Oct. 27, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:03:14
3111 A Message For Social Justice Warriors - Call In Show - October 24th, 2015
Question 1: [1:51] - My question concerns two subjects: bureaucracy and moral luck. The first is self-evident. We all have had to deal with the frustration - and, at times, terror - of dealing with bureaucracy and the mindset that both causes it and is caused by it, even if the bureaucracy might have been created with "best intentions." Moral luck is more difficult, because the definition is that a moral agent might sometimes not be responsible for their actions because of circumstances beyond their control. What are your thoughts about the relationship between the two? Question 2: [48:30] - Sometimes, grey areas in life seem to point to the fact that it is much more effective to bend, and adapt to the environment than it is to insist on voicing hard, rational philosophical conclusions. Given the fact that most people recoil, lash out, and ostracized you for bringing up most philosophical topics or rational conclusions, is there a philosophical framework general enough to resolve all of the instances of sticking to principle/self vs adapting to others opinions that may not be rational or philosophical?Question 3: [1:54:28] - I signed an apartment lease with a girlfriend, giving her an extremely favorable rent split. Shortly after moving in together, we broke up, initiated by her, and she proceeded to treat me poorly for about 14 months. I, being unassertive, never really attempted to renegotiate the split. She made it clear during that period that she was willing to lie to me and take advantage of me. Upon her moving out, I chose to keep half her security deposit, because I couldn't stomach the idea of giving her any more money. I still cannot decide if this was a moral choice, and I was hoping to get Stefan's weigh-in.
Hi everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
What a show we had.
We really, really covered a lot of ground.
I think you'll find it very valuable.
The first caller had a question about the relationship between morality and luck.
And we talked about it relative to bureaucracy and the endless proliferation of crazy complex laws in a state of society.
So that was very interesting.
Now, the second question, which is, again, a question we all wrestle with, and the question is, how much do you speak out about what you're passionate about?
A lot of people recoil, they lash out, or they ostracize you for bringing up anything rational or philosophical, so how do we approach the challenge of speaking to a crazy world when we're rational without it becoming self-destructive and crazy and so on?
So that was a very juicy topic, and we talked a lot about The role of language in creating immorality and the challenge of wrestling concepts from evil people and have them serve goodness.
So that was a really great chant.
And our other third guy was great.
He signed an apartment lease with his girlfriend and gave her a really good break on the rent.
And then shortly after moving in together, she slept with another guy in their bed.
He came home and caught her.
And then...
Oh, what can I say other than you should listen to how the conversation goes from there, because I think, you know, we all face our challenges with standing up for ourselves in relationships, particularly men when they're young with romantic relationships, and I think we got some good spine stiffening out of that conversation, which I think you'll appreciate.
So without any further ado, let's get started.
All right, so who do we have up first?
Alright, up first today is Tim.
Tim wrote in and said, My question concerns two subjects, bureaucracy and moral luck.
The first is self-evident.
We all have had to deal with the frustration, and at times terror, of dealing with bureaucracy, and the mindset that both causes it and is caused by it, even if the bureaucracy might have been created with the quote-unquote best intentions.
Moral luck is more difficult because the definition is that a moral agent might sometimes not be responsible for their actions because of circumstances beyond their control.
What are your thoughts about the relationship between the two?
That's from Tim.
Hey Tim, how you doing?
I'm doing well, Steph.
Thank you very much for taking my call.
Ah, well, hopefully you'll thank me at the end.
I'm not sure I quite understand The difference, what you say, between bureaucracy and moral luck.
Sure.
This was a difficult one to try to put together, and I took some copious notes.
To try to keep my thoughts together, I had some particular points that I wanted to throw out there.
Maybe we can go from there.
Okay, so point number one about moral luck.
So Kantian ethics defines morality as duty, obligation, and universalization.
And it is immune from luck.
So we are moral regardless of what happens to us.
But moral luck, as defined specifically by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, who wrote on this subject many years ago, they formulated in what's called the control principle, which is we are morally accessible only to the extent that what we are assessed for depends on factors under our control. which is we are morally accessible only to the extent And a corollary to it is two people ought not to be morally assessed differently if the only other differences between them are due to factors beyond their control.
Right.
So someone who someone who just goes and shoplifts a loaf of bread.
And they have the money on them.
They're just doing it for kicks.
We would not judge that person morally in the same way as someone who's starving to death and must steal in order or feels he must steal in order to live.
Is that a fair way to put it?
That's right.
And to give another example, say you're standing in the line of a supermarket and somebody falls into you and steps on your toes.
You would be upset with the person that they did that thinking they did it on purpose, but when you find out that somebody had pushed them and they did it completely on accident, you would not judge them as morally responsible for something that was outside their control.
Okay.
Okay, so that's the first point about the specific definition of moral luck.
So the second point is...
Well, sorry, sorry, sorry.
That's why I was confused about moral luck.
Okay.
Because I think what you're saying is that luck is not morally judgeable.
Correct.
And so it's sort of like lucky planning or something.
It's not.
It's amoral luck would be the better phrase, right?
Right.
Okay, alright.
So luck, fortune, and so on.
The other thing too is that we would say generally of somebody who worked to achieve his wealth that he probably, all other things being equal, is more skilled than someone who inherited a lot of money and was wealthy, right?
That's right.
Okay.
And we also know that somebody who was born pretty or handsome or beautiful in some physical manner We often describe that to charisma when it's really just based on biological symmetry preferences and so on, right?
So there's some luck and so on, but we try to normalize for luck when making moral decisions, both good luck and bad luck, or moral judgments.
Is that right?
That's right.
Okay.
So I have a second point with that.
So this goes to the Greeks, and Martha Nussbaum...
Professor of Chicago wrote in The Fragility of Goodness, a book from years ago.
It's just kind of funny when you say, this goes to the Greeks.
Non-Greek name, sorry, this goes to the Scots.
Ahmed!
Anyway, go on.
Right.
So her one book, The Fragility of Goodness, which came out in the mid-80s, talked about Greek morality and moral luck specifically.
So the main points that I got from the book were that the tragedians in particular were spot on with the subject of chance and human affairs.
For example, you have Aeschylus and the Agamemnon.
In Antigone, the central characters are warding off chance and fate by reducing their commitments and love.
In other words, win by not losing.
So choosing stability as a bulwark against radical change and chance.
Socrates and Plato were committed to the project of techne and episteme.
Techne meaning practice and skill, among other things, and episteme as knowledge.
As the means towards progress, which in turn would give humans control of unforeseen circumstances.
The more you plan, the more you reduce the likelihood that something bad would happen to you.
Like brushing your teeth every day to avoid cavities, exercise often to maintain your health.
But Euripides in Hecuba has the main character choose revenge when the death of someone very close to her happens.
The death is caused by someone she knows, which makes it worse.
That person has lost their morality, And it adversely affects Hecuba, which is a good person in the play.
She starts off as good.
This is a destruction of human relatedness and human language.
Now, she also treats about Aristotle, which I had to go back and read, that Aristotle does acknowledge luck as the means to the good life, where But he was very specific in what kind of luck, that you had to be male, Greek, between 30 to 40 years old, had good friends, no ill health befell you, and so on and so forth.
So it seemed very restrictive, or he was very restrictive in what the criteria was for the good life, and Plato and Socrates were more about control, but then the tragedians were more like, hey, you know, shit happens to you.
But in the case of Euripides, it's a very extreme example where somebody did a complete 180.
They started off good and then they just...
Completely lost it and then became an evil person.
So that's the second point, and that's the section of the point.
Okay, so if you can get to your question, just because the Encyclopedia of Philosophy may not be terribly gripping to the majority of listeners.
So if you can get to the question, that'd be great.
Sure.
So the two points I just wanted to lay down about what moral luck was and chance in human affairs.
So about bureaucracy in itself, and I'll try to keep this short, is that we all have to deal with bureaucracy, and it seems that dealing with more and more bureaucracy as time progresses, the more complex it is, that it not only hems people in, it causes that it not only hems people in, it causes them to become stupid in dealing with it, especially when you're bureaucratic runaround, and...
I'm sorry, dealing with bureaucracy causes people to become stupid?
That's according to one author I read about it.
Okay, I'm not talking to the authors, I'm talking to you.
So I need to, if this is an idea that you are advocating, then you need to be able to understand it and not defer to the author, right?
Because he's not here, right?
So I just, I want to, yeah, there's more bureaucracy and it can be annoying to deal with.
But I just want to understand, we'll get to the definition of bureaucracy in a second, but I'm just curious what you mean when you say it makes people stupid.
That when you're dealing with paperwork and specifically, that you see yourself as an intelligent person being able to deal with what you need to do.
But when you're being given the bureaucratic runaround and having to fill out forms and if you're trying to find somebody who has some power over what needs to be done, But you're trying to second-guess that person, then you make mistakes.
That's it in a nutshell.
So it's not exactly that it makes you stupid, it's that you're kind of in a no-win situation, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Alright.
And I wonder if we can just get a definition of what you mean, or what in this conversation you mean by bureaucracy?
So, rules.
And...
I don't know that the two would be synonyms, right?
I mean, there are some rules that make good sense, right?
Sure.
So, let's see.
Rules are certainly part of it.
It's not essential to it, but formalism, the...
I don't know what that means in this context.
Hard to define, really.
Well, we need to.
We can talk about bureaucracy.
You know, definition is the essence of philosophy, at least at the beginning.
Okay.
So I'll take one definition that it's the most efficient and rational way in which can organize human activity.
So bureaucracy for you is the best way to organize human activity?
Not the best way, but it is a way.
I thought you said the best way just in this definition.
Well, this is coming from Mox Waiver too, but this is one definition for bureaucracy.
Wait, are you again quoting someone who you don't agree with?
No.
But you quoted it and said it was the best system, and that seems a bit surprising because bureaucracy normally has negative connotations.
Yes, especially negative connotations.
So it can't be the best system and have negative connotations, right?
Right.
So which is it?
So I would define bureaucracy as the negative connotation.
It is...
Okay, so let's get a definition of bureaucracy then.
Okay, so my definition of bureaucracy is the negative sense of restrictive rules, restrictive procedures, too much emphasis on efficiency, and not taking into account individual circumstances.
So by efficiency, because, you know, being focused on efficiency is...
Kind of what I'm doing now in this conversation.
So being focused on efficiency is not a bad thing, right?
No.
So do you mean that there are too many generalized rules that can't take into account specific or individual exceptions to those rules?
Yes.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, that's a balance, right?
I mean, if your rules are too rigid, then it doesn't take into account individual situations.
But if your rules are too loosey-goosey, then you don't get efficiency, right?
That's right.
I mean, you can't say, drive whatever speed you want, because sometimes there's a guy trying to get his wife to the hospital before she gives birth to triplets, right?
But at the same time, if you say, well, I'm going to pull over this guy who's trying to drive his wife to the hospital to give birth to triplets, and then I'm going to spend a long time giving him a speeding ticket while his wife is pumping out pup after pup in a rather squelchy backseat, right?
is the cop stops you because you're speeding, and you say, I'm trying to get my wife to the hospital, and the cop says, let me help, and drives ahead, right?
Right.
So bureaucracy is you say, well, no, he was speeding, and therefore you must, whatever, whatever, right?
Right.
Now, bureaucracy, of course, is not something that...
So, bureaucracy where there's a focus on defensive rules rather than efficient rules.
It's the cover your ass stuff.
Well, I got a signature and it was filled out in triplicate and so whatever happens is not my fault.
There is in the free market, of course, a necessity for standardization, right?
I mean, you don't want to be...
If you're building a railroad, you don't want to be a different width than the railroad that everyone else has, right?
And if you're building a car, you know, in England they drive on one side and in North America they drive on the other side.
And so you want to make sure that you build things roughly standardized to the environment and that sort of makes sense.
And the degree to which you can standardize the production of things is the degree to which you get economies of scale and so on.
So there is a drive to standardization, but there does also have to be, in some cases, exceptions.
So in the free market, there's a drive to standardization, but there must be an accommodation for exceptions.
And in a bureaucracy, as far as I understand it, it's where there is organization...
But without the competitive or voluntary element that limits the multiplicity of rules, right?
