeah, and I mean there is a genuine tragedy in the heart of most blacks within Western cultures, particularly in America, which is, you know, they're doing not that great relative to the general population.
And, you know, there's a whole complex series of reasons why some of them have to do with, I'm sure there's racism out there, but also a lot of it has to do with bad choices within these communities.
You know, I mean, If you – Bill O'Reilly pointed this out recently where he said that, of course, black youths commit 10 times as many violent crimes as whites and Hispanic youths combined.
But also they have children out of wedlock.
They have this whole thug culture.
They don't generally have a problem getting and keeping jobs and so on as a result of the war on drugs and the profits to be made.
It's a very complex question.
It's not solved with slogans.
It's not solved with chanting and waving.
You have a complex set of interactions, some of which are external.
To a community, and some of which are damn well internal to a community, which the black community, to some elements within the black community, to their credit, have realized.
You know, stop having children out of wedlock.
Wait till you're 21 to get married and have kids.
Complete high school.
Get and keep a job for at least a year.
And if you do all of that, you have very great chances of ending up in the middle class.
If you don't do those things, you're going to stay poor.
And, of course, you can't talk about self-responsibility within the black community without being called a racist, unless you are, in fact, black, in which case it would be a wonderful opportunity for President Obama to do those kinds of things.
You know, as Bill O'Reilly was saying, you know, have him run an ad that says, targeted at black teenager women saying, don't have children when you're a teenager, you know, do these things and so on.
That would be actually helpful, but instead, you know, he talks about how frightened people are when he gets in an elevator, which...
I don't know.
Anyway, it is a language-based system that we live in still, and language has such powerful possibilities for clarification or obscurations.
The great Eastern philosopher who said, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names and not live in the matrix of language, but that's hard for people.
Well, it's even when you just use the term having a child out of wedlock versus a female-headed household.
I mean, even if you use, you can't use the word illegitimate hardly at all anymore.
And you can't use bastard at all.
No, no, no, no, because it creates a negative connotation, and so then you get – especially when it comes to these upper class, generally white women who you see some movie star who's saying, well, I'm going to have a child.
They had a donor or something like that, and of course this person also has enough money that they can hire a nanny or someone to take care of their kids.
And – but it creates this image that, well, we can't lump everyone saying an illegitimate child or a child born out of wedlock.
We have to use the – that nicer term that will fit in more with a feminist value, female-headed household.
You get this image of a strong, dynamic woman who's trying to keep her family together.
Yeah.
Versus, oops, I got pregnant.
Or, you know, I selfishly want a child without having a husband or a man around.
I mean, this is incredibly – I mean, the statistics – this is why you don't see this argument so much anymore.
You probably may remember that Murphy – It's so nice talking to somebody who's not 20.
But you probably remember that Murphy Brown debacle from, I don't know, 20 years ago where Dan Quayle said, you know, about the show Murphy Brown, it was promoting single motherhood, which is bad for kids.
And he got lambasted.
And even Candace Bergen, who lambasted him at the time, you know, a few years ago said, yeah, he was kind of right.
I mean, the statistics are incontrovertible by now.
It's about as certain as anything you can be in the social sciences how absolutely terrible and destructive single motherhood is at every wage scale.
It doesn't matter if you've got nannies or not.
I mean, nannies could be even worse because then they've got a whole cycle of caregivers who come and go usually.
particularly boys to be raised without a mom and dad.
It's one of the great relearnings that Murray Rothbard used to talk about.
He used to talk about how he was talking about in the 60s, you know, everybody kind of lived in communes and stopped washing, you know, and then they all got these horrible lice and, you know, scabies.
And it's like, yes, soap is important.
Why did we forget that?
Let's reinvent things for sure.
Let's question things about society.
But let's not say everything in the past was bad.
And this idea that you need a kind of two-parent household to effectively raise children was well-known throughout antiquity, was the fundamental basis of marriage, you know, that the woman gives up some freedoms, the man gives up some freedoms, but in return for the woman, the freedoms that the woman gives up, the man has at least a reasonable certainty that the children he's raising are his own.
And that's what tames men and all this, you know, the wild testosterone and the, you know, the fact that we have a very flat bell curve of ability, particularly white males, you know, we have more geniuses and more idiots than any other random grab bag of genes on the planet.
Like we threw out everything to do with the past and just figured we could start in some sort of communist fantasy land with a clean slate.
