2899 An Incredibly Inappropriate Show - Saturday Call In Show - January 31st, 2015
If rights don’t exist, can’t the same be said about the non-aggression principle? My wife and I have been together for twenty years, but are having conflicts over our daughter - would we be better off divorcing and trying to find different partners? Is there anything wrong with having casual sex without a concern for the other person’s character or values?Includes: Rights vs. principles, saying inappropriate is not an argument, a great rant on entitled teachers, let’s forget about lederhosen, the hidden roots of conflict, the unconscious inner ego, intensity around inconsequentialities, happiness provoking aggression, the reality of biology, differences between the genders, consequence free sex and the welfare state. Source: http://www.fdrurl.com/marriage-sexual-partners-study
And welcome to our Saturday evening philosophy chit-chatty, chitty-chitty bang-bang conversation flying car through London with Fanfare.
Mike, who do we have first?
Alright, up for us today is Yuka.
He wrote in and said, You said that you don't believe in rights as they don't exist, and also because rights is a word which is used to create an absolute where no such absolute exists.
However, doesn't the same apply to the non-aggression principle?
Okay, well, I think that there's something in there that you said that is an accurate portrayal of my position and some things that are not.
An accurate portrayal of my position.
So just because something doesn't exist doesn't mean that I would not accept it as a standard.
Like the scientific method doesn't exist as a physical thing, but that doesn't mean I won't accept it as a standard or logic or grammar and so on.
So there are things which don't exist which I'm perfectly willing to accept as standards because, of course, You can't have standards that are mere physical things, because each physical thing is just one instance and not a universal.
So all standards must be universals, and therefore they cannot be tied to the existence or non-existence of any particular thing.
We have a concept of birds, even if a bird flies into a propeller.
We have a concept of dinosaurs, even though, again, outside of Joe Behar, there are no dinosaurs around today.
So we have categories for extinct animals, we have and so on, dead people.
So, I certainly agree that rights do not exist.
They are a concept or an abstract at best.
But that doesn't mean that because they don't exist, I would not accept them as a standard.
Does that make any sense?
Sure.
But what about the absolute, then?
What do you mean the absolute?
Well, I'm...
It's been a while.
Sorry, you might need to flesh those two words out a little bit because I wouldn't want to misinterpret what you say.
That's a pretty wide net to cast.
Right.
Well, it's been a while and I don't remember what you said exactly, but I think you said...
Well, in the question there was this idea that rights are a word that's used to create an absolute where no such absolute exists.
Could you go into more detail on that or do you think...
No, I don't remember that quote.
I'm not saying I didn't say it, but I don't know what context I might have been saying it in or what that means.
I can certainly tell you a little bit more about my challenge with regards to To rights.
And to me, when somebody says, I have a right to X, and this is a word that is used even more egregiously than most words are used.
And it's pretty wretched.
Every group claims that they're taking away our rights.
They're taking away our rights.
So for instance, in California...
After 16 months of being a teacher, you can't get fired, basically.
I mean, like, one or two out of hundreds of thousands of teachers in California get fired every year.
And the number...
I mean, what do I know?
I mean, I don't go to school in California, never have, but the number of terrible teachers in California...
Probably quite a few.
Some studies put it at 2%, which I consider absolutely wrong, completely incorrect.
But, you know, I'd sort of have to look at the methodology.
But one teacher, one bad teacher, can cost your child a year's worth of education, and one bad teacher can cost your child $1.4 million in lifetime earnings.
One bad teacher.
They are incredibly Dangerous.
Bad teachers are about the most toxic substance around, except for fiat currency, which is what they're paid with, so two sides of the same coin.
And so there's a woman, she used to be, I think, a newscaster or reporter or something, and she's fighting this and saying, look, if teachers can't be fired, children are being denied a good education.
And the courts have recently, in California, ruled in her favor and have struck down teacher tenure.
Because there are some states that don't have any tenure at all, and some states it's years, and California, of course, it's 16 months.
And, of course, the teachers' unions, a lot of the teachers, to be fair, as they try to be, of course, a lot of the teachers are hugely relieved that tenure is being struck down, because they hate working with crappy, dangerous, nasty, mean-spirited, horrible teachers, just like anybody else.
You don't like the person in the next cubicle to be a horrible person.
So they're probably quite happy.
I don't know how this is going to shake out.
I don't think that you can, and I don't know the details in particular, but I can't imagine that they're getting rid of tenure for teachers who already have it in their contract.
It's probably going to be new teachers, which again just means that it will take half a generation or more for this terrible teacher turnover to occur.
But, you know, we're in government time, not internet time.
And so the teachers' unions, of course, are screaming blue murder that their rights are being taken away, stripped of their rights for collective bargaining, for job security, for safety, for the keys to paradise, and being able to nestle their head in Kim Kardashian's sweaty bosoms.
So they just use the word rights, and it has this power.
You can't take away my right to pension, job security.
We can't take away our rights.
Like in Scott Walker in Wisconsin, when he took on the public sector unions, he said, look, it's not fair and it's not democratic for you guys to negotiate pensions, the cost of which is not going to hit for 20 years, because those taxpayers may not even be born yet.
And so, no more negotiating for pensions that are kicking the can down the road.
If you want to negotiate, negotiate for your salaries in the here and now, because that's what people actually have to pay for.
And they can make an informed decision.
And of course, you've taken away a right of collective bargaining, stripping it for the rights, rights, rights, rights, rights.
So, I am a rights skeptic insofar as they're used so appallingly, even by their proper context.
Rights are supposed to be universal.
But every group claims to have special rights, that it's inhumane, evil, and absolutely funded by Koch dollars to question or to oppose or to take away.
So I don't like rights.
In terms of philosophy, They're not a useful concept, in my opinion, because they don't exist like all mammals are warm-blooded.
That's a property of the category mammal.
It's not if the government so decrees it, mammals are warm-blooded.
It's not like the government cannot take away a mammal's right to be warm-blooded because you're simply identifying an objective property of the biological category called mammal.
And so I think human beings have properties like, you know, self-ownership and capacity for rational thought in general and so on.
Capacity for abstractions, free will, all of these things are properties which can be very reasonably argued for as human beings having.
So If it's not a property, if it is a property, let's call it a property, but it's not because something being warm-blooded is something you can test and you can measure, right?
Mammals, do they give birth to life young or do they give birth to eggs?
If it's eggs, not a mammal.
If the egg comes out of the eggshell outside the body, it's a lizard or something, a bird or whatever.
And so it's not an objective property, rights are not an objective property, and so if they are to have any validity in philosophy, it's either going to be an objective property Which is more in the realm of biology or physics or whatever, or it's going to be a universal.
Now, if it's a universal, let's just call it a universal, which is why my theory of ethics is called universally preferable behavior.
It's a universal.
It's an abstracted Deals with everything universal.
So if it's not a property, then it must be a universal.
And if it is a universal, then it's a rational argument that establishes it.
Just in the same way in science, if you're going to put forward a thesis or a hypothesis that is universal, then it's a rational argument plus empirical evidence that's going to validate that hypothesis for you as much as possible.
So it's not a physical property.
Rights are not physical properties.
Therefore, if they have validity in the realm of philosophy, they must be universal principles.
If they're universal principles, let's stop calling them rights.
Let's just call them principles.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, I'm a bit nervous and having some trouble collecting my thoughts.
But I get that there's a big difference between saying that I have the right to wear lederhosen and I have the right to housing and food and stuff like that.
I'm sorry, are you saying those two are different statements?
Yeah, because if someone says he has the right to wear lederhosen, it's something that he feels like he's morally allowed to do.
Like, his wearing lederhosen is not causing harm to anyone else, right?
Well, no, sorry to interrupt, but it depends what you mean.
So if you mean by the right to wear lederhosen, If you mean by that, that if I go and buy my lederhosen, then I can wear it.
Then, okay, sure.
But that would not be a right, because it would not be universal.
You can't have a universal that is specific to lederhosen, right?
But the other thing is, if it means I have the right to wear lederhosen, therefore, schoolchildren in Austria must sew me lederhosen, and then unicorns must be conscripted to fly it over.
No.
To Canada, then that means I have the right to wear lederhosen, which then would be analogous to I have the right to housing because other people have to make the housing and you have the right to own the labor of others, which kind of makes you a slumlord of the human soul.
So it depends what you mean by the right, if it makes sense.
I get that.
I get that.
But that's not what I meant with the lederhosen example.
It's just like the difference between taking an action.
And being entitled to something.
But if somebody said to me, I have the right to wear ledehosen, I would say you don't understand what a principle is, right?
Well, let's...
I don't mean it's you.
I'm just saying somebody made that argument.
Because, I mean, that's like saying that...
It's like saying that this weasel is the entire definition of the category mammal.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, so let's forget about lederhosen, since it seemed somewhat confusing, but let's say I have the right to pick my nose.
No, again, this doesn't mean anything, because it's not a universal.
No, no.
I'm speaking in the colloquial sense of the word.
When someone says the right to do something, people think that it's something that you're morally allowed to do, right?
But then there's this other sense of the word, where people use it like they're entitled to something.
So, something that you're morally allowed to do is something that causes no harm to other people, right?
And that's fine.
Well, again, sorry, to be technical, no harm to other people is a very broad category, right?
I mean, you're allowed to say things that are upsetting to people, right?
Sure.
Okay.
Well, someone might consider that harm, sure.
But that's another story, I guess.
But yeah, it's difficult because I've read something about two different ways to look at rights.
One would be like positive rights, which would be something that must happen, or you must do, or someone must do to you.
And the other side would be negative rights, where it's like no one is allowed to do X to me.
Yeah, positive obligations versus negative obligations.
So a positive obligation is I have to pay my taxes.
A negative obligation is no one's allowed to initiate force against me.
Right, so negative obligations are fine, right?
They're rational.
Everyone can not do something at the same time.
Alright.
Yeah, but the problem is in the positive obligations.
That's basically what you're talking about with lead housing being made somewhere, produced by someone and housing and whatever you'd be getting, right?
So that's the bullshit side.
That's irrational.
Well, it's the tyrannical side.
That's the tyrannical side, which is I have the right to the laborer.
Of others.
And they don't have the right to my labor, right?
Because if everyone has a right to a thousand dollars, then we all just present each other a check for a thousand dollars or present each other with a claim for a thousand dollars and it all cancels each other out.
So it has to be disproportionate in order for it to have any value for people politically or materially, economically.
And so if...
Sorry, go ahead.
That's something we've agreed on right from the start.
Alright, so what's your question then?
Well, I'm just suggesting that I don't think it's appropriate to dismiss the idea of rights.
I'm not sure what the word appropriate means in that context.
Sure, but I mean it's It's a word that has some value, especially because...
No, it has no value.
Look, if you want to make a counter-argument, I said rights can't be properties, therefore they must be principles, and let's just call them principles or universals.
That was my argument.
Now, you have a chance if you want to rebut that argument.
I could be wrong.
I may have made a mistake in my reasoning, or there may be counter-evidence or whatever.
But the word inappropriate doesn't add anything to the discussion, right?
I mean, because that's not telling me how my argument is incorrect.
Like, we can at least agree that rights are not properties of people, right?
There's no organ that you have called a right.
It's not like your spleen or your whatever, right?
So, rights are not physical properties.
Like, if someone says, they're taking away my rights, they don't mean that they're coming in You know, like in some horrible Mexican scenario, drugging you and taking out your kidney to sell on the black market, right?
So rights certainly are not physical properties.
They do not exist metaphysically.
They're not physical properties of human beings.
We agree with that, right?
Yeah, but if we take the negative obligation version of rights, That's basically the same as, or the result or the goal of that is the same as the goal of the nap, right?
Like both are just concepts meant to delineate the boundaries of acceptable behavior.
Well, but that's circular, right?
If we say that rights are designed to delineate the boundaries of acceptable behavior, well, acceptable by whom?
Acceptable to whom?
Acceptable in what conditions or under what circumstances or by what standard?
So you're using things like inappropriate and acceptable and so on, but they have no value philosophically.
Think of mathematics.
You would never say to a mathematician that's an inappropriate The equation is correct or it's incorrect.
And you'd never say, well, that's false because a lot of people accept it or don't accept it.
I mean, it has to stand and fall on the merits of its own principles and arguments.
Let's put the word appropriate behind us, shall we?
Yeah, appropriate.
And what was the other one I just talked about?
I've been confused here.
Listen, I'll let you take another run at it, because I've put forward an argument about rights.
And if you want to rebut the argument, you're certainly welcome to do it.
You don't have to do it now.
You can sort of take some notes and do some thinking and come back.
But what you're doing now is not philosophy.
What you're doing now is using the words like acceptable and appropriate and so on.
They have no...
I mean, maybe that works in women's studies or whatever, but there's no value in the realm of philosophy.
Because you have to rebut the argument or accept it.
That's how philosophy works, right?
Well, now you're being kind of dismissive of me.
And you haven't really let me speak.
No, no, I'm not being dismissive of you.
This is how philosophy works.
I've put forward an argument.
You can rebut it if you want.
Or we can end the conversation, or you can accept it.
But you said that something I said was, I think, inappropriate, you said, right?
It's inappropriate to dismiss the idea of rights.
But that's not how...
Sure, I agree.
I take that back.
If you keep interrupting me while I'm talking, I'm absolutely going to move on to the next call.