So, in a free market, there will be insurance companies and those insurance companies will need a bunch of information from you in order to provide for you an insurance policy.
Because there's competition, they're not going to send you like 300 pages of fine print to read and fill out, right?
That's your iPad, which is driven by sort of governments and regulations and tort and all that.
And so in a free market, there is a drive to standardize and to minimize the amount of...
I think about this, and I'm sure everyone does, like every time that Apple notice pops up that says, you know, there is now a 56-page end-user license agreement that you have to follow.
Well, of course, that's because they're complying with government regulations and government laws and all that kind of stuff.
So that mess is sort of the way that has evolved.
In a free market, there is a desire to please the customer.
And the customer is pleased both by the efficiency that comes from standardization, but not the rigidity that allows for no outside-the-box circumstances.
So I think that bureaucracies occur when there's not the voluntarism, And there's not the competition that drives the streamlining process, right?
The last sort of example I'll give is the law as a whole.
It always has struck me as absurd beyond words.
I mean, beyond Kafkaesque in an LSD tunnel isolation tank.
That they say, well, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Well, I can get that if you're dealing with the common law, which has maybe 25 or 40 statutes, you know, like, you know, don't steal, don't rape, don't kill, don't assault, and, you know, keep your word, keep your contracts, you know, kind of stuff like that.
And so there are involuntary laws in the common law which are around the protection of persons and property that are basic common sense and can be taught to your average five-year-old and indeed that's usually the best time to teach them.
So there are common law principles and then there are other principles which you voluntarily engage into and therefore have the chance, you know, read the contract, your cell phone and stuff like that, your bank and all that.
You read the contract and you sign it and so on.
But the reality is that there's no human being alive in any Western country who knows even 10% of the laws that apply to the population as a whole.
Because there's, I mean, so ridiculous, right?
I mean, more people go through the family court system than through the criminal justice system.
And in the family court system is notoriously ill-defined and confusing and contradictory and wildly expensive.
And of course, you go to the family court system.
Government don't appoint you no lawyer, so you're going to have a whole wilder hurt time.
So, when you have a system that has grown up without competition and without voluntarism like government law, then you are going to end up with these ludicrous situations where people are literally subjected to hundreds of thousands of laws that nobody understands.
That nobody can process, and for which there are often no clear or even remotely objective answers as to the legality or illegality of what is occurring.
And so, I think bureaucracy occurs when there's no limiting principle of voluntarism to the multiplicity of rules, which is why rules rarely get repealed, right?
I mean, when I was a kid, there were these things growing up where you'd Did you know that in Paris it was illegal for 150 years for women to wear pants?
And did you know that in so-and-so it's illegal for all that?
You can't keep a bee in a shot glass upside down in Tennessee.
Like there's all this crazy, crazy stuff.
And of course these laws never get repealed because what's the benefit?
I mean there's no benefit.
Of course every good...
Rule makers should occasionally scrap everything and start again.
You know, like there's this old principle that in the software world, you build a proof of concept and you may even sell some of them, but then when you sell the company or somebody really professional comes in, they'll often scrap the whole thing and build it again because the first round was built kind of jury-rigged and is not scalable and all that kind of stuff.
And that, of course, should happen to systems of law as well.
So for me, bureaucracy is basically when rules are protected from competition and voluntarism by force, they tend to multiply until collapse.
And navigating that, I think, is probably closer to what we're talking about.
Bingo games in North Carolina cannot last more than five hours.
Hey, old people have to pee too, and I believe quite a lot.
In Quitman, Georgia, chickens are not allowed to cross the road.
Which saves everyone from 10,000 variations of the jokes from children.
And if you cut down a cactus in Arizona, you can actually be sentenced to 25 years in prison.
And in Texas, you can't sell your eyeballs.
You can sell highballs, but not eyeballs.
So anyway, these are just kind of...
It's against the law to sing off key, which is why they don't let me back into North Carolina.
So anyway, is that sort of a fairly rough but viable working definition for what we're talking about here?
Yes, it is.
And you bringing up the word Kafkaesque was on my mind too, especially in literature, when you look at the trial in the castle, of the fear of being accused of a crime, you have no idea what it is.
Right.
And nobody will tell you.
Right.
Nobody will tell you.
So, I was thinking about moral luck initially in connection with this of if somebody does not know and you are committing a crime, but who is to say if it's a crime or not, then can you be held responsible for doing something that you were not aware of, that you had no knowledge of?
I'm just kind of curious, if you don't mind me asking, these are some fairly obtuse moral quandaries.
I'm just kind of I'm curious why this is sort of top of your list to talk about in a public show of actionable philosophy.
I don't mind theoretical questions.
I'm just curious, generally, if this is the biggest moral issue that you see facing yourself or the world at the moment.
Well, some of it is also related to how others can use bureaucracy as, say, extraction of wealth.
That it's repression.
So...
You know, repression, being a volunteerist myself, do not like any kind of repression, especially if I had no say in creating the system.
And, you know, trying to be a moral person, but also afraid of making some kind of mistake.
Yeah, I mean, as far as knowledge goes, and we talk about this with regards to parents, if they've been sort of bad or abusive or harmful parents or even sort of spanky parents and so on.
And, um...
Ignorance of the moral law and its capacity to excuse people from action, that's a really interesting question.
And it's one of these gray areas.
I mean, clearly, there is...
There are certain situations where there's no excuse, right?
I mean, a normal functioning adult should know that it's wrong to shoplift, right?
Because there are signs everywhere in the store.
Shoplifters will be prosecuted.
We've usually had some exposure to the idea that stealing is wrong and so on.
So if some 25-year-old person, like I read the study the other day that said young people, like one out of six of them have stolen something in the last year.
That's a lot of...
I mean, maybe they're making up for Social Security.
I don't know, but that's a lot of theft.
Anyway, and so if a 25-year-old young man gets picked up and he's shoplifted, ignorance of the law is not going to cut it.
I mean, there's just generally an understanding that you know the norms of your society to that degree, and you know that stealing is not allowed.
On the other hand, if there's some really obscure regulation...
That applies to something, well, I don't know.
I mean, in Eureka, Nevada, you're driving through, Eureka, Nevada, you got a mustache, and you kiss your wife.
Well, apparently that's illegal.
Now, ignorance of that law?
Yeah, I think we can go there.
And...
In Idaho, it's illegal for a man to give his fiance a box of candy that weighs more than 50 pounds.
That's just generally a good idea.
So, would you know that?
No, I don't know.
In San Antonio, Texas, it's illegal to flirt.
And in Indiana, it's illegal to attend a public event or use public transport within four hours of eating onions or garlic.
And in Wyoming, you can't even take a picture of a rabbit from January to April without an official permit.
And so, I mean, these kinds of laws, well, they're pretty weird.
And so this question of ignorance of the law and ignorance of the moral law is pretty important.
And we generally have to, like the reason why there's a rule which says ignorance of the law is no excuse is because if ignorance of the law were an excuse, every single person would use it.
Right?
Every single person would say, I didn't know.
It was never explained to me.
I didn't know.
And so if ignorance of the law was an excuse, everybody would use it.
So, there is a grey area in which, in the current system, it's understandable.
I think Tom Woods was saying that people commit three felonies a day without even knowing it.
And so, of course, a rational moral system, a rational legal system, would be something where the laws were simple and basic enough that people would be able to understand it and would not be able to claim that they had no idea what they were doing was wrong.
And...
Of course, that's not the way the system works at the moment.
I mean, I think it was Ayn Rand who said a dictatorship It's not a system of iron laws or bad laws.
A dictatorship is a system of no laws.
You don't know what is legal, what is not legal, what is permitted, what is not permitted.
And we can see this with...
The Department of Justice has just decided not to prosecute Lois Lerner of the IRS for the IRS's targeting of conservative groups.
And that's because you have a left-wing government in power and conservative groups are obviously unpopular.
And of course, if...
Lois Lerner is prosecuted and found that she had illegally targeted conservative groups in order to sway an election.
That would be a crime of treason and that would actually have invalidated the last election which put Barack Obama in power.
And so, this is not a government of laws.
It's a government of men and women just making decisions as to their particular political preferences.
So, America, at least to some degree, used to be a rule of law and the Justice Department would operate independent of the presidency and so on.
But to now, it's all political, right?
I mean, there are reports that Hillary Clinton called up Barack Obama in a rage telling him to call off the dogs because they were circling her email server and finding the classified emails all over her email server plus emails that she'd promised to hand over that weren't handed over.
Now, if you mishandle classified information, not only is it a felony, But it also is one of the few laws in America that bars a person convicted of the crime from ever holding public office or being employed by the U.S. government ever again.
And that is obviously pretty important.
But, you know, Bill Clinton got away with blowjobs and perjury and the...
Buried among Hillary Clinton's email treasure trove, or at least on her server, were emails That Tony Blair had agreed to go to war.
He had agreed with George Bush to go to war against Iraq when he was saying to the British public that he was committed to the peace process, that he was exploring all diplomatic options, that war was a last resort, and all that kind of stuff.
And that, of course, is...
I don't know the degree to which that's criminal or not, but agreeing to go to a war while telling the public...
That you are committed to peace would seem to me to be treason of the highest order.
You can't really come up with a greater set of treasonous activities, which means that all the Syrian refugees should go and live at Tony Blair's house.
But of course, that is in a fantasy world of reciprocal justice that we can only dream of and we can't achieve while we have a state.
So...
So, knowledge of the law, well, if the law is so complicated, ignorance of the law becomes a much more defensible excuse, and the whole point of law is to be simple enough that you can really explain it to a five-year-old.
And five-year-olds understand promises, because any time you make a promise to a five-year-old, I promise I will buy you candy after lunch.
You know, their little candy hamster wheel of infinite grabbiness goes to work tirelessly, and that's...
That's what they're waiting for.
And so, you know, Dad, you promised.
You've got to keep your promises.
Okay, well, no.
Welcome to contract law, right?
And when it comes to don't hit, don't steal, and so on, this is all stuff that is explained to three-year-olds and therefore you can't have ignorance of the law as an excuse because it's something that people have been exposed to since childhood.
Keep your promises and don't harm other people's persons or property.
Keep your word and don't hit or hurt or steal or harm.
And...
It's hard to know what a modern common law or what I call dispute resolution organization or anarchic or voluntary developed system of laws might look like.
It certainly wouldn't look like anything that we have today.
But it would definitely be designed with the idea that ignorance of the law is no excuse, is only a valid principle when the law is easily comprehensible By people who have an IQ of 75 or so.
Maybe even 70, right?
70 is usually the cutoff for, at least among Europeans, Caucasians, for mental retardation.
And so if somebody is capable of living in society without supervision, then the law has to be comprehensible to people with an IQ of 70 to 80.
And, obviously, the law is far from that.
The law should also be clear enough that it should be reasonably possible to act as your own advocate without hiring a lawyer.
Of course, lawyers, and this goes back to To Dickens, but lawyers have a vested interest in making the system so opaque and incomprehensible that you have no choice but to use their services.
But in any reasonable common law system, the price of lawyers and the value of lawyers would be limited by a legal system simple enough.
That you could be your own advocate and feel like you could do a fairly good job.
So that's where I would put it.
You can't really judge it now because the situation is so ridiculous, but that's where I think it would have to gravitate towards in a free society.
What you mentioned about the lawyers is what I was getting at of the personal interest in obfuscation and making things way too complicated for the average person to perpetuate...
The system, bureaucracy, the state, whatever you want to call it.
And, you know, taking advantage of that.
Sorry, were you going to finish that thought?
Yeah, so...
Yes, taking advantage of that and then going back to the person feeling trapped within the system because they have no recourse against it.
Because they were not the ones that created the system in the first place.
Right.
Right.
And, you know, they all cry that justice denied is justice deferred.
You know, stuff can take, you know, by all reports, stuff can take a long time in the legal system.
And, of course, that's, you know, to the advantage of the people who are in the legal system and to the disadvantage of everyone else.
And look at the tax code.
The tax code.
Literally, they will look in the future at our tax code and they will not understand Our society at all, how we functioned, how there was like no sort of philosophical rebellion and revolt against this ridiculous tax code.
