Sept. 24, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:47:36
3082 The Gl0ryh0le 0f S0cietal C0llapse - Call In Show - September 23rd, 2015
Question 1: [1:52] - The novel 1984 by George Orwell describes a dystopian future and is often compared to our current society. How does our understanding of this novel and outlook change when we look at them through the lens of r/K selection theory?Question 2: [49:44] - What do you think the advantages and disadvantages are of having more than two parents involved in the raising of a child? Can quality and quantity exist together in the realm of love? Can you explain why you think that people who are K selected are, by definition, monogamous?Question 3: 2:20:08 - If one is trying to spread the philosophy in order to change the world, at what point should one stop using the vestiges of the old system to do so? Does using those institutions – road, taxpayer funded schools, unemployment insurance - make ones message ineffective?
Actually, it just means that tomorrow is my birthday.
I will be turning 49.
If you would like to help make my birthday extra scrumptious and special, please drop by freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show and bring a smile to my face.
And hey, for $8 or more, I will pop out of a cake in your dreams.
So tonight we had some fantastic calls.
We had the novel 1984 and its relationship, the relationship between totalitarianism, between dictatorships and R versus K gene types and R versus K organisms.
It was fantastic.
I had some great ranks.
I think you'll really, really enjoy it.
However, I will say very honestly that the star of tonight's conversation was the Matthew and Christine show.
So Christina is willing to date Matthew, but she wants to reserve the right to have affairs at some point in the future, have sex with other guys to...
Well, you'll have to listen to it to see.
And my response was fairly incendiary, but I hope quite helpful.
And I think you'll find the...
It's a challenging dance that we went through.
Quite interesting.
And if there's only one you're going to listen to, that would be my suggestion.
It really was quite powerful.
And then we had a fine young gentleman who called in, also named Matthew, who wanted to talk about...
A question we get quite a bit, you know, should I take unemployment insurance?
I just got laid off and I'm an anarchist or libertarian.
And should I vote in something that's important to my kids that's going to have an impact on taxes and so on?
So we did chew through that one, and I think you'll find that very helpful as well.
Thank you, of course, for listening.
Thank you for subscribing and donating.
Freedomandradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
And without any further ado, here are some great, great calls.
All right.
Well, up first on the show today is Ross.
He wrote in and said, 1984 by George Orwell describes a dystopian future and is often compared with current society.
How is our understanding of this change when we look at this book through the lens of R versus K selection theory?
That's from Ross.
Hi, Ross.
Hey, Steph.
How you doing?
I'm doing all right about yourself.
Well, thank you.
So, obviously we have to assume familiarity with the novel, and you can do a search back through the archives.
I had years ago a great conversation about 1984 as it describes the mind of a murderer.
Because, of course, Eric Blair slash George Orwell, as you can read about in his autobiographical book, Homage to Catalonia, joined in the Spanish Civil War and killed some people.
And I think that he was morally sensitive enough that this translated into psychological aspects to his personality that I think erupted and showed form in 1984.
And I think that the R versus K stuff has some applicability to it.
Do you want me to just launch into my thoughts?
Do you want to talk first?
What's your preference?
Launch into your thoughts.
Go for it.
All right.
The R gene set, and for those who don't understand either this or 1984, go read the book 1984.
After you've done that, you can...
Look at the Gene Wars presentations which are available at freedomainradio.com or youtube.com slash freedomainradio.
So the R gene set can only flourish When everyone is equal under an omnipotent predator, right?
This is the R gene set of like early sexuality and little care investment in children and feminized males and masculinized females and all of that.
The optimum petri dish for the breeding of the R gene set is everyone is equally subjected to a virtually omnipotent predator.
And so if you look at totalitarian regimes throughout history, they are perfect breeding grounds.
And by that I mean, of course, that there's generally an undifferentiated mass of people who are randomly preyed upon by the state.
And this promotes, of course, this early breeding.
This promotes single parenthood.
And so basically the R's gene set needs a wolf.
A bunch of rabbits that need a wolf.
And in my view, this is the great tragedy when people think about things like foreign policy.
They think of things like foreign policy.
And what they think is that...
Like this balloon that's held underwater.
There's this group of people who are preyed upon like a mean guy holding a balloon underwater.
And if you just take away the mean guy, then the balloon will pop up to the surface and the people will be free and so on.
To a limited degree, I think there's some truth in that.
But the idea that if you decapitate the leader, what squirts up from the jugular is volcanic sprays of human liberty is incorrect in general throughout history.
And so if you look at something like Assad in Syria, or of course the late Saddam Hussein in Syria, Iraq or any of the ayatollahs in Iran and so on.
And even to some degree Putin in Russia.
What you see is you see a very powerful central figure who's the predator, who then preys upon the people.
And that's really bad for the Ks, but that's really great for the Rs.
And so, to me, dictatorship is an R-generated survival strategy, which is, if it is true that political dictatorships are an R-generated, R-gene-set flourishing survival strategy, then...
This explains why when you remove a dictator from one of these societies, a new dictator springs into his place.
Because the dictator is necessary for the R mindset and for the R gene set.
The rabbits know deep down that they can't survive without the wolves.
Because if the wolves don't eat the rabbits, the rabbits will blindly reproduce until they strip all of the vegetation around and then they all starve to death.
And so the R gene set cannot survive since it's not self-limiting.
It basically just reproduces as fast as, I would say, humanly possible, but as fast as rabbitly possible or oysterly possible.
And it knows that without the predators, it has no internal self-restraint structure.
So without the predators, it's going to expand until it destroys the...
The environment and then itself.
So the R gene set needs a predator in order to survive.
Otherwise it expands and destroys the environment.
Now with this understanding in mind we can look at these societies and see that they are reflections to some degree of a genetic strategy that is followed by the R gene set.
And this is why when you take out the leader, another leader Pops into place.
And the other aspect, of course, of all of this is that, you know, when people always say, they always say the same thing.
If you get rid of the person at the top of the power structure, it creates, what do we always hear?
A power vacuum.
And someone else will step in to take...
The place of the prior leader.
Now this is true for the Argin set.
Because if all of the wolves in general, like if all the wolves go off or die, then there's more for the owls and the owls will multiply.
When you have a prey species in the absence of a particular predator, another predator will come along.
Let's say there's a bunch of gazelle in Africa and then there's some lions.
The lions get hit by some specific toxoplasmic parasite or whatever.
The lions get hit by some parasite that kills them.
It's not then that the gazelle are going to live in peace and plenty forever.
The gazelle are going to just have more and more gazelles until they strip all the vegetation and starve to death.
Or what is more likely another predator is going to...
So when you move in, right?
So when you're in a predator-prey relationship, you get rid of one predator, it creates a predator vacuum or the invitation to feast for other predators to come in.
But this is only if you're a prey species whose only practical limitation is the predation of others.
And this, you know, if you look sort of the one-child policy of China that's...
The government has become the predator that basically, quote, kills, sometimes literally, but most times through prevention.
The government has become the predator that kills the offspring of the prey species, the R-selected species.
So, this all goes back to childhood, as we've talked about many times earlier.
The R gene set, I believe, comes to its fruition or is epigenetically programmed from basically conception onwards through childhood.
The R gene set is selected and brought into being through environmental cues from the womb onwards.
And so it definitely shows up there.
But the K's don't have a power vacuum.
So when someone says, well, if you get rid of the government, there'll just be a power vacuum and something's going to rush in and take its place.
Or when people say, well, if you don't have a country, then anyone's just going to invade you and take you over and so on.
What they're saying is that they are...
An R gene set and the R gene set is in a symbiotic relationship with the predators.
Without the predators, the R gene set cannot survive.
It's just maximum reproduction, maximum consumption, limited only by predation, but that limitation is absolutely necessary for the R gene set to survive.
So if you look at this with regards to 1984, the chilling thing about 1984 is the degree to which Very few people have any problems with the existing system.
And I think that is really important.
Also, the other chilling thing that's in 1984 is the degree to which the children are turned against and spy upon their parents.
Now, of course, that is really important because the lack of parent-child bond is characteristic of the R gene set.
Lack of investment in children, lack of investment in parents is really, really essential to the R gene set.
And so what's interesting is that in the West you see as a whole, for a couple of generations now, the R gene set has been well fed and the K gene set has been starved.
And it's been well shown that the more intelligent you are, the less maternal feeling in general you have.
Now, this was not the case in the post-war period, right?
I mean, during the baby boom.
I mean, Phyllis Schlafly, nobody could deny, agree with her or not, she's a brilliant, brilliant woman.
And she had like six kids and so on.
So that wasn't the case.
But as the circumstances for a happy and healthy family life has generally receded, right?
And then more taxes and more working and bad schools and it just becomes less attractive.
And the risk of divorce and the risk of what an old business colleague of mine used to call acid mitosis.
Lose all your money to your wife and her lawyers.
And alimony and child support and the sexual allegations in divorce, accusations that can be thrown against people and so on.
You know, parenting and family life, in general, death sucketh these days.
And so smarter people tend not to have kids.
And so the R gene set has generally starved.
Sorry, the R gene set has generally flourished.
It's welfare and so on, right?
But the K gene set has generally starved itself out.
And so what's happened is...
You've made a lot of promises as a society to take care of the elderly, right?
You know, pensions and social security and a variety of names in a variety of countries, but you've got all of these promises.
And those promises are important to a K gene set, but the promises are not important to the R gene set.
And this is the fundamental mismatch that's occurring, is that the, you know, the government every 20 odd years, 20 years and change...
Spends as much money as it took over 200 years for the K's to accumulate in the founding and growth of America.
And it's speaking very generally, of course, right?
But the R's, they're not going to have...
They don't have any particular loyalty to the elderly.
So they just promise security to the elderly, which, of course, K's don't really care about.
Rather save their own money.
But R's know that they haven't invested enough in their kids.
Their kid's going to want to pay them back.
So they want government security.
But now you've got a whole bunch of R's and they're not really going to care that much about what happens to the old.
So with 1984, of course, you have a society where there's no quality.
No quality is allowed.
The only quality that is allowed is obedience and work.
Subjugation and work.
And no personal levels of quality can be allowed.
There is a terror and hostility towards success, particularly moral or intellectual success.
There is a terror and hostility that the R's have towards success.
Because when there's great disparity of success and failure, that is what feeds the K gene set.
So the way it generally works in a free society is It's the exact opposite of how it works in a state of society, in a free society.
If you are very intelligent, if you work hard, if you save, and if those virtues are respected and treasured as they would be in a free society, then you have lots of kids, right?
And...
If you're irresponsible or lazy or just not that smart or whatever it is, then you're going to have fewer kids because more resources would accumulate to the more skilled and economically valuable people, which tends to correlate with both innate and learned abilities and virtues, intelligence plus hard work, dedication, and so on.
And you can contrast this by looking at something like Christianity versus Judaism.
In Christianity, the very smartest people throughout most of Christendom We're rendered infertile by the dictates of the Catholic Church.
And so the smartest people, oh, you can learn Greek, you can learn Latin, you can, you know, recite the Mass, you can do all these cool funky things, you really enjoy the writings of St.
Augustine.
Well, I'm afraid we're going to cock-block your gene set from reproducing because we don't want church holdings to be diluted by the primogeniture, right?
By the Handing out of property to kids.
So in Christendom you have a dysgenic whirlpool, right?
Like you take the smartest people and you put them into an environment where they can't breed.
And then you take the biggest and most aggressive people, i.e.
the warriors who became the aristocrats, and put them into a situation where they can breed more.
And this is one of the reasons why you had these collective disasters that kept hitting Christendom.
Which didn't hit the Jewish community as much, right?
Like the plagues and so on disproportionately affected the peasantry and the Christians and the Jews got away with it more because they had more money and they weren't in the quote sanitary system of the big cities and so on and they lived in the country and were more isolated.
Whereas in the Judaism, you had the smartest people who went into becoming the religious leaders in the Jewish community, the rabbis.
Who mastered a number of languages, who dealt with very difficult texts within the Torah and so on, and were highly and hugely respected within the community.
And statistically, they had significantly more children than the less skilled, less intelligent Jews.
And this is one of the reasons why the Jews in the Ashkenazim Jews are so smart.
It's one of the reasons theorized, and I think there's fairly good math behind it.
So, and this is why we have this precious resource called intelligence as a species and it tends to get squandered.
It's even worse than squandering capital because capital is the effects of high intelligence.
And so, excellence and differentiation from the masses was highly respected and rewarded within the Jewish community.
And not, in fact, it was punished.
Genetically, you might as well have just strangled these people in the crib, right?
The people who became priests in Christendom.
They were good for spreading the meme called Christianity, for the mental ideas or the mental set called Christianity, but you might as well have castrated them in the womb as far as their reproductive powers went.
Now, of course, some priests did Step out a little from time to time and, you know, squirt some forward momentum to the Euro-Caucasian gene set.
But for the most part, it was a significant inhibitor.
And even if they did have kids, a lot of times it was with mistresses where they couldn't give a lot of money to them and so on.
So differentiations, great differentiations in ability are...
Boy, the greater the differentiations that society allows, the more...
Reproductive ability is going to accumulate to the Ks, right?
And this is why the Rs want to flatten everything out and they want to take money from the Ks and give it to the Rs.
Because when there's a higher mountaintop and valley, More resources are going to accumulate to the smarter, more sophisticated, harder working, more responsible people are going to end up with more resources.
Now, of course, R's want resources for themselves, which is why they want a flat society where the government redistributes everything.
Because not only does that give them more resources by the government taking from the K's and giving to the R's, but it means that women won't reject R's in favor of K's.
If you have a free market society...
Everyone kind of gets rich and everyone kind of does well.
But there's really quite a staggering difference in a free society between the very intelligent and the average or the below average of intelligence or ability or hard work or whatever you want to call it, the X factor that produces wealth.
Now, in a free society, the women of the highest quality, I don't just mean physical looks, but, you know, good moms and good companions and good friends and so on, the women of the highest reproductive quality in a free society are going to want to get with the Ks, because the Ks have the most resources in a free society.
And so the Rs are disproportionately downgraded in a free society, and the Ks are disproportionately upgraded.
Now, in a...
Socialist or communist or welfare state society, the R gene set flourishes and the K gene set Languishes or is slowly and steadily taken out of the gene pool.
The gene pool, quite the opposite happens in a free market society.
In free market society, the K's are disproportionately rewarded and the R's are taken away.
So the fact in 1984 and other dystopian novels, you see a predator called the state and you see a flat mass of undifferentiated human beings underneath them.
The sort of gray huddled masses.
It's a great poem...
People in the rain, like wet leaves on a bough or something like that.
