Oct. 13, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:57:06
3100 The New N Word - Call In Show - October 10th, 2015
Question 1: [2:47] - Is the “n-word” really offensive? People say context matters, but the only context I've seen it used in is when the user is black. If it is offensive, why does the oppressed group use it so much?Question 2: [1:12:45] - Since I started watching Stefan's videos, I’ve realized that I abused my children as they were growing up. I spanked them, yelled and even once got into a fist fight with my teenage son. I believed that I was 'doing the right thing', but now I am ashamed of the things I have done to them. I’ve expressed this regret to them, and have been working over the last two years to change my parenting style. The problem is that my children don’t agree, and have even said that they wished I had spanked them more! How do I help my teenage and adult children to understand that I made mistakes when I raised them, and convince them that spanking and hitting are wrong? How do I stop this cycle of violence that I was raised with and have now perpetuated into my family’s future?Question 3: {1:59:14] - In my experience, the more someone understands about politics, the more they tend towards one of two ideologies: Libertarianism, or some derivation of a powerful nationalistic regional state. A common argument against Libertarianism is that without the cultural inertia of a church or government, the individuals of a society will tend towards nihilism and hedonism. Although I agree with Stefan that Libertarianism is the ideal, is a nationalistic regional state a more realistic form of government, as it would require far less intelligence and morality in the populace?
Hi everybody, Sifan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Yes, we had quite a show this evening.
I think you'll really enjoy it.
The first up was a listener who questioned the politically correct ban on the use of the word nigger.
And he demanded to know why he couldn't tell jokes using that word.
And we had a great conversation, I think, about...
The legitimate sensitivity to a historically brutal and ugly word, and the degree to which it is used inside the black community, and why it probably is used inside the black community, and the wide divergence of use of the word within the black community.
So it was a really great conversation, and I made a pretty strong case for what I think is the real new racism that is occurring in the world.
Second caller was calling from a giant train wreck of a family situation, and he had been turned on to peaceful parenting late in the game through this show, through Free Domain Radio.
And his family was in crisis.
His children were dating, I guess what we could charitably be called, dirtbags, and were at risk of wrecking their lives that way.
His younger daughter, youngest daughter, had called the cops.
When her mother came home saying, I don't know who this woman is.
I don't know why she's in her home.
So, yeah.
It was a crisis situation, and I think you'll agree with the way that I handled it, which was the only way that I could see it could be handled.
So, that was an interesting conversation.
I think we did some real good there to help save a struggling family.
And the third caller had questions about...
Why it is that people who get into libertarianism either end up as like complete open border guys or sort of closed-minded semi-fascistic types who value their own particular culture or race and so on and seem to be very exclusionary.
And I didn't exactly agree with that false dichotomy and we had a pretty rousing discussion about...
Nation-state, ethnicity, and tribalism, and culture in particular.
Because his view was that the Industrial Revolution destroyed religion, destroyed culture, and opened up the way for nihilism.
So he had a rousing debate about the historical validity of that approach.
So without any further ado, here's the show.
Please, of course, send your feedback to us.
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So here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
All right.
Well, up first is Armin.
And Armin wrote in with a question that me just saying is going to get me in trouble.
So these are Armin's words.
And this is the question.
Is the word nigger really offensive?
People say context matters, but the only context I've seen it used in is when the user is black.
If it is offensive, why does the oppressed group use it so much?
And that's from Armin.
That's a fine question.
Armin, do you want?
Yeah.
I'm always curious, and this doesn't mean that it's not important, but I'm always curious why this is an important topic for you.
A lot of stuff that is kind of minute to some people is really important to me.
I just overanalyze a lot of things.
Yeah, that doesn't actually answer the question, though.
I mean, there's an infinite number of things that you could find interesting that other people don't that aren't this topic.
So why this topic in particular?
Honestly, if you just said, okay, we're not doing this call and hung up, it wouldn't really change my day for better or worse.
Not answering the question.
I really don't...
I don't think there is an answer to the question.
Some things just are.
Wait, you have no...
Because of all of the infinity of questions you could have brought to the table of this show, I assume that you listen to the show and you want to talk about this.
And again, I'm not saying it's not an interesting question.
I think it is.
I'm just curious why it's interesting to you.
Are you white?
Yes, I am.
Okay, just worth checking because, you know, it's a racial term.
And do you think it's an important question in the world?
Somewhat, yeah.
Or is it more important for you?
Because, you know, if a guy says, I'm thinking of divorcing my wife, that's an important question for him, and it may be an important question to other people, but it's not exactly an important question in the world as a whole, because it's not philosophical specifically, right?
So, is there any particular reason why you think this is of interest to you?
I guess I do care about fairness, is one word for it, in between races.
I think racism is an actual problem, but when people just call everything racism, I think it diminishes the severity of the problem.
Okay, okay.
Well, okay, so when we go through the question as a whole, Yes, nigger is an offensive term.
I'm pretty much on firm ground, I think, when I say that.
It's a highly offensive term because, of course, it refers to a very negative view of blacks in America that traditionally comes from a subjugated legal and social state.
So it is an offensive term, and it's a very offensive term.
Is it more offensive than the term cracker?
You know, which I guess would be the closest equivalent.
It used to be honky, but I don't think that's used so much anymore.
But is it as offensive as the word cracker, which of course I've been called countless times, along with racist and all the usual stuff, right?
It is, I think, because whites in general had an elevated socioeconomic and legal status to blacks throughout the majority of American history.
There's a case to be made that that's no longer the case, and there's a case to be made that the reverse is more the case with affirmative action and so on.
But I think that it's fairly safe to say that there's not quite an equivalent term for whites as there is for blacks in this context because of disparities in the way that the societies have developed and the way that the law has developed and so on.
So yes, I think so.
The first point, it is an offensive term.
The second point, or the second question, I suppose, is why do blacks use it?
It's more...
The question, I'd say, is misphrased right now.
It's not...
My question, personally, isn't, is it an offensive term?
Because, obviously, yes, it is.
But, is it justified to be one?
Is it justified to be an offensive term?
Yeah.
Well, I think I just gave you a brief argument as to why it is.
Maybe you could, if I misstated something or got something wrong, I'm certainly happy to hear...
How that's not the case, but I think I made a case for that.
Do you not agree with the case?
Well, can I see if we both agree on something first?
Yeah.
Do you think the variant of nigger, nigga, is a different word?
N-I-G-G-A? Yes.
Oh, like my nigga, you know, like Denzel Washington in his inimitably cool way says in some movies and so on?
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Do I think that that is less of an offensive term?
Like a different word in general.
I think it's, again, I'm scarcely an expert on this, but my understanding is that it's more of a friendly, convivial term.
Okay.
And see, I disagree there.
And I'm not saying this is all black people, but...
When you think of a black person saying a word ending in ER, they usually replace the ER with an A. So it's not officer, it's officer.
It's not like plumber, it's plumber.
So why is it the same for every single word in the dictionary ending in ER, but it's not the same for nigger?
I honestly couldn't tell you other than language has its vagaries, right?
Yeah.
And a slightly modified word could be something that is more friendly than the original.
I mean, as to why, I have no idea other than language is funny.
Funny that way.
Lots of different things that can occur.
Now, as far as groups using within themselves...
A phrase that has been used from outside the group as a term of insult, as a term of non-insult.
It's a very convoluted way.
So if an out-group attacks an in-group with a pejorative, like nigger, then the in-group can choose to co-opt it, to adopt it, to take sort of, quote, the sting out of it.
From that standpoint, that's one reason why it would be less offensive, of course.
For a black person to call another black person a nigger doesn't bring all of the racial animus and slavery and Jim Crow and all of that.
It just doesn't bring the same thing in.
In the same way that if a gay man calls another gay man a fag, That's not quite the same.
Because there is just...
When you're in that particular group for which the pejorative is applied universally, you simply are not going to have the same relationship to it when you're in that group.
I mean, I've certainly heard gay people refer to each other as fags.
And I've certainly...
There's a sort of joke about women who have a gay friend...
That they're fag hags, you know, and I've heard, you know, gay people say, oh, is your fag hag girlfriend coming over tonight or something like that?
And it's just kind of funny, you know, it's not the way that I would particularly choose to talk, but it's a way of owning the word and taking the power away from the outgroup's use of it as a pejorative.
And see, the one problem I'd have with that is, from that example, you would think context matters in the sense of you using the word.
If you're using it in a good way, like a gay person calling another gay person a fag in a playful way, then you'd think it's not an offensive word.
But if I were to go on TV and say, well, I think faggots are entitled to the same rights as normal people.
Then I'd get a lot of flack.
That would be a pretty astounding statement to make, but all right.
But look, I mean, first of all, the word itself, no word itself can be offensive.
Correct, yeah.
People are offensive.
Words are not.
And we simply know that because anybody who studied a foreign language, Mike, if you want to look up any of these, they could be kind of fun, but anybody who studies a foreign language knows that there are words in that other language.
That are perfectly innocuous, that are shockingly rude in your language, right?
So in another language, it may refer to a tree, and in your language, it may refer to something pretty heinous, right?
Shiitake mushroom!
But anyway.
Are you talking about, like, the context the word is used in, in, like, society?
No, I'm not.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
I guess I didn't quite understand your point there.
Okay.
When I said the word tabernak, does this make your hair stand on end?
No.
No.
Okay.
Well, if you're in Quebec, Canada, that is an unholy curse word.
It doesn't offend you because you're like, I don't know, is that some sort of Mormon choir?
I don't know, right?
But in Quebec, it's a hideous and heinous curse word.
Okay, so you're saying...
Close to MF in English.
And so the word itself is not offensive.
Only people can be offensive.
And it's all about the tonality, the inflection, the level of emotional oomph behind it.
And yes, if you're not part of the in-group that the pejorative applies to, you're automatically suspect in your use of it.
This is why a black man calling another black man my nigger...
Is not subject to the same level of outrage as, I don't know, Bull Connor or some fat southern sheriff using that, right?
Yeah.
But to that, I'd also like to add that it's something that's only seen in the black community.
In most cases, you don't see Mexicans calling each other wetbacks.
You don't see Asians calling each other chinks.
You don't see whites calling each other crackers unless it's in a satirical tone.
Like, only blacks...
Well, okay, but there's another...
No, but so, for instance...
Probably the closest equivalent to cracker in English is white trash.
Now, my understanding, and again, please forgive my non-expertise in this, but this is just my particular thoughts on the subject.
Within the black community, and this goes back to an old Chris Rock bit from, I don't know, a decade or more ago, But within the black community, there are nice, honorable, decent blacks.
And this is the view from within the black community.
And then there are the black equivalent of what white people would call white trash.
And the word nigger is sometimes used within the black community to refer to the black equivalent of white trash.
And so, of course, it's really a not-great temptation within the white community to look at the black community as just one big blob.
Blacks in America experience this.
It's like, no, they don't.
I'm pretty sure that Mike Brown's upbringing and experience was markedly different from, say, Tom Sowell's or Walter Williams or any of the other...
Fantastic and great black intellectuals or Marcus Garvey or Booker T. So saying there's a black experience in America is false.
Even Malcolm X would talk about this.
He would say there are the house slaves and there are the field slaves and the house slaves have a very different relationship Because they lived in the house and they lived among white people and they ate at the white man's table or at least nearby.
They were involved in the white man's dramas and they helped raise the white man's children so they had a very different experience of slavery than the field hands who slept out in sheds and had very little interaction and their primary interaction with the white man was not his cute cuddly children crawling on their lap to be told a story Or sang a spiritual, to use a cliché, the field slave's experience of the white man was the overseer with a whip.
And that's just one of many divisions.
This is something that Malcolm X talked about at quite a bit of length.
So from that standpoint, the idea that there is a black experience or this one big blob called the black experience, it's just not the case.
And there, of course, there's a strong history, at least there used to be up until the 1960s, there's a strong history of black intellectuals, very powerful intellectual black movements saying, Do not accept the white man's charity.
The white man's charity is put there to make the white man superior, to keep you dependent on the white man, to keep you down.
And if you take the white man's charity, the black family will be destroyed.
The charity is the way to emasculate the black male.
Because the white man's charity will in general be given to the black woman, making the black man irrelevant, Causing single motherhood.
I mean, there was a big tradition of, of course, you don't hear that much about this anymore, which is really tragic.
But there are, of course, still a lot of very vocal, very powerful, very intelligent, and incredibly, I mean, just great writers in the black community who are talking about the disaster of the welfare state.
That the welfare state among blacks Has done, as Tom Sowell points out, he said the welfare state has done to blacks what even slavery couldn't do, which is to destroy the black family.
And this was a tradition that went back to, at least to my, again, somewhat limited knowledge, but to the late 19th century, there was a very strong black movement that said, you know, we need independence, we need to be our own entrepreneurs, we need to not, I mean, some of them didn't even want to take loans from white banks, you know, we need to Show the white people we don't need them.
Anytime we fall into the white man's dependence, disaster follows.
And that was a very vocal and powerful part of the black movement.
Much more vocal and powerful than it is now, after the fact of the welfare state and all that.
And so the field hands and house slaves and anti-welfare and pro-welfare within the reparations, reparations for slavery within the black community is, or certainly was in the past, maybe less now, a hotly debated topic.
And some people say, yes, well, you know, the wealth of white America was accumulated on the backs of slaves and they owe us.
They owe us.
Other people say that would be a disaster.
Everyone's dead.
And how on earth you'd have to run DNA tests to figure out who might even possibly be a slave.
And lots of people would fake it.
I've got a whole podcast sitting in the archive about all of this.
It's yet to be released.
But the question of reparations.
The question within the black intellectuals and the black community as a whole, I'm sorry, I don't mean to say that it's only black intellectuals who are discussing these things.
These are very hot topics in the black community as a whole.
You know, the big question in the black community, what the hell is wrong with our young man, is hotly debated.
And some people, of course, say, well, it's a legacy of racism.
And some people say, well, it's lack of educational opportunities.
Other people say that it's poverty.
And other people, again, to tip my hat to Tom Sowell, Dr.
Sol, to be precise, say, no, it's toxic African-American culture that is causing the horrors of black youths.
And other people in the black community say, well, white racism is really bad and it's uncaused.
You know, whites are just white devils and racists and so on.
Other people within the black community say...
Well, no.
Given the black crime rates, whites have good reason to be feared, right?
Was it Jesse Jackson who said some years back, he said, after 20 years of working on equal rights and race relations, it breaks my heart.
I'm walking down a street at night, I turn around and I'm relieved to see white people, not black people.
So even the courses of the staggering levels of black violence and criminality in the United States are hotly debated within the black community and some people say, well, You've just got to marry the moms of your kids.
If you married the moms of your kids, then black crime rates would fall significantly, and some people even argue that if black men married black women before they had kids, then the huge disparity between white and black crime would virtually disappear.
It's a complex ecosystem of wildly divergent and often opposing thoughts.
And so within the black community, they sometimes use the word "nigger" to refer to trashy blacks that would be the equivalent of white trash.
And again, I'm not going to put Chris Rock as some sort of sociologist, but it was a very famous bit.
Mike, we have some rude words in other languages.
We do, and I'll leave it up to you to try to pronounce them, if you feel so inclined.
Oh, really?
All right.
Oh, yeah.
