All Episodes
Previous Next
April 10, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:30
2948 Winners and Losers
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, everybody.
It's Devan Mollady from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So, question from a YouTuber.
Why is everyone so afraid of freedom?
Why does everyone desperately run to the state for protection, security, and sacrifice their freedoms in this unholy bargain?
I've talked about this before in the story if you're on enslavement video you can find at youtube.com slash freedomainradio.
I talk about it.
It's kind of how we're raised.
To be subjected to authority of parents, politicians, priests, and teachers, mostly the parents, priests, and teachers when we're kids, so that's what we're used to.
But there's a more fundamental level.
But when we talk about human tendencies, we are, of course, biological entities and subject to the same weeding out and evolutionary drivers as all other animals.
Now, DNA attempts to replicate itself, as you know, and the DNA which replicates itself most successfully tends to flourish and spread throughout a population.
Now, the DNA that spreads most successfully is the DNA that not only cares about its own particular host organism's capacity to reproduce, but like organisms' capacity to reproduce as well.
I mean, who shares the most DNA with a starling?
It's another starling!
I mean, there's the starling itself, and then there's another starling, which is why birds cooperate to evade predators and why there are symbiotic relationships between remora and sharks, you know, the ones, the little sucker fish that hang off the shark's jaws and eat bits of it, and they also help clean its teeth, and there are particular birds that pick off the nits from the backs of hippos and so on.
So, remember, your DNA doesn't just care about your...
It cares about the reproduction of all like DNA. And, of course, understand, I'm using the word cares, carelessly.
So, this is very, very important to understand.
So, your DNA is bound up in the survival of you individually.
Most importantly, that's necessary, but not sufficient for the long-term flourishing of the DNA. You've got to reproduce.
So your DNA is interested in your reproduction.
And then there are these concentric rings of value for your DNA. So your DNA is concerned with the survivability of you and the survivability of your offspring and of their offspring and of your cousins and so on, nieces, nephews.
In concentric rings, going out to your tribe, and then your race, and perhaps your nationality, if your nationality has certain genetic elements to it, which some do, and then to humanity as a whole, and you just sort of think about this, right?
I mean...
Just looking at a purely biological standpoint, let's take sort of all the altruism out of the equation for the moment, as biology tends to do, and say, well, so there's people drowning in a river.
And in general, you will tend to save...
Obviously, yourself first, and then you'll tend to save your kids, and then you would tend to save your nephews, your nieces, you know, out of a sort of crowd of strangers.
You would try and rescue your own DNA. And this, again, this does extend to race, as far as I understand it, and therefore, you know, people say, well, there's racism and so on.
Well, there is, and there's bad racism, which is sort of making moral judgments about everyone of a race based upon that race.
But there are, like it or not, there are biological drivers to have own race preferences because that is the closest to your DNA. And it doesn't mean we can't overcome it.
It doesn't mean that it's always good or always bad.
It's just that's the way it goes.
And so this appreciation of the development of one's DNA to value not only Yourself, but also your immediate offspring, those who are the closest to your own DNA, is really, really important to understand when it comes to ethics.
There could well be an argument that says that...
What is the old joke that says...
I can't remember the exact numbers, but the geneticist who says, I love you as much as...
I love my children as...
Half as much as I love myself, and I love my cousins one-eighth as much as I love myself, and all that kind of stuff, right?
I mean, and it's based upon the shared DNA. Now, if we understand this, and please understand, again, I'm not making moral arguments here.
I'm just talking about how particular behavioral traits are developed.
It doesn't mean ethics has nothing to say on the matter, but you need to start working with what is before we start working with what ought to be.
If we ought to build a big house, then we need to figure out what kind of ground there is around us before we start building.
So I'm building some swamp or build your house upon sand.
So before we need to figure out what should be, we need to figure out what is.
So there is a very strong argument genetically to be made that says, I will save 50 people on my tribe before I would save a cousin.