Just undifferentiated blobs.
Or like those, you know, I've said this metaphor before, in the background of Monet paintings, there are just little daubs of humanity.
Just these blobs are supposed to be people in a stadium or something.
It was blobs.
And that's where the R's want to be.
They want to be undifferentiated.
They don't want to compete with those who have significantly greater ability.
Because otherwise, the R gene set...
It's really harmed and the K gene set is really rewarded so they must provoke hatred against the Ks and they must promote an external predator that is perfect for the R gene set and absolutely unbearable for the K gene set and one of the sort of little details that's hard to miss in 1984 is the fondness and conscience to some degree that Winston Smith uses to describe his relationship with With his mother,
that there was a certain kindness around his mother, that he felt very guilty for taking a chocolate bar and eating it during the war and so on.
And his conscience, his positive relationship with his mother, I think, was one of the foundations to his struggling K nature that was identified by the party that was identified by O'Brien.
And...
The terrifying scenes where O'Brien is torturing Winston Smith.
Winston Smith's great argument or great claim, his great hunger, his great desire, is he says, freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four.
If that is granted, all else follows.
Individual consciousness...
Is not allowed.
Individual consciousness that goes against the masses is not allowed in the R gene set because it all struggles to reproduce itself by creating a lack of differentiation.
The R gene set is a wall.
They're called glory holes, I think.
They're like holes in the walls with penises through them or whatever.
You can have a vagina pushed up against a hole in the wall.
You have no idea who's on the other side.
Could be old, could be young.
That is the ultimate R factory.
Whereas the K-Factory is very fastidious.
And that's, you know, glory hole versus bidding war.
I don't know.
That's what you need to look at.
Now, and then the last thing I sort of want to mention, just in terms of where societies are.
Jews do very well.
Christians and Caucasians do okay.
And the Muslims tend not to do so well, of course.
And a lot of that has to do with...
The tradition within the Jewish community is to give the most breeding capacity, like the most resources and the greatest respect to those who are the most intelligent.
In Christianity, that was specifically denied.
But inbreeding in Middle Eastern cultures is catastrophically common.
Here's a quote, inbreeding...
A consanguineous marriage is a common tradition practice in Middle Eastern cultures.
Studies from various countries and communities of this region showed that the frequencies range from 20% to greater than 70%.
Inbreeding is known to have adverse effects on morbidity.
And mortality.
Syria's total rate of consanguinity was found to be 35.4%.
And, I mean, the number of health issues.
And this also seems to have a negative effect on IQ as well.
That the more the mix within certain limits, the more the mix, the greater the progress.
And, of course, cousin marriage or marriage within a particular community or arranged marriages, all of these are selected.
Mating schemes because they all indicate a lack of willingness to compete.
A lack of, oh, I'm going to marry my cousin.
Oh, I'm going to marry whoever my parents tell me to.
I don't want to go out there and compete.
Everyone's the same.
Doesn't matter who I marry.
And they found this actually even in birds.
if you kind of force birds to get married, so to speak, and force them to have babies rather than let the birds choose each other, then the bird's parenting is actually much worse.
And so this is one of the ways in which not only do you end up with generally less genetically flourishing offspring, but the parents of these kinds of situations tend to be worse because good parenting is virtue.
And if you're not selecting based upon virtue, then the free market often selects based upon virtue, But if in these marriages you're not selecting based upon virtue, you're going to end up with less genetically flourishing children and less quality parenting as a whole.
It's kind of humiliating to be told who you're going to marry.
And it takes a very competition-averse mindset to want someone to find who you're going to marry or to marry within your marriage.
Your gene pool, so to speak.
That's sort of my thoughts.
How do they strike you?
They sound very good.
The thing that I like that you touched on was the degree to which the society in 1984, the government, undermines the case selection or case-selected people, the case-selected mindset.
You know, to where they diminish individual thought, but they do it even to the extent that they destroy the language so that you can't even think.
You know, they redefine words and they diminish words to the extent that someone who wants to think lacks the capacity.
I think that's really interesting when you look at how you can undermine a case-selected society or case-selected individuals within your society.
There is, yeah.
I mean, there is...
That's a very, very good point.
And so for those who don't know, there's something called Newspeak in 1984, where they say, like, language is ridiculously inefficient.
Like, you have good, better, excellent, fantastic, wonderful, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And the argument is to say, well, no, let's just have good, plus good for really good, double plus good for really good, double minus good or whatever it is, right?
So just...
You don't need all of this ridiculous language flourishes.
You just want to simplify the language to the point even where words for unconventional or anti-authoritarian ideas simply are scrubbed from the language.
It's not just a war against K's.
It includes the letter K or anti-K in the letter as well.
And of course, what you were describing put to my mind...
Cyrano de Bergerac, right?
This is a famous story where there's a very good-looking guy who's, you know, thick as a brick, and Cyrano de Bergerac, who has this giant honking schnoz, right?
Your nose was on time, but you were five minutes late.
He has this big nose, and so the dumb pretty guy wants to woo this woman, but he's, you know, she only responds to poetry, to beautiful language.
And so the pretty guy stands under her window and Cyrano de Bergerac, who's a master of language and very poetic and so on, he whispers to the dumb guy what to say.
And then the dumb guy woos and of course the woman thinks that he's showing the case-selected aspect of great speech.
But that's what actually Cyrano de Bergerac has.
And he only has the R-selected aspect of great physicality, physical beauty.
And so it's kind of an interesting thing how the R is masquerading as a K in order to get the quality woman.
And of course that is not that uncommon in literature.
It's a trope or a cliche that's been used many, many times in literature.
And...
In the K society, sorry, in the 1984 society, when you get rid of the complexity of language, again, you're reducing people's capacity to show their intelligence, right?
When you get people to self-censor, you cripple their ability to show their intelligence.
It is actually, for those who haven't tried it, one of the things that I do that I think is courageous is show unfettered intellectual power on a public stage.
That is highly difficult for the R's to see.
It really, really is provocative for R's to see unfettered, unapologetic, unpandering to R's intellectual power.
And eloquence in a public sphere.
And the purpose of the restriction of language in 1984 is to make sure there are no poets and that everybody is the dumb guy in Cyrano de Bergerac and nobody is Cyrano de Bergerac.
And that means that because of course language skills, eloquence, passion and oratory are all Aspects of significant intelligence and therefore are a differentiator that if allowed into the our world would begin to Get K's to accumulate more resources at the expense of ours and so on.
And so you see this thought crime.
You can't even think it.
And the thought crime, of course, is old.
Thought crime goes back, of course, to Christianity, particularly Catholicism, where the thought is the crime.
If you look at another woman with lust in your eyes, a hammering in your heart, and...
Steroids in your balls, then you you have committed the infidelity.
The thought is the crime.
What this does is it makes people self-censor and when you self-censor You lower the quality of what you can bring to the world stage, which benefits the R's at the expense of the K's.
And so, for me, the challenge, and, you know, I continually work with this within myself, you know, the amount of training I do to do what I do is prodigious to make sure that I dismantle self-censorship.
You know, in the controversial areas we talk about female responsibility and race and statism and parenting and all that kind of stuff, that I... We dismantle self-censorship to let the K light shine, so to speak, and provide a beacon for other people to say that you can flourish and do well in society by exercising your full intelligence, which is horrible to the R's, which is why they tend to react.
Now, they can't compete with Ks in intelligence, so all they have is venom, you know, and ugly things to say.
And, you know, it's really pathetic when you see it for what it is, but I guess they feel that it works, because on some people it does.
And this is why you see...
On campuses, you see that you're not allowed to say anything, right?
Thought crimes are all over the place in modern campuses because campuses have been swarmed by ours and ours can't handle disagreements because disagreements mean win-lose, right?
And win-lose means as soon as there's win-lose, their anti-competitive nature flares up.
And so you see this fairly continually.
Sorry, you were going to say...
Oh, it was just with, like, the safe zones and the trigger warnings.
And then what you have, too, that I notice, particularly within modern feminism, is the redefining of words to the point where you can't have a conversation because you're talking past people.
Because what I understand is racism and what the feminists understand as racism are two different things.
And I don't understand your definition because it's a floating target that you like to move.
And so the degree to which those themes are brought forward into actual modern-day reality, I find very intriguing.
Right, right.
So there's something where, you know, there's check your privilege, right?
You know, you're launching into some passionate speech and then just throw bricks in front of your locomotive.
Check your privilege!
You know, which is thought crime!
I mean, it's just supposed to trip you up.
Because your emotion is terrifying for them.
When R's come in contact with real quality, the enemy is no longer the predator.
Remember that the true enemy of the R is not the predator, it's the K among them.
Because the R's need the predator.
The R's need the predator in order to survive.
Slaves need a master in order to reproduce with other slaves.
And if you're a slave of low quality, you really want there to be a master.
This is the most fundamental thing to understand about ours and modern society and society throughout history.
If you're a low quality slave, you desperately need a master.
Because a master will make everyone look like you.
Everybody gets crushed down.
Everybody is as flat as paint on a floor.
And so the females...
Have very little to choose between.
I can choose this slave or I can choose this slave.
And so...
The crushing of quality makes slavery preferable to low-quality people.
You see, you're likely to get a slave mistress or a slave wife if everyone's a slave.
There's no reason to reject you.
You're just like everyone else.
Plus, the master might even assign you.
Hey, how about that?
And remember, the genes only care about reproduction.
However, if slavery...
Tomorrow, for the low-quality slaves, that means that the caves will assert themselves almost immediately, will start gathering the resources, will start gathering the quality women, and they'd rather have an 80% chance of reproducing with another slave than a 20% chance reproducing with a free woman.
Right?
This is really, really fundamental to understand that Dictatorship is a reproductive strategy for low-quality people.
They want dictatorship.
They want enslavement.
They want the predation of the state that crushes the inequalities that would leave them genetically at a loss, that would leave them in the dust.
And R versus K, again, it's complicated.
I mean, there's R Christians, there's K Christians, there's R atheists, there's K atheists.
So it's not any particular intellectual category.
R Republicans, K Republicans, there are even K Democrats.
So it's not, you can't sort of just drop people into these sorting mechanisms and so on.
It's important.
But these trends, I think, show up quite a bit.
So when you start to talk about A free market.
The reason that people freak out to the point where they're willing to literally go to the wall is that their genes are telling them we have more chance reproducing in a dictatorship where quality is crushed down to nothing and there's no differentiation between us.
We have more capacity.
We're going to have more success statistically reproducing in a dictatorship than we will reproducing in freedom.
And this is one of the reasons why, we've talked a lot about immigration lately, one of the reasons why you get R-selected groups going into K-selected countries, Middle East to Europe, and the R's are not used to competing for women because they've grown up in a dictatorship where all capacity and inequalities are crushed down.
This is one of the reasons why there's a lot of frustration, a lot of anger, and, tragically, a lot of rape.
Because the R strategy, to some degree, if you're in a K society, the R strategy survives by raping a K woman.
Because they can't win them.
And the genes want to reproduce, and the genes don't care if that reproduction is voluntary or involuntary.
Ideally, it should be voluntary so that the resources get invested for the male and the female into the child.
But when you're faced with gene death, from a genetic standpoint, rape is a positive strategy.
And so if you think...
I mean, just...
I don't know.
I mean, where there's a real dictatorship...
What benefit does a low-quality person have genetically to move to a free society where he does not have access to the higher-quality women anymore?
Right?
So even if he does, he's going to be a lower-quality woman, which means, in general, the quality markers for a woman have to do with reproductive genetic success or health.
So the genes are going to get access only to a lower quality woman, whereas when everyone's flattened and everything's assigned, well, the Rs do much better proportionally and the Ks do much worse.
And it also struck me, of course, in 1984 that Julia, the woman that Winston Smith has this affair with, her job is to write pornography for the Rs, for the proletariat.
And that, of course, pornography is perfect because it perfectly stimulates the insatiable R sexual appetite, the insatiable R thirst for variety in sexual situations and so on.
And that's exactly as it should be for that society.
So, yeah, it's important to remember that for the R slaves, their enemy is not the state.
Their enemy is freedom.
Their enemy is freedom.
Because in freedom, they are deselected from the gene pool.
In slavery, they are pro-selected for the gene pool.
And so their genetics make them resist liberty far more than they would ever resist the state.
And that is why the welfare dysgenics and a variety of other dysgenic Situations within society have created a population that is genetically, fanatically invested upon the continuing enslavement of everyone around them.
And this is why you can't reach them through reason.
And if you look at other habits in the West, women are free to put on sexual displays of quality.
You know, that could be a bikini.
Or it could be a power suit or it could be an Hermes handbag or a Louis Vuitton suitcase.
They are free to put on displays of quality.
Whereas, of course, in the Middle East and in other cultures, women are not allowed to put on any displays of quality because the men don't want competition.
Right?
Right?
Competition-averse reproduction is essential to our based societies.
So men don't want other men to know how attractive their women are or not.
Everyone's got to be this big blob.
So I think that's as much as I sort of have to add to that aspect of things.
Has that been relatively helpful?
It has.
I'm curious.
I have two questions and they're kind of It's disparate in nature.
One is the role to which the constant surveillance Big Brother plays in regulating the society.
And then the other is, what do you think the gene motivation is for those that are in charge of the government, those that are running it?
Do you think they are case-elected, are selected, or just insane?
Well, the first is that the constant surveillance The constant surveillance is foundational to the R gene set because the R gene set is common to prey species.
And what a prey species doing all the time is scanning for danger.
So to the degree to which people lose privacy, that is exactly the degree to which you stimulate the growth and spread of the R gene set.
When people feel like they're always being watched, And this is as true in North Korea as it is in 1984, as it is in the celestial overlord of a lot of deities.
Always watching you.
Always potentially about to strike you down.
Always about to punish you, right?
Danger and death are omnipresent.
You must keep your wits and guard about you.
And if you can't find an external threat, then you can turn to thought crime and monitor yourself.
So, the predator-prey relationship exists within the R gene set.
There is a wolf far more common in the mind of the rabbit than in the field of rabbits.
Because, of course, in the anticipation of the wolf coming into the field of rabbits, the rabbits always have to be thinking about the possibility of predation.
That's why they're always darting around.
That's why they're always popping their heads up.
You see these nature films where the prairie dogs or the gophers pop their heads up and dart from place to place.
They're always thinking about being watched and being aggressed against.
And so when you come up with a society...
Where people feel watched and in danger at all times.
Well, that's perfect for the R gene set because that stimulates a high sex drive, that stimulates early sexual activity, that stimulates all that kind of good stuff that provokes the R gene set.
So I think the big brother is watching you.