And let's just redesign human beings.
And maybe we don't need moms and dads, despite the fact that all animals have them and evolution has dictated that for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
Let's just say we don't need this stuff.
And then, you know, the inevitable catastrophes strike, and it's really hard because then you have a huge voting constituent of people who've made terrible mistakes, often through no fault of their own, who don't want to be told about those terrible mistakes.
And so you end up with the media propping up all of these images of the strong, noble, brave single mother and all that kind of stuff.
And sure, some of them are.
But statistically, it's about the worst thing that can happen to a kid, particularly a boy.
Well, I mean, and on top of that, I just want to throw this out, too, that There's been a huge amount of – well, I'm sure in Canada too, but in the United States, a big issue about gay marriage.
And I think one of the interesting things is I'm wondering if that's going to change the way family courts are.
Particularly in the United States, once you start seeing it's not just a, okay, guy, girl, go in.
And there's still a prejudice towards the male if he wants custody of his child or children.
And I'm wondering how that's going to play out in the future.
Sorry, you said prejudice towards the male.
I think against the male.
I just want to be really clear of that.
I think most people would understand.
That would be clear.
Okay, go ahead.
And I'm just wondering if we're going to see a change in custody laws once we start seeing all of a sudden two women going into court more often fighting for custody of their children.
But two lesbian women and so forth.
This could actually start… I'm just thinking if you go back – this sounds crazy, but if you go back to the 1970s and you think about the fact that it was somewhat off topic, but it was – feminists just hated pornography.
They were out protesting it and so forth.
And then with the VHS when it came out and then later DVD, all of a sudden you had a split in the feminist community because suddenly it wasn't just the dirty seedy side of town where the guys with trench coats went into and stuff.
It suddenly turned into, oh, you mean you could have feminist erotica.
They call it erotica.
That's another thing.
Generally, I've joked with women about this.
It's like if you have something that men want to watch, it's pornography.
If women like to watch it, it's erotica.
And it's the same thing.
I think we've unearthed the first double standard in feminism.
But anyway, go on.
Yeah, yeah, but the thing is that maybe since a lot of feminists actually now are saying, well, it's not so bad as long as there's no exploitation involved.
Well, you may see a situation where feminists in the future, when a woman is fighting for custody of the child against her wife, you might suddenly start seeing a little bit of political action being taken.
In various legislatures saying that, well, maybe we need to rewrite this maybe more like more of the Scandinavian model where there's a – if no one is really at fault, it's just people just kind of lose interest in each other, then we form some sort of joint custody situation, which in America, no, that is like – the lawyer is like, no, no, you don't want that.
We need to have a fight and stuff.
So yeah, I mean these – These breakdowns in the social norms and so forth that you bring up, I mean, yeah, these have been sold to people too.
We change the language a little bit to say, well, this is a good thing versus a bad thing.
I think, for instance, we look at – I mean I'm not getting down on people or anything, but it's the – we use the – what's the new word now that came out a few years ago?
Blended families.
Oh, yeah.
The Brady Bunch sort of thing.
And it's all an attempt to be like, okay, well, let's change and make a new context around something.
And most people just follow the context, which is unfortunate, and which is interesting is if we go back to psychopathy.
And assume that most people, well not most, but a significantly higher number are attracted to politics, are attracted to marketing and corporate and stuff.
And the military, I would assume, yeah.
In the leadership positions, I would say.
They're the ones that are going to be shooting for the promotions really quick.
You don't want to be the guy that's like, well, we need to go take that hill.
And it's like, oh, wait a minute.
40% of us aren't going to come back.
They don't want that.
They may have a certain – they want the glory, but they don't want to take the risk.
So – Yeah, the danger I think you have is a lot of people – and I don't know if it's any different now than it used to be, but a lot of people don't think.
And if they're not thinking, then they're just going to go with the flow of whatever is the – In politics, the favorite flavor of the day or what the society says is the right thing to do.
And of course they don't look back at someone like Edward Bernays who said that almost all of what most people do is dictated by a small number of people who know how to market it.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, no, people, as an old quote says, most people imagine their thinking when all they're doing is rearranging their prejudices, you know, usually according to some piece of language that is put in place that is supposed to make things different.
Yeah, blended families, um...
Extremely risky for children, right?
