I am constantly changing my mind on which career to pursue, how do I make a decision? Should somebody stay in a romantic relationship if they aren’t happy? What explains the public support of spanking? Should we encourage our children to wait for sex until marriage? What's it like to be a Libertarian in Canada?
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| We are going to dip into the listener mailbag and see which gems we can come up with. | |
| Hey Stefan, my name is Michael, age 24. | |
| I found your video titled, Unleash Your Passion Now! | |
| Sounds a bit fascist. | |
| Very inspiring from the standpoint of picking a goal or a long-term career path and putting tons of energy into it. | |
| Particularly in the past six years, I'm constantly changing my mind on which career to pursue. | |
| I listed about 20 things that I would love to pursue a couple of weeks ago and aimed to refine them into two or three things with preferably one major thing. | |
| Some of the options I have considered are advanced basketball coaching, programmer, physicist, biophysicist, excavator, math teacher, permaculture designer, film, music, composer, producer, Klingon volleyball star. | |
| Okay, I made up one of those. | |
| In prioritizing these options, I have considered variables such as enjoyment, potential existing strengths, and level of demand in whichever type of work. | |
| Right now, I decided to pursue computer programming, but from my past, I'm likely to change my mind again and again. | |
| I have been in these similar loops of deciding what I want to do, changing my mind, deciding on something else, etc. | |
| for six years, and I'm not sure where to go from here. | |
| I'm happy to pursue any of the 20 things on the list, but afraid that I'll continue to change my mind after one month. | |
| Three months, one year, and so on. | |
| What are your thoughts? | |
| Well, that's tough. | |
| It's tough to have such an embarrassment of riches that you can do such amazingly wide and wonderful things. | |
| I'm a little bit more specialized, but two thoughts come to mind. | |
| First of all, you're talking about all of this in isolation. | |
| You're not talking about anyone else who might be helping you with these decisions. | |
| You're also not talking about people who would inspire you or who you'd want to be like who would be in particular fields and so on. | |
| So those are the first things. | |
| One's life's ambitions should be discussed in conjunction with friends, family, and so on. | |
| So, sit down and talk with people. | |
| What do you think my strengths are? | |
| What do you think would make me the happiest? | |
| It doesn't mean you have to do everything they say, but socialize your ambitions. | |
| If you try to create them in isolation, you are a little likely to be one of those weather vanes who turns any way the wind blows. | |
| Number one. | |
| Number two... | |
| Oh, Michael, how do I put this nicely? | |
| You selfish bastard. | |
| All you are thinking about is your own pleasure alone. | |
| And I'm not an altruist. | |
| You should, of course, pursue things that are going to make you happy and so on. | |
| But there is kind of a needy world out there, and the world needs philosophy, commitment, education, integrity, elevated examples, passion. | |
| And you can do and pursue virtue in the world, and you can be a comedian and do it. | |
| You can be a surgeon and do it. | |
| You can even be an accountant and do it. | |
| But there's nothing in here about maybe what the world might need. | |
| Because you're a young man, it doesn't really strike you as that important, but I'm telling you, it is that important. | |
| To maintain a difficult course of action requires that you have a desire bigger than yourself. | |
| Let me rephrase that or repeat that. | |
| It's important. | |
| To maintain a difficult course of action requires that you Understand that it is much bigger than you, just your particular pleasures. | |
| The pleasures of the moment, the hedonism of the moment, are always going to change. | |
| But if you pick a goal, I mean, my goal is, you know, bring reason and virtue and peace to the world as best I can, then when I face the difficulties on that path, you know, oh, people haven't donated much in a while, or you're getting a lot of flack for X, Y, and Z, or shows aren't getting a lot of traction, whatever it's going to be. | |
| Well, I just have to remind myself that it's bigger than my daily preferences. | |
| And being part of a bigger machinery of motivating and improving the world, however that's going to formulate itself, is a great way to kind of stay with the program. | |
| It's more than just about you. | |
| So it seems kind of isolated, and it seems like you're not wondering what the world might need as well. | |
| People who have gifts for philosophy, for communication and so on, to me, you are natural surgeons. | |
| And if you've studied it and you've listened to this show and you've studied other things and you've studied philosophy and you've read Ayn Rand and you've read your Nietzsche or whatever, whichever philosophers get your juices flowing, well, you have trained yourself to be a physician to the greatest of the world's ills, which is... | |
| The combination of ignorance and evil. | |
| Now, evil we can't cure, really. | |