Assuming that the tribe is 50 to 100 people, there's lots, of course, interbreeding and so on.
Like as a royal family tribe?
Because, and genetically, you know, 50 people probably share more of your genes than one of your cousins.
50 people of your sort of immediate tribe.
So this idea of sort of sacrifice for the tribe, which of course has...
Questionable moral validity certainly has some valid biological evolutionary validity.
That's really, really important to fundamentally grasp.
A lot of what is called ethics is just layering over what is biologically expedient and serves evolution.
In other words, ethics has evolved as a way of allowing for more than immediate sacrifice for evolutionary purposes.
So, for instance, there's no successful tribe that has used women as warfare agents, right?
As soldiers.
And the draft, to my knowledge, with a few exceptions, such as Israel, which rarely put women on the front lines.
But women are not subject to the draft, at least the sort of front line fight and die draft in the way that men are.
The reason for that, of course, is that males are disposable relative to females in the reproductive arena.
Millions of sperm versus an egg or two every month.
All of that is really important to understand.
This idea of women and children first and heroism and self-sacrifice and white knighting and deferral to the ladies and chivalry and all of that, well, That is all to allow people to make sacrifices beyond their immediate blood bond, right?
And fundamentally to make sacrifices for the ruling classes, but to make sacrifices for their nation state or whatever.
So that's really important to get.
When you look at sort of historically developed ethics, it really has to do with DNA transmission optimization.
And so some of it is hijacking and some of it is not.
So, for instance, soldiers are told to sacrifice themselves for their country.
Their country is presumed to be everyone, but it's not true.
In fact, because not everyone gets to order them to go to war, not everyone is subject to the draft, so in general, sacrificing yourself for your country means sacrificing your DNA for the DNA survival of those in charge, because if they lose their country, they're either killed, as were the Romanovs, By the Bolsheviks in post-Tsarist communist Russia, or they're sort of driven into exile or whatever, right?
There's some guy in Windsor or Kitchener or someplace like that, Canada, who's a direct descendant of the Bourbons, and I don't know, he's a plumber or something, right?
So slightly less reproductive optimization if you get kicked out of power.
So if we understand this, that there is, at the DNA level, Significant drivers towards collectivism.
And the drivers towards collectivism are that, at a sort of DNA calculation standpoint, at some point it makes sense to sacrifice yourself or your interests for a certain number of those who are not directly biologically related to you, but who do in fact share enough of your genes that the gene transmission is further optimized by you and your sacrifice.
So I hope this makes some sense.
I hope it's relatively clear, but this is an important thing to understand.
Now, for gene optimization to occur, there must be, of course, winners and losers.
So, to take the, you know, oft-cited example of the giraffe's neck, the giraffe that developed a longer neck would be able to get more of the leaves, and the giraffes with shorter necks would starve to death or starve to the point where they would be so weak that they could not evade the predators, the lions, and the giraffes with shorter necks would starve to death or starve to
So, that example is, well, the reason that giraffes have longer necks is that there was a greater fecundity, a greater degree of reproductive success among those giraffes who developed longer necks.
Now, the heart pumping and the valves that are required to get the blood from the heart up to the top of the giraffe's neck to feed the blood and so on, Those valves and pumps, they actually have to shut off when the giraffe leans down to drink water, right?
Because otherwise it would blow the giraffe's head off in.
Not exactly furthering reproductive success.
And so those giraffes that develop the valve shutoff system...
Anyway, you get the idea.
So...
Now, a giraffe will probably not sacrifice itself to save an alligator.
A giraffe may sacrifice itself to save its offspring, and human beings who can sort of understand collective threats may sacrifice themselves individually to save a large number of human beings, in particular if those human beings are women.
And that is valuable to the DNA of the individual who sacrifices himself, because the human DNA, particularly the female capacity to pass on the human DNA, Is served better by the individual dying and saving a...
There's some mathematical way to work it out, which I don't have the ability to really do.