I mean, for a single mom in particular, if she brings a non-biologically related man into her household, the children are up to 30 times more likely to be abused in a variety of methods because there's no biological tie.
There's no history, of course, particularly when the children and the girls reach teenage years.
I mean, there's just not that same biological inhibition that comes growing up with your own children.
It's incredibly risky.
But you can, you know, most people won't even want to hear these facts.
There are so many facts that are like third rails of conversations.
Like, don't bring up these facts!
This goes against all the value-neutral language that I've been injected with that has rendered me insensate to statistical dangers.
And I think that is...
That is really tragic.
People are afraid of terrorism and the real risks that are occurring in the world are the risks of national deaths, the risks of war, the risks of child abuse, the risks of divorce from men.
A lot of men sail into marriage Without ever really thinking about, you know, the 40 or 50% chance it's not going to work out.
It could have them dragged ass backwards like Alec Baldwin through the justice system, as it's called.
He wrote a book about it, said it's basically it's about the same as being pulled behind people in a truck, you know, dragged by a chain.
You know, the ride ends when they say it will, not when you say it will.
And it's an incredibly risky thing to do, and a lot of men are just sailing into this without really thinking about the dangers and the risks of what they're doing.
So we're taught to stare at these incredibly tiny risks that are very dramatic, and yet the actual risks in our life are almost completely obscured and actually become things that you almost can't talk about.
It's so volatile.
Well, if you deal with the whole terrorism thing, I was just – there was just some headlines one day.
There was a movie star who – what is it?
He died of – it later came out that he died of erotic asphyxiation.
And, you know, I was like, whoa, I heard about that once, I think on an X-Files or something.
What is that?
Oh, this is like Michael Hutchins, the singer from NXS. He died from that, too.
I think it's the idea that if you strangle yourself while you're achieving oxygen, sorry, while you're achieving orgasm, the oxygen deprivation makes your orgasm more intense.
Yeah, and so what I did was I thought, okay, I got to look this up.
So I looked it up, and it listed how many people in – just in America, just how many people die per year of this, and I was like, oh, wow, that's more than I thought.
It was – I can't remember the exact figure, but it was in the hundreds.
It may have been like 1,000 or whatever died of that per year.
Yeah.
And then I thought – this is like about 10 years after 9-11.
So I was thinking, okay, 3,000 people died on 9-11, and it was something like twice as many people have died of erotic asphyxiation during the same time in the United States.
So you have double the chance of knowing someone personally who died from that than from terrorism.
And yet no one even talks about that kind of issue.
Then we go into drunk drivers.
Your risk of dying from a drunk driver is – there's probably more people that die from drunk driving in gosh, just a couple months.
In the United States, then die throughout all, or even maybe a month.
I don't know the exact figures.
I think traffic accidents in the U.S. are, traffic fatalities about 35,000 a year, which is, you know, it's like 9-11 every five weeks.
But, and I don't know how many of those are related to drunk driving or whatever, but it's, I think, much more about danger when I'm pulling out of my driveway than I do when I'm getting on a plane.
Well, Oh, absolutely.
And I'm not so worried about the terrorism.
I'm more worried about is the pilot going to do a good job or if there's some bolt or something that's missing.
Now we're now getting everyone scared that's listening to this is flying this tomorrow.
But the thing is that, again, it's what our perception is.
If we throw an issue out and keep it in the public eye, then people will – Think differently about it over time especially.
You brought up the thing – I got to go back there.
You brought up the thing about risk-taking in marriage, and we were talking – I mean I never even thought about this.
We talked a few minutes ago about will psychopathy, if there's any genetic link, will it decrease in the future or increase?
Well, if psychopaths are more likely to take the risk, they're going to get married at a higher percentage than people who have gone through – their parents divorced.
I've read the – what do you call it?
The millennial children.
These are kids born during the – around the 1990s.
So many of them have gone through divorce that males are really, really scared of committing, even in relationships.
And so you have fewer men who are committing at the same time, economy being what it is.
Then women see that men don't commit, and then pretty soon everyone is just kind of doing their own thing.
And then, you know, trying to, and of course, you know, okay, well, you know, I'm 35, I'm female, I don't have kids, I better go to the sperm bank and have a kid because there's no guys out there.
And this is, I think this will become a norm in the, in the future.
You can see this in Japan.
I mean, in Japan, I mean, there's a significant portion of the young men who are just not at all interested in getting married, settling down.
