2984 The Biology of White Knighting - Call In Show - May 27th, 2015
Question 1: I am having difficulty understanding how we can remove the concept of the State from a society which practices the concept of property ownership. Aren't States, at least in the traditional sense of monarchs and limited republics, nothing more than one or a group of human property owners collectivizing their efforts to defend property from natural forces? | Question 2: My wife is the definition of a keeper, but I’ve completely friend-zoned her. Is just a friendship good enough for a long-lasting romantic relationship? Is such a relationship a good ground for raising healthy children? Or is there a way to reignite the feeling? | Question 3: My daughter recently turned four. I know that someday soon I will need to address the concept of government and all of the joys that come along with it: coercion and war. How do I introduce the state to my young daughter, without glorifying it or traumatizing her?
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Waller from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well.
So, I hope that you will check out at YouTube slash Free Domain Radio the truth about male privilege.
It's a challenging presentation to get through, certainly challenging to research and record, so I hope that you will enjoy it.
And I'm working on some new stuff that is just literally, it's the stuff that's blowing my mind more.
Than anything since, like, bombing the brain.
So I hope that I can get it to more than one every half decade.
But it's some fantastic stuff.
And we're going to try and start releasing that soon.
That's the thing about this show.
What's the next thing that's going to blow our minds?
Yeah, what's the next thing that just takes your eyebrows and puts them where your ass was?
You know, I mean, just what?
I'm upside down.
I'm backwards.
And yeah, it's cool.
And I really, really appreciate, of course, the support of donators and so on who allow us to work on this kind of really amazing stuff.
And it is...
R versus K reproductive strategies and politics and oh man it's fantastic stuff and we'll be putting out a whole series of those coming up soon so freedomainradio.com slash donate to keep the show afloat help the show survive help us continue to spread you know it'd be nice if in a year or two we were at 200 million philosophy show downloads we can only do that with your help and support so freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show But let us move on to the links on the bicycle chain
that make this wheel go round.
Mike.
Alright, well up for us today is Waleed.
He wrote in and said, That's from Waleed.
Right.
Wally, is there anything that you wanted to add to that question?
You know, I'm not sure that there's anything that I wanted to add.
It's just a really basic kind of starting point for this exploration that I wanted to do with you, Steph.
I think that I could tell you how I came to this question itself, if that would help.
Or how I arrived at the question, I mean.
Sure.
Right.
So, I mean, I was just...
I've been, through your podcast, I've been exposed to anarcho-capitalism, and it made sense to me for a very long time.
I read your book, Everyday Anarchy.
I've read through The Property of Human Ownership.
Hopefully I'm getting that title right.
Oh, that's The Handbook of Human Ownership, A Manual for New Tax Farmers.
The other one is Practical Anarchy, and people can pick those up at freedomainradio.com slash free.
But sorry, go ahead, Juanita.
Right, and then I started reading about the history of militaries and states.
And one thing that really stood out to me was the Greeks, for example, how they were essentially warrior farmers.
And they would band together, they would own their plots of land, and they were like this community of warrior farmers who essentially just...
Anybody who invaded the land, they just were...
Confronted with this massive phalanx.
And that's what worked for the Greeks for, I don't know, like a thousand years or so.
And eventually the Greeks started invading other people using their military superiority that they'd cultivated over years, defending their own land and whatnot.
And so that's really how I came to this idea.
It's like, so like the basic root of Of civilization, it would seem, is human beings who are essentially defending plots of land for agricultural purposes.
And I started trying to think about how could we remove the state from the process of agriculture itself.
And I was thinking about it pretty deeply.
I thought, what would even be the incentive for committing to agriculture If you didn't have a state agency or some sort of organized force, essentially, which you could call a state, you could call it property owners, you could call it whatever you wanted, but it seems to me like it would come to embody as a sort of manifestation.
We call it the manifestus state, essentially.
And so going back to the question of why would you even bother with agriculture if you didn't have a guarantee, at least, That this land would be secure.
I couldn't really come up with an answer as to why you would do that.
I mean, if you didn't know the fruits of your labor, you could spend a year cultivating crops, and some bandits could come just take your crops from you if you didn't have some sort of organized force.
So there was like a year of your labor down the drain.
No, I'm in agreement with you there.
I mean, I just made this case last show.
So yeah, without some sense of security in the investment, the longer that it takes for your labor to pay off, the more property rights you need in many ways, right?
And so with agriculture, it's different from just say hunter gathering where your food rots in a couple of days.
In agriculture, you need to gather your seed crop, you need to turn over the land, you need to clear the land, turn over the land, put the seeds in, maintain them, keep the birds away.
Fertilize, harvest.
I mean, it's just a huge amount of labor, and that's before you really get anything.
So yeah, you have to have your property rights guaranteed in the land, otherwise nobody bothers and you're just a subsistence hunter-gatherer society.
Right, right.
And so one thing I was thinking about was, is this all facilitated by the state?
I mean, is it really just facilitated by...
No.
And if you're going to study history and think that you're going to get philosophy, that's like studying the history of science and thinking you're going to get quantum physics, right?
Or even just the scientific method up to about the sort of 15th century AD. So if you're studying a whole bunch of history, you'll see how stuff developed or how stuff...
You can't say it developed in any sort of philosophical way any more than evolution follows philosophical principles.
It doesn't.
But...
You can't have a state as a requirement for the maintenance of property rights because the state is a violation of property rights because the state is defined by its ability to initiate force to fund itself through taxation.
And so you can't...
Philosophically saying we need a state to protect property rights makes no sense.
It's saying we need an entity with an infinite capacity pretty much to violate property rights in order to protect property rights.
Which is like me saying I'm going to keep your bowl safe by smashing it.
It just doesn't make any sense, right?
The whole point of a state is it violates property rights.
So it can't be for the protection of property rights that we have states.
Right.
And I mean, I... So here's how I was looking at it.
And now I want to say...
This is where I kind of have to do, I'm doing like a bit of a jump here.
So another thought I had regarding all of this was, it's kind of like a homesteading thing, where it's like, at what point do we say that one person has occupied enough land?
And to what extent can we say that one person...
It's not, no, it's not.
Sorry to interrupt you, Waleed.
It's not, there's no third agency in a free society that says, here's how much land you can have.
Right, but the thing is about the free society...
Wait, wait, wait, hang on.
But there are mechanisms by which you...
There are mechanisms that society says, okay, you've had enough land.
Right, and that's usually people saying, you can't come onto my property.
Sure, of course.
If it's somebody else's property, then you can't take that.
But the mechanism is to economic boycotts, ostracism, and so on.
So if some guy, just nobody likes them anymore, then they're not going to do business with them, not going to deal with them.
The DROs are going to dump them until they come back in line with some sort of social mores that is acceptable to people.
That's one.
And the other two is that if somebody...
I think we are happy with whoever can make the best use of a resource having control of that resource.
So if I'm a really bad farmer and I can only produce, you know, 50 bushels of wheat from an acre, and you're a really great farmer and you can produce 500 bushels of wheat from an acre, I think everyone is pretty much happy, even me, pretty much happier that you're the one who gains control of the land.
And of course, if you can get 500 bushels of wheat and I can only get 50, then who can afford to bid more for the land?
Well, you.
So, in the price mechanism, in the bidding mechanism, there's a filter, even before somebody acquires land, assuming it's being bought, there's a filter, which is, if you're going to bid for a piece of land, the person who expects to get the most economic value out of that land, it doesn't have to be bushels of wheat, it can be a view, it can be a swimming hole that people will pay to go, it doesn't matter what it is.
So the quote allocation of land is whoever believes that he or she is going to make the best use economic productivity of that land.
They're the people who are going to accumulate the most land.
And then if they stop being very good at accumulating value from that land, then other people will be able to outbid them and buy it from them.
So there is an economic efficiency principle in the constant ebb and flow of ownership over land that generally over time has an aggregate towards whoever can provide the best economic value from that land.
And, yeah, that does make sense within the context.
So here's the thing.
I'm sorry, Steph.
I probably should have mentioned where I'm approaching this from.
No, I need to know if you're understanding.
I don't understand if you agree, but we've had sort of two arguments now that you're not providing me any response to, which is always kind of disconcerting to me.
The first one was that a state can't be a protector of property rights since it relies upon the violation of property rights.
And the second was there are limits on land ownership, and those limits over time tend to be the economic efficiency that person can put the land to.
And the person who can put the most economic efficiency to that land usually ends up being the owner.
At least, for as long as they can.
So there are limits on land ownership, economic efficiency, and I just, those two arguments have kind of come and gone, and I sort of, it always annoys me, just telling you, it doesn't mean it's anything bad, it just annoys me when I make an argument and people just start changing the topic as if I haven't said anything.
So you can disagree with me all you want, but I'd like to at least acknowledge that I opened my mouth.
No, I understand.
Could you just repeat the first argument of yours, just because that's, I think that's the one that first I had a contention with.
Wait, did you have a contention while we were talking about it?
Yeah, yeah, I did, because I wanted to...
Why didn't you say something?
I just want...
I'm not good at interrupting people, so...
Well, no, I stopped after a while.
Oh, I started talking.
I thought that you wanted to continue, but...
So...
Okay, the first argument, actually it's now the fourth time I'm making it, so the first argument was the state cannot have evolved as a protector of property because it relies upon, philosophically speaking, because it relies upon the violation of property.
Right, so I'm telling you this, it would cost me a lot less than half my income to protect my property in a free society, but the government takes half my income and is really bad at protecting my property.
Really, a government is terrible at protecting people's property.
Not only does it take half their money to begin with, but I don't know if you've ever tried to get the government to deal with a theft or something like that, but they don't do anything.
All they do is fill out a form so you can get your insurance money.
I mean, the idea that they go and pursue and deal and all that kind of stuff doesn't happen.
Well, I mean, let's assume that there is a situation with something, an entity, a property owner, who...
It's essentially saying, you can come onto this land, and you can farm this land, and essentially all you have to do is pay me a tax, and I will protect you.
I'll take care of all your protection.
Well, sorry, is it a monopoly?
Yeah, I mean, it's his property.
Wait, sorry, I must have missed that.
So, give me the scenario again.
Let's say that there's a property owner, and he has an estate.
And he brings, and then there's a...
I'm approaching this from the idea that there is a state of nature, and then there's a state of civilization.
And in the state of nature, it's essentially king of the hill, dog-eat-dog, kind of like a Hobbesian reality, essentially.
And in the state of civilization, there is a rule of law, there are agreements between people in a certain geographic area, i.e., We're not going to kill each other here.
We won't steal from one another here.
And there's a property owner who says, you can come onto this estate.
You can farm the land.
You don't have to worry about your protection or anything like that.
But you can farm this land and all you have to do is pay me a tax.
Whatever, like 20 bushels of wheat every quarter.
Whatever it is.
Hang on.
I'm just trying to figure this out.
Is the land owned by...
The estate owner.
And how did the estate owner gain possession of that land?
He said it's his.
And anybody who comes onto it, he just kicks off with his military force, whatever that is.
But how does he have a military force?
Maybe he had a bunch of sons.
Maybe he has an extended family of So basically he's like the mafia in that he doesn't actually own the land, but he wants to shake down people for the right to farm land that he himself has never invested a shred of labor into.
He's just a guy who says, well, I've got 12 sons who are really good with machetes, so you better pay me.
Like, if you're going to be within a day's walk of my house, you better pay me money or I'm going to hack you up or beat you up or something like that, right?
Well, no, I mean, he's just saying that we will take care of your defense needs, essentially.
He's saying that we will take care...
Well, what if you say no?
What if, well, and you say, no, I've got my own shotgun, I'm fine.
Then don't go there.
There's no crime around here forever, so forget it.
Yeah, in that case, like, you just wouldn't go there.
I mean, it's...
No, no, no, no, no, because we're trying to establish...
The reason I'm asking this is you said he owns the land, right?
Right.
But if all he's doing is saying, well, I just own everything I can see...
Without actually doing the common law thing to own something, to own land, the common law rule that has developed over thousands of years is you enclose the land in some way that's not just peeing in a circle.
Maybe they had that sometimes too, but you enclose the land by building a fence or something around it, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming, so you can't just build a fence 100 miles around.
So you build a fence around like 10 acres, let's say, which takes you a couple of weeks.
And then the land is yours unless you don't develop it within a year or two, at which point it goes back to an unowned status and then you have to go and build the fence again or you have to go and register it again or do something.
And so I'm trying to figure out how the estate owner has his land.
Does he work it?
Has he invested labor into it?
Because if he has, if he's grown crops in it, then he can rent it out to other people who are going to grow crops and so on, and that's all perfectly valid.
And that's what I'm trying to sort of figure out.
I don't want to start in midstream.
So how does he have, let's say he's got a thousand acres, how does he have those thousand acres?
Has he worked them?
Has he fenced them?
I mean, how has he established any kind of ownership that would be recognized by others?
Well, he's just basically said, like I said, he's just basically said it has nothing to do with the common law.
He's said that this is my land.
You can come try to take it if you want.
So then he doesn't own it?
He does not own it.
That's like me saying the mafia who will shake down a bunch of restaurants in an Italian neighborhood own those restaurants.
They don't.
They're just threatening the restaurant owners with violence if they don't pay them off.
That's not the same as owning those restaurants.
That's a shakedown.
That's why we call it extortion and not rent, right?
Well, here's the thing with that.
If we're talking about restaurants, we're already talking about a civilized context.
No, no, no.
Dude, it's an analogy.
We're not actually talking about restaurants.
It's an analogy.
Forget about the restaurants.
It doesn't work for the reason that you're talking about a civilized context versus a context where you're in a state of nature, for lack of a better word, where it's essentially nobody has claimed this land and you've come across this territory and said, well, I want this territory and I'll bring people in to work on it if I want.
We can talk about, yeah, there's a common law that says what you can own and what you can't own.
But that requires somebody—and we're going to talk about philosophically.
