Aug. 16, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| This is listener question time, listener Q&A. If you would like to send a question to bounce off my shiny cranium, you can send it to mailbag at freedomainradio.com. | |
| First question, what do you think of pickup artists and the seduction community? | |
| First of all, I'm tragic that they approach me more. | |
| I wanted to make a podcast request about the Society of Pickup Artists. | |
| I went to an anarchist meetup today. | |
| I was very surprised that a couple of guys there were practicing PUA. It surprised me. | |
| I didn't see the connection between PUA and anarchism. | |
| I expected less fakery from these people. | |
| I say fakery because I was into PUA for a while years back, and I think the whole thing is very manipulative because there are like these positive reinforcers and negative reinforcers for men to say to women to control them. | |
| When I spoke with the two people there at the meetup, one of them seemed very insecure about belonging to a group and the other seemed very cold. | |
| A cold pickup artist, I can't imagine. | |
| I felt like he thought I was not even there. | |
| I think lack of empathy is a good word here. | |
| I would really like to hear you talk about the pickup artist society. | |
| The idea came when one of the guys actually was a listener of yours. | |
| I was surprised and disturbed that some people just listened to belong to something. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Well, I don't know much about the... | |
| I've heard a few things like you give a woman a sort of compliment with a little sting in it to sort of make her feel off balance and insecure and there are sort of physical and verbal cues that you attempt to use to steer women into bed. | |
| So, first and foremost, it's kind of ridiculous that Women would fall for this nonsense. | |
| This is such an obvious nonsense, you know, the idea that you could just use these cues and so on. | |
| I mean, certainly, I guess it must work. | |
| I mean, otherwise there wouldn't be any such thing as a pickup artist. | |
| But it means that you're basically pointing your dick at a deep chasm of dumb. | |
| And that, I think, is disrespectful to your dick and disrespectful to dumb. | |
| So... | |
| Any woman who's going to fall for this stuff is either just allowing herself to go along because she has no will, spine, or self-esteem, or she actually is dumb enough to be manipulated by this stupid stuff, in which case... | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's like three steps up from bestiality. | |
| That's just tragic. | |
| It's tragic. | |
| There's a deep hatred, I would imagine, of women as well. | |
| Women are only good for one thing, for fucking and discarding and starting using them like Kleenex and so on. | |
| And the hatred towards women, again, I would usually guess would come from a severely dysfunctional maternal relationship and so on. | |
| So I think it's one of these things where there's a competence in something that is It's pretty egregious. | |
| It's not evil. | |
| I mean, you're not initiating force, assuming you're not date raping or whatever, or dropping the date rape drinks into people's drinks. | |
| You're not initiating force, but it's pretty wretched. | |
| And there is, of course, a lot of lies that have to go into it. | |
| I mean, do you actually say to the woman, I kind of hate women. | |
| I just want to have sex with you because I think that you're just there as a cum bucket, and then I'm just going to move on to someone else, and I have no interest in any kind of relation. | |
| You have to just kind of lie. | |
| Now, the moment you lie towards someone, the moment you lie to someone, you really have become inferior to them. | |
| This is sort of something people don't generally understand about lying. | |
| People think, well, if I lie and manipulate other people, then I'm in control of them. | |
| Nothing could be further from the truth. | |
| If you can't say to a woman honestly what your goals and intentions are and what your motives are, then you are abandoning the truth, abandoning your integrity, abandoning your honesty for the sake of So who has power over who? | |
| Well, the woman has power over the man. | |
| So this idea that the pickup artist is somehow in control of women is ridiculous. | |
| He's just lying and falsifying things and so on in order to get sex from women. | |
| So if the moment you start lying and you give up your integrity and you hide who you are and you hide your motives and you pretend to be something you're not and so on, you're a slave to the object of your desire. | |
| So I think it's a very weak and kind of pitiful, very destructive and harmful and hateful approach to women. | |
| So next, I have just left school and I'm soon to get a job. | |