They're called grass eaters or herbivores because they basically had not considered to be into the red meat of sex and reproduction.
There's a whole movement in the West called Men Going Their Own Way or MGTOW, which is basically men saying, look, I'm not interested.
It's too risky legally and emotionally to try and settle down with a Western woman or a woman at all.
And of course, in Japan, it's easy to see how this came about.
I mean, this death by overwork, this karoshi, I mean, all of this kind of stuff that occurred, which these guys basically grew up without dads because their dads were working 80 hours a week and then going out to get drunk with the boss at the karaoke bar and then, you know, having a heart attack on the subway on the way home at 2 o'clock in the morning.
I mean...
What sane human being would want anything to do with that?
And, you know, with the advent of pornography, you can just masturbate and you don't have to worry about that urge, you know, that sort of Catholic restriction, the hairy palm, don't do it stuff has kind of fallen by the wayside.
And so it's, you know, for men, it's a whole lot less attractive to get involved in relationships, considering the risk and the disastrous that a lot of particularly men saw their fathers go through with divorces or overwork or just that general enslaved to the family that you never see kind of thing.
it's really not that appealing.
And I think society is going to have to adjust with that at some point because at the lower edges of society, there's lots of guys who are floating around happy to impregnate what they call in the ghettos, these apartment buildings full of rent-subsidized welfare women.
Yeah, they call them girlfriend farms because they basically just go, these guys will go and have sex.
I think it's race-related.
They'll go have sex and move on.
If the woman has a baby, well, the welfare state will take care of it and Medicare will take care of it and the public schools are subsidized and free for the families and so on.
And so at the lower echelons, I mean, they're breeding, like it takes a pretty cold-ass guy to, Yeah.
Have that many kids and not be interested in taking care of them.
So I think this is another way in which it's breeding.
And in the U.S., you know, I think trying to control for as many variables as possible over the last 15 years, sociopathy has doubled, doubled among the young.
And yeah, it really is kind of the end of the world scenario when the smarter people and the more gentle people are looking at the risks and saying, no way.
And the heedless and careless are like, yeah, I'm there.
Well, the interesting thing about that, too, is I think you've had an increase in sociopathy.
If you want to, we can get into the difference between psychopathy and sociopathy.
Do you want to just touch on that?
Might as well do it at the end.
Well, this is – I just use this analogy.
There's a – I think there's a documentary called I Am Fish Head, and I like what one psychologist said.
If you put a psychopath and a sociopath in the room and you're interviewing them and you say this pin that's sitting here on the table is the most important thing, how do you get it from me?
And he says how the difference is like the sociopath will take it.
The psychopath will manipulate you into taking it.
And using that analogy that we've been talking about a little bit here, it's like if you leave your 17-year-old daughter in the care of a psychopath or a sociopath while you're on some sort of business travel or something like this… The difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is the sociopath will rape your daughter if he wants to.
The psychopath will seduce her.
So the same thing happens.
It's just the difference that it occurs, and that's one of the best ways, I think, of seeing the difference between the two.
But the...
The family situations, if you – if the media presents – I can't remember how – there was a guy that did a book recently that – he may have been one of the ones that was involved with the bell curve.
I don't know.
But he was comparing – and he only – he didn't want to be accused of racist, so he just looked at from 1963 on because before 1963, everyone had kind of a shared set of values.
If you were a hardcore leftist liberal, you still had kids.
You still got married.
If you were a hardcore right-wing fundamentalist Christian… You did the same thing.
It was just everyone kind of did the same thing until about 1963.
So he wanted to avoid the racial component, so he just said, let's take a look at a typical middle – I mean an upper middle class white community and their standards and a lower class – he used the term working class white community.
And he said that a divergence started taking place in 1963.
We had the sexual revolution, stuff like this.
He said that most of the time, the upper-class family, they played around with it in the 70s.
But then they realized, okay, you know, if I want a good college education, if I want to do all these wonderful things, I can't be getting girls pregnant all over the place.
They're going to be chasing me in the family court.
Sorry, you mean the kids?
I want to make sure.
So you said they started playing around with it in the 70s, but who's they?
Is it the middle class family, the adults or the kids?
I just want to make sure I'm clear.
Well, to a certain degree, just about everyone, but the younger people in the 70s, a lot of the upper middle class youth, if you think about the stereotype of the sorority fraternity people and stuff like this.