| Ignorance we can. | |
| And so, if you have trained yourself to think deeply and communicate well, then you have become a surgeon. | |
| And sometimes a surgeon... | |
| Just has to go help people. | |
| If you're a surgeon and there's some car pile up and you have your kit with you, you go and help people. | |
| You don't say, well, you know, I'm on my way to the restaurant. | |
| It's really good. | |
| I don't want to miss my reservations. | |
| It's like, sorry, you're a surgeon. | |
| You kind of have an obligation to help people. | |
| No one's going to throw you in jail if you don't, but it's kind of dickish not to. | |
| So if you have real abilities to help the world, go help the world! | |
| That's what those abilities are for! | |
| And leave the world a better place than you found it, and then it won't just be about your particular preferences of the moment. | |
| I have a question. | |
| You've talked much about the importance of marriage and stable relationships. | |
| Especially isotopes. | |
| I'm not married, nor do I have children, but I've been living with my girlfriend for four years now. | |
| However, I've come to the conclusion that our relationship is at an end. | |
| I care for her very deeply, but I don't love her anymore. | |
| We've become roommates. | |
| It's been like this for quite some time already. | |
| I know you are highly critical of people ending relationships because they simply are not happy anymore. | |
| Sorry. | |
| Sorry. | |
| When you put yourself out into the world, the things that you see reflected coming back at you is crazy. | |
| If you're not happy, don't be in a relationship. | |
| Now, if you're just kind of going through a rough patch and you have eight children and your life has been wound together, then yeah, don't go sleep with the pool boy, dude. | |
| But if you're living with some woman, there's no kids, you're not married, and you're not happy, and, you know, you've tried to work it out and figured out what's going on. | |
| Don't stay in relationships that you're unhappy. | |
| It's just that the statistics are that, like, 50% of people who consider divorce, but who are just, I'm so unhappy, I'm going to get a divorce. | |
| Five years later, if they stay married, when they get interviewed, they're like, man, I'm glad I didn't get a divorce. | |
| The marriage now is better than ever. | |
| So, you don't let a rough patch bail you out. | |
| But if you've been living for four years and you haven't married the woman... | |
| Dude, come on. | |
| For me... | |
| I mean, I married my wife within ten months of meeting her. | |
| And I think you should... | |
| Challenge yourself to make a commitment. | |
| It's a great way to find out if the relationship's going to work out or not, right? | |
| My best way of breaking up a relationship that didn't work out for me really well was to propose. | |
| And, you know, you propose to a woman thinking she's a goddess and then she turns into Gollum with the ring. | |
| Well, sorry, it's lava time for you. | |
| Please leave my finger behind. | |
| So, if you are with a woman for a year, 18 months... | |
| You know, you don't have forever. | |
| Go figure out if you can stay with her for your life or not. | |
| So, work at looking for a long-term commitment, particularly if you want kids. | |
| Just kind of hanging around and living with. | |
| And, you know, we've been dating for five years and all. | |
| Just get married, for God's sakes. | |
| What are you, immortal? | |
| I mean, come on, Abby. | |
| Well, you know, perhaps in the 54th millennium. | |
| After we have colonized Uranus, we can perhaps think about it. | |
| But right now, I'm really enjoying my 450th year of adolescence, right? | |
| I mean, this is just go get married. | |
| Or, you know, if you get married or you propose, you feel really depressed like I did, then get out. | |
| Anyway, sorry. | |
| On the other hand, do you really think a person should stay in a relationship, but he knows it doesn't have that it can't have a good future? | |
| What a rhetorical question. | |
| Yes, you should stay in a relationship that's doomed. | |
| And also, never bail out of an aircraft when it's heading into a mountainside. | |
| Stay lashed into a truck when your brakes don't work and you're heading off a cliff. | |
| Whatever you're going to do, that is completely disastrous. | |
| Philosophy says do it. | |
| What a great message. | |
| No, of course not. | |
| If the relationship makes a person positively unhappy, should he still stay in it, hoping against hope that things will get better? | |
| Oh, my God. | |
| Well, I think you should write all of that on a Valentine's Day card, even if it's not February the 14th. | |
| And you should say, Oh, dear sexy goddess lover of mine, you make me so unhappy. | |
| I'm here... | |
| Because I was here. | |
| And I'm still here because I haven't left. | |
| I have some momentum. | |
| We share bills. | |
| My photos are geotagged with you. | |
| I don't even know how to separate that. | |
| We bought that ottoman together. | |
| And like, what the hell am I supposed to do with half an ottoman? | |
| So... | |
| I guess we could copy the music collection. | |
| Boy, it must have been tough in the days of albums, eight tracks, CDs. | |
| Ah, sorry, off topic. | |