I think that is the cold eye of Sauron kind of thing that is...
You know, this is why, you know...
This is sort of fundamental why...
K people, they go insane when they hear about things like the NSA, right?
The NSA is spying on everyone.
It's terrifying to the Ks.
It's appalling to the Ks.
But the Rs are like, yeah, sounds about right.
The Rs are like, well, if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to hear.
Right.
And that is a total fuck you to the case, right?
Yeah.
In a very fundamental way.
Let's get really down and gritty in this topic, right?
Ours fuck to martial marching band music.
Ours are turned on by policemen watching them.
No, it's true.
It's true because all of the situations that set up a feeling of being preyed upon is a giant turn-on to the R's.
Oh, they like it when you watch.
As long as you have some power over them, it can do them harm.
And so, you know, was it five plus million fingerprints just got stolen from United States government servers and...
Massive numbers of files get stolen and, like, they love this stuff.
It's hot for them.
It's sexy to them.
In a very literal way.
I'm not, oh, it's hot.
Literally, a police baton is the R's dildo.
It is.
Marching band music and watching those guys all marching in formation, like a bunch of scissors or the Hammers in Pink Floyd's, the wall marching, like the uniforms, like, God, I tell you, the Nuremberg rally was a giant finger yourself till your head explodes orgy for blonde-headed, R-selected German women.
I mean, they probably had spontaneous orgasms to Hitler's screaming.
Because that provokes such wild sexuality that being preyed on means you gotta have sex.
Wolves being around means let's fuck now because we might be dead tomorrow.
That fin de sequel, that end of the century, that end times, whatever provokes the end times, drives the sexual hunger of the are-selected.
This is why they pour into rallies.
This is why they get that collective orgy shit going on.
Whether it's people rutting like a bunch of stuck pigs at an Occupy Wall Street rally or out there at Burning Man or out there at Woodstock.
Whatever is going to erase identity and create a sense of danger is fantastic for the sex drive of the Rs.
Is that similar to where the The theme of constant war comes into play?
Well, certainly, if there's constant war, then you are provoking the R gene set, for sure.
Which is why you can see, from the 1960s onwards, as the R gene set has begun to take over, there is constant war.
I mean, America's been in so many wars, it's ridiculous.
It's become constant war.
It's become constant war.
And it's a turn-on.
Literally, it is an aphrodisiac for the R gene set to be watched, to be in danger, and to be preyed upon.
And which is why if you take away danger, you take away the sex drive of the Rs.
If you take away being preyed upon, if you take away fear, anxiety, right?
Then it removes their sex drive.
And I've certainly noticed, I've noticed this from when I was young.
I mean, socialist chicks.
Oh my God.
Easy and unsatisfying lays are left of center.
Turn to the left.
Let me spin you like a rotisserie.
And that sort of, the sex drive in the face of danger is, you know, the thrilled seekers, the thrilled junkies and so on.
It's really, it's a very powerful thing.
For these people.
And the opposite of danger is depression, right?
I mean, the R's are generally more depressed than the K's.
And so they need the stimulation of danger to get through the day.
But statism is their Viagra.
You know, a flag going up to some degree, not...
Not the patriotism, noble fight for your in-group case stuff, but the size and power of the state, the worship of pomp and circumstance, the veneration of the cult of the personality.
All of that danger predation affects the R-selected mindset like sticking your hand up their ass and tickling their prostate just before they come.
It's like the last few seconds of Michael Hutchins, right?
I mean, it's like strangle to death to get a better orgasm.
That's pure our selection.
Michael Hutchins, singer for InXS, just another way in which dating a single mother could be fatal.
He had an affair with Bob Geldof's wife and they got involved in all this messy legal stuff.
Anyway, so those are sort of my thoughts.
I'd like to move on to the next caller if you don't mind, but that's stuff to chew over and mull on if that makes sense.
Yeah, no, it sounds great.
Thanks for letting me ramble.
I appreciate that.
I hope it was helpful.
Anytime.
Thanks for going over all that stuff with me.
You're welcome.
All right.
Thanks, Ross.
Well, up next, we have a couple, Matthew and Christina.
They wrote in and said, the devastating repercussions on children raised in single-parent households is indisputable.
However, what do you think the advantages and disadvantages are of having more than two parents involved with the raising of a child?
Can quality and quantity exist together in the realm of love?
Can you explain why you think people who are case-selected are, by definition, monogamous?
That's from Matthew and Christina.
Hey, how are you guys doing?
Well, thanks.
Hi.
Hi, you guys can both hear off.
Yep.
So, just to lay this out for me, what kind of scenario are we talking about?
Polygamy?
Divorce and step-parents?
And what are we talking here?
Well, everything is, I would say, theoretical.
Alright, then why is it theoretical for you guys?
Because you can deal with any particular topic.
There's usually a reason we have an interest in something rather than something else.
Well, because, I guess, well, it's more Christina who has expressed interest in, I guess, polyrelationships, but not necessarily.
Polyamory?
Yeah, in polyamory.
Okay.
So, Christina, how are you doing?
Hi.
Hi.
So, what are your thoughts is that you'd like to...
Be with Matthew but have the option to be with other men?
Women?
Farm animals?
Right, yeah.
Just that why does being in one committed relationship need to restrict me from other relationships?
So what you're saying is that Matthew might not be enough for you?
In a way, yes.
Well, I mean, if I've just had the best meal I can have, I'm not sitting there saying, I want to go to another restaurant, right?
Well, the next day, yeah, you probably don't want to eat the same thing.
Okay, so when it comes, and you're really talking about sexual activity here, right?
Well, I mean, emotional intimacy or physical intimacy.
Well, emotional intimacy is not necessarily polyamory, right?
I mean, you can be friends with other people and share emotional intimacy with them.
That's not the same.
It comes down to sexuality because generally relationships, love relationships are around the regulation of sexuality because of the potential for creating children, right?
So emotional intimacy, you know, I don't care how intimate you are, you ain't getting anyone pregnant through words alone, right?
And so I think we're just, in this particular context, I don't think Matthew would say you can't have any friends outside the relationship, right?
That would be pretty unhealthy.
But I would assume that there may be some difference of opinion on who gets access to your hoo-hoo, right?
Sure, yeah.
I think I said that right, hoo-hoo?
I think that's Latin.
Anyway.
Well, I think there's two different kinds of bonds, and I wouldn't necessarily say that all pair bonds have to be sexual, right?
You can have social pair bonds.
What?
What do you mean social pair bonds?
Like you only have one friend, and that other friend can't friend other people?
I think, well, more just friends who were really close.
And the conversation that I wanted to have was sort of...
No, no, no.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
I think you just...
I was having a conversation with Christina, and I think you just kind of fogged in there.
I don't know what we're talking about now.
No, you can not have pair bonding and friendships, right?
Because you can have a friend, but no good friend will ever say to you, you can't have other friends, right?
True.
Okay, so forget about friendship.
We're talking about sexual access.
That is where monogamy tends to show up.
Can we at least agree on that part?
Well, yes, but your relationship with your partner is much, much more than just sex.
I get that, but sex is the one thing that differentiates it from what you can do with other people.
Sure.
Right?
You can be friends with other people.
You can go to dinner with other people.
You can go to see movies with other people.
You can go play tennis with other people.
You just can't bang them senseless, right?
That's the one thing that monogamy is defined by.
It's monogamy of naughty parts.
It's a monopoly of squishy bits.
It's about sex.
And again, I'm not trying to say that a love relationship is only about sex, but a love relationship, a pair bonded relationship, fundamentally is defined by A monopoly on sexual activity because everything else is fine, right?
You have friends and dates.
I mean, sorry, friends and not dates, but friends and dinners and movies and go bowling.
You can go rock climbing.
None of that is a violation of monogamy.
Sex outside the relationship, that's the very definition of the violation of monogamy.
Right.
And so why is that a bad thing?
What do you mean by a bad thing?
It's not evil, right?
So if I have a relationship with my wife, someone goes and has, like one of us goes and has an affair, that's not something you can shoot someone for.
It's not evil.
It's not the initiation of force, right?
Right.
But if you make the commitment to be monogamistic, right?
If you make the commitment to Circle around the squishy parts and keep all others at bay, then that's a promise, right?
That's a commitment.
And of course, in a marriage, the sexual monopoly is basically the vow, right?
And so if you make a promise to someone and you break that promise...
That's not evil.
It's aesthetically negative behavior in the parlance that we talk about here, but it's not evil.
So I just want to, and it's wrong.
Well, if you make a promise to be monogamous and you break that promise, then you've lied to someone about something very fundamental.
And if you go out and have sex with someone else after promising to be faithful to Christina, let's say, you go out and have sex with some woman, and then you don't tell her about it, Well, of course, you could be bringing home an STD. You could also be bringing home another STD called Psycho Crazy Woman Might Want to Stalk You or something like that.
Hey, I don't remember slashing my own tires.
Hey, where's my bunny, right?
So if you make a promise to be faithful to someone and you go out and have sex with someone else, it's bad enough.
You come home and tell them, well, okay, you deal with that.
But if you don't tell them, Then a lot of other messy complications can occur.
And then you're in a situation of continual lying to someone, to falsifying their existence, to falsifying your experience.
Something that's always on your mind is something you can never talk about with the other person.
You have to pretend to be intimate.
She's going to sense that something's wrong.
She's going to ask you what's wrong.
You're going to say nothing's wrong.
I'm just tired.
It's been a tough day at work.
I've got gout.
You know, whatever it is you're going to make up.
And so you are going to be continually lying to someone when the foundation of any intimate relationship must be honesty.
So you've broken a vow.
If you've had an affair, you're coming home and you're continuing minute by minute to break that vow by continuing to lie and obscure information against someone.
So that's really bad.
Okay, well, so that wasn't exactly the question.
The question does not have to do with breaking a commitment to monogamy.
The question has to do with entering into...
A relationship where it's not exclusive.
You're not committing yourself to exclusivity.
Right.
So if you go ahead of time and you say, I'm going to have sex with you and I'm going to have sex with other people, right?
Then you're not lying when you go and have sex with other people, right?
Right.
Right.
It's sort of like lending out your car.
Lend out your car.
Whatever, right?
I'm not using my vagina tonight, so yeah, you can go off and dip your wick somewhere else, right?
Right, yeah.
I think we all agree that dishonesty in a relationship is killer.
It's just going to destroy the relationship.
And do you guys want to have kids, do you think?
Yeah, we've talked about that, and we do.
Right.
Okay.
And so, of course, if you're having sex with multiple partners when you want to have kids, you, of course, in the past, when all this stuff evolved, one of the reasons it evolved is that there were no DNA tests, right?
So, one of the problems of multiple partners during the evolution of human romantic commitment was if you're having sex with a bunch of people, you can't ever find the guy who knows it's his kid.
And so, you understand that fundamentally, a woman always knows the kid is hers.
This comes out of an old Strindberg play.
But fundamentally, a woman knows always genetically that the kid is hers.
A man doesn't know for sure.
That the kid is his, right?
But men, of course, want to pass along their genes just as much as women do, but women automatically are passing along their genes by being pregnant.
But men have to be very careful to make sure that they're not being cuckooed, right?
Or cuckolded, right?
Which comes from the old, right, the cuckoo used to lay its egg in another bird's nest and the other birds would end up raising the cuckoo and remove it.
So if you invest 20 or 25 years of your life as a man into a child that is not yours, that is catastrophic genetically, right?
And of course, genetic preference for close kin is the foundation of evolution.
It's why we have big brains.
It's why we have this conversation.
It's all these things, right?
So, if you are a man and have any preference for yourself, then you want your child to be half yours.
And to do that, you need to have a commitment from the woman to forsake all others.
And the woman needs to earn that commitment and she needs to embody that commitment so that if the kid comes out, as it will sometimes happen, not looking much like you, you know, just, you know, it's your kid.
It's just, you know, genetic chance.
Then you trust and know that woman enough to know that the next 20-year investment you have in raising that kid is raising your kid.
And so that's why it evolved.
I'm sure you can sort of understand that, that genetically the men who did not ensure that the kids they were raising with their own kids, those genes, those preferences died out, right?
Because you'd be pouring your effort into raising another person's genetic material rather than promoting the success of your own genetic material.
So men who rejected monogamy in the past Now, women who rejected monogamy would also face significant barriers to reproductive success.
Because if you don't have monogamy from a man, a woman generally, before birth control, right, when all this stuff evolved, a woman generally would spend the vast majority of her time from 14 to 40 either being pregnant, recovering from pregnancy, breastfeeding, or being pregnant again.
There's a pattern here.
I'm trying to figure out what it is, right?
Now, this requires 20 or 30 years of massive resources investment from a man, right?
Because she's kind of busy with 12 kids and breastfeeding and diapers and cooking and cleaning and diapers.
And I think I may have mentioned something about diapers, right?
So she needs the man to go out there and get her a big giant house.
And she needs the man to go out and bring home 10 times the amount of food that he needs to eat for himself.
And so she needs the commitment from the man.
And so women who were not monogamous, Would generally tend to produce kids that no individual man had much investment in.
And that's why men and women would date, would get engaged, would get married, and then would be monogamous.
Because that gave each individual's genetic material the best chance of...
Surviving and flourishing.
And those people who turned away from monogamy ended up being weeded out of the gene pool over time.
Not permanently and not for everyone and not forever of course because nature is nothing if not playful.
But that's sort of the fun.
So if you want to have kids I guarantee you that the vast likelihood is that if you are not monogamous and if you Matthew end up with Christina getting pregnant by some other guy's kids, then your commitment to the protection of that child will be vastly diminished much to the detriment of that child.
Well, I don't think that it's fair to equate monogamy or equate non-monogamy with a lack of commitment.
You can still be committed to someone and...
You can be committed to multiple people.
Well, but it's like I didn't even speak earlier.
We're not talking about something as nebulous as commitment.
I'm committed to my cell phone plan because they won't let me out, right?
So what?
I can go buy another cell phone and nobody takes me to court.
You're saying you're going to be less committed to the kid, right?
Well, no, but you said you can be committed to multiple people, but we're not talking about something as nebulous and open-ended as the term commitment.
But statistically, the best person to protect and nourish a child is the biological parent.
And we see this because when stepfathers or unrelated boyfriends come floating through children's lives, they are 30 to 32 times more likely to be abused by non-biological relatives or non-biologically related people, right?
They are incredibly in danger Because the taboos against incest, so for sexual abuse, the taboos against incest aren't there.
And the biological investment isn't there.
And of course, you know, the great cry of stepchildren when the step parent or the stepdad tries to tell them what to do.