| I have so many ideas for how I would like to spend my life, but I can see them all ending in me getting horrifically entangled with the rat race, working hard for little money and then losing most of it to taxes and the most basic living costs. | |
| Do you have any advice on how to escape this? | |
| I do. | |
| I do So, I don't know where you're from. | |
| Oh, you're from the UK, according to... | |
| Okay. | |
| So, I don't know what the tax laws are in the UK, but certainly here in North America, if you're self-employed, you get deductions, and all perfectly legal, and they do help to reduce your taxes. | |
| Not perhaps to, you know, Mitt Romney's teenage tax bracket, but you do get to reduce them quite a bit. | |
| The really important thing, and Doug Casey talked about this last year at Libertopia, he said a lot of libertarians, if you're a libertarian, are kind of poor. | |
| Money gives you some freedom, some flexibility. | |
| You can travel, you can take time off, you can buy books, you can do lots of great stuff, you can do lots of charitable work, you can further courses that you're interested in, but there's almost no way to become wealthy. | |
| In a salaried position. | |
| I mean, unless you're like a heart surgeon or a law partner or something like that, which requires 20 years of sacrifice and 80-hour weeks and no life and all that kind of stuff. | |
| So there's almost no way to become wealthy in a salaried position. | |
| So what you want to do is you want to think of products and services you can supply to people that are going to be of value to them and be an entrepreneur. | |
| I mean, I got my first job I actually got my first job when I was 9 or so, painting plaques of the Queen. | |
| Great job for a future anarchist. | |
| And then I got my first job when I was 11 in a bookstore, assembling newspapers and putting them all out on Sunday mornings. | |
| And I've sort of been working ever since, but when I got into my 20s, I became an entrepreneur. | |
| I mean, I've had a couple of salary positions since then, but I've been almost exclusively an entrepreneur ever since. | |
| Certainly with the show that I do here, it's pretty entrepreneurial and so on. | |
| So what I would suggest is try and find some way that you can provide value. | |
| From whatever skills you have or friends you have or relationships you can put together or solutions you can put together and work to sell them directly. | |
| Being an entrepreneur is like a full soul exposure to challenges. | |
| You're always going to be a cog in a machine if you're an employee. | |
| You're always going to be, oh, here's where you go and here's what you do and this and that and the other. | |
| If you're an entrepreneur, you get to see all aspects of business, sales, marketing, R&D, product development, relationship management, advertising, you name it. | |
| And if you're smart enough to listen to this show, you're too smart to be a cog in a machine. | |
| Be your own machine, is kind of what I'm telling you. | |
| So constantly be on the lookout. | |
| You don't have to come up with all these great ideas. | |
| Just constantly be on the lookout. | |
| Use social media sites, business media sites like LinkedIn. | |
| Just be constantly on the lookout. | |
| Post on Facebook. | |
| Say, I want to become an entrepreneur. | |
| Who's got a great idea? | |
| Who wants to get involved? | |
| And then really vet like crazy the people you're going to get involved with because it's closer than a marriage in some ways. | |
| So, be an entrepreneur. | |
| That would be my suggestion. | |
| There's lots of ways that you can get into it, find something that excites you, and just start taking the risks and recognize that, you know, first one or two will probably fail. | |
| The first, you know, nine or ten will probably fail. | |
| But you will gain experience no matter what. | |
| And if you've been an entrepreneur, you just have great value no matter what happens. | |
| Even if all you've done is fail, you've got a lot of experience under your belt and you've learned a lot of what not to do. | |
| So just keep trying and that's the best way to escape the rat race, in my humble opinion. | |
| Next, you mentioned recently the development of empathy being more related to paternal involvement. | |
| Do you think it is because the mother is so much more physically related to the child? | |
| The child grows in the womb for nine months, then breastfeeds, so it's almost like they would naturally assume that the mother understands them. | |
| The father would be the first person outside that paradigm who would understand the child. | |
| Thus, that might be why they develop empathy more from the father than from the mother. | |
| Yeah, I mean, the moms and the kids are... | |
| I can't imagine growing a human being in my belly and breastfeeding. | |
| It's symbiotic. | |
| I mean, they are an extension of the mom, right? | |