But at some point, there's a tipping point where self-sacrifice is beneficial to human DNA. So this idea, you know, like I'll throw myself on the grenade in order to save 10 women, that is actually evolutionary advantageous.
So for evolution to work, there are winners and there are losers.
And of course, a lot of it is accidental.
It's not exactly based on ethics.
It's just, did you happen to get a slightly longer neck as an evolutionary mutation?
And understanding that is understanding how in society, in order for society to advance, to progress, There need to be winners and there need to be losers because nobody can tell for sure how resources should be allocated, how time should be spent, how much money should be saved rather than invested, how much people should work versus rest.
Nobody knows.
Nobody knows.
I mean, each individual does not know what is optimum for his or her life.
Otherwise, we wouldn't have the concept of regret.
And because we have the concept of regret, we know that each individual...
Does not know for sure what is best for him or her in the moment.
So you don't know for yourself.
Always you don't know for other people.
You don't know for society as a whole.
So we understand, right?
We are freedom lovers.
And so because nobody knows what's better or worse, we must have constant biofeedback and reinforcement and ways of determining it.
And of course, one of those ways is price, right?
So where there's a greater demand, there's a giant sucking sound as resources flow towards where someone can profitably supply that demand.
So there's this feedback mechanism.
But that involves winners and losers.
So, if I invent some magic, fantastical phone that satisfies more people's demands, then people will buy my phone, but most people don't buy two phones at the same time, especially if they're 1H Clinton, but they will buy my phone, they will not buy someone else's zero-sum game, they will not buy someone else's phone, so I win and they lose.
If you're listening to this podcast, this show, you're not listening to just about anything else unless, look out to your left, you're playing Call of Duty or something like that.
Call of Duty happens to me every morning.
Anyway, you have win-lose situations.
So once we understand that for society to optimize, for society to progress, for society to advance, there is win-lose.
And this particularly happens in the realm of ethics.
If I convince people that spanking children is immoral, as it is, that aggressing against children is immoral, as it is, certainly aesthetically negative actions, if not necessarily violations of the non-aggression principle, then there's a win-lose.
So those who continue to hit and aggress against their children will lose out in the long run should my arguments take hold more firmly and fully in society.
you Thank you.
There's win-lose.
Those who won the slavery argument won the day, and those who lost the slavery argument, particularly those who owned and profited from the slave trade, lost the argument, right?
So yeah, we understand all this, right?
It's not wildly complicated.
There's win-lose stuff all over in society.
And there's lots of win-win as well, don't get me wrong.
It's win-win between myself and the person who loves my super-duper Steph-Bot phone-o-rama.
That's why I didn't spend too much time in marketing, but There is a win-win for us, but it's just win-lose for whoever else has the not-quite-so-super-duper phone.
Although, assuming that they can compete on price, you drop their price and so on.
So, all of these aspects mean that for society as a whole to progress, there must be winners and losers.
If we could imagine some situation, and this has been tried, you know, you create sort of these mouse utopias where they have enough food, they can have as much sex as they want, they're protected from predators and so on.
And their societies fall apart.
We are like muscles.
We strengthen with resistance.
Those societies fall apart.
There's war.
There's promiscuity.
Parents abandon their children.
And there are what are called the beautiful ones who just sit around observing everything and grooming themselves and not participating in society as a whole.
But there is a whole set of experiments about what happens when utopia is created.
And certainly if there's no selection pressures for DNA, evolution would cease.
If everyone gets to pass along their DNA no matter what, then there would be nothing to adapt to.
And if nobody loses in the marketplace, then there's no progress in society.
It would be impossible for no one to lose in the marketplace.
Even if it's political, their winner loses.
So winning and losing is foundational to the success of the collective.
To take an example, if farm subsidies were removed tomorrow, then those who are getting, like in California recently, I pointed out $350,000 a year in direct subsidies, along with a wide variety of other subsidies, those people's economic...