So this isn't like the adults having their key parties where the adults would sort of get together and wife swap and that was sort of a fan that occurred in the 70s that sort of faded away.
You're talking more about the young people and it's sort of starting out their lives kind of thing, their adult lives.
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because the older people, even at their key parties, you talk about at least my understanding of swinging back in those days was that it was – the typical swinger was like 40-ish.
They were pretty much done with their kids, and they were – now they were looking for some sort of extra excitement.
So kids are left with the babysitter.
They go out and switch partners.
Right, right.
The teenagers and the young adults of the 70s, what happened was they experimented with all this new sexual freedom, but for the most part, at least if they experimented, and nowadays it's even more so, if they experiment, they will use some sort of contraception and so forth because they don't.
If you're going to go to college, you don't – in your senior year of high school and you're planning on going to college, you don't want to get your girlfriend pregnant, or if you're a girl, you don't want to get pregnant.
other hand, the opportunity cost for these kinds of things is much less.
So if your goal is to go work at Walmart and suddenly you wind up pregnant, it's like, "Oh, okay, well, I'll get my mom to watch the kids and they'll go watch..." Or to be fair, they can say, "Well, if I end up on welfare, that's not a huge step down from working at Walmart." Whereas if you want to become a professor and you end up on welfare, or a CEO or a lawyer or a doctor, and then you end up on welfare, that's a huge step down, even from where you started.
But for the poor, and Charles Murray talked about this, of course, in Losing Ground, for the poor, it's like, okay, well, if I end up on welfare...
I'm not hugely materially worse off than if I had a minimum wage job, but I don't have to work.
Because minimum wage jobs generally suck, which is why people try to graduate from them if they can.
So I just wanted to point that out.
So the opportunity costs in many ways for the poor people having a lot of kids is really not nearly as great for anyone with ability or drive.
But at the same time, the media will concentrate on selling these ideas of what it is to be successful and so forth to the lower classes, and they'll sell that.
Well, you look at a music video, a typical music video that will depict… A lot of hardly dressed girls dancing around, guys driving a big car with big gold necklaces around his neck and so forth.
There's a reason why that is done.
It stems back to some studies – well, in the 1950s, they studied people that lived in lower class neighborhoods versus upper class.
Upper class people park their cars in their garage.
Lower class park their cars out on the street.
And there was a reason.
Because if you're lower class and you can't afford a nice home, you could still put all of your discretionary income into a really nice car.
And then everyone can see it because it's on the street.
Right, right.
Okay, okay.
Exactly.
And this is why our media today, if you look at the media that's aimed at the lower classes, whether it's these In insane so-called reality shows or TV programming,
like I said, the music videos, where their audience is considered, well, probably not – I'll say they're probably not – they're probably not getting a lot of people at Harvard and Stanford that are saying, oh, we need to watch the new episode of and so forth.
It's not aimed at them.
It's aimed at – A group of people they know are highly susceptible to consumerism and status and – status symbols, and then you sell them things that are everything from – you might be poor, but you can afford a jacket that costs $2,000 or a pair of sneakers, which people have died for.
People are shooting people in some communities to steal shoes because they're like the new whatever brand that – It's like $1,800 shoes.
But these are status symbols, and therefore the people that do these shows, these people live in nice communities.
Their kids go to college.
They don't spend all day long watching this stuff, the videos, reality shows, what I would argue the children's programming.
If you watch any children's programming, you see how materialistic it's oriented and how, you know, you don't go to school to learn, you go to school to be seen, is the message.
You know how destructive that is, but at the same time, you present it because it makes money.
I would argue that is in a way a reflection of a psychopathic society that you just don't care as long as, well, my kids are going to go to a nice college because I'm making money selling this particular brand of clothing because we're going to insert it into all of these programs that we know that 12- and 13-year-old girls watch all day.
So I mean it's devoid of any kind of moral principle.
Are we doing it right?
I would argue they don't think that.
Do you ever show kids sitting down in children's programming looking at a book and studying?
No.
What do you do?
You show the teachers and… The parents, particularly the fathers, as being idiots, stupid, nerdy, and this sells.
But unfortunately, not only does it sell products, it also sells ideas in which especially the lower class are thinking, oh, why do I have to listen to this teacher?
Oh, if they do have a father, why do I have to listen to my father?
He's just some jerk that for some reason my mom puts up with and that sort of thing, and I think that's actually destructive.