So, the word that I really have trouble with, I mean, is the see you next Tuesday word, C-U-N-T. Okay.
And apparently, and I hesitate to say this because we have a fair number of kangaroo fans in Australia, but the see you next Tuesday word is...
Apparently a greeting in Australia.
Yeah, yeah.
I think they all meet on Tuesdays, is that right?
Yeah, Tuesdays are big...
Not quite.
It's terribly offensive in the US. It's somewhat neutral in the UK. Japanese, Busu, extremely ugly girl.
I said I saw a bumper sticker today.
Beer, helping ugly people have sex since 1837.
Or, Beer!
Beer!
Because your friends really aren't that interesting.
Or...
You're not drinking alone if your kids are actually in the house.
Anyway.
So...
Or...
Kintama.
Golden balls.
Kisama.
Lord of the donkeys.
Whoa.
I'm only going to imagine what that is.
They call him.
Junior tripod.
Shut up, brat.
Pai-pai.
Bests and nipples.
And...
In Russian...
You have bought me a lot.
Well, actually, that's just true in Russia as a whole because the winter is pretty long.
Your mother sucks cow dicks.
I'm not even going to try some of these ones.
But apparently in Russia, it's very hard to say I have a big yellow dick.
I've got to think that pretty much you'd say that at the doctor's because I'm pretty sure.
I haven't seen a huge number of dicks in my life, but I do not remember that being a very healthy color.
Wait, let me try it.
Let me try it.
That would be MF.
I actually had a roommate once who claimed to and he ran me through it.
I think it was true.
He had learned In 22 languages, he had learned the phrase to say in a bar.
I will have a beer.
My friend will pay.
Okay, Charles Barkley.
We as black people, we are never going to be successful.
Not because of you white people, but because of other black people.
It's a dirty, dark secret.
You know, when there are young black kids doing well in school, the loser kids tell them, oh, you're acting white.
For some reason, we are brainwashed to think that if you're not a thug or an idiot, you're not black enough.
And...
the German just no alright okay okay Arschgeschicht.
Arschface.
Schwurzlutsche.
Actually, that one I can do even better.
Schwurzlutsche.
Cocksucker.
So anyway, so these words are offensive if you know German.
Otherwise, they just make Polish people wet themselves.
So, yeah, sorry for a fairly long answer to that, but, you know, black people use it sometimes in terms of my friends or sometimes...
And I don't think it's a very classy thing to do.
And, you know, gay people use faggots sometimes and black people use niggers sometimes in a wide variety of contexts.
And I... I don't think that it's...
I don't think...
I just...
I can't imagine...
Tom Sowell sidling up to Denzel Washington saying, Denzy, my nigga.
I just can't see it.
Does that help at all?
Somewhat, but there's a big part of the question that I still have unanswered here.
I have no problem with accepting that the word nigger is offensive, but the context obviously does matter.
And I don't think I should be forbidden to use it, or if I just want to use a joke, I shouldn't have to look behind both shoulders before actually saying it.
If I'm using it in...
Wait, you want to use the word...
Wait, hang on, hang on.
You want to use the word nigger in the joke?
Well, there's...
Like, yeah, there are jokes.
See, I can't...
I gotta tell you, man.
I gotta tell you.
I can't, for the life of me, figure out the cost-benefit of that weighing in your favor as a white person.
Like, there's no amount of laughter that would be big enough, or people who I think would be laughing in a decent way, or people I'd like to be around to laugh at a joke containing the word nigger.
I just can't possibly see what cost-benefit there is in that.
How could that possibly be a win for you?
What do you mean, how could that be a win?
Using a joke with the word nigger in it.
Well, it would get laughs.
That's one thing.
But it's not even that it's a problem.
It's more the principle that just because I'm white, I can't use the word.
That's what I take issue with.
Oh no, you can use the word.
You can do whatever you want.
You can use the word, it's just there may be consequences.
And I think those consequences would be pretty negative.
And I can't really quite disagree with those negative consequences.
Because if you're going to think it's really funny to use a joke with the word nigger in it, I've got to imagine that the negative consequences you might accrue would be, you know, pretty fair.
Like, there's better ways to...
Just look at Michael Richards.
There's better ways to make a joke, right?
So would you carry that over to all sorts of offensive jokes?
Well, sure.
I mean...
I mean, why would you want to tell a joke using the word faggot or nigger or I don't even know what else.
It doesn't even have to be condensed into words.
It can just be offensive jokes themselves.
Like, Daniel Tosh got a lot of flack for his rape joke.
At some point, I think people should understand that a joke is a joke and no one's trying to To offend people in a meaningful way with their jokes.
They're just trying to get laughs.
How do you know?
How do you know that people are just trying to get laughs?
I guess you don't.
Maybe there is deep-seated racism or anti...
Female thoughts or misogyny or whatever.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Now, to be fair, I do think that what Jerry Seinfeld and Dennis Miller and Chris Rock have all complained about, they don't want to do college campuses anymore because college students are just so hypersensitive, right?
Yeah.
And so politically correct that you just can't make a joke because everyone just tightens up, right?
Yeah.
And so I get that.
I mean, but so the joke that Jerry Seinfeld apparently got in trouble for was he's saying, you know, it's pretty tough to look manly or something like that when you're, you know, scrolling through your contacts on your phone like a gay French king.
I think that's a little funny.
I mean, I have a soft spot for Jerry Seinfeld.
I think he's just pretty funny as a whole.
But that's not exactly offensive.
And that's not anti-gay or anything like that.
And, you know, but, oh, the PC police are all about that stuff and causing even problems and all that.
So, yeah, it can go too far, but he's not using any offensive words.
I can't for the life of me imagine a white person telling a joke with the word nigger in it and it being worth it.
Yeah.
I do find it kind of hard to figure out a joke, but I think if you give me a few days, I could figure one out.
No, but why would you?
Why would you want to bother?
There's so many great jokes in the world.
Why would you need to use a joke containing a word that's very volatile?
Well, you can say that for anything.
Why would you want to make a joke about cripples?
Why would you want to make a joke about white people?
Why would you want to make a joke about your weird neighbor?
There's so many other things that wouldn't offend anyone.
No, no, no, but you can...
I don't know about cripples, but in terms of white people and your weird neighbor, you could do all of those without using...
Very volatile language.
And again, look, don't get me wrong, I'm no stranger to controversy, and I don't mind shaking the trees a little bit, because I think people get, these days, they're just getting too rigid, and everybody's worrying too much about the effects of language.
So you're preaching to the choir a little bit here, but I just, I don't see the cost-benefit.
I mean, ethical issues aside, right, how could this be a win?
Well, can I give you a real example that I've run into in my actual life?
You sure?
In, I forget which grade it was, but in school we read books from the era of slavery, and they do use the word nigger pretty extensively, and when you're called on to read, it's somewhat of a moral quandary if you have a black student in your classroom, whether you, as a white person, should say the word that's written on the page.
So you're not implying anything by it.
But that's easy enough.
Hang on, hang on.
But that's easy enough to solve.
How would you solve that?
And it comes from just treating the black person like a human being.
Yes.
And the way you solve that is you, you know, let's say you're reading Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus or whatever it is.
Or maybe you're reading Huck Finn, which has the word nigger in it.
Yeah.
So you say, you turn to the black guy and you say, listen, man, we both know what's coming.
There's the N-word here.
Do you want me to read it or do you want me to skip it?
I mean, because, you know, how are you feeling about it, right?
Right.
And my guess is that 9 times out of 10 or 9 times out of 100, the guy will say, well, that's what's written, so read it, right?
I'm not made of glass, right?
Now, if it is something that's really upsetting to him, you can have a conversation about it.
Say, oh, well, tell me more.
Tell me what your thoughts are.
But you deal with it as a communication issue between two reasonable and intelligent people.
And that obviously gets more complicated.
And also, that's not reading a joke, right?
That's not telling a joke where it's optional.
Yeah, well, the joke was just one example.
The real point I'm trying to get at is the fear behind it.
I don't think that white people should be instilled with the fear of using the word in any context, whether it be historical or comical.
Oh, and it's by far the least, but I don't think that's a big problem, right?
There's another big problem when it comes to racism that...
I'm going to address.
Sorry, this is a like it or not situation.
I hope you won't mind too much.
Yeah, go ahead.
No, the new nigger is racist.
What do you mean by that?
Right, because the word racist is something that is tossed around so casually and so aggressively and those two should never ever be co-joined, casual and aggressive.
That's sociopathic.
But the word racist...
It's tossed around so liberally.
Oh, and I mean that in the double meaning of the word.
Yes, I do.
I find that is the most offensive racial term that is around these days.
And it's everywhere.
And it is much more damaging to any honest conversation about racists than the word nigger.
The word racist is the radioactive word.
That is the word That is destroying any semblance of having an honest conversation about race.
Because the invitation to have an honest conversation about race means that you can't bring up facts that people don't like.
Liberals don't like.
And that is bullshit.
I mean, I on this show have tried to have a meaningful conversation about race.
Had lots of black callers.
Been great to chat with them.
Bring out facts.
Apparently facts are racist.
Bring out perspectives.
Apparently perspectives backed up by data are also racist.
And this is why, you know, occasionally I'll see a comment.
I don't watch comments much, but occasionally I'll see a comment.
I get called a racist for pointing out facts from well-respected data sources.
Massive prevalence of black crime.
Yeah!
It's a problem!
Quick question!
Were there more whites who owned slaves or more blacks who are criminals?
A narrow margin, but I'd say the blacks.
It's not that narrow.
Yeah.
In some places, you know, in Washington, D.C., in Washington, D.C., a black man is 53 times more likely to end up in prison than a white man.
That ain't all racism.
So this is an honest conversation about race.
Yeah.
Yeah.
White people have done some bad things.
Black people have done some bad things.
Ask the neighbors of Japan whether there's any Japanese privilege or colonialism or general rape, Nanking.
Yes, they've done some pretty horrible goddamn things too, as has every other culture and race throughout human history.
But yeah, blacks are doing some pretty terrible stuff.
Again, you know, it's still a minority, but it's a statistically significant minority compared to Everyone says, oh yeah, America is such a violent country.
No, it's really not.
The blacks are violent.
Because if you just look at white crime statistics, they're equivalent to Belgium.
America would be as peaceful as Belgium.
So yes, there is a problem with violence within the black community.
And I think that's quite significant.
Because when people say, I'm scared of blacks, well...
Of course you shouldn't be scared of all blacks.
You know, meet Morgan Freeman at a dinner party.
You know, you're pretty certain to end up walking out of there with your wallet still in your pants.
It's not a big problem, right?
But when people say, as Jesse Jackson said, he said, I'm scared of blacks.
I mean, boy, you think white people are scared of blacks?
Try talking to blacks about what it's like living in a black neighborhood.
They're terrified.
And rightly so!
Because the vast majority of the considerable homicides committed by black people are against black people.
And so we can't untangle questions of racism until the races act the same.
Right, so if the races act the same, then we can start to talk about racism.
Look, if you're walking down a dark alley And you turn around, because you hear footsteps behind you, pretty light footsteps.
You turn around, you see footsteps behind you, and you see two elderly Asian women fiddling with their giant cameras.
I guarantee you that if you say, I feared for my life, that you have an irrational fear.
Yeah.
Because demographically, they're not going to be the people who you're going to have much trouble with.
And so, until the races act the same, it's really, really hard to talk about racism without pointing out the fact that the races act differently.
In the 1970s, somebody collected statistics on almost 50,000 murders and non-negligent homicides.
Almost 50,000 murders and non-negligent homicides.
Let me ask you a question, my friend.
Of those nearly 50,000 deaths, how many were caused by Japanese Americans?
Where were these deaths taken from?
I think it was on the West Coast.
In America?
Yeah.
Very few.
A percentage, maybe.
Like 1%?
Less, maybe.
Like 500?
Yeah, something like that.
You would be off by almost, well, over 100 times.
Of the nearly 50,000 murders that occurred and non-negligent homicides that occurred in this time period, a grand total of four were committed by Japanese Americans.
I was thinking a low number.
That's low, would you agree?
Yeah, very.
Right.
Now...
That's not the numbers for blacks.
Very high.
I mean, we all know the stats.
And the population does come into question.
Young black males, 2-3% of the population, responsible for more than 50% of the homicides.
So, until the races act the same, not identically, but the same, in other words, white people in Belgium commit about the same number of crimes as white people in America, So there's some similarity there.
White people throughout Europe pretty much commit the same amount of crimes as white people throughout the world.
And in almost all black countries, at least, well, all the ones that I've studied, and again, not exactly cornered the market on specialty in this area, but the black countries have staggeringly high crime rates.
Now, of course, people immediately start rushing to white racism.
I submit that is a racist perspective.
Because the moment that an entire community, an entire group, an entire ethnicity all around the world can blame all of their dysfunctions on people, on other people, you've just completely disempowered them.
And until blacks stop committing so many crimes, it's going to be kind of tough for non-blacks to go, great!
Lots of blacks around!
How wonderful!
You know, it's not right.
It's not fair in some ways because, of course, the majority of blacks are law-abiding, wonderful, nice people and all that.
But still, the numbers are the numbers.
Yeah.
And until black kids start doing better in school, right?
I mean, in Florida, they've had to change the grades for black students if they're doing so badly.
Mm-hmm.
And so when black kids who are disproportionately violent and don't do well in school start coming to people's schools, that's a big...
You know, then people say, I'm not happy with this situation.
Well, the moment somebody just screams racism, they're not even bothering to think.
I was reading this...
I think it was in New York where there were a bunch of rich liberals, all voted Democrat as long as time has existed, a bunch of rich white liberals, and the school a couple of blocks over, which was a roughneck low-income welfare mom black kids school, was running out of space, so they started busing the black kids into the white liberal school.
Do you know what the white liberals did?
Well, they do.
Tried to block it every means possible.
Threatened to pull their kids out of school.
Yeah.
And people are like, well, wait a minute.
Interview reporters will go and talk to them.
Well, you're liberals.
What are you doing?
He's like, it's complicated, particularly when it's your own children.
Hello!
Welcome to the integration that everyone else has had to deal with, right?
It's a challenge.
Hey, nobody sits there and says, oh no, the Chinese mathletes are coming to my school.
Actually, they probably do because it makes the white kids look bad.
I don't know.
But nobody sits there and says, oh no, a Japanese family has moved in down the street.
There go my property.
The fact is that the races act differently.
Ethnicities act differently.
And that results in different opinions of the races.
And to just say, well, that's all racism.
I agree with you.
If somebody has a negative view of an ethnicity, when that ethnicity acts the same as everyone else, or better...
Well, that's racism or potentially racism for sure.
But until we can close the gap in achievement and until we can close the gap in crime levels, until we can close the gap in single parenthood, until these things get closed off, closed down, once the races start acting the same or similar, then we can start talking about racism.
But right now, everybody who screams racism is completely blowing over the fact that the races act differently.
I wish they didn't.
I really do.
Because if the racists act the same, it'd be very easy to spot the out-and-out racists.
And to add on to that point...
Do you know the bank that turns away the most black applicants?
It's a black-owned bank.
One of the arguments of why the housing crash occurred was because the government forced...
Banks to give loans to minorities who could squeeze themselves in if they self-reported their income and if interest rates stayed really low.
And then when they didn't, anyway.