Interests would be hit very hard in the short term, and then they would adapt, and society as a whole would do better, but there's a reason why special interest groups don't want the government to change what the government is doing with regards to particular subsidies and so on.
If government schools were privatized, then there would be some chaos, there would be some loss, and People who let their health go on the assumption of free healthcare for the rest of their lives would face a challenge, a significant challenge, and some of it they could adapt to, and some of it they could not adapt to.
So, society as a whole would benefit, and kids would benefit in the long run, and so on, but lots of people would, their economic interests would be harmed in the short run, and some even in the long run, in the permanent run.
Now, winning and losing is essential for the progress and success and optimization of collective resources, whether they're DNA or money or time or whatever.
But each individual does not want to lose.
That's right.
Individuals do not want to lose.
So, society as a whole enormously benefits.
I mean, we are the result of billions of years of evolution, which required massive amounts of creatures, what, like 90-95% of all the animals that have ever lived are now extinct.
And...
This reality that no individual organism wants to lose, but if no organism loses, there's no progress is one of the fundamental tensions between the individual and the collective.
No individual giraffe wishes to die of starvation, but the giraffes that get necks tall enough that they can outstrip all the other animals that might be feeding from the ground are happy that this is the DNA that was passed along, like the longer neck DNA. So individuals don't want to lose, but collectives require that individuals lose in order to optimize and progress.
Whether it's...
Like, it's all amoral, right?
Whether it's economic or DNA-based or whatever.
So these realities are part of society as a whole.
And I talked about this recently with health insurance, that individuals don't want to pay health insurance.
And if you don't pay any health insurance and then you feel that wonderful stuff has happened, as a result of you not buying health insurance, you saved all that money and you didn't get sick and whatever, right?
But if you didn't buy health insurance and then you get some very expensive illness, then you're unhappy, right?
You've rolled the dice and come up snake eyes.
And so those individuals have what is colloquially called regret and massive regret.
And this massive regret is an indication that they took a chance and it didn't work out.
The guy in Canada died.
He was a base jumper.
He jumped off and pulled parachutes at the last minute, and he loved it.
And one time he did the base jump, and the parachute didn't open.
And, oh, sorry, you're irrevocably demised.
You are a human stain on some very sharp rocks.
So he had lots of fun, he had lots of thrills, and then his parachute didn't open, and he died.
If you drive and you never get in a car crash, good idea.
If you drive and get in a car crash, it was bad to drive that day.
We get it all.
So there's these individual regrets.
People don't want to suffer those consequences.
And those consequences can be disastrous, right?
I mean, if you...
Let's say you are a mean guy, don't buy health insurance, nobody likes you, and you get sick, and nobody wants to help you out, or at least not enough people will, and you can't convince the healthcare system to give you free healthcare and the charity, and you're not part of a church, and whatever, right?
Well, then you can die for lack of healthcare.
And what that does, your death serves as a reminder to others that...
You should be nice.
You should help people out.
You should get people around you who love you, who care about you.
You know, when I faced some healthcare bills a couple of years ago, the listeners stepped up and were very, very helpful because they care about what I'm doing.
And thank you again.
I appreciate that so much.
So, it's a reminder, you know, buy healthcare insurance, or at least have people around you who love you, who are going to be willing to help you out, and so on, right?
And those who don't, who die sort of alone and bitter and all that, you know, the women who make mistakes when they're the youngest and most attractive, they date a series of alpha jerks.
And then nobody wants to marry them when they're older.
And, you know, the information that I put out about how dangerous it is to marry women who've had a lot of sexual partners, that you're almost guaranteed to get divorced and it's just going to be a complete mess.
Well, if my perspective of the facts get across to society as a whole, then those women who've slept around are going to lose out.
They're going to lose out.
Like in Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley Kowalski warns his friend that the woman he's dating is a real slut.
And he stops dating her.
So she loses out, but he's saved from a crazy dangerous woman.
I guess you could lie and say, well, I haven't really had any partners.
There's ways of figuring that stuff out.