You're not my dad.
You can't tell me what to do.
Well...
Kind of a bit of truth in that, right?
And so the relationships in general, and lots of exceptions, right?
But the relationships, the quality of the relationships statistically are the very highest between biological parents and offspring, right?
Directly related, half you, half me.
That is the best environment statistically for the children.
And it would be crazy if it wasn't.
Like evolution would make no sense if people had no preference for more closely related genetic material.
Well, I do think that there's a biological preference, and you see that in just the way that kids gravitate to their parents, right?
They want to imitate their parents, but that doesn't really have anything to do with philosophical raising of children.
I don't know what that means.
Well, you're always telling people that go beyond the biology.
It shouldn't just matter that this person is related to you in blood.
Wait, sorry.
Whenever I told people to go beyond the biology, I didn't talk yourself out of being hungry.
I mean, maybe I did.
I just don't remember making those arguments.
I'm talking about...
No unchosen obligations, that sort of thing.
That's nothing to do with this.
Because having a child is a chosen obligation.
And the choice to be monogamous or not is a chosen obligation.
So you're really grasping at straws here.
And is that because you want to be able to have sex with people other than Christina?
Or Christina wants to have sex with people other than you?
Or is it both?
Well, I actually don't want to have sex with anyone else.
But...
Christina is the wandering spirit, so let's get back to her.
And you need to not talk for a bit, if that's all right.
Okay, Christina, are you there?
Yes.
Yes.
All right.
But I will say I'm interested in the theoretical data.
No, no, no, no, no, no!
Time to talk.
Time to talk to Christina.
All right.
Time to talk to Christina.
Manage your anxiety without me.
All right.
So, Christina, what is it that you want in another sexual relationship that you wouldn't get from Matthew?
Well, it's more just, it's not like at the moment I'm interested in pursuing other people, but it's something I foresee in the future as a possibility that I'll meet someone who could be a No, no, no.
Come on.
We're talking about sex.
Let's talk about what it is.
We're talking about eating and you're talking about the decor, right?
We're talking about sex.
You want to have sex with other men.
Not have people in your life, because I'm sure Matthew wouldn't ever say, you can't ever talk to anyone with a penis, even at a funeral, even if they're in the casket.
Sorry, penis.
No eulogies for guys, right?
He's going to have to be friends with men, right?
So we're talking about sexual appetite, that in the future, you would like to have other men have sex with you other than Matthew, right?
Yes, possibly.
And I want to leave the relationship open to that possibility.
And I don't see any downsides to that as long as I set the same standards for other partners that I do for my primary partner.
What are those standards?
Someone who will be committed and...
Well, committed?
Wait, wait, hang on.
Hang on.
The whole reason you're in a relationship, sexual relationship with someone else is because you're not primarily committed to, right?
You're not fundamentally committed to Matthew.
So I don't see how commitment can be.
No, that's not true.
That's not true.
Just because I'm committed to someone else, I can be committed to more than one person.
Okay, but then you need to explain to me what the word committed means then.
Meaning not...
Like, I'm committed to this conversation, which means I'm not hang gliding at the same time.
Right?
If you're trying to do two jobs at the same time, you're not as committed to one job, right?
If you're fully focused on one task, you're committed to that task.
If you interrupt that task to do something else, you're no longer committed to the first task, right?
So, just help me understand what you mean by the word commitment.
I mean, it's entirely possible I have no clue what I'm talking about, and I'm really misunderstanding something, so I'm willing to be schooled.
Well, for example, I mean, I'm not sure exactly how I would want it to work out, but like polyamorous parents who all live together in the same house, right?
It's a long-term, lifelong, committed relationship, meaning you're not planning to abandon that person.
You're planning to maintain relationships.
Contact and keep up the relationship, right?
There's no reason that has to be exclusive to one person.
No, no, but first of all, I don't know what planning to abandon means, but you are certainly planning for the possibility of falling in love with someone else, right?
I mean, if you're going out and having sexual relationships with other people, then you might fall in love with those other people.
It doesn't mean I fall out of love with Matt.
Okay, so let me just sort of make sure I understand this.
So let's say that you and Matt have been together for five years or ten years or whatever and you have two children and you love Matt, right?
Right.
Okay, so then you want to go and have sex with another guy.
Now it can't be because you love that guy more than Matt because you know him less than Matt, right?
Because you're new to that relationship, right?
Sure, I don't know if you can measure love like that.
Yes, you can.
Yeah, you can.
So, for instance, I've known my wife for like 13 or 14 years.
Now, let's say I meet a woman and a week later I say, I love her more than my wife, right?
Okay, no, that wouldn't make sense, but that doesn't mean you can't love this other woman.
Well, no, I didn't say couldn't love.
What I'm saying is that, well, first of all, you can't fall in love in two weeks.
That's just lust, right?
But...
Let's say that you're with Matt and you love Matt like 95%, right?
Now, would you say that the quality of sex is related to the amount of affection or love?
I can't say I know.
I don't know.
What?
Sure, probably.
Do you love Matt now?
Yes.
Do you think that sex...
If you had the choice...
Okay, let's go to the extremes.
If you had the choice to have sex with someone you love or someone you hate, which would you choose?
Love, obviously.
Okay, I think you're right.
You don't have to choose.
We've got some thought exercises going here.
If you had the choice to have sex with someone you loved more or someone that you loved less, which would you choose?
Well, it depends because if I have sex with the person I love more every day, then maybe I want to mix it up.
So you want to have sex with someone you love less because you know that person a lot less time.
So you find that person perhaps more physically attractive, but you don't love the person as a person as much as you love Matthew because you don't know the person that long.
Possibly, but that doesn't mean they don't have other qualities that are great.
Like, it doesn't mean I can't grow to love them as much as I love him.
There's potential.
But those qualities would have to be qualities not present in Matt.
So let's say Matt is 100% honest with you, right?
So somebody else who you...
And Matt has been honest with you for 10 years straight, right?
You can't meet someone who's going to have more of the virtue called honesty than Matthew, right?
Well, so there's the core virtues, and I would expect them to have the same core virtues that I would require in anyone.
And what would those core virtues be?
What?
And what would those core virtues be?
Well, honesty, self-awareness, you know, self-knowledge, things like that.
Are you saying that...
No, no, Matt, no, no, hang on.
Still chatting with Christina.
Don't make me tase you, bro.
Okay, honesty, we've got self-knowledge.
Okay, what else?
Well, compassion, empathy...
Things like that.
Compassion.
Okay.
Empathy.
Anything else?
Curiosity.
Ambition.
That's not really a virtue.
Okay.
You can be curious about bomb making, right?
What else?
I can't think of anything else.
I'm sure there's more.
I guess I don't know how to articulate them.
So that's fine.
So you've known...
I mean, these are all largely female virtues, if you don't mind me saying so.
Compassion, empathy, moral courage, bravery, you know, you don't have the dude stuff, but that's okay.
I mean, you're not dude enabled, so, you know, that's fine.
But, so, when it comes to, if you've known Matthew for 10 years, and he's got 100% honesty, 100% compassion, 100% empathy, he's gentle with your kids, he's gentle with you, he's a great guy, all of the virtues there, right?
Well, those are proven and tried and tested virtues.
Now, when you meet somebody new, somebody could be faking those virtues.
They might have them inconsistently.
They might have them while they're on their meds.
They might only have them when they've got a low buzz of alcohol on.
Any number of things could happen, right?
They could be faking.
That's assuming that I am not perceptive enough to see that.
Well, sure.
I mean, of course, by definition, right?
It's not fraud if you could see it.
I get it, right?
But people do fool other people, right?
I mean, you wouldn't believe the number of people...
Right, so the fact that you can fool me doesn't mean that it's not worth it.
It doesn't mean I can't take the time to see through that.
Obviously, it wouldn't be something to rush into.
But that's no argument that there wouldn't be something there that's worthwhile in pursuing, you know?
Well, no, because if Matthew has these virtues that have been proven over 10 years to be 100%, then whoever you meet...
Is going to have less of these virtues by definition, right?
Less that I know about.
That doesn't mean they don't have the same virtues that he has.
Right.
But if sex is better because of virtue and Matt already has the proven virtues, then by definition sex is going to be better with Matt than with some new person.
I guess I would...
I don't...
I don't know if...
Like, the amount of time that you know somebody is the only thing that factors into the quality of the sex.
I also think...
No, no, no.
Because, no, come on.
I didn't say the amount of time you know someone.
What I'm saying is, if you've had ten years of seeing Matt display wonderful virtues, and you have ten years of experience knowing what each other likes sexually, like, whoa, wrong hole!
I mean, that's not...
Maybe what you want, right?
And so, if you have 10 years of proven virtue, and you have 10 years of established love, and you have 10 years of experience experimenting and knowing what feels best for the other person,
then help me understand how sex with A stranger who doesn't have any experience in what you want, and who certainly cannot match, in your experience, the proven virtues of 10 years of Matt's moral excellence, how can that sex be better?
How could that be something that you would want from somebody else?
Okay, number one, there can be a value to novelty.
But you can get novelty with that!
No, not necessarily, but it's not a usual excuse.
It's not a zero-sum game.
It doesn't have to be either one or the other.
There's no reason for that.
I'm sorry, I don't know what that means.
It's not like having sex with someone else is going to detract from my relationship with Matt.
It's not like It's not like they have to compete between each other, because I can do both.
I don't have to compare the two.
I can say, well, this one person has virtues and values, and I want to be intimate with this person.
And so does Matt, obviously, but that doesn't mean I can't get close to some other person and have sex with them.
All right.
So, Matt, sorry to put you on the sidelines for a moment.
Can we just drag you back in for a sec?
Sure.
Okay.
So, let's say you're married to or committed to Christina, and she's been just with you for 10 years, and you have children together, you have a life together, and so on.
And then she sort of sits down and says, you know, while I met a guy online, I'm going out to have sex with him tonight.
How do you feel?
That would seem pretty premature to me.
I would feel anxiety, some uneasiness, and I'd want to know why she's doing that.
It would not be something you would welcome, right?
Well, if we...
Come on.
Look, dude, just pretend it's you and me talking.
Let's pretend we're in a locker room that smells vaguely of mildew and man juice, right?
You and I talking man to man.
The woman you love, the mother of your children, says that she wants to go out and ride some other dude.
What are your thoughts?
Do you say, wow, I can't wait?
Yay!
Can you film it?
Right?
I mean, seriously.
The sex part...
Doesn't make me feel good, but...
Well, what does it make you feel?
What are your feelings about this?
I mean, if it's for the sake of my children...
What?
What?
Where do the children come into this?
I think children are everything when it comes...
I mean, they're the center of all sex.
What does Christina go in and having sex with another guy have to do with...
For your kids.
Go bang a stranger for the kids, honey.
Because he could be a second dad.
Why would he want to be a second dad?
Because people aren't determined solely by their evolutionary instincts.
There's more to people than that.
And sometimes they want to join a family not just because it's their genes that are passed on.
Maybe they want to join us.
Maybe we want to be poly parents.
Maybe we all want to live together.
Not everyone wants to have their own kids.
Some people just want to...
Take more of a periphery role, right?
You mean sort of be a half-parent, like in the attic or the basement or like a shed in the backyard?
Like maybe live in the car in the garage or something like that?
Well, I think this gets to another issue, which is that...
No, let's get back to how you felt when she said she wanted to go have sex with another man.
I'm sure I would feel jealousy.
So it would be a negative experience for you, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
And the reason I'm saying for that is that Christina said that it would have no negative effects, right?
Yeah.
Now, empathy was a virtue for her, or compassion and empathy.
So, Christina, I would submit that if compassion and empathy are a value for you, and it would make Matthew feel bad for you to go and have sex with another guy, then you should act on your values of compassion and empathy and not do it.
Or if you go to the other guy and you'll only have sex with him if he's virtuous and he has compassion and empathy and you also have honesty as your standard and you go to this other guy and say, well, I'd really like to have sex with you.
Then the other guy, but I'm married.
Then the other guy would say, well, how does your husband feel about this?
And you, because you value honesty, would say he feels pretty bad about this.
In fact, I think he feels terrible and we don't know what's going to happen from here.
Then the guy who has, hang on, the guy who has, hang on, the guy who has honesty and self-knowledge and compassion and empathy will say, I don't want to have sex with you if it's going to make your husband feel bad.
Okay, well that's quite obvious.
But the reason Matt and I have started discussing this now, even though it's not a potential...
It's not going to happen anytime in the near future is because we're trying to work through those feelings together and just because he feels negatively about it now doesn't mean that's not going to change.
So obviously I know I would not do something like that until Matt and I had discussed it extensively and made sure we were both okay with it.
Maybe the guy has to go on a date with both of us.
I don't know.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
I don't even know what planet I'm on.
Okay.
All right.
We need to circle back a little bit here.
So, as long as Matt was uncomfortable with it, you wouldn't do it.
No, I would not.
Okay.
Okay.
So, Matt, then you would have to be honest and say, unless I'm perfectly okay with it, in fact, happy.
You can't be neutral about something like this, because there's a huge risk involved.
Because if she goes out and she finds some guy who rocks her world, blows her socks off, and she has orgasms that put her into low orbit...
That's going to have some destabilizing effect on your relationship because she's going to be really drawn to that guy.
That's going to interfere with her availability as a wife and a mother and all that kind of stuff, right?
So this is a destabilizing event for sure.
Either the relationship with the other man...
I mean, that's like saying, well, I've used this courier company for 10 years.
They've delivered every single time on time.
But now there's some new courier company that opened up across town.
I'm just going to go try them.
It's like, well, if you have something that works in a stable, why would you?
Because you can have both.
You don't have to choose between one or the other.
No, but if the courier company is already delivering everything that you want on time at the price you want, why would you want some other courier company?
I mean, he can't do, like, absolutely everything.
What do you mean everything?
There are certain things that...
Does he draw the line at goats?
I mean, what does that mean, everything?
I mean, there are certain qualities that he doesn't possess that other people will possess.
And what are those qualities?
I mean, they're not necessarily the core values, but they're just other things.
Abs?
What are you talking about here?
Things like just certain shared interests or things like that.
No, no.
Shared interests you get with friends.
You do not have to bring vagina to the shared interest party.
Or just a different personality, you know?
Okay, but you're not saying anything.
What is it that you would want to have sex with another guy for that you're not getting from Matt?
Well, I mean, I don't exactly know, but just a different personality, different character traits to bring to...
But you're just using the word different.
It doesn't mean anything, right?
And I know exactly what's going on here, if you want me to tell you.
I mean, I can tell you what's going on.
What do you think is going on?
Oh, I know what's going on.