Like volume after volume after volume after volume after volume with hundreds of thousands of lines, I'm sure, of addendums and updates and clarifications every single year.
And holy crap.
You know, Donald Trump's tax plan, like it or not, like him or not, that is, you know, don't pay any tax, zero to $25,000.
$25,000 and one to 50,000, you pay 10 cents on the dollar, 50,000 and one to 150,000, 20 cents, 150,000 and one and up, 25%.
Look at that.
You can do it on a postage stamp and, you know, for single filers and corporations, I'm sure, as a whole.
Different thing, but yeah, it's ridiculous.
You need like thousands and thousands and thousands of lines of software code just to navigate the first page of the tax code.
Well, you know, let's get some more electronic stores in for husbands and put H&R Block accountants doing something useful.
Yeah.
Anyway, is there anything else you wanted to mention?
I'll move on to the next caller if there's no yearning burnings in your brain.
Well, I just had one last thing about bureaucracy itself.
Would you take the stance that maybe the reason why bureaucracy exists is a means to reduce chance?
And this goes back to earlier what I was saying about moral luck is trying to reduce...
Negative consequences of actions that were outside of your control?
Negative actions of consequences.
Well, bureaucracy, since it's a negative, can't be about...
I mean, reducing risk to an excessive point becomes an increase of risk.
Risk is like an inverse bell curve, right?
If you don't take any precautions against risk, then you are in a very risky situation.
If you take too many precautions against risk, ironically, you're in a very risky situation, right?
So there has been a steady drumbeat of terror, of abductions and cars killing children and meteors flaming down from the sky and exploding entire schools.
And everybody has been completely terrified for the last couple of decades about children and all the terrible things that can happen to children.
Because, you know, we wouldn't want to be talking about something tangible like the national goddamn debt or anything.
So let's men vent all these boogeymen so that the real intergenerational theft remains unexamined.
And so we have...
Wrapped kids in bubble wrap over the last couple of decades.
Let's keep them inside.
Let's keep them close.
If they go out on the street, they could get creamed by a car.
They could get abducted by strangers and so on.
And this has to do with a wide variety of things.
Unconscious guilt for intergenerational predation and national debt and social security and so on.
It also has to do tragically with what is commonly called multiculturalism.
As different groups, whether it's ethnicities or races or cultures, when different groups try to mingle in a neighborhood, social trust goes down.
It collapses, in fact, to the point where people just say, I'll just stay home.
Just stay home.
And of course, you know, video games have become more fun and texting and all that.
So what's happened is as a result of fear and as a result of neighborhoods breaking down, of course, a lot of communities have become bedroom communities, they're called, which is where the parents, they get up and they take their kids to daycare or to school in the morning and then they go pick them up in the afternoon.
And oftentimes they'll eat out on the way home or whatever because they just don't have time.
And so there really aren't kids playing in the neighborhood.
And of course, if there aren't kids playing in the neighborhood, there's not much value being home and having your kids try to play in the neighborhood.
In order for neighborhood play to work, there have to be a whole bunch of kids around.
So that, you know, you can pick and choose and there's competition for the best playmates and, you know, all that great stuff for kids, which is unstructured, gloriously anarchic time in nature, or at least without parents around.
And so because neighborhoods have collapsed as far as free play goes, if everyone's...
And summers too, right?
I mean, if the parents are all working in the summers, then they've got to put their kids in summer camps or daycares.
So they're all gone from the neighborhood during the summer.
Like when I was a kid, you could walk out the door and there'd be like 20 kids to play with around.
At least.
And because we were all broke, it all had to be sort of unstructured, negotiated play, which was...
Really important.
And this is one of the tougher time I have with the younger generation.
It's not their fault.
It's just they've grown up.
Everything's structured.
You go to karate class and then you go to dance class and then you go to shot put class or bowling leagues or like everything's structured.
You don't have to go.
You just pulled along like a box on a conveyor belt from place to place.
And parents are all there and everything's structured and everyone gets to play and there's no negotiation.
The whole point of play for children is so that they can learn how to negotiate.
It's the whole point of play.
Why do lions pretend to attack each other when they're cubs?
So that they can learn to eat gazelles.
And why should children be out playing in an unstructured format?
So that they can learn to negotiate.
And so that they can learn what leadership means.
They can learn how to appeal.
When you're a playmate in an unstructured environment, You are an entrepreneur selling fun to your customers.
You are an entrepreneur selling fun to your customers.
And people grow up.
And that's the whole point of all these thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of unstructured play in nature for kids is so that they can learn to negotiate, so they can learn what it is like to be a leader, what it is like to motivate other people, and what it is like to buy and sell fun to In an unstructured environment.
To be an entrepreneur.
In the free market of playtime called It's Not in a Room with fluorescent lights with adults and rules and money and everyone telling you what to do.
You can check this out.
Podcast 1027.
Every media scare I've ever heard of in three breaths.
Just in case people might want to watch the video too.
And so we have...
It becomes diminishing returns for people to stay home.
So, you know, we had Phyllis Schlafly on the show a while back ago.
We chatted offline just about, you know, when she was in the post-war period, all the moms were home and all the moms had like five or six kids.
And so they'd say to the kids, go out and play.
Off you go, right?
And so because there were lots of kids around and the kids were mixed ages, which is great for developing empathy, The kids all hung out together and parenting was a whole lot easier.
But that only works if there's lots of people doing it.
Like if you're in a neighborhood and everyone's kids are in daycare and you're the only stay-at-home parent with a kid who's at home, well, it's really not that much fun because the kid kind of goes out into the neutron bomb zone of nothingness.
No kids out there, nothing to do.
And if the kids, you can't plan for it, right?
Which is why you have this ridiculous thing called playdates.
Like you're going to the prom.
It's become such an event for kids to play with other kids.
Let's make a date, right?
The idea of playdates when I was growing up was incomprehensible.
It would be like dressing up in a tuxedo to go play soccer.
It just made no sense at all.
We need a play date.
A play date is called going outside.
There's lots of kids to play with.
So now, even if there are kids in the neighborhood, you never know when they're going to be there or not, whether they're going to be out or not.
Especially if it's like, oh, there are some roughly ghastly gray clouds on the horizon.
Oh, Junior, you'd better stay home.
And the idea of being sort of spoiled and cloistered and kept at home and around other adults, this was like little Lord Fauntleroy stuff.
This was like Gwendolyn Mary in Mallory Towers.
This was considered to be a very bad thing.
And, yeah, it's a good entrepreneurial activity.
Child's Playdate Tinder.
I'm Billy, I'm four, and I like eating blocks.
Swipe right, and you could make a friend for life.
And so we've put kids in this bubble wrap and wildly structured their time to the point where they're unhealthy.
They're unhealthy physically because they're just not out getting exercise.
They're unhealthy psychologically because they have not learned how to negotiate and how to be self-sufficient socially.
And, you know, the pluses and minuses of where I grew up is blah-de-blah-de-blah, but it is a very different world.
And...
That has become, we're now trying to manage and control too much risk for kids.
And now there's this pendulum, I mentioned this on a show previously, this pendulum going back now to the point where people are saying, oh, stop wrapping your kids in.
Like, let them climb trees.
Of course, this is also the absence of fathers.
So fathers are supposed to drive the kids out of the nest, right?
The moms make the nest really comfortable and happy, and the fathers say, go play outside, for God's sakes, I'm going to set fire to the Xbox if you don't take a step back.
And this is, of course, this is the single mom household, the mom-dominated childhood, that kids are just, oh, your mama feels anxious.
You know, it's perfectly natural.
But it's not the way that things go.
So if you don't have any insurance, well, okay, life can be uncertain and problematic.
But if you have too much insurance, you are having a lot of problems.
And the other thing, too, is that you do need some level of bureaucracy, at least, you know, in any world that's imminently imaginable, because the moment someone creates a benefit, a swarm of assholes tries to exploit that benefit.
I remember having a chat with a guy.
I used to do radio in college, and I remember chatting with a guy who was saying, oh, yeah, this is just when ATMs were coming in, right?
Back in the day...
You can't explain this to anyone anymore.
Back in the day, it's like...
Oh no, it's Thursday at 2pm and I might need money for the weekend.
I've got to get to a bank.
Because they closed at 3.
And they didn't open Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
And there were no ATMs.
So if you couldn't get to the bank by...
3 o'clock on a Thursday, you had no money for the weekend.
And that was a...
It'd be a problem.
And...
And so the issue of ATMs coming in and this guy was saying, "Oh yeah, no, I figured it Here's what I do.
I open up a bank account at each branch and then do you know what I do?
You can take out up to $200 Even if you don't have any money in there, you can take out up to $200.
And then you know what you can do?
Just race, you know.
If I open up 10 bank accounts and then I race around, I can get all this money out and it's going to take them forever to try and get the money back.
And here I've just made $2,000.
I'm paraphrasing or whatever, right?
But that was the...
The big get that he had figured out that he thought was just going to be fantastic.
And so because of that, I have to wait for five days for my check to clear.
Because this asshole is out there trying to game the system, which means that I can't get my money for five days until the check clears.
And, you know, the asshole tax is something that is just...
Continual in society and really annoying.
Now, of course, in the future when people are not exploited and raised problematically as kids, then it will be better as a whole.
But, you know, you've got to pay that tax and so you do need a bunch of rules.
People try and game, you know, big corporations all the time.
And I'll just say one last thing.
I appreciate your patience for this.
It's a Julie Lithcott Hames.
This is from The Independent, October 17th.
Helicopter Parenting.
Former Stanford dean explains why overhelping is ruining a generation of children.
So she noticed a disturbing trend during her decade as a dean of freshmen at Stanford University.
Incoming students were brilliant and accomplished and virtually flawless on paper.
her.
But with each year, more of them seemed incapable of taking care of themselves.
At the same time, parents were becoming more and more involved in their children's lives.
They talked to their children multiple times a day and swooped in to personally intervene anytime something difficult happened.
From her position at one of the world's most prestigious schools, she came to believe that mothers and fathers in affluent communities have been hobbling their children by trying so hard to make sure they succeed and by working so diligently to protect them from disappointment and failure and hardship. she came to believe that mothers and fathers in affluent And And you can read the whole article, but it's something, reams of statistics, the rise of depression, other mental and emotional health problems among the nation's young people.
She lives in Palo Alto, California, a community that, following a string of suicides in the past year, has undertaken a period of soul-searching about what parents can do to stem the pressure That young people face.
So when I talk about a voluntary society, I kind of lived that when I was a kid.
I mean, outside a boarding school, which was a little Nazi camp, basically.
You know, I had this glorious anarchy.
That's how I grew up.
My mom, like most of the parents around, was Busy trying to find a guy to take care of her, despite the fact that she was kind of hobbled by having a bunch of kids around and no particular income and so on.
And so, you know, she was off glamming herself up for dates and we were just off trying to do, doing our thing with other kids in completely unstructured, no money environment.
And so the idea that you can live a life without central organizing authority, it's becoming tougher for a lot of kids to kind of get, but I wouldn't say for all of my generation.
I had fairly unique circumstances.
And let's, you know, to put it as nicely possible, sort of a hands-off mother.
And I get that it works because I've lived it.
But if you haven't, it's probably a little hard to theorize about.
All right.
Sorry, I've got to move on to the next caller.
But thanks for bringing up some interesting topics and giving me a platform for which to yell my soap bubbles at.
Sure.
Thank you, Steph.
Thanks, man.
Alright, up next is Jake.
Jake wrote in and said, Given the fact that most people recoil,
lash out, and ostracize you for bringing up the most philosophical topics or rational conclusions, is there a philosophical framework general enough to resolve all of the instances of sticking to principle-slash-self versus adapting to others' opinions that may not be rational or philosophical?
That's from Jake.
Well, thank you, Jake.
Very interesting.
Is this a sort of an abstract question, or is this something personal that's going on in your life?
Or both?
Both.
It is both.
My mind always tends to go to the abstract, but it'd be good to talk about it in both senses.
I imagine a lot of other people sort of struggle with this, too.
Right.
Oh, no, I agree.
I agree.