Oh, it is.
And it very much is feeding the present at the expense of the future.
Because, of course, when these people get older, they're going to have to live in a world that is populated by the children that they fed all this horrible propaganda to.
This is a problem, of course, as old as philosophy, that youth tends to be quite foolish, but it's very pretty, right?
Whereas age tends to be quite wise.
But it's not so pretty.
So the prettiest exteriors hide the most foolish souls, and the ugliest exteriors can hide the most beautiful souls.
But of course, we only have two eyes.
The third eye of the mind doesn't usually work for people where you can perceive virtue.
And it is, of course, a terrifyingly materialistic culture.
I think that has a lot to do with the fact that we've thrown kids into daycare.
We have, as a species in our history, the traditional ratio has been four adults for every child, right?
Because extended family and tribalism and so on.
And so children grew with a lot of top-down influence.
Now, you know, put kids in daycare and there are 10 kids to a teacher, 20 kids to a teacher in schools, 25 or 30 kids or more.
To a teacher, and so with the lack of adult instruction, they gravitate towards peer instruction.
And that always tends to gravitate towards the lowest common denominator.
It tends to be the sociopath or the psychopathic kid who is the most intimidating, who is the most shallow, who is the most brutal, who is the most willing to do damage to other children, either verbally or physically.
And thus you end up with a very primitive, ugly set of childish personalities hurting everyone around.
And it's a lot easier in that environment to buy a set of sneakers than it is to develop virtue and thus risk alienating yourself from a pretty primitive and brutal tribe.
So abandoning children to be raised by each other is a complete disaster, and I hope that we learn that sooner rather than later.
Well, even in societies where – and the 1950s model of dad going out and working and mom staying home, that did not exist, for instance, during the pioneer days.
I mean in the pioneer days, dad might go out and go hunting or whatever for meat and the woman is out there tilling the crops.
I mean often, very often, she's the one out there plowing the fields and she might be six months pregnant doing it.
But – The interesting thing in that era was, like you said, there was someone to take care of the kids, and usually that was either one set or both sets of parents because you'd have one of the parents probably living with you, whether it's the mother's parents or the father's parents.
Yeah, so you always had a situation where you had someone who was a stereotypical 60-year-old, 70-year-old, 80-year-old person sitting on the porch and probably pretty strict with the kids because they might be a little bit more frail, so therefore the kids aren't going to get away with a lot.
They're going to go after them, but also teaching the values.
And they are a heavily invested blood relative, not someone in a daycare making minimum wage who's going to cycle in and out of that job every three months, not some teacher who's there because she wants summers off and the ability to work six hours a day.
I mean, it's not to condemn all teachers, but there's no substitute for heavily invested blood relatives.
I mean the fact that we care about our progeny despite their endless inconvenience, and I say this as the father of one child, completely respecting that you have eight kids.
So I probably don't even know half of what I'm talking about or one-eighth.
But there's no substitute for a heavily invested blood relative.
There's a reason why we care more about our own genes than other people's genes.
And I don't think there's a huge amount of substitute.
Just farming kids off to be raised by strangers for the most part is not going to help them develop meaningful and deep relationships.
No, and I mean the irony is there's been a lot written on why is it that humans have menopause?
And there's one other species that has menopause, and that's pilot whales, and pilot whales and humans are the only species that recognize grandchildren.
And also the species in which the grandparents, like you said, they're invested.
They will work to raise the children as well.
So the idea is the woman reaches 45, 50, 55.
She's no longer able to have kids.
Therefore, she now will help with raising her own – her grandkids.
And in today's society, we don't – I mean we don't have the grandparents nearby anymore.
I mean if you're in northern Europe, you just stick grandma and grandpa either in an apartment or in a rest home and forget about them.
If you're in the United States, grandma and grandpa are getting in the camper and going down to Arizona during the winter and doing their own thing because that's what's promoted.
Live for yourself.
Go move to a condo in Miami or something like this.
And hardly ever see the kids.
Maybe with Skype you can talk to them during Christmas or something.
But the thing is that then, again, we open it up more to what the society Is going to promote versus the kids getting their culture and their learning through those who've lived through it.
I mean my father, he's like 90.
If I want to know something about the Depression, he can tell me what it was like living during the Depression.
I can show my kids, oh, here's a documentary about the Depression.