But the methodology of the study all turned out to be complete nonsense.
And the banks were not denying loans to qualified minority applicants or anything like that.
But what's interesting is that the bank...
With the highest rate of rejection for black applicants was a black bank.
And you see, one of the great things about being black in America is that you can treat black people as human beings without being called racist.
If blacks have disproportionately lower income and disproportionately shorter work histories, Then guess what?
They're gonna get fewer loans.
If banks are so racist, how come just about every Japanese-American family that applies gets a loan?
So, but you can go and say, look, I'm saying no to you.
It's not because you're black, it's because you're poor.
Or because you have an unstable work history.
Or because you can't verify your income.
Because you don't have any assets.
People say, ah, yes, well, you see, it's circular because they don't have any assets and therefore they can't get loans and therefore they can't grow their assets.
That's bullshit.
Wave upon wave upon wave of Jewish and European and Chinese and Japanese and Eastern European and Russian immigrants came crashing onto the shores of North America for hundreds of years with no assets.
Ah, but they never faced any racism.
Sure they did.
Sure they did.
And again, if you want to start screaming racism at people, then you have to prove that the races act the same and therefore all disparities come from racism.
You can make the case that if blacks end up as peaceful as whites and whites still don't like blacks, okay, let's start talking racism.
But what we need to do is instead of nagging white people to stop thinking negatively about black people, how about nagging black people To have intact families, you know, that would be really, really helpful.
I mean, President Obama has had a bully pulpit going on seven years now.
Has he ever once brought up the topic of single motherhood in the black community and its incredibly negative effects on young black men in particular?
Why no?
Why no?
Because the big fucking problem in America is the Confederate flag.
Yeah.
So no, I find that the use of the word racism is to me the only and most vivid example of racism out there.
It's the use of the word racism.
That's why when people accuse me of being racist and can't cite any specific evidence, then I'm not racist.
I'm data-driven because I like facts.
I like to base my perspective on a little thing we call reality.
I think the world is actually a pretty fair place.
And the communities where the family unit is the strongest, they tend to make the most money.
Among Asians, and slants not dots for my British friends, but among Asians, very cohesive, strong communities and families.
They're making out like bandits in white-run capitalism.
They're much higher per capita income than whites.
So, I think that the problem...
I did a speech years and years ago, 2008.
By God, that's a lot of years ago.
Coming around six or seven years ago, in the New Hampshire Forum, where I said that It's the evil that is hidden that is the most dangerous.
The evil that everyone sees, they reject, right?
It's like your body, if it sees an infection and goes for the infection, that's great.
If it doesn't go for the infection, you have a problem, because it doesn't recognize it as a danger.
Or if it attacks the wrong infection, in other words, it's not an infection, then you have an allergy which can kill you, right?
And racism...
If a white person...
Comes out and says some horrible thing about blacks.
Some obviously offensive thing.
I think Michael Richards is kind of in that category with his stand-up routine and all that.
Well, yeah, he's ostracized.
His career is over.
I don't have any particularly strong disagreements with that because I don't want someone like that out there.
I mean, I wouldn't ban anyone.
I wouldn't make laws against anything.
But, yeah, that wouldn't be where my entertainment dollar would go, to say the least.
So, the racism that everyone thinks is out there is not.
You know, like I did a show, I don't know, 8 or 10, 12 months ago, where I said, look, I've never met a white racist.
And it's true.
Yeah, I've read things online from people who claim to be white, who say racist things.
Yeah, okay, for sure.
But I've never met.
I'm not saying they don't exist.
I'm just saying I've never met them.
And, you know, just try holding a Klan rally in Manhattan, right?
I mean, you're not going to have a lot of fun.
And so, white racism is something that everyone has been so hypersensitized to that it's really not that much of an issue.
Because there really aren't a lot of people out there touting god-awful white supremacist views or anything like that.
It's just not a big thing in society.
Which is why there are all these witch hunts over...
Rick Perry used to have a niggerland ranch for years in his family.
That's the point.
Oh my god, are we chasing down ancient rock writings?
What are we, fucking Gandalf now?
Niggerhead.
There you go.
Niggerhead, right?
Or you can't use the word niggerly to mean stingy.
So it's become that ridiculous.
So white racism in terms of its public level of acceptance, it's a done deal and it's been done for decades.
I swear to God, the only racism that I see now out there is people screaming racism almost exclusively at white people.
That is the only verifiable racism that's out there and people don't even see that it's racist.
If you accuse someone of racism without clear evidence, Where someone is making a statement about another race that is negative, that is not backed up by any data, that is universalized, that is consistent, not something that just, you know, whatever, right?
In a heat of anger, you know, whatever.
But somebody who, like, consistently makes negative generalizations unsupported by any data about some...
Okay, fine.
Then you've found yourself an honest-to-God racist.
Good job!
You have found the modern unicorn.
But just go online.
I mean, just look through my videos.
The number of times that the word racist gets hurled around, man, you know, if you're really concerned about racism and you're throwing the word racist at people because they're bringing up uncomfortable facts, guess what, Buster?
You're the racist.
You're the racist.
Because calling someone a racist without evidence makes you the racist.
I think...
I wouldn't call it racist.
I would call it more dishonest.
Whenever I've run into people who use the term racist really lightly in conversation, it's usually because you present a fact that, obviously, since it's a fact, you can't prove wrong.
No!
No!
It's racist!
Because they're only saying racist because it's a white person.
That's why it's racist.
When Tom Sowell says black crime levels are horrendous, nobody calls him a racist.
When Jesse Jackson says I'm terrified of young black men, nobody calls him a racist.
It's only because a white person is saying it.
That's why it's racist, because it's a one-size-fits-all pejorative that only applies to white people.
That's what makes it racist.
Okay, yeah, I do see what you're saying there.
I do agree in that case.
But to add on that...
If a statement made by a black person is not racist, but becomes racist when made by a white person...
Whoever calls that white person racist is the only verified racist in the whole interaction.
Because they are having a different negative standard only for white people.
That's the very definition of racism.
I have a negative pejorative that only applies to white people.
That is the very definition of racism.
That's why I'm saying the people who say racism, racism, racism only against white people They're the only verified and invisible racists left on the goddamn planet as far as I can see.
Yeah.
And to add to that, I think it's more of a dishonest point because no one's trying to actually call you a racist.
What they're doing is trying to ignore your points by calling your points racist.
There's no way to prove the facts wrong.
No, they're trying to shut me up.
Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get at.
There's no way to prove the facts wrong, but to prove the facts racist and get some sympathy would help your argument out.
I don't know what you're saying.
I'm just telling you they're racist.
I can know what you're saying.
That's the only racism that I see.
And, you know...
What about, you know, has anyone ever, do you ever see these articles that say, gosh, I wonder how white people feel being called racists all the time?
The moment that they don't immediately kowtow to the dominant PC narrative and somehow claim to respect blacks by saying that they're all endless victims of centuries-old racism and slavery and Jim Crow and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
The moment a white person steps out of line And says, I have more respect for blacks than to portray them as victims.
There's things that the black people can do, you know, maybe.
I don't know how slavery 150 years ago is causing you to hit your children a lot more.
I don't know how slavery is causing you all to not get married.
People say, ah, well, you know, but slavery destroyed the black family.
No, it didn't.
No, it didn't.
Black slaves, when freed, used to cross hundreds or even thousands of miles to go and find their wives and children.
It was a heroic migration of infinite masculine power and devotion.
They would travel heartbreakingly, staggeringly Nearly infinite, foot-bleedingly, throat-parching distances to find their wives and children and reunite with them.
Now some wannabe rapper can't even pull himself away from Judge Judy to go visit his kid three doors down.
Yeah, yeah.
And the black family was way stronger in the 1920s.
Ooh, but are you going to argue that there was less racism in the 1920s?
Think you're going to have a tough time with that, my friend?
Not you, right?
And so when someone says, and Shelby Steele writes about this very eloquently, jaw-droppingly great writer, but when someone says, hey, I don't think that blame is going to solve your problems.
I don't think blame is going to solve your problems.
Like, if you met someone who said, I'm scared of blacks, and said it's because they commit so much crime relative to whites, people would say, that's no excuse, or that's a lie, or you're a racist, right?
So, white people don't get to blame their perspectives on even somewhat verifiable facts.
So, white people don't get the excuse, and neither do Asians.
They don't get the excuse...
Of blaming other people for their perspectives.
Even though you could argue that in contemporary American and British and Canadian society, ridiculously high levels of black crime might be a little bit more relevant to the current social discourse than slavery from 150 years ago.
Maybe.
Might just have a little bit more effect on people's perspectives.
So, and that's what I mean.
The moment you go to black people and you say, oh, but slavery, oh, but Jim Crow, oh, it's not your fault.
That's racist!
Yeah.
Unless you're going to go to everyone and say, oh, well, if you're scared of blacks, well, you know, there is a fair amount of crime in the black community, so you can be excused for that.
That's not your fault.
Nope.
You see?
Highest standards for whites, lowest standards for blacks.
Blacks can blame things on slavery.
Whites can't blame any anxiety about blacks on high levels of black crime.
Slavery 150 years ago, high levels of black crime in the here and now.
Very high standards for whites.
Very low standards for blacks.
That's racist!
And very anti-black.
I think that the healthiest thing would be...
Look...
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Okay, look.
We've tried the white guilt thing for, I don't know, do you want to start with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin?
Do you want to start with a variety of black movements in the late 19th, early 20th century around empowerment?
Do you want to, I mean...
Do you want to start with The Killer Mockingbird?
Do you want to start with the 60s?
Where do you want to start?
But we've given it a good old college try, right?
Yeah.
Suffice it to say, it's been tried.
Yeah.
And I think that by far the greatest and healthiest thing that we can all do for relations between the races It's for white people to stop feeling guilty and stop paying and call people out on their racism.
I was raised to treat blacks as equals.
I had black friends throughout my youth whose company I really enjoyed and whose cultures, to be fair, my one Jamaican friend, yeah, that was a bit of an aggressive single mom culture.
And that's coming from me.
So, when I say it's pretty aggressive, yeah, I think that there were some dysfunctions.
Most popular guy in my high school was a black guy.
Great guy.
So, my approach, in a nutshell, is I don't care that you're black.
I don't.
Isn't that what we want?
A colorblind society?
Isn't that what Martin Luther King Jr.
so much wanted and cried out for and bled and died for?
Judge not.
I want a world where a man is judged not by the color of his skin, by the content of his character.
Absolutely.
I don't care.
I don't care that you're Chinese.
I don't care that you're Native American or Native Canadian.
I don't care.
I don't care.
You are, to me, moving muscle.
In different upholstery.
I don't mean to spark a whole...
That's my thing.
And what that means is that if I take the color out of the equation, I take the black part out of the equation, and I say, okay, what if these were all white people committing staggeringly disproportionate amounts of crime and wildly disproportionately reliant on welfare?
Yes, it's true in America more white people are on welfare than black people, but there are quite a few more white people than black people.
And what if there was a white group that was pretty violent in a lot of ways, really three-quarters of them growing up without fathers, heavily over-represented in the prisons and criminal justice system.
If there was a group of white people, what would you say to them?
Forget that they were black.
What would you say to them if they were just...
It doesn't matter whether they're white or not.
Just if we were truly colorblind, if it didn't matter at all that they were black, what would you say to that group of people?
I'd say they did things in their life to bring them there, and they're the only ones to blame.
Yeah!
Something in the lines of, stop doing stupid shit!
Yeah, yeah.
Stop it!
Stop it.
Stop doing stupid shit.
Shape up.
Read books.
Get educated.
Finish high school.
Get a job.
Keep a job for at least a year.
And don't have children before you got married!
Yeah, yeah.
That's the recipe, because if you do all of that, it's virtually certain you're going to end up in the middle class.
Finish high school.
Get a job.
Keep it for a year.
Don't have children out of wedlock.
You do that?
Home run, baby.
Middle class, all the way.
Absolutely.
And I'd say that.
And I'd say, stop doing stupid shit.
Stop having a culture that worships giant clocks and big asses.
Stop it.
Just don't do it.
You just have to stop.
I'm sorry.
Your culture is not helping you.
It's barely a culture.
It's a culture like mold is a culture.
And this is the frustration.
I want to speak for non-blacks, but the frustration is we want a colorblind community.
Oh, really?
Okay, so if I saw this dysfunctional group of whites, whites, I'd tell them to shape up, stop doing stupid shit, and I'd tell them the facts about their community.
Maybe they weren't aware of it.
Maybe they didn't know how destructive single motherhood was.
But I'd say, man, you people are doing some stupid shit.
Stop it.
You can't say that.
Oh, okay, so we're back to being a very fucking color-focused society and now I can't be as if I was in a color-blind society.
Oh, you're a racist.
Okay, well then I give up.
And that's the point, right?
The point is just to make you give up.
You can't win.
I can't talk about facts.
I can't assign responsibility.
I can't criticize.
So what, do I just stand here, fucking stammer, apologize, and fire a cannon full of money at a problem where more money just makes it worse?
Oh, great!
So I'm supposed to live in a hyper-race-conscious society where all non-blacks are just supposed to shut up and pay up.
It's funny you say that.
It's funny you say that as a joke, but that's actually what's happening in cases of affirmative action.
It's where you're making white people lose jobs that they're qualified for, for less qualified minorities.
Yeah, I mean, okay, so we're supposed to live in a colorblind society, but blacks are supposed to get legal advantages over everyone else.
And, boy, if you think they get legal advantages over whites, Just talk to some Asians about how much they enjoy having their SAT scores normalized down and blacks normalized up.
They're currently engaged in a lawsuit out in California, I think, where they're saying this is horrible.
You have to score ridiculously higher as an Asian person to get the same mark as a black person.
Because reality really cares about SAT scores, right?
So it's like, okay, well then...
How the fuck are we supposed to treat the racists as equal when we have legal requirements to treat them as different?
In Florida, they're normalizing up the scores of black kids in schools.
So are they equal or not?
You can't win?
Well, of course you can, just by telling the truth.
But...
Yeah, it's not working.
I mean, come on.
We all know that it's not working.
I had a friend who told me...
The way it is right now, nobody outside the black community can fix things in the black community, but at least what we can do is stop, because...
I'm sorry to keep ranting, and I'll stop in a second, but listen, man.
I don't care fundamentally about the feelings of black activists.
I don't care.
I don't think that they're...
And I'm talking not the...
The more responsibility-bound and educate yourselves and toxic cultural black activists, right?
I mean like the white, institutionalized, racist, social justice warrior, bullshit artists, right?
I don't care about their feelings.
I'll tell you who I care about, fundamentally.
And this is true for so much of what I say.
If you unravel most of my speeches, you'll find this tiny beating heart at the core.
What I really care about is the black kids.
The black babies coming out.
Wouldn't it be nice for them to have a dad around?
Yeah.
It really, really would.
Absolutely.
Wouldn't it be nice for them to know that the government didn't have to step in and pinch hit for them so they could get on first fucking base?
Do you know how disempowering it is?
For young black kids to look at the world and say, well shit, we can't even get a job if the government doesn't force people to hire us.
How crappy are we?
The government will go and round up a date for you and deliver to you in an armored car and have her kiss you at gunpoint.
Do you feel pretty yet?
Bet you don't.