Well...
So I'll give you a very brief sort of my thoughts on it that I've been mulling over today, and then we can see how it hits your theory and or practical considerations.
Is that okay?
Sounds good.
All right.
Well, you know, there's a crime, believe it or not.
You probably can believe it.
It's a crime.
To impersonate a veteran, right?
You can't go to a parade and slip in with fake medals and a fake uniform and all of that, right?
It's wrong.
It's a crime, right?
Because if you didn't do the fight, you can't pretend you have the medal, right?
And...
I wish to raise the value of those who do the fight for mankind to make the world a better place.
I wish to raise their value by denying other people the imaginary medals they think they've achieved.
And so, as you've probably noticed in my show, I'm constantly saying, yeah, okay, that's fine in theory.
What's the practice?
Okay, it's a fine abstract question.
How does this change things?
And I'm always trying to tie things back to practical prosaic Empirical, lived, day-to-day reality, right?
I mean, it's fine to be a nutritionist, but at some point, people got to push some different shit around on their food with their fork.
And so, my concern is that if people think they're being moral heroes or, you know, doing the social justice warrior fight for goodness, truth, light, and virtue, when they're not doing the right thing and, in fact, maybe even, in fact, doing the wrong thing, I don't want them to pretend that they've got a medal when they're not actually in the war.
And that really is one of the things that I focus on quite a bit, where I say to people, is this really the biggest moral issue that's going on in your life right now?
Because if it's not, what are you doing?
People listen to this show for months or years, and they finally get the courage or feel the need to call in and chat about something, and obviously they respect my capacity to think through Philosophical issues in practical terms, and then they get one shot!
You know, they get one shot at this call usually, and then, okay, I assume that what they want to talk about is the most important thing, and then my question, if it's something really obtuse and abstract, it's like, okay, well, why is this the...
The big issue.
I mean, you don't go to the doctor when you've got a stabbing pain in your stomach and then just show them your holiday shots and say, oh, I feel fine.
No, but here, look at this.
It's the old Sherb Tarlacc line.
And here's my car with the doors open.
And here's my car with the doors closed.
So, I don't want people who aren't taking on the real moral issues of the world, I don't want them to pretend that they are.
You know, like some social justice warrior screaming about anti-sexism and anti-racism.
How they can do that and imagine that this is any kind of new ground?
Right.
I understand.
Any kind of new ground?
I mean, come on.
Yeah.
Racism was dealt with decades and decades and decades ago.
And now they're in the phase of inventing enemies so that they can feel heroic.
Look, I shadowboxed.
I'm king of the world.
I'm champion of the world.
I mean, that's, you know, it's like singing karaoke in your basement and then demanding a stadium pay for your concert.
And so the real issues at the moment is how children are treated, and in particular how boys are treated, because boys are hit more than girls.
Boys are called on less than girls and boys get worse marks than girls even though they do the same or better in standardized tests.
And so the way children are treated as a whole and the way boys are treated in particular is the pressing moral issue in the world at the moment.
I mean it always has been but now it's something we can finally communicate about.
And so People who are not focusing...
And look, I think there's good arguments for that.
I'm not saying that's a clincher and everyone has to be focusing on the better treatment of children.
I think I've made a pretty damn good case as to why that needs to be done.
But, you know, maybe there's something else that's a yearning burning for other people or maybe they have particular skills or influence in another area.
And so my concern is that there are lots of people out there Thinking that by screaming against the patriarchy, they're doing something great.
Hey, you want gender equality?
Let your hair grow.
Go become homeless, because over 90% of homeless people are men, and we've got to take that number down, which means more women got to suck it up and go live on top of subway grates.
Or, you know, go staple your hand, because over 90% of workplace injuries occur to men.
Got to even that out.
So, you know, the idea that you're, you know, screaming against white people or males or patriarchy or, you know, like the idea that this is not anywhere close to where the moral urgency of the species is.
This is all just posturing.
This is all just posturing and conformity and, you know, like people on the left have this totalitarian streak and they always have.
They always have.
It erupts regularly.
There's a feminist group recently banned.
We're talking about censorship of women.
I mean,
I mean, the number of times you hear about some racist incident against, particularly on campus, you hear about some racist incident against Black or something, it turns out they fabricated it themselves.
It's like, really?
Is that where it's at?
Like, you can't find enough real racism?
Do you got to go make it up?
And, like, there was some woman, it turns out the letters that were typed to herself so she could get out of a test.
It's like, oh my god, this is so sad.
So I just don't want people...
You know, licking and sticking Cheerios to their chest and strutting around like they're General Montgomery in the 1942 Tunisian campaign.
This is not any kind of moral heroism.
And in fact, those people who feel entirely comfortable in their moral posturing are usually the greatest cowards of all.
Like, if you go around screaming that you're against white racism, I mean, racism by whites, not racism against whites, that would be more interesting.
But if you go around saying, well, I'm against rape and I'm against racism against blacks, I mean, that is...
Of course, do you feel any fear?
Do you feel like you're going to be attacked by anyone for that?
No.
If you have no fear of being attacked, you're not in the war.
If you have no fear of losing, you are not in the game.
And this is what I want to say to social justice warriors and the, oh, you know, women are oppressed in society and minorities are oppressed in society and white societies are racist and so on.
It's like, okay, who's going to attack you for that?
Who?
Who?
How are you going to suffer for that?
And if the answer is no one's going to attack you and you're going to get rewarded, then you are a poser.
You're a poser.
And you're exploiting morals for your own personal gain.
If no one's attacking you, you're doing wrong.
And so I did swear, that's all I wanted to say.
I just want to rip the medals off the posers and give it to the people who are doing the real work.
If you were a rich man on the Titanic, you were 65% likely to die when the Titanic went down.
If you were a poor woman, the poorest woman on the Titanic had a 55% chance of dying.
So, I don't know if they...
They groped around and couldn't find their penis card, like they couldn't find their patriarchy card and use it to swipe the magic portals to salvation.
But if the richest men on the Titanic have a greater chance of dying than the poorest women, yeah, I don't think that's much of a history of oppression.
Okay.
Yeah, so I see kind of what you're getting at.
It's like working out with five-pound dumbbells, right?
And calling yourself sort of like a bodybuilder, essentially.
No, because at least that's lifting something.
Okay.
No, in a combat, it's hiding from the front and then going home and pretending you were in the fight.
It's robbing the glory of the moral heroes.
It's robbing their glory and bathing yourself in it, which means you know the virtue and value of morality, and you know the virtue and value of moral heroism, you're just not displaying any.
I mean, if everyone around you is agreeing with you and all the media is telling you that you're doing the right thing, given how corrupt the world is, if the world as a whole is agreeing with you, you're wrong.
You're worse than wrong.
You're colluding.
You're enabling.
You are feeding the corruption of the world.
If you're not hated by a lot of people...
I mean, this is, to me, this is just basic logic.
The majority of the world is viciously corrupt.
I mean, obviously, you take autocratic, theocratic regimes in, like the Middle East and so on, it's off the scale, right?
But even in Europe...
Even in Europe, the majority of people are morally, viciously corrupt.
I won't get into the details of how I know all of this, but there's somebody from the Freedom Club who wants to go and talk to Kids in school, like teenagers in high school and so on, right?
And he has this presentation.
It's all charts and bullet points and, you know, because there's nothing more that a teenager loves than PowerPoint.
It's what they live for.
It's their crack.
Porn or PowerPoint?
Porn or PowerPoint?
It's always the choice when you go online.
And yes, I guess you could combine the two.
Alright, hang on, just make a note here.
So the suggestion was made to this person, okay, this is pretty boring.
But what you could do is you could say to the kids in school something like this.
Well, if you're worried about the government and power and control and coercion, you know that you're here by force and your parents are forced to pay for this, whether they agree with it or not, or like it or not.
And the teacher who invited me here, who's standing right over there, can't be fired.
Has to be paid.
Get Summers off.
And will steadfastly resist any introduction of voluntary choice into this situation.
Then they tell you all, don't get what you want by force.
Use your words, not your fists.
Don't bully, don't steal, don't be mean.
This whole goddamn system is a bully cathedral.
It's more than a bully.
It's based on a crime.
And the crime is the initiation of force against your parents to pay for a system that they probably find reprehensible.
And in fact, we know The teachers know for sure that your parents hate the system because the moment you say, oh, well, let's take the overhead out of taxation, just have the parents pay you guys directly, they're all like, no!
Whatever you do, don't make it voluntary.
Well, that's what a rapist, right?
Rapist has a knife because he knows the woman doesn't want to have sex with her.
And now, of course, if that person were to take that stance, they would get about 10 seconds into that speech and would never be allowed near a school again, right?
And the majority of people are still hitting their children, and society is still not having any kind of rational debate about this horrible old-age pension system and healthcare system that has no money in it and is simply preying on the young.
Right?
I mean, in the Republican and the Democrat debates and in the debates up here in Canada, nobody talks about this intergenerational theft and warfare.
It's not even allowed to be discussed.
The majority of people are viciously corrupt.
They vote to just grab whatever they can from the public purse, the future be damned, the children be damned, the young be damned.
So the vast majority of people are horribly morally corrupt, even in the freest societies in the world.
And if you point this out, What are they going to say?
Are they going to be like, yeah, that's a great point.
I hadn't really thought about that.
Thank you for that moral clarity.
No.
You hold up a mirror.
Just think of standing in front of someone and heaving over a full-length mirror, right?
You are an angel of virtue and they are a devil.
But they think they're an angel, right?
This is what morality is in a nutshell and this is what philosophy is.
Real philosophy is in a nutshell.
Right?
You're an angel.
You're standing in front of a devil.
They're looking at you.
They think they're looking in a mirror.
They think they're seeing an angel.
Right?
But what happens is real philosophy holds up a mirror to the devil so the devil can see that he himself is a hideous monster of demonic ill will.
So they're looking at you.
They see an angel.
They say, oh, that's me.
I'm an angel.
I'm a good person.
I'm a virtuous person.
I care about the poor and the old, and I oppose violence, and I want a peaceful and ordered and secure society, and I want candies and ponies and rainbows and all these.
I'm just a wonderful, wonderful good person, right?
And so they're looking at you, who is an angel, and they're looking at the angel thinking it's the mirror.
Now when you hold up the real mirror, And you show them how they look, which is demonic, which is devilish.
What happens is they think that you have turned into the devil.
They think because they just looked at you and saw an angel, but then you hold up a mirror.
Now they see a demon feasting on the unborn, praising all the moral virtues as a mere cover to rob whoever they can get their status little grubby hands and claws on.
And now what happens is you've held up a mirror and like a bird attacking its own reflection, they attack you because they think you have turned from an angel into a devil.
No.
All that happened was you held up a clear and accurate mirror to their own souls and they saw who they were but they thought it was you and they attack you when what they're really horrified at is their own demonic selves.
Right.
So, I guess if we get into, like, kind of pointing this out to them, it becomes a matter of sort of strategy, right?
In that you can be all, you know, like, Bible brimstone, like, you are evil, this is the logic, therefore this.
But then there are other ways of saying it that's more, kind of, you boil more gradual, and it kind of boils, you relate to their sort of...
Understandings and what they hold as virtuous.
And then slowly bring them over to the conclusion.
Kind of like how your talk way long ago about talking to atheists about statism.
So you mentioned sort of like, you know, they, you know, atheists already acknowledge principles of, you know, there's no abstract concepts that are just magical, that are oppositional to both parties.
And then you sort of apply that to the state and compare the state with religion.
And so...
I also tend to agree with your entire stance that you sort of summarized and sort of attitude, I guess.
People are the ones capable of error and they should submit themselves to or strive to adhere to logical principles and be moral and virtuous.
And so I have always taken sort of the approach of this is the logic, you guys got to deal with it.
Because, I mean, I had to deal with it as a kid and as an adult too.
But then the resistance and pushback that I always get is, oh, well, you shouldn't say it that way.
Or just like, you're absolutely correct, but it strikes people out.
Sometimes they often fog out on the exact reasons, and when I try to push it, find out why they don't.
But I saw one recent example that might illustrate kind of what I'm talking about a little better.