Like, how can we say philosophically?
What is the ethical, moral thing that binds somebody from saying that this is my land, you can't come onto it?
Because, let's say, who said—maybe it's because his God said that he owns the land, or he just simply thinks that—or maybe he said he has an intention— To farm it someday, but maybe he's just taking a break right now.
Or who knows?
There's so many different variables that you can put in to justify somebody's ownership over land.
And sometimes I think it's kind of sinister to say, but I think the only thing keeping people from taking each other's land, essentially, and in many circumstances, is the fact that if they try to, they will either get killed or injured or it's simply not worth their while to take that person's land and so they just peacefully trade with one another.
Oh, no, it's much more economically valuable to trade than to try and take over other people's land.
And historically, there has usually not been massive conflicts over land.
Land is usually settled quite peacefully.
And there's usually even like way in the frontier where there's no particular access to courts or police.
Land was this Wild West.
It's a real myth, right?
I mean, it's just something invented by governments to say, ah, before we got here, it was crazy.
It was a mess.
But Land is actually, there's a great chapter in, I think it's Bourbon for Breakfast, a book that I read of Jeff Tucker's, which you can get at freedomainradio.com.
And he talks about tailgating parties and so on and where people can park and all of that.
And it's all very peaceful because it's so much cheaper to trade with people than it is to try and fight them and take over their land and take over their crops and so on.
Because especially when, you know, if we're talking way back in the day, you can't wipe out the whole family or the whole clan.
So you go and attack someone and take their land.
You know, their brothers are going to come gunning for you.
And then your brothers are going to go gunning back to them and you get this Hatfields and McCoys crap that is just so ridiculously inconvenient and destructive.
I mean, immoral, but inconvenient and destructive.
It makes much more sense.
Good fences make good neighbors.
Good fences make good trading partners.
Most people, the vast majority of people, are able to settle any kind of property disputes pretty easily and pretty validly because it's really just not worth it.
So, you know, this Hobbesian, you know, Nature Red and Tooth and Claw and so on, well, you know, I mean, way back in the day, pre-philosophical, pre-highly developed neofrontal cortex, pre-philosophy, well, sure, but I mean, that doesn't, I mean, the fact that 10,000 years ago, nobody knew that the Earth was round doesn't matter anything other than that they were quite primitive.
But I don't think that saying, well, people would really like to kill each other over land, it just doesn't really happen throughout history.
Now, there's wars, you know, funded by the state, but the wars are in effect of a violation of property rights, which is the foundation of the state.
They either steal people through the draft or they steal people's money through taxation.
But absent the state, Things are, you know, it's sort of like saying, well, why would you go out and get candy when you could just basically hide in the bushes if you're bigger and steal children's candy and so on?
I mean, the odds of you getting caught, you know, you could put a mask on or something very low, but people generally don't do that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't want to steal somebody's candy because, like, you would know, at least in a civilized context, you'd say, well, if I steal this person's candy, I mean, in the long run, I'm making this community worse off for everybody.
So if I have kids someday, I don't want him growing up in the same neighborhood where there's a bunch of candy stealers.
So on that note, yeah, I definitely do agree with you.
We do derive enormous benefit from trading with each other.
And I think obviously the prosperity that we have today is pretty much due to the fact that we, as you said so many times in your podcast, Steph, we've sat down and had win-win negotiations with one another.
Sorry to interrupt, but farmers also, everybody benefits from a varied diet and so if you're really good at farming wheat and somebody else is really good at farming barley and somebody else is really good at farming cows and carrots or whatever, then the fact that everyone has different property is great because everybody can specialize and you get a much wider variety of food.
And also, of course, in farming communities, you know, farming is a lot of sitting about and then like crazy amounts of work.
And by sitting about, I'm talking about sort of northern climates in the winter where everybody basically in the medieval period, they just huddled in bed and told stories until spring came and they ate as little as possible.
But a lot of farming, particularly around harvesting and planting, is massively labor intensive.
And if you don't have the support of other people in your neighborhood, Sorry, a bunch of farms is not a neighborhood.
There's my urban bias.
But if you don't have the support of people, I mean, goodness, I mean, you know, if a log lands on your leg, you know, run for help, run to the next farm and get help.
And if everyone hates you, you can't really make a go of it.
As a farmer.
And this is why respecting property rights and sort of peaceful cooperation and trade and mutual support is just so economically and Darwinianly advantageous to people.
It's just really hard to make a go of it out there if you're being a total tool bag.
Yeah, it is at the, I hate to say this term, at the human livestock to human livestock level.
That is completely true and I mean the reason why I use those terms is it's essentially it's just like I see the world today and I think that as you've elucidated before that there are tax farmers and there are livestock like like me for example who throughout the ages tax farmers have taken advantage of and to me I mean from from what I've been I think the The conclusions that I'm slowly beginning to
come to, which I want to be proven wrong, by the way, are that those are basically fixed classes of human beings, essentially.
It's like you're going to have your tax farmers, and then you're going to have your tax livestock.
And I guess the reason why I'm coming to this conclusion is...
It has to do with the whole idea of property rights itself.
It has to do with the whole idea that having a tax farm is insanely profitable.
And because of the fact that it's so profitable in one way or another, either you have one with a pretty developed economy like the United States, or you have one with a pretty underdeveloped economy like Angola or something like that.
Because it's so profitable, There's always going to be somebody out there who's going to try to take over vast quantities of land, or they're going to lay stake to vast quantities of land, and they're going to develop some sort of means by which to take that land over.
Now, they're not going to necessarily clash with the taxed livestock themselves, because those people are valuable.
You don't want to essentially send your cattle to the slaughter, because you don't have anybody to You know, make your stuff for you.
You don't have anybody to sow your crops or whatever.
And so given these facts, I think, well, I think they're facts to me, but we can argue that given these premises, I don't think that, I don't know, I don't see how we have property rights At a tax cattle level.
Well, let's take this one at a time, right?
Because, you know, one of the biggest objections to a free society, Waleed, you bring up, and rightly so, which is, but magic net gathers land and have state.
You know, like somebody just has the ability to go and magically get all this land, and then they set up a new government, and this, that, and the other, right?
And I'm telling you, it's not easy.
It's not an easy thing to do.
So you say, well, there's something about, maybe you're saying there's sort of two classes of people, like Nietzsche, what Nietzsche would call the master, the ubermensch, the master morality, and the slave morality, and so on.
The challenge with that, Waleed, is that so much propaganda has to be poured into creating masters and slaves.
That it can't conceivably be thought of as anything innate to the human condition.
Anything innate to the human condition.
Now what is innate to the human condition is to want to eat sweet and rich food, have lots of sex, rest when you're tired.
If you think of the amount of propaganda that was poured into the brain of your average medieval serf, I mean, that God existed, that the world revolved around a flat earth, and that God had appointed the master of the religion in the form of the Pope,
and that God himself had appointed the local aristocrat to rule over him, and that to disobey the local aristocrat was to disobey God.
Which meant burning in hell forever.
And this was drummed into him and drummed into him, this and many other layers of propaganda.
I mean, there was this whole idea in the Middle Ages that society was like a body, and the aristocrats were the head and the brain, and the priest was the soul or the heart of the conscience, and the peasants were the fingers.
They were dehumanizing everyone by reducing them to appendages or individual bits of the body politic.
And the amount of irrational, anti-empirical, completely anti-scientific propaganda that has to be poured into people to get them to accept this ridiculous hierarchy called the state is staggering.
These ideas are all false, and the purpose of philosophy is to help people understand what is true and what is false.
And so, with the spread of philosophy through this show and through other mechanisms, the spread of philosophy helps people to understand that, no, God did not put the government in charge of them.
No, you do not pay and render under Caesar what is Caesar's and render under God what is God's.
No, you are not born with original sin.
No, you are not born with Now, once people accept and understand that, it unravels all of the propaganda that they have drummed into them for years and years and years and years.
Now, The reason that people pour all that propaganda in is that people's beliefs shape society.
When you think of the amount of energy and effort that religions and governments and other irrational institutions pour into people, it's because it works.
Pouring bullshit into people is the kind of fertilizer that grows tax cattle.
It really works.
And that's why they put so much energy and effort into this relentless, aggressive, slippery, hysterical, bullying, undermining, mind-shredding propaganda.
So, I assume that the people who've been running this racket for the past, say, 200,000 years know what the hell that they're doing, which means they know that their power rests upon Ideas.
Their power rests upon beliefs.
Their power rests upon axioms that people accept.
There is a God.
Without the government, there'd be chaos.
The good Lord has seen fit to put Barack Obama in control of three quarters of your life.
And so...
These people know what they're doing.
I respect, though I don't respect the moral content, I respect that they know what they're doing, and it is the contents of people's minds that produce the shape of the world that we live in, and in particular the hierarchies.
The more irrational the thinking, the more it can be manipulated.
You can't manipulate reason, but you sure as hell can manipulate superstition.
And so if you want to create things that aren't true, you need people first to believe things that aren't true.
If you need to exploit people, if you want to exploit people first...
You must teach them that they're not being exploited, but rather serving God or serving their country or serving civilization or defending their children against the predations of space aliens with tentacles for eyeballs.
I don't know, whatever the hell they come up with.
And so by substituting true beliefs for false beliefs, we end up giving everyone the power and capacity to comprehend and manipulate reality in a positive and rational way.
And therefore hierarchy dissolves.
So yeah, you can look back in history and say, well, this is the way the shape society was, but first you must look at what the people were taught, what was in their brains.
And what was in their brains were psychotic delusions.
What is in people's brains to a large degree now are psychotic delusions.
Of countries and deities and races and classes and Democrats and Republicans and rulers and rules and oh my god I mean it's literally a madhouse that we live in.
It's slightly less of a madhouse than it used to be which is all that it took for human beings to vault ahead in progress but it's still largely a madhouse and only five minutes rational conversation with the average person on the planet will teach you that very convincingly.
But the substitution of false beliefs with true beliefs A superstition for reason fundamentally will change the shape of society, and irrevocably, because once you get reason, you don't go back, right?
You don't go back to crazy.
And at least most people don't.
So in putting out beneficial ideas, in putting out true arguments, in putting out valid propositions and the data, particularly on peaceful parenting, Well, we can build a society or we can basically build human beings unencumbered by the historical ghosts of psychotic delusions, then we end up with a peaceful and rational society.
So you can't just, to my sort of point is you just saying, well, people are just, they're going to magically take over all this country.
Well, the way they do that is by convincing people that God told them that they have to obey this guy.
It's really expensive to own unindoctrinated human beings.
They are very rebellious.
They can pick the locks.
They can dig under the fence.
They can run you down in the field and gore you with the twin spikes of reason and empiricism.
It's really, really expensive to own unpropagandized human beings, which is why human beings must be propagandized.
That's the brand they put in your brain, the propaganda.
Before you can be owned, you must first be broken mentally and intellectually and put into the asylum of false people.
So, in the spread of true beliefs, we are going to make it very expensive to own human beings.
And when the price-cost ratio changes and human beings become too expensive to own because they don't believe the lies that make ownership economically efficient, ah, lord and above, we're going to be free.
Right.
And, you know, I have nothing else.
I don't have any disputes with the things that you said.
I do actually totally believe that that's what religion is.
It's just essentially It's a technology which keeps human beings sedated and obedient to the ruler.
Yeah, it lowers the total cost of ownership for human livestock.
Right, and obviously you have to indoctrinate them from youth and whatnot.
And one thing, you know, and then this whole discussion, and my thoughts as well, I was curious as to the free society.
How is it functionally different from, let's say, a republic?
So we have all these people who own property, who own their own property, And they've banded together for a common, as a common nation, let's call it, I don't know, Ancapistan.
How is that, I mean, how is it functionally different from a republic where, a limited republic, where essentially the landowners are responsible in one way or another for the protection of the land, and they all get to vote on what the state does and control, well, I know that we're not talking about a society with a state, but I don't quite understand this.
I mean, the richest people in the world, it's not land that's made them rich, right?
Mark Zuckerberg, what does he own?
A couple of square acres with a house on it?
I mean, I don't get the land thing so much.
Why do you care so much about land is not the fundamental economic driver in the world anymore?
No, definitely not anymore.
But at the fundamental level, I mean, that's what you have a state for.
I think the only reason why we even have a state is because we have agriculture, essentially, and we need Some agency that's going to enclose land and say that this is our land, these are our calories.
And then from that we build cities with the excess calories that we derive from that.
Well, and I think we also only have philosophy because We have lies.
I mean, so agriculture means that people aren't roaming, which means they're stuck in one place, which means that they're easier to own, right?
They have their own little fence in the zoo called their property.
And so you know where they are, right?
Not like caribou moving all over the damn planet like a bunch of dandelion fluffs.
And so in order to get people who were formerly morphery, to get them to submit to being owned by other human beings, you have to tell them lies and those lies have to be very abstract.
In other words, the control of human beings spread the philosophy, spread philosophy and spread our capacity to process abstractions.
Because those people who didn't believe the lies were in such a minority, they generally get killed or expelled from the group and lose the capacity to reproduce.
So those who believed and swallowed the bullshit of propaganda flourished, genetically speaking, in that society and therefore developed the kind of capacities for abstract reasoning or at least abstract thought that philosophy can hook into and reverse.
So I just sort of wanted to mention that.
It's not proven, but I think there's a valid approach to understanding it there.
But so, what's the difference between a republic and a free society?
Well, a free society recognizes that the non-initiation of force and the respect for property rights is universal, and a republic believes that there are these magic exceptions to universal ethics called people in the government, and they are completely reversed.
It's like saying, well, what's the difference between a universal theory of physics and one that is universal, except it believes that In Philadelphia, the theory of physics is reversed.
Well, one of them is consistent, and one of them is not.
Yeah, so...
Sorry, Steph.
I kind of blanked out there on the last example that you gave, so I'm not going to...
No, it's fine.