That jobs and economic opportunities need to be rounded up by the state and delivered to blacks?
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
How is that supposed to make them feel equal or competent or powerful or effective in their society?
Now, the only answer is that they are wonderful and competent and effective, exactly the same as, say, Asians.
It's just that everyone in the world hates them.
Right?
Because, you know, white racism wouldn't explain it because Asians Have higher per capita income, not as high assets, just because they've been around this long, higher per capita income than whites.
Asians start a whole bunch of companies, right?
And Asians then should be, because they're smarter than whites on average, right?
106 to 100.
Asians are smarter than whites and have a higher per capita income, significantly entrepreneurial, so they should be able to tap into this unmined resource Of black excellence and competence.
But they don't, which I guess means that Asians are also racist against blacks.
What about Jews?
Jews have an even higher IQ than Asians, at least Ashkenazim.
110, 115, 120s if you just count verbal and ditch the spatial reasoning.
Of course, Jews are incredibly entrepreneurial and very successful.
I guess the massive amounts of white anti-Semitism is...
They're just biding their time.
It's just biding its time.
Well, first we're going to wait until they have all the power.
But even Jews won't tap into this huge resource of amazing black intelligence.
So, oh, the Jews must...
Everyone!
That's the only way that affirmative action can be justified.
Because if only whites didn't want to hire blacks because of white racism, boy, they'd learn pretty quick because all the towns in blacks would be snapped up by everyone else.
Thank you.
White companies would go out of business because they'd be significantly limiting Their acceptance of applicants.
Yeah, same goes for women too.
So the only way that this...
Yeah, yeah, what's another?
Let's just try and offend one group at a time, if that's alright.
I don't think we've offended just about everyone so far.
But let's continue.
I think there's probably still someone in Lapland who hasn't been offended.
So the only answer as to why the black community needs massive amounts of government enforcement and support and rounding up hires to give them jobs or Basically go to jail is, well, everyone's gotta hate us.
And that's the message that affirmative action gives.
And how that is not anything but unbelievably destructive to young black people, I cannot fathom.
And I'm just, again, this is just basic empathy.
I mean, if I lived in a black-dominated society, dominated is the wrong word, let's just say I lived in a majority black society, And I knew, walking into every job interview, that this person might be forced to hire me against his wishes, that he just really didn't like me, but I could use the power of the state to force him to hire me or go to jail.
Well, that's job rape.
How humiliating that would be.
How wretched that would be.
How inferior...
That would make me feel, you can't get a job unless the government points a gun at someone and forces them to hire you.
Oh, God!
That's the message that's been pounded in to the black youth through all of this affirmative action.
I don't just mean the hiring stuff, I mean all of it.
All of it.
That's being imbibed by the black youth, and that is the most destructive element of everything that's going on.
Blacks are not children.
Blacks are not dumb.
And I join with a huge legion of black activists in saying, stop blaming.
Stop doing stupid shit.
Everybody in the West lives in a first world country.
Way more opportunities in the first world country than at any other time in history and any other place in the world.
So, Step up or shut up.
Because my guilt is out.
Yeah, definitely.
All right.
Got to move on to the next caller.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
For your question.
Have a good one.
Thanks.
All right.
Well, up next is Martin.
Martin wrote in and said, Since I started watching Stefan's videos, I've realized that I abused my children as they were growing up.
I spanked them, yelled at them, and even once got into a fistfight with my teenage son.
I believe that I was, quote, doing the right thing, but I'm now ashamed of the things that I have done to them.
I've expressed this regret to them and have been working over the last two years to change my parenting style.
The problem is that my children don't agree and have even said that they wished I had spanked them more.
How do I help my teenage and adult children to understand that I made mistakes when I raised them and convince them that spanking and hitting are wrong?
How do I stop the cycle of violence that I was raised with and have now perpetuated into my family's future?
That's from Martin.
Great question, Martin.
I really appreciate the courage it takes to call in with something like this, you know, massive respect.
It's been difficult the last probably year and a half, two years, really, since I, you know, thought about it and started coming, you know, to these conclusions.
And there's been issues within our family, you know, arguments and Just major drama and problems arguing between the siblings and things like that.
It's been a lot of difficulties to get through.
And I want to get it to stop.
That's really what it's about.
Question.
Do you want me to Dig into the—I think I've got a fairly firm grasp on the history, and I apologize for even saying that, because obviously the history is complex and so on.
Do you want to dig into the past a little more, or do you want me to tell you what I think is going on now?
Well, what I want is—what I'd like is practicality, something that I can really— Take and move forward with, I would guess.
I mean, I have a lot of personal history myself, and obviously a lot of history within my family, you know, my children and my wife and stuff, but I don't know.
Let me ask you a question.
We'll see if it's fruitful, and if not, we'll I don't want to drive...
I know you want to get...
I can sense from the email you want to get someplace practical, and I don't want to drive with my eyes firmly glued on the rearview mirror if we're going fast, right?
So let me ask you this question.
What is your kids' social circle like?
Who are their peers at the moment?
Who are they hanging out with?
Who are they spending time with?
My son is spending a lot of time with me right now.
He's 19 years old, out of high school, and does not have a job, and lives here at home, and we play a lot of video games together and stuff.
Just as an FYI, about a month and a half ago, I quit A corporate job that I'd had for six years.
And I did that because of moral reasons.
And I haven't been able to find a job yet since then.
Oh, six months.
It's been a month and a half since I quit.
So I've been spending a lot of time out.
Right.
You have not answered my question.
I have not actually.
That's fine.
I just wanted to point it out.
My son hangs out with me a lot.
He has a few friends.
We have a few friends online that we'd say together that we talk to via Skype.
My oldest daughter, she works three jobs.
She's 21.
She doesn't have a lot of social time.
But she is dating the next door neighbor's son and they are trying to move in together.
So there's that.
What's he like?
He is...
He has two children with two different women and is eight years older than she is.
Eight years older than she is.
Nine years old.
Nine.
Okay.
So here we have the answer.
Without even having to go any further, we have the answer.
Now, do you know why I asked about your children's peers?
I know that peers tend to have a lot more influence than adults, especially in the teenage and young adult life.
But other than that, no.
Alright.
So, when you hit your children...
When you get involved in fistfights, as you said, with your son when he was a teenager, when you hit your children, what happens is you shape who they are.
I know.
And, you know, we just had Dr.
Eric Turkheimer on the show.
It's not been released yet, but watch it.
Watch it, man.
But you should watch it because he talks about how...
Children who are physically disciplined where it's sort of calm and it's explained and it's a couple of light taps on the butt, they don't tend to do that bad, right?
But that wasn't your kind of discipline.
Your kind of discipline was kind of like an escalation and a lashing out.
Yeah, there were many times like that.
I mean, it wasn't...
It doesn't matter how often it happened, but it happened enough times.
Right.
For sure.
Right.
And so what's happened is that you have created in your children patterns that have drawn them into or kept them in a particular social environment.
And that social environment is, at least according to your report of your sister's boyfriend, kind of low rent, right?
A little trashy.
My daughter's boyfriend.
Right.
Sorry.
So when they say that they have no problem with what you did, what they're saying is, you helped us to adapt to our horizontal peer environment, and if you change and you regret what you've done, we can't hang out with these people anymore who are our friends.
If we change and we improve, Then we have to get better friends and better boyfriends.
And they don't want to do that.
Especially to a young person, peers are very important.
And it's sort of like, alright son, we're going to Japan.
I'm going to teach you all Japanese and sons and daughters and now we're going to get you embedded in the Japanese culture.
And now all of your friends are going to be Japanese speaking people and you're going to know everything there is to know about the Japanese culture.
And then after they've been in that Japanese culture for 20 or so years...
You say, kids, it was a terrible mistake to move to Japan.
Japan is the worst place ever.
We're now going to Iceland.
What would they say?
Yeah, they wouldn't agree with that at all.
They'd be mad.
No, they'd say, I'm glad you brought us to Japan.
This is all we know.
They'd be angry with me for trying to remove them from it.
I know that.
Yeah, like why the hell would you bring us to Japan and then say it was a really bad and wrong thing for you to bring us to Japan?
What are you, crazy?
Is this a fair approximation to what may be going down?
Yeah, I can see that for sure.
I really tried to stop doing physical discipline at a young age with them because what made me realize was I grabbed my daughter.
I believe she was 9 or 10 years old at the time.
I just grabbed her by the arm.
Really angrily and pulled her towards me and gritted my teeth and, you know, said something.
I don't even remember what it was about.
But I grabbed her so hard, I left a bruise on her arm in the shape of my hand.
And that's when I just completely stopped.
But by that time, it was too late.
There was lashing out from them onto me, especially when they started hitting their teenage years and...
Yeah, and my wife still continued to do it because, you know, I thought that was what was right.
And I know that's not an excuse.
That's not a valid reason.
Well, I assume you didn't read the books on parenting or whatever that might have given you different options.
No, I truly believed that the things that my parents had taught me were the right things to do because I considered myself a good person, and the only way that I was that good person was because of the things that I had gone through.
That was, in fact, the attitude that I had and the things that I told people.
I said that I would not change anything that I'd ever been through because I'm a good person, I love who I am, and meanwhile, here I am doing these pilot things.
Yeah, I mean, it is horrifying, right?
Like, you look at yourself saying, well, how did I get here?
Yeah, yeah.
It's been a struggle to actually just deal with this stuff myself.
And even, you know, my wife and I still disagree a lot of times.
And she gets very angry at me because I'm accusing her of abusing her children.
And she loves her children.
And I'm, you know, accusing her of being a bad parent.
And therefore I no longer love her because of this stuff.
It's been a struggle there.
I mean, it hasn't come to the point where we disagree so much that we can't be around each other, but we talk openly about this, and once in a while it gets very angry, and we have to stop, and it seems like we never resolve the issue.
Right.
Right.
No, listen, this is why change is so hard.
It's hard enough if you're like solo.
If you've got other passengers in your plane of life, it's, you know, it's really a challenge.
So, I mean, you switch into the autopilot of Virtue and they think you're diving into a cliff, right?
And, I mean, a little bit about my past.
The thing is I realized that I had been abused and my parents, you know, were bad people.
A long time ago and in fact what we did was it was 17 years ago when we decided we were leaving the town that we grew up in or my parents were because they were just too much into our family and trying to tear our family apart it seemed like and I left.
Oh this is you and your wife?
Yeah we did and we didn't speak to my parents for three years I think and At this point right now, it's been four years since I've even seen or talked to or heard from my parents at all because of all of this.
And they don't consider us family.
Well, I'm sorry.
I mean, I'm obviously sorry to hear about all of that, but I certainly understand.
But that's one of the problems, too, is because I did that.
You know, I've been...
My youngest feels like she can say that we're not her family and she sometimes pretends like we're not.
She's 17 years old and she once even called the cops on my wife saying that she didn't know who this woman was and this woman's in her house and the cops came over and took her.
Wait, what?
She pretended your wife was an intruder?
Yeah, and called 911 and said, I don't know who this woman is, and her brother, too.
And, yeah, that was a few months ago.
So...
Wow.
And the cops, you know, they said they understood, and they...
Took her and she spent a night in the hospital because she told them that she was hearing voices in her head, which, you know, we've tried to get her to go through counseling and stuff.
She doesn't...
We almost literally have to physically force her out the door to do it, and we can't...
I can't do that anymore.
I used to be able to just pick them up and do that, but I... Oh yeah, they get bigger and you get older.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's what happened with my son a few years ago when we got into the fist fight.
So I went through a lot of this stuff with my own parents when I was a teenager as well.
I got into a number of fist fights with my father.
And yeah, I was pretty physically punished as long as they could do it to me.
Yeah, I mean, you have an adverse childhood experience score of 8, which is, you know, pretty wretched.
So I sympathize with you for all of that.
So is it fair to say that your family is in significant crisis?
It's in a plateau right now, but it's very close to a crisis.
It seems like it's on edge every day.
There's always little things that go on.
Oh, hold on, somebody...
I hope you recognize that dog in your house.
It sounds to me kind of like if I had to guess your daughter's involved with this guy who's, what, eight years older than she is and has had two kids by two different women.
And I'm guessing that your daughter is imminently number three.
Right.
So the odds are I would imagine that your daughter is going to get pregnant by this guy.
And then your life becomes permanently exceedingly complicated.
And this seems like a very urgent moment to me.
Yes, yeah.
I don't want to stop her from making her own decisions.
She wants to move on.
Oh, no, you do.
No, listen.
If she's going to go live with this guy, she's going to get knocked up.
And that's a disaster.
So, yes.
I mean, obviously you can't force her and, you know, I guess she's an adult and all that.
Did you say she's over?
She's 21.
She turned 21.
Yeah.
So, you can't, you know, you can't force her.
I mean, the die is somewhat cast now.
But, you know, I think that where you are as a family is far beyond, you know, what an internet philosophy show is.
Can deal with.
And so my suggestion would be that I know you said you drag her to therapy and so on, but I think that you and your wife, at least, or even just you, if you can't get her to go, you've got to get to a family crisis specialist yesterday.
Yeah.
In my opinion.
Yeah.
Because this is all hanging over an abyss, right?
Right.
I mean, if you've got a daughter who claims to be hearing voices and you've got a daughter who calls up the cops and says she doesn't recognize her own mother and spends the night in hospital, is this the same daughter who's shacking up with this death bag who's banged up?
No, no.
See, and that's the thing is, the younger daughter is also dating the next-door neighbor's son, their brothers, and...
Oh, your sister's dating brothers?
Oh...
It's street cyst.
Yeah, and they don't like it.
They don't like, you know, because my youngest daughter started dating the neighbor like a year and a half ago, and my daughter just started dating his brother like maybe six months ago.
Yeah, and these sound like real dirtbags to me.
Yeah.
I wouldn't say that to their faces.
I try to judge people based on the individual stuff that they do.
I could say that because I don't live next door to them.
But I am not particularly...
Come on, man.
Two kids by two different women?
That's dirtbag territory, right?
They lived there with their dad who also had many kids from different women.
As well.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, multi-generational dirtbag nest.
Okay, fine.
So, this is...
Because these guys are probably going to knock your daughters up.
That's next.
There's already been, with the youngest, there's been two pregnancy scares.
Right.
And unfortunately, you can't fire a cannon full of birth suppressants at them, right?
So...
We did get...
Both of them, birth control.
Good.
I mean, now that then the risk is just STDs, which is not, in this case, babies.
All right.
So, yeah, your family is pretty much in serious crisis mode, right?
I mean, and for that, you need, you know, I don't think there's anything philosophically that I can tell you other than this is where philosophy ends, and I think you really need Professionals in there helping you guys with this stuff.
I mean, I gotta think, like, the self-esteem of your daughters to date these guys, that they think that this is the best they can do, their self-esteem must just be in the toilet.
Or maybe it's way too high, you know, I mean, in terms of, like, they just think that they know everything and no one can tell them anything and so on, but the basic facts about just how wretched these guys are is terrible.
It's a terrible situation.
I mean, I feel for you, man.
It's a horrible situation.
But I really think that you need specialists in here, people who really know their stuff, who can really work with your family to try and turn this around.
What does your wife think of these guys that your daughters are dating?
She doesn't.
I think she likes the older guy, but I know she's very skeptical too.