I know what's going on.
Okay.
Go ahead.
Have you ever listened to Adele?
The singer?
The singer.
Just a couple.
You probably heard her on the radio.
Like, you can't get away.
She's like a sky virus.
You can't escape, right?
Although, she's a good singer.
Anyway.
So, have you ever heard of the phrase hypergamy?
I believe so.
Hypergamy is a woman's desire to get the highest quality mate that she can possibly get.
And it's perfectly natural and it's perfectly healthy.
Right?
Like, a man, in general, wants to get...
The most fertile and attractive woman that he can get.
And a woman in general wants to get the most successful, whatever that means, can be a variety of things.
You want to get the best that you can.
Nothing wrong with it.
Like everyone wants to get the best job they can possibly get.
Everyone wants to get the best pay that they can possibly get.
Everyone wants to get the best car that they can possibly get.
But of course we all have to make compromises, right?
Not everyone can get everything that they want.
Everything is finite, right?
We get the best person that we can get based upon who we are at the time.
So, Christina, I'm going to assume that Matthew is the best guy that you can date at the moment.
Yes.
Because if there was another guy who was better who wanted to date you and you genuinely believed that person was better for you, you'd be dating that person, right?
Right.
Right.
Now, the problem with dating when kids are going to be involved is this.
A man, when looking at a woman, can judge her fertility quite easily, right?
Right.
healthy, shiny hair, you know, hip to waist ratio, all of the markers that are generally, even features, like all the markers that are generally considered physically attractive are all the markers for fertility and good genetic health, right?
Now, it's possible, of course, some entometriosis, premature ovarian failure, could be any number of things that might cause infertility on the part of the woman.
But the man has to take a bit of a gamble, but he has some particular clue that she's not 80.
right?
He's not going to be trying to squeeze children out of a cryptkeeper or something, right?
Now, a woman, though, I assume you guys, you sound fairly young, right?
Is that right?
Yeah, 20s.
20s.
Okay, perfect.
Good.
Then I'm still potentially right.
So a woman...
Matt, I'm going to assume you're not fantastically wealthy, right?
Well, actually, no.
Damn, don't say it, man!
Because if you were fantastically wealthy, then my thesis would evaporate.
But anyway, but you have potential, right?
You're not like...
reading guy who can't find suits.
You've got potential, right?
You've got smarts, you've got some desire for learning, you've got some, you know, potential, right?
So a man has to choose a woman who's fertile, but a woman has to choose a man who has potential.
Because by the time a woman has invested sort of two or three or four years or five years into a relationship with a man, her fertility is starting to fade, or at least beginning to, or at least the value of it is beginning to fade.
And she has to invest into a man a lot before she finds out whether he's going to provide enough resources for her to raise her kids.
Right?
Because Matt's income, hopefully, is going to go up over time.
But, of course, Christina, your sexual market value is going to go down over time.
Right.
So, yeah.
So, Christina, what's going on here.
Is that you're basically saying, well, Matt, what if a guy comes along who can give me more resources than you?
And by resources, I'm not just talking money.
It can be any number of things, right?
But a woman has to find a man to commit to, and a woman...
Who thinks she might be able to do better wants to leave the door ajar a little bit.
Right?
You've heard of this friend zoning, right?
That the woman keeps a friend zoned guy around just in case.
So you know those old things where guys and men and women in movies they say, oh, you know, if we're both single when we're 40 we promise to marry each other.
You gotta keep a backup.
And it's a perfectly valid reproductive strategy for a woman.
And It's just up to the man whether he's willing to accept being a potential also ran in the major and main competition in life.
So you in the future, Christina, think or believe that there's a possibility that you might be able to do better than Matthew or Matthew plus some other guy will be better for you.
But that's not what works for children.
What works for children is you commit.
And if you can't commit to Matthew, then you don't date Matthew and you wait until you come across a guy where the idea of having sex with someone else is not appealing.
How do you know that that doesn't work for children?
How do I know that...
Having multiple men around.
Well, whether they're around or not, so let's just say your kids are sort of 8 and 10, right?
And you meet some guy and you go off and have an affair with him.
Are you more available or less available to your children?
Maybe he moves in with me.
No, no, no.
Forget before he moves in.
We're talking about the dating part.
Hopefully you don't meet some guy and have him move in the next damn day.
Hopefully you're going to at least vet this guy for a year before you allow him around your children, knowing the risks of non-biological pseudo-parents around children.
You've got to vet the guy for at least a year, right?
So, you're dating and having weekends away and vetting this guy for...
So we'll hang out with the kids.
Let me finish my thought.
Let me finish my thought.
So you're dating and vetting this guy and going for weekends away and all that.
For a year, are you more available, the same, or less available to your children while you're having this affair?
Well, so my children are my first priority and I wouldn't do something that would make me less available.
Okay, then you can't have affairs!
By definition, if you're off having an affair, you are not there for your children.
You can have an affair and be around your children.
No, you can't.
I hope you're not having sex in front of your children with strangers.
You can't.
You cannot have an affair and be with your children at the same time.
Well, I don't know why we...
No, no, no.
Still talking to Christina.
She'll survive.
She's a big girl.
I can't chime in?
No, no.
This is something I'm trying to talk about with Christina.
This is basic math.
You cannot be in two places at the same time.
It's called an alibi, right?
You cannot...
Have an affair with another guy outside the home and still be equally there for your children.
No, I don't think that's true.
What's not true?
Reality?
You can be around your children and have the guy around.
It's not like you're having sex 24-7 with this guy.
Because if you were having sex with your husband and you're still around your kids, that doesn't make any sense.
Okay, if you're not in the house and your children are in the house, are you physically with them?
No, but I can be in the house.
You can be in the house having the affair?
Okay, well...
Come on, Christina, let's not talk at this level.
First of all, you can't bring the man into the house until you've thoroughly vetted him to know he's not going to be dangerous to your children, right?
So the initial months, at least, of your affair must be out of the house, right?
Can we at least agree on that part?
Okay, whatever.
Okay, so then you're having an affair outside the house for many months where you are physically not there and available to your children.
Now...
Matthew then gets the fun task, or you get the fun task, when your children at the age of 8 or 10 say, where's mommy?
Oh, mommy's having sexy time with her special friend this weekend, or whatever, right?
I mean, you either lie to your children, or you tell them the truth, which is terrifying for them.
Because they're looking at the pair bonding stability of their parents, right?
Sure.
And what's going to happen to your children's respect for you if you're basically abandoning them to go have sex with some guy they don't even know?
Okay, let's...
I'm still talking.
Still talking to Christina.
What's that?
Still talking to Christina.
I don't know if she's talking to you.
She can tell me that she doesn't want to talk to me anymore.
That's fine.
You're not listening to what I said.
You can just take what you said and go with it.
No, go ahead.
What?
Me?
You said I wasn't listening to what you said.
I'm sorry if I spoke over you, but I didn't hear.
Go ahead.
What I said is that I think maybe our conceptions of an affair are different.
I'm just thinking of just someone...
You know, someone you're friends with, someone who knows your kids, you hang out with them at home, hang out with them other times.
You know, it's not like...
I don't think it has to be an affair in the traditional sense of what that means.
So, he's just a friend of the family who's hanging around with your home?
Something like that, yeah.
That's not an affair, then.
Well, right, but it can be romantic.
It can be, you know, a sexual relationship.
Then it's an affair.
He can still be around the home.
I can still be where I need to be.
It's not mutually exclusive like that.
Yes, it is.
Okay.
I don't think we're going to get any...
Obviously, the sexual part of the affair can't be in the house with your children home.
We at least agreed on that.
Do I have sex with my husband in the house with the children home?
What's the difference?
Well, um...
Not in the same room.
But the thing is, you already know your husband.
You've established the relationship.
Right?
So, I don't know about other guys out there, of course.
I can't speak for all men.
But if I want to embark on a hot sexual affair with a woman, if I was single, and she said, why don't you come over and watch The Little Mermaid with my kids?
I'm like, that doesn't sound like a lot of action to me.
It sounds like I'm a babysitter.
Okay, well, that's obviously not the kind of affair I want.
I'm not thinking like traditional...
What people do.
Okay.
Let's say you meet this guy.
I don't know where you meet him.
Where would you meet him?
A coffee shop or something?
Where would you meet this guy?
Sure.
I don't know.
Okay.
Let's just say you meet him at a coffee shop.
I don't know if you wear a ring or whatever, but I assume it would come up.
If you're romantically, even remotely interested in each other, you have to tell him you're married very quickly, right?
Okay, maybe it's someone I've known for a long time.
Maybe it's someone I've been friends with for years, and so I already know him.
No, no, that's too easy.
That's too easy.
And do you have someone like that in mind at the moment?
Possibly.
Oh, you do?
No, I mean, nothing...
No, no, this is great.
I'll give you this one.
Okay, so there's another guy you've known for years that you're thinking of having an affair with at the moment.
Well, not exactly.
Come on.
What are you talking about?
Are you backing off?
Do you want to retract the statement?
Yeah, I want to retract the statement.
Because it's a false statement or because you just don't want to talk about it?
I don't want to talk about it.
So you do have a guy that you want to have an affair with.
Have you told Matthew?
No, there's people who are potentially, right?
Potentially.
Okay.
So there are guys around that you've known for years that you might want to have an affair with.
Sure, yes.
And have you told Matthew this?
Yes.
So, Matthew, you know the guys that she might want to have an affair with.
I don't know them personally.
Wait, they've been around...
Your girlfriend for years, but you don't know them?
Well, we've only been dating for a few months.
So you know that there are guys who are floating around her that she wants to have, or she might want to have an affair with.
They're a candidate for an affair at some point in the future.
Yes.
And how do you feel about that when she told you?
Well, when I initially found out, it was upsetting to me.
And we talked about it for a while when we first got together, and she – because I wasn't comfortable with it, she agreed to be exclusive.
It's very impressive.
As long as I was open to considering polyamory.
And I agreed to that.
I have been considering it.
But for her, not for you in particular, right?
Yes.
Right.
So this means that there's an imbalance of sexual attraction here.
What that means is that you are reaching too high up the scale of feminine attractiveness and you're willing to let her sleep around to make up for your own relative lack of attractiveness.
Listen, do you think if you were Brad Pitt, she'd be like, OK, but I really want to be able to bang some guy from high school, right?
I mean, there must be some mismatch.
Because if you're willing to do something, Matthew, that makes you, if you're willing to consider something that goes against your sensibilities, that goes against what you want, it must be because you feel that you must compromise in order to maintain her attraction to you.
I mean, if she had that conversation with me, oh my god, it would be like, no, not in a million years.
And the fact that you even think that's possible, if you want to be with me in some sort of committed relationship, that you can go and have sex with other guys, I don't even know what to say.
Like, that is absolutely a deal-breaker.
Because I would be heartbroken if you wanted to go out and have sex with other guys, and you've got to come home with some other guy's cologne all over your body.
And with that slow-walking, loose-lipped, post-orgasmic happiness that you didn't get from me.
Ew!
I love you.
I want to be with you.
I'm committed to you.
I expect the same thing in return.
Or you've got to pay for your own coffee and I'm out of here.
But you don't feel confident enough to take that stand, to make that statement, to uncomplicate your life.
Because I'm telling you, man, Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, I don't care how pretty she is, obviously you do, and you're still in the haze of not thinking straight because you're in the first six months of a romantic relationship, which means your brain has turned into a self-flagellating dick-knacked squid.
So, she's giving you this challenge which says, hey, am I pretty enough that you're willing to massively complicate your life and break your heart just to be with me?
What's my vagina worth to you?
Is it pure gold?
Are you willing to sacrifice your own future happiness and stability just to be with me?
And you don't feel confident enough to say, hell no!
You want to be the mother of my children?
You want to be with me?
And then you want to go bang other guys and bring them around our kids and have me explain that?
And maybe you like them better or maybe you like them worse or maybe you bring home an STD or God knows what.
Maybe it's not even he wears a condom but there's bedbugs in his bed crawling out of his ass.
I don't know.
But no, that's not going to be part of my life.
It's not going to be part of my future.
I love you.
I'm not sharing.
Sorry!
Doesn't work that way for me.
Because this is not something that you want.
And the only reason that you'd be willing to even consider it is because you feel that you're not bringing enough to the table, just as you are, so you have to bring other penises around, potentially, just to keep her interest.
And I'm sorry to be so blunt, and I wish that there were people who'd already told you this before, but that's what you need to hear.
How do you know it's not in my interest?
Thank you.
For your woman to have sex with other men?
Yeah.
Because your feelings told you that right away.
Because we have evolved for monogamy.
Because your genetic material is precious to you and the stability and happiness of your children are precious to you and the stability and happiness of your relationship are precious to you.
Well, again, you're assuming that I'm going to be unhappy.
You are going to be unhappy.
You already know that, because you told me that.
That the idea of Christina having sex with other guys makes you unhappy.
This is not a theoretical thing.
Well, it is theoretical, because I, well...
No!
You already had the feelings!
And she said, will you crush those feelings to enhance my future potential sexual access to men I find more attractive than you?
And you're like, okay, because you're pretty.
Oh, God, please don't.
No, no, I want to understand those feelings.
But you're not, because you said you're willing to consider...
She's walking out the door, you know she's gonna go and have sex for a weekend with another guy, and your kids are saying, where's mommy going?
How, in what potential scenario is that not a terrible fucking day?
On what planet is that not like the worst thing ever?
Sorry.
Mom's off chasing penis.
I hope she'll be back.
Probably will.
Let's play hide-and-go-seek.
She's off playing hide-the-salami.
Let's play hide-and-go-seek.
How is that not a terrible, terrible day?
What does it mean?
Where's she going?
She's going to go kiss other men.
But she kisses you, Daddy.
Not this weekend she doesn't.
What if that guy's my best friend?
He ain't your best friend if he's banging your wife.
I don't even know why I need to say these things, but I do.
Because he knows it's gonna fuck up your life.
He knows that it's gonna make your children cry.
He knows that it's gonna break your heart.
He knows that it's gonna crush your pride like a meteor from hell landing on an ant.
Which still has more testosterone than you, apparently.
So there's no friend on the planet who says, love you, Matt.
The way I'm going to express it is bend your wife over to the sink.
Well, you know, it sounds like you have an idea of what polyamorous relationships are, and No, no, no.
Let's get back to you.
Sorry, man.
I hate to do this.
Don't give me this theoretical crap.
You're just thumbing through a dictionary of abstract defensiveness and obfuscation.
Your feelings when your wife is heading out...
For a sex weekend with another guy.
And he ain't your friend.