| But I'm here because there's just this momentum of me having... | |
| Been here, so I'm still here. | |
| It's sort of like a dust bunny. | |
| It accumulates over time, gets stuck between your toes, shuffles around, and eventually is sucked up by the Roomba of an exit strategy. | |
| So I just wanted to say, lover, goddess, I'm so unhappy, and I'm here, and I want to tell you that I'm committed to hoping against hope. | |
| That things might ever get better. | |
| Now, kiss kiss! | |
| Now, any woman with any spine will slap you in the dick and run. | |
| Alright, so what are the social forces behind the phenomena of people sharing internet memes that promote hitting children? | |
| Put differently, what explains the behavior of public support of spanking? | |
| I don't expect a lengthy response. | |
| Well, wrong show! | |
| Sorry! | |
| But I figured I would ask again in light of the fact that after I called in, I felt and still believed the question was left unanswered. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, why do people share internet memes promoting hitting children? | |
| Because they have hit children. | |
| Right? | |
| I mean... | |
| I don't know. | |
| Why would bank robbers want bank robbery to not be illegal? | |
| Because they like robbing banks, right? | |
| So if you've hit children, you face this constant war against the expansion of peace in human relations, this constant war against the progress of ethics and the extension of full personhood to children, which remains a completely unguessed for, for the most part. | |
| Field of progress in human morality. | |
| But you're facing this constant war against the progress of the species. | |
| All people who do evil, who do bad things, who hit Poor, defenseless, dependent, unchosen parents' children. | |
| All people who hit children need to reinforce the virtue of hitting people. | |
| Delusion seeks a crowd with which to replicate its delusion. | |
| Like you and I, we deal with reality, right? | |
| We deal with reality. | |
| I don't need someone else, if I'm looking at the CN Tower, saying, Hey man, do you see that big stick going up there? | |
| Good? | |
| Man, thank you. | |
| Seeing things all over the place. | |
| Oh, you're not real either? | |
| Shit. | |
| When you deal with reality, you don't need what's called social metaphysics. | |
| You don't need reality to be defined for you by other people. | |
| When you don't live in reality, when you live in the ensnaring and exploitive fantasies of other people, whether it's nationalism or religion or sports fanaticism or whatever, when you live in predatory delusions, then they keep falling over. | |
| You know, I don't need to hold up my walls because, you know, they're up. | |
| But delusions are like a pup tent in a cyclone. | |
| Hold on! | |
| Go on for a ride. | |
| You've got to really keep propping them up. | |
| They're always falling over because they're opposed to To reality, right? | |
| You believe in a deity? | |
| Well, no deity ever talks to you, or if they do, please seek some medical help. | |
| And they don't show you guys walking on water anymore, not so down with the burning bushes, the loaves into fishes, the creation of life, the giant floods, you know, all of this stuff, which is supposed to have proven the existence of the Old Testament deity, Well, tragically, once science and video cameras and so on came along... | |
| Boy, you know, of all the times to make yourself scarce when we could finally prove that there would be a deity, sucks, but... | |
| So if you believe in a deity, or you believe in the virtue of your government, or if you believe in the innate goodness and value of your sports team, well, reality is constantly knocking that shit over, right? | |
| Because it ain't true. | |
| So when reality knocks... | |
| You're stupid shit over. | |
| You have to go and get other people like a bunch of Amish lunatics to rebuild that barn of idiocy, right? | |
| You just have to do it, right? | |
| And so there is a desperately needy form of tribalism that comes from collective delusions, right? | |
| Which is why there's no atheist church, right? | |
| I don't need to gather with the anti-unicorn people every Sunday morning and reaffirm That there really aren't any unicorns. | |
| No need to do that. | |
| I don't need to go with the round earth people every Tuesday night and say, oh, that earth thing. | |
| Bring me those pictures, man. | |
| I need to see that earth is round again. | |
| I mean, I keep losing it. | |
| I'm faith that the earth is round. | |
| I keep losing it. | |
| You know, okay, I remember like I took some pictures when I was flying high in a plane. | |
| I saw a tiny curve. | |
| Everything else seems kind of round. | |
| The moon, the sun, Kim Kardashian's giant globes, everything. | |
| But I can't get there. | |
| I keep losing the earth thing, man. | |
| Help me, help me. | |
| Let's sing some songs. | |
| Oh, earth, you are so round. | |
| I mean, this is what people need to do when they believe things that aren't true. | |
| We've got to reinforce each other. | |
| So people who do unbelievably shitty things, like hitting children... | |
| Well, it's wrong. | |
| And so they constantly need to get other people to reinforce their defenses against their conscience, right? | |