That's not nearly… As emotionally invested as knowing that your grandfather had to go out and – in order to feed the chickens, when they were little kids, five and six and seven and eight years old, they had to go out and gather grasshoppers because they couldn't afford feed and stuff like that.
So it gives a certain level of – What I would say is respect for history.
And then if you have a situation, like you said, you have a daycare where – and I would argue that to a certain degree daycare is something that is used – I would say, for instance, the Nordic model of daycare is also associated with acculturating or socializing children to be one homogenous group,
much like Public education was set up in the United States to take all these immigrant kids from Catholic and Protestant and Jewish backgrounds with different languages, stick them into one classroom, and make them all into nice Anglo-Saxon, at least Protestant ethic individuals.
And I think daycare to a certain degree, it doesn't have that political aspect in the United States and I don't know about Canada, but especially the United States, yeah.
But I think ultimately it could where it would be used as a socialization technique as it is, like I said, in the Nordic model or how it used to be in the Soviet Union.
Well, I mean, it clearly communicates to children that their priorities are not important.
I mean, I worked in a daycare, and I mean, there's no question.
I mean, kids experience everything in terms of how valuable am I to my parents.
That's their fundamental survival drive.
Am I valuable to my parents?
If they miss that, they might get abandoned on an ice floe or something.
And fundamentally, when you put your kids in daycare, what you're telling them is, I got better things to do than spend time with you.
Now, you could say, well, you know, but I have to go to work and we've got to have food on the table and so on.
That's fine.
Kids will understand that when they get older.
But when they're younger, all they get is, well, mom or dad or both.
They have more important things to do than spend time with us, so they're going to stick me with strangers.
I mean, that's so humiliating for children.
You know, I mean, it's like getting married to someone and then saying, well, I'm going to spend most of the week living with someone else who I like better.
I mean, how's a wife going to feel about that?
Not good, right?
I mean, it is fundamentally humiliating.
And that humiliation plays itself out in gang-related activities.
It plays itself out in...
In drugs to mask the pain of that humiliation.
It plays itself out in bullying, in hierarchy, in nerdish outcasting.
The humiliation of, my parents don't want to spend time with me, and that's clear based upon their behavior.
Children are relentlessly empirical.
They don't care about your stories.
They only care about what you do.
It's just tragic, and this humiliation is going to bounce back harsh on society.
Well, especially when we consider the fact that a lot of parents, even when they're with their kids, they just put the kids in front of television.
Yeah, or video games or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, what's it, 15 hours, 15 hours a week kids spend in front of media, 20 hours a week, it's like a part-time job, and they're already not dealing, they're already not interacting with their parents all day, and half the weekend when they got chores, like, everyone's got errands and stuff to do, the amount of quality conversation time that kids have with their adults can be measured, you know, in 10 to 20 minutes a week.
I mean, it's astounding how terrible that is.
And to get back on – again, the relation with psychopathy, you said that the sociopathy psychopathy seems to increase, has increased lately.
And it's not – I don't think the genetic ones, people that actually have this predisposition, but it's more like what you call secondary psychopaths.
When kids start learning what seems to work in society, they no longer have grandma and grandpa.
For instance, I'll just use the extended family model from the 19th century.
They don't have grandma and grandpa giving stories and saying that we don't do this because it's wrong.
They don't have that enculturation.
Instead, they watch television where often the hero, whether it's a children's show or something more brutal or more adult, the person who's the hero gets what they want through being more manipulative, breaking social barriers and breaking the law and doing these other things in order to achieve their goals.
And so a lot of these kids are...
Excuse me, I'm a cat here.
Yeah, put a cat in the video that increases your viewership on YouTube.
Oh, look at that.
Our views just went up 600,000 times.
Yeah, just put something about cats in a video and you're going to wind up with millions of views.
But that gives you an idea.
People want that kind of thing.
But the thing is...
That with today, I think the lessons, instead of sitting around the campfire, if you're going to go back a thousand years and telling the sagas of your people, instead of grandma and grandpa teaching you, instead of mother in the 50s teaching you.
It's these children's networks.
It's the big corporate media, which is only controlled by six companies ultimately in the Western world.
They're going to give you an image of what life is like, which doesn't exist.
I mean this image does not exist, but that's the image that you create.
It's like the soap operas.
No one ever works in the soap opera.
They just dress up like they work.
And then, like I said, the kids go to school.