She tells my daughter that you need to really think hard about this and it's not the best way.
We were 18.
She likes the guy who has two kids by two different women?
Oh no!
Oh no!
And that's why they're able to date them.
I mean, what would your wife consider a red flag?
Do they exist in her universe?
Are there any danger signals for any guys?
Do they have to, like, show up to your house in, like, Jofors and with a live deer head as a hat?
I mean, what are the red flags for your wife?
I don't think she considers kids to be a red flag because they're just...
I don't know exactly...
Well, no.
Kids?
Okay, maybe.
She's 35 and there's some guy whose wife died.
It's not the kids part.
It's that he's way older than your daughter, which means either she's fantastically mature or he's ridiculously immature.
Yeah, of course.
It's eight years when she's 21.
She's extremely ambitious, too.
Like I said, she's got three jobs.
She's always been that way.
She was diagnosed with dyslexia and learning disabilities at a young age, and she basically told them, you know, they told her she would never be able to read the way that she wanted to, and she said, no, I'll read how much I want, and then ended up spending most of her teenage years reading books in her bedroom.
She's just one of those really hard workers.
When she was 12 years old, she was...
Well, I love her a lot.
You just remind your wife that when this guy was learning how to masturbate, your daughter was still peeing her diapers.
That's gross.
And also that relationships where there are significant differences in age.
And this isn't just the eight years.
It's one thing to be 72 and 80, you know, or 56 and 64.
But 20 and 28?
And two kids with other...
I think he just turned 30 and she just turned 21.
So nine years!
Cheers.
Oh man.
Thank you.
Oh, man.
Yeah, that's not good, right?
And the dad's a philandera, right?
The dad is a man-whore, right?
Yeah, I guess.
I don't know.
I don't ever see women over there.
He's old now.
You told me.
You said that he had lots of different kids.
He's got a few.
You make it sound like quarters.
Well, he's got a few quarters jingling around in his pocket.
No, he's got a few kids by women he's not married to, right?
I think his youngest just turned 18 recently.
And then, of course, his oldest is 30.
Right.
Right.
So your wife is like...
Do you think she genuinely can't see that this could be any kind of problem?
No, I don't think she can't generally see.
I think she wants to support her daughter, not tell her daughter what to do.
But I keep telling her...
Why?
Why can't she see that this is a problem?
I don't mean to insult your wife, but did she join the other kids in the short bus to school?
I mean, why can your wife not see this?
She is not very educated and not very...
I'm not talking.
You don't need a PhD for this stuff.
You just need the common sense God gives your average platypus.
She grew up without a father at all.
And she...
I don't know.
She clings on to...
I think she clinged on to me when we were young, obviously.
I don't know exactly how to explain...
How did she feel about not growing up with a dad?
Oh, she...
I mean, she hated it.
She...
No, that's not one of your dogs in the background.
That's just me making my exasperation noise.
If she hated growing up without a dad, what does she think about this entire family?
I think she thinks that...
Of distant dads.
I think she thinks the women took it away from the men.
Because in her life, that's the way that her mother did it with her.
Her mother ran off with her and wouldn't let her father have any contact with her at all.
How about that?
Well, I think it's because her mother's stupid, but I don't know exactly.
The guy's not nice at all.
She eventually found him when she was a teenager.
Talked to him once or twice on the phone, and then found him again when we were 21, and we went and visited him across the U.S. for Christmas.
It wasn't very long after that that he told us that he didn't want anything to do with us at all.
Okay, so does she understand that her mother made a terrible choice?
Oh, yeah.
Of who to have kids with.
Does she understand that her daughters are doing exactly the same thing?
I don't think so.
I don't think she understands.
She will understand it if pointed out so, right?
She might.
No, she's not here.
She had a function she had to go to for a food bank she volunteers for.
Okay, yeah.
That's important.
Food bank.
All right.
Okay.
Well, you play this for her later, if you don't mind.
All right.
I'm not going to ask her name.
I'm going to call her Madam X. All right.
Are you ready?
Hello.
I'm sorry that you couldn't be with us.
I would suggest that the crisis in your family is a little bit more important than the food bank that's currently going on with you at the moment.
That's my particular perspective.
But you don't have to have your daughters have the same life that you had.
There were aspects of your life growing up that were wretched for you.
Growing up without a dad.
Growing up with a mom who had no respect for or love for your biological father and in fact kept him out of your life.
And as you found out when you contacted him in your teens and then in your early twenties, for good reason.
He was a bit of a D-bag.
Sorry about that, you know, we don't all get to control our sperm donors.
In fact, none of us do.
I mean, you can't control machinery before you're even there.
But you've got to see the degree to which your daughters are following the same pattern that your mother did.
Now, you made a better choice.
You've got a guy who obviously was a bit rough-handed, or a lot rough-handed, but the kid's growing up, but is wising up now and trying to do something better.
But it doesn't have to be the same for your daughters as it was for you.
And in fact...
Given that you're older and you have the experience and you know what it's like to grow up without a dad, you are fully responsible for what happens to them now.
Now you're going to say, but they're adults, they have to make their own choices.
No.
No.
Because you have not given them the information they need to make better choices.
You have withheld from them the information that they need to make better choices.
You need to sit down with them and you need to say that they're in grave danger of getting involved with guys who make terrible fathers.
We know that because they're not married to any of the women they had children with already.
You're in grave danger of settling down with guys who will make terrible fathers.
I grew up with that.
And I've kept that information from you, maybe to protect you, maybe to protect myself, doesn't matter right now.
I need to give you this information right now.
These guys are, to put it as nicely as possible, not exactly top-tier individuals.
I think you can do better.
I think you can do better.
But in order for you to do better, you need to know What not doing better looks like.
What not doing better means having a guy who's going to knock you up, who's going to be unreliable, who's not going to be around, who you're going to be ashamed to have around your children, who you're going to be frightened of, who might be vengeful, who might be crazy, who might be unstable, who's not going to be there for you, and you are going to be crying yourself to sleep every night with your baby fussing in the corner, wondering how on earth you ended up in a place Of interplanetary loneliness.
Where you've got a life or lives dependent on you.
No man to share the burden with.
No provider to ease their wants.
No one to snuggle up with.
You'll go for days without having an adult conversation.
And your children, who should be your greatest blessing, may feel like your deepest curse.
And all the joys of motherhood, which are in many ways the most profound joys of womanhood, will be taken from you and replaced with a bitter resentment and a fear and an anxiety and a hostility and a short temper and an irritability and a tiredness and a wantingness and a hunger for resources, contact, connection, communication, love.
And you'll know every day that you wake up without a father there, you'll know That your children are looking at a family portrait of you and them.
And there's a big giant hole where their father should be.
And that giant hole in the family portrait where their father should be will transfer to their own heart.
And it will have a man-sized hole in their heart where their father's connection and love and contact and communication should have been.
And that hole in their heart will lie dormant Until they hit puberty.
And then that hole in their heart, the shape of their father, will cry out for male contact.
And when your children grow up without a father, and your daughters in particular, when they cry out for male contact, they will be like a hungry, starving, dying man at a buffet.
They won't wait for a good meal.
They'll grab whatever is closest.
Maybe even the boy next door.
And thus the cycle will repeat.
But it doesn't have to be.
If you tell them the truth about what it was like for you growing up without a father, about how painful it was for you first to not know your father and then to know your father, and by that I mean You're a white trash sperm donor.
Then maybe they can awaken from this deep daze of spinning history, this...
You know, when the music's played out on an old 45?
You guys are young.
What do you know?
When your music is played out on an old 45, you just get...
The hole in your children's heart from father absence will be filled up with father trash in the future.
And that's how the cycle repeats.
And your father and I have apologizing to do.
I know it's uncomfortable and I know that it means that things are going to change in your life.
But you're heading the same place that my mother was heading.
And it's my lack of communication and my lack of clarity with you that is making that happen.
And that's my fault.
Now, it's your responsibility to listen, because I'll tell you something else.
I'll tell you something else.
You could get away with this shit in the past, but where society is heading, there is not going to be enough money to pay for fatherless children in the future.
There are over $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities.
I don't know how much money that is, but I believe it's quite a lot.
If they told me I won that lottery, I think I'd do three skips around the living room at least.
That's a lot of money.
Can't be paid.
So in the past, there was this, oh, you know, well, I can get knocked out by an unreliable guy.
It's okay.
Daddy government will step in and take his place.
It's going to be great.
I don't have to wash any Underwear with skid marks.
It's gonna be great.
There won't be one side of the couch that gets really squished down.
I won't have to watch the wire and spinal tap and pretend to know what the hell's going on.
Or like it.
There'll only be tiny little squeaks.
No deep manly gorilla farts in bed.
There'll be more wine and less beer.
More Peters.
Less meat.
So in the past you could have father absence and survive.
It ain't gonna be that way for long.
And the worst and the worst and the worst is going to happen.
That you're gonna make decisions around fatherlessness.
That may have worked for my mother or may even have worked for me, but sure as sunrise are not going to work for you.
The urgency of not having children out of wedlock now is higher than it has been since the 1930s.
It is a new era that is going to dawn.
The money won't be there.
And then you're going to end up, because the money is not going to be there, to pay For your illegitimate children, for what used to be colloquially known as your bastards, the money won't be there, and you're just going to have to grab any guy who's willing to throw $1.50 a week your way.
And that's going to be far worse and far more destructive to your children than any decision you could make now.
So you need to stop this course.
And that would be something that I think she needs to talk about.
But no, the option of, well, they're adults and they can make their own decisions.
Ah, you're still the parents.
Peace.
Okay, you can't hit them.
You should never have hit them.
But that doesn't mean you have no influence.
Doesn't mean you don't have any authority.
And I get it.
This is a huge change.
How do you influence adult children when you've raised them in some ways not well or badly?
How do you do it?
Well, that's something you need to work with an expert, because I can't give you that answer.
Philosophy is about prevention, not cure, right?
I don't know.
It cured me.
I'm about diet, not cardiology, right?
Sorry?
Philosophy cured a lot.
Well, and I appreciate that.
I mean, you are a testament as to what change is possible, but how hard change is, right?
And, you know, you probably days wish you'd never...
Heard that hitting your kids was bad because you could have sailed on.
But this is the heroism that changes the world.
It's not about all these movies where you upload viruses to the bowels of spaceships in orbit.
I mean, that's not bullshit.
I rushed a guy on a train who had a gun.
It's great, but I'm going to save the world.
What you're doing is going to save the world.
But you need, in my opinion, Experts to help you out, to help you to negotiate, to help you figure out how to get your kids to understand stuff that your wife in particular seems to have shielded them from and how to communicate them without aggression, without violence in a way that is not going to have them call up Cops and say that my house is haunted by two people who look vaguely like my parents who are dead.
I mean, that's just some crazy stuff.
And I think at this level of extremity, you need more than backup.
You need people front and center helping you navigate and negotiate.
I know she would argue that we didn't abuse our children.
We've had this discussion many times.
And she would say that what we did was not.
Okay, but I don't think that's an argument to get into in particular at the moment.
Right?
I mean, whether or not you accidentally steered into the iceberg, the ship is still going down.
And the important thing now is not what caused it, but what's happening now.
Your daughters are getting involved...
With really trashy, unreliable, dangerous guys.
So, okay, fine.
Concede that point.
Okay, we didn't abuse them.
Fine.
Somehow, mysteriously, they ended up dating these low-rent guys.
That's what we've got to deal with.
Because the moment they get pregnant, man, that's your life.
There's your next 20 to 30 years.
The moment they get pregnant, These guys aren't going to marry them.
And if they do marry them, what kind of resources are they going to have if they've got to pay child support to two other women?
It's going to be a low IQ gene pool, to put it as nicely as humanly possible.
And you're going to have these douchebags floating around your lives for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years.
And what's going to, I don't mean to put it as crudely as this, but what the hell is going to happen to your daughter's marriage market value If they have kids with these jerk-offs, what good, honest, respectful, responsible, productive, decent, intelligent guy is going to want to shack up with them after this?
If this happens.
This is make or break for your entire gene pool.
This is the urgency I'm trying to point you in.
They get knocked up.
That's it for them.
That's it for you.
Yeah, that's really where it lies for me, too, is that I know I'm going to have grandchildren, and I don't want to see them put through what I went through or what I put my kids through.
Oh, the quality of your life as a grandparent is going to be shit in this circumstance, because the kids are going to grow up in chaos, in need, And if your kids don't get their heads screwed on right before they have kids, what are the odds that it's going to happen afterwards?
Yeah, it's not going to be good.
Yeah, slim to none.
And so if you want your kids to enjoy being parents and you want to enjoy being a grandparent, that means you've got to You've got to ditch the himbos and you've got to start steering your daughters towards some quality guys.
I mean, assume they don't have tentacles coming out of their ears and four eyes and a third nipple, although maybe the third nipple is fun for some people, but they don't have to bottom feed like this, right?
That's probably what they're comfortable with.
That, tragically, is where they feel they're at home.
But if you can't pry them off these leech kings, I mean, you're going to just...
I think it's going to break your heart for the next 20 years watching how these grandkids get raised and what their life is like.
Because the guys who come after the guys who knock your daughters up are even worse than the guys who knock your daughters up, right?
Because their sexual market and marriage market value is more than halfway to China by then.
And your daughters will now have the kind of red flags that will steer any decent man in the opposite direction.
Any decent man who can read any kind of red flags is going to look at your daughters and say, oh, okay.
So you got pregnant with a guy who'd already had a bunch of kids with other women he wasn't married to.
Now you and that guy aren't together, but he's still hanging around.
But he doesn't really pay you any alimony, so you're going to need a lot of child support.
So you're going to need a lot of resources from me, and you've already shown that you made a really bad decision, and I'm going to judge your parents by that.
And then this guy's going to be floating around.
He's going to be creepily looking over my shoulder as I'm the new dad, and your kids are going to be All traumatized from being growing up in this chaos, dadless environment.
Are they going to scream at me, you're not my real dad, 24-7?
I mean, why would any guy of quality with options want to get involved in that?
And that's the future that your kids are facing without strenuous, professionally-led intervention now.
I don't know how you get your kids to listen.
I'm not...
That's not my...
That's not my training, that's not my experience, that's not my job, that's not my credentials, anything.
So you need to get to people who, there's lots of people experienced with how to deal with these kinds of crises in a family.
I'm not them, but they exist, right?
You're family crisis counselors or whatever, right?
Yeah, we went to a few family counseling sessions together, the whole family, before my insurance ran out.
But we haven't been able to do that.
Since then, my son and my daughter have individual counseling, but they usually ditch it.
They don't go.
I take another shot, man.
Whatever you can do.
Because, you know, the amount of money you're going to have to spend if one of your kids gets knocked up, it's going to be far more than you'll spend on therapy now.
You know, penny wise, pound foolish, right?
I mean, you...
Spend the money now.
A stitch in time saves nine kind of thing, right?
I mean, I think it's worth spending the money now so that you don't end up with an intractable disaster.
Once kids come into the picture, your choices are all gone.
All gone.
Assuming your daughters keep the kids, right?
Don't have an abortion or give them up for adoption.
Once the kids want your daughters...
I mean, your options are all done.
For the most part.
Yeah, I'm very concerned that if I try to...