A free society accepts that the non-initiation of force is a universal.
It doesn't mean every single person believes it, but it's a dominant enough belief that it's what drives society.
Whereas a republic believes that It is not a universal rule, the non-initiation of force, because there are those in the government who can use it and those outside the government who cannot.
So they do not have any consistency in their thinking.
So saying that something is universal and then creating a massive exception for it is deranged.
I mean, it's what we call hypocrisy in the realm of ordinary human interactions, but somehow it's called political theory in the psychotic world of statism.
So, and in the free society, I mean...
I know I keep coming back to land, and the reason why I keep coming back to land is because somebody needs to own it, a person needs to own it, and we all need to live.
Obviously, I know it's kind of silly to say, but we all have to live on land.
So let's say that are there landowners and tenants?
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Who the hell lives on land?
No, seriously.
I mean, who...
Have you ever tried sleeping outside on land?
It's horrible.
You live on a structure that's built on land, right?
I get that, but that's a big difference, right?
Because I don't think that anyone has any objection to having to buy a house that somebody spent six months building, right?
You can't just go and take that, right?
No, I mean, well, you wouldn't take it.
If you, you know, if you're a decent human being, obviously, and if you want...
No, no, but nobody thinks that houses just erupt out of the ground, right?
So it's not so much ownership.
The reason I'm saying this is it's not ownership of land that matters.
It's ownership of whatever land produces.
Whether it's being the base for a house, whether it's crops, whether you flood it and people like to bring their children over to hunt toads, or like to swim, or you build a big pit and people practice rock climbing.
It's whatever your labor can do to transform the land into something That produces a good.
And that good could be purely non-material.
Like, there's a geyser there and people want to come and watch it because there's lava and it looks like a rainbow of fiery particles going up into the sky.
Right?
So, it's not the land itself.
Who cares?
It's completely unimportant.
The land is only there as a prerequisite for whatever it is you're going to do with the land that produces value.
Right.
I mean, I agree with that completely.
At the same time, it's like somebody owns it, correct?
Somebody owns the land upon which you are doing all these things.
Nobody owns the land because, again, in common law, which I think is a pretty good starting place, if you enclose the land but don't do anything with it, you don't get to keep the land.
And so it's not the land that you own.
You own the land or you have the right to use the land as a prerequisite for whatever you're going to do on the land.
So if I plant a bunch of wheat, then the wheat would not exist if I didn't plant it.
So I've really created or brought that wheat into existence.
So clearly the wheat is mine.
Now the only way I'm ever going to bring that wheat into existence is by having the right to use the land.
And so this is why you enclose it.
And if you don't use it within a year or two, it goes back into an unowned state.
So the land is a red herring.
The land is like this.
Everyone goes stampeding off to the land.
It doesn't matter.
And I say this like I've done claim staking in northern Ontario for over a year.
And that's what we did.
We would go around and we would say, ah, we claim this land.
We'd go and hammer stakes in.
You didn't have to build a fence because it was really rough terrain.
You go and you hammer your stakes in and you hammer stuff to the To one kilometer square saying this is mine and you get the mineral rights for like a year or two But if you don't do anything with those rights if you don't drill or you don't make a mine or whatever then you either have to go back and do it again or it reverts to an unowned state and So the land the land is only marked out as a prerequisite for Doing something to add value to the land planting a crops building a house making a swimming pool Making a view.
I don't know Making a spaceship rocket launching pad, I don't know, right?
And so the land is not particularly important.
It's what people do that they use the land to create something out of.
That's where the property rights are really important.
Because that doesn't revert back to common.
If I build a house on the land, then that land and my house, that's mine.
Like forever.
So the house does not revert back to an unowned state.
But the land does if it is not utilized.
So think of the house.
Don't forget about the land.
No, sure.
I mean, that's the one thing that I was...
The whole common law thing, the idea that...
I haven't heard this one before.
The idea that nobody necessarily owns the land upon which we stand...
I think it's a pretty interesting concept.
I haven't really even processed that one before.
Which is something I'd like to chew on a little further.
Yeah, I think...
Okay, and so I'm going to just, sorry, we're going to try, we've got a bunch of callers tonight, so I'm going to move on to the next caller, and I don't want to start repeating myself too much, but I really do appreciate the call.
Great questions.
You know, really, I like this kind of stuff in terms of how a free society is going to operate in terms of stuff, in terms of stuff, how stuff is going to operate, you know, like, Waleed, in terms of stuff.
This is the kind of quality philosophical conversation that people flock from miles around to.
Yeah.
To listen to.
No, great questions.
I really appreciate you bringing these topics up.
And listen, chew on it and definitely call back in if and when the next round of questions hit you.
Sure.
Would you mind if I plugged my website here?
I do not mind at all.
Sure.
Well...
Thanks, Steph.
And my website is, it's called lateempire, L-A-T-E-E-M-P-I-R-E dot com.
And it's a philosophical blog that I recently started, and it's really inspired by Steph's efforts.
And again, I'm really excited to start it up and Again, thanks for the chat, Steph.
I really did enjoy it.
I think that you had some really valuable input and some good thoughts to think about.
I can feel it fermenting in my groin, the truth about land ownership, the next great hit.
Actually, I do have some posts on the site just regarding my thoughts on that, too.
So, yeah, thanks again, Steph.
Really enjoyed it.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Bye-bye.
Up next is Tom.
Tom wrote in and said, the reason behind this question is my wife.
She's the definition of a keeper.
She's cute, she's smart, she's faithful, and she's crazy in love with me.
What more could a guy want, right?
Nothing more than being in love himself.
Maybe it's because of the implicit pressure or just that missing spark, but I have totally friendzoned her.
I do love her in the way that you love your closest friend or a dear family member, but it's totally not a romantic love.
As the subject of having children pops up more frequently, the issue becomes even more pressing.
Is just a friendship good enough for a long-lasting relationship?
Is such a relationship a good ground for raising healthy children?
Or is there a way to reignite the feeling?
For so long I have been battling this problem and I'm running in circles.
I need a piece of advice from an external, objective, and more experienced observer as my relationship is on the verge and so are my nerves.
I'm terrified of making the biggest mistake in my life.
Is there an intrinsic value to love, or is just friendship good enough a ground for a healthy relationship and bringing up healthy kids?
Please help.
That's from Tom.
Oh, boy.
Oh, Tom, that's tough, man.
So you've got a marriage with no, like, 70s bass soundtrack, no oils, no robes, no chest hair, no mustaches, no candlelight, or anything like that.
That's rough.
That's rough.
Yeah.
Well, there is also some background to the question that, because listening to your shows, I get the impression, and correct me if I'm wrong, That your outlook on the subject of the value of love appears to be pretty grim, with pretty much any intimate human relationship being purely functional.
Wait, wait, grim?
What do you mean by grim?
Yeah, I'm just going on to that, that they're purely functional and animalistic, that girls want security resulting from resources, so they trade sex.
Guys want hot girls to have healthy offspring, so they trade resources.
But that leaves very little space for any, I don't know, grand feelings or anything like that.
So is that really the case?
Is this your point of view?
Well, I mean...
We have hunger that doesn't mean we have to eat people.
So the fact that there's a drive doesn't mean that it has to be fulfilled in some amoral or immoral fashion.
Just because I'm hungry, which is a human drive, like sexual attraction, just because I'm hungry doesn't mean that I can go and bite the head off a kitten or go to a down-market Chinese restaurant.
But I repeat myself.
Or go steal food from someplace, or go dine and dash at some restaurant and say, well, you know, I... Right, so the fact that you have a biological urge, you know, sexuality or whatever, doesn't mean that there can be no ethical way of implementing it.
So, yeah, in general, there is, you know, your daddy's rich, your mama's good-looking, that's the old song says, that there are drivers.
And men look for fertility signals, and women look for resource signals.
Again, Without a government, with a government, everything gets all screwed up because basically we live in this rabbit world of infinite resources and no predators.
And so you get this idiocracy flowing out from the loins of people who are challenged in their capacity to control their impulses, let's put it as nicely as possible.
So yeah, the fact that the basis of sexuality is eggs for resources doesn't mean that you can't have a moral and noble expression of that because You know, I don't care whether you're like 18 and, you know, chugging blue pills 40 to the dozen, you still can't spend a good amount of time having sex.
You know, there's a whole lot of time in a relationship where you're not having sex or providing resources.
Sorry, go ahead.
So would you say that the feeling of love is just yet another, I don't know, nature's toolbox to make us mate and procreate?
Or is there some inherent value to it, actually?
Well, I think that's a bit of a false dichotomy.
First of all, what you're talking about in terms of nature is bonding.
There's a chemical called oxytocin, which is released when mothers bond with their babies, which is sort of why it's important for moms to spend a lot of time around their babies.
And there are dopamine and other happy joy juice chemicals.
Chemicals that flood the system during times of early romantic stimulation the longest again, I'm no expert on this but the longest Tom that I believe that these chemicals will last is four to six months and So that's not enough to to have a lifelong relationship and I think that the love love is a form of admiration and we admire that which Expresses
our values, right?
I mean, so if I think the world is beautiful, I'm going to admire pictures of beautiful things.
I may look at pictures of ugly things and say, well, I admire the technique, but I probably won't really admire the content.
If I think the world is an ugly and vicious place, then I'm going to want to look at ugly and vicious pictures and so on.
So we admire that which reflects our values, and I think admiration is In virtue is what we look for.
To admire virtue, to admire a portrait of virtue in our partner is a very powerful thing.
And the reason why we have romantic feelings is for the raising of children.
And I believe, and this is more than a belief, I think there's pretty strong evidence behind it, but I believe that if you are a moral person, Which doesn't mean perfect, but you're committed to doing right and being brave and encouraging virtue in others and telling the truth in situations that are appropriate and all that kind of good stuff.
Then if you're a virtuous person, then you would not want your children to be raised to be non-virtuous.
And the best way to raise children to be virtuous is for you and a partner who is also virtuous to be engaged in the raising of those children.
So it's a very practical thing that occurs.
The spark which you sort of mentioned in your letter, this like, ah, gotta have her...
You maybe get a couple of weeks or a couple of months out of that.
It's not going to last.
Our brains very quickly adjust to extra happiness.
However happy you are now, it's probably not going to change a whole lot.
It'll go up and down to some degree, but if you get this giant rush of happiness, your brain is like, whoa, too much happiness.
Let's damp that down so that we don't OD. That high usually can't last, and it's usually followed by By a crash, because, you know, these happy joy juice chemicals hit your brain, your brain stops receiving them because it doesn't want to get OD,
it doesn't want to overwhelm, and then they begin to diminish as the person's natural flaws emerge, and then what happens is you're really short of them, because it takes a while for your body to crank them up again, because the body says, oh, the brain's not receiving them, let's not bother kicking them out anymore, and this is why the romantic high is followed by a significant crash.
That doesn't happen when you admire constant Constant characteristics of a person's personality.
So if I love someone for his or her virtue, that is going to be a constant presence in their life.
If I just love them because I'm getting benevolent chemicals rushing to my brain as a result of sexual attraction, that can't possibly last and the crash is going to be pretty hard when it comes down.
So it's a much more sustained way to stay in love with someone.
But it would appear to me that what you described right now as love is more like, I don't know, infatuation and just a very, very temporary thing, which I perfectly agree with.
What?
No, no, no!
No, no, I said that the sexual attraction part is four to six months.
Love as an attachment to a drive or desire for virtue, which is a fairly constant aspect of someone's personality, that is a long-lasting thing.
So, you say...
Again, I don't have any point of reference because this particular relation has been the longest one I had.
But is this strong love and this...
Again, let's put the sex drive aside for a while.
But is love itself possible to maintain through many years of marriage?
Well, no, it's not possible to maintain because it gets stronger if you are married for the right reasons.
I mean, I hope, in fact, I know I am a more virtuous person than I was 13 or 14 years ago when I first met my wife.
I'm still away from being perfect, which I'll never be, but I'm a better person than I was 13 or 14 years ago.
My wife is a better person than she was 13 or 14 years ago.
It wasn't like we were part of a motorcycle smuggling gang when we met or anything, but because we encourage each other in virtue and support each other in the various challenges of being virtuous in the world.
I love her more now than I did when we first met.
I don't think that love is something that stays constant.
It diminishes or it increases depending on one's drive to earn the affections of good people.
So does this border in a way on a platonic love in that sense?
Because this is the best word I can describe my current state with pretty much.
I don't know if it's a good case for a long-lasting...
Sorry, the question is...
Okay, so the first question is, do you find your wife...
You said she's cute, right?
So do you find her physically attractive?
Yeah.
It's not necessarily, you know, exactly my type, but certainly she turns guys' heads.
Wait, I'm not sure what you mean.
So do you say that you find her...
Because you said she's the type.
She's not your type.
So do you not find her physically or sexually attractive?
I do find her.
It's, I don't know, it's not maybe the hottest I've seen, but she looks okay.
She looks okay?
That's not a very ringing endorsement.
I'm just trying to get to the truth here.
Well, let me put it this way.
Her looks were never the main reason for being together.
Her virtues, her...
Her being, again, her virtues were the main incentive for being together.
Okay, so what do you admire about Rotom?
That she's honest, first of all, that she's faithful, that she's very kind, and she's, you know, unconditionally kind.
So people who meet her immediately can spot this kindness about her.
And I'm perfectly sure that she would be a great mother.
Okay, hang on, hang on.
I'm sorry to interrupt your flow of thought.
But my alarm bells kind of went off there with unconditionally kind?
Yes.
What does that mean?
That means that when she, for example, meets somebody, she always tries to be kind towards them.
Unless, of course, they do something wrong to her or to us.
But she always tries to help.
She always will be kind.
I don't know how to describe it better.
Can you tell me a situation in which she has exhibited moral courage in the face of adversity?
Moral courage, oh gosh.
Because I'll tell you, nice is a boner killer.
Yeah, I know.