Yeah, and their illegitimate child is already a teenager after two years after they got pregnant in the first place.
I remember my mom watching those soap operas.
That was like, hey, that kid, she was – now the kid is dating.
Anyway, the thing is though that, again, it's – everything turns into what does the – what's the appearance?
So if I go to school dressed in all the designer clothes, I – If you're in America, you're 16, you're driving a nice car, and all these other things, well, that counts.
Learning something in the classroom is just a distraction from the important stuff, and that's to be seen by other people.
So you get a situation where kids smart off more, and then how does the school system react to that?
They become more authoritarian.
My son attended a school in Provo, Utah, and the rules there were – I mean it was a working-class high school.
The rules there were atrocious on – you got detention if you were – Tardy to class no matter how much time, but a couple times.
The way you had to validate whether you truly were sick went beyond the parents just saying, Johnny was sick yesterday.
He couldn't come to school.
It's almost like he had to provide a… Signed affidavit from a doctor without Johnny being punished for missing school.
So the classroom, it becomes more authoritarian.
The kids get used to it.
Pretty soon you have police monitoring things and checking the lockers, and this gets the kids used to this idea because, again, they don't have this inner connection.
There's no ethic built into them, so then everything has to be external.
You've got to do right because if you don't, we're going to come down on you for not doing right.
And the kids don't understand that.
It's just like – I remember when I taught in public school in the United States and you would – And you'd have a substitute that was really mean, and the kids would be like – you'd have a kind of class that had some unruly students, and they're like, don't get that substitute anymore.
She was really mean.
She did this and this and this, and I'm just writing down, note, get that teacher.
Get her to come in every single time.
You didn't want the teacher coming in that was all nice and like, oh, class, let's talk about flowers, and then they're eaten alive by the students.
And that's sad because in some of these alternative educational settings for the kids that are like 16 and under, if they have this desire and it's been instilled by their parents to learn, You don't really have to have all those rules.
You don't have to say, well, here's the 100 rules you have to follow because they just do it.
And I think that most people, when they have this idea of let's just be free and do whatever, even if it means infringing on other people's rights, they don't understand that the powers that be, whether it's government, whether it's schools, whatever, are going to become way more authoritarian.
In order to keep things under control.
Well, there's a great old quote.
I think it was Montesquieu who said that if you forget the few basic rules, you end up with 10,000 petty rules.
Like you try and play catch-up all the time.
I'll send you the quote.
It's not exactly that, but it's something like that.
And listen, just before our audience completely runs out of oxygen, I think we should end here.
A fantastically enjoyable chat.
I'm sure we could chat what is all night for me and all morning for you.
But make sure that my listeners can get a hold of your existing work and your upcoming novel.
Where can they find you on the interwebs?
Okay.
Well, first of all, the best thing, if you just look up the fan site at Freedom From Conscience on Facebook, then you can find information there.
You can look up Freedom From Conscience on Amazon, and you'll come up with both.
It's Freedom From Conscience, Melanie's Journey is the first book.
Freedom From Conscience, Melanie's Awakening is the second book.
Yeah, if – try it out.
I think that sometimes it gives people a better perspective if something is written from a fictional standpoint because you can relate to the character.
You can be thinking, how is she thinking?
Why does she commit this crime, justify it, and then just go on with her own life and not worry about the consequences?
Yeah.
How can she not have this consuming her and just go on like this?
And it's – I think you'll find it for a psychological thriller.
It's not just about violence.
It is about psychology.
It's about philosophy.
It's about government.
It's about – well, the second book goes into family, which we've talked about a lot, how is – Our goals towards family are very vital and how does this affect society?
And so I try to play a lot with the union archetypes.
Everything has a symbolic meaning.
It's not just thrown out like, you know, here's a car chase.
There's no car chases in these novels.
It's not a car chase.
It is if something's done, if an event takes place, there is a symbolic meaning behind it.
And so, you know, I mean, I may be the author, but I'd say I think people would enjoy it a lot.
Both books.
I will be sure to put the links in the low bar to the video and also in the notes of the podcast.
Mike, I'm very glad that you got back in touch.
I've really enjoyed the conversation.
I hope we can do it again.
And thank you so much for your time.
I hope that this didn't get you up too god awfully early, or I hope that you can get a little bit of sleep before your day begins.
Oh, thank you very much.
And thanks for having me on.
My pleasure.
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