You know, discuss these things or force, you know, tell them some of these things that they will do the same thing that I did with my parents as well.
It's one of my biggest fears.
Just leave.
I get that.
And, you know, I mean, I think you're in a position of deserving better than that now that you're admitting faults and trying to change things.
But don't imagine you can do this alone.
Right?
This is why, oh, well, if I sit down and talk to them, even if it's just you, if you're the only person who can go, go to someone and say, here's what I'm facing, what do I do?
There are people who've got experience in this area.
And you won't be speaking alone in terms of just going in there and trying something without knowing what the effects would be.
There are people who've got experience in this stuff.
If you can't afford any therapy at all, as the offer stands as it does for emergency situations, give us a call.
We'll front some of the bills.
We'll pay for some of the bills through this show.
I'll pay for some of the bills.
But I need you to at least have...
Maybe you'll succeed.
Maybe you'll fail.
But at least I want you to be acting with as much expert knowledge as possible.
So if you can't afford it, just let us know.
We'll cover a couple of sessions.
It's certainly well worth it to me.
Well, I would definitely... wouldn't mind offering services in return if they came to that as well.
Yeah, don't let price be an issue.
It's an investment.
It's well worth it.
So just go find the people, get the quotes.
You know, even five sessions or whatever can make the world a difference with people who, you know, hey, my family's in crisis.
My kids are adults.
Here's what I'm concerned about.
They're not interested in coming.
Only I can come.
I need strategies on how to deal with this.
And there are people who do that.
And you don't need to be reliant on the acceptance of other people.
To join you in that.
So that would be my suggestion about the approach to take.
Thank you.
I appreciate that very much.
Listen, man, I appreciate what you're doing.
Really taking a stand here.
It's heroic.
It's magnificent.
You magnificent bastard!
And you'll keep us posted and you will let us know.
You'll let us know how it goes and you'll let us know if there's any resources that we can give you if you need them.
I will let you know.
Thank you.
Alright.
Is that a promise?
You'll let us know if you need resources and you'll keep us posted?
And I'll let you know if I need resources.
And that is a promise.
That is a promise, right?
Alright, I'm spitting in my hand and I'm giving you a digital handshake.
Next I have to cut my hand, so don't make me do that.
Interviews with my tennis grip, which isn't as important to me now as when I was a teenager.
But anyway, thanks, man.
I appreciate your feedback, and I look forward to hearing how it goes.
Thank you.
All right, let's do Uno von Morinas.
All right.
Well, up next is Zach.
Zach wrote in and said, in my experience, the more someone understands about politics, the more they tend towards one of two ideologies, libertarianism or some derivation of a powerful nationalistic regional state.
A common argument against libertarianism is that without the cultural inertia of a church or government, the individuals of a society will tend towards nihilism and hedonism.
Although I agree with Stefan that libertarianism is the ideal, Is a nationalistic regional state a more realistic form of government, as it would require far less intelligence and morality in the populace?
That's from Zach.
Alright, Zach.
How you doing?
Alright, so give me this...
It's either statelessness or fascism?
Is that what we're facing here?
That's an interesting dichotomy that you brought up.
I'm not really...
No, I'm trying to understand the dichotomy that you brought up.
Not mine.
I should start with this.
I'm really excited.
I'm a big fan of your show.
This is a huge deal for me.
I'm really excited to be here.
But anyway...
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that, and I'm very happy to be chatting.
The problem with a medium state, a state that's in between being libertarianism or mostly fascist, is that all kinds of different factors come into play.
Media, social trends, like a new fashion, like, oh, you can't be racist, you can't be whatever.
Those kind of things come and go.
Whereas, if you are in a libertarian state, that's less likely to be the case.
Or if you're a fascist, it's also less likely to be the case.
Although, I'm not really advocating fascism here.
I'm just trying to bring up the dichotomy and the difference between the two.
Alright.
I'm not sure that clarifies that.
So, let me just make sure I understand the question.
Alright.
So, When people get into politics, you say they kind of go one of two ways, right?
Either towards libertarianism, which I assume means like the night watchman state, the government that deals with the police, law courts, military, maybe the prisons, and it's just the arbiter of disputes doesn't get involved, that kind of stuff.
All right.
What I meant was when people get into politics and become right-wing, usually they stay Republican for a while, but then once time passes, they go towards your route of being a They become very extreme, like 4chan's poll or Stormfront or one of those kind of fascist websites.
So that's usually the ending.
And yes, the brand of libertarianism I am talking about is the brand you just mentioned, the Nightwatch from the state.
Right.
Okay.
And I don't know much about, actually I don't really know anything about, what was it, Stormfront and was it 4chan?
Give me a brief overview of those.
Alternate rights.
The new alternate rights where people are advocating like, oh, Hitler did nothing wrong, that kind of stuff.
That's usually the end goal, or not end goal, the end point of many people.
Hitler did nothing wrong?
You're not mischaracterizing these people a little, are you?
I mean, it seems a little bit...
It gets towards that point.
Okay, so I'll start.
I'll validate.
Well, no.
So, wouldn't it be more like Hitler had a point, even though what he did was whatever, whatever.
I'm a little bit excited.
I drank too much coffee.
But I'll try and...
No, that's fine.
That's fine.
I'm just trying to understand what it is that you're characterizing as these people's positions.
And again, I don't know.
Maybe they do say Hitler was all good.
And I only know some of this stuff because on my video, what pisses me off about the migrant crisis, which I hope people will check out, You know, there have been a few commenters who were like, this wouldn't happen if Hitler was in power.
Which, you know, could be true, but that doesn't mean that other god-awful things wouldn't be happening if Hitler was in power kind of thing, right?
I mean...
Right.
So I'll try and validate what I was saying.
So I mentioned 4chan, I mentioned Stormfront.
There's a couple other ones.
These are all websites for people that are a bit right of center to the point where Reddit and Tumblr and Facebook and all these other pages where people usually discuss politics, it isn't sufficient.
So they go a little bit further right.
Also, these people usually value freedom of speech a bit more than the moderation of Reddit and Tumblr and Facebook would allow.
And those are the websites I'm talking about.
The predominant belief of those websites usually is something like, I don't know, national socialism is great because of various reasons that I want to bring up and discuss with you here.
Yeah, okay, we'll bring them up.
So, let's see.
I've not had this before, so please, make the case.
I know you're playing devil's advocate, but make the case for...
It goes back to the question that I asked.
The question was, society leans toward nihilism and hedonism.
I think I pronounced that right.
And libertarianism is the ideal, but it neglects the fact that people, their culture will dissolve if there isn't some sort of church or state or something like that.
And I'm going to try and qualify this.
I'm learning about the Industrial Revolution at the moment, and what happened during the Industrial Revolution was there was a huge boom in the economy and the government couldn't keep up.
So all these people moved to new regions and they worked for big factories and things like that and churches couldn't keep up and build churches in those areas and the state wasn't strong enough to regulate anything and what ended up happening was a lot of people stopped being very religious and a lot of bad things started happening.
Families started falling apart because the mother was working and the father was working and Stuff like that, which I think is an interesting parallel to modern-day society, where there's not much of a strong culture holding people together, there's not much of a strong religion holding people together, and so bad things can happen.
Like the caller we just had, whose family is in shambles at the moment, that's because, in my opinion, or the opinion of people that believe this ideology, is that he didn't have a strong church telling him what to do when he was at a young age, he didn't have a strong Government telling him what to do at a strong age or a strong culture telling him what to do at a young age.
And so he made these mistakes, even though these mistakes have been made hundreds and thousands of times before in history.
And that's a problem.
And so, I'm kind of rambling here, but do you understand what I'm saying?
No, fine.
First of all, I didn't know that there was family breakdown in the Industrial Revolution.
I knew that there was intergenerational breakdown because a lot of the young people left the country to come and work in the city because the country was horrible.
I'll try and explain it better.
So they left their parents.
I don't know if marriages dissolved or disintegrated.
You obviously read more about that than I have.
They didn't dissolve, but gender roles broke down.
Women started acting like men in that they went to work and they came home and they weren't as happy to cook and clean and things like that.
The place of women and men in society became jumbled because everyone was doing pretty much the same thing.
And also relationships between children and their parents dissolved a little bit as well.
Wait, wait, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Okay, so the thesis is that during the Industrial Revolution, women started working?
Well, they started working in mass, yes.
Did the people think that they...
No, but I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but it just, again, you've studied this more than I have, but my first thought is...
Holy crap.
I mean, Zach, didn't women work on the farms?
I mean, I've known farmers and these women are built like oxen and they get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and they work pretty much till they pass out at 9 p.m.
I mean, I don't know how it's the case that...
Women, were they perceived to have a life of leisure before the Industrial Revolution?
Like, they sat around eating bonbons and watching, I don't know, soap opera hand puppets done by their kids?
I'm not very well versed in this, but many of the news outlets that I follow are pretty well versed in this.
Women in the past had a much more important job than getting food or getting money.
They had the role of carrying on the traditions of their ancestors and raising the children, which are very, very important.
Whereas in the Industrial Revolution, when women...
Well, families in general had to work much harder in order to make enough money to live in a big city, which they had to do because they wanted a better life for themselves.
Women stopped doing that role of being the passers-on of tradition and stop being the ones raising the children as much.
And so that's what I mean when I say the breakdown of society.
The traditional family unit was no longer quite the case.
Okay, I mean, I'm willing to accept that that's a perspective I don't know about.
The fact that millions and millions of children didn't starve to death during the Industrial Revolution is kind of important to me.
I value the tradition called children don't starve to death fairly highly.
So yes, if some of the religious...
Edicts weren't passed down to children who weren't dead.
Yes, I'm okay with children's lives rather than passing down edicts.
The problem with culture...
Look, I've heavily criticized culture in the past.
By culture, I don't mean superstition.
By culture, what I mean is the emotional transmission of values.
Because...
You don't have to be a nutritionist to know that you gotta eat your veggies.
And you don't need to be a philosopher to know about UPB or the non-aggression principle or whatever.
So for me, culture is the emotional ways in which compelling values are implanted in the general population.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with embedding emotional values into people If it results in them having a correct emotional response to that which is rational.
That's a very complicated way of putting it.
Let me see if I can rephrase that.
You get it.
Okay, okay.
Once more, just not for you, but for the audience as a whole.
So...
The way kids usually learn about food is there are dancing vegetables and the sugar is like an evil monster or something and so on, right?
And the way that it was explained to me when I was a kid was that I needed to brush my teeth because otherwise little sugar fairies would dance on my teeth and their dancing would crack my enamel and that's how the bugs would get in and make my teeth hurt.
Is that true?
It's not.
Did it make me brush my teeth?
It did.
Now, There's so much in life that we need prettied up for us and gooied up for us and so on, right?
Who the hell wants to write assembly code when you can swipe at a screen, right?
And so culture is the way of giving people the rational emotional responses without having to have them understand all the reasons behind it.
And...
I mean, it's a lot more fun to play Candy Crush than manipulate ones and zeros, right?
It's just more engaging and more fun or whatever, right?
And so by culture, when I'm talking about it in the current context, I don't mean the culture that says, God is watching you, he'll send you to hell, oh, and by the way, he put the king in charge of you, so if you rebel against him, you're rebelling against God and you're going to go to hell.
That to me is just...
That's just how evil is transmitted.
But you can use the similar mechanisms to transmit virtue as you can to transmit evil.
And so I just want to be clear about that.
Not all culture is created equal.
I mean, I have taught my daughter about right and wrong.
I have not read her UPB as a bedtime story.
Actually, if I did, she'd probably go to bed earlier just to escape the tendentiousness.
So in terms of culture...
The problem with the modern world is not a lack of culture.
The problem with the modern world is the presence of force.
See, force is the opposite of culture.
Culture is what happens when you can't force people to do things.
There's no culture of obedience in prison between the inmates and the prison guards.
There are violently enforced rules The challenge with culture is how to keep people in a prison when they can walk out at any time.
It's the voluntarism of the world that stimulates the need for culture.
The need to get people to do the right thing when you can't force them and most of them aren't smart enough to render philosophical arguments in real time in the moment they need to make moral decisions.
Where there is voluntarism There is culture because you have to have people do the right thing without forcing them.
There's a culture of charity.
There is no culture of welfare.
Okay.
So let me just sort of finish the point.
So the people who are saying, well, there's a lack of culture, say in Europe, there's a lack of cultural identity in Europe and that's why all of these economic invaders are coming in.
No, they're mostly not coming from Syria.
No, they're not women and children, they're mostly men.
No, they're not coming because they've got no place to live.
No, they're coming for welfare benefits, and they're coming for religious colonialism reasons, let's put it as nicely as possible.
Not all, but most.
So people say, well, there's no cultural unity in Europe.
Well, of course there isn't.
Because Europe turned culture over to the state.
And when you turn culture over to the state, culture dies.
Because culture is an unnecessary overhead when you can force people to do things.
There's no point having culture.
A rapist doesn't bring flowers and chocolates.
Because he's going to force the woman to have sex with him.
He's going to rape her.
So he doesn't need the overhead of seduction.
He doesn't need his Barry White CDs and he doesn't need his cologne and he doesn't need to wash his peepee in the always awkward sink before doing the nasty, right?
Because what he's doing is truly nasty.
He's raping.
There's no seduction in rape and there's no culture where there is the state.
So the problem is the presence of government Not the absence of culture.
When government grows, culture dies.
Because when you can force people to do stuff, you don't need to convince them to do stuff.
And culture is all about convincing people to do things.
There used to be a strong culture called single motherhood is really bad.
That culture is no longer necessary because people are forced to pay for single mothers.
It goes away.
So...
It wasn't like Hitler came in with a vast reduction in government to allow culture to flourish, right?
I mean, he was a national socialist.
He was a big government guy.
Hitler would not have solved the problem.
I mean, aside of all the evil stuff, right, Hitler would not have solved the problem of a lack of culture.
Because as a totalitarian, he might have kept migrants out, but culture in Germany would have died.
Because when you coerce, there's no culture.
The culture in Germany actually took off when he was in power.
I don't know if you know about the Volkish movement, but it's about, you know, you treasure the folk and the lore and the history of your people.
That's one of the main things that made so many people work so hard in Hitler's Germany because they felt like they were in a commune.
They were working together.
No, but it's from the States!
There was a culture of pro-communism under Stalin.
That doesn't mean it was organic.
It doesn't mean it came from the people.
Alright, I will admit that.
It wouldn't necessarily have naturally formed on its own if he hadn't done anything.
But I'd like to go back to what you...
No, if he hadn't done anything, the natural culture would have formed on its own and it would have been healthy.
It wouldn't have been Volkish and it wouldn't have been all these other things that made it more militaristic.
I understand.
But I'd like to go back to...
Hey, can you hear me?
Are you there?
Okay.
I'd like to go back to what you said before about how government kills culture.
Government kills people, kills volunteerism.
I think that's what you said.
But I'd like to posit that in your libertarian society, when the government is gone and corporations take over, they don't take over everything, but let's say you want to get from point A to point B. Let me continue.
Let me continue.
If you want...
Yeah, okay.
I'm sorry.
It's just, I mean, the corporation thing.
No, it's good.
I'm glad you're bringing it up, Zach.
I appreciate it.
Go for it.
Go full tilt.