Nice in that, oh, I'm nice to people, I'm kind to people, and so on.
It's like, pfft, right?
I mean, that's all well and good.
But nice...
I've never actually seen the movie, but there's an old Patrick Swayze movie called Roadhouse where he says, well, I'm nice until it's time to not be nice.
And I'm always...
I have a...
This is just my opinion, so please don't let me tell you what you think and feel, but I have a special kind of biblical contempt for people who are always nice and kind.
Because that just strikes me as appeasement and cowardice.
I'm not saying your wife is this way.
I'm just telling you my thoughts about it.
That's why I sort of ask, okay, well, does she exhibit moral courage in the face of adversity?
Does she sort of stand up for her beliefs, even though you can take punches in the world for doing that?
That's hot, you know, I'm telling you.
I think because that shows a particular kind of courage that's not appeasement.
And so it's great to be nice.
I like to think that I'm a pretty nice guy.
Until it's time to not be nice and then Wolverine fingernails come out.
I think we're necessary because that's important We don't want to just be nice.
We want to be nice and we also want to be courageous I think in the face of adversity which is always necessary in this world because It's not a very rational or a good world that we live in as yet Yes, she can be courageous in faced with situations, but not necessarily with people she she tends to be a little meek and she has Difficulty to express her own will and her own opinions.
So...
Okay, so courage in the face of, like, avalanches and stuff is not moral courage.
That's physical courage, and it's fine.
That's what I mean, yes.
Exactly.
Okay.
Yes, that's what I mean.
So, can you not think of a time...
I don't mean to sound like I'm cornering you, I just want to make sure I understand this.
So, you can't think of a time where she has a moral principle, and someone has violated that moral principle...
But you can't think of a time either where that's happened or where that's happened and she's confronted the person.
Well, she's very well weak with confrontation.
She will simply back down and, I don't know, withdraw most of the times.
Well, so you say most of the time, so there are times where she doesn't do that.
I believe she's trying to learn this courage, and I believe she made quite a progress in that regard.
But most of the times it would be me who faces the adversaries, to put it that way.
Okay, so you must find women scary, right?
I used to, for sure, yes.
Okay, and why did you find...
I mean, I know a little bit about your adverse childhood experience score, but what was it in particular?
And the reason, sorry, for those who aren't necessarily used to this kind of methodology, if you choose a meek woman, it's because you find women scary.
And so if a woman has got moral courage and is willing to be confrontational in the spread of virtue in the world, that can be alarming for people who've experienced a lot of aggression at the hands of women or men, for that matter.
So what was it in your history, Tom, that made you...
It was my parents and their terrible marriage.
My mom was bipolar and my father was a coward and I was in the middle between the snow stacked between the two of them constantly fighting and I had my first date when I was about 21 years old because I was just afraid that I would end up in the same situation.
You mean the same situation as your father?
Yes, exactly.
So I just wanted to avoid any relationships for the longest while, but then of course hormones get in and the drives and the like.
So I started dating after all, but I was afraid.
I put a lot of effort into trying to work on my issues and consciously fight with that.
Yes, I believe this, I don't know how to put it, this temper or character is something that I miss, actually.
And not in myself, but in my partner.
Sorry, which temper, which character?
That probably someone with a more character and more, I don't know, someone more vigorous, in a way, would maybe, you know, spark things up a little more for me.
So when you say, yeah, I get that.
That was my thought too, for what it's worth.
But when you say your mother was bipolar, I may assume that she was diagnosed as bipolar?
Well, she never wanted to go to an actual doctor, but she ended up in a mental institution.
Well, it was a result of my grandfather being an alcoholic.
He actually died of a liver failure.
So, there's a long history of violence in the family, unfortunately.
So, was she diagnosed as bipolar in the institution?
Yes.
And how did the bipolar manifest itself before she was in the institution?
Well, she had those moments when she was all giggly and happy and everything was fine and we, I don't know, we went for a picnic or something and suddenly out of nowhere she would have those attacks of completely groundless, you know, for new reasons.
She would get angry, she would attack us first verbally, then most of the time we would start to do an actual fight.
And do you believe that she was unable to control these outbursts or this aggression?
Like it was impossible for her, like an epileptic attack?
Or like if the phone would ring or the doorbell would ring and it was someone that she needed to impress, would she scream at that person too?
Or would she be able to change her behavior?
I believe she would be able to change.
I think, this is only just my guess, that she was trying to tease and break my father's To see and to check if he can handle and actually try to motivate him to some reaction, but he never would.
So she wasn't...
Because this is...
You know, when I had cancer, I didn't answer the doorbell and didn't have cancer, right?
And this is what's weird to me about this...
Mental illness stuff is like, to me, an illness is not situation-dependent.
You know?
It's not like, well, I had a migraine, but then the girl called that I really wanted to impress, so then my migraine vanished.
It's like, well, then that's called psychosomatic.
That's called, to some degree, open to your choice.
And so that's sort of...
This...
What used to be called character defects have somehow become...
And a lot of people, like the first thing you said was bipolar, and bipolar is, oh, well, you know, some brain chemistry or whatever...
But brain chemistry, if there is that brain chemistry, I don't see how people are able to will it away if the right motivation's there.
Like, if somebody's really drunk, they can't will away being really drunk if the right motivation.
They might try and fake it or whatever.
They can't will it away.
And, I mean, I just say this because, you know, people I've known are raging, and then the phone rings.
Hi!
How you doing?
Oh, I thought it was a guy who was...
Like, they just change when the incentives are there.
And that's why I was sort of asking.
Whereas, you know, somebody who's got epilepsy, it doesn't matter who's at the front door.
It doesn't matter who's...
I mean, they have to go through their attack, right?
I mean, it's not something that...
It's not something that you can will away based upon incentives.
Basically, I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't really tell for sure.
But what I can tell, there's this long history of completely...
Unwarranted aggression towards pretty much any family member for no reason whatsoever.
So I don't know how to call it better.
Well, not no reason.
That's to say that there's no motive whatsoever.
That's another flip side of no female responsibility, right?
So, okay, so no apparent reason, at least from the point of view of a child that I was at the time.
Well, again, I'm trying to be really specific here, which is...
No reason that was honest.
No reason that wasn't a lie.
Because I'm sure your mom would say, I'm angry at you because X, Y, and Z. And what you're saying is that she was lying about the reasons she was angry about.
Not that there was no reason, but the reasons that she provided were lies.
Hard to say, really.
They were never a good marriage.
They had such totally distinct characters, opposing characters, that it was impossible to make it work.
Then I appeared...
Again, you're giving me all of these, and I really have to stop you here, because, Tom, you're giving me all of these words that take away any responsibility.
It was impossible.
There were such opposites and so on, right?
And then I ask you, your mother gives you reasons, yes, and then, well, are those reasons valid?
And it's like, well, it's hard to tell.
It's like, well, then, because originally you said there were no reasons for her to get upset.
And I was saying, well, everybody has some reason, even if it's a cover story, why they're upset.
Like somebody could have a really bad day and yell at a waiter, but they're going to yell at the waiter by saying, I'm yelling at you, I'm angry and I'm upset because my soup is cold.
And then if there's someone around who can cross-examine them on that in some hopefully not too horrible way, then they might say, well, you know, my dog died this morning and then I got into a fender bender and I stubbed my toe, so I'm just really upset.
It's not really about the soup, right?
In other words, that when they say, I'm yelling at the waiter because the soup is cold, They're lying.
That's not why they're really upset.
Okay, so what I'm saying is that I don't know the reasons for sure.
What my guess is, is their failed marriage.
And the fact that they got stuck in a relationship, they were both unhappy.
Okay, so let's go back again.
And you'll hear this when you listen to this again.
You're again applying a no free will standard.
They got stuck.
Like just some...
Third party, they got stuck.
Somebody just glued them to it.
They sat down on a park bench and somebody put glue on and they just got stuck.
Yes, I was that glue.
You know, in Poland, where I come from, at least at the time when you had a child, you were pretty much stuck together.
And what they did and what they believed were the best for the child was to stay together for the child, which was, of course, the grave mistake, because they couldn't have done anything worse to the child.
But they did stay together to raise me.
Okay, okay, hang on.
I get it, I get it.
So, are you saying then that...
The decision to have unprotected sex was not their decision to make, but happened to them.
Well, that was their decision, alright.
I don't believe they thought of the consequences possible, but...
What do you mean they didn't think of the consequences?
I mean, they have an IQ north of 60, I hope, right?
So they know that unprotected sex can lead to pregnancy, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so even if we accept that somehow they got stuck in this relationship because of you, that was still their choice.
That's number one.
Number two, would people in Poland, or anywhere in the world for that matter, say that you stay together because it's best for the child, and the way that you make it really great for the child is to scream at each other all the time?
Of course, in Prague, when you come to think about it, logically not.
But there is this, you know, pressure from society and also the way they brought themselves up that you need to stay together for the child.
And this is your biggest commitment.
Now it's pressure from society.
Do your parents have any free will whatsoever?
Did they make any choices?
Because all you're giving me is this weird deterministic billiard ball thing.
And look, if you're going to tell me that they had no free will and no choices, that's fine.
You can tell me that, but just don't keep implying it.
I do believe that we have free will, but most people are so much under the pressure of society, the norms, the social norms, or whatever way you want to call it, That they actually surrender their free will and submit.
And this is a well-established fact that people just tend to go with the flow, right?
And if many people are looking one direction, another person who comes will also look at the same direction.
It's only just an example.
But if there is a social norm that if you have a child and you have to be together, then people, even though they don't want it, They feel this pressure and they act upon it.
I agree with you with all of that.
But there's two big caveats.
And I'm not mad at you.
I hope you understand this.
So I hope you take this in the spirit in which it's intended, Tom.
But number one, if there's a social norm called you spend the rest of your life with whoever you have a child with, then use some goddamn protection.
So, let's say there's a social norm that whoever you get pregnant, you've got to spend the rest of your life with, then you should be really choosy about who you get pregnant with.
So, saying that there's a social norm doesn't excuse Their bad marriage, right?
Yes, of course, and I'm not trying to excuse it by no means, of course.
Yes, you are!
You are!
I'm telling you, you are repeatedly, because you're not giving them any free will whatsoever.
You're giving all social forces.
Number two, I can't imagine that there are social forces in Poland or anywhere that say that the kind of tension and conflicts that your parents had is the ideal or good.
I mean, did they not...
I assume that they hid this dysfunction within their marriage, right?
Well, yeah.
Okay, so the fact that they hid the dysfunction of their marriage meant that they were willing to go against social norms.
Because the social norms are, don't scream at each other in this kind of way, but they did it in private and they hid it.
So they were willing to go against social norms.
Well, they're no longer social, really, if they're in a closed environment where no social environment sees them, right?
In a social environment, they were behaving pretty much normally.
They would only start fighting and arguing and stuff only when they were alone.
No, no.
There's a contradiction.
Hang on, hang on.
You said that they had a bad marriage because of social convention.
And then if you say, well, the bad aspects of their marriage were outside of social convention, then we open them back up to free will, right?
So in private, they're not subject to social convention, right?
Which means that the social convention cannot explain the dysfunction in the marriage.
And I'm saying this because you seem helpless.
this.
And if you have a template from your parents called, responsibility is all external.
Because you say you're stuck in your marriage and you're on the edge and so on.
And this happens when we don't feel we can will anything.
We don't feel we can choose anything.
We don't feel we can make any choices.
We're in a no-win situation.
And if you describe to me, and I don't mean this in any negative way, I appreciate it.
Your honesty, Tom, but if you're telling me that your template is people are just pushed around by forces beyond their control, well, her grandfather was an alcoholic, and there's this social pressure, and then, you know, they've got to get married, and, you know, then she's got bipolar, and it's like, none of this is any responsibility, any choice.
And then the fact that you find yourself in a marriage without sexual desire and feel helpless because of that I'm just trying to point out to you that you seem to have a template called shit happens to you.
Not you make stuff happen.
Well, I don't believe that.
I don't quite agree.
I think that my parents made a grave mistake by staying together.
And I think that it was there within their free will, by all means, to split and they should have done it.
But I don't quite see how it translates to my current situation.
The very reason I was trying to get your opinion is because I want to make a decision.
I want to act.
I don't believe I'm stuck in anything because I'm not.
And I just want to make the best decision and the one that's moral.
Because on one hand, I have this wonderful woman, this keeper.
On the other hand, I just wonder if pursuing love or disinfatuation or anything has really any sense.
This is my main point here, really.
Tom.
I'm trying to point you.
At your wife's hoo-hoo with a jetpack of lust on your back.
So I'm working my ass off here trying to get you pointed in that direction with lust and love in your heart and loins.
And I will lift the lid and tell you my methodology.
You cannot love virtue without hating immorality.
Okay.
A prerequisite for love is hate.
That doesn't mean you hate first, but it's just, it's natural.
You can't go north without heading away from south.
Now, I'm going to accept that your wife is a good person.
Is she a Randian heroine?
She said she's working in that direction, and we all have to take steps in that direction.
So, your wife is a good person, right?
And so, as somebody who, according to my theory, Love is our involuntary reaction to virtue if we're virtuous.
Now, if we are virtuous, it means that we love virtue and hate immorality.
Okay.
Okay?
Now, so if you have moral ambiguity or relativism relative to your mother and your father, In other words, if you whitewash them, if you give them the get out of jail free card of circumstances, if you get them off the hook, it means that you are not disliking immorality.
It doesn't mean hate your parents, but disliking immorality.
And if you don't dislike immorality, you cannot love morality.
I couldn't be further from that than I am.
So I'm not giving any free card to my parents.
I have a huge grudge to both of my parents for staying together.
Because I believe they should have...
No, it's not the staying together that's the problem!
The staying together was relative to each other and the staying together did not...
The fact that they stayed together is not why you have an adverse childhood experience score of five to six.
So let's just go through that and let's talk about this specific behavior of your parents that they willed.