Because I'm trying to make a point here, and you keep talking in my ear.
It's really annoying.
Okay?
So you have the opportunity to rebut my argument or accept it or say, I'll think about it.
So I'm not being dismissive.
I'm telling you this is how philosophy works.
It's like if you and I are playing tennis and you try and hit the tennis ball With a baseball bat, I'd say, sorry, that's not tennis.
You say, well, you're being really dismissive of my baseball bat.
I'm like, no.
Baseball bats don't work in tennis, right?
And things like inappropriate and...
It just doesn't work in philosophy.
You have to tell me how the argument is wrong that I'm putting forward, which is fine.
It could be wrong.
Or you can say, I accept this.
Or you can say, I will think about it and get back to you.
But just plowing on as if I didn't say anything or didn't make an argument...
While attempting to sort of put a negative spin on my argument without actually counteracting it or addressing the argument, that's not how philosophy works.
Yeah, well, let's say I take back what I said about inappropriate.
I know that's not an argument, that's not philosophical, and I didn't really mean it as such.
Would that be okay?
I don't know what that means.
I didn't really mean it as such.
That sounds like a bunch of weasel words to me.
I mean, did you know at the time that you were saying that it was not a philosophical argument?
Or have I instructed you on that since then?
I wasn't really even trying to make an argument at that specific time.
Did you know that you weren't trying to make an argument?
Did I know?
Well, is it enough that I didn't think I was?
Well, no, because if you...
Either you know that you have to rebut my argument or you don't.
Now, if you know that you have to rebut my argument to continue the philosophical conversation, if you know that you have to rebut my argument and then you go off with the inappropriate and whatever, acceptable and all that, then you know that you're supposed to rebut my argument...
But you're weaseling out of that obligation.
That's one possibility, which is kind of slimy, right?
Or the other possibility is that you don't even know that you're supposed to rebut a rational argument, in which case I don't know what to say, because this, I mean, I've already said it a bunch of times, in which case you've got to just go to the ABCs of philosophy rather than this conversation.
Can we try again?
I'm not particularly interested in doing that because I'm still not getting any answers to the points that I'm raising.
So, Mike, if we could move on to the next caller, I would be appreciated.
Please, please, please don't hang up on me yet.
Okay?
Okay?
Yeah.
So, let's forget...
Oh, that's hassle there.
And I'm fine with what you're saying.
No, no, no.
I'm not sure what you mean by hassle.
Please, please, please don't latch on to that word.
I'm really confused.
I'm having trouble thinking.
I'm having trouble collecting my thoughts, as I mentioned.
So let's not latch on to the word hassle either, please, okay?
So now I'm latching on to something like it's just some irrational.
You know, every time you open your mouth, I feel kind of insulted.
I mean, to be honest with you, right?
I mean, latching on like I'm just sort of irrationally fixating on something, it's not a hassle.
It's foundational to how we have a discussion about ideas, which is I put forward an argument and you rebut it, accept it, or say that you'll think about it and get back to me.
But it's not just a hassle that we're having.
I accept what you said.
That's fine.
But, okay, let's see.
How should I say it?
Like, I think we were on the same page about negative and positive obligations, right?
We would agree, we'd both agree that positive obligations is irrational.
Yes, I would certainly accept that.
Yeah.
But I'd say that the negative obligations side, it's kind of like the non-aggression principle.
Because if you adhere to the non-aggression principle, You agree or you accept that you have a negative obligation towards people.
So refrain from aggressing against them, right?
Yeah, I mean, I don't use really the term obligation when I talk about ethics, I don't think.
At least I don't remember having used it very much.
To put it in sort of the language that I would prefer, it doesn't make it right, but universally preferable behavior language would be to say that positive obligations fail the test of universality because everyone in the same room cannot be positively obligated to each other.
However, negative obligations can pass the test of universality because everyone in the same room can refrain from Killing and raping, assaulting and murdering each other.
So only negative obligations can be universally preferable behavior and therefore can be part of ethics, which is centered around universally preferable behavior.
So I don't know about obligations.
I'm not sure how technical or precise that would be.
Again, just by the by, I mean, every time...
Start working in the realm of ethics.
I think like yourself I get drawn into Appropriate and acceptable and correct and right and nice and moral and and and so on and what I try to do You know, I think I think it's valuable But what I try to do is to say would that work in physics with that work in mathematics with that work in these way now in in mathematics, you wouldn't say There's a positive obligation.
You know, people will get it right or they'll get it wrong, and if they get it wrong, you'll tell them that it's wrong, and so on.
But it would be very tough to talk about appropriate and positive obligation and acceptable and so on.
That's correct and incorrect, and that's sort of...
Because there's such a huge mental vortex that we all have around ethics, because it's been so owned and co-opted by...
Governments and gods and elders and teachers and preachers and you name it.
When I was in theatre school many years ago, I was working on a play.
I was talking about the goblins of the mind or the gremlins, the gremlins of the mind or something like that.
And my teacher got kind of annoyed at me, writing teacher.
And he said, he said, gremlins is owned by, I don't know, Steven Spielberg or whoever it was that made the movie called Gremlins.
He said, that word is owned by Steven Spielberg.
You can't use it.
And he didn't mean that, obviously, illegally.
He just meant that that word is now so associated with that movie.
You can't just use it.
You can't appropriate that word.
For your own use because everybody will start immediately thinking of this movie.
And it's the same thing with the word ethics or right or wrong or appropriate or nice or whatever.
All of these, this language has been so owned by agencies and organizations antithetical to the universality.
They all claim universality of ethics and then they exempt themselves, which has, I think, been the point of ethics throughout most of history.
It's been a smokescreen for savagery.
And so when it comes to thinking clearly about such a confusing and propagandized topic, I always try to go back to science, to math, to the hard clarity of logic and so on.
And whenever I find myself dealing with words that are emotionally charged or appeal to our Desire for ethical conformity with the tribe and I try to veer away from those words and peel them out of the language that I use and even within my own mind the language that I use With regards to ethics of course the big problem with ethics is is the begging the question one of the many big problems is the begging the question where you assume That you're correct when you are
exploring the issue and so when you were talking about Acceptable and appropriate and so on That's after ethics is accepted, then you could start talking about these things.
But when you're trying to establish the validity of rights, you can't use things that require a generalized agreement already.
Because if there was a generalized, if everyone agreed that rape and murder was wrong and never did it, we wouldn't need anything to do with ethics.
But that is why I'm sort of pushing back when you use language that would be inappropriate to mere reason or Or physics or mathematics and so on because if we can't get ethics into the realm of real logic, of pure logic, if we then continue to have to rely on these emotional trigger words to try and gain acceptance from people.
I'm not saying you're doing that or trying to do it consciously or anything but it's just a habit that we all have.
When it comes to ethics, because we so desperately want the world to be good, those of us who are moralists, we so desperately want the world to be good so that our children can be safe, so that we can have no more war, that we're very tempted to use the threats of the government and the bribes of religion to get people to agree with us.
And that is a challenge.
The word rights only exists with regards to governments, fundamentally.
And that, to me, is a real challenge.
You know, I mean, I can't get rid of religion in my mind and hang on to the Ten Commandments, and I can't be an anarchist and use the term rights, which is what we beg for on bended knee for the government to grant us, and which it only grants us in the violation of, like, property rights.
It can only protect our property by stealing it first in the form of taxation or borrowing or Fiat currency printing or whatever.
So I'm sorry for the long lecture and I'll shut up, but that is why I sort of push back on this, you know, the word rights appropriate, acceptable and so on.
None of these would be valid in the realm of pure logic or physics or mathematics.
And that's why I push back against them.
Because if we can't get ethics, what I call universally preferable behavior, if we can't get it to the realm of pure logic, Then we can't basically convince anyone who doesn't already agree with us.
So anyway, I'll be quiet and let you respond with your thoughts.
Yeah.
Well, I guess maybe I said appropriate mostly because I wasn't really sure how to express myself going forward.
But yeah, I guess we could move on to determinism.
Oh no, I'm sorry if we can't stuff those two big topics into one conversation, but you're certainly welcome to call back about determinism, but we have a full deck of callers tonight, and I can't do rights, ethics, and determinism in one caller, but it's certainly a great topic, and feel free to call back in with...
How about ten minutes?
I'm not going to...
No, I'm sorry, man.
I really can't, because I can't do these shows till midnight anymore.
I'm too old!
So, but thanks for calling in, man.
I really appreciate it.
It was an enjoyable and stimulating chat.
And feel free to call back in, Yuka.
I appreciate that.
Okay.
Well, bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Alright, well up next is James.
James wrote in, and this is going to be a bit of a long read, but he wrote in and said, My wife and I have been together for 18 years, and we're both in our late 40s.
We each score a five on the adverse childhood experiences test and have had very traumatic childhoods.
We have an eight-year-old daughter.
Prior to her birth, our relationship had problems, but since our daughter was born, it's steadily gone downhill to the point where we're now living apart and are legally separated.
We are in a five-year-old daughter.
We are in a constant power struggle over my daughter and have shrunk our lives down to the point where we rarely do anything together to avoid tension and conflict.
I know working it out, doing more personal inner work, we've both done a lot of therapy.
Healing our relationship and changing behavior patterns would be best for our daughter.
But I think we both feel like a quote unquote do over with another person might be better.
I realize it's easier said than done, my wife less so, she's very attractive.
I want to get on with my life and jump in 100%...
Wait, sorry, I just...
I'm not sure why the attractiveness of the wife popped in there, maybe I missed something.
I read it as it would be easier for her to find somebody else because she's very attractive.
But James can correct me.
Oh, okay.
So she's, okay.
All right, got it.
I want to get on with my voice.
She's more of a genital magnet than the guy feels like, right?
Okay, got it.
I want to get on with my life and jump in 100% in either direction and just feel paralyzed as to what I should do.
Fear of the unknown, guilt over hurting my daughter, and I don't want to admit failure, etc., etc.
I know my daughter will be devastated if we divorce, but I also know we are messing her up by fighting all the time, often in front of her.
I'm wondering if based on our ACE scores, we should keep trying to work it out or just get divorced and each try to find someone else that's not as wounded.
That's what James wrote in with.
And it's...
Hi, James.
Are you there?
Yeah, I'm here.
Thank you.
Oh, yeah.
Listen, thanks for calling in.
Your wife's not on the line.
Is that right?
No, she's not.
She's not.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, that's quite a tale.
And I am obviously sorry.
I mean, this is really heart-rending stuff.
I mean, that this is going on in your family and that it's affecting your daughter, as you say, is...
Heart-rending, and I really sympathize with you both for an extremely challenging and upsetting situation.
And so, thanks for calling in.
I obviously can't answer your questions, right?
I can give you hopefully some principles that might be of value, but it's, like all the listeners, it's your call.
And that's what I was thinking, Stefan.
You know, we've been to tons of therapy, read dozens and dozens of books.
All that stuff and I discovered you in the last month or so and just really I really want to thank you for all your work and everything.
It's just amazing.
I'm just blown away by it.
And I thought, wow, maybe I could approach this from a sort of philosophy.
I heard you say once that knowledge equals virtues equals happiness.
And maybe approach trying to mend our relationship through striving for virtues.
I don't know.
I'll just be quiet and let you talk.
I won't talk much because it's mostly questions I have at the beginning, get to sort of lay of the land.
All right.
So how long were you married before you had your daughter?
Barely a year.
Was that by plan?
We were together for nine years and then just didn't feel any real pull to get married per se.
But then when...
My wife was feeling like she wanted to have a baby.
We got married, and my daughter was born ten months later.
All right.
You know, we got married and got right to work, as you've talked about.
Yeah, got it.
Honey, you dropped something.
Right, got it.
Exactly.
And why did your wife want to have a baby?
Again, I'm not saying she shouldn't, obviously.
It always sounds like those, why the hell did your wife want to have a baby in this godforsaken moonscape of a human evil world?
But just what was her motivation for it?
Well, I actually said I don't know that I really want kids.
I just, I'm not sure.
I grew up in such a crazy, violent, insane asylum that I don't know that I... Could be good at it.
She really wanted a child, I think, for a lot of women, and I don't mean this in a negative way, you know, having a child is something they really want to do.
I did not want to part ways with her and decided let's go ahead with it and felt good about it.
I didn't feel forced or blackmailed into, you know, doing it.
But she just really wanted a child.
She wanted the experience of motherhood.
I think probably wanted to give a child the things she never got, stuff like that.
All right.
You're aware that you didn't answer my question, right?
I'm sorry.
I thought you said, why did she want a baby?
Yeah, and you didn't.
I didn't answer?
No, not even.
And, you know, I'm not trying to pick on you.
I'm really not.
I'm just pointing it out, right?
Yeah.
You said she wanted to have the experience of motherhood, which is sort of the same way as saying she wanted to have a baby.
But when you listen back to this, you'll be like, wow, that was a long journey back to the land of fog.
Because you didn't answer why she wanted to have a baby.
I'll make my answer shorter.
No, no.
I don't mind if they're long answers.
I just want an answer.
And if you say, I don't know why she wanted to have a baby, that's a perfectly fine answer for me as well.
But I'm not sure if you know that you don't know why she wanted to have a baby.
Thank you for that clarification.
I don't think I know why, really.
Oh, do you know why?
Because now I think that you do have some theory, but you're not sure if it's 100%.