If you want to go from A to B, point A to point B, you know, you pay road company ABC a certain amount of money and you go from place to place.
Road company ABC really wants to make more money.
And so they don't really care if you're from America or you're from Somalia or from some other place.
They just want to make money.
They want to have the best service so more people come to them so they can, you know, help people out in that way.
That seems to me like it would destroy culture in the sense of the word that we know it today, which is like, you know, a bunch of people wearing lederhosen, playing pipes, or people, you know, dressing in kimonos and painting their face white.
That kind of culture, I think, wouldn't survive in a libertarian society.
Wait, wait, hang on.
Are you saying lederhosen is culture?
The traditions, the, I don't know, what's the term for it?
Ceremonies, things like that.
Okay, no, the traditions, the cultural values, the values, the moral decisions.
That's what culture is all about.
I put on a pair of lederhosen, I'm not Austrian.
I'm sexy.
I'm not Austrian.
Right?
So it's not lederhosen, and it's not songs.
These are all just frou-frou.
They're not unimportant, but that's not what culture is.
Culture is how you make moral decisions without being a philosopher.
Right.
Okay, so are you familiar with Peter Hitchens?
Yeah, Christopher Hitchens' brother, Christopher Hitchens the noted atheist, and Peter Hitchens the noted theist, right?
Right.
He once did a presentation or a debate in which someone said, oh, why are we teaching children poems?
It's completely pointless, it's wasting their time.
And he recited a beautiful poem off the top of his head that he remembered from high school or something.
And he said that it was a tremendous condemnation of his nation's culture to say that poems don't matter, to say that ceremonies and wearing lederhosen and things like that, they don't matter because if you don't know these things, you don't really understand the mindset of your ancestors and you've lost touch with the things that your ancestors knew and such things like that.
That's his argument and I would say that that's a pretty good argument against what you say, which is that these things don't matter.
What really matters is Yeah, but poetry is heavily involved with right and wrong.
Right, and I would say almost every aspect of ceremony and tradition is also very heavily tied to it because it makes people interested in it.
Here's a poem that I remember when I was a kid.
I remember reading when I was a kid.
Very influential.
Sure.
Are you ready?
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for their doubting too, If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
or being lied about, don't deal in lies, or being hated, don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good nor talk too wise.
If you can dream and not make dreams your master, If you can think and not make thoughts your aim.
If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken and stoop and build them up with worn out tools.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss and lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss.
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone.
And so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them, hold If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings but not lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
if all men count with you but none too much, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it.
And, which is more, you'll be a man, my son.
That's Rudyard Kipling's If.
It's a great poem.
Highly, highly relevant to ethical decisions.
Very, very complex and embedded socio-moral arguments in that poem.
And it's also not very cultural.
It's not religious in any sense of the word.
I suppose you might have said Godin at one point there, didn't you?
Well, first of all, it might be religious.
It might be religious.
And that doesn't mean it wouldn't be cultural.
Because the purpose of religion, fundamentally, is the conditioning of norms.
I think religion and culture are very intertwined.
I wasn't making that distinction.
What I was trying to say is the thing you just brought up, that culture, that right and wrong and all that sort of stuff, that isn't easily transmitted in something that isn't religious or some aspect of culture.
If you told that story or that beautiful poem to a guy in Africa, you know, With a spear or something like that, you would say, oh, that's interesting, but I'm not going to remember that.
I'm not going to tell that to my children and things like that.
It takes someone very intelligent with a really good sense of what is right and wrong in order to remember that poem, think it's great, and then want to tell their children that.
Most people...
No, no.
Rudyard Kipling was a populist poet.
It does not take great intelligence to understand that poem.
That's the whole point of culture, is you need to translate values into...
Okay, so...
And get people motivated to do crazy things.
Look, some cultures can get people to fight for freedom, to fight for rights.
Other cultures get people to blow the shit of themselves up in public places and fly planes into buildings and crazy shit like that, right?
So there are some cultures that embed values that help, and there are other cultures that embed values that harm.
Very true.
And it is the degree to...
We look at the society that we have and I've got a podcast coming out called Social Market Value or Community Market Value.
And it's a stupid phrase.
I just couldn't think of a better one in the moment.
And I won't go into it here other than to say that we look at society as it stands and we say...
Well, you know, we have no values.
And therefore, you know, we need a government or we need a strong central leader or we need someone who's going to tell us what's what or we need someone to keep out foreigners or whatever it is.
It's like, no, you have no values because you forced people using the state.
And when you force people using the state, culture becomes a ridiculous and unnecessary overhead.
Who are the most hostile towards culture?
It is the big government people because they recognize that culture renders government as unnecessary as government renders culture inefficient.
Wait, wait, wait.
We just talked about national socialistic Germany.
Yeah, they have so little trust and freedom that they want a government to impose a culture or to defend a culture.
Listen, the moment you need government to defend anything, it's dead already.
The moment that you need government to force you to hire someone or marry you or pay you something, your value is dead.
So you're saying it's the people that need to keep culture alive.
It can't be a government or else it's just a zombie.
It's being propped up.
No, no, the people will keep culture alive.
Culture is an economic argument, fundamentally.
I mean, just to look at single motherhood, right?
When there's no government, people ostracize single mothers.
Now, do people like ostracizing people?
They don't.
Ostracizing people is not fun.
So, when the government pays for single mothers and people don't have to pay out of their own wallet, Then people stop ostracizing.
And then it becomes the heroic, wonderful, single mother of Sue.
Hang on, hang on.
So why do people want the overhead of culture?
Because it's economically efficient to have that culture.
So let's say, for instance, there are two incompatible cultures living side by side.
They won't mix in a free society.
I mean, they may mix in terms of like there'll be some trade or whatever it is, but they won't mix generally socially.
And they generally won't mix when it comes to education.
And I mean, we see this in America, right?
And I'm not saying these cultures are fundamentally incompatible, but I mean, churches where affirmative action and violations of people's right to choose who they sit next to the pew with, like the vast majority of American churches are either all black or all white, for the most part.
So where you have different cultures...
Opposing is too strong.
I'm thinking more like Libertarian and, I don't know, Radical Muslim or something.
Obviously this is not oil and water, right?
Only one of which is flammable.
So in a free society, When you have different or opposing or incompatible cultures, people will tend to discriminate.
And that doesn't mean the same as being bigoted or racist or whatever.
They'll separate, yeah.
They'll separate.
And hopefully then philosophers will work to give everyone a common enough set of values that culture brings people together.
But when cultural values are based on irrational things like nationalism or Mere history or religion, of course they're going to have to separate because irrational values are incompatible with other irrational values.
They're only compatible with like irrational values.
Whereas philosophy is compatible with everything because it's reality-based.
But you know, that comes at the expense of people who are currently managing their livestock by irrational wits.
I'd like to interject right there.
Again, you are assuming that everyone is extremely intelligent.
That everyone will be able to listen to arguments and say, I agree with that argument.
I'm going to start believing that.
That isn't always the case.
No.
No, no, no, no.
I said culture.
Philosophy will provide the base values.
It's the job of the artists and the poets and the rhetoricians to translate that into emotionally compelling actions for people.
Listen, I started off as an artist.
I started off as a poet, as an actor, as a playwright, as a novelist.
And so I know quite a lot about translating philosophical values to emotionally compelling values.
I mean, you know, if people want to pick up my book, The God of Atheists, I think it's a prime example of what I'm talking about.
Or something like Dostoevsky did it.
You can look at the Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov.
Or Ayn Rand did it, or other people, right?
So, it is the job of the artists...
To translate the values to the people.
And this is one of the reasons why Plato, who was a terrible philosopher in my humble opinion, Plato has been incredibly compelling because Plato was an incredible writer who came up with some of the best allegories in the history of philosophy.
You know, the allegory of the cave and the symposium and so on.
Just wonderful allegories about the gradations of love and so on.
Now, maybe the philosopher and the artist can be one, but it doesn't hugely matter.
But at some point, I'm not saying everyone has to go through the syllogisms, because you're right.
A lot of people won't.
But it is the job of the...
It is the job of...
You could say the propagandist, because that's...
Although propaganda always has a negative...
Connotation, yeah.
...standpoint.
Yeah, a negative connotation is a better word, thank you.
But the reality is that when I was a kid there was propaganda against smoking, there was propaganda against drunk driving.
I don't see it as a bad word.
If it saved lives, great, right?
I don't see it as a bad word, that's okay.
But it's a way of making abstract arguments emotionally compelling for people and that's what happens in a free society.
In a free society, people are, they care about other people's children.
The idea, like this modern idea, and it is a very modern idea.
You can't tell me how to raise my kids.
You know, throughout history, that idea would have been completely incomprehensible.
For like 99% of human history, people would have said, yes I can, because I'm going to have to live with your children when they grow up.
So yes, I get to tell you how to raise your kids.
But this idea, well, they're my kids.
I can do what I want.
You can't tell me how to raise your kids.
Yeah, I can.
Because you're going to die and your kids are going to be living with me and my kids.
So yes, I do get to say how you raise your children.
I mean, imagine growing up in like 17th century in a Quaker village in the 17th century and you're like, hey, I think I'm going to turn my kids on to Satan.
Right?
Can you imagine?
Hey kids, go to the playground and tell other people, Hail Satan!
Yay Satan!
Do you think the other parents would have a bit of a problem with you?
Why yes they would!
And you say, you can't tell me how to raise my kids!
And you know what?
Those people would then engage in the initiation of force called the state in order to stop those people from acting and spreading that.
No, they wouldn't!
Are you kidding?
The Quakers would kick them out!
Oh no, the Quakers, they would shun their asses!
No, they wouldn't kick them out.
They wouldn't kick them out.
They would shun them.
Which is way more powerful.
And way cheaper.
But it just requires the kind of moral courage that you only have in a voluntary society.
Because in a status society, you get the government to do all the heavy lifting and your moral muscles get weak.
Because the government goes and forces everyone to do it.
No, they would shun them.
Look, I mean, how do the Amish survive?
They don't have the police round up The people who go on their rum spring or whatever the hell it is, their rum spring break, rum late spring break, I don't know.
But they don't round up the people who don't come back, right?
You try to leave Islam, you gotta outrun a bullet, right?
But the Amish, they ostracize the kids who leave the community.
I'm not saying this is all great and right.
I'm just saying that it's very powerful.
That's what they do.
I'd like to bring up something that's a bit more modern.
So you say Amish people will shun people they don't agree with and those people will leave.
But shunning is a two-way street.
By ignoring people and keeping them out of your society, you are also keeping your children from being exposed to what they believe in.
Whereas in the modern age, people that do something bad, like single mothers and things like that, saying, oh, being a single mother is great, those people are shunned maybe one way, but not two ways.
Young children growing up, they get pregnant, they look at the TV and they see that being a single mother is perfectly fine and all that stuff.
Even if you live in a wonderful free society where everyone believes in single motherhood being bad, the kids will still be exposed to it.
So it won't be the same sort of two-way shunning.
Wait, I don't know what you're saying.
It's supposed to what?
This is kind of an abstract concept I'm trying to explain.
So, Amish people shunning the Satanists, right?
The Satanists is being shunned, and so the kids of the Amish people don't have to deal with the Satanists.
The kids of the Satanists don't have to deal with the kids of the Amish, right?
Because it's a two-way shunning.
Whereas in modern society, that is not possible, because the ideas will still get out.
No, no, no, no, it's not, no, no, no.
The example I gave was not a two-way shunning.
Because the Satanist Quaker, I think we have a showteller, but when the Satanist Quaker sends his kids out to convert the other Quaker kids to Satanism, he's not shunning them.
He's actively engaging with them.
No, but when they are being shunned, when they keep their kids away from them, that separates the kids.
They're separated.
They can't communicate.
Wait, so when the Quaker kids say to the Quaker Satan kids, you can't play with those kids?
Can't play with the Quaker Satan kids, right?
But the Quaker Satan kids want to play with the Quaker kids, but the Quaker kids don't want to play with the Quaker Satan kids, so it's a one-way shining.
This is so convoluted.
No, it's not.
It's one-way shining.
Who is not being exposed to new ideas in this situation?
The Satanist Quaker kids or the ordinary Quaker kids?
They're not being exposed to any new ideas.
Well, yeah, because the parents want to keep them away from the Satan Quaker kids.
But you're saying that the Satan Quaker kids...
Also, no, they will be shunned.
They want to go play with the other kid.
They will not be shunned.
They will still be exposed to the ideas of the ordinary Quaker kid.
Well, no, because nobody's playing.
Right, so that's a two-way shunning.
That's two-way shunning.
Neither of them are sharing ideas.
That's what happened in the past.
No, you can't use the word shunning that way.
Shunning is the active act of excluding someone from your social circle who wants to be in your social circle, right?
Right.
It's not like I'm shunning a whole bunch of people who don't speak English.
You can't just say suddenly we're transferring to ideas and there's a non-transference of ideas.
I'm shunning for that.
Shunning is just an act of social ostracism and exclusion of people who want in.
The Amish aren't shunning me because I don't want in.
So if you want to talk about ideas and cross-pollinization or fertilization, that's fine.
You just can't use the word shunning to include the non-transmission of ideas in a two-way street as opposed to an active-willed individual act of social exclusion.
Let's see if I can try and explain my point a bit better.
I'm going to diverge from the Amish.
I know it's a great concept, but I'm going to move from the Amish to the 1920s.
Now we're in the 1920s.
So...
I previously talked about the Industrial Revolution.
I think you'll remember that.
And in the Industrial Revolution, religion and culture and all these different things started fading away because people were living in this new town.
They didn't have their own village and their own rolling hills to tell tales about.
So culture and religion sort of dissipated.
And what?
No.
No, that's incorrect.
Are you saying that the Victorian age was somehow not a strong cultural age?
The Victorian age was the late 19th century.
No, it was still strongly cultural.
I just, I'd like to...
That's when the whole damn empire was going on and the British were out there saying we got the white man's burden to colonize the savage races of the earth.
I mean, there's a huge cultural imperative.
That's where this poem was written.
That's 50 years after about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Maybe a little bit longer.
But what I'm trying to bring up is the children of those people that grew up in that time when culture became a little bit weaker were the 1920s people, you know, that they were drinking and being expatriates and things like that.
That is a definite separation from the past, you know, ancient historical belief in the nation of Britain, that sort of culture, towards a different sort of culture of cosmopolitanism.
That brings me back to the libertarianism concept, where if everyone is free and you're not around people that look like you, that believe all the same things as you do, you will eventually tend towards cosmopolitanism and forgetting your culture, which in my opinion, or in the opinion of people I'm representing here, Will lead to what is called degeneracy, the degeneration of your culture.
Because these people were drinkers, they were having a lot more sex than they were in the past, and things like that.
So, lack of a strong culture, lack of a strong nation that you support, so nationalism, usually will lead to...
You understand what I'm saying, right?
The people will start drinking more, they'll still have more sex, they'll start being more single mothers.
That sort of a thing.
Okay, so you're talking about the Industrial Revolution, but you kind of skipped over the First World War.
That also led to it, as well.
The First World War led to more cosmopolitanism, because people had to collaborate.
And also, people fought for so long, they stopped liking the idea of the noble warrior and all that kind of stuff.
I think you cover this often, and you believe in this a lot, where they fought for so much Right.