It was with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he was talking to Richard Dawkins about how Neil deGrasse Tyson, how his relative swore that she saw God or something like that.
And Neil deGrasse Tyson is a little more logical, but he didn't take the approach of, well, is there evidence for it?
Can you feel it, touch it, smell it?
Well, then how is it different from the null hypothesis?
What he sort of did was Oh, hey, aunt or whoever, next time you meet him, meet God or whatever, or see him, ask him what's on the other side.
Like, how is Grandfather Charlie doing or whatever?
So, essentially what he did was gave her the tools to ascertain and sort of investigate and sort of see for themselves.
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand this.
You ask him how the dead relatives are doing on the other side?
Right, right, right.
It's all hypothetical.
Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't believe all that, but what he does is like, well, it's sort of the questions that we on Earth would ask.
I don't believe in an afterlife, whatever, but, you know, just essentially giving her questions to ask that if she found the answer to would determine whether the afterlife was real or not, whether she actually saw...
Whether she actually saw God or she's just hallucinating.
Wait, this was an older female relative, right?
It's all hypothetical.
No, but in the hypothetical example, this was an older female relative, right?
So my question is, let's say his kids wrote down that two and two make five.
What would he say?
So with this approach that I'm sort of...
Right, so he would disprove that child's erroneous assumption in the moment, right?
I'm sorry?
Like, the idea then would be to disprove the erroneous idea in the moment.
The child's wrong idea, the two and two make five.
You would disprove it in the moment.
You wouldn't say, well, next time you're doing this math sum, maybe you can try this, maybe you can try that, and wander off, right?
Well, those would be the two different approaches, I guess, or strategies.
Well, no, no, see...
They're the same?
When I was a kid, I don't know what your schooling was like.
You can certainly let me know.
When I was a kid, when I got something wrong, what did I get next to it?
So why is it that we feel comfortable correcting children when children are wrong?
But older female relatives or whatever, we've got to be all kinds of sensitive and, you know, all kinds of delicate.
Aren't we just talking about disparities in power?
That we have power over children so we can just say, you're wrong.
Got to fix it.
You're incorrect.
You're wrong.
Rome is the capital of the Arctic.
No, it's not.
We don't say, well, you know, next time you're in the Arctic, maybe you can have a look around and see if you see a guy in a tea cozy being carried by some muscular young man who's not in a gay pride parade.
And we don't say that.
We don't say, well, here's some tools, maybe go and figure it out at some point on your own if you feel like it.
We say, no, that's wrong.
The Earth is not banana-shaped.
Mars is a planet, not a god, or at least in terms of reality.
So, when it comes to how we deal with children, we give them the big red X, right?
It's wrong.
Here's your marks back.
You got 7 out of 10, and 3 you got wrong, and 7 you got right.
Now, I'll help you, you know, figure it out, or this and that and the other, but the spelling bee isn't, well, you know, I guess those words could be arranged in a different kind of way, but, you know, It's like, nope, you spelt it wrong.
That's not how it's spelled.
That's incorrect.
So with kids, society as a whole doesn't seem to have any problem whatsoever saying, red X, you're wrong.
But then with adults, well, see, they have more power.
And so now we've got to be all kinds of delicate.
But shouldn't we reserve our greatest delicacies?
If we're to have these delicacies and these hysterical hypersensitivities, shouldn't we reserve them for children?
I agree.
I agree.
So why do the elderly female relatives or whoever it is in this example, why do they get such a pass?
Because they have more power.
Because they have the power to make us uncomfortable, whereas we have the power to make children uncomfortable.
Yeah, I agree with you.
That sort of double standard is not that good.
It was just sort of the example that came to mind.
Well, no, I'm not trying to pick on you.
I'm just sort of pointing out that we've got to be so sensitive, we've got to be so delicate.
Yeah.
That's only because it's only people we don't have power over who can make our lives difficult.
But then let's just say, well, when we're scared of people, we're going to not call them out on their crazy stuff, right?
Right, right, right.
When people have the power to do us harm, then we won't confront their delusions because we're scared of them.
Okay, that's fine, but let's not call it diplomacy, right?
Let's not call it being sensitive to other people's needs.
Well, you know, these people are scary to us.
And so we don't call them out on their bullshit.
Okay, that's fine.
But see, we're not scared of kids, so we'll give them the big red X. But other people, well, we're going to be...
I'm scared of these people, so I'm going to be nice to them.
I'm not scared of kids, so I can be blunt with them.
That's all.
All I want from people is honesty.
And I'm not talking about you.
And I'm not even talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I'm just talking about people as a whole.
Let's just be honest about it.
And say, well, you know...
My grandmother, who's religious, well, she's got power over my mom, she's got power over my dad, she gives me stuff at Christmas, and she has a really bad temper and can make Thanksgiving dinner very unpleasant, so I'm going to tiptoe around her crazy superstitions.
However, you know, my little brother who says two and two make five, I'm just going to tell him he's wrong bluntly, right?
Yeah, I see.
But let's not pretend it's got anything to do with diplomacy or sensitivity and so on.
It's just it's fear and bullying.
That's the way that knowledge, quote, works in the modern world.
And probably this has been the case throughout history.
But let's not pretend that there's any kind of diplomacy to it, because if we have this methodology of learning called sensitivity and kindness and let them learn on their own and so on, then we should be applying this to children, but we don't.
So that exposes the whole racket for what it is, which is just a, you know, you pee down the ladder, not up.
And so, you know, we...
We can be blunt and harsh with people we have power over, and we have to be delicate and sensitive to the people who have power over us because we're bullies and we're scared.
I mean, that's fine.
We can just...
Just be honest about it, right?
Yeah, be honest about it and say, you know, again, no false medals, right?
Yeah, okay.
And look, I'm like this, right?
I don't, you know, I'm going to a customs agent crossing a border.
I'm not talking about uniforms and imaginary lines and anarchism.
Why?
Because that person has power over me.
Right?
I mean, I'm being honest.
Why do I do it?
Why do I pay my taxes?
Because I throw my ass in jail.
And so, I mean...
Let's just be honest, right?
Yep.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that's actually the theme I sort of came to conclusion to in my experiences is, you know, you point out all these inconsistencies and double standards and it seems like it always comes down to power and, you know, gain, you know, sexual attraction or whatever you want.
And so, if we were to sort of, you know, I acknowledge all that and so if we were to Try to come up with more of a framework for that.
So I think you've in the past said, you know, all is permitted if just be honest about it and acknowledge what you're doing, right?
Yeah, like people saying, well, I want to vote.
Like some single mom saying, well, I want to vote for the left because I care about social justice and Obama.
And it's like, no, come on.
Come on.
What you care about is getting your government freebies.
Yep.
And that's a very predictable voting pattern.
You know, the moment that someone can show me a well-funded, nationally organized single mom to reduce the deficit group, then I'll...
It's a funny joke, right?
Single moms against deficit financing.
Oh, my God.
I mean, that's a joke, right?
I mean, that would be a bad comedy skit.
It would be a pretty good one on this show.
Yeah, I guess.
But, I mean, this is...
It's not going to happen, right?
Yeah.
Because...
They know which side of the bread is buttered for them, right?
They know that they need big government because they can't keep a man.
And they decided to keep their kids selfishly, I might add.
Single mom who keeps her kids is being selfish because the kids would be better off in a two-parent household.
They should have given the kid up for adoption.
But she's, you know, so of course they're going to, right?
Of course they're going to hang on to their...
They're freebies, right?
But let's not pretend that they've got any kind of social conscience or anything.
It's like, I need free shit because I'm too horrible for a good man to hang around, so I've got to force people to pay for my kids.
And let's not talk about this having to do with sisterhood or femininity because married women in general have to vote defensively against the vampiric single mothers suck and dry their husbands' wallets and their own wallets.
It's got nothing to do with, you know, I mean, they're political prostitutes.
They'll go down on Bernie Sanders' wrinkled lizard dick for cash.
I'll vote for cash.
I want the money.
If I've got to hold my nose and pretend to love some creaky socialist, okay, yeah.
Whatever it takes.
Right, right.
I guess what I'm gathering from this is...
Basically, if someone acts like that, then you don't owe them that consideration.
Treat people the best you can, and then treat them how they treat you afterwards.
So if you are meeting someone who's not guilty of all this yet, as far as your own knowledge goes, then Is it wrong or, I guess, yeah, I guess the question is, is it morally wrong to just, you know, say bluntly you're wrong because this, that, and the other?
Well, look, I mean, you have to, I'm going to say this sounds annoying the way I put it.
You have to understand, like, you know, you don't, right?
But we're designed to have sex and have babies.
And our brain has developed in response to that.
We are designed to have sex and have babies.
We're not designed to be good.
We're not designed to be virtuous.
We're not designed to be moral.
Now, it's a pretty good gig to convince people that what is moral is to give stuff to you.
Priests do it.
Single moms do it.
Corporations do it.
Prison industrial complex does it.
Teachers do it.
Politicians do it.
Give to me And that's the same as being good.
Ka-chingo-rama, right?
That's the whole reason why our capacity for abstract persuasion developed was it's a great way to mine and farm human beings instead of mining and farming rocks and crops, which is a hell of a lot harder, right?
You know, rocks don't harvest themselves, but if you can guilt a miner into giving you money and calling it virtue, well, the miner will go and get the rocks for you and hand them over.
It's a little like crops don't grow themselves, cows don't milk themselves, but human beings can do all of that shit for you.
If you just convince them that giving to me is the same as being good and the same shit is going on, go back to single moms, well, taking care of the children because the mother's The boyfriends or the husbands are just bad people and didn't stick around, so we've got to step up and support these heroic single mothers.
The hardworking teachers.
Really?
If they're so hardworking, they should want to switch to a voluntary free market system because, you know, really smart, capable, dedicated, child-loving, hardworking teachers will make a fortune in the free market.
It's like Bill Gates is like some government working janitor and they say, well, let's privatize it and turn it into a software shop.
And he's like, no!
That would be a terrible idea.
Well, of course, you know, Bill Gates would make a fortune in a privatized software shop as opposed to being a janitor at a government school or something.
If he's opposing it, it's because he knows it's going to make less.
And so everybody just says, well, give to me, and that's the same as being good.
Now, if only it was a gift, that's different, but it's either the propaganda of evil or the propaganda of prison, right?
It's either original sin or the tax code, right?
And so, yeah, everyone says, giving to me is the same as being good.
And so, yeah, poor people on welfare are like, well, we need the welfare state to take care of the poor people.
Okay, I get it.
Giving to you is the same as being good.
Single moms say, well, you know, we need all these programs of women and infant children hungry, schools section 8, welfare food stamps, government schools, we need all this stuff because the kids!
It's like, okay, so giving to you is the same as being good.
And everyone says, everyone says this, if you can convince people of this, you have, well, you get to be a professional linguistic parasite.
Right?
You get to give the oral socks, right?
The oral sucks of inserting your proboscis of moral guilt into people's brainstem and sucking out all of their children's money fluids rather than getting a real job and actually contributing something to society.
Right?
Because it's positive economics is, hey, look, I'll sell you a tablet and make your life better and easier.
Or, hey, look, I've got your tablet.
I'll break it if you don't pay me 50 bucks.
Okay, well, one is the provision of a positive and the other is the threat of a negative.
And we used to have an economy that focused more on offering people something positive and now we have Quote, an economy, basically, which is hostage-taking and threats where we don't have anything positive to offer and therefore we're just going to threaten people with negatives like jail or hell and so they'll give us money for that.
Or, you know, slander through the mainstream media or whatever it's going to be, right?
Oh, you're a terrible person, a racist or whatever.
And so now we're just threatening people and we've got this wild mafia style economy where everyone just gets threatened.
It's like, oh, if you question single moms, you must hate all women.
Oh, if you question the welfare, you must hate all the poor.
Oh, you know, if you question subsidies to farmers, you must hate eating.
If you question subsidies to large corporations, you're against capitalism.
If you question foreign policy, you hate brown people.
If you question foreign aid, you hate poor brown people.
It's just stupid shit.
There's no rhyme or reason in it anymore.
We keep putting presentations out, and we've got one coming out.