Drop hints with friends, ask family, look at Facebook histories, and so on.
There's ways of figuring these things out.
You can lie about the number of partners you've had, but there's ways to suss that stuff out.
So those people who've made mistakes desperately wish to be shielded from the consequences of those mistakes.
Now, in a free society, there are significant mechanisms for that.
However, Everybody recognizes that it's a very challenging, sophisticated, and ever-changing balancing act, right?
Because if you shield people too much from the consequences of their actions, then their actions will become progressively negative.
This is a huge challenge.
Let's say there was some charity that set up and said, well, listen, we're going to pay for all of your healthcare bills no matter whether you have healthcare insurance or not.
Particularly if you don't have healthcare insurance, we're just going to pay for all of your healthcare bills because we don't want anyone to be denied healthcare.
Well, then what will happen is, assuming this charity is believable and solvent, massive numbers of people will simply stop buying health care insurance and instead will rely on the charity.
And that's a huge problem, right?
So you may start off with only a percentage point or two of people who need the support, but, well, you'll end up with a lot more.
So when you help people avoid the consequences of their bad decisions, you subsidizing those And it's a tough...
When I was a kid, if you failed to study for an exam, you got an F. If you failed to study for a spelling test and you got 0 out of 10, you got 0 out of 10.
Nobody said, well, we'll take some of the marks from the kids who did study, we'll give them to you, because that was simply not allowed.
And that had severe consequences.
You could lose like a year of your life in school if you got held back a year.
That's a year.
That's a lot of time.
So, with the government, people have a way of bypassing their bad decisions, right?
I mean, if you find it really comfortable to work as a waiter, even though you could do something that requires more intelligence, but you just don't feel like doing the work, you don't feel like studying, you don't feel like changing things out, you like the cash in your pocket at the end of the day, whatever, right?
Well, you're going to probably end up with less money.
And that's a problem.
And if we give huge amounts of money to people who aren't earning it, then we end up with people not taking the steps that they need to actually be economically productive to the point where they earn stuff.
A significant amount of money, which means that we'll have less money to take away from people to give to people who make less economically optimum decisions, right?
So individually, nobody wants to fail.
Collectively, people need to fail for things to improve.
Imagine if movies cast people randomly.
How good would those movies be?
Well, not very good, which is why really good or popular actors get huge amounts of money for a movie.
What if everybody at the karaoke club got a recording contract and was played on the radio?
Well, radio would die because there wouldn't be enough good singers and songwriters to have people tune into the radio.
But we understand all of this, right?
What if the ski jump was chosen randomly from people in Africa?
Well, you'd have a whole lot of not people where there used to be somebody screaming, going off a ski jump.
So why do people fear freedom?
Because freedom...
And people now have made so many bad decisions that they simply can't accept or abide freedom, right?
Like the people who've said, oh, I get free healthcare, so I'm going to get fat and all that.
I've got diabetes and...
I'm taking pills and all that.
Well, those people, if that health care were to come to an end, I mean, they're literally facing potential extinction as individuals, right?
Statism has lasted so long now.
And single moms, of course, as well, right?
I mean, single moms have made their decisions based upon the availability of government support.
And if that were to end, then they've still got kids.
They still need that, right?
So this is why it has to play out.
It has to play out.
And we've got so much sympathy for the individuals who suffer that we're forgetting the collective good.
Yeah, I know I'm using that term, but again, remember I'm using it as sort of amoral sense of optimization.
So I hope this helps us why people are scared of freedom.
We all want there to be enormous benefits in societies.
Everybody wants a new cell phone.
Everyone wants a better TV. Everyone wants a safer car.
Everybody wants cheaper CPUs.
But all of that is predicated on the reality that people need to lose significantly in order for us to get these benefits.
And everybody wants these benefits.
Nobody wants to be among those who've lost.
So I hope that helps.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
Hope you're having a wonderful day.
Please help this show.
Survive, flourish at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
▲
Export Selection