Because if he is your friend, he ain't banging the mother of your children.
Alright?
So that you have to explain to your kids where mommy's going that weekend, that man is not your friend.
That man is selfish and greedy, lacks compassion, lacks empathy, and is willing to destabilize an entire family for the sake of getting his rocks off.
That is not a quality individual.
There are plenty of women out there who'll have sex with guys who don't have children, who don't have a husband.
The fact that he's willing to choose this woman means that he either can't get a woman who's unentangled or doesn't give a crap that she's entangled and has children and is willing to just go and get his rocks off anyway.
So don't give me this what he's a friend.
He is not your friend.
He is your enemy.
What if the condom breaks, man, and she gets pregnant?
What then?
What then?
What if you don't really like the guy that much and she's carrying his child?
Well, yeah, we would want to make sure that wouldn't happen.
You can't make sure that didn't happen because those buggers swim.
And condoms break and condoms fail.
I mean, you've heard this show, I don't know if you've heard this show a bunch of times, and the number of women are like, Yeah, I think you can get devices that...
Okay, what if it's just an STD? Maybe he doesn't even know he's got it.
Are you gonna have people tested every single time?
Ooh, that's romantic.
Blood sample, two weeks, then we'll have sex.
Oh wait, something could happen in those two weeks.
Because we're all polyamorous, so great.
Gonna go in with a hazmat suit?
Mmm.
I can't feel anything.
This is like having sex with a burlap sack in a mountain.
You don't have any of those complications having sex with each other.
It's fun.
It's relaxed.
You know each other.
You know what you like.
You're willing to experiment.
There's trust.
There's virtue.
Don't have to explain anything to your kids.
Other than, I don't know, mommy rhythmically stubbed her toe last night.
Sorry about the noise, right?
But you don't have any of those complications.
Have sex with each other?
It's beautiful.
Well, you said I lack confidence, but the way I see it, I'm showing a confidence in my selection of her.
No.
No, no.
I get what you're saying.
Like, I'm so confident you can go out and bang other guys.
You'll always come back to me, right?
No.
No.
You're afraid that she's not going to be with you if you say that affairs are off the table.
You're afraid of asserting yourself.
That's not true, because I already said that once.
I understand.
Oh, come on, man.
Don't weasel me.
Don't Clinton me, bro.
I did, though.
Because you already said that she said that she wanted it, but you said, I don't want it, and she said, will you be willing to consider it?
Right?
And you said, okay.
Because if you'd said, no, I'm not willing to consider it.
If you want to be with me, you got to be with me.
If you want to have my children, you can't be tarting around with other guys.
Again, the fact that we have to have these conversations is just so wild to me.
No!
No, you can't go and have sex with other guys because we're a family.
I'm not explaining your boomerang hoo-hoo to our children.
Why not?
Thank you.
What is the benefit to you?
Tell me what is the benefit to you.
How does this make your life better?
Forget what she wants for the moment.
Just for the moment.
Help me understand, Matt.
How does your wife having sex with other men, the mother of your children, going out, being unavailable to you, unavailable to your children, getting entangled with some other guy, how is that a benefit to you?
Forget what she wants.
Forget what she needs.
Forget her preferences.
Just for the moment.
If you can explain to me how it is a benefit for you, regardless of her feelings, I'm open to hearing it.
It's not about me.
It's about the children.
Oh my God!
Do you have an identity?
Can you not know what is good for you?
Explain to me how it is good for you, for your wife to have affairs.
You mean if we don't have children?
No, no.
Just having kids.
Let's put the kids...
I only fundamentally care because you're thinking of having kids.
Otherwise, it's like, I don't care.
Do what you want, right?
But if there are kids involved, I'm all over it, right?
So you have two children.
You have two children.
You explain to me, as a husband and a father, what is the benefit of your wife having affairs?
More people involved in the kid's life.
You don't have to have affairs for that.
They're called playdates.
They don't have to come with dildo cakes.
They're called grandparents, cousins, neighbors, people you meet at Starbucks who you don't have sex with but rather introduce to your children because they have children, people from school, people from the Boy Scouts, people from the playground, lots of people that you don't have to pour Crisco on.
Right, but those relationships aren't going to be primary in your childhood.
Really?
Grandparents aren't going to be primary.
Is that your theory?
Some guy who wants to have sex with your wife is going to provide a more quality family interaction for your children than their own grandparents.
Yeah.
You are mad.
I don't even know what to say.
The idea that some guy who wants to fuck your wife is going to provide a more quality experience for your children than their own grandparents is mental.
Unless your grandparents are insane and evil.
Well, we don't need to go there. - Okay.
Okay, but people who are there for the children are more likely to be positive to the children than people who are there to have sex with your wife.
Because they're not there for the children, they're there to have sex with your wife.
Because if they were there for the children and not to have sex with your wife, they'd be a family friend your wife wouldn't be having an affair with.
Why is that?
Why is what?
Well, how do you know that they'd just be a family friend?
I don't know what that means.
Why is that like a sign of sex?
Oh, because if somebody's friends of yours and enjoys spending time with your children and doesn't want to have sex with your wife, they're a friend, not an affair by definition, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so we've solved that one.
I'm saying if they do want to have sex with my wife and they're a family friend, why does that...
They're not a family friend if they want to fuck your wife!
Why?
Because it fucks up your family!
How do you know?
I'm your friend and I want to give you a shiv in the ribs.
Well, it's one or the other.
You can give me a shiv in the ribs or you can be my friend.
You can't be both.
Because I still need you to tell me how it is beneficial to you for your wife to have an affair.
What is good for you in that scenario?
Forget the children.
Forget what she needs.
How does your life improve when your wife is out having affairs?
Well, it could improve my competition level.
Thank you.
Right?
It could up my game.
Wait, are you saying that if your wife is actually going to have an affair with someone else, you'll be nicer to her?
No, but...
You'll be more considerate?
You'll be better in bed?
You can do those things without your wife going to have an affair.
Right?
Well, when people are in a relationship for a long time...
Because it has to be something that only this does, right?
If it's something you can achieve just by being a better person, then you don't need foreign dick in your wife's private parts to be a better person.
Well, if she's having an affair, maybe I'll buy her flowers.
You can buy her flowers without her having an affair, right?
No, obviously I'm going to treat her...
I want to treat her as best I can.
Okay, so you're not going to up your game if she has an affair.
So let's try another answer as to what's in it for you, Matthew.
And you understand, I'm on your side here.
I'm not trying to make your life difficult.
I'm actually trying to make it fun and easier.
What is the benefit for you?
Forget your kids.
Forget her for the moment.
What is your selfish benefit and motivation in your wife coming to you and saying, I'm going to go and screw some guy I met at Starbucks?
I keep coming back to her happiness.
I know that's not for me.
No, that is not enough.
If her happiness comes at your expense, all you're going to find is resentment in your heart.
Well, I know you've talked in podcasts before, like, you'll watch a movie you don't like because your wife likes it, and it gives her pleasure so that makes you happy.
Right.
Right.
So this is the same thing.
If it makes her happy...
That's because watching a movie with my wife, and usually I'll find a way to enjoy it, watching a movie with my wife doesn't threaten the integrity and stability of my entire family structure.
So I don't feel that the stakes are that high.
You can't do something because she said honesty, self-knowledge, compassion, and empathy.
Which means she logically can't be happy doing something that makes you unhappy.
The only way she can go and have an affair if it makes you unhappy is if she's a cold-hearted bitch.
Which I don't think she is.
I think you guys just haven't thought things through.
I don't think she is, just to be fair, right?
But if it's making you miserable and it's making your kids miserable, it would be woefully selfish for her to go and do it.
And so her happiness can't exist if you're unhappy.
You're saying, well, I want her to be happy at my expense.
Okay, well, then that's a universal rule.
Universal rule, which means she can't want something that makes you unhappy, which means she's not going to go and have the affair, right?
Have you ever had an affair?
Married, you mean?
Well, um, no.
You mean have I ever been unfaithful in a relationship?
Sure, yes.
I don't know, I kissed another girl when I was a teenager, but no, no, not in any fundamental way.
But certainly not in a marriage, and it's never going to happen for either of us.
I guess I'm wondering how you know that it's going to make you unhappy.
Just because you have some initial uneasiness about it.
Because I can't upgrade.
Right?
If they put you in first class on an airplane, do you say, I want an upgrade?
No.
Unless you want to fly the plane.
I don't want to fly the plane.
That's not an upgrade to me.
I like landing at less than 90 degrees, right?
So, I can't upgrade in my relationship.
And my wife can't upgrade.
Now, something's missing for Christina, which is why I was asking earlier, well, what's missing that you want to upgrade, right?
That's important.
The solution to that is to figure out what's missing.
Not to say, I'll backfill it with an affair and destabilize my family and break the hearts of my children and break the hearts of my husband.
But that's not a solution.
So if you're not in a relationship where you can't imagine an upgrade, I cannot conceive of a better woman than my wife.
I couldn't design one.
If I was some obsessive Japanese robot sex engineering genius fanboy with entirely sticky hands.
I could not design a better woman than my wife.
There is nobody out there who could conceivably take her place.
This is why we try to stay healthy.
What if your wife wanted to go outside of the monogamous vows?
She won't.
She won't, because she knows she cannot upgrade from me.
She can't do better than me.
I can't do better than her.
But if she did, you would...
No, no, no.
No, no.
Doesn't happen.
People are not random.
Right?
Yeah, I understand that.
I mean, have you ever heard of a movie where they say, well, we just paid $20 million for Brad Pitt, but let's put the guy in the background there as the lead and put Brad Pitt in as an extra, right?
People don't act randomly.
That's what character and virtue and integrity are all about, is reducing the randomness of interactions with people.
Right?
There's a terrifying movie called The Importance of Being...
The importance...
God, what's it called?
The importance of being honest?
I referred to it as the importance of being naked or something like that.
But it's some movie.
Some European movie.
And some guy wants to have an affair with a woman.
And he finally...
Oh, the unbearable lightness of being.
That's it.
The unbearable lightness of being naked.
Because it's a European film.
So rather than have a quality script, they have flesh.
This guy wants to have an affair with a woman, and he has an affair with her, and she's needy, and she wants him, and he decides to abandon his wife and his family, and he finally tells his wife and his family, and he leaves, and his kids are crying, and his wife is crying, and he drives across the town, and he goes to the woman's apartment to be with her for the rest of his life, and she's left.
There's not even any furniture there.
She's just gone.
Now that's the kind of randomness in people.
Oh, come be with me.
Let's be with me forever.
Go tell your wife.
I'll be here waiting.
He comes back and she's moved.
No forwarding address.
She's gone, baby, gone.
You think you know someone and then just one day...
Right, right, right.
Now, of course, people...
That's back to our selection and we go on like that forever.
That the predators are other people's randomness.
But when you have...
Quality people in your life, and I'm not saying that you don't.
I think you guys are great, and I hope that you get the love in what I'm saying, right?
I'm really trying to do my very best to give you arguments for the best life you can have.
And it's not about reserving open dick portals in the future, right?
It's about if you are not willing to commit to each other, then don't.
And if you are, then do.
But don't do with one foot out the door.
Don't half do it, right?
That's like one foot on the dock, one foot on the pier.
You just end up getting wet.
But when you are around quality people, and you have talked through these issues, and Christina, I know that you don't want to do something that breaks Matt's heart.
That a sexual encounter is not worth breaking the heart of who by then should be the love of your life.
It's not worth it.
There's no big throbbing man-meat thing.
That is intense enough to make it worth stepping in stilettos over your husband's heart and leaving it pinpricked and broken and pouring out.
So if it's going to hurt the love of your life, you don't do it.
And so that's why, Matthew, you need to find the answer.
And if there's no answer, there is no answer that makes your wife and the mother of your children having sex with other guys, there is no conceivable way that is beneficial to you, and there's no conceivable way that that's beneficial to your children.
Now, could you construct an elaborate scenario wherein some wonderful, magical guy comes into your life and he's wonderful with the children and the children love him and Matthew, you love him and you're totally happy that Christina might...
Oh, forget it.
These scenarios don't exist.
These scenarios don't exist because if someone is that wonderful a person, then why would they want to get involved with a married couple?
Do you think really that relationships get easier to navigate when you start stacking the deck with penises and vaginas?
Do you think having more people in the relationship makes it easier to navigate or harder to navigate?
I think we know the answer to that.
And so if you have a great relationship, just the two of you, you're doing really well.
If you don't have a great relationship to the point where you want to go and have sex outside, it means you're not doing really well.
It means bringing somebody else.
If you can't navigate and manage and satisfy each other's needs, bringing some third party's needs and complications into the relationship ain't gonna simplify it.
And it's not gonna make things better.
It's gonna make things worse.
It's gonna make things more complicated.
I just, I can't for the life of me imagine any scenario in which I'd say, Yeah, I'd like to get involved with a married couple and help raise their children.
I mean, come on, can you imagine a scenario for you, Matt, in which case you'd say, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
I mean, what could be better?
Well, one of the reasons that I'm considering this, and the argument that it's hard to find in escapable logic is, it actually comes from you, because you've said before that you should parent as if you're Could they choose to have any parent they would choose you?
And I guess part of my thinking is, well, what if I actually gave them a choice?
You know, instead of saying, well, what if?
And wouldn't that help me improve?
Wait, wait, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Hang on.
No, I appreciate where you're coming from.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Okay, there's some things that are mental exercise that children should not be exposed to, right?
First of all, of course, you and Christina, you're choosing each other.
My daughter didn't choose me as a father.
Now, for me to parent as if my daughter could choose any man in the world is a great mental exercise for me.
In the same way that you don't take your partner for granted when you're married, right?
Right.
That's very different from bringing my daughter down to a warehouse, lining up 50 guys and say, go on, choose a dad.
That would be traumatic for her, right?
Yes.
Because then she would be like, well, wait a minute, don't you want to be my dad anymore?
No, no, it's an exercise, a mental exercise.
Here, I'll go stand with these 50 guys.
Now, choose a dad, right?
But that would be weird for her, right?
And scary.
Like, what the hell is going on?
So it's one thing to have that as a sort of mental exercise to keep your game up.
It's another thing to actually do it, right?
Because when you guys decide to, if you decide to get married and have kids, then you've already had the lineup.
My daughter didn't have the lineup, right?
She's never going to get it, right?
But you guys will have already had the lineup.
So you don't get the lineup again later.
Yeah, it wouldn't really be a lineup.
It's just...
She would be born into a family that already had two or three dads.
No, because if you want...
Look, there are people who love my daughter and there are people who take care of my daughter...
But nobody has to have sex with each other, right?