Well, I thought I had kind of said that, not to annoy you, but I think she had feelings like a lot of women have where their life won't be complete if they're not a mother and really wanted that experience of motherhood and having a baby.
And she had a very...
Crazy childhood herself, and I think maybe wanted to, you know, get it right, quote unquote.
Well, so, okay, but these are all important.
Because, and the reason I'm asking all this, James, is what are you fighting with your wife about the most?
Your daughter.
It's just a control thing.
I think because we both had such painful, chaotic, No, no, I got that.
I mean, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
I want to make sure we'd be really efficient with our time here.
Okay.
So, but if I understood it correctly, and obviously, look, anytime I... I've got a little snippet here and there.
So whenever I go off from your actual life experience, just tell me and I'll complete the 180 because it's your life.
Don't let me tell you anything about it.
What I got from what Mike read or what you sent in was that one of the major sources of what you fight about with your wife is your daughter.
Control issues with your daughter or influences over your daughter and so on.
Yes.
Okay.
So then the question is, if you're having a conflict with someone about something, the question is...
What does that something mean to the other person?
Let me give you an example.
Let's say you and I are neighbors, and I want to build a fence, right?
And I go to the city or whatever it is, and I get the survey of our properties and so on, and I start building the fence.
And you freak out, right?
And you're like...
What the hell are you doing?
And I said, I'm building a fence.
I don't know why.
Let's say we even talked about it and you're like, fine, go ahead.
I start building the fence and you're like really freaking out.
Now I'm obviously a little bit confused.
Let's say, because this is a ridiculous scenario, but bear with me for a sec.
So let's say, James, that one of the reasons that you're freaked out about me building the fence is the line that I'm building the fence in Is going to dig up the body of a homeless man you murdered last year.
Right?
In other words, that little plot of land that I'm heading to with my auger is going to gouge up all of the strangely overhaired head of the homeless people.
So I don't know what we're fighting about because I don't know what that little stick of land or that little whatever bump that I'm heading to means to you.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
Or you could say, you know, that's, you know, to take a less horrific scenario, that's where my beloved dog is buried and I sure as hell don't want to dig it up, right?
Yes.
So, I mean, for whatever reason.
So now once, if I say to you, like if you say to me, that's where my beloved dog is buried, you probably wouldn't tell me about the homeless guy.
But then I could, at least I know what we're having a conflict about.
At least I know what I'm doing means to you because I now know what the piece of land means to you.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
So...
Since you're both fighting about your daughter, to the detriment of your daughter, as you say, you fight in front of her, right?
Once in a while, not all the time.
No, I get it.
But it's negative for your daughter, right?
Yes.
This conflict.
So, because it's negative to her, it's not her needs that you're both focusing on.
And what that means is that she means something to you, and she means something to your wife that is exclusive or independent of her actual existence.
In other words...
You care about that little plot of land I'm digging up because your dog is buried there or a homeless guy is buried there.
It's not the land, it's the dog or the homeless guy, right?
Yes.
And so it's not the thing itself, but rather what that thing means to you.
Like if I take a piece of cloth and fold it up incorrectly, if it's a tablecloth, nobody's bothered, right?
If I'm at the VA and it's American flag, are they bothered?
Yes.
Yeah, because it means something to them.
The flag means something.
Folding it correctly means something.
It's powerful for them, right?
I mean, if I take a piss in the woods, nobody's that upset.
If I'm standing in front of an altar, people are upset.
And I think rightly so.
It's a pretty bad thing to do, right?
So the reason I'm giving you all of this and the reason I'm asking why your daughter is there, why did your wife want to have a daughter?
Is that if there's a lot of conflict about something, usually it's because that something means something more than the thing itself.
Like you've probably heard about...
I'm thinking like Israel and Palestine.
They're fighting over these particular places.
And that's to a large degree because those places are imbued with holy meaning to the opposing sects, right?
Yes.
And so that kind of stuff is...
It's really, really important.
It's not that particular piece of land.
It's because of the meaning that people pour into it.
And most of the conflicts, I think, that really occur and become intractable in human relations occur because there's meaning being poured into something that doesn't exist within it.
And we fight over meaning.
I mean, because clearly, if you and your wife were solely focused on what was best for your daughter, Then this wouldn't be happening, because it's not best for your daughter, right?
Of course.
No, it's not.
And I'm not trying to criticize or be negative or anything.
I'm just trying to point out that your daughter means something to your wife, and she means something to you, and you're really fighting about those meanings.
And I don't know what those meanings are, and we'll talk until we figure it out, hopefully.
But that's why I asked why she wanted to have a baby.
What does your daughter mean to your wife?
Now if, and sorry to shut up in a sec, but you said that she, I think you got the impression you were saying like, she wanted to do it again and do it better than what she received, right?
Yes.
So then if your daughter then represents some sort of backwards salvation bomb to your wife's agonized history, that's not your daughter.
I mean, that's, I'm not saying that's what she's doing, but that would be an unfair burden to put on her.
A child, right?
Like, I need to be a better mom than I received so I don't feel as bad about my childhood or something like that.
That wouldn't be about your daughter, but about your wife's history.
Does that make sense?
Of course it makes sense.
That's what we're fighting about.
You know, for instance, the first two years of my daughter's life, we could not get a babysitter because she didn't want to leave my daughter alone.
And of course...
You know, that wasn't what I signed up for, quote-unquote.
I, of course, having a child sounded great and something I wanted to do and being a father and I'm sure I have all...
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on.
Uh-oh.
Oh, James.
I just, I felt the earth move under my feet.
Let it fly.
I felt the sky tumbling down and tumbling down.
So earlier, earlier, earlier...
James, what did you say earlier?
You said, well, I wasn't really sure if I wanted to have a kid, but, you know, I didn't want to lose my wife, so basically I coughed up some sperm and hoped we'd all be happy, right?
Well, I mean, I guess that's a way of putting it.
I think that if I'm really honest with myself in this moment, I think the feeling that comes up for me is being a father sounded like something that would be fulfilling and Rewarding and a great experience, but it also was something that really scared me.
Really frightened me as far as my ability to do a good job on it based on how I never witnessed what a good father would even be like.
So there was a lot of conflicting feelings.
No, I get it.
I mean, if you've had a bad childhood and somebody says, do you want to be a dad?
It sort of reminds me of these stories of...
In the Second World War, the Germans used to keep sending these spies into England, and they'd give them all these kinds of training so that they'd blend in.
You know, here's how to accent, and here's how to talk, and here's the words to use, and so on.
And these spies would then be parachuted in, and they would try and infiltrate into English society.
And I remember one German spy got caught because he went in to a bar in Yorkshire at 11 o'clock in the morning, and he owned a pint of Guinness.
But a bar in Yorkshire, you can't get alcohol at that time until 12 p.m., an hour after the guy ordered it, right?
And that's, you know, everybody's like, he's a spy.
I mean, everybody around here knows that.
There's no one who wouldn't know that.
And so to me, if you've had a bad childhood and then somebody says, want to be a dad, it's like, Okay, I know you don't speak German.
You've never been exposed to German.
You know nothing about Germany.
Want to be a German spy?
To which the correct answer is, maybe after some training, but not off the spur of the moment.
So, yeah, no, if you haven't had it imprinted, I mean, it's really tough to muster up expertise in something that not only have you not been trained in, but you've been counter-trained in.
Well, and knowing the woman that I'm going to have a child with is in the same predicament, you know, was counter-trained.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like not even that you haven't learned German.
It's like someone's taught you German that only insults people.
Like, good morning!
Fuck your mother's ear with a cantaloupe!
Right?
I mean, that's sort of what you're going to go.
And it's like, oh, I have to unlearn that stuff about the cantaloupe and replace it.
Like, it is the unlearning, not just the learning, that is the challenge, right?
Yes.
Agreed.
Okay.
Now, did your wife have these concerns as well?
She didn't seem to.
No, no.
She seemed to feel like her programming, you know, the software that was installed, as it were, was not going to be an issue at all, and it was going to be fine.
Now, did she say that?
Like, did she say, I had a bad childhood, but it's going to be fine?
No, but...
Oh, it just didn't even come up?
It did come up, but she didn't say it in those words, but she, by her, you know, in so many words, I think she was feeling like, I know I had a traumatic childhood filled with, you know...
Emotional and sexual abuse and divorce and insanity.
You know, you've seen the ACE score, both of us.
But I feel like I still, you know, want to do this.
Right.
Now, you talked about your cautions or hesitations or fears about becoming a father, but I think that's probably less than half the picture.
Because I think the full picture is your heart of heart, deep down, balls of your balls, fear of your wife becoming a mother and how that might play out.
I mean, you can't have been blind.
If you were aware of your own concerns and fears and your wife was blithely ignoring hers, wouldn't that raise some alarm bells for you?
Well, of course it did.
And what it did was is that my wife was the victim of just graphic sexual abuse by one of her mother's, one of her stepfathers.
And yes, I definitely had fears of, especially if we had a girl, and of course we had a girl, I definitely had fears about how You know, what unconscious stuff would come bubbling up and buttons pressed and all that for her if there was this helpless little girl,
especially when she got to the age of when my wife was horribly molested, which was between five and eight.
And oddly enough, that's when things have gotten really bad in the last three years.
My daughter just turned eight.
It's not oddly enough, right?
I'm being facetious, obviously.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Well, the thing is that part of the reason why I'm calling in is because I've been so just blown away by the 15 or 20 hours of content of yours that I've listened to and just...
Can't thank you enough.
I bought all your books and I'm going to be sending in more money.
But what I want to say is that I think after seeing so many therapists over the years, I just thought, like I said, maybe I can get some answers here and get some movement by talking with Stefan and approaching it from a philosophical ethics point of view.
Yeah, see, we were getting somewhere in our conversation, and you just completely jumped out into abstract land.
Okay.
And tried to distract me with praise, which I appreciate.
It's nice what you're saying and all of that, but you really recoiled from where we were heading.
Okay.
Well, let's go back.
You're right.
I get it.
All right.
So, what about your wife's trauma as a child...
Made the relationship easier for you in the short run.
This is time for, like, scalding mirror time, right?
Okay.
Okay, so how long...
Okay, so you met your wife...
I'm trying to do the math.
You said you were together for nine years.
Is it 19 years?
Is that right?
I met her about 19 years ago, yeah.
19 years ago, okay.
And you said she was very physically attractive, right?
Yes.
Okay, that, you know, you're a guy, I get it, right?
I'm a guy, right?
So that has something of value to you.
How long after you started dating, or even before you, after you knew her, did you find out about her sexual abuse history?
Probably about a year after dating.
Start, you know, a year into the relationship.
And how long after you started dating did you find out about her dysfunctional childhood?
Um...
I mean, I was getting, you know, little bits and pieces along the way.
People don't kind of, you know, open the closet and show you all their skeletons in the first few months.
But I was getting stuff along...
No, no, no, no.
Some people do.
Okay.
Well, she didn't.
Right.
I got some of it along the way.
And then got the, you know, as I said, the horrible, you know, sexual abuse whole story probably about a year in.
Right.
And so when you would ask her about, you know, I assume at some point you said, well, you know, what's your...
Or how do you look along with your stepdad?
Or when was the last time you talked with your stepdad?
Not because you're prying, just because you're curious and want to know about her.
I mean, did you ask those kinds of questions before the year?
Where she revealed things?
In other words, did she minimize or mislead before or the subject of her...
She never misled.
She never misled.
She just didn't talk about it.
And when I was told about the sexual abuse, she has, you know, at that point and up until this day had no contact with that man.
And you didn't ask her, I would imagine, too much about her childhood in the first year?
No, I mean, we did.
I think probably because the things I found out that were kind of crazy and dysfunctional probably on some level made me feel More comfortable because I came from such crazy dysfunction and all that.
So, you know, hockey players aren't attracted to chess players.
You find someone who knows the rules kind of thing.
I don't know.
Okay.
And what about your dysfunctional childhood?
How long was it before she learned about that?
Probably around the same length of time.
I would say that, you know, little Little bits and pieces here and there came out, but then when we moved in together at about the one-year mark, we started kind of revealing a lot more and, you know,
realized that we had both had just really, you know, traumatic, abusive childhoods and that we were going to We were going to overcome it.
We've both been very successful as far as, you know, the work and achievements and all that.
I'm not saying that that means anything.
I'm just saying that we were going to do everything we could to overcome that and not, you know, have it negatively affect us.
Right.
No, you say it doesn't mean, no, it means something to me.
It means something to me.
What means something to you?
Oh, you said we've both been very successful.
Not that that means anything.
It certainly does.
It means something to me.
I don't think it means anything as far as being really happy.
I've made really good money.
I've had lots of achievements and I still battle anxiety and depression and I'm in this situation with my wife and we have this little girl that we've brought into this mess now.
Right.
How old was your wife?
Just roughly, you don't have to give me the exact age.
I'm going to assume that she was in her, what, mid to late 30s?
Or mid 30s when you...
She was 36 when my daughter was born.
Right, so right in the throes of baby rabies, right?
Yes.
Right.
I mean, I've heard it's like, you know, constantly being hungry or constantly having to pee, this sort of yearning for...
Having a baby, and it does, you know, before the eggs expire and they're, you know, not past their due date, but close to their due date at that age.
And that is what happens when a lot of people tip into having kids.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, at the nine-year mark, she just was like, oh my God, we have to have a baby.