| So, you know, one of the reasons why infant babies are so helpless for so long. | |
| I mean, they have one of the longest, ridiculously incompetent phases of any mammal, let alone any animal. | |
| It's because all children are born prematurely, right? | |
| So the nine months after birth are called the fourth trimester. | |
| The reason that they're born prematurely is because otherwise the head gets too big, and I shudder to even describe this, but the head gets too big to fit through the vagina, right? | |
| And so the children are born ridiculously prematurely, which is why they're so bonded and need so much physical contact with the mother. | |
| So for, you know, I mean, assuming that the mother breastfeeds for the first sort of 18 months, I mean, that's over two years. | |
| I think that's an incredible thing to experience, but it does not give them a lot of space and objectivity with which to regard each other. | |
| It's an essential bonding, but I do find that in my experience with moms, they tend to, you know... | |
| They're so used to reacting intimately to the moods of the infant, right? | |
| So when the infant cries, they just wake up. | |
| I remember staying with one mom who ran into a wall when her baby cried because she just woke up and had to go. | |
| So they're so attuned. | |
| Their emotional limbic systems, their neurological systems become entwined, and there's just not that distance. | |
| And that's great. | |
| That's exactly how it should be. | |
| But the dads have a bit of a wider orbit, and so the moms' emotional lives are so symbiotically fused with the infants in successful bonding. | |
| I think it's healthy, it's right, it's exactly how it should be, but dads don't have the same experience. | |
| So in my experience, when the kids get upset, the moms just get upset. | |
| I mean, the good moms, you know, it's the way it works, right? | |
| And dads have a little bit more emotional distance and can actually relate as separate people, if that makes any sense. | |
| And since empathy develops so early, I mean, it's not like moms are doing this when the kids are 12, right? | |
| But empathy develops so early that it's really hard to imagine how it comes from the mom, given how symbiotically fused the mom and the baby are. | |
| And so I think it comes from the dad relating to the infant or to the baby as a separate person without the same fusing of the emotional lives. | |
| This is not scientific, my opinion. | |
| This may be a silly question. | |
| But if a person homesteads a piece of land and over time makes it productive, it becomes his property. | |
| By the same logic, wouldn't a child that is born from the bodies of its parents and then raised for many years become the property of its parents? | |
| I understand we don't want to live as slaves, and morality dictates we'd be legally free after a while, but I was wondering if there was a universal principle behind how private property was distinguished. | |
| I mean, it's an old argument back from the slave days. | |
| The abolitionists, the anti-slavists would say, If you can own property, you can't be property. | |
| A human being can't be your property, right? | |
| Because you can destroy your property at will, right? | |
| I mean, if I just were to reach in and punch this camera, people might say, well, that's not where I want my lovely donations to you, dear Steph, to go, but nobody would take me to jail. | |
| If I break your camera, it's kind of a different moral matter because I'm not my property. | |
| So you can destroy your own property at will with no negative moral consequences. | |
| You cannot destroy your own children at will without negative moral consequences. | |
| So that's something slightly different. | |
| Your children are your responsibility, right? | |
| Because if you have a child and you take that child home, the assumption is that you will then take care of that child. | |
| If you don't want to, you have to announce a deviation from what is generally accepted. | |
| I mean, if you go into a store, you don't have to sign a contract which says, I'm not going to shoplift. | |
| But if you want to shoplift and you want to be honest, you come into the store and say, hey, listen, I really want to shoplift the store. | |
| The guy's going to say, well, get out, right? | |
| So if you're going to deviate from what is generally accepted, you have to announce that, give other people the opportunity to change their behavior based upon your deviation from the norm. | |
| And so you're responsible for your children because they can't fend for themselves, they can't feed themselves, they can't clothe themselves, they can't get their own health care, and so on. | |
| So you're responsible for your children, of course, but you don't own them in that you can destroy them like any other piece of property. | |