The truth about gun control, which, you know, we dug deep and found the actual correlation that's important when it comes to homicides by guns.
And, you know, everyone's going to scream at that, you know, because we've all just become these reactionary, R-based, hysterical worry-bots and verbal abuse-bots.
And it's just nonsense.
So, you know, when it comes to do people want to hear the truth?
No.
They pretend that To use the truth so that they can get stuff.
And the reason that people dislike the truth is because it interferes with the free shit they want to get their hands on.
You know, for most people, they hear philosophy like this.
This is most people, right?
You're in some club, right?
Lights are flashing, pet shop boys are blasting because apparently it's the 90s.
And you're in a club and you're with your best friend and And your best friend has syphilis.
I don't know.
Maybe you're dating a resurrected Nietzsche.
I don't know.
Your best friend has syphilis and he's talking to this really hot girl and this hot girl with whatever physical attributes he finds the sexiest.
This hot girl is going to totally leave the club and fuck his brains out all night long.
And he's like, he's being all kinds of cool and his abs are crawling out through his shirt sleeves and saying, hey...
These could be pressed against you.
And you then walk up to the girl and you say, he's got syphilis.
That's philosophy for most people.
You're hoping to get a great benefit by lying.
Philosophy comes along and cock blocks your socialist greed.
It's immoral to take money by force.
Wait, man, don't cock-block my syphilitic penis of taxpayer raping!
Don't do it!
You bastard!
Cock-blocker!
I hate you forever!
Right?
And that's the reality.
That's why people hate philosophy.
I was only pretending to use a principle to get stuff for free, and if your principle, which is actually a real principle, is enacted, I don't get stuff for free.
Right?
That's all when philosophers are just leaning over saying, he's got syphilis.
Don't fuck him.
That's all it's about.
People get all angry, right?
People get all angry, you know?
I hit you, my son, because I loved you.
That's not love.
Hey!
You bastard!
Right?
I see.
I'm a single mother and I'm a victim.
No, you're not.
You made choices.
Why I have to pay for them and why your children have to pay for them is incomprehensible.
Right?
Right, right.
But he had tattoos.
Yeah, maybe Hep C. I don't know.
Still, you had some protective sex with him and you don't get to have my money for that.
I cannot pay people to fuck losers.
That's one of my basic philosophies.
It's really important.
I find it morally repugnant to pay people to fuck losers.
I cannot look at a modern democracy like some sex show in Holland.
You know, like, okay, find the ugliest loser in the crowd, bang him senseless, and I will then pay you 10% of my income for the next 40 years.
Yeah.
That is a really, really bad show.
When you strip politics away, that's what it's all about.
I see.
So whether you decide to point out someone has syphilis in a very blunt way or sort of, I don't know, maybe the analogy breaks down.
Is there a nice way?
I don't know.
What?
You like the story, the myth of Sisyphus?
No, it's a club.
You're not hearing what I'm saying.
Yeah.
He's got a gay cat, a sissy puss?
What are you talking about?
I don't know what you're saying.
Yeah.
So basically, the conundrum, the actionable sort of conundrum I was trying to maybe resolve that I may have an answer to is, I guess...
It's not wrong to point out bluntly or nicely or meanly.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
No, it's the effect.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
It's the effect.
Does it matter whether you bluntly or nicely point out that the guy in the club has syphilis?
Well, it's a little more nuanced than that because, let's say, with spanking, you could say...
No, no, no.
Let's just stay with the simple example first.
You've got to deal with the simple before we get to the nuanced, right?
Okay.
Does it matter how you tell the hot woman your friend is trying to bang that he has syphilis?
Does it matter how you tell her?
Nicely?
Like, is he going to say, well, you did tell her kind of diplomatically, so I guess it's okay?
Well, for this example, no.
Right.
Now, with the single mom...
You know what?
Forget about picking on the single moms.
We've done that for a while.
For the rich mega-corporate farmer who's getting millions of dollars in tax subsidies, does it matter...
If it is bluntly or nicely that you get his tax subsidies revoked.
It's the effect that matters, not the methodology.
Right, right.
But if it affects the...
So if I may interject my example, right?
It's something that you've talked about too.
So let's say you're trying to get some parent who's hitting a kid to not hit their kid.
If you say...
If you come down on them hard and be like, you know...
Hitting your kid is evil, that's repensable.
If you, you know, this, that, you can't hold a higher standard to a younger kid than an older kid, do you hit your mom, etc., right?
Then that can enrage them and the effect can be that they're going to hit them more and blame the kid.
It's like, see what you made me do.
Right, sorry, hang on a sec, sorry.
So we're switching now from politics to parenting.
Well, no, the abstract idea was always about how you sort of, whether you say it bluntly or diplomatically.
And this is an example of where it does matter.
Well, I don't know.
See, it's hard to come up with rules.
Some people appreciate the bluntness.
Okay.
Right?
Like the, man, stop beating around the bush.
They view it as manipulative.
And also, if you're treating people as fragile when they're not, they'll get annoyed.
Just in the same way as if you treat people as if they're not fragile when they are, they'll also get annoyed.
I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all We're all looking for these rules of human communication.
Here's how you pick up the hot chick.
Here's how you land your dream job.
Here's how you communicate to freedom so that people will give up their own economic self-interest and join you in the mad march to a free society.
Well, I don't know.
There are times when I've been very blunt with people in this show and there's times when I've been more diplomatic.
When it comes to interfering with people's legitimate self-interest, Or for what they perceive as their legitimate self-interest.
When whatever your words are end up damming up the flow of free stuff that they want that they have not earned.
Whether it's adult children's love or whether it's tax subsidies or farm subsidies or whether it's free stuff for single moms or whatever.
If the effect of your words as a whole is to dam up The free stuff that they want, that they have not earned, whether it's love or money or power, well, their gene set will view you as a predator.
And it doesn't matter if the predator approaches loudly or softly, it's still a predator.
And that's where, you know, when I was younger, I thought, well, we're kind of all the same, and I'll just reason with people, right?
I mean, I guess they've just never heard these arguments, and so I'll reason with them.
And, you know, I also have to be granted, as having been in a unique position of having doing very public philosophy for about 10 years now, and before that, for 20 years before that, in a more private and personal manner, but having done...
Ten years of very public philosophy and getting more feedback and more conversations than any other philosopher in history that I know of.
And that's technology, right?
I mean, you know, we get, I don't know, thousands of YouTube comments a day and emails and Facebook and like the amount of feedback that I'm getting is unprecedented in the history of philosophy.
And this doesn't even count having conversations and having lots of debates and so on, right?
And before, you'd write a book and maybe a couple of people would write to you every week.
Maybe you'd see some sales and maybe there'd be some articles written or whatever.
But this level of intimate 360 feedback for a philosopher is unprecedented.
So I have more information about the state of Of the mind of the world than any other philosopher in history.
That is a very unique position to be in, and I'm sensitive to that literally every single day.
I have more information on the general receptivity of the world in a real-time, immediate, day-to-day sense than any other philosopher in history because of the technology that allows for that 360 continual feedback of what it is that I'm doing and people's receptivity to it.
And so your opinions on that, in light of that fact, is...
Have changed.
Oh, sorry, I mean your approach.
Your opinion on the approach.
So I thought we were all the same.
And people generally want to be good.
And they generally recognize that to be good, you need to be consistent and rational.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness, right?
And we're all pretty much the same.
And, you know, we may be slightly different locks, but there's the one skeleton key of reason and evidence that unlocks everybody's heart, more or less.
I mean, I knew there'd be people committed to immorality and so on, right?
Of course.
But that's not, generally, what has played out.
Okay.
And there's been positives and negatives in that.
And it's kept me interested.
It's kept me nimble.
As you can imagine, I'm a bit of a stimulus junkie.
And I'm glad, in a way.
I mean, I'm sad that philosophy has made good inroads and the show's bigger than I thought it was going to be, but not the kind of inroads that I was, you know, in my wildest dreams or most optimistic thoughts would have imagined.
But...
It's because people are designed to make more people.
They're not designed to be rational.
And rationality is a methodology that they use to get...
The pseudo-rationality is a methodology that people use to get free stuff.
To get stuff that they don't have to work for.
And that's why we have a language center.
We don't have a language center because we want truth.
We have a language center because language is how high IQ people mine people, not resources.
Because it's a lot easier to mine people than it is to mine resources.
It's a lot easier to be a rabbi than it is to be a coal miner.
It's a lot easier to be a priest than it is to be a farmer.
And so that is the reality.
So me thinking that I was going to take a tool developed for exploitation and use it to liberate the species was delusional.
I wasn't delusional at the time because I was working with the best information that I had.
But yeah, language was developed as a tool of exploitation.
Philosophy was developed as a tool.
Our conceptual ability grew because it drew more resources to those who had the best capacity to use language to bewitch, bother, bewilder, and exploit everyone around them.
It's easier to hook people with guilt than it is to bait a hook and catch a fish.
Wouldn't it also have evolved to, you know, just help you with fighting against the natural world too, right?
So you see, you know, certain patterns in cringe streams and fishes and whatnot, and then you take those abstract patterns.
Oh, fuck, bears do that.
Okay, yeah.
I mean, god, intergenerationally monarch butterflies can find their way from the armpit of Canada down to Mexico.
No.
It has to be something that animals can't do.
And what animals can't do...
You don't see the fucking salmon whisper a bear at the edge of a stream saying...
It is good for you to jump in my mouth.
Only the best and most virtuous salmon make their way to the heaven called my belly.
In here is the infinite salmondom of giant waterfalls and sacks with all 72 hot female salmon for eternity.
I, as a bear, can promise you all of this wonderful thing, and only the most evil of fish will swim away from the paradise of my sweaty, hairy bear belly.
Only the most evil and immoral of salmon who don't understand how good it is to be eaten by the bear of virtuous heavenly bear-belliness.
Okay.
Excuse me, hang on a sec.
Pardon me.
Bear talk is hard, right?
And you don't see the lions circling the antelope with words.
They circle them and claw them and the antelope run away because they don't want to die.
But they don't say to the antelope that the greatest virtue of an antelope is to sacrifice to yourself to the common good of lions and antelopes, which is basically just me eating you.
And you don't say that the most heroic are the ones who sacrifice themselves on the altar of the common good and all that sort of shit, right?
It's, you know, it's open, kill or be killed, or kill or flee, right?
Kill or run, fight or flight, all that kind of shit, right?
But only human beings developed language and concepts and abstracts and guilt and manipulation, and they did it because the moment that human beings developed more resources than they needed to immediately survive, in other words, the moment that they developed agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the moment they developed agriculture, It was like, well, damn.
Now we can get a parasite class.
But who the hell is going to want a parasite class?
Right, right.
Who the hell wants, hey, I could feed my family or I could feed my family plus this asshole in a funny hat.
I think I'll take column A. Just my family.
Thank you very much.
I don't need my family.
I don't need to build my house and a cathedral.
What the hell, right?
What's the point of that?
No good, right?
And so, no, you wanted to hoover up the excess, but you didn't want to actually work for it, right?
I see, yeah.
So you had to invent some stupid shit for people to believe and provoke their guilt.
Manipulation.
In order for them to pay you to cure them of an imaginary disease.
I'm casting a curse on you!
Now, pay me three fish a day and I'll make sure you don't die from it.
Okay!
I don't like curses and fish are smelly.
I guess the asshole with the funny hat is in.
And that's the way that our capacity for abstractions developed.
And then what you do is you hook into people's genetic preferences for their own family.
I like my family, not strangers.
hey, I'm going to invent this thing called a tribal country religious love festival.
And everyone's your family.
Everyone's your brother.
It's the common good.
And everyone is your friend.
And everyone is your family.
And I'm in charge of the distribution.
So I'm going to hook into your love for your own genetic preference for your own related kin.
And I'm going to make it everyone.
And I'll be in charge of handing all that shit out.
And if you don't, you're evil and go to hell.
Right?
I mean, this is why language developed.
I see.
Music developed because musicians get laid.
You know, guy and woman has clothes on walking past.
Guy plus guitar, woman's clothes fly off, at least in a welfare state, right?