If you want something for your kids, then yeah, have people around who love your kids, who your kids love, who they're dying to see, and have all that wonderful stuff around.
But why on earth that involves rutting is beyond me, right?
I mean, just pay a babysitter, not with penis.
But you understand the argument.
You understand what I was saying, right?
That if you have multiple...
I mean, the people who would be in the periphery, you know, your close friends, the family, it's not the same as, like, being a close parent.
I'm not going down this road because people can be close to your kids without having sex with your wife.
Again, the things I need to say on this show are incomprehensible to me.
People can love your children without having sex with your wife.
People can be close to and care about.
I mean, I can't even say it.
It's just too ludicrous, right?
Now, you know I can see pictures of both of you, right?
Yeah, I guess I do know that.
Yeah, and we're not going to publish these, of course, right?
But I'm telling you, What would you rate her on a 1 to 10 attractiveness scale?
Oh, we've done this exercise and we said the same thing about each other.
Like, I think we each thought we were a 6 and the other was an 8.
Wait, she thinks she's a 6?
And she thinks that you are more attractive than she is?
Yes.
Yeah, it's not true.
You know, you guys would be nice to each other.
It'd be nice if you were nice to each other to the point of not wanting to have affairs and all that, but no.
I'm trying to find my picture.
Oh, that's not a bad picture.
Okay, well...
Okay, that's what makes my point more.
That, at least at this moment, right, physically she looks to be more attractive than you.
And I'm a fairly good judge of this kind of stuff.
You don't have to take, right?
And this doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you, of course.
I mean, nice looking guy and all that.
But, you know, she's very attractive.
And the other thing, she has youth and fertility and you're just getting started in life, right?
Which means that she has more sexual market value than you do, right?
So you've overshot attractiveness-wise, and so you feel you need to make up your seven to her nine by offering her penis on the side.
Hey, is me plus extra penis?
Does that equal nine?
Wait, are you saying you want to join our circle?
I didn't understand that.
I will pay...
There's no amount of money I would pay to not join the inner circle, but...
No, what I'm saying is that your basic statement is if she's an 8 and you're a 7 or if she's a 9 and you're a 7 or whatever, then you feel you need to, like, you're like a short guy...
And she doesn't date short guys, but if you stand on a couple of extra penises, then are you tall enough?
Like, can you date her if she gets extra penises on the side?
Right?
So you're simply saying that it's the me plus stuff that I talked about in the Robert Williams video, right?
Me plus optional penises equals equality in this relationship, right?
I don't have hair, but if I wear a penis toupee, when you date me or whatever, right?
If you don't like guys with no hair.
So what I'm saying is that you need to have the confidence to say, I'm not willing to accede to a condition in a relationship that's going to hurt me.
And I'm also not willing to date someone, right?
Because I don't think that she knows how much it would hurt you.
I mean, maybe you've talked about it and you've said, well, I'll consider it or whatever.
But if she really cared, she'd say, OK, well, if it's really upsetting to you, then it's off the table because I don't want to hurt you.
But I'm telling you, man, think of her at 250 pounds.
Right.
Do you really think if she said at 250 pounds, yeah, I'll date you, but I also want to have sex with other guys.
Come on.
You know how this is working, right?
Well, actually, she wouldn't be able to get sex, so...
No, um...
Oh, you don't think 250 pound women have sex?
Are you kidding me?
Google the following term.
No, I'm kidding.
Chasing chublets?
I can't remember how it goes, but...
No, she would be able to have, but what you're saying is that you wouldn't be with her if she was 250 pounds, right?
No, I'm not saying that.
Oh, so you're saying if she was 250 pounds, she would then still be able to demand penis on the side and you'd be okay with that.
It's a good exercise.
You can do better.
And by that, I don't mean that you can do better than Christina.
I don't know.
Maybe you can.
It's only been a couple of months.
But you can do better than offering up your own future heartbreak in order to date a woman.
There's something...
Have you ever heard of this phrase, the shit test?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
This is a shit test.
Yeah, and actually, that's what I thought the first time.
She's reaching under your kilt here and saying, do we have peas or bowling balls down there?
Unfortunately, you came up pea, but it's a shit test, right?
She's just giving you an outlandish request in order to gauge how in lust you are.
See...
And this is sorry to be so coarse, right?
And I'm certainly not saying this is conscious, and I'm not saying that there's not a lot more to her than this.
I'm just talking about this particular mechanic.
My outlandish requests measure the value of my vagina, measure the value of my prettiness.
I can't wait for somebody to make this their ringtone.
Hey, quote it out of context.
There's a first.
But this is why when a woman is carrying a very expensive purse, or she's wearing very expensive shoes, or she's dressed all in white, or she's in some very expensive whatever, right?
What she's saying is, in general, right?
Assuming she didn't earn the money herself, what she's saying is, hey, this is what my vagina is worth.
This is what I got for my eggs at market.
Ka-ching!
Right now, you don't have the money to buy her stuff so that she can parade around the value of her eggs, right?
But she can make outlandish demands, and if you exceed to them, that gives her a glow of power, it gives her a glow of value, and it's exactly what nature intends people to do, which is to gauge their sexual market value and get the maximum possible.
And so if you're willing to let her have sex with other guys, it's because she's that attractive that you're willing to offer her up to other guys just to get a slice.
And that gives her value, pleasure.
Yeah, the attraction doesn't necessarily have to be sexual, right?
What?
Well, you're...
You heard me use the word vagina, right?
Does that mean, are you living in Regina and you misheard me?
I don't understand what's going on in this part of the conversation.
But what about toy trucks?
We're not talking about toy trucks.
That are admirable.
I'm sorry?
Just her qualities that are admirable.
That's what attracts me to her.
No, but admirable qualities don't make people give you shit tests.
The shit test is, I wonder what my eggs are worth.
I wonder how besotted this guy is.
I wonder how much power I have over him.
And again, please understand, Christina, I know you're still there.
I'm not saying this is some big conscious thing.
And maybe I'm completely wrong, but this is my thought.
Is that, wow, he's that besotted by me.
My eggs are so valuable.
My attractiveness is so besotting to a man that he's willing to share me with other men just to be with me?
Damn, I must be hot.
It's like the crazy thing.
If you're crazy...
You know that hot crazy, the heart of the crazier, right?
If you're crazy and guys still want to be with you, then your craziness is also the measure of how hot you are.
So if you can be random, if you can be a bitch, if you can be mean and guys still come swarming back, well, that'd be hot.
I must be hot, baby!
And so these outlandish requests, that's what...
Again, I'm no expert.
This is my understanding of, you know, just...
What can I get away with?
Which translates into how attractive am I? I guess...
Now, it's kind of swinging in the dark because I don't get the sense that you guys have modeled particularly healthy familial relationships beforehand, but it is, you know, it's something that you listen to patiently and say, not in a million years, honey.
No, you're looking for the spineless guy down the street who's going to pant after you like a puppy dog and just, oh, scratch me behind the ear and I'll just lick your leg.
No, no, come on.
Would it be different if both of us wanted polyamorous relationships?
Given your different levels of attractiveness, we're talking about what if one of you could fly and one of you was a narwhal?
I am not going to deal with these kinds of theoretical situations.
Well, I have some introspection to do about it, for sure.
All right.
All right.
Well, I appreciate the call.
I'm sorry, Christina, talking about you like you weren't here and all of that.
And I hope that you appreciate, even if I'm completely wrong, that I'm doing my best to try and bring happiness to you guys.
Because I think if you can commit and be more empathetic to what each other need, I think that would be fantastic.
Is she off the air?
I'm here.
Okay.
Thank you.
Okay, thanks guys.
I appreciate it.
Have a great night.
You too.
Alright, well, up last on the show is...
Can you do another call, Steph?
Sorry, just the word narwhal.
It brought that to mind.
Alright, can't be long, but I'm willing to go in.
Alright, up next is Matthew 2.
He wrote in and said, This is regards to using roads, tech-payer-funded schools, that type of thing.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, people could judge the rationality of my arguments.
I mean, if people want to say, but you use roads, but you're an immigrant, but you use socialized healthcare, but you were educated in government schools.
All they're basically saying is, thinking is hard, but I'm good at tripping people.
I'm not a good runner, but I'm good at setting stupid traps, right?
I mean, just, you know, deal with the rational arguments.
You can always find something that someone has had to compromise at some point, you know.
Who cares, right?
Well, I mean, the arguments stand whether or not, right, this is ad hominem, right?
I mean, which is against the man rather than against the argument.
And there's some vague value in that at the beginning.
I've made sort of in praise of personal attacks video.
But when it comes to a carefully constructed argument, you know, like I did this migrant video, which was a rant, right?
A very passionate rant.
Going over half a million on YouTube.
And then I spent a couple of days putting together a very recent, tightly reasoned argument, which is cooking at 30k.
So that's like 15 times.
You know, if people want to focus on, well, you're deaf, immigration, but you're an immigrant.
It's like...
Let's say I am.
Let's say that somehow I had complete free will at the age of 11 when my mother dragged me from England to Canada, and therefore nobody has to look at any of the moral arguments I put out almost 30 years later.
40 years later!
So, tomorrow is my birthday.
Feel free to go to freedomainradio.com slash donate and give me some sugar.
But, um...
Yeah, so I mean, you know, people go, he's an immigrant, so he's an hypocrite.
Yeah, because when I was 11, I really had a big fucking choice, right?
So yeah, I mean, just if people want to focus on that, I mean, just move on.
Well, and that was what I did, is that I kind of made the fundamental tactical error of discussing something of substance on Facebook, which is just a really horrible idea.
See, I have this problem of, I listen to you, I listen to EconTalk, and I have this idea that perhaps the world is getting better educated, etc., And in reality, then you go on Facebook and realize that it's really not.
But I've had some success in not being a social progress parasite.
And when you are starting a conversation with someone who says, well, I'm I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative and am somewhat of a Republican, at least that's generally how I vote.
You can start from a common ground and work towards a more voluntarist anarchist type mindset, but you can't jump there immediately.
And that's been what's most successful, at least from my perspective, in going stuff.
This other one was just Facebook, where I commented on somebody who had basically reposted some meme where if conservatives were still in charge, black people would still be at the back of the bus, children would still be working on in factory labor and you know you're you would still not know what was in your food and so I discussed things I just I just wanted
just wanted to point it out that that is so liberal style reversal The Democrats were the ones behind the most racist measures against Blacks.
From the KKK to Jim Crow to all of that, right?
The Democrats were the most racist party.
And the KKK was the military wing of the Democratic Party in the South.
And it was the Republicans who, of course, fought to end slavery.
It was the Republicans who had black congressmen in their party.
It was the Republicans who tried the first Civil Rights Act in the 1880s.
It was the Democrats who've been blocking all the progress that Republicans have been trying to make for that.
Republicans being more pro-free market, The free market is what got children out of labor, like out of laboring.
I mean, this idea that child labor was invented in the Industrial Revolution, like before the Industrial Revolution, in the Middle Ages, oh yeah, it was all just the princess bride and children just cavortled and gambled around the field until they were 18.
No, they died.
The fact that they were alive is because they were working and then they weren't dead.
And the fact that they were aggregated in the city rather than dying out in the countryside meant that Charles Dickens could cry with his poison pen about them.
So, and just want to point out that, you know, this idea that, you know, Republicans are racist and hate children and all that.
It's completely, I mean, it is, of course, the opposite of the truth in a lot of ways, you know.
Democrats love children so much.
They want to give them all to single moms because that's just so great for children, whereas Republicans want two parents to raise them.
Oh, yeah, they must hate children.
So anyway, just go on.
Sorry.
Well, that was actually what I said, is that the pro-segregation movements in the South in the 60s were Democrat-run and the South was run by Democrats, etc.
And their argument was, yes, that was true, but we got rid of all of those Democrats and they got over to the Republican Party in the 70s.
Really?
Yes, that was what they said.
So the Republican Party just welcomed a whole bunch of KKK members?
Yes.
I'd really like to see some evidence for that.
It'd be quite fascinating.
I mean, it is the best PR job I've ever seen to convince Southern people or to convince Black people that the Democrats are their friends.
It is absolutely amazing. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Black people are not stupid.
I'm not saying you're saying they are, but black people are not stupid.
They don't care about the history.
They want government money.
Unfortunately, a lot of blacks are dependent, single moms and all that, dependent on government money.
And the Democrats give them more government money so they're willing to whitewash the Democrat history to get the government money.
They don't say independently evaluate the information and then go for the Democrats.
It's just this is the natural cover-up so that it's less embarrassing to vote Democrat.
Well, and I brought that up as well, that essentially the Democrats created a dependent class so that they'd have a permanent voting bloc.
And I was told that I was wrong historically accurate, and that was a lie.
And was that the extent of the argument?
Yes, that was the extent of the argument.
Okay, so hang on.
So our lesson here might be, if somebody posts an offensive meme, or a ridiculous meme, or a meme without any arguments...
That may not be the best person to start debating with.
Yes, I learned that lesson again.
Like, I knew that lesson from ten years ago back when it was a live journal, not Facebook, but I learned that lesson on Facebook now, too.
Right.
There may be a common denominator, which is not the technology involved, but the typists behind it, right?
Yes, and that's why I restricted myself to discussing it with people who are already somewhat inclined, or at least I know are somewhat inclined, because it's easier to move people who are already rational and will respond to rational conversation.
No, like I started just saying, you know, a couple of weeks ago...
Occasionally we'll glance through some YouTube comments.
And yeah, not an argument.
Not an argument.
You're a fascist!
Not an argument.
I hate you!
Not an argument.
You have a tiny penis!
Okay, well that's an argument.
But anyway.
So it's just not an argument.
Not an argument.
And the reason I do that is just...
I don't expect anyone to change their mind.
I just want people to recognize how common it is on the internet...
For people to have no idea what an argument is.
Like someone today posted literally, Steph, these are the worst and most terrible arguments you've ever made.
You're completely wrong.
I expected better of you.
Right?
It's like...
Wait, you're criticizing me for making bad arguments by making no arguments.
I don't think this word means what you think it means.
And I just want people to see that the level of discourse, the quality of discourse in very important areas is tragically low and people don't even know it.
Yes, which is sad.
So you just say it.
It's not an argument.
Yeah.
It's an offensive series of statements.
It's sophistry.
But it's not an argument.
Like the Republican war on women.
We want fewer female abortions.
You hate women!
Alright, okay.
Okay.
Um, so a parallel, uh, you know, because people can reply to different things, a parallel conversation evolved there, which was, um, uh, essentially somebody said, it's not a problem with, uh, um, you know, the Republicans or the Democrats or the left or the right.