We have to get married right now and get pregnant.
And I was like, well, let's...
No, no, no, no.
No, you don't understand.
It has to happen now.
I was like, okay, all right.
And, you know, we...
We eloped.
And as I said earlier, she was pregnant about five weeks later.
Give me an example, if you wouldn't mind, James, of a specific, and please don't give any identifying details, of course, but a specific conflict that you have with your wife about your daughter.
daughter um she just tends to spoil my daughter a little bit and and and babies her and stuff and uh you know um and then i can you give me an example of that um Well, my daughter took a very long time for potty training.
Like, really long.
And...
You know, I kind of wanted to have a little bit more of a structured approach to...
It lasted so long that my daughter couldn't go on little sleepovers and stuff because she didn't want to be teased that she had to wear a pull-up or something to bed or something.
So it's all sorts of kind of things like that.
At what age?
Hmm?
At what age?
Like seven.
So are you saying that she was still not potty trained by seven?
To sleep through the night, I don't mean like during the day, but like to sleep through the night, no.
And so is that sort of the spoiling or infantilizing?
Is that right?
Uh, yes.
And then I think I overcompensate and maybe I'm a little too sort of like, you know, rigid or kind of, you know, too disciplinary or something.
I can't think of the word I want.
But how is your daughter corrected by yourself and your wife?
I mean, what happens when you want her to behave in a different way for you and your wife?
We pretty much talk and negotiate, but I'll be honest, I've lost my temper at times and raised my voice or yelled.
I don't hate her or anything, although I have whacked her on the butt probably, I don't know, ten times in her life.
Sticking your finger in the socket, pulling the frying pan down, I've paid me Pulled her by the arm once when she was going to run into traffic.
I've definitely done about 10 of those things that I really regret, especially after listening to some of your stuff on child violence.
To be fair, James, light years ahead of what happened to you in terms of improvement generationally.
By the time I was her age, I was being punched out, knocked out cold.
And I'm incredibly sorry to hear that.
I was just saying to another parent the other day that I think our generation, James...
Yeah, I think we're the same age, aren't you?
You're 49.
I think, yeah, I think somewhat, yeah.
I mean, probably pretty roughly.
But I think our generation...
This is the biggest change in parenthood in any generation that has ever occurred in history.
I've been thinking, like, in the past...
It all seemed pretty incremental.
Because, I mean, I talk about parenting with other parents a lot.
It's always good to get feedback and share notes.
But I'm saying, can you think of a bigger change in parenting from, like, any time in history until the last generation and this generation?
I think it's, I don't think that's been a bigger change.
I just wanted to point that out.
So the fact that you, you know, hit your, or yanked your, I mean, obviously not great, but compared to where you came from, what an unbelievable evolution.
You reason, you negotiate and so on, and you raise your voice or whatever, and you know, you can work on that, but man, what an incredible evolution.
Step forward, step up, step to the light, jetpack, rocket fuel of peace and reason has occurred between how you were parented and how you're parenting.
Well, for sure.
For sure.
And good for you.
Like, holy crap, that's something to be incredibly proud of.
Well, thank you.
You know, what a therapist did say to me in the last year, you know, Child abusers don't worry about whether or not they're abusing their child.
Because I am, you know, I've been wracked with guilt just in the 10 or 12 times that I did whack her on the butt.
Mostly when she, you know, just with an open hand.
I've never hit the child.
I was hit with belts and hangers and punched and kicked and nothing like that has ever been done to this little girl.
Right, that's amazing.
I mean, that's...
I mean, that's fantastic.
You know, I mean, yeah, room for improvement, but holy crap, man.
I mean, that's...
What a huge step forward.
And that's something to go to your brave...
Sorry, to go to your...
Same word.
To go to your grave with a smile on your face about congratulations.
And what a...
Yeah, what an astounding investment and effort that is.
And good.
All right, so the babying and...
The spoiling and so on.
Is there anything else in particular that we fight about?
With regards to your daughter?
It's just all controlling stuff.
You know, if I say, like, you know...
Let's eat over your plate, honey.
Okay?
You're dropping crumbs everywhere.
Let's try to eat over your plate.
Then my wife is like, you're hovering.
All kids her age drop crumbs and get food all over their face.
And I'm like, no they don't.
The spoiled, kind of fucked up ones do.
By the time they're seven or eight, they can kind of sit still and eat and not drop food everywhere.
It's stuff like that.
Alright, so let's go to the The crumbs.
The what?
That's, I mean, the crumbs, right?
The table crumbs.
I mean, it's an issue all parents face, and it can be annoying, right?
I mean, it's like, I don't want to sweep, you know, like every meal.
I want to sweep up under the table.
I want to pick up all this crap, right?
Yeah.
And so for you, what does it mean...
Outside of the practicalities, look, clearly from a sane, which I'm not saying I always achieve, right?
So I'm, you know, I'm in there with you, right?
We're going down into the trench together.
From a sane standpoint, it's not worth a big conflict over.
In other words, like if someone were to say to you, okay, well, you have a choice.
Your daughter can eat more over the plate or you can separate from your wife.
Or no, your daughter can eat less over the plate, or you can separate with you.
Do you know what I mean?
The crumbs themselves are not worth the living apart from your wife and having these conflicts, right?
Well, of course not, no.
Right.
So the question is then, since these crumbs are triggering the conflict, it's not about the crumbs, it's about what the crumbs mean, right?
So what is the fact that your daughter eats and drops crumbs, what does that mean to you at a very big picture level?
I was raised by an army drill sergeant, alcoholic, child abusing wacko and had to eat over my plate.
And so you're going to eat over your plate.
You're not going to get any more leeway than I got.
And my wife, I think, obviously that's all unconscious, although I'm trying to make it conscious.
I think my wife The mother jettisoned the child molester and then they were alone for a while.
So my wife being raised by a single mom, crumbs on the floor were not that big of a deal.
There was no man around.
So I think...
Well, but it's not...
Okay, let's get back to yours.
That's my best guess.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's good.
That's more than a good guess.
Okay.
So if you did in your childhood what your daughter does in her childhood...
Belts and beatings and screamings and chaos and bruises would ensue, right?
Yeah.
Which is...
People who've not experienced a full-on parental assault as a child don't understand...
I'm not trying to put thoughts or words into your mouth.
I'm just telling you what I think, so correct me if I'm wrong, James.
But people who've not experienced a full-on assault from a parent when they're a child, particularly when they're young, little children, don't understand what it's like to be in a room with a giant who can kill you.
Right?
I mean, if you were in a room with a crazy person who was 22 feet tall, And weighed like 950 pounds and they were beating on you and you didn't know if they could stop or when they would stop or what might happen.
Then people don't understand what it's like to be physically assaulted by a parent.
It is having a giant in the room you're afraid Could kill you.
I'm not saying purposefully, but anytime you uncork the dark genie of violence, you never know where it's going to go.
You know, there have been tons of cases where, you know, parents hit a kid, the kid stumbles down the stairs, hits their head, fucking dead.
Oh, yeah.
Or the belt buckle, you know, you squirm and the belt buckle hits your eyes and fucking blinded.
There have been times where people have gone to jail and Because they're in a bar, somebody pushes them, they punch the guy, guy falls backwards, hits his head on the bar, he's dead.
Like, every time you uncork the dark genie of violence, you don't know who or what it's going to take down or how things are going to go.
And, I mean, the woman who assaulted my mother, right, assaulted me, beating my head against a metal door, I mean, I had to go limp because I could have died.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so if you've not had the experience, I mean, I think people can kind of get it and understand it, but if you've not had the experience of being really assaulted by a parent clearly out of control, you don't know what it's like.
You can try and enter into the mind space, which is why I try to give these analogies like some 22-foot giant hitting you because they're much bigger than you are.
And they're clearly out of control.
And even more terrifyingly, not only are they out of control, but they believe that they're in the right.
They believe that they are righteous helpers of you by doing this violence.
In other words, you cannot ever rely upon a guilty conscience to minimize the next attack.
In fact, the attacks tend to escalate because they are justified, because it is your fault.
You didn't listen as the child.
They're doing the right thing.
If they didn't do this right thing by you, they would be bad parents.
There's nothing to appeal to with people who think the evil they're doing is righteous.
You know, I mean, to take an extreme example, it's like going to Hitler and saying, you know, those Jews are really unhappy in those concentration camps.
And he's like, well, yeah, I'm defending my country from the moneylenders and crap.
Like, whatever he says about that, right?
When someone thinks they're doing the right thing, you're just going to get more of it.
And I would assume that your dad wasn't like, you know, man, I'm really sorry I hit you.
I lost control.
I had a bad day.
I've been drinking.
He was like, no, that's what you do, right?
What you got to do to be a good parent.
You know, it's funny.
Once in a while, he would be very...
Apologetic and tender, but I almost think that makes it worse because I've read, you know, a few hundred books on this and I think that when children know to gird themselves against consistently negative evil behavior, they don't ever open their heart a certain amount and they can sort of protect against and not do that split off as much that we know about in psychology.
But when there's that tenderness and that apology and that sort of expression from the parent that I'll never do it again and the child opens up their little heart and then it happens again two days later, that in a sense is even more damaging.
Lower your shield, I'm done fighting.
Boom!
Right?
Yeah, my father would do stuff like, what do you got your hands up for?
What are your hands up for?
Put your hands down.
I'm not going to hit you.
You'd put your hands down and he'd slap you.
Fucking...
You know, the last time that he hit me, I was 17.
He punched me a couple times and shoved me against the wall.
Right.
Yeah, I'm sorry about it.
I mean, I could do a whole show on that, and I'm incredibly sorry about all that stuff.
Well...
So for you, I'll give you sort of a radical thesis.
Tell me if it makes any sense to you at all.
Okay.
When your daughter drops crumbs, you want her to stop doing it to protect her from the father in your head who was there to protect you from the father in your house when you were a boy.
Huh.
Because we internalize abusers not because we're masochistic, but because we want to survive.
Right?
So...
I would imagine, you know, like all children, you would feel great anxiety, the possibility of being assaulted by your father.
And assuming your father wasn't completely random, which if he's military, I would assume not, then there was particular things that could be predicted that would set your father off.
And so when you would contemplate doing those things, You would have internalized your father to yell at you because it's easier to be yelled at and much safer physically to be yelled at by an alter ego in your head than it is to be beaten by aforementioned 22-foot giant in the house, right?
Wow, that's great.
That's really good.
You internalize the abuser to keep yourself physically safe from the fists because internal self-attack through verbal anxiety is infinitely safer.
It's the old thing, like, would you rather punch yourself or have an angry giant punch you?
Well, you'd rather punch yourself because you can control that, right?
And so you'd rather attack yourself.
I'm so stupid.
I don't do that.
I can't think of that.
I can't believe I did.
Like, don't do that, right?
You'd rather attack yourself and prevent the behavior that will trigger the external attack because the internal attack can be managed and is only stress, not A cracked forearm or a broken bone or a gouged eye or a fall down the stairs or whatever, right?
Yeah.
And so when your daughter does this stuff, your inner dad...
Right?
But your inner dad was there to protect you.
It feels like self-abuse, but it is...
Like scar tissue is there to protect you.
And so your daughter does these things which would have provoked an attack against you as a child.
Your inner dad is like showing up saying...
Because he's got no time sense, right?
The inner dad is like, you know...
I mean, nobody in the African savannah thinks, well, I'm sure the lions have gone extinct.
It's like the lions are always there.
Always worry about the lions.
The lions could always be there.
Because, of course, when we evolved these defenses within our minds, these forms of self-management, nothing changed in society.
We were stuck in these static Groundhog Day stupid ass tribes for like 50,000 years where nothing changed.
So the idea that you would not be around a former abuser or the former abuser would not be replaced by some new abuser because that was the tribal standard was incomprehensible.
These inner alters, these defenders of the realm don't have any idea, any idea That circumstances have changed and we've got some sense of voluntarism.
I mean, they have about as much idea as our tongue does that sugar is plentiful now, right?
It doesn't.
Eat!
We don't know if we're going to eat again.
Well, actually, it'll be later today.
No!
It could be weeks.
The herd could be thinning.
There could be no rain.
We might be out of food.
Eat!
Right?
So our bodies don't, and our sort of, the psyche, the way that our defenses work to protect us, have no idea fundamentally that tomorrow could be any different from yesterday.
Abuser yesterday means abuser tomorrow.
And so your unconscious, your subconscious, assumes that your dad is in the house looking at your daughter.
Hmm.
And young, and healthy, and aggressive, and by the way, 22 feet fucking tall.
And so, if you can, you must then, I would assume, deep down, you get this, I must stop my daughter from dropping crumbs, because the alternative, if I fail that, is for her to be attacked.
Because unconsciously, we just assume that the abusers are here, And if they got hit by a charging woolly mammoth, some new abuser, because that's the cultural standard, right?
My dad learned it from his dad, from his uncles, from his...
There's some other abusers going to be around, and the same standards are going to apply.
Oh, yeah.
My father used to...
He would beat my brother and I with, like, belts and hangers, and then he would say, be grateful.
When I was your age, my father would take my brother and I up onto the roof and beat us with golf clubs.
You got it easy.
Swear to God.
Well, good thing that the warriors get training from somewhere, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, yeah, that's a great point.
Thank you.
And so he was also, of course, I mean, and I'm not trying to give you any sympathy points to hand over to your dad.