| So they have to consistently post spanking memes. | |
| Kids need today is a good spanking. | |
| When I was a kid, they were spanking. | |
| I was spanked and I turned out fine. | |
| That's when they knew how to get respect out of children. | |
| They have to reinforce and all make jokes and this and that and the other because they did shitty things. | |
| They hit their children, and I can't imagine what that's like. | |
| I've never hit anyone in my life, and I can't imagine hitting a defenseless, dependent child. | |
| What a cowardly, vicious, bullying, cowardly thing to do. | |
| I mean, these are the kinds of people, they'll hit their children, but they won't even send food back. | |
| When it's wrong at a restaurant sometimes. | |
| Because, you know, don't want to upset the waiter. | |
| They're perfectly nice to waiters and hit their own children. | |
| Yeah, because waiters come and wipe your ass when you're dying, right? | |
| So, that's my answer for that. | |
| I'm currently listening to Steph's recent YouTube upload. | |
| How much would you pay me not to masturbate? | |
| And that's much better in slow motion, by the way. | |
| And he is talking to the young man whose father asked him to sign a contract for school which involved not having sex. | |
| As a father of a young daughter and two boys, sons, actually, I have thought about this issue and how best to address it with my children. | |
| I'm obviously, obviously aware of the biological urges we all face as teens, but I'm also aware of the negative consequences of having children too young. | |
| Or out of marriage. | |
| So has Steph written anything on addressing sex with children? | |
| I think I know what you mean, but Mr. | |
| Windowless Van, you might want to rephrase the way that you're phrasing it and what he believes is appropriate. | |
| Should we encourage our children to wait for sex until marriage? | |
| Or Paul Walker? | |
| Or do we simply hope that their teenage sexual encounters do not lead to bringing a child into the world, which is definitely a risk since we know that birth control isn't totally effective and given teenage pregnancy rate, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Well, it's a great question. | |
| Of course, you know, the biological urge is strong in teenagers, but the best way to keep it, quote, under control or not have it create a life-devastating situation is to have a close emotional relationship with the parents. | |
| And my belief is, my experience has been that when you have a dysfunctional family, sexuality goes into hyperdrive. | |
| For reasons of biological and evolutionary necessity, if there's aggression or chaos in the world... | |
| Then pair bonding isn't your best strategy for raising children and having your genes survive. | |
| The best strategy is just to spray and pray, right? | |
| You just have sex with a lot of people and hope your kids get to maturity. | |
| But if you're in a peaceful environment, then pair bonding and heavy investment in your children and so on is the way to go. | |
| So our sexuality scans, I think from the womb onwards, our sexual apparatus scans the environment. | |
| If the environment is aggressive, sexuality will go into hyperdrive and consequences be damned because that's the best evolutionary strategy. | |
| If, you know, there's a calm, peaceful, loving, happy household, then we're in a place which is not warlike. | |
| There's no starvation. | |
| There's no disease. | |
| There's no want. | |
| So we can make longer-term plans, and sexuality responds to that by being less manic and less full-speed ahead. | |
| Damn the torpedoes. | |
| Damn the consequences. | |
| So if you close bond with your kids, I think that they'll make better decisions about sexuality. | |
| Keeping an open line of communication with your children is About sexuality is very important. | |
| I mean, this idea that somehow it's embarrassing to talk about sexuality with your children, it's kind of strange. | |
| You know, I mean, it's like not wanting to talk about FedEx with a box. | |
| You know, that's the reason you're here. | |
| You know, daddy wanted some, mommy wanted some, and we got a whole lot of you. | |
| So I think that it's perfectly sensible to talk to children about sexuality and Look, I mean, teen pregnancy is a huge, huge issue. | |
| It's a life-undermining, let's say, event, so definitely something to look out for. | |
| STDs are big, and there's generally a cheapening of sexuality the more that it is spread around. | |
| It's like butter, you know, spread it one atom thick on a piece of toast and you're not going to get much flavor. | |
| For women in particular, there seems to be a very strong statistical correlation between the number of partners they have before getting married and the failure of that marriage to the point where if a woman has like a dozen or more partners, the marriage over a five-year period has like an 80% chance of failing, whereas zero to one partners got an 80% chance of success. | |
| So these are just the realities. | |
| I think it's just keep the open lines of communication and make sure that sexuality is not something that is furtive or hidden in terms of its effect and its impact. | |
| Keep the lines of conversation open and show, you know, healthy affection. | |