It's a problem with the system as a whole.
And I said, well, I agree with this, hence why I'm an anarchist.
And they said, you know, essentially, you libertarian anarchists are all alike.
You think that no one—that you can operate in a vacuum, and you don't realize how interdependent everybody is, and— My counter to that was, actually, that's the only way anarchism works, is that you are all dependent on each other, so you need to cooperate through a market, which is the best way to have people of differing goals achieve mutually acceptable outcomes.
And that market can be for security services, it can be for education, it can be for anything.
And then, you know, I talked about how taxation is theft.
And they said, well, you know, it's amazing how many anarchists and libertarians are educated at institutions funded by theft.
And the only reason that you have such an education is because of the theft.
Therefore, you are not allowed to criticize the theft.
Right.
So if government education produces anarchists, why isn't everyone an anarchist?
I mean, it must be because you've disagreed with your government education that you've come to a conclusion different from most people who are in government education.
Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that I benefited from it.
Well, no, who's to say you benefited from it?
No, seriously, I mean, who's to say you benefited from it, government education?
I mean, because, you know, they had me for 12 goddamn years, and I learned more In a week of doing this show than I learned in about 10 of those 12 years.
Like after I learned my basic math and how to read, it was all just a complete fucking waste of time.
And a boring, trapped, hyper-hormonal sardine can of dissociation, desire, fear, and hatred, and a massive...
Dog trapped in a bear trap desire to chew my own leg off and get the hell out.
So the idea that I benefited from this is like, well, I was unjustly imprisoned and beaten by the guards, but they did set my bone for free, so I guess I can't criticize.
Like, did they ever say, I can't believe Nelson Mandela ever complained about apartheid.
I mean, free food and lodging.
I mean, he ate that damn food.
What the hell right did he ever have?
Oh, no, wait.
No, he's politically correct, so he can complain all he wants.
Well, in all fairness, essentially, room board, which I would have had to pay anyway because I was living in an apartment at the time, and some books that I stopped buying once I realized they weren't actually used for the courses, and basically nothing else because I went to school on a full academic scholarship.
Bought me access to about half a million dollars worth of electronics labs, logic analyzers, etc.
So it was a really expensive trade school if I had paid out of pocket.
But since they wanted me there, it allowed me access to...
This is why I did the computer engineering, not the computer science route.
You can teach yourself programming languages and databases from books and a computer.
But the gaming access to the logic analyzers and FPGAs and ASICs and development boards, especially back then, Those boards required way more capital than I had at my disposal.
I'm sorry to say this to a fellow anarchist, but it's probably worth thinking even further outside the box.
The reason why those labs weren't available to you privately is because the government was always providing them publicly.
It's that mistaken thing that we say, well, if the government wasn't providing it, it wouldn't be provided.
So if there was a demand, like you being able to get logic analyzers is a value to you and is a value to your future employees, then, I mean, what I would do is create, if there was no government around doing this stuff, is I'd say, okay, let's create this big lab.
Let's have kids come in and use it as they want.
And let's see who the smartest ones are and give them jobs.
I mean, wouldn't that be a fantastic way to hire people?
I mean, if you're not allowed to give an IQ test or anything.
I mean, so these things would be available to kids if they weren't already being provided by the government and they would be free because it'd be huge value in finding the best talent.
And, you know, they don't charge people to enter American Idol, right?
Because they make money off the whole contest.
Well, in a lot of things, I think that's part of what is going to be the logical extension of the maker movement.
Right now, it's just a bunch of people getting together and hacking on stuff and having a common space to do that, which is paid by the dues of the members or by some benefactor or whatever.
But realistically, a lot of people in my local scene, at least, meetups are a great place to network and find places to work or find people to work with you.
Right.
Which actually brings up another thing.
When you talk about government providing something that is not provided by the free market and it's still part of the system, there's actually two different things that happened after this Facebook exchange.
One was I got laid off.
And so as I'm trying to find a job, the question is what if I can't find a job, especially heading into the holidays?
If you don't have a job by American Thanksgiving, you're not getting one until the new year.
So Should I... They call it unemployment insurance.
Generally, I view insurance as something that is voluntary, not compulsory.
But I've been forced to pay into this system.
Do I collect from it?
Or then am I benefiting from the state?
And does this make me a hypocrite and thus invalidate my argument?
Yeah, I mean, obviously, you have been forced to pay into the system.
I don't particularly care.
It's not a moral issue to me whether you take it or not.
I would argue against the practical value.
I mean, I've never taken it.
And the reason is because if you get the unemployment insurance, it undoubtedly is going to blunt your desire to look for work.
No question.
You're just going to be...
Looking for work.
And they see this regularly, right?
I mean, people who get unemployment insurance stop looking for work as hard.
And then when their unemployment insurance is about to run out because they're rational actors, they double down on their efforts to get a job.
So I think it's a bad idea to take it insofar as you really want to pour as much effort as you can, and this is going to inevitably dull your efforts in that direction, thus making you less employable down the road as you've had more months out of the workplace.
So obviously, if you're going to starve to death, You've been forced to pay into it and take out of it.
It doesn't particularly matter to me.
You know, when you're in a situation of compulsion, I don't care what moral...
There's no moral decision.
So you're just in a strategic decision place at that point.
It's like playing chess.
It's not good or evil moves.
Once you're in a system of compulsion, the good or evil is out of it.
But I would definitely say that the inevitable result of it is going to be most likely that you're going to blunt your efforts in looking for work until you get closer to the end, which case you're in a worse position than if you hadn't taken it.
Yeah, I seriously doubt I'm actually going to have to take it.
I've gotten some callbacks and we have some time.
The company liquidated my division, so they're being very decent about it.
They gave us two months notice and we're going to get severance based on our time at the company.
And so it's going to be roughly another two months salary that I'm going to get paid out of severance.
So it's quite likely that I'm going to end up having a new job that I can start immediately after the old one concludes.
And we'll walk away with the severance as a bonus.
But it was a thought experiment of what if.
Yeah, whatever keeps you hungry is a good thing.
I like to stay hungry.
You cannot achieve excellence unless...
I was just talking about this with an interviewee the other day.
You can't achieve excellence unless you have something to beat.
And whatever keeps you hungry is a pretty good thing to have in your life.
And the final thing was a bit of an ethical conflict as far as existing systems and infrastructure, etc.
Basically, the local library board of trustees, they want to build a new building, and they've raised $1.5 million, and there's a vote upcoming that they want to float a bond with For the remainder of the money, which is about $1.8 million, to be paid back over 20 years.
And of course, the way that the system is set up, they would tax people based on property values, which for the average house in the district is going to be about $50 per year.
Wait, what?
They have a bond?
Which it's due in 20 years, but they're taxing people now?
Well, the idea is that they float the bond now, get the money now, and then begin collecting the taxes.
So they pay the bond back over 20 years at a rate of $50.
Oh, that's not going to happen.
No, they're going to float the bond, they're going to collect the taxes, they're going to spend the taxes, and in 20 years there'll be no money.
It's just like Social Security, or there might be an IOU. But there's no way that they're going to save.
Governments don't save money for 20 years to pay something, right?
That's not how it works.
Oh, I think they have to start paying it back immediately.
So it's not a late maturing bond.
They have to pay dividends and then at some point they'll have to pay...
Is it more like a mortgage?
I don't quite understand how this stuff works.
The way that these municipal bonds work is that it's more like a mortgage.
Okay, so they're getting the money now.
They're going to pay it off over 20 years.
They're going to raise taxes, and supposedly that money is going to go.
It probably won't, but supposedly that money is going to go to pay the bond.
Okay.
Right, and after 20 years, the tax is supposed to go away.
It never actually does, but that's what's supposed to happen.
But the thing is, on the one hand, this is morally wrong.
For everybody who voted no, the stick-up man is going to come and pick your pocket and take the money, and you don't have an option unless the whole thing goes down.
The irony here is that if you say, let's say, half the district was willing to pay more $100 a year, $200 a year.
So we'll be the ones who will voluntarily pay for this improvement because we want our children to go there.
We want to have that I'm sorry, I'm going to fall asleep with this detail.
Is there something particularly, you said a burning moral question, and this is for what, a library?
It was a library?
It's for a library.
Yeah, because there's no internet, so let's have a library.
Okay.
It's a modern library in that there's community rooms and children's reading rooms and books on tape and all of these other types of things.
One of the rooms is apparently going to be a makerspace.
There's multifunction rooms.
It's libraries.
Okay, okay.
So it's a fantastic library, not just a place for old people to fall asleep in.
Okay.
That's We have one of those.
And so what's your moral question?
Is it ethical to vote yes so that my children have a library because I'm willing to pay it even though other people won't and the majority rule goes?
Or is that inflicting my will upon someone else?
I'm more inclined to say that it's the latter, but I was interested if you had any thoughts on it.
I mean, what...
consequences of either way like are you going to self-attack do you feel like let's say you vote yes right and you say well we might as well get some value out of the crashing dollar because in 20 years we're going to be using bitcoin one or some sort of space dust from aldebaran to use because it's not going to be the u.s dollar in 20 years so we might as well get some value out of it now before the government does a soft or a hard default right right so let's So, I don't care whether you vote yes or no, because you're already in a system of compulsion, right?
Now, it's not like if you vote no, taxes aren't going to go up anyway.
I mean, they'll use some other excuse.
There'll be some other thing that goes up, whether it's hidden or direct.
So, it's not like you're going to save a whole bunch of money or save, you know, massive amounts of violence in the system if you vote no for this.
On the other hand, you know, do you want the government spending money on a library or weaponry, you know?
If you have to choose, I guess there's worse things than the library, right?
So my question is, what does it matter what you vote?
Like, I mean, do you feel like, oh, if people find out about it, or do you feel like you're going to get criticized?
Are you going to criticize yourself?
Like, I don't really understand why it's important.
I mean, I'm sorry, I don't mean not important, I just not quite understand how it is.
Because if I vote yes, I feel like I'm mugging little old ladies to give my kids a better library.
Well, the little old ladies have no problem mugging your kids for their old age pensions, so I think your kids can't possibly come out ahead of their combat with the aged.
I mean, the old people are getting like three or four or five times more out of it.
Things like the medical care that they get, prescription drug programs, social security.
They're getting way more out of it than they ever paid into it.
And the difference is being paid by your kids.
So, you know, you want to go mug some old ladies and give money to your kids.
You can't possibly mug them enough, you know, unless you buy them solid gold, individualized, personalized libraries for themselves.
Then you can't possibly rob the old ladies as much as the old ladies are robbing your kids.
So I've got no problem with that.
Yeah, I suppose I hadn't looked at it that way.
At least my kids are only robbing the little old ladies for 20 years.
The little old ladies are robbing my kids for as long as they can stay alive.
How about the national debt?
You're talking 50 bucks a year?
Okay, old ladies, I'll tell you what.
I won't vote for the 50 bucks a year.
You pay my portion of the national debt, the unfunded liabilities, and all of the extra costs of being old that you're getting out that you didn't pay in for.
How's that for a deal?
Okay, so you owe me about a million dollars, and I'll not charge you the 50.
That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
I actually have a better one than I always flowed out, which is, I'll tell you what, I'll continue to pay for your Social Security if I never get to collect it.
I'll pay in Social Security until I die.
I'll never collect it, as long as all of my descendants never have to pay into it or collect it.
I would make that bargain in a heartbeat.
Right.
That's very loving of you towards the next generation.
Like, I just did an essay today, and I'll read it tomorrow, about how one of the reasons why government grows is that there aren't enough men who have the motivation of protecting their children's futures from the government to fight the government, right?
There are not enough fathers around.
Lots of guys are like, yeah, I'm I've got video games.
I've got my job.
But if you have kids, you become very concerned, as you know, about the future and what kind of world you're leaving to your kids.
And once you can get men to stop having children, they stop fighting the government because they don't have really anything to fight for.
What's the point?
Yeah.
I appreciate your concern for that.
Well, also, going back to the R versus K gene theory from the beginning of the show, is that if you can get them to stop caring about the children quite so much, it doesn't matter that they have them.
Oh yeah, that's true.
It's effectively the same thing.
If they go to one of those project baby farms, and what is it, girlfriend farms, and have a couple of kids there, it doesn't particularly matter.
And in fact, you could even argue that they would be less inclined to fight the government because the government subsidizes their lifestyle and takes care of their children for them.
Right.
Yeah, so I mean, if you can get some goodies for your kids, you know, I mean...
It's fine.
You know, it's perfectly fine.
There's no moral standard by which people can say, oh, you're hypocritical, you voted for this, so you didn't vote.
I mean, vote or don't vote.
I mean, vote for this or, you know, but don't self-attack, you know, based upon what you have to do to survive in a concentration camp, you know.
I maybe, I stole some of the guard's candy bar because I was really hungry and I mean, that's a violation of property rights.
You know, it doesn't matter.
I mean, you're not in a voluntary situation.
And, you know, don't break the law, obviously.
That puts you in a less voluntary, even less voluntary situation.
But I wouldn't, you know, I think this is kind of precious in a way.
Like, vote or don't vote.
But, you know, I wouldn't waste the time on trying to unravel the moral complexities of how to survive and what to do in a situation of foundational coercion.
Yeah.
You know, like when I was a kid, I would sometimes take a quarter from my mom's purse to go play a video game at the mall.
You know, do I sit there and say, oh, but I violated property.
I was just trying to grab a little bit of happiness in a miserable situation.
So I'm perfectly fine with it.
So that would be my suggestion to cut yourself some slack, focus on the big fight, spread peaceful parenting, which I'm sure you're doing.
And that's where your claim and flag should be staked and planted, not worrying about this other stuff, which You have no control over and which you fundamentally can't really affect one way or the other anyway.
So I'd let that stuff go and focus on the good that you can bring.
Stay away from memes and talk to parents about being nicer.
That's my big suggestion.
Yeah, it's actually doubtful that one vote is actually going to make a difference anyway.
But, you know, there's only 5,000 people or whatever in the district.
But it was interesting.
Thanks for the advice.
I do appreciate it.
It gives me something to think about.
You're very welcome.
And thank you, everyone, for the last call.
In my 48th year.
Last show in my 48th year.
I will be 49 years old tomorrow.
Hanging on to that youth demographic of 18 to 49 for one more year.
A great thing about surviving a deadly illness like cancer.
Hey!
You never, ever complain about birthdays again.
Glad to have them.
Hope to have more.
There's no creak in my body that can possibly match the joy of being still this side of the sod.
So, if you'd like to make my birthday even better, more special, freedomainradio.com to help out the show and have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful night, everybody.