Number one, verbal abuse and threats.
Was this from your mother or your father or both?
Both.
Mostly my father.
And what was the verbal abuse and threats that you received?
Well, for my father, it was mostly physical.
And in terms of my mother, it was an emotional blackmail.
So she would deny her love or her help or something if I didn't obey.
And did you get called names?
Names per se, not really, no.
And so what would your mother threaten if you did not comply with her wishes?
It was so many years ago, I can hardly remember, really.
I mean, if you don't, if it's not on the tip of your tongue...
No, I don't.
I'm sorry.
I don't remember.
That's fine.
No.
Okay, so number two was physical abuse, non-spanking.
And what was that?
That was, yes, especially from my father.
And how did it manifest?
Slapping, pulling my ears, I don't know, twisting my arm, things like that.
Twisting your arm in what way?
To immobilize me or to actually move me to a particular direction, closing me in a room, you know, locking me in a room, things like that.
So he would grab your arm and twist it to the point, I assume, of significant pain in order to control you physically?
Yes.
That's pretty scary, right?
I mean, you can get...
Yes.
A twist fracture, a hairline fracture, you can get something popped out of a socket, but it wasn't that hard?
Fortunately, that never happened, no.
Well, no, it could, right?
I mean, that's what you'd be afraid of.
Yes, yes.
And how often would that occur?
Again, I can't recall.
I recall just a few situations that buried in my mind pretty deeply, but I guess I didn't like my childhood, so I didn't try never to memorize much of it really.
Physical abuse towards female adults?
Well, that was the fighting between the two of them.
They were actually getting pretty physical.
With each other or...?
Yes, yes, with each other.
And what would that look like?
What would happen?
Well, I don't feel very comfortable describing all that, but, you know, throwing things at each other, you know, to the point of using a knife.
So, yeah, pretty nasty.
Wait, so one of them threw a knife at each other?
No, actually, attacked with a knife.
So one parent attacked another parent with a knife?
Yes.
How old were you when that happened?
I don't know, 12, 13 maybe.
I'm sorry for all of this, Tom.
I mean, this is terrible, terrible stuff.
There were even worse, but again, I don't feel really comfortable talking about it.
But there were really physical, real scenes of actual violence, the shit you see on TV. You mean like the guys and the wife beaters being dragged into the back of a cop car and that kind of stuff?
No, like running, you know, my mom took a canister of gas and tried to set my father on fire.
Phew.
Wow.
Yeah.
How old were you when that happened?
I was about 25 at the time already, and my sister was about 18.
Fortunately, at that time, I was no longer living with my parents.
I came only, you know, when my family called that there's some really bad things going on.
This is when my mom ended up in a mental institution.
Yeah, normally people would go to prison for attempted murder, but...
Well, yeah.
I mean, am I wrong?
Trying to set fire to someone with gas that's in that attempted murder?
I guess things work a little different in Poland.
That's why I say that she really had some mental issues, because this is not a behavior of a healthy individual.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I obviously have no idea, but I'm not sure that everyone who commits criminal acts is mentally ill.
Well, good point, yeah.
Because, I mean, maybe evil will just turn out to be mythology, like the devil.
Like maybe it's all biochemical and so on, in which case we have no free will and there's no virtue and no good and no evil and so on.
Which is great, because then I can't do anything wrong and nobody can do anything wrong and we're just unrolling chemical robots.
But I don't believe that.
I mean...
And I don't believe that because, as I asked earlier, your mother had the capacity to suppress her destructive behavior under certain circumstances, right?
If somebody, to me, if somebody is beyond free will, then they will commit a criminal act right in front of a policeman.
They won't suppress, they won't repress, they won't put on a smiling face and hiss at you, wait till we get home.
You know, they just, they don't have the capacity to suppress that action, and then that's how we know, I think, that they're beyond the realm of free will.
But where you have the capacity to suppress...
Then you have moral responsibility, so...
Okay, I'm not taking moral responsibility from them, by no means.
Again, if that's the impression...
Dude, come on, Tom, Tom.
I have given you...
You've got to not be glib with me, right?
I mean, we have to give each other that respect.
Yes.
And I have given you four or five or six examples of the way that you phrased your parents...
Reactions and interactions as not being a result of their own choices.
And then after I've given you four or five or six examples, and then you tell me, well, I'm not trying to take away their free will, you're being incredibly glib with me and you're not being present in the conversation with me.
Now, you don't have to agree, although I think when you say it's social forces and it was bipolar and, you know, when you give me all of these things that Are external to choice, you can't then say to me, I'm not trying to take away their choice, because everything you're portraying to me about them is externalized, is not ascribed to their decisions.
Okay, I see your point.
Yeah, I feel like you're kind of backing out of the conversation here, which you can totally do if you want.
But if you're going to do that, then I'll move on.
I would just appreciate just steering towards the initial question and being if more of a platonic love could lead to a sustainable relationship and bringing up healthy children.
Well, I think I've told you two or three times I am talking about the initial thing now if you don't see any connection between what we're talking about here and your initial question Then my suggestion is let's take a break You can listen to this and then call back in if you feel that there is any connection I can very briefly outline the connection for you But if you don't think that what we're talking about here has anything to do with your wife Even after I've explained how then I don't really know how to continue So,
would you be so kind as to just, you know, sum it up for me, just to make sure if I understand it right?
I'm going to use extreme terms.
Please do.
And I don't mean for this, I don't know your parents only by what you've reported of your parents.
So, I'm going to use extreme terms, and I hope you'll forgive me for its lack of...
Ambiguity or ambivalence or complexity or whatever, but I'm just going to have to use some pretty bald terms here.
And this is not the sum total.
This is just the way that it's easiest to explain.
Okay.
Your template for femininity was an evil woman who abused her children, abused her husband, tried to kill him.
Just evil.
Mm-hmm.
Just evil actions.
And this is your template for femininity.
Now, we can never escape the template of femininity that our mothers give us.
Okay.
It doesn't mean that we're forever bound or we have no free will in it, but we have to recognize the influence.
That is how you were created.
Now, the way that we work biologically is we model ourselves after the most sexually successful male in our vicinity.
That's always the father.
How do we know?
Because we're here!
Which means that, right, genetically, we always attempt to replicate the sexual strategies of the most successful male sexually in our vicinity, which is always our own father.
Okay.
Now, so, this is the template of attraction that you have.
So, in your and mine and everyone's evolution, It was very rare, if not downright impossible, for us to ever meet a woman different from our mother.
Because we'd live in a tribe of 40 people or 50 people, of which there'd be like, I don't know, 5 or 10 women that we could possibly have a relationship with.
And they'd all been raised in the same culture, by the same style of parenting, in this dumb, blind, stupid repetition of photocopied human history.
So the reason why we have a habit of modeling ourselves after our fathers and pursuing women like our mothers is that that's what the genes want.
The genes don't want us to be happy.
The genes don't care if we get beaten up.
The genes don't even fundamentally care if we get set fire to as long as our kids are grown.
Okay.
So you will have a biological drive to pursue women like your mom And to act like your father.
Now, you have made a different choice.
Fantastic.
Good for you.
Good for you.
But your sexual template remains the same.
Okay, gotcha.
Do you understand?
Now, the only way that you can reject the sexual template is with morality.
Morality is even more powerful.
Than the sex drive.
And we know that because people go off to fucking war and get their balls blown off prior to reproducing because they think it's the right thing to do.
I don't know why that is.
Probably some weird evolutionary quirk that benefits the eggs in some collective fashion.
I don't know, and I don't really care for the purposes of this conversation.
Morality is stronger than genetics.
Because you can get people to do incredibly self-destructive things that completely wipe them out of the gene pool.
First World War, Second World War.
If you can convince them that it's the morally right thing to do.
You can get people to take themselves completely out of the gene pool and become monks and become celibate priests because it's the moral thing to do.
Morality beats biology.
Morality wins hands down.
And how can I employ it in my situation?
It is the brain beats the balls every single time.
Okay.
So, the reason that I'm talking about your mother and morality is that the only way to point your dick at your wife is to completely use ethics to repudiate your mother's evil actions.
But at the conscious level, I do.
I just...
doesn't seem to have the effect.
Oh my god.
Tom, you're killing me.
You're killing me softly.
I keep telling you, and you'll hear this, and your jaw will drop at the unconsciousness of all of this, but this is why your penis is not pointing at your wife in the way that it should.
Because every time you introduced your mother and her immoral actions, you never once ascribed free will, and you never once ascribed morality.
It was immoral what they did.
No, you're telling me now because I'm pointing it out, but that's not how you introduced it.
I'm first talking to your penis, now I'm talking to your defenses.
Okay.
I will need to listen to this again afterwards because I was convinced I did say that I did not agree with their decision and that they should have split, but apparently...
No, no.
The splitting is between them.
What I'm talking is about how your mother harmed you.
Oh.
Your parents splitting, that's their fucking business.
The question is, how did they harm you?
And you are programmed like I'm programmed, like everyone is programmed.
Do shit which gets you babies.
And your dad and your mom did all the stuff that got them babies.
And that's what our DNA is like, oh shit, well they had me, so that's the standard of sexual attraction for the tribe, so that's what I'm going to do.
Look, we've talked about this before.
I saw a documentary once on sexual fetishes about a guy.
He enjoyed being dressed up in a rubber suit.
Human sexuality is a wild planet.
But he enjoyed getting dressed up in a rubber suit and having prostitutes straddle him with a little breathing tube and close off the breathing tube.
That was his big sexual turn-on, right?
Okay.
I guess my tastes run a little bit more simple.
But anyway, so when they were asking him and asking him, it turns out that when he was a boy, older girls used to chase him down and straddle him and put their hands over his mouth and try and choke him.
It's like, so your dick is like, okay, that's the freak in this society.
Let's do that, right?
Whatever that is.
Oh, am I supposed to have a really long neck?
Okay, let's put these weird fucking hoops on my neck and make myself look like a giraffe.
Oh, are big butts what's successful in this?
Hobo, hobo, hobo.
You know, let me get me some full-on Kim K double watermelon action going on and let's go to town.
Whatever it is that the tribe finds sexually attractive is what you will do.
And your dad loved himself some evil crazy.
So your dick is like, okay, the way we get more dicks is through evil crazy.
We dive into the evil crazy, we make eggs with the evil crazy, and that's how we do it.
Now, your wife is not that way inclined, but your initial impression, your first sexual imprinting is evil crazy gets your kids.
And we're not kind of designed to think, oh, well, I'll go away from Poland and away from this tiny tribe and I'll go to the opposite tribe.
That didn't happen throughout our evolution.
You had to pick from the slim pickings that were around.
Okay.
So if you've decided to overthrow...
Your sexual imprinting, and it's not sex with your mom or anything like that, but what it is is like, okay, these are the females who are around who are sexually reproductive.
There's not going to be a hair's breadth of difference fundamentally between my mom and the other women in this tribe of 50 people, right?
That makes sense, right?
Yes.
And so, if you don't act like your dad, you don't get to reproduce.
And if you don't find a woman like your mom, you don't get to reproduce.
That's why you're not turned on by your wife, who's not like your mom.
Your balls are confused.
They've wandered far from home.
They're like, where the hell am I? You're like a dandelion that landed in Mars.
These eggs, Jim.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Are these ostrich eggs?
What the hell?
Are these obelisks?
What the hell is going on?
These eggs are nice.
Oh, I don't know.
Does that mean that they've got bombs in them?
What the hell is going on?
Why the hell is no one setting fire to anyone else?
Where's the screaming?
Where's the throwing stuff?
Nobody has any knives.
There can't be any fertility here.
Let's go back to crazy town and bang ourselves senseless because that's how we got to be here.
So to overcome this pre-programming, do I need to condemn my mother in a more conscious way?
Is that what you're saying?
Well, she sounds like an attempted murderess.
I think it's okay to have a few negative thoughts.
Oh, I have plenty, but it's just...
Okay, but then stop presenting her as a victim of society and fucking...
Pollen spores of togetherness in the Polish atmosphere, and bipolar, and convention, and pregnancy, and you're just the willless victim.
Okay, so I pretty much need to assume she's the bad person, right?
Oh my God.
Will you fucking show up to this conversation?
Now you're getting all passive.
I just need to assume she's a bad person.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no.
I'm just, I'm absolutely frank and honest.
I'm not trying to be passive, aggressive.
No, no, no, don't take it that way, please.
I'm just trying to understand the best I can.
What can I, in practical terms, what can I do?
Okay, let's assume, Tom, let's assume that your mother has moral responsibility.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
Was anything she did immoral?
Plenty of things, yes.
Okay.
Of the years and years and years and years and years and years that you've known her, what are the moral, virtuous, good things that she has done?
Well, she kept, she fed us, she put us in some good schools.
Not moral.
No, come on.
I mean, daddy penguins cough up half-eaten herring for their babies.
That doesn't make them paragons of moral virtue.
Feeding your offspring is not a moral action.
I was convinced it was, but, uh...
No, that's just what people tell you, so they don't have to be moral!
Look, I regurgitated some herring!
I'm a hero!
I hope that I get to be a Marvel superhero, the herring coffer!
Look, I'm a moral champion!
Okay, so we're getting somewhere with this, yeah?
Give me some other moral superhero characteristics of your mom.
I guess that the sacrifices they made, that they instead of, I don't know, spending the money they earned on themselves, they spent them on the education for myself and for my sister.
This is...
Not moral!
No?
No, for God's sakes, watch a documentary on...
I'm just going to pick on our good friend, the penguins.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, the male penguins freeze their fucking asses to the snow for four months in the middle of the Arctic winter, where it's like minus 60.
They don't go off with the women to get food.
They stay there consuming their own fucking bone marrow and protecting their children.
And they all take turns shuffling around the outside so they don't get too much wind.
Massive sacrifices.
A polar bear mother sits with her cubs all winter losing a third of her body weight rather than go out and try and get any food.