In a non-welfare state, you've got to grit your teeth and avoid the drummers.
But anyway, so I thought, see, language developed to steal from people.
The concept of property was invented to steal from people.
The concept of virtue was invented to turn people against their own selfish interests.
And the concept of the common good was invented so that individuals could steal from others but bypass their natural revulsions against stealing by pretending they were all part of the same club and they were all chasing virtue.
So when I thought that I could use language and concepts and ethics and philosophy which is a tool developed to exploit people and to get them killed.
Go fight for king and country!
Really?
Are they fighting?
No!
The king is safe in his palace and the country doesn't exist.
You will be taking all the shrapnel on their behalf.
So I thought that I could take a tool that was developed to exploit people and use it to liberate them.
You know, like the hammer that enslaves the people can be the hammer that frees the people.
Well, no.
It doesn't work that way.
So the idea that I could use language to free the world when language only exists to enslave the world I was a little bit overeager.
We're not the same.
There are gene sets that have developed to exploit others.
And there are gene sets that have developed to serve others.
And both of those gene sets are symbiotic.
Right?
A soldier...
Has the respect of his community and thus gains resources because the soldier is perceived as virtuous.
It's not just the leaders who are exploiting the people.
It is the followers who use the relationship of following to serve the people.
Sorry, let me start that again.
It is not just the leaders who exploit the people.
It's the followers who profit from that exploitation, who are symbiotic in the exploitation of the people.
If you take away the leaders, you also take away the sexual market value of the followers.
I love a man in uniform.
I was talking about this a couple of weeks ago, a month or two ago, with a guy who was a dad.
Man, if you're a military guy, you have very high sexual market value in a lot of places.
And so if you take away the state, you take away the sexual market value of all of the gene sets that have evolved to serve the state and to gain reflected glory and resources from the power of the leaders.
Which is why there are followers.
There are leaders and there are followers.
And I was sort of focusing on the followers and saying, well, I'll talk to these guys and...
No.
Because they're designed to conform and praise the state, which is how they get their sexual market value, which is why that gene set flourishes and does well.
And it's like the dog who's forgotten how to hunt, who lives off the scraps of his master's table.
You go to that dog and you say, well, you don't need a master.
He's like, I really do.
I really do.
I don't know how to hunt anymore.
And it's a lot easier to just pick some shit off the ground that falls from the master's table than it is for me to go out and try and remember what the hell an ass end of a rabbit looks like.
And the people who have evolved to believe that it is virtuous to provide blood and treasure to the exquisite verbal abusers of those in the power structure.
They proliferate too.
They proliferate as well.
So there's the state and then there's the church.
And the church can take the form of the military or the bureaucracy or the unions or the religious cathedral.
But let's just say that you have been a patriot your whole life and you have taught your children to revere and respect their country.
Not necessarily the virtues that your country reflects, but your country.
Well, Your value to your family is heavily wrapped up into and embedded within the legitimacy of the state.
Obviously, if you're a cop and a soldier and so on, right?
But even if you're just somebody who waves a flag and praises the state, well, your whole value within your tribe, within your family, It's dependent upon the continued virtue of that which you have praised.
So who are we talking to?
Well, we're talking to people who have the extra rationality gene set, who have such a tumoresquely developed set of neofrontal cortex consistency modules that they cannot resist the truth even though they want to.
Yeah.
They cannot resist the truth, even though it makes good sense to try and resist the truth.
Truth is the heroin.
Truth is the crack.
You should quit.
You can't.
And it's a genetic susceptibility to consistency that we are trying to capture.
Now, in order for that to work, we have to get that gene set to flourish and we have to cock-block the other gene sets.
Right.
Sorry.
The K and the R and the others, right?
We have to get in the way.
And what that means is that...
Agreed.
I've just done a whole bunch of podcasts on this about sexual market value, so I won't go into it in great depth here.
But, you know, why is there a welfare state?
There's a welfare state...
So that single moms have higher sexual market value.
Right?
So that you can get involved with single moms and you don't immediately have them hoovering $3,000 a month out of your bank account.
Because they get the state to pay for it.
And so when you talk about ending the welfare state, you're talking about the sexual market value of single moms collapsing.
And what that means, like I was just thinking about this today.
About, you know, snap your fingers, end the welfare state tomorrow.
I mean, immigration's gonna do that either way, but you snap your fingers, end the welfare state tomorrow, and everyone will scream, and the single moms will scream and say, well, we don't have, right?
We can't feed our kids, right?
To which, you know, a reasonable K response would be, uh, well, I guess you're gonna have to go find a nice guy and provide him a lot of value so that he'll pay for you and your kids.
Well, uh, What would they say?
Oh, that's so sexist.
No, but they'd say whatever, right?
Patriarch or how could you?
We're not going to be subject to a man and so on, right?
Crap.
It's just a bunch of crap.
Their sexual market value would lower to the point where they'd have to be really nice to people to make up for their lowered sexual market value.
We all know about the beautiful woman who's the ice queen, and she kind of has to be.
Sorry, she kind of has to be the ice queen because so many guys want to be her boyfriend or go on a date with her or have sex with her, but she's got to be the ice queen.
Her sexual market value is so high, she can be a cold-hearted bitch and guys will still want to get with her, right?
That look, that searing, cold-eyed look that Angela...
It's Angelina Jolie.
She's got that down, that haughty, sneering, you know, only the bravest penises dare pass this, right?
Which she put to fairly good effect in Maleficent, which was basically her writ large, even bigger cheekbones.
They were like Kim Kardashian's butt implants, went for a holiday and ended up on Angelina Jolie's face during Maleficent.
But it's okay.
They've got to get out.
You know, they're quite a lot in the dark and squished.
So...
But so, if you have very high sexual market value, you can be a nasty person.
It's not always the same, but it gives you some liberties, let's say, and if you're that way inclined, it probably enhances it.
And so the subsidy to single moms is to their sexual market value, which means they can be pretty horrible people.
Whereas if They really do need a man to come in and take care of them and their kids.
They're going to have to grit their teeth and be really, really, really, really nice people because they're in a low sexual market value and therefore they have to be much nicer.
See how the welfare state is making people feral.
It's making people mean.
And so, yeah, in the welfare state, the sexual market value of single moms plummets.
They've got to go find some nice guys, but they're competing with all these unattached women.
So, yeah, sorry, they've got to rub some feet.
They've got to give some great fucking back rubs.
Right?
They have to give blowjobs to the point where they can't talk on the phone the next day.
I don't know.
They can shit up here.
But they have to make some really great meals.
They have to be really great listeners.
They have to be so great as human beings that they can overcome the low sexual market value of having kids and less time and all that kind of stuff, right?
They have to be Of great value.
They have to be great confidants.
They have to give wise counsel.
They have to be just great people to the point where people say, well, you're so great, I'll take the kids too.
I don't want to do that.
I get it.
I mean, obviously, there'll be better people if they do it.
Just as men are better people if they're good, kind, honest, generous, nice partners.
But, of course, you know, the pretty boy alphas, they don't want the end to the welfare state because it subsidizes their Wanderlust deep-dicking forays through low-rent vaginas.
We're not the same.
There's a lot of incompatibility and the sexual market value tends to rule.
It's...
It's not reason alone that's going to do it.
And recognizing the ferocity to which philosophy gets attacked is more comprehensible when you look at it not as individuals who are choosing to be irrational, but gene sets that have adapted to exploit irrationality running out of food.
Does that make any sense?
It does, it does.
Alright, got another caller, man.
Got to move on, but I really appreciate the questions and thank you for standing by my rant.
I appreciate it.
Sure.
If I may have, you know, sort of last little thing I noticed that might be of value to people that kind of ties into topics.
Yeah, so we started talking about with like how to, you know, talk to people whether it's moral or not.
So it seems like that's not a moral question.
It's more of an individual basis and a strategy question.
And also it's kind of like a war and a competition, right?
So maybe instead of, you know, Sort of talking to people about it, we could just, you know, outbreed them, in a sense.
It's sort of like kind of a circumvention to accomplish essentially the same goal in a different way that, you know, we may have not thought of.
Yeah, and also we want to trigger epigenetic changes, right?
Yes.
And epigenetic changes are triggered when environments change substantially.
And epigenetics can continue throughout your whole life.
I swear to God, I am not the same person I was 20 years ago.
I mean, not just physically, like my cells have all been replaced.
Like, I am not the same person.
Because, oh, even 15 years ago.
But, yeah, significant changes will provoke epigenetic changes.
Everybody looks ahead of time and say, oh, there's no way that I could possibly survive without welfare.
Of course you can.
Of course you can.
Hey, you get more fat cells in winter, for Christ's sakes.
You can survive a dip in your free shit from the government, right?
So it would provoke epigenetic changes.
And people don't know the degree to which human beings are adaptable.
You know, we survived the Ice Age, people.
Let's have a little confidence in the robustness of our species, for God's sakes.
But everyone's like, oh no, what if there's a tiny dip in my welfare payments?
I can't possibly survive.
It's like, oh come on, give me a break.
God's sakes.
There were saber-toothed tigers.
We took them down with...
Pencils.
In the past, you know, we'll survive all this crap, right?
So, anyway, you know, I appreciate that, and let's move on to the last call.
Nice talking to you.
Thank you.
Nice talking to you, too.
Alright, well up next is Will.
Will wrote in and said, I signed an apartment lease with a girlfriend, giving her an extremely favorable rent split.
Shortly after moving in together, we broke up, initiated by her.
She proceeded to treat me very poorly for about 14 months.
I, being unassertive, never really attempted to renegotiate the split.
She made it clear during that period that she was willing to lie to me and take advantage of me.
Upon her moving out, I chose to keep half her security deposit because I couldn't stomach the idea of giving her any more money.
I still cannot decide if this was a moral choice, and I was hoping to get Stefan's thoughts on the subject.
That's from Will.
Hello Will.
Hi Stefan.
How are you doing?
How are you doing?
I'm well.
I'm well as well.
Wow.
Is there any more background?
Why did she break up with you?
What did you do to that poor nice young lady?
You know, I think towards the end I had become pretty needy and I think that that kind of turned her off over time.
Wait, are you saying you got even more beta and this dried up her hoo-hoo?
Yeah, I believe that could happen.
I believe that's what happened as well.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, you know, I don't know what is a boner killer for you, and I don't know what the equivalent is of a boner killer for a woman, but I'm pretty sure it has to do with not going by your name Will, right?
And if you beta up in the hopes of keeping a woman's affections, basically you're turning her vagina into a Bedouin.
It will wander the...
The deserts of masculinity until it finds some relatively well-hung oasis to nestle down in.
So I'm sorry about that.
And I'm sorry, of course, about that.
It's a lesson you probably got from your dad or your mom about what, you know...
It's important not to listen too much to what women say they find attractive.
A lot of it is a kind of a test, right?
I like a sensitive man.
Really?
Sure.
I have a headache.
Okay.
Yeah, I know.
I learned that lesson from this experience quite painfully.
It actually changed me pretty deeply to go through that.
It was extremely painful emotionally.
Right.
Yeah, and I apologize if I'm making light of it.
No, no, no.
It's okay.
I mean, it's been a while.
I can laugh about it.
We've all got to do it at one time or another.
I mean, if anybody who's been raised by a single mother realizes that the single mother tries to mold you into the kind of man she never would have had sex with in the past.
So it's just kind of weird the way that works.
All the resentments against the man who didn't stick around, I'm gonna turn you into the opposite of him so that you'll never breed again.
Yeah.
So what were the specifics of her dumping you?
Now that you've revealed that it's exquisitely painful, of course, I want to keep digging.
Oh, God.
Did she just wake up one day and say, I'm in love with someone else?
No, dude, it's really funny in retrospect.
So I was going out to hang out with my friends on a Friday night.
And she sent me a text message asking me to tell her when I was going to get back.
And this was a little unusual.
She didn't normally do that.
So she could empty the bed of whatever biker trash she happened to haul in?
Wow, you're strangely prescient.
Okay, so I texted her back.
It's a miracle.
Yeah, and I said, I'll be home at 11.30.
And to my credit, I was actually pretty accurate.