But in a weird way, he was hitting you with a belt because he was protecting you from being hit.
By his inner father's golf clubs, which we assume are still like the abusers.
The abusers are always in the room to the unconscious, which is why a huge amount of self-knowledge is necessary for these kinds of things.
And so the crumbs, again, they have this meaning.
And there is a weird way in which aggression is considered defense.
Right?
It's not weird if you sort of understand the mechanics.
And you understand.
I'm no psychologist.
It's all just my nonsense theory.
So, you know, if you find them helpful, great.
If not, not.
But the unconscious does not know time.
It doesn't know civilization.
It doesn't know voluntarism.
It doesn't know we're in a post-tribal society.
It doesn't know that we get to choose our own companions and our own tribe and our own friends and our own circle.
Right?
It just assumes that whatever happened to us as children is going to happen to the next kids, right?
In other words, if a child...
Let me take an extreme example.
If a child used to get sacrificed to the gods for allowing his shadow to fall upon the altar of the god, because that was a sign of disrespect.
I'm just making something up, right?
Then you must protect your children from having their shadows fall on the altar.
Because if that happens and they're seen, they will get their throat slit, right?
They will be sacrificed to the gods.
And so if your child is walking in front of the altar and the priest is standing there, the witch doctor is standing there, and the child's shadow is about to fall on the altar...
And you hit that child, you throw a rock at that child, you do anything to get that child not to have the shadow fall on the altar, then you are defending and protecting that child.
And this is how we have evolved, in that children were highly expendable.
I mean, they used to throw children to the sharks, they'd have them high sacrifice.
I mean, the story of The story of Abraham and Isaac, right?
God tells Abraham, go kill your son.
Abraham's like, okay.
Sorry, son.
Voices in daddy's head are telling him to kill you.
Right?
I mean, this is not a made up...
I mean, the fact that God said stop, well, I don't think things were quite the same between them after that.
But...
What it means, it's not the crumbs.
The crumbs on the ground are just crumbs on the ground, right?
I mean if a bird flew into the house and not crumbs on the ground, you'd probably laugh, right?
Yes.
So the crumbs on the ground are the crumbs on the ground, but If the crumbs on the ground trigger your inner father who was there to protect you from your real father and assumes that your real father is still the same size, still the same energy, still the same vigor, still the same opinions and still the same proximity and power, then you are going to feel great anxiety when your daughter does what would cause an attack upon you as a child and you must stop her from doing that to protect her.
Well, I've been going, I've been seeing therapists Stefan, since I was 12, for 37 years now, on and off, PhDs the whole nine yards, and no one has ever said that to me.
No one has ever explained that.
But that may not be a compliment to me, right?
That may be.
I don't know.
I'm not trying to compliment you.
I'm trying to say that I think that, I don't know, the whole psychiatry and Write a prescription for fucking drugs and all that stuff.
I feel grateful that I got sort of a new kind of take on it.
Because it makes total sense to me.
It's like I have this light bulb.
Sort of going off and like, of course, I couldn't figure it out.
Like, why when she would do stuff like that?
And of course, I thought, well, it's because she's getting away with stuff that I didn't get away with.
And my inner child is jealous of her having a better childhood than me.
And what you just explained and articulated makes total sense to me.
And it's just a relief.
Because I feel like I can remember that now and approach it differently.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you say to your inner dad, he's not here anymore.
He's not in the room.
He's not in the house.
We don't have to do this anymore.
Right.
Now, for your wife, I mean, she's not here, which is a shame, but nonetheless, I'm going to go out on an even more theoretical limb.
Okay.
And give you a...
A possibility as to why she infantilizes.
Well, first of all, she was not raped until she was five, right?
Uh, no.
And so she wants to keep her daughter young because that was safe.
That's one possibility.
Another possibility is that...
I don't know how your wife was disciplined as a child, but...
She was never hit by her mother, rarely, like once in a while, you know, because the men, after the second husband, the molester, left...
There weren't really men around very often, or if they were, they didn't last long and they never touched her or her brother.
So to answer your question, from probably eight years old until high school, for the rest of her life, she was never hit as far as being disciplined.
So for your wife then, the imposition of rules causes anxiety, right?
Right, because there's a man around and he must be an abuser or a child molester or something.
He's got nuts and a penis.
Yeah.
No, and I get that.
And it's a shame that the colloquial for insane and testicle is the same.
But there's another possibility, too.
And again, this is all just theoretical nonsense, but maybe it's helpful.
So...
For your wife...
The internalization is of her mother, right?
I would think so.
That would be my guess.
Did your wife, when she was a child, desperately want your mother to impose some goddamn rules on the environment?
I can't imagine that she didn't.
Yeah, one would be, don't rape the children!
Don't beat the children and don't rape my daughter.
Right.
Right.
So, lack of boundaries was the internalization of the mom ego to your wife.
So, your mother-in-law is very hostile to the requirement for standards and rules, right?
Right.
Because Stan, you mentioned narcissistic and, you know, that's your word and let's go with it, right?
But if all of that's true, narcissists hate rules.
Because it limits their behavior, right?
Right?
They don't get to do what they want and get away with everything and just make up whatever they want in the road, right?
Her mother is very religious, and I think, you know, the whole confession thing and Jesus will make it all better and just, you know...
Yeah, so she gets the get-out-of-jail-free card ex post facto, right?
Exactly.
After the fact.
And I've been an atheist for most of my adult life.
I went to Catholic school and was an altar boy and had priests pinching my ass and shit.
So I've been out of that shit for years.
I've known how fucking insane it is.
Yeah, because, I mean, she can still be very religious with seven marriages.
I mean, eight would definitely be breaking the vows in the covenant before God.
My wife can't stand Elizabeth Taylor and doesn't know why.
She can't stand the woman.
It's so funny.
I'm like, honey, why do you think you don't like her?
I just don't like her.
So...
Your daughter, sorry, your wife, when she was your mother-in-law's daughter, when she was a kid, your wife had a desperate desire for rules, standards, boundaries, rule, like any structure, right?
Kids need structure.
Everybody needs structure, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Now, if she were to request or impose or demand or whine for or beg for any kind of structure on the part of her mom, what would have happened?
I mean, I think her mom either would have rejected her or just said Well, I'm doing my best.
Where are you going to go?
You're stuck with me.
It's me, you, and your brother.
In fact, your wife, when she was a child, was so afraid to be honest with and demand protection or request protection from her mother that she submitted to rape.
That's how fragile any kind of trust or bond was with her own mother, and that's what the pedophiles prey on.
Is children who won't talk to their parents?
Yeah.
And so your wife would have had to internalize structure and rules are bad.
Structure and rules are dangerous.
Structure and rules requesting or imposing them will cause maternal abandonment.
Wow, yeah.
So you come in with your inner dad saying, rules, order, structure, right?
And your wife has the inner mom, which is rules and structure are the worst thing ever.
And you see what I mean?
when I say it's not about the crumbs it's about the self-protection of children dangling over a volcano Yeah.
And this collision, if it's not understood, continues to move you apart.
You come in with the rules because you're anxious if the rules are broken.
And your wife comes in with the no boundaries and is anxious if there are any rules.
And neither of them are you.
They're the inner parents who are there to help you.
In the past, but are hurting you in the present.
You nailed it.
Because she said out loud many times, you know, there were no rules.
My mother just let us do whatever we wanted to.
My brother and I were kind of latchkey kids and there were no rules.
There were no rules.
But some rules are good.
I get.
The crumbs is a bit extreme, but don't rape the kids.
Pretty good rule.
So now that you know, like we started talking about me building a fence, me being your neighbor, build a fence, right?
Right, so...
And I don't know what the plot of ground means to you, buried homeless guy, buried dog, whatever, right?
Now, if you know this about yourself, if this is true, right, it's all hypothetical, but if this is true, if you know this about yourself, you know this about your wife...
Then I think it's pretty important to understand that people who are fighting for survival, which is what's happening when your daughter is spilling crumbs, you're fighting for survival from your dad and your wife is fighting survival from her mom, right?
Right.
If that's known, then clearly it's not about the crumbs and tragically it's not even about your daughter.
It's about your childhoods and your parents and what you legitimately and necessarily had to do to survive that environment.
And then correct me if I'm wrong, my daughter in a sense is the fence and the dead bodies that my wife and I don't want to be dug up or found are all the pain and just horror of our childhoods that we just don't want to fucking look at anymore.
Yeah.
Your daughter is simply growing up, and she doesn't know that as she grows, she knocks over more of the fragility of all of us, or all of our children when they grow.
We want to shield them from the horrors that we may have experienced as children.
And in the shielding of that, we do them a good service in many ways, but it's a challenge, because they don't know that there's all this china.
They're just dancing around the room, right?
They don't know that there's all this stuff that could topple and break.
I think part of the reason why I can't stand her mother is because I know her mother knew.
I know she fucking knew.
In other words, in the last two or three years, there is no way in fucking hell That if I was doing something like that to my daughter, that my wife wouldn't have known.
That my wife wouldn't have sensed it on some level.
And the fact that that happened to my wife and my mother-in-law claims that she never knew, I don't fucking buy it.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
That's what I was told when I was a kid.
You know, I climbed over a wall to get a ball And I got caned for it when I was six.
Caned for it in boarding school.
And I said, I didn't know.
I didn't know that I wasn't supposed to climb over that wall to get the ball.
The headmaster said, ignorance of the rules is no excuse.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
And it can't be, because then everyone would say, I didn't know.
So, the argument, well, I just didn't know.
I mean, I don't know.
People, they think that makes it better.
It makes it worse.
Yeah.
You didn't even know there was a pedophile in the house.
You didn't even know that your daughter was being raped.
How fucking clueless are you?
How disconnected from your children are you?
How self-absorbed are you?
Your daughter is getting raped?
No change in her behavior?
No change in her demeanor?
No problems with her sleep?
No problems with her friends?
No problems with her basic biological functioning?
No problems with any of it?
No problems with sleep disorders?
No problems with nightmares?
No depression?
No anxiety?
No problems with homework?
No acting out?
No nothing?
Nothing happens?
There's no negative consequences to a human psyche for being raped?
Why the hell is it illegal then?
It's illegal because it's so fucking destructive.
Yeah.
Just my wife and I living apart for the last six weeks.
My daughter has cried and upset and pissed off and was acting up in school a little and then she started rubbing her mouth in this little nervous way.
So...
That's just from us having lived apart for a month, month and a half.
So I can't even imagine how a child would change when something so graphic was happening to them.
That adults couldn't notice it.
Oh, no.
I mean, you know.
You know.
You know.
Well...
I really appreciate it.
I feel like I really got something in those two sort of distinctions you made for me as far as the inner dad and the inner dad I created, the real inner dad, and then the same thing that my wife is doing with her mother.
I feel like it's...
It's something that really can help me and that I can talk to my wife about this conversation and maybe play this back to her.
Yeah, I mean, look, I feel for you both.
I mean, your childhoods were unbelievably wretched and what you're striving to do with your daughter is incredibly noble and successful.
I mean, in terms of You've taken a horror factor from, like, 99% to, like, 3%.
I mean, what an incredible achievement.
Yeah.
Now, if you guys split, it will be very hard on your daughter.
You know that.
I don't need to tell you that.
Yeah.
The statistics are very clear, and it's very hard.
You know, I don't know you guys.
I mean, I think I get a good sense of you.
I get some sense.
Of your wife, but it doesn't seem to me that it's necessary in any foundational way.
You have an undertow of failed marriages, like Black Widow-style failed marriages on your wife's side.
My parents being together 50 years, they're fucking crazy.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that's a successful marriage either, right?
Yeah, I wouldn't want their marriage either, so, you know.
Yeah, I mean, whether you trade in for a new broken car or keep the old broken car, you still have a broken car, right?
Exactly.
That's good.
So, yeah, but I mean, it's not like, oh, you know, she...
Hit me in a baseball bat while I was sleeping or, you know, you set fire to the house.
I mean, it seems like with a real dedication to self-knowledge with regards to this.
Look, you know, I'm a big fan of Dr.
Richard Schwartz has something called family systems therapy.
He's been on the show and you can read family systems therapy.
For more on this, and I did, you know, when I was in therapy, did a lot of work on alter egos.
Massive amounts of work.
I've got notebooks and notebooks and notebooks filled with conversations with alter egos.
And so, you know, I'm just telling you things that I've experienced or things that I think.
But internal family systems therapy is, I think, a very useful and powerful approach.
It happens to coincide with what worked really well for me.
So, you know, this is not any kind of scientific endorsement, but I think it works well.
But if you are really committed to understanding What is triggering the intensity over inconsequentiality?
Because isn't that what drives you nuts in relationships?
What always used to drive me nuts in relationships was this intensity over inconsequentiality.
Yeah.
Like I could understand, you know, boy, you know, you had an affair with the Boston Bruins, you know, I could, okay, that's, you know, yeah, that's a, that's a bit of a hurdle.
For marriage to get over.
But of course what couples end up fighting over is so often not massively significant.
But it is imbued with this power that, you know, there's this thing in movies, I think Hitchcock, I can't remember, I think maybe Hitchcock coined the phrase, the MacGuffin.
You may know this from movies and theaters and stuff, right?
Right.
The MacGuffin is some shit that people want that motivates them, right?
So in the Maltese Falcon, they want the Maltese Falcon, if I remember rightly.