Sacrifices for children is common throughout the animal kingdom.
And anything that a penguin can do, I cannot ascribe moral virtue to that which is so programmatically ingrained.
Well, in that case, I don't have too many choices left, really.
I'm happy to hear.
I mean, take your time. - I don't see anything because if we have this penguin, you know, thing that-- Oh, let me ask you, sorry, let me ask you one other thing.
Sorry, I don't mean to laugh.
I don't mean to laugh.
It's pretty serious.
Okay, it's okay.
Okay, let me ask you this.
I mean, you're from Poland.
You have a black sense of humor, right?
Okay.
Oh, I do.
I know, I know.
How else do you survive communism?
I don't know.
But let me ask you this.
Has it ever happened to you, Tom, that by chance, by the off-off chance, that your mother has ever expressed her virtue as, I fed you and made sacrifices?
In other words, has she ever claimed that as a virtue?
Yes, many times.
That makes it especially not a virtue.
Because then that becomes, I am super Jewish mom guilt machine, right?
That's my superhero.
Instead of a herring, I'm coughing up a lifelong original sin obligation because I put carbs in your body.
There you go.
You're mine.
I mean, you can't use that shit.
Even if it was virtuous, using it to control other people and make them feel guilty takes a little bit of the icing off the virtue cake, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, spot on.
Yeah, but in that case I really have nothing to show for my mother, really.
And what do you think?
No, no, let me rephrase that.
Do you have any feelings about that?
Well, for many years I felt a lot of anger, mostly against my father, that he never stood up to my mother.
But again, it takes away the responsibility from her and guiding it towards my father for not acting upon it.
But as far as my mother goes, I honestly don't know.
It's just that she was a bad person, actually, and this is where we arrived.
And I'm saying that if you net that into your balls, I'm not saying right now, although, you know, I guess it could happen.
But if you really add that into your balls, they'll point a different direction.
And again, I'm not saying this is any kind of eatable complex or you want to have sex with your mom.
I don't believe anything like that.
But it just takes a tiny shred of evolutionary knowledge to know that We tend to mimic the sexually successful reproductive strategies around us.
We don't try and reinvent that wheel, so to speak.
The woman has to say yes.
And generally what we do is...
Okay, this is going really, really deep.
So I know you can do it because you're hanging on.
How's it going for you so far, by the way?
Useful?
It's okay.
It's okay.
I'm really struggling the best I can to understand.
I maybe sound confused because it's not an easy subject, but, you know, that's why I wanted your opinion, because you're objective.
You will point out my bullshit to me, and this is exactly what I need right now.
Well, I appreciate that.
I mean, don't overestimate my objectivity, but I hope...
And the reason is, if I was objective, I'd just say stuff and I wouldn't need to make a case.
I make the case because I want to make sure I'm being as objective as possible.
The objectivity is in the case that I'm making.
So, anyway...
So, you, like me, like every other testicular-based life form on the planet, have an innate, get-out-of-jail-free set of glasses we put on when staring at women, right?
What do you mean by that?
You're angry at your dad.
You say your dad didn't stand up to my mom, but the degree to which you would also ascribe moral responsibility to your mom is tough, right?
I mean, it is...
It's hard.
This subject of female responsibility, we started talking about it a couple of years ago.
I talked about it off and on very early on and so on.
Really started pushing the idea of female responsibility, for which, bizarrely, I'm labeled anti-female by some people, which is, oh, so I give women full moral responsibility and absolutely the same high standards that I give to men.
And somehow that's anti-female.
Saying that somebody who gives equal or gives full moral responsibility to men, saying that person is anti-female is incredibly sexist.
I mean, it's incredibly sexist to say that, but of course people don't usually see that kind of stuff.
So the question is, for me, always the question is, the ethics are pretty clear.
Of course women are fully morally responsible.
The question is, why are so many men white knights?
Why are so many men They get angry at what men do, and they gloss over what women do.
So the question always to me is, given that it's such a universal phenomenon, this white knighting, this excusing of women's immorality, the question is what evolutionary purpose does it serve?
You know, lots of people have noses.
In fact, just about everyone I've met has noses.
Some people have very big noses that I've met.
Your nose was on time, but you were five minutes late.
Some people have very small noses, but everyone's pretty much got a nose.
So when everyone has a nose, we can reasonably say what evolutionary advantage does the nose provide?
And the answer is, great place for your glasses.
And secondly, if you notice that there's two invisible brown mountains on the side of your eyes, it'll freak you out for about five minutes.
Anyway, so we know what the nose is for.
It serves an evolutionary advantage and blah, blah, blah.
So my question is always, okay, and this does go right back to your wife.
What evolutionary advantage does white knighting have?
It's a tough question.
If you want to take a swing today, you can.
It's your choice.
I would take a swing, not in case of my wife in particular, but in general, I would believe this is to make life easier for men to have children and have sex with bad women, basically.
Yeah, you got it, baby.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because if you say, if you're in a tribe full of crappy women, full of, like, women who will, like, club you in the head if you look at them wrong, and you say, well, you see, these women are not up to my moral standard, and I really feel that I cannot go down to this trailer park Clinton refuse dregs and put my penis in that pile of aggressive, crazy vengita dentata...
So I'm afraid I'm just going to have to sort of sit this one out MGTOW Stone Age style and therefore my moral standards remain vastly above the shaking angry cleavage of massive male meat pounding evil that is known as testosterone as estrogen based life forms in this tribe.
So you can have those high moral standards.
And say, I am not going to gloss over the evil that these women are doing.
And do you get any eggs?
No, you don't, of course.
You really don't!
Not one!
And so the white knighting is, well, all of those who had high moral standards with regards to women...
Die out.
Weed it out of the gene pool now, didn't they?
Because women said, well, we have two choices.
Women, they say, we have two choices if we're called not great by a man around us.
One choice, choice number one.
Choice number one, we can say, I wonder if that guy's got a point, you know...
I guess we can be kind of mean.
We can be kind of vicious.
And we did club that baby seal with both our frozen tits yesterday.
So that's not great, I guess, in some ways.
We do beat up our children a lot.
And, you know, we scream at our husbands and boyfriends.
And we caddy towards each other.
You know, this guy, this guy who's complaining about us, you know, he might have a point.
I guess we could stop relying so much on our sexual attraction and egg hoarding.
And we can actually strive to become...
Better human beings and listen with reason and respect and humility to the moral criticisms that this man has been kind enough to bring to our attention.
That would be one potential way that bad women in a bad tribe could respond to moral criticism.
What would be the other way that women could respond?
No eggs for you!
No eggs for you!
Right?
We're going to kill those fucking genes dead right now.
You know, vagina is closed for the season.
Genes die in the gutter.
We're going to breed you out of existence or unbreed you out of existence.
Guy with the temerity to bring moral responsibility to females and for God's sakes, don't tell the other men to do that or there's no eggs for them either.
In fact, we'd rather have some other tribe come over and take us over than raise our moral standards for these men.
I'm not saying the men are any better.
We're just, you know, focusing on the women here.
And it's just evolutionary, huh?
I mean...
Yeah, it makes sense.
So, of course, we've got this, uh...
Women can't do any wrong, and...
And, you know, if they did some wrong, uh...
You know, it was men's fault.
Right?
I mean, we're just putting out this myth of...
Male privilege.
Oh, sorry, the myth of male privilege is...
We're putting out the truth about male privilege...
For exactly the same crime, with exactly the same criminal history, in exactly the same courtroom, in exactly the same location, women get an average of 18.51 months of sentencing.
Men get 51 and a half months of sentencing.
So a year and a half to four and a half years almost.
That's the difference.
And this is after decades of feminism and we want to be equal and shit like that, right?
So, you know, people get mad at the white knighting and so on, you know, I was waiting for the mangina to show up and defend the single moms and blah, blah, blah.
And but, dude, I mean, it's just an evolutionary strategy, you know?
Oh, you're gonna morally criticize these women?
Oh, did that mean man tell you that you could be a little bit better morally?
Oh, it's okay, honey.
It's okay.
He's just a mean man.
I'm here for you.
I'm going to tell you everything's just fine.
You don't have to bow, bow, bow, bow, right?
And then you get it on.
And then your white knight, they go charging up.
They've got the horses.
They've got the broken penis lance or whatever the hell it is.
And they go, ah, round the bend we go.
Up the tubes we go.
Let's get to the egg.
We are the white knights.
We'll always win.
You are the moralizer.
Professor, you are bred out of the population.
So, yeah, it makes perfect sense to me that you'd be like, oh, yeah, my dad can't believe you didn't stand up to my mom.
you know.
Yes, you can.
Right?
It's Poland!
I shouldn't say that.
I mean, I just had a very good friend who's Polish.
But this is the quality that's around.
And we're so used to, I mean, it's just...
You know, we can't reinvent the template every single generation.
It's just not biologically efficient.
And so we are programmed that whatever our dad does, we do.
And whatever, our mom was like, that's the kind of woman we want because there was no choice.
You know, it's like being in the Arctic and saying, you know, whale blubber and seal meat Just not doing it for me.
I'd really like some bananas and a nice quinoa salad.
And they'd be like, dude, it's the Arctic.
We don't have those things, right?
Oh, you know, these evil set-and-fire-to-husband women, they're not really for me.
I think I'd like a really nice, healthy, calm, positive, virtuous woman.
They'd be like, look around.
You know, these women all have fucking bones through their noses.
And angry lions painted on their boobs.
We don't really have those women, so you either die out or you hold your nose and get this massive blind spot towards female evil and shag the she-devils to get the next generation.
Okay, I see your point.
And it's tragic because...
This white knighting, again, this is all without philosophy, without self-knowledge.
It's so insulting to women, right?
Because, well, we don't want to disturb the little angels with any possibility that they might be dysfunctional, so I'm just going to overlook that because eggs!
And it doesn't give women the...
The opportunity for genuine and healthy feedback that can help them grow, which is what men get all the time.
I'm sure you're listening to me giving you a lot of feedback and you're not fainting and falling off the couch and shit like that, right?
So I think that women can.
And I think the degree to which we, dare I say, pussyfoot around these issues is the degree to which we're going to continue to retard the progress.
Of the species.
Women need to hear the truth and men need to hear the truth.
And if women run screaming hysterically from the room, then they'll get used to it over time.
You know, it's like...
People, politically correct people, there's some studies that say that they've got very sensitive amygdala.
They tend to avoid negative stimuli, which produces political correctness.
You know, your words are hurting me.
Your applause is confusing me.
I need a safe room with a teddy bear.
But the point is that, yeah, if people have difficulty with negative stimuli, I mean, progressive exposure seems to be the way to go.
But every time you appease people's desire to avoid negative stimuli, you just make them weaker for next time.
You know, it's like, well, I'm really weak.
So it's hard for me to go to the gym, so I'm not going to go to the gym.
It's like, well, welcome to being even weaker, right?
So I think that women can.
I mean, there's a lot of women out there who are pretty damn tough, and they can take a lot of feedback and criticism, and they get frustrated with this white knighting as well.
Like, stop treating me like I'm some retarded child who you have to erect these giant testosterone man shields around me and reality and moral responsibility.
And anyway, I just...
People who really think about this, and by really think about it, I mean think about it for about three and a half seconds, will realize that I'm very much the opposite of anti-women.
I'm incredibly pro-woman.
By not wanting to treat them as retarded children who have no moral responsibility, I'm incredibly pro-women.
And for Christ's sake, you white knights, you stay away from my daughter when she grows up.
You stay away from her.
I'm not giving her all this moral responsibility so you people can ride up and erode it with your little foam and your little cards and your little songs and your mixtapes and your, oh, you don't worry about it, honey.
Don't you try that shit with my daughter.
Okay, can I have just one quick question?
Just a follow-up to all that you said.
Save me from myself!
Stop me from talking.
Go ahead.
No, no, no.
I was very, you know, intently listening to what you were saying, but just one question that's, you know, at the back of my head after we talked about my mother.
So, by your definition, what would be an example of a moral behavior of a mom towards a child?
Given that anything that a penguin can do does not qualify.
So what would be a practical example?
Because I'm trying, I'm still at the back of my head, I'm trying to find a proper example, you know, to support my mother in a way, but I'm struggling to find any.
And I was just curious if you could provide any examples.
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's fundamentally different from moral behavior on the part of a father.
I don't have gender-specific morality, otherwise it would be uterus PB rather than UPB, so I'm pretty much into universal morality, but one thing, again, I don't know for sure, but one thing I don't see happening a lot in the animal kingdom is parents interfering or parents intervening when other parents commit child abuse.
So, like, a new male lion comes along, he'll often kill all of the baby lions, because he doesn't want to invest in another lion's offspring, and it's not his DNA, at least, right?
And I don't think that a lot of, you know, like, if a mom is beating up her kid in the ape world, I don't think that other...
moms or dads sort of intervene.
So I think that intervening in situations of child abuse is a pretty brave action.
It's a pretty scary thing to do sometimes.
So I speak from some experience.
And so I think that's an example of moral courage.
I would say that pursuing self-knowledge, pursuing truth, no matter where it leads, is an example of moral courage, of basic commitment to honesty.
It can take a lot of moral courage and so on, right?
And so I think that...
Standing up for what you believe in and making a good case for it, refusing to be intimidated by bullying, which of course has become the substitute for intellectual exploration in the modern world.
It's so great how the internet has enabled us to use this greatest technology to use the most lowly simian intimidation tactics of ostracism, lies, and bullying to each other.
Isn't it great?
Where the greatest potential for communication in the human experience is used for bullying and masturbation.
Almost exclusively.
Anyway.
And maybe both at the same time, if I understand it correctly.
So there's lots of examples, I think, of moral courage.
So, for instance, not doing wrongs that your parents did is an example of moral courage, right?
So for you, you know, choosing a wife who's different from your mom, if your mom's actions had significant immorality attached to them, which is the nicest way I can put it, You choosing and going through self-knowledge, having conversations like this with me, with therapists, with other people, whoever you're talking to, that's an example of moral courage.