And then when the war ended, the reason the war stopped and people didn't continue going to fight was because they were so disheartened from war.
Right?
I thought you covered this.
I thought you were the one that gave me this idea that the reason the war ended in Japan wasn't that we destroyed their army.
It was that the people had such a...
They were so disillusioned with fighting that they stopped fighting.
Didn't you?
I don't...
I mean, look, I've done thousands of shows.
I don't recall saying that the war ended because people got tired of fighting.
I think the war ended because...
There was no possibility for victory anymore.
I mean, after the Americans came in in the First World War, they brought so many resources to the European theater that there was no chance for Germany to win.
And Germany, in order to avoid being invaded, decided to surrender.
Japan was surrounded and was being repeatedly bombed and then decided to surrender.
There's no chance for them to win.
Oh, okay.
We can argue about that.
And then what happened, of course, sorry, what happened after the Second World War, sorry, what happened after the First World War, Zach, was that governments had to pay huge amounts.
The losing sides, they had to pay huge amounts of reparations.
But even the winning sides, they lost millions of working-age men who were their tax base.
And they had huge medical bills from the people who had survived the war but who were broken in mind and spirit.
They had, of course, war widows' pensions to pay.
They had contracted enormous, staggering amounts of debt during the war.
And so what happened in the 1920s was an orgy of money printing.
No, no, not frivolity.
That was just an effect.
So what happened was the governments basically took over the giant levers of the economy with central banking, with currency manipulations and so on.
And this created the roaring 20s.
But, of course, because the government was taking over the economy and the government was now providing for the war widows and for the people who were sick – And so there was less need for culture because the government was paying the bills for millions and millions of people.
So can I argue against that or bring something up?
Yeah.
Okay.
The Black Death killed like one-third of everyone in Europe at the time.
It didn't cause them to stop being Christian.
In fact, a lot of the time it made people more Christian.
Whereas the First World War made a lot of people absolutely renounce Christianity.
They lost to Christianity.
Why didn't that happen during the Black Plague?
I would posit that it's because...
No, listen, it did.
And one of the reasons why it happened during the Black Death, and I've talked about this in the show before, one of the reasons why it happened during the Black Death was because...
It attacks kings and peasants, right?
No, no.
Let me finish.
The wages of sin is death.
And the people who died the most, by far, were priests, because the priests were at the deathbeds of all the people dying.
And so they contracted the bubonic plague the most.
And so priests died, and it wasn't an accident that after the fifth or sixth successive wave of the Black Death that you get the Protestant Reformation.
Right?
So there was significant skepticism.
Remember, very roughly, Catholicism was Christianity, and the beginning of Protestantism was the end of Christianity, as it was perceived at the time.
Now we think of them all as Christian, but that wasn't the case in the past.
Oh, okay.
So I guess I'm wrong with that.
What was my point?
My point was that Christianity and culture at the time of the...
Industrial Revolution was greatly weakened by people going off into factories and losing their culture, and they didn't have a government that strictly enforced their culture, and so they ended up being...
What's the term for it?
I don't know, expatriates.
The guys like S. Scott Fitzgerald, those guys drinking all the time, drinking absinthe, and writing books about sex and things like that, which is a going back or losing refinement that they had in the past.
Yeah, I mean, my argument would be because government was paying the bills, people could afford to become social relativists and amoral and nihilistic and so on, because the government took over paying the bills for most people, or for a lot of people, the culture became an unnecessary overhead.
Why bother?
Alright, so would you say that...
Well, why bother having, like in the modern world, why bother having an anti-single mom culture when you don't pay for them anyway?
I mean, not directly.
You can't avoid, right?
Alright, so let me just get this straight.
What you imagine is a bunch of people are floating over a great big abyss, and they have culture holding them up.
And state comes in and holds them up as well, and then the culture fades away, and they're being held up by the state.
And if there wasn't a state, then they would fall, right?
Is that what you're trying to paint?
Is that the picture you're painting?
If the state diminishes?
Culture will...
Oh, the culture will come back.
Of course it will, yeah.
Okay, so going back to the question...
You take a rock out of a stream, the water doesn't keep going around it, just fills it in, right?
Right, all right.
So going back to my original question, which is the difference between, I think the exact words I used was powerful, nationalistic, regional state versus libertarianism, is you say that right now the state is prompting everyone up, and so people have an awful culture.
They allow for a single motherhood, for example.
But if you take away the state, Culture will flow back in and take the place and hold people up, and then people will stop believing in single motherhood and all that stuff, and it's only the sake of keeping people up.
Is that basically your concept?
Yeah, I mean, we simply have to look at where the government spends the most on people, there is the worst culture.
I mean, who receives the most money and resources in America?
Single mothers and poor people and people who don't want to work.
No.
No?
No.
Natives.
Uh...
Can you elaborate?
Well, Native Americans, Native Canadians, the indigenous population that we hear when the whites came, or the Europeans came, they receive the most resources.
And their culture is the worst.
What?
Next would be blacks, and their culture is the worst.
Okay, I'm gonna need you to explain this.
I'm interested here.
Explain what?
Their culture is the worst.
What do you mean by that?
I mean, rights of alcoholism, of suicidality, of nihilism.
Okay, they're modern culture.
Okay, so what you're saying is they lost their culture.
Yeah, I'm talking about people.
Let me put it this way.
The natives weren't receiving government money before there was a government from Europe.
Okay, right, so of course I'm talking about contemporary culture.
Okay, so we're agreeing on the concept that people are floating over this abyss, and either the state or culture holds them up, or some combination in between.
And if you get rid of the culture, then the state will prop them up.
If you get rid of the state, the culture will prop them up, like that, right?
No, no, that's almost completely incorrect.
Sorry.
First of all, I haven't said anything about hovering over an abyss.
I don't even know what that means.
I brought that up.
I know, but you're saying my basic argument is, and then you're characterizing it in a way that I've never mentioned.
That's not a way of phrasing my argument correctly.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to misrepresent you, but I thought that's what you meant with your indigenous people argument, where they lost their culture, and now the state is holding them up.
And because the state is holding them up...
No, no, but you're saying that people are hanging over...
You're saying people are hanging over an abyss...
It doesn't exist.
And the culture...
Or the government saves them.
I don't even know.
What is this abyss, though?
Is that nihilist?
I don't know.
Fallout 4 is chaos, right?
Society.
Yeah, I've not made any of those arguments, so I don't know where this hanging over the abyss thing comes from.
We have a natural environment.
You know, I mean, it's...
It's sort of like saying, well, rabbits are either hanging over an abyss and they're either going to have to go and find their own food or they're going to get owned by people, kept as pets, and people will feed them.
I don't know what the hanging over the abyss is.
I mean, they need to eat and they're either going to find their own food or get fed by their owners, but hanging over an abyss seems like an unnecessary addition to the issue or the question.
I just wanted to point that out because it's not an argument that I've made about hanging over an abyss or whatever that means.
Yeah, it's a bad analogy.
Sorry about that.
I probably should have said something like that Something else.
I should have said something else.
And then the other part was that if culture goes away, you get more government, you said, and if government goes away, you get more culture.
And that wasn't my argument at all.
My argument wasn't, well, culture just mysteriously vanishes and then government rushes in.
My argument is that the natural state of human beings is social enforcement through culture.
And how do we know that?
Because there were no governments in the vast majority of our evolution, hunter-gatherer societies, right?
Tribal hierarchies and so on, but not governments as we would understand.
No violent redistributionist coercive welfare state, anything like that, right?
No fiat currency when we were just basically chasing the arse end of an antelope every time we got hungry.
And so it's not that, well, culture mysteriously vanishes and government rushes in to fill the void.
No.
People who would face ostracism for their bad decisions turn to the government to avoid the effects of ostracism and through turning to the government and this is just one of the many mechanisms by which it can grow but through this turning to the government they end up creating an environment where culture is an unnecessary overhead and falls away and then people can start making fun of
people who have values and wish to enforce them as prudish and intrusive and busybodies.
They can start to make fun of like the church lady.
I don't know if you've ever watched that old Dana Carvey SNL skit but the church lady was like the pure socialist mockery of culture.
We've got the government so now we can make fun of the church lady.
And we can make fun of anybody who wants to impose their values on others as a weird, uptight, Victorian prude, in your face, in your business, won't leave people alone, neurotic, right?
Okay.
And in a weird way, they're kind of right.
And so, in the past, when people actually had to pay for single mothers, they would be invested in not having them.
And the way that they would do that is they would ostracize the single mothers until the single mothers gave up the children to be adopted because that was what was best for the children.
Okay.
And then when you gave the children up to be adopted, then you could go to some new town and you could be a single mom, a single woman who didn't have kids and you'd lie about it or whatever, or whatever, right?
But society would act in a way that would transfer the children To the environment which would be by far the best for them, which would be to be raised in a two-parent household.
And that's because society knew that if single motherhood ran rampant, then crime and drugs, drunkenness and more single motherhood would all just run rampant and be a huge disaster.
You name it, right?
But now that society is not paying anything direct for single moms, or at least can't avoid paying it through the state, well, now if you're concerned about single motherhood, you're just considered to be some weird, neurotic, bizarre, you know, busybody, and why would anyone bother?
Live and let live.
They're fine.
They're wonderful.
They're doing fine.
They're great.
Yeah, because ostracism is unpleasant.
It's difficult, and nobody wants to do it.
And so when the government takes over the costs of dysfunctional social behavior, People don't want to enforce it, and then you get lots of people making fun of those people.
And then, decades later, everyone goes like, oh shit, those people were right.
Two examples that popped to mind was Daniel Moynihan's 1965 report on the coming disasters in black families because of the welfare state.
And everyone called him a racist, and everyone said he was wrong, and it won't have any effect, and blah blah blah.
Another one is all the people who said, I guess we just passed the 50 year anniversary of Ted Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act that said, well, enough of compatible Europeans, let's bring in as many Third Worlders as humanly possible.
That's not going to cause any problems at all.
And of course, they lied about all of that and said it wasn't going to change the demographics of the nation and all that.
And now there's 50 to 60 million Third Worlders imported who vote 8 to 2 to...
Keep Democrats in power.
Democrats realized after the fall of the Soviet Union that they couldn't win the argument for socialism, so they just started importing people who were more used to bigger government, and that's how they pretended to win the debate.
The third, of course, is more colloquial, the Dan Quayle criticizing the choice of the television sitcom character played by Candace Bergen called Murphy Brown to have a child as a single mother in her 40s.
He said this is not in the best interest of the child and of course everyone shat all over him from a great pontificating liberal Hollywood height and now Candace Bergen who led that charge has of course now that it's far too late to do anything about it has said you know we were wrong and Dan Quayle was right because she can read numbers with a clear brain now so yeah I mean now everybody looks weird when they want to control things socially And then decades later it turns out that
they were right, but by then the damage is long intractable.
Okay.
It seems like you're very interested in this concept of single motherhood and all that, and I think that's a very interesting topic, but I'd like to get back to the whole libertarianism and fascism and all that sort of stuff.
Hang on, hang on.
What are you talking about?
We're kind of going off on a tangent.
What are you talking about, interested in the single motherhood thing?
No, we talk about various things, then you go back to it, and I think it's very interesting, but I'd like to cover the question that I asked.
No, no, no.
I gave the example of the black family.
Right, right, right.
That's not just single motherhood.
That was also to do with the black family as well.
I'm not trying to insult you or anything.
I'm just trying to continue on with the debate.
I think we can both agree that large state and culture are sort of opposed a little bit, where culture rushes in, state rushes in, like that, what we were talking about, where there's no need for the cultural overhead, like what you said.
Now, let's go into your libertarian society.
We're gonna have a whole bunch of people that all believe in good morals and they all have a strong culture of single motherhood is bad and things like that in your libertarian society.
The problem is that people who don't believe in that stuff will be able to immigrate in.
Or people who have dissenting opinions, people can freely change their opinions and things like that and so the society can change from your wonderful paradise into Iran.
Which isn't a good thing.
No, no, no, they won't.
No, because nobody will, like, let's say that Minnesota, right?
Minnesota, let's just say it's, you know, all white and Christian, right?
And then a bunch of Muslim Somalis want to move in, right?
And let's say that, unlike in the present situation, people in Minnesota are perfectly free to discriminate, right?
Okay.
Well, will those Somali and Muslims succeed in Minnesota if nobody wants to rent them places, if nobody wants to hire them, if no, right?
So, I think what you're arguing for is something that I think that the people I'm representing here are also supporting, which is nationalism, or the ability to choose your own people over external people.
No, no.
I just said it's the right to discriminate.
Forced association is a violation of freedom of association.
It's perfectly libertarian to say, I don't want to hire someone from another culture.
I'm not saying that's me.
I'm just saying it's perfectly valid and perfectly, it's no violation of the non-aggression principle to refuse to do business with someone.
Okay, but then those people would still be around.
So it's not nationalism.
Sorry?
But those people would still be around, right?
Well, no, no, they wouldn't.
No, they wouldn't.
Because if nobody's willing to rent them places, if nobody wants to hire them, and there's no welfare state, how are they going to survive?
Okay, very good.
So that's, I would say, people separating based on their own belief systems and forming their own groups, which can be called nations.
So not necessarily nationalism that they hate other people.
It's nationalism in the sense that they are separate Yeah.
Okay.
Human beings are tribal.
Yeah.
So then those people all living together, they could be libertarianism, they could be libertarian, they can be Anything, right?
But I would say that this model of the world that we are representing here where people have values and people with other values that they won't get hired because the values are so different they can't really work together, that resembles like monarchies or some other what I would say is a powerful nationalistic regional state.
Yeah, I don't know.
Listen, I think I'm going to have to wind it up here.
I've enjoyed the conversation, but I just feel like we're not communicating at all.
By that I mean you're not listening.
So I'm saying that how we go from people not wanting to hire people whose values directly clash with their own, To its now royalty or a nation state, I just, that's too much to believe.
And, you know, we've been circling the topic for a while now, and I think we're still at sixes and sevens, so I'm going to have to sign off by saying it's, you know, a very enjoyable chat.
I think we've done a lot to help people, but I think that we're just not able to get at the basic principles that can bring us to accord in this conversation, Zach.
But, you know, I do appreciate the call and really did enjoy the chat.
Oh, my biggest role model doesn't like me.
Oh, well.
See you next time, though.
No, I didn't say it.
No, see, here again.
I'm just saying that we're not able to.
Now you're jumping off to I don't like you.
I just said I really appreciated the chat and really enjoyed the conversation, but the law of diminishing returns has been met for me.
It doesn't mean anything wrong.
That's where we're at.
All right.
No, I really did appreciate and enjoy the conversation.
But, you know, we're just not able to get to a place where we're in agreement on the basic principles.
I'm talking about freedom of association, and you're turning that into a monarchy.
And I just don't know how we get there.
But anyway, thanks everyone so much for listening.
Of course, a wonderful, wonderful, delightful, meaningful, deep, and quasi-spiritual experience for me to have this kind of conversation with the world.
I appreciate it.
All the listeners who call in who share their thoughts and feelings with the world and I think help bring out the best in me in terms of what I can bring to the table.
So thank you everyone so much.
Freedomainradio.com to help out the show.
You know you want to.
You know we need you to.
So please, please, please go to freedomainradio.com to help us out.