And it doesn't really...
It doesn't matter what it is.
You just...
There's a ring of power!
Everybody wants the ring of power!
Some people want to destroy it, some people want to use it, right?
There has to be a...
That people really invest this energy and power in, you know?
It's the original Declaration of Independence.
You know, it's a Koran written in the...
It's the chalice of the Holy Grail.
It's, you know, the spear, the Turin.
Like, it's just...
People really want it.
And it's just called a MacGuffin in movies because you have to have a motivator.
You gotta...
People gotta want something in order for there to be conflict and drama and all that, right?
Right.
He wants to live.
The other guy wants to kill him.
Right.
And...
So many of our lives, it's like, we think it's some fundamental thing.
It's just a MacGuffin.
It's just something that, it's almost like it's there, which isn't really that important when we think about it, but just is imbued with history.
You know, if you just bought a little silver ring and then you lost it, no big deal, right?
It's your wedding ring.
Oh, my God.
Your grandmother is...
It's imbued with meaning.
It's still a ring.
No ghosts in it or anything.
My grandmother's Holocaust ring.
No, whatever it is, right?
So this intensity over inconsequentiality, it seems weird when we're adults, like the stuff that we fight about, but that's because they weren't inconsequentialities when the defenses were formed, right?
They were very, very important and maybe even life-saving.
Great point.
Crumbs could get you killed.
Rules could get you abandoned.
And having the self-respect for our own emotional apparatus to say, yes, it's not petty, it's not weird, it may not be appropriate to the moment, but it's not irrational.
In its core, and it's certainly not irrational in how we evolved as a species and the dangers that we all face through non-compliance with abusers.
You know, death by non-compliance with abusers was the foundational, I would argue, the most foundational drive for the development of our psyche.
You step out of line in a tribal culture, you know, you're not doing well.
I mean, either A, directly, like you just get killed, or B, Nobody will have sex with you and give you babies, and therefore the genes for non-compliance just kind of die off until they pop up in people like you and me, you know, we go around changing the world.
So, highly recessive, let's just say.
Not just my barber's name for my hairstyle, but also I think change, you know, evolution and growth.
It was, for almost all of human history, it was unbelievably dangerous to not follow The tribal mythologies and to not, which basically means complying with abusers.
And so the genes to the mechanisms we've developed for automatic unconscious compliance with abusers is like they're very, very powerful.
And this is one of the reasons why it's very hard to undo and why it keeps tripping us up.
So, you know, I think we're only here because of it, so we can't have too much disrespect for it.
But it sure is a challenge.
And I think that's why I battle, like, depression and kind of that low-grade anxiety.
The other shoe is going to drop because that's all the stuff from my childhood, too.
It's like, you know, I've been fortunate.
I've worked very hard.
I've achieved things and material things and all that.
But I still have that kind of other shoe's going to drop, low-grade depression thing that just...
It's just...
But that probably also, again, I'm just guessing, but that probably would strike me as, how was your dad when you were happy?
Let's say you came in, you know, you're skipping, you're happy, you're tiptoeing through the tulips, you had a great day, you're singing at the top of your lungs.
I mean, how was happiness regarded by your father?
It annoyed him.
Yeah.
It would annoy him.
It would annoy him.
And so for you, low-grade depression was probably a way of not provoking your father with happiness.
It's just another defense.
Fuck.
God, you're right.
Jesus, why the fuck?
Why didn't I fucking know that?
Of course that's what it is.
It's not a defense if you know it, man.
The whole point of a defense is you're not supposed to know it, right?
It's not a good defense if it's conscious.
It's like, yeah, of course.
Stay depressed.
Stay small.
Don't shine as bright as you are.
Under the radar, man.
The tall poppy gets cut.
It's the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down.
Don't be happy around nasty people.
It's just like rubbing yourself with marinade jumping into a hungry lion's It's a protection.
I'd rather take low-grade depression than high-grade assault.
Yeah.
I guess I thought at this age it would be gone.
It would be gone.
I haven't lived with them since I was 17, you know.
But the defenses don't know time.
Yeah.
They don't know.
Like, the defenses evolved over tens of thousands of years of utterly static human existence.
They've not evolved for change.
They don't...
Like, why on earth would the genes that evolve all the way from apes up to us where nothing changes?
Why would they ever...
It would be completely counter-evolutionary for them to constantly scan for change.
Because nothing changed, right?
I mean, it's like a...
A walrus developing the hair of a polar bear.
I mean, it's just not how it works.
You adapt to your environment.
And the environment for almost all of human history was unbelievable stasis.
This is the Groundhog Day of human history.
Well, and I guess, you know, what's coming up for me now is, okay, you've done all the wrong therapy for the last, you know, 30 years or whatever.
You've got to do different, you know, like the three years Stefan did, you've got to do that kind of therapy because, again, if I have...
This achievement and success and the nice house and all this stuff that is supposed to make you happy, but I still have this low-grade depression and anxiety and the other fear is going to drop, the other shoe is going to drop, then obviously I haven't done the right kind of therapy because if I had, I wouldn't feel this way.
I could be happy more often.
Yeah, look, it takes a great deal of courage.
To be happy.
And please understand, James, I am not in any way implying a deficiency of courage in your part.
I'm simply pointing out why it's hard for us to be happy.
Happiness draws aggression.
It does.
It does.
And it's not just because people are nasty.
It's just that everybody's evolved with this I mean, and it's not, I mean, everyone's involved with this, don't be happy, or fucking lasers, right?
I mean, if you're really happy in church, what happens?
You know, Jesus died for your sins.
Here, we're going to toppy this dusty Jewish zombie into your lap just so you don't ever think about smiling again.
Because original sin and going to hell and the devil and the...
Right?
Vomit up all of the traumatic prehistory of the species into your tidy little shiny cheek lap.
And so, happy in church?
No, you don't, you know...
I mean, for a priest to save you, he's got to damn you first.
I mean, what does the priest have to offer a happy man?
Except an imaginary illness that will never make him happy again, which he'll pay to have an imaginary cure given to him.
Go to school and you're, oh, you know, I love being in school, I love learning.
I mean, the teachers may be okay with it, but how are your peers?
Well, Keener, nerd.
Apple polisher.
It's what we used to get.
Oh, here's an apple for you, teacher.
Right?
Be happy in the world.
Just try it.
Low-grade depression may be better than the alternative.
I'm just, you know, being for she's or she is, right?
But be happy in the world.
I saw a Dr.
Phil many years ago where There was some tabloid that, you know, Dr.
Phil got outrageously angry and this, that, and the other, right?
And they had a picture of him, like, angry.
And it turned out he was just cheering at a basketball game.
And there was some bad call from the ref.
Dr.
Phil explodes with rain.
You know, like, just nonsense, right?
And, I mean, just the lies that are told in the media.
I mean, forget it, right?
It doesn't go on and on.
But, you know, beware of Somebody is happy.
You know, there's just this Nazgul.
This Nazgul to fly around the world looking for any tiny points of light, of happiness.
Well, you just...
Peck, peck, peck, claw, claw.
Oh, no, they're happy.
Right?
You just really helped me...
You just really helped me make another connection.
And what that connection is, is, you know, when I first met my wife, she's very personable and happy and funny and easygoing.
She's really fun to be around.
And as I learned more about her history, I was like, you're in denial.
How can you be so happy in all this shit that happened to you?
And while I think that may be partially true or whatever, as far as kind of what's going on here, what do you kind of Trying to hold down by being happy.
I think another component for me Which is what you just helped me connect is that her being happy scared the shit out of me.
Because I was like, Jesus Christ, probably, you know, on an unconscious level, you can't be so happy.
You're a target.
You got to like be a little depressed and cynical and scared like me, you know, the bad boy.
She was like the captain of the cheerleaders.
She was valedictorian of her high school class.
And I was like the bad boy, you know.
A princess plus thug.
I've never heard that combination before.
Something new every day.
Anyway, look, okay, but the other thing too, but for women it's a different equation, particularly for head of the cheerleader hotties, right?
I mean, they're allowed to be happy because nobody wants to contradict them because eggs!
Right.
They've got the eggs!
Guarding the eggs!
And so it's a little different for guys.
Well, and I was the athlete, the handsome athlete guy and all that stuff.
So it was the cheerleader and the captain of the football team thing, but we were both so fucked up underneath it all.
Right, right.
Listen, Ann, I got some other callers.
Do you mind?
I just wanted to mention Internal Family Systems Therapy.
We don't get a commission, but, you know, if you've got resources and you wanted to check it out, it might be helpful.
If this approach, and look, I don't claim to know smack all about psychology or anything like that, but this is an approach that helped me.
I'm sharing it.
If it helps you, internal family.
My therapist was not an IFS therapist, but she was very keen on working with alters, alter egos.
If it's a value to you, that's the only structural place that I know that does this kind of works.
So that would be my recommendation.
Well, Stephan, thank you so much for your time and all your insights.
I really appreciate it.
I'll be donating all the time and listening and just you're such a great model for me and a great, you know, just everything.
I'm just so grateful, so glad and so great that your show is there for me.
Really appreciate it.
Well, thanks, James.
And I appreciate your support.
And yeah, get your wife to call in if she wants.
I will.
I'm gonna.
She will.
She's gonna call in.
Great.
Well, tell her she's welcome.
And I'm nicer than I seem.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
Let us know how it goes.
All right?
I will.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Thank you, James.
Alright, up next is Luke.
Luke wrote in and wanted to know, is there anything wrong or bad about having sex with someone without having a concern for their character?
I understand the historical slash pre-contraceptive reasons, but at a time where you can wear a condom, I struggle to see the negative effects of two people enjoying sex without necessarily seeing a future together.
like playing a game of tennis.
I have a huge double standard with this emotionally.
When considering my own sexual activities, I see no reason not to have sex with someone I find attractive, if I'm single and they are game.
However, when I meet a woman that I see as a potential long-term partner, I consider it a red flag if she has had these no-strings-attached flings in her past.
Basically, if a woman wants to have sex with me very soon after meeting me, I judge her, dismiss her as a potential girlfriend, but I'm still willing to have sex with her.
*laughter* Right.
I think as far as rational calculations go, there's a case to be made for that.
But is there anything you wanted to add to that?
Hi, Steph.
Hi.
My mind's spinning a bit after that last call.
That was just so captivating.
Oh, good.
His courage and openness and your insights, I just feel a bit like I'm trembling on the stage after Jimi Hendrix has just walked off and I'm just a bit nervous.
You bring the sex and so that's fine.
He just has the insights.
You have the...
Right?
So don't worry about it.
Well, nice to meet you, Luke.
And it's interesting because sex for men and women is different, you know, and I hate to state the blindingly obvious, but the vulnerability that a woman has with regards to sex is not at all the same with the vulnerability that a man has for sex.
Right.
So, men usually have, what, 40, 50, 60 pounds on a woman.
Women have like 40% less upper body strength.
And so for a woman to let a man have sex with her when she doesn't really know him is much more risky from a just, he could be nutty, right?
I'm not trying to sort of get into this rape culture stuff, but he just could be, right?
Right.
He could be one of those Robert De Niro bite your cheek off guys or whatever, or he could just be some guy who ends up not taking no for an answer when she's already in a compromised position, and that's a really horrible thing to occur, right?
Yeah.
Now men, sorry, to be clear, because we just did this and people should check this out, the truth about rape culture, men do get raped.
At an equivalent rate to women, and it's harder, traumatic, and of course for all the sexes and genders, but there is a difference in the physical vulnerability between men and women, size, strength, and the very act of penetrating versus being penetrated is different in terms of vulnerability.
Women, of course, have...
Risks of pregnancy?
Yes, condoms.
Of course, condoms are not magic.
Condoms are not 100%, right?
You know, Mike, you can maybe look up these statistics if you don't mind.
But I think they're like 80 to 90%.
You know, they can break, they can leak, and so on, right?
And of course, for men, if you're with some woman who's kind of crazy, you might get sperm jacked, right?
So you might throw the condom in the garbage and she fishes it out and Scoops out the sperm, jams it up there.
Next thing you know, you've got 20 years of full-on Alec Baldwin-style support for the sperm checker.
STDs, you know, condoms are not in bio suits.
They're magic spheres of infinite protection.
You can still get crabs from just pubic hair to pubic hair contact and so on.
I don't know.
I've never had any kind of STD, but I imagine it's pretty unpleasant to get crabs.
If I remember from health classes, somebody said, well, why don't you just sit in the bath until they drown?
It's like, well, crabs can stay underwater a lot longer than you can.
So there are risks involved.
And so it's not like a game of tennis.
Like, it's not.
There are risks involved.
There is also, of course, with sexuality, with orgasm, there are a lot of endorphins and so on released, bonding chemicals that are released and so on.
So it's not, you know...
Sex isn't competitive.
You're trying to win against the other person, right?
I mean, tennis is, I don't know, maybe I'm square, but it's not competitive in the way that tennis, tennis you want to win, it's win-lose and so on, which win-win with health and exercise and it's fun to play or whatever, but win-lose in terms of the game, but there's not usually win-lose in terms of the sexual encounter.
If it's, you know, Voluntary, of course, right?
So, with regards to a man's judgment for having casual sex, yeah, there are risks involved, without a doubt.
And those risks, you know, I mean, was some guy just got 10 years in prison for being accused of rape on a college campus?
Like, holy!