| Obviously not sexuality, but show healthy affection and pair bonding between the parents. | |
| I think that's your best shot. | |
| Alright, let's do 101 more. | |
| Oh, a subject I would love to hear you touch on would be, what's it like to be a libertarian in Canada? | |
| My wife is originally from France and explaining our philosophies on life to her family seems to be a chore, to say the least. | |
| Yeah, I mean, being a libertarian in Canada is... | |
| A challenge, in a way. | |
| In a way, it's not, because you just know that nobody's going to even remotely comprehend what you're talking about. | |
| So, you know, if I speak some Japanese, then conversations are a challenge if I'm in Japan. | |
| If I speak no Japanese, they're not a challenge, because I just don't do them. | |
| So, now I'll drop a few little things here and there in conversations with people, but... | |
| I don't hang with statists. | |
| I mean, I just don't. | |
| If I'm an anti-racist, I'm not going to hang with the KKK members. | |
| And if I'm Jewish or anti-Semitic, then I'm just not going to hang with a bunch of Nazis. | |
| And I'm just not going to hang out with a bunch of people who want me thrown in jail for... | |
| For disagreeing with them and following my own conscience about peaceful activities like the right way to educate children and the right way to help the sick and the poor and so on. | |
| And, you know, when they are basically putting their ghostly fucking hands down my child's neck and scooping out her financial future to the tune of half a million dollars in debt when she's born, well, they're not exactly my friends, right? | |
| I mean, if someone stole half a million dollars from you, They would not be your friend, and I would not really be hugely enthusiastic about, as you say, explaining my philosophy of life to such a psychopathic predator. | |
| Now, stealing half a million dollars from me is bad enough. | |
| Stealing half a million dollars from, say, a fetus? | |
| Well, That's pretty terrible. | |
| And the existing system, almost throughout the world, has children born enormously in debt. | |
| If you don't have a problem with stealing from the unborn, then you are a human monster who has no conscience. | |
| And what on earth am I going to have to say to you, right? | |
| Other than, get thee behind me, Satan, and perhaps with a little mace. | |
| So, I don't, you know, when I talk to people, if I want to get close to them, then if they're not libertarians or not anarchists, then, you know, I will patiently and positively explain what propaganda has kept from them. | |
| If they still, you know, and I'll give them a little bit of time, a couple of days, a week or two to process, if they pretend the conversation never happened, or if they react emotionally and aggressively, or if they're just They turn into these dull, idiot, dust bunny rhinoceroses that just become immovable. | |
| Then, you know, I'm sorry. | |
| You know, if you're not going to admit that crimes are occurring, that murders and theft are occurring across the generations, then I don't know what I'm going to have in common with you because anybody who thinks that theft from the unborn Let alone, you know, throwing people in jail to be ass-raped because they have the wrong piece of vegetation on their pocket. | |
| Bad salad! | |
| In the jail, right? | |
| I mean, people who have no problem with that are zombies. | |
| They're human horror shows. | |
| So, I mean, why explain my philosophy of life? | |
| I mean, these people, once they're illuminated and continue to pursue the policies of theft and violence and murder and predation known as the state, They're evil because the state is only held aloft by the hot air of those who sing its praises. | |
| The chants, right? | |
| The state is a balloon, not a helium balloon. | |
| It goes up on its own. | |
| The state is a balloon that you've got to keep pushing up because it falls, right? | |
| Like I said, delusory beliefs need constant reinforcement. | |
| The state is an evil institution that must constantly be kept aloft by the praise of the slaves. | |
| And so I labor Under a tyranny because people refuse to call it tyranny. | |
| It's nothing more complicated than that. | |
| The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names. | |
| I labor under evil because people refuse to call it evil. | |
| I will not, will not support them In their refusal to call evil, evil. | |
| Because their refusal has enormous consequences on my life and the life of my child and my friends and my wife. | |
| So I don't know what it means to say there are people who want to steal from the unborn, who are happy with the forced coercive theft of taxation, who are fine with the mental prisons of public schools, who are fine with millions and hundreds of millions of people around the world being jailed for completely non-violent and non-offenses. | |
| But I'm having a tough time explaining my philosophy of life to them. | |
| I don't think it's your job to grow consciences in the soulless. | |
| There's no point scooping up brains that have fallen on the floor and throwing them back into a decapitated head. | |
| So, no. | |
| Explain your philosophy of life. | |
| Say, this is violence. | |
| This is evil. | |
| And if you continue to praise and support it, you cannot hang. | |
| With good people. |