Doesn't happen in the animal kingdom.
So, yeah, self-knowledge, adhering to moral standards, even against your own immediate comfort and self-interest, these aren't things that show up in the animal kingdom.
And they are things more powerful than mere biology.
I think that what happened was false universals served biology so long, That false universals became stronger than DNA, because it was the most powerful way for DNA to replicate it.
And therefore, if we can hook into the false universals and turn them into true universals, then we have...
This is why we don't have to wait for evolution.
We can use our adherence to universals, which is the foundation of our success as a species, concepts, and so on, and has been so incredibly profitable for the replication of human DNA. We hook into that.
With true universals, we can turn this thing around incredibly rapidly, but it does take the kind of courage I think that you're pursuing in this.
If you fully delineate and reject the evils that your mom did, And you fully commit to virtue.
You cannot commit to virtue while ignoring the existence of evil.
That's like adhering to principles of health while ignoring that there's any such thing as illness.
You can't do it.
The two are one and the same thing.
You cannot commit to health without recognizing the existence of evil and rejecting it and opposing it and fighting it.
And you cannot commit to virtue without recognizing, opposing, and fighting the existence of evil.
And if your mom's actions were fundamentally immoral, and this is all kind of fuzzy in you, well, I think you can see the results in your sex drive.
I clearly see the blind spot I had there.
You pointed it out to me, so I really appreciate it.
Really, thanks for that.
You're very welcome.
Will you let us know how it goes?
I will try to follow up, yeah.
Good.
Go have, you know, wild, virtuous monkey sex with your wife.
And say, thought I was Polish?
Turns out I'm from the Amazon, baby!
Yeah, let's know how it goes.
And I really appreciate you calling in.
It's a tough thing to talk about, but I really appreciate that you did.
Okay.
Thanks so much.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
All right.
Up next is...
Hey, come on!
Nothing?
Come on!
Give me a break.
Coughing hair.
Next up, hopefully there's gonna be something interesting.
Something new.
Something that...
Are you coughing herring into someone's mouth, Steph, with your...
I'm just coughing virtue into somebody's balls.
But anyway...
What can I say?
Actually, I've gotten quite a few messages from people specifically wanting advice about their white knighting.
Because they've picked up on their ability for white knighting.
So this is a very timely call because apparently a lot of people want more information on this subject.
So thanks again, Tom, for calling in.
Alright, well, up next is Heath.
Heath wrote in and said, My daughter recently turned four.
I know that someday soon I will need to address the concept of government and all the joys that come along with it.
Coercion and war.
I do not remember having these concepts explained to me as they were kind of baked into the public school and Cold War life.
Patriotic songs, the Pledge of Allegiance, presidential heroes, etc.
Don't forget G.I. Joe.
war is awesome.
I am wondering about healthy ways to introduce her to the state without glorifying it or traumatizing her.
It is embarrassing to be human having to explain yourself to a new member of the race, especially when at this point the wonderful advances in technology are being taken for granted considering that she has never known life without them.
I think that next time we go camping we should leave the tech at home so we can have that discussion.
But as for the explanation of government I am embarrassed to have this conversation.
That is from Heath.
No, I get this.
I mean, I've done a video called Shape the Hell Up World, where I talk about the joys of explaining things like war and incarceration and taxation and so on, as my daughter is asking questions or whatever.
But why do you feel ashamed?
You know, I think there's a combination of reasons, I think.
First, I mean, I can barely explain it to myself.
You can describe it, but explaining it is a different matter, right?
Right, right.
I've put forth quite a bit of effort to do so, and I'm still not quite there yet.
I spend a lot of time working, and then we spend a lot of time together.
And the effort I feel that I should probably be putting forth and doing something, you know, like what you do or, you know, I think I feel a little inadequate there.
And I, you know, I try to do things to, you know, so I pay folks to kind of help me, help the effort there.
But yeah, so I think that there's a combination of I wish I could do more personally and that I'm just struggling for the right approach.
That's a wonderful way to not answer the question.
I appreciate that.
Okay, so why do you feel ashamed?
You didn't make the state, right?
You didn't create public schools in their curriculum.
You didn't invent all of this propaganda.
You didn't stitch together the flags.
I mean, what the hell does it have to do with you?
You were born into it, right?
Right.
I feel like I should...
I mean, I feel like I do have an antidote, but...
No, she's still not answering.
Yeah, that's a...
The question isn't...
And I'm just going to be really annoying here.
So, Heath, I apologize.
And if I get it wrong, just interrupt me and tell me I'm wrong.
That's totally fine.
But the presence of evil is not what's hard to explain.
What's hard to explain, and you did touch on it already, what's hard to explain is, so, Daddy, there are these bad things in the world.
What are you doing about them?
Mm-hmm.
Where were you in the last great war, Daddy?
Right.
What did you do, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Now, I don't have any perfect answers, but, you know, even if everything I'm doing is a huge mistake, I can at least point to a huge mistake that I did.
I didn't do nothing.
I made giant colossal mistakes every single week, right?
I mean, but at least I was out there making mistakes, which hopefully other people can learn from and do something better with, right?
So, you know, my daughter is aware, of course, that there are evils in the world, and I've explained to her in pretty great detail what it is that I'm doing to try and combat them.
And...
That, I think, is probably where you're having a tougher time, is the, well, so, Daddy, you have all this knowledge.
Somebody's poisoning the water supply.
I know who it is, and I know where they're poisoning it.
It's like, Daddy, what are you going to do about it?
Nothing.
Right.
Much.
So, why did you study all of this?
Why did you learn all about this immorality if you didn't do anything about it?
Mm-hmm.
Well, and I do agree with you that the change that we all desire, it's a gradual process.
It's a generational effort.
And so I think I'm doing my part with her.
But I do feel a little kind of like, you know, just like you pointed out, that I think the shame is that I maybe should be doing more or...
Exactly.
If someone's poisoning the water, I should be in front of the well, right?
Yeah, I mean, you can get two lessons in one, right?
You can get some Play-Doh or some plasticine and you can construct a tiny human spine, like the spine that a four or five-year-old would have.
And then you can get like this big ass circus element to come over and sit on it and say, well, that's your economic future and that's the national debt.
You are basically a stain on an elephant's ass with nothing left to support you upright.
And I'm obviously not suggesting that's real.
But, you know, I have yet to inform my daughter how much she's in debt for.
I mean, I'm not telling her that right now because I still want her to get out of bed tomorrow morning.
But she is going to find out at some point.
She's going to find out that she's hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt just for being born.
Don't you wish, don't you look back nostalgically on the days when it was only original sin and eternal damnation that you had to worry about?
Wasn't that just glorious?
It was beautiful.
Because you could disbelieve in the deity and poof!
The debt is gone.
Right.
But strangely enough, I disbelieve in the government and the debt keeps piling on.
There's no amount of atheism towards the state that takes away these curses.
Right.
So she's going to find out about it, right?
She's going to find out about it.
She's going to say, Dad, did you know about this?
And be like, yeah, I did.
Well, what have you been doing about it?
Being a good parent?
Yeah.
What is going to satisfy you to answer that question?
Look, being a good parent is, I believe, the most important thing, so you're not going to get any criticism from me for that aspect of things.
And if you are willing to, like, if you can say to yourself, look, sorry, let me start again.
I've got a podcast in the Donator section, which you can access, not you, but other people, because you already say you support people, but freedomainradio.com slash donate.
There's tons of podcasts and books in the Donator section.
And one is about UPB and the conscience.
So why do people get so angry at UPB? It's just a moral theory.
It's barely even registering on the world stages yet.
People get really angry about it.
UPB is...
Right?
And people get angry because UPB is the conscience.
We used to have this thing called the conscience, the Jiminy Cricket, the little, what Socrates called the gadfly, or the demon that would whisper.
No, he was the gadfly, sorry.
The demon that would whisper in his ear if he was doing anything wrong is the conscience.
It's the universalization.
And our conscience grows stronger with our expansions of moral knowledge.
And those of you who are in this conversation, who are listening to this show, you are the furthest ahead in terms of moral knowledge.
And hopefully, if you're going to therapy, or if you're not going to therapy, at least doing the self-work in terms of self-knowledge, I think we're tip of the spear of the future.
We are tip of the spear of the future.
This is the most advanced conversation going on in the world right now.
I genuinely, fully, and completely believe that.
And if there's one that's more advanced, please let me know.
I'll shut down this shop and go and bring them coffee.
But...
You are the furthest ahead of just about everyone in the world.
And the question then becomes, given that you have a conscience, as I have a conscience, and everyone has a conscience, who's not a complete sociopath, then the question is, what is going to satisfy your conscience?
That is not an absolute answer.
Right?
There is no...
There's no universal standard for what is going to satisfy your conscience because there's no universal standard of the right thing to do to right the wrongs of the world, right?
How much is enough?
I mean, there are times when I just go for a walk, right?
I'm not combating evil at that time, right?
I might not even be thinking about anything to do with philosophy.
I might just be like, oh look, a butterfly.
That's pretty.
That cloud looks like a duck.
Wow, you know, when dandelion bleeds blow past you, it's almost like it's snowing sideways, right?
Those clouds shimmer like Anne Margaret's sequined dress in a Las Vegas.
That could be anything that I'm thinking of.
It has nothing to do with...
With philosophy.
Now, I'm not fighting the good fight at that time.
You could say, ah, you see, but I'm resting to fight the good.
Now, come on.
I mean, that just doesn't happen.
Oh, yeah, sorry.
UPB as Conscience is a two-part series.
It's in the Philosopher King section.
50 bucks a month subscription will get you there.
So, I don't know what the answer is as far as how much...
What work do you do to satisfy your conscience?
How much work do you have to do?
How many risks do you have to take?
How many confrontations do you have to take?
How much danger do you have to expose yourself to fight immorality in the world?
And there's no absolute answer to that.
There's no, well, you know, if you take 25% of your free time, not 26, not 24, 25, like there's just no answer to that.
And so, when you have moral knowledge, I believe it creates an implicit obligation.
It's not a positive obligation.
Like, it's the old thing, like, if you can swim and there's some kid drowning in the water, because you can swim, you have a kind of implicit obligation to go and help them.
It doesn't mean that it's a positive obligation, like someone can shoot you for not doing it or whatever.
And so, if you have knowledge of a cure, like, if you go back in time...
And you say to people, you know, it's the fleas on the rats that are spreading the plague.
It doesn't take you that long to say that if you're in the 14th century in Europe and, you know, 70 to 80 percent of people are dying from the Black Death, you could go back in time.
You don't have to say it like a moral obligation, but it's pretty douchey not to, I guess, right?
Yeah.
Unless it is true, this eugenics theory that says that the dumber people died and therefore we got the Renaissance, I don't know how true that is.
But if you have knowledge of a cure, What portion of your life needs to be devoted to spreading that cure?
If you have knowledge of virtue, what proportion of your life needs to be spent spreading virtue, spreading the truth?
I don't know the answer to that, because I don't think it can be objectively defined.
Everybody has different levels of risk tolerance, everyone has different levels of skills and abilities and enthusiasms, and everybody has different perceptions of the cost-benefit involved in all of this stuff.
I don't have a clear answer, but I think if I were to reframe it, reframe your question, hopefully not just to serve my own agenda, I really think that it is the first thing that you said, Heath, which is, what do you need to do to satisfy your conscience in the realm of spreading virtue?
I don't know the answer to that.
I'm not expecting you to have one off the top of your head, but that's a very fundamental question.
I mean, you know, I guess it's eight or nine, seven or eight years ago, I think, since I first started this show full-time, and that was a big question for me.
I said, well, you know, I have a pretty unique set of abilities for getting this stuff across to people.
I'm A pretty good speaker, a pretty good thinker, I have some technical abilities, I have entrepreneurial experience, and I have this relentless curiosity for the source of all things.
So, if not me, who?
If not now, when?
This is a big question, right?
And knowing how high the stakes are for when mankind goes rancid morally, knowing how many, many, many people get killed when mankind goes off the rails from an ethical standpoint, for me, it was...
Because I'm a plus-brainer, it was kind of a no-brainer.
And I've not regretted that choice at all.
I've not regretted that I have written virtually no books since my daughter was born because of a variety of choices I've talked about in other places.
But, you know, my question has always been for me, you know, my very first video I ever did was, you know, your deathbed looking back.
And I think you will be able to comfortably talk about all the evils in the world with your daughter, not happily, but comfortably, if you have satisfied your conscience with regards to what you're doing about it.
You know, there's this old joke, oh, everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
It's like, well, lots of people talk about ethics and virtue and truth and morality.
But how many people do something about it?
And now, of course, the barriers to entry to doing these things, doing something about virtue truth, and, I mean, the barriers to entry are virtually nil.
I mean, you don't even need a computer.
You can go to a library, type it into a blog there, or whatever it is.
So given that we have, I think, greater moral knowledge now than we did in the past and the barriers to entry to helping to shape the conversation in the world about ethics, the barrier to entry has never been lower.
I mean, I wish a few more people would join me out here at the very front, at the very tip of the spear of breaking the immoral habits.
Of the species.
I wish there'd be a few more people out here on the ramparts blowing these trumpets and assembling these forces of light.
It can be challenging.
And it's one of the reasons why I do these videos that say, these guys who think you're heroes were not heroes.
You know, Gandhi and George Washington and MLK and all these other people, they weren't heroes.
Because heroes, and I'm not talking about you or me in this context, Heath, but heroes in very many ways are a great excuse.
We love to elevate people to the realm of moral hero so that we imagine that it is only the gods that can have these fights.
It is only Ragnarok.
It is nothing in the everyday.
It is nothing we can achieve.
It's nothing, any small act of kindness or courage that we can take.
It's no little steps.
It's all these giant gods on top of Mount Olympus who determine the fate of the world, not little old me.