There's some significant risks for, you know, the fatal attraction stuff that's out there.
So, if you put all of those risks together, You know, possible pregnancy, sperm jacking, STDs, crazy women charges or allegations or whatever.
I'm not saying, you know, God, you can never have flings, you can never have...
I mean, not that it would make any sense.
I mean, what do words do against biological drives that are the reason the words exist to begin with?
But it is a bit of a risky business.
And I say this sort of...
It's different than when I was a young man.
And that is me sort of trying to understand what life's like out there There for young women these days.
And I do get sort of emails from young men saying, like, man, you don't get it.
It's a totally different world out there for young men these days.
Just before I jump into that, Mike got something and says here, in one year, only two out of every 100 couples who use condoms consistently and correctly will experience an unintended pregnancy.
Two pregnancies arising from an estimated 8,300 acts of sexual intercourse for 0.02% per condition pregnancy rate.
Okay.
One year with perfect use, meaning couples use condom consistently and correctly at every act of sex, 98% of women relying on male condoms will remain pregnancy-free.
With typical use, 85% relying on male condoms will remain pregnancy-free.
One year with perfect use, 95% of women relying on the female condom will remain pregnancy-free.
With typical use, 79% relying on female condoms will remain Pregnancy-free.
By comparison, only 15% of women using no method of contraception in a year will remain pregnancy-free.
Okay, so, I mean, obviously, if you're using them perfectly correctly, it's pretty high, but typical use, 79% to 85% pregnancy-free, but that's a year, right?
So the odds, if you use a condom correctly, the odds of impregnating a woman who's not a sperm jacker In a single act of sex, they're very, very, very low.
So I just wanted to sort of get the facts out there as far as that goes.
Mike didn't even look that up.
He just checked his journal.
But...
Hey!
Sorry.
Didn't know you were still on the air.
But so, yeah, I mean, but so for women who've had a lot of Sexual partners, I mean, they are putting themselves in dangerous and vulnerable positions.
Not quite the same as a man, though, of course.
Statistically, both genders get raped at roughly equal levels.
But the question is why?
You know, the fundamental question is why.
Look, obviously, sex with new people is exciting and fun.
But sex with people that you're in a stable relationship with is better.
Because...
Knowledge counts, experience counts, that kind of stuff, right?
So the question then is, why has someone, like, someone who repeatedly has these one-night stands putting themselves in more risky situations?
You can check out a novel called Meeting Mr.
Goodbar.
I think it was called Meeting Mr.
Goodbar, about some woman who slept around and anyway.
I just remember I read the end of it a couple of times and it's really quite a shocking ending.
But anyway, so, but the question is, well, why?
Why wouldn't you want to get into a stable relationship with someone you could have, you know, safe on pretty much every level, predictable and enjoyable and ever increasingly great sex?
I mean, wouldn't that be better?
It's sort of like the guy at the tennis club who only ever plays with someone else once.
And has no regular partners that they play with.
I would play with them once, and I never want to play with them again.
I'd be like, well, why?
I mean, why would you find someone you can play with on a more regular basis?
And all that.
So, anyway, that's a lot of thoughts that don't lead to any particular destination, but what do you think?
Well, the problem I have...
I mean, you just said it was different for men and women, but the problem I had was the double standard.
The...
Should it be a red flag for me, like you said, if I do meet a woman that I want a stable relationship with?
Should it be a red flag for me that she's had lots of sex partners?
And then, if so, then surely it should be a red flag for her as well.
No, no, no.
Come on.
It's only a double standard if it's applied to two identical entities, right?
Okay.
Right, like if I say...
The fact that men and women are different makes...
The fact that men and women are different is important.
We have not evolved with the same sexual strategies.
Because there's a sexual strategy that is available for men that is not available for women, or at least has not really been available for women throughout most of human history.
So, men have the...
My approach to Unreal Tournament, it's the spray and pray.
Lob some grenades and see what happens, right?
But the sort of spread your seed widely approach for men is a strategy that makes us in frogs and is a strategy that we can employ, right?
Because we're not short of sperm.
If I remember my teenage years and my rather stiff sheets correctly, we're not short of sperm.
And so we can spread it and see what happens, right?
Women don't have that option throughout history because she gets pregnant and she has to breastfeed and she has to be the primary caregiver, right?
So women have not evolved with this sort of spray and pray approach.
Now, again, look, I'm just talking about evolution here.
I'm not talking about like every single human being in the world right now.
I'm just talking about these sort of Trends that women have evolved the way that women have evolved is roughly this My eggs are scarce and my window of fertility is short relative to a man's right women get like 30 years and men get like 60 or 70 years depending on how long they live So My
eggs are scarce and my resource requirement for children is huge and inescapable.
Pregnancy is nine months, childbirth is dangerous.
You can get killed throughout most of history.
A lot of women died, as you can imagine, in childbirth, right?
And so women evolved to demand a commitment from a man in order to give him sexual access.
Right?
And...
So, up until, like, incredibly recently, you had to get married to the woman in order to have sex with her.
Because that's the way that the sexual strategy had to work for women.
Which is why when people talk about patriarchy, it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, society was organized around the needs of women.
Women withhold sex until they get commitment.
Because sex means babies.
Which the woman is going to have to commit to.
Now, if the woman doesn't get the commitment from the man biologically, evolutionarily, in the way back distant, right?
If the woman doesn't get the commitment from the man to raise the children with her, those children were much less likely to survive, right?
Because the man wasn't continually bringing them resources and meat and milk and bread and whatever, right?
And planting the crops and whatever, right?
Because women were constantly pregnant and constantly breastfeeding.
So they needed resources, right?
And pregnant women and breastfeeding women are like resource black holes.
And so women evolved with, hmm, I'm not gonna, you know, of course they've got lust and enjoy sex, it's just as bad, but it's like, hmm, gotta...
Got to get into man's commitment in order to have the sex.
Now men, again, in a society where you have to commit to women to get sex, then the spray and pray, let's see how many tadpoles we can hatch or how many baby sea turtles we can dig into the sand, that strategy doesn't work for men.
Because women grit their teeth, cross their legs, they're chaperoned, they shotgun dads and all that, they're just, nope, no eggs without a ring.
No huggy, no kissy until I get a wedding ring.
Oh, honey, my baby, don't put my love upon your shelf.
She said, don't hand me no lines and keep your hands to yourself.
And that was the reality of it.
Commit, followed by sex.
Now, that all changed.
All changed with the welfare state.
And I've gone into those reasons before, so we don't have to worry about it in particular right now.
But that's the way that women have evolved.
I don't believe that the welfare state has changed our fundamental brain structure, genetics, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
I just...
I just...
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe we are a complete blank slate.
And there's no innate differences.
I mean, Janet Heimlich has been on the show and made that case.
And, you know, maybe...
Maybe.
I'm just telling you, maybe.
I don't think anyone knows for sure.
Yet.
But...
I think that if you are going to look at a woman who is, you could say traditional, which I think is just in accordance with how we evolved as a species, then I would view sex like sugar.
You know, like, I mean, okay, sure, have some sugar, right?
But don't live on sugar.
And a woman who...
Who is engaged in a male-style reproductive strategy when women have evolved for a non-male, or at least not that option of spray and pray, I would view as someone to further scrutinize before committing to.
That's all I can say.
I mean, because what do I know, right?
But I'm a big one to kneel before Evolutionary biology, and I talk about it a lot in this show, kneel before evolutionary biology.
It doesn't mean that biology is destiny.
We can choose and there's differences and so on, right?
But I think it would be something that it's not just a double standard.
Because a double standard requires that you're treating two very similar entities with opposite rules.
But when it comes to reproductive strategies, men and women are not the same.
Steph, I have some data here that would be easier for me to read.
No data!
Does it contradict anything I'm saying?
In this case, absolutely not.
This is a chart, and I'll put this in the show notes for the podcast and the video, because this is something definitely worth looking at.
Women who have had more non-marital sexual partners are less likely to have stable marriages.
Okay.
The chart covers sexually active women over the age of 30.
Women were defined as having a stable marriage if they were currently married or had been in the same marriage for at least five years.
Alright, now let's go through the percentage.
If you had one partner, if you had zero partners, Before you got married, the chance of your marriage being stable is 80.47%.
If you had one non-marital sexual partner, it drops to 53.63%.
2 drops even more to 43%.
3, 39%.
4 goes up to 41%.
Then 5 drops down to 29%.
Then 28 for 6 to 10, 29 for 11 to 15, and if you get to 16 to 20, the likelihood of you winding up in a stable marriage is 17.80%.
So it's dose dependent, right?
The more sexual partners the woman has, the less stable her marriage.
Now, that's not causal.
Who knows, right?
So it could just be that women who are better suited for stable marriages don't have a lot of sexual partners.
It's not like if you took one of these 16 to 20 women and then just moved them back in time and put them on a desert island, that they then have stable marriages, right?
So, you know, like there's a thing that says that married people are happier.
But it could just be like nobody wants to marry a grump, right?
So grumpy people don't get married.
The cause and effect is tough.
But, you know, going from, you know, 80, what was it, 84% success rate down to a 17% success rate for pretty much the most important decision you're going to make as an adult is who you're going to marry, right?
Maybe somewhat equivalent to what you're going to do with your life, who you're going to marry.
That's a big difference.
Big swing.
Now, we don't have the data for men, as far as I understand it.
No, I wish we did.
That would be fascinating.
I wish we did.
And maybe it's even worse or better.
I don't know, right?
But I think the evolutionarily biological argument...
Would be to say that the woman who requires commitment from a man before, you know, giving up her flower is someone who is a traditionalist and, you know, is on that heavy investment side.
It's the R and K reproductive strategies, if you want to go and look into it in more detail with regards to biology.
And, you know, actually, Mike, you want to have a...
I know we've talked on this before, but if you can find a good brief summary of the RNK reproductive strategies, I think that would be helpful.
But, you know, sex is not...
You know, as I said before on this show, it's a big person's game that makes real people.
And it's only fun because it makes people.
It's not fun because nature wants you to make your own face because it feels good.
It's fun because it is...
To make people.
And that doesn't mean, of course, like you've got to be Catholic and say you can only have sex if there's a chance of making a person.
I'm not saying that at all.
Sex can be recreational, of course, right?
But fundamentally, it feels good because it's there to make people.
And I think if we divorce that completely and just make it purely recreational, I think that it's kind of turning a beautiful poppy into heroin, if that makes any sense.
So I don't think it's wrong to say that I think it's wrong to say it's a pure double standard.
On the other hand, if I were a woman, I would definitely also view a man who'd had significant numbers of casual sexual partners, I would look upon that person with some caution, if that makes any sense.
That makes a lot of sense.
Because either he was having sex with women who were...
Doing this other strategy, right?
Women who were taking on this male reproductive strategy, in which case, you know, then he obviously has a thing for women who are not suitable marriage partners, so to speak, or less suitable.
So either that's happening, or he was giving the appearance or impression of a man who wanted to become a woman's boyfriend and then just dumped her.
Right?
So he's either into women who are Not statistically great potential for marriage partners, which, you know, if I want to get married, it's not a good thing for his, not a good place for his taste to run.
Or he's doing a fake out, right?
He's pretending that he's interested in stability and he's pretending that he's interested in investment and boyfriend and fiance.
And then he's just like, nope, I'm gone.
In which case, you know, he's a bit of a deceptive scumbag, right?
I almost feel embarrassed that I got sucked into this feminist mentality where they just disregard biology and everything's equal regardless of sex.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, how many times...
Well, if a man does it, he's a slut.
If a woman does it, she's a slut.
It's like, yeah, well, you know.
Ideology, meet biology.
Let's see who'll win in the long run.
I know which one I'm going to put my money on.
And for two generations, women have been told, yeah, go live like men.
Go live like men.
As if, I don't know, as if there are all these men out there having all this sex.
I mean, like, 80% of the sex goes to, like, the top 20% of the guys.
I mean, go live like a man, okay, go play video games and masturbate.
I don't know if there's all these, like, if feminists are being told or women are being told by feminists there's all these sex of men and, I don't know, just not true as far as these statistics go.
Yeah, I know a couple of guys that have an insane amount of sexual partners in their past.
I mean, I guess they're part of this 20%.
I feel like it would be difficult to find a woman in her early 20s growing up in this student culture in England that hasn't had a lot of sex partners.
It just seems to be the norm now.
I don't know.
Yeah, well, you know, keep your eyes peeled for that Amish chick in the corner who's got a tent erected around her.
No, I know what you mean.
I know what you mean.
I mean, there's a lot of coarse comments that float around some communities about...
Some women have sex with a lot of the alphas in their 20s and then they look for the beta provider in their 30s to help them raise the alpha's kids or to give them a kid or whatever, who they're probably going to end up divorcing.
Crudely put, it's alpha fucks, beta bucks.
You know, the alpha has sex with the women and then the beta male is dragged in to sort of provide for the alpha's children and all that kind of stuff.
And I don't know any statistics on it.
I've just read that this is a perspective that some people have.
And so I definitely would remain cautious around people who've had a lot of sexual partners.
You know, this is purely my opinions.
So, you know, there's not anything I would count as proven.
But biologically, I would expect men to emotionally be able to survive much better multiple sexual partners than women.
Again, just because of the reproductive strategies that are available to men and not available to women.
Men would have adapted to remain much healthier with multiple sexual partners than women would have.