| Of course you do infuse your labor, so to speak, into your children, and you take care of them, you give them food, health care, and so on. | |
| But that does not mean that they then become your property. | |
| A property is fundamentally inanimate. | |
| And, of course, has no feelings and has no potential for owning property itself, right? | |
| So no matter how much I clean my car, it's never going to go out and buy a new car and cruise around downtown trying to find pickup artists to drive over. | |
| So anyway, I hope that helps a little bit. | |
| Those are the... | |
| Hey, those are the questions! | |
| Yeah! | |
| Oh, no, wait. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| No, one more. | |
| One more. | |
| Sorry. | |
| I went to an event where I wasn't expecting them to play the national anthem, so I was thrown off guard. | |
| Would you stand up, and how would you explain that to your kid? | |
| I mean, look, I get that these are questions that, from an integrity standpoint, feel important. | |
| They're not important. | |
| Stand up, sit down. | |
| I mean, I don't care. | |
| I don't care. | |
| I sort of tried to put myself in that position. | |
| It's been a long time since I've stood up for the national anthem. | |
| I love to sing, so get up and belt something out. | |
| I'll do that in church if I'm there. | |
| When was the last time I was in church? | |
| I can't even remember. | |
| But it doesn't matter. | |
| If you're in some foreign city, I guess it doesn't really matter, if you're with your friends and family and they don't know your beliefs, then you're going to have some pretty exciting conversations. | |
| If they do know your beliefs, then they won't mind so much. | |
| But Breaking from conformity when you have children is a real challenge, because you as an adult can make that choice and accept the consequences of breaking with conformity. | |
| Your children are not going to have the same luxury. | |
| So you may decide to not stand for the national anthem. | |
| But then some of your kids' friends may see that and then say, well, that's weird. | |
| You're the guy whose weirdo dad wouldn't stand for the national anthem. | |
| What the hell's the matter with you? | |
| So you're kind of throwing your kids a little bit to the conformity wolves when you're making that choice. | |
| So it's more complicated than just your own personal integrity. | |
| If you're single and you don't have kids or whatever, then do whatever you want and you alone take the consequences. | |
| But when you have kids, they will take the consequences of your You know, moral stands for the integrity of sitting when there's a national anthem. | |
| I don't really care. | |
| I probably would just stand and sing, and I would explain to my kid that this is, you know, a song that people sing because they like living in a particular place, which is, you know, kind of true. | |
| That's what most people believe. | |
| Like, somebody asked me on Facebook about there's movement in Canada to take out the Pledge of Allegiance to the Queen. | |
| Out of becoming a citizen and so on. | |
| You know, what do I think of it? | |
| It's like, this is not how... | |
| I mean, whether you stand or sit, the national anthem is not going to dislodge the 10,000-year-old state. | |
| You know, whether you say particular words, I pledge allegiance to the... | |
| I pledge allegiance to Queen, but just the band. | |
| That's a different matter, right? | |
| But you say these words or you don't say these words, it doesn't matter. | |
| Maybe you mouth the words and don't say them so that you'd know. | |
| This is like fiddling while Rome burns. | |
| This is rearranging deck tears on the Titanic as it's going down. | |
| I mean, this is not how we're going to solve the problem of the state, whether you stand or sit at a particular time or whether you say these words. | |
| It's not magic. | |
| It doesn't have any effect on reality, fundamentally. | |
| I mean, the way that we change society is we are kind to our children. | |
| We are gentle with our children, and it's a multi-generational change. | |
| So, that would be my particular focus. | |
| Don't sweat the small stuff. | |
| I mean, most of life isn't pretty small stuff. | |
| Don't sweat it. | |
| You know, stand, sit down, doesn't really matter. | |
| You can have an interesting conversation with your kids either way. | |
| But recognize that if you take a stand that is going to be unpopular among your kids' friends, they are going to face some challenges. | |
| And it's just important to really think about that because that's not quite the same as you deciding of your own accord to take these stands. | |
| So I hope that helps as well. | |
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| But really appreciate it. | |
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| Have yourself a wonderful week, everyone. |
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