And when we elevate people to positions of heroism, we do that so we can take a giant step back and not get involved.
Only giants can have these fights.
I'm not a giant.
There actually aren't any giants around here.
Let me inflate someone in my mind so that I can distance myself from all of that.
But I guarantee you that all the people who you think are heroes and those of you, those who are genuinely heroic, all of those people...
They did what they did because they did not believe in heroes.
They believed in the everyday courageous actions of the everyday people.
Because heroes will only ever win if they get followers.
Because heroes are just five or six foot tall people.
Heroes only ever win moral battles if they are charismatic or powerful or fearful or rich enough to get followers.
And philosophy, by definition, can't be a movement of followers.
It can't be.
It can't be.
And so the action that each individual needs to take to satisfy his or her conscience must be with reference to what you are capable of, reference to what I'm capable of, and with a steadfast denial of the possibility and power that Heroes will save us.
That it is up to anyone other than ourselves to take the steps necessary to save the world.
No one is coming to save us.
There is no great golem or Goliath who is going to bestride this world and It's not going to drag us to freedom.
It's not going to be Rand Paul.
It's not going to be Paul Ryan.
It's not going to be Ann Coulter.
It's not going to be whoever on the left is that you like who is going to bring us to some sort of peace and virtue.
It's not going to be anyone except you.
Because this movement, this philosophical movement, is unique in that it can never be a movement.
Like it can never be, oh, there's someone at the head, there's me or somebody else at the head who gives these thunderous speeches and gets people to cheer and gets people to believe in something and gets people to follow.
It can never work that way.
It can never work that way.
That's like saying, follow me to yourself.
Follow me to individuation.
Let my judgment substitute your judgment so that you can find your conscience.
All of these are paradoxes.
They're impossibilities.
Self-contradictory statements.
The call to arms is for everyone to answer.
I'm not going to save the world for you.
No one's going to save the world for me.
It is all individual actions.
Particularly since most people do not change their perspectives or opinions or beliefs based on any reason and evidence.
In fact, study after study shows that if you provide somebody who's prejudicial, who's got a confirmation bias to a particular position, if you provide them with arguments and evidence to the contrary, it actually only further strengthens their irrational position.
And given that People are not going to change their minds about the non-initiation of force, about peaceful parenting, about taxationist theft, about a free society, all the things that we've talked about here.
People are not going to change their minds based on reason and evidence.
They're going to change their minds based upon persistent and continual and expanding examples.
And those examples can never be behind anyone else.
They can never be in the train.
They can never be in the shadow.
They can never be in the following of anyone else.
To be a leader of a philosophical movement is to not be a philosopher.
To have energy, charisma, and eloquence to the point where you can drag people along like fallen water skiers behind the excellent boat of your maximum verbosity is not to be a philosopher.
The philosopher puts forward arguments, puts forward principles, and enables people To pursue virtue according to their own conscience and their own abilities.
And I can't tell you what that is for you.
It changes for me from sometimes day to day, from circumstance to circumstance.
And there is such a habit in this, Heath, of course, of...
Wanting so desperately for someone to come along and do this work for us.
For someone who's going to come along with enough money or charisma or power or enthusiasm or leadership ability or organizational skill or you name it.
Someone.
Someone is going to fall from...
Krypton and and lift their spaceship out of their own crater and and stride off like a colossus and Statist intellectual bullets are gonna bounce off their chest and they're gonna lift the locomotives of prior prejudice and anyway, it's all the Superman metaphors I can think of There is this this this desire and this desire is implanted in our heads by evil people because evil people long and lust for us to wait they lust for us to externalize and The solution
to evil.
They long for us to wait for someone to lead us to virtue because they damn well know that there's no possibility of anyone coming along to lead people to virtue.
The only place you can lead people to is collectivism because leadership and following is a collectivist notion and institution to begin with from beginning to end, from the Alpha to the Omega.
Leadership and following is a collective institution which necessarily must devolve to the lowest common denominator.
If you can't get Homer Simpson to join your movement, you're not going to have a movement.
And if you want to get Homer Simpson to join your movement, your movement can't be philosophy.
It is always a collectivist movement, and it always has to appeal to the lowest common denominator, which is politics, right?
And philosophy cannot do that.
You know, the ring of power, they always goad you to take up the ring of power.
They always goad you to get a movement going, be a leader, get people to follow you, get people to...
Right?
Because they know that if you follow that, you lose philosophy, you lose conscience, you lose individuation, you lose ethics.
Everyone becomes a herd.
And once you become a herd, you're open to manipulation and the sophists are way better at it than anybody who's got any integrity.
And so...
This is one of the reasons why I keep hammering down heroes.
It's one of the main reasons why I continually make fun of myself and continually tell people, you've heard me say this a billion times in these conversations.
This is just my thoughts.
I don't want you to substitute my judgment for your judgment.
This is just my theory.
I haven't proven it.
This is just my thought.
Don't let me tell you your own experience.
I've said this probably a dozen times during the last two calls.
And I'm continually saying These are just my thoughts, these are just my theories.
I'm perfectly happy to stand tall and strong and firm where I have worked out the arguments.
But I am steadfastly continually eroding, and quite consciously too, and quite calculatedly too, continually eroding anybody who wants to substitute my judgment for theirs.
Because that would be to invite people to follow me, which is the exact opposite of what will bring freedom to the future.
It is up to you, and you, and you, and you, and you.
Don't look over your shoulder.
There's nobody behind you.
I'm pointing straight at you.
Now, the degree to which you can or feel comfortable or are willing to put your ass on the line for the cause of freedom, reason, empiricism, and virtue, and the future, is up to you.
And I can't tell anyone how far to take it.
Because that is an individual decision that is subject to a wide variety of factors, not least of course, of which you have a child and a wife and all that.
These are not insignificant things.
So I'm sorry for the long speech.
I hope that it's helpful.
But the answer, I think, is going to be not daddy is there evil in the world, but daddy.
What have you been up to about it?
What have you been doing about it?
So do you think I should wait until she gets her first paycheck?
I do not.
I'm kidding.
That was a bit of a deflationary response to what I thought was a fairly good speech.
No, absolutely.
I was just making a little joke.
No, it was not my intent to detract from what you said.
No, I mean you wanted to deflate the importance of what I was saying because it's uncomfortable, right?
I'm not really finding discomfort.
You know, I don't find anything that you stated that I disagree with.
But did you not say at the beginning that you don't think you're doing enough?
Yeah, it might be in relationship.
I feel like I do things, but the world that I'm hoping for her to inherit, I feel like we're kind of handing it to her, and it's a mess, and I feel partially responsible for that.
Do you feel responsible for the world being a mess or remaining a mess?
Being a mess.
I do what time has allowed me to do since I changed my perspective.
But I feel like maybe if I slept an hour less and I stayed up and I And I wrote and organized my thoughts or found, you know, a place to be an activist that I could trade an hour of sleep a night, you know, and put forth that additional effort.
That's where I feel kind of inadequate, you know.
Okay, let me just run through a quick checklist then, I hear activist and I'm automatically, oh no, I could be wrong, but are you satisfied with how you're doing as a dad?
I am.
Good.
There's some, you know, I feel that I'm trying to, you know, I'm an example.
I believe I'm an example for a good one for her.
And is your daughter exposed to any influences that contradict your philosophy?
No.
No, not at this point, because we haven't had the political conversation.
My in-laws are, you know, a little, they're on the political left, and so there is some strain there.
But they're not, I assume that they're not yellers or spankers or anything like that.
No, no, no.
Okay.
And that to me is, you know, the against me argument is pretty extreme and obviously optional for people.
But if they're not spankers and so on.
So obviously when she gets much older, she'll recognize that you say that taxation is the initiation of force and that your in-laws support the initiation of force.
And, you know, that's going to be a challenging conversation.
Right.
But there's ways to talk about that.
Mm-hmm.
There is a cost-benefit analysis to that, which is that maybe they provide support for you as a father, and maybe they have kids that she likes to play with.
These things can be considerations that are not unimportant.
But that's obviously a conversation for when she gets much, much older.
Okay, so she's not exposed to any emotionally destructive people, is that right?
No, she's not.
Okay.
What are your school plans for her?
We're going to homeschool.
We've already kind of begun.
She's doing fantastic.
She's started reading and it's exciting to watch.
It's something, a plan that came to fruition.
I approached the reading and when she started doing it, it was pretty amazing.
Oh, isn't it?
I mean, especially if you've been around from the, you know, undifferentiated blob of green poop and goo that comes out of the mom, when you start to see this, as I've used this metaphor before, just this personality and characteristics arise out of this undifferentiated ocean, like the city of Atlantis rising towards the sparkling sunlight.
I mean, it's an astounding phenomenon.
Like, hearing my daughter, like, half the time when I'm not chatting, which is not that often, what I hear is, She's figuring out words and how to spell them and all that.
I mean, it's the coolest thing.
It's just absolutely astounding.
And I think it's hard to...
You know, I always sort of thought that if there were more stay-at-home dads, there'd be a little less war just because you really get how much work it takes to make one of these damn human beings.
It's really hard to casually break them.
But anyway...
So, yeah, if you're comfortable with your conscience, I don't think as far as what to do...
Again, that's one of these things that everyone has to answer for themselves.
If you can come up with an answer that's going to be satisfying for you and satisfying for your daughter, or at least that you can say with satisfaction.
It doesn't mean it's perfect, but I think if you're doing all the right things and your daughter is not exposed to malign influences and...
You're satisfied with what you're doing as a father, then I think it's a damn fine base.
And my God, that's better than...
I don't even know what the numbers are in terms of ratios and percentages for what other people are doing.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's no religion involved, and we don't take part in any of that, of course.
But, you know, there's this...
You know, monster out there, this government thing that I'm going to have to explain.
I've had the conversation in my mind, and I can see where the questions are going to go.
Have you had the conversation with your daughter?
I mean, at what level have you...
Oh, about the state?
Yeah.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Yeah.
And do you have any recommendations, or did you find something to be more effective?
Well, I mean, to me, as I've always sort of talked about, I don't want to give my daughter conclusions, I want to give her the facts.
So...
You know, I will tell her what the state is, and here's how it works, and this is what it does.
And if she says, what do you think?
Then I'll say, well, this is what I think, and here's why, and, you know, but what do you think, and all that.
I mean, but I don't want to imbue in her any of the sort of moral horror that I feel about statism.
Right.
Because I don't want to prejudice her with my emotional...
experiences and thoughts.
Again, I'm not trying to spark at her.
I'm not trying to be like crazy Mr.
Spock guy and have no emotional content.
But I also don't want to be like, oh, there's this terrible, horrifying, morally evil institution at the heart of society that educates other children and lies to them and has indebted them and starts wars and imprisons people unjustly.
Like, I don't want, you know, I mean...
She loves butterflies and cats.
Her stories are like, the butterfly and the cat met in the meadow and the tree hiked them and they all became friends.
I don't want her to be like, but unfortunately there's this fiat currency that subsidized the logging industry that caused all of the government-owned land to be stripped of all of the...
I just don't want that.
What's the point of giving people moral knowledge that they can't act on?
This is why I'm not in politics.
Hey, let me give you moral knowledge that will paralyze you and you can't act on.
Evil people love nothing more than to put out unactionable moral knowledge out to people so that they get frustrated and paralyzed and won't take any particular steps.
Like, first we want you to join the evil gang, but if you don't wanna join the evil gang, we're gonna give you moral rules and moral perspectives that you're helpless to do anything about.
And that way, virtue will be its own punishment of futility.
Join with us and be effective evil, or if you want to be good, at least be neutered.
And so...
I tell her the facts as they are, and there's plenty of time to work out the ethics of it over time, but I won't withhold anything, and if she asks me what I think, I will tell her what I think, but I'm not going to rant at her because she does not have as yet even remotely close to the cognitive or independent ability to react to my passion with any kind of objectivity, if that makes sense.
It does.
How is your wife with all this stuff?
We've kind of been on the journey together.
She started out and of course she had a job.
We were two working non-parents and that changed when she was born.
It's an incredible education for everyone involved.
And she's really, I think, flourished, you know.
All right.
Well, I hope that helps.
I think just, you know, give her the facts, but recognize that you're still like this giant god to her.
And, you know, when the gods get upset, the children get freaked out.
And she doesn't have any particular capacity to put your passions in context.
Although, you know, as far as passions go, I wouldn't say that your bucket is overflowing.
Is that in response to this conversation?
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I am a little bit nervous.
I've been a listener for, jeez, a very long time.
And so it's very bizarre to have a conversation with you because I've heard your voice almost every day for years and to talk back to it is odd.
If this is in fact what's happening and you haven't just gone mental, always important to check, right?
I sort of feel at the end of this cycle of shows, at some point I'm going to wake up, I'm going to be in an insane asylum and it's all been some psychotically introduced situation.
Okay, good.
Is there anything else that would be helpful?
Not at all.
I thank you very much for taking the time.
Was this helpful?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Great.
Thank you.
Well, thanks, Heath.
And I think we'll wind the show up there.
I really appreciate everyone who has called in.
It's always such a massive pleasure to chat with the Brainiac crew of the future.
And freedomainradio.com, of course.
YouTube.com slash freedomainradio.
Freedomainradio.com slash donate to help the show out.
It's always essential.
You know, I mean, the economy is tough.
You know, I... We get it.
It is tough.
And obviously, people got to eat.
And please don't put philosophy above food.
That would not be a rational prioritization.
But we do need help, you know, as the economy grinds its way on There are people who are unable to support the show for reasons of financial constraint.
We need new people to step in.
And if you can do that in any way, shape or form that doesn't interfere with your responsibilities in any foundational way, we really need your help.
So freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out and help us spread individuation or at least provoke and goad people into becoming more fully themselves.
I really genuinely believe even more so Then the nearly 10 years ago when I first started publishing publicly, I believe even more so now than I did back then, that we are on the right path to freeing the world.