Because it would be such a maladaptive reproductive strategy for women to sleep around in the past.
With men, of course, it was always a A possibility.
So, whereas, of course, for women, a more common strategy would be to get pregnant and then get resources from the man, right?
Which is the shotgun wedding, and now it's been sort of replaced with child support.
I mean, what was I reading about?
Was it Brendan Fraser?
He used to be a pretty big movie, so I haven't seen him in something for a while, but...
He got divorced, at the height of his career success, he had to pay $75,000 a month in child support.
A guy ended up declaring bankruptcy.
Dave Foley, another guy, can't even come to Canada because of the judgments against him.
There's only one debtor's prison that remains, and that's for men paying child support in general.
I don't think that women have evolved that kind of capacity to sleep around and not...
Be harmed by it.
And that's just an opinion.
I can't count that as proven.
But, yeah, I wouldn't fall into the women are just men with tits.
Like, I just don't think it's how it works.
No, the hypothesis makes total sense.
It was...
Yeah, it's basically what I was looking for.
I've had...
I had a long-term relationship from a young age.
I was 15 when we got together.
And she had had two sexual partners before.
What?
15?
Yeah.
I know.
Holy God.
Yeah, I lost my virginity to her.
And then later on in our relationship, this jealousy started building up.
It wasn't there at the beginning.
And I always used to...
I never...
It was before sort of self-knowledge and your show and everything, and I never spoke to her about it because I felt like my jealousy was something bad that I should repress.
It was like, well...
But no, I feel like I should have cut myself some slack.
Right.
Yeah, and it is...
I don't know.
You know, I'm an older generation, and...
You know, I don't know if these, you know, lipstick parties and, you know, the stuff that Tom Wolfe had written about and hooking up, I don't know if this stuff is all true.
I don't know.
Because, you know, because I'm old.
I basically look like the Crypt Keeper to a good portion of my audience.
But it does seem like the sexual revolution has just gone full on spin cycle, like to the point of just complete disorientation.
And I think it's become really, really tough.
You know, for women as a whole, there used to be sort of a camaraderie, like a don't break the line.
Because withholding sex only works if there aren't a lot of scabs.
Like a strike only works if there aren't tons of people pouring over the line to take those jobs, right?
Which is why unions try to keep scabs out so that they can get more leverage, right?
So women as a whole used to withhold sex until they got commitment, and any woman who broke that covenant was roundly ostracized and driven out.
It worked because nobody broke the line.
But then with the sexual revolution, there was like, yeah, come on, break the line.
Yeah, you know, go have sex.
And of course, when you're young, sex is like, whoa, you know, well, this makes up for taxes.
And once that line broke of women not having sex until they got some sort of commitment, I'm not necessarily talking a lifelong marriage, but even like, you know, three months, be my boyfriend kind of thing, right?
Now it's like a race to the bottom.
That joke only works in England.
But now it's like a race to the bottom because...
What's it called?
A bell end?
Anyway.
So because now women are like...
Maybe at 15, I don't know, girls, girls.
They're sort of like, well, this guy likes me, and if I don't have sex, then he'll go to some other girl who will.
And that becomes this sort of race to the bottom of standards and safety and all that.
And that, you know, when it was like, well, if I don't have sex with him, I know sure as hell there's not anyone else who will, then you feel more comfortable with holding, right?
And I think that is to the benefit.
You get to know each other better and find out if you can trust each other.
Again, not all these things have to lead to marriage, but...
Whereas I think now it's become really tough for women because...
Well, anyway.
Let me tell you a little bit about these strategies.
So...
So biologists often refer to this spectrum or continuum that helps people distinguish one organism's reproductive strategy from another.
I'll put the link to this...
All living organisms are supposed to fall somewhere on this continuum between the two extremes, R and K. Organisms can be differentiated from one another in terms of their relative reliance on one strategy over the other.
So going from R to K, R strategists usually create an abundance of offspring in the hopes that a few will make it.
So bacteria, obviously a lot, not a lot of breastfeeding bacteria.
Bacteria from R to K. Bacteria, mollusks, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, apes, humans.
And so these species usually have a very short maturation time, often breed at a very young age, have short lifespans, produce many offspring very quickly, have young with high mortality rates, and invest relatively little in parental care.
And there are some theorists who say that the R and K reproductive strategy also work across different cultures and possibly different races, even within humanity.
On the R reproductive strategy, the parents do not focus on passing down memes, units of cultural information to the young.
Instead, the behavior of the young is determined by their genes.
The young are pre-coachal, meaning that they often can make it on their own without any instruction from their parents.
Our selected species, bacteria, insects, and fish.
K-strategists are very different in that they attempt to ensure the survival of their offspring by investing time in them instead of investing in lots of them.
It's a reproductive strategy that focuses on quality over quantity.
K-strategists have relatively few offspring and make an effort at being good parents.
The young are...
I'm sorry?
No, I didn't say anything.
Oh, battery-less.
Oh, sorry.
I think my earpiece just said battery-low.
I thought that's asking something about J-low.
Anyway, their young are altriciol, I think it is, meaning that they cannot survive on their own until they reach adulthood.
This extended period of maturation is used for mimetic transference.
The parents teach the young so that they can go on to reproduce themselves.
K-strategists are known to have a relatively long lifespan, produce relatively few offspring.
The offspring have low mortality rates, and the parents provide extensive...
The offspring are also relatively intelligent so that they can internalize the lessons from their parents.
K-selected species include elephants, apes, and whales.
Humans are perhaps the most K-selected because their young are truly helpless.
They necessitate a full two decades of parental care and tutelage and the parents usually only produce one offspring.
So the only reason we're able to have these giant brains is because we have this K strategy.
You don't get the brains without the K strategy, which is why we tend to outperform bacteria and spelling bees.
So the fact that we have these brains is because we have produced, we've followed this K reproductive strategy.
And so for us to take these giant brains and then use it to pursue our reproductive strategy is not in keeping with evolution and our nature.
And again, it's not impossible, of course, right?
But, you know, the statistics seem to show that it's not going to lead you to a very stable or happy place in general.
No, that is hugely helpful.
All right.
Alright.
It's hard to denormalize the culture because it's like I'm so immersed in it and all the young people, well, my age, all the people at university and everything just seems so normal that girls can Just have one night stands and feel fine about it when evolutionarily that just can't be the case.
There must be this sort of untalked about emotional issues that they're having as well.
Well, I mean, not to take too big a view of it, and I get we're talking about your Dick's Destination, so I want to take this with personal attention as well, but Sex is how the welfare state sells itself.
I mean, once there's a welfare state, sex becomes something that society doesn't have to enforce anymore.
And as we all know, sex sells.
And this idea of decoupling, coupling from children, right, of removing sex from children and commitment and so on, I mean, it's something that the young love.
You know, it's great, you know, because, you know, you're young.
I mean, and then you're obviously thinking wisely about these things, so I'm not going to generalize about the chronologically advantaged hugely, but it's fundamentally how the government grows, is it promises you free shit, and everyone thinks that's like healthcare.
No, it's sex.
Free poon, free penis.
This is how the government grows.
Is it appeals to your basis instincts for free stuff and that is free sex in general.
Which is why the sexual revolution happened at exactly the same time as the growth of the welfare state.
The two are one and the same.
It's how you corrupt a society.
Give them free sex.
Consequence free sex.
You know, recreational, roll in the mud, Woodstock sex.
Orgies, communes, sex, sex, sex, right?
Communism, free love, sex, sex, sex, right?
It's how you get people to not think critically about your belief system is you offer it with a side order of free sex.
And that way, the hormones take over and people, oh, does it get me free sex?
I'll vote for that.
Oh, I get healthcare too?
Great.
Fiat currency, I get more shit without having to pay more taxes?
Great.
But really, it's just about the free sex.
Because sex is the underpinning of everything, why we're here and everything.
So it's more than just a cultural thing and it's, you know, feminists are tools of those who want to expand the government just as the welfare state is and the military-industrial complex and the media.
I mean, all just grow the state, grow the state.
But what your generation, to a smaller degree mine, but definitely your generation, is being offered is free consequence, free sex.
The result of that is going to be I don't think there's any fundamentally such thing as consequence-free sex any more than there is consequence-free eating.
Although sex, obviously, I think has more deeper and more permanent effects.
But it's part of a general program that a bunch of people have to expand the power of the state by giving you free stuff.
And free sex is foundational to that.
Free consequence, free sex.
I mean, who doesn't want that when they're younger?
And the consequences of it tend to accrue only when you're truly shafted and need the government to provide all the resources that a husband used to provide.
And so, yeah, I mean, sexual conservatism means a smaller government, and true sexual responsibility, I believe, is a sort of prerequisite for anarchy, because when you have people irresponsible sexually, you end up with kids without fathers, and people run to the state for that, that and that's why the welfare state is basically the single mom state which is why I talk about sexual responsibility and have my oppositions to single moms because I want to grow up in a freer world or at least grow old in a freer world
so it's part of a much larger thing than I think just what you may be seeing does that make any sense yeah when you were talking I was it reminded me of um the sexual health clinics in England and um how They're just full of people, I can't remember the times now, but like three times a week it just gets full of people getting free sexual health checks and they're all having their blood taken and everything.
And even something as small as that, if that was taken away, then people would think a lot more about these casual relationships if they had to pay for their own sexual health checks.
Well, yeah, because what used to happen if a woman got pregnant, then the parents would have to end up raising the kid.
And they've just finished raising a kid.
Probably not that well if she's getting pregnant.
So this is why there would be so much investment in controlling youthful sexuality.
And I don't mean that in a bad way.
I mean, you don't let your kids eat nothing but sugar, and you don't encourage rampant sex among teenagers, in my opinion.
And so in the past, the negative consequences of pregnancy would accrue to the parents.
And so they had a huge incentive to chaperone their kids.
Like, oh my God, we're not going to spend another quarter million dollars and another 20 years raising a kid when we just finished it.
And also, if our daughter gets pregnant, no one's going to want to marry her.
She's going to live in our basement.
We're going to have screaming babies and shadowy strange guys around all the time.
And you just won't want to have anything to do with that.
So, I would say that once you've decoupled the true economic costs of pregnancy from those who otherwise would have to pay for it, then all of those standards get relaxed.
But it's the economics first, I would say, followed by the sexual revolution.
But the sexual revolution really primes the pump for the vicious cycle of increasing statism and increasing relaxation.
On sexual relations.
And by the time people have figured out how bad it is, it's usually too late.
All right.
I'm going to...
Sorry, go ahead.
I think what you're trying to say, Steph, is it's all Luke's fault.
And thinking about casual sex is why you're being crushed by this massive government state.
So, thanks, Luke.
I'm sorry.
The approaching dildo of fascism is terrifying.
That's what I'm...
Actually, if it was a dildo, it wouldn't be fascism because I'm talking about pregnancy.
But anyway, turkey baster of...
Anyway.
No, thanks, Luke.
And if you are continuing to have trouble...
Try the AV Club.
Anyway.
Go to the Dungeons& Dragons convention for ladies.
Anyway.
No, listen, I mean, I think, you know, smart people everywhere try and overcome propaganda and view everything with skepticism.
So, you know, you may not...
It may be very helpful that there's lots of people out there having lots of sex because it might help you find the needle in the haystack you're looking for.
So, given all this, the government intervention that is in place, should I... Do you think if I was looking for a long-term relationship, I should sort of cut the girl more slack, as it were, if she'd had more sexual partners because of all this, you know, socialism?
I think if she was continuing, like if she was proud of it and didn't have any problems with it, that would be a red flag for me.
But if she's like, yeah, you know, I mean, I gave it a shot, but it just didn't feel good or didn't feel right or...
I felt used or, you know, because you are.
I mean, they're using each other.
I mean, you're using each other as a giant masturbatory device if you're having casual sex.
You don't really care about the person.
You don't care about their thoughts and dreams.
You don't respect them.
You don't think that they're heroic and you don't admire them.
You don't want to have conversations with them.
I mean, you basically are treating them as a...
Giant penis sheath with a pulse.
And that is kind of dehumanizing.
A woman is infinitely more than a vagina.
A man is infinitely more than a penis.
And if you're just using a woman for her vagina, the woman's just using a man for his penis, that is really dehumanizing.
I mean, I don't know how to put it any more clearly than that.
It's like having a friend just because he has money.
It is exploitive.
And...
I think if, you know, if the propaganda says give it a try and you give it a try and you go like, well, you know, I don't really feel good, it means you've got an empathy and a conscience.
And if people are like, no, it's great!
Couldn't be better!
Last thing I'd ever want is any kind of long-term relationship.
It's like, well, let me help you out with that by slowly backing away into the fog.
Right.
So it would be a sign that she wasn't in touch with her emotions or something like that?
Well, the best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior.
And if a woman has a history of one-night stands, you're just going to be another notch in her lipstick case, right?
Right.
Whereas if she tried it and didn't like it and is looking for something more serious and so on, well, great.
It also means she has confidence, right?
And that she's not willing to buy your momentary attention with an excess of poon.
So that shows some self-confidence as well, right?
Yeah.
Alright, well, thanks, Steph.
Yeah, you've put a lot of this into context.
I'm very glad, and thank you so much for calling in.
And I'm sorry to the people we didn't get to tonight, but...
I don't know.
We'll try next time.
So, have yourselves a wonderful week.
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