I got home plus or minus five minutes from 11.30.
And I walked in and I heard her getting banged by somebody.
Like that was what greeted me when I stepped through the apartment door.
Oh, are you kidding me?
No, not at all.
She's sucking down some pillowcase or acid in the air saying, you got to hurry up and finish because my boyfriend's coming home.
Yeah, pretty much.
She didn't hear me arrive.
And I actually did not go interrupt them.
I just...
I went to the spare bedroom and just freaking hung out and felt like crap.
And then the next morning, we had it out.
And...
Wait, sorry.
You come home, some guy's banging your girlfriend, and you go into the next room and are upset?
Yeah, I was very unassertive at the time.
I regret...
Yeah.
Oh...
Unassertive.
I'm not saying go in and shoot the guy or anything, although I can understand the sentiment.
We've got to go a little further back that you end up in this kind of situation, right?
Sure.
Where she did not fear her life by doing this, right?
I mean, what...
What happened?
What happened?
Were you going to go in and massage his butt in case he got a cramp?
Where did you come from with your family that this was where things came to?
My mom was just absent.
When she was around, she was very loving, but she just wasn't around that much.
I was literally given to a babysitter before one year of age because both my parents had to work.
From six months on, I was with some woman.
I don't even know who that lady was.
She was my primary caregiver as an infant.
And then my mom just always worked.
She was an insanely hard worker, which I admire, but she just wasn't really around.
Why do you admire it?
Well, I mean, I admire discipline in sort of an abstract sense, and she certainly has a lot of it.
What?
No, no, hang on.
Sorry, man.
Like, let me put it to you this way.
Let's say that I have three cats at home, right?
Okay.
And I'm working night and day for a week, and they starve to death.
Do you admire my work ethic?
No, no, that's harmful.
Right.
So if I have...
Animals that are dependent upon me and I choose work over their welfare, how is that admirable?
Well, it isn't.
Your mom had a kid at home who needed her.
That would be you.
That's right.
Maybe I don't admire her.
I get this.
Again, when I criticize single moms and they say, we get these comments under the videos.
I've been working three jobs.
I don't take any government welfare.
I'm a great single mom.
It's like, No, you're not.
Yeah, the kid needs you.
Who's raising your kids?
You know, your kid's thinking you're going to dump those feral rats into society and we're all going to have to deal with their lawless ways because they have not had a parent at home when they're growing up.
You're not a good single mother.
You may be a good worker, but the better worker you are, the worse single mother you are.
And the worse worker you are, the more you're in my wallet for taxes.
I agree completely.
What about your dad?
It's hard to sum him up briefly, but he was cool.
He played with us.
He was good companionship to us.
He was gone a lot, too.
He was quick to anger, and it was kind of arbitrary.
If I spilled milk during dinner, as kids do, because they're not as coordinated as adults, he'd actually yell at me.
It was very...
It really felt crummy and it kind of damaged our relationship.
So it was kind of strange.
It was a strange mix of he was really awesome to me and then occasionally terrible.
So it was this weird kind of push-pull.
And how often would he be terrible?
Probably once every couple weeks.
Maybe one or two times a month.
Enough that I was always...
Oh, so as far as the spilling of milk goes, like maybe once or twice a month you'd spill milk and he'd yell at you the other times, he'd be fine with it?
No, no, no.
Every time it happened, he would get upset.
It didn't happen that often.
So you would only do something that would result in your dad being upset once or twice a month?
Yeah, I learned to kind of not hang out with...
I kept to myself a lot as a kid.
What was the cool part of your dad?
You said he was cool.
Yeah, we would play with Legos for like four hours.
And he was extremely playful and very fun-loving and we had a really good time.
And it felt very loving to share that with him.
But hang on, if he's only getting upset with you once or twice a month and he's playing with you for four hours at a time, why would you spend so much time alone?
I was addicted to video games, but that was a separate issue.
Well, but nothing occurs in isolation in a family, right?
I mean, you can't just be addicted to video.
You go live on a farm on your own, you can be an alcoholic and nobody's going to interfere.
That's true.
But what that means is that you preferred video games to the company of those people in your house whose job it was to provide you with good company, right?
That's right.
My job as a parent is to be good company so that she's not...
Ending up being distracted by non-interactive, non-relational things like tablets or games or whatever, right?
It doesn't mean she can't play them.
It just means that, you know, if she has to choose between a conversation with me and something that's electronic, I would like her to choose me at least, you know, a good portion of the time.
So it's not like you just got addicted to video games.
That is the result of your parents not winning your conversational affections, right?
You're right.
You know, that's a good point.
It's easier for them.
It's easier for them if you're holed up in your room and you're playing video games.
That's easier for them than something else, right?
Because they let it happen and then the computer becomes your parent, so to speak, right?
Or your babysitter or whatever.
Yeah.
My dad, he would come home from work and he basically just wanted to eat dinner and veg out in front of the television most of the time.
And so he did his vegging and I did my vegging.
Because I didn't really want to watch TV with him and he didn't really want to stop doing that to do other things.
So there you go.
But he would occasionally play with me.
So actually now that I think about it, the play was really great when it happened, but it was not nearly as often as it needed to be.
So how often would he play with you in the way that you liked him?
You know, when I was young, it was pretty often.
Between ages of two and five, I think I got a decent amount of attention from him.
But once I went off to grade school, I don't remember what this...
It's been a really long time, but I don't remember why.
But he kind of retreated a bit from me and from all of us, actually.
Well, I'm going to tell you why I think he did.
Go for it.
Because you had...
He had challenges in grade school that made him uncomfortable.
Sorry, when you said that, it just reminded me of something.
When I was a kindergartner, there was this kid who bullied me, and I told my dad, and my dad actually went over to the kid and gave him a stern talking to.
And I remember at the time feeling like, oh God, why is he doing that?
It's so embarrassing.
And in retrospect, that is not appropriate.
Like, that's not, like, normal parent behavior right there.
Like, he should have coached me on how to deal with it.
Not, like, went over and threatened the kid or something.
What, did he threaten the kid?
I don't know what he said, to be honest, but...
Oh, of course, yeah, yeah.
Did you have any other problems with bullying in school?
No, not really.
I was always on the taller end.
So, you know, I didn't really get pushed around too much.
Right, right.
So why do you think it happens that your father pulled away from you when you went to grade school?
I mean, you have more stuff to talk about.
You know, when you're a stay-at-home dad, like I am, I mean, one of the challenges is that you spend all day with your kids, so what do you talk about?
I mean, I'm better at it than most because I've got lots of abstract things to talk about.
But, I mean, when you're away from your dad during the day, you've got all the school stuff to talk about and that.
So it shouldn't be that conversation would diminish during that time.
More stuff to chat about.
You know, my best guess, I think his career accelerated during that period.
He got promoted a couple times at his company.
And I think he started working longer hours.
And he started stressing about it more.
That's my best guess.
Alright.
And what was this relationship with your mother like?
It was good.
And again, preface this by saying it's hard to have a sense of that.
My memories are not awesome because it's been a really long time when I was a kid.
I think it was good.
How old are you?
I'm 31.
So for me, 5, 6, 7 years old is over two decades ago.
Yeah, well, you may be talking to the wrong guy about that message of time.
Okay, fair enough.
So when I was a kid, I think it was pretty good.
They used to have date nights and that sort of thing.
When I was 11, 12 years old, that just stopped.
And my mom admitted to me later that my dad got super depressed and basically their relationship just tanked.
But she didn't want to divorce him because He had gotten fired and she would have had to pay him alimony.
Oh my god.
I know, right?
So they just stayed in this horrendous sham of a marriage.
And the household sucked.
It was horrible.
There was just this weird feeling in the air of negativity and nobody wanted to talk about anything.
It was really bad.
Do you know what caused their relationship to go awry to begin with?
Mostly he just got depressed?
I've thought about this a lot.
My best guess is that my dad...
He had a severely, severely abusive father, and his response to hardship is just retreat and put his head in the sand.
So he literally didn't work for two years, forcing my mom to become the primary breadwinner, and that basically destroyed the marriage.
Was it the depression or the fact that she had to work?
Probably both.
She probably resented him.
I mean, I would have resented him.
It's like, dude, go get a job.
It's been a year.
You know, and she would be sitting at the computer working.
Dude, go get a job?
That's the family's approach to depression?
No, no, no, no.
I'm saying, like, me, retrospectively, that's what I think about it.
Shake it off.
That's what I think about it.
No.
I mean, he couldn't talk about it.
He was incapable of having an open conversation about it.
He would just get angry.
What do you mean he was incapable?
Was he...
Did he have a giant egg-laying alien on his face that rendered him speechless?
I mean, of course he was capable, right?
No, he was.
Let me change my language.
He was unwilling to talk about it.
And the reason I'm saying all of that is because, of course, the degree to which you strip free will from your dad is the degree to which you're not going to be assertive, right?
It's true.
Because if your dad becomes a passive agent, then for you, assertiveness will be unmasculine, unmanly, or not what men do, or it will be a betrayal of your dad.
Whatever virtues we ascribe to our parents, we will inevitably reproduce in our own lives.
And so, if your father is passive, and that's your perception, then inevitably you're programming yourself to be passive, right?
Yeah.
Alright.
Yeah, that happens.
Double-check on that, because, you know, the whole reason we're talking is passivity, right?
True.
Now...
Who wore the pants in the relationship?
My mom.
Well...
Was that all the way through?
No, it was my mom.
Yeah.
I think it was.
It's hard to say early, but definitely later it was.
Right.
So why do you think your mom chose a passive guy?
She had a really...
She had an abusive mother and a very, like, soft father.
So she maybe sought to replicate that.
Subconsciously.
Yeah, so she was used to the women being in charge and the men being beta, spineless, whatever, right?
Yeah.
Pretty much.
And then you end up with a girl.
Yeah.
She's in charge, right?
And you're beta, right?
Yeah.
That happened.
And this is not news to you, is it?
Or is it?
No, I've never made such a clear connection between the patterns of my parents and this before.
You mean as now, we're talking tonight, right?
Yeah, I definitely concluded that I had been really beta with my girlfriend, and I resolved to never be like that again, which I've been fairly successful with.
But I didn't realize where it came from.
This is definitely news.
Right, right.
And did you ever see your dad stand up to your mom and...
I mean, it's not fight, it sounds like, but, you know, fight for his preferences and his perspective and disagree with her and stand his ground.
You know, all of which is natural and healthy in all relationships, right?
Yeah, sometimes.
He would sometimes.
He would also yell at her the same way he yelled at me over little things.
Yeah, yelling at people is not alpha.
No, definitely not, because it shows it's not in control.
That's beta.
Yeah, it shows you're frustrated, and it's a sign of weakness to yell at people in general.
I mean, unless they're a total enemy or whatever it is, right?
Sure.
Yeah, yelling is definitely not where you want to go.
I mean, I find lowering your tone is more effective.
But anyway, it's a huge matter in general.
So...
Your mother did not love your father, but she stayed with him because otherwise the government would have forced her to pay alimony, right?
Correct.
Jesus God.
And they say that this doesn't change people's decisions, right?
I know, right?
Wow.
And what happened with your dad?
He got a job eventually?
He did.
He actually got rehired...
He got rehired at a company he'd worked at previously.
The one that had fired him rehired him.
And his social skills are not very good.
He naively thought that this would magically fix the marriage.
But the damage had been done.
Right.
When did you get addicted to video games?
Four or five years old.
I got my Nintendo back in 1990.
Right.
Again, attempting to make yourself sound old fails, but maybe not to others.
So, I think I may have an inkling as to why your father got depressed.
Yeah?
Well, he'd been a non-involved father for six years.
But then why wouldn't he want to make up for lost time?
He still didn't really spend time.
When he got fired, he had all this free time.
He still didn't really spend it.
You get involved in video games when you're four or five years old, right?
It's in your early teens, is that right?
When your dad gets depressed and the relationship goes to the crapper?
Yeah, that's right.
Okay.
So there's seven or eight years that he's not been A good father.
Again, it's not all one thing, and I'm sure there were intermittent bits of better stuff, right?
Sure.
But seven or eight years of being a bad father is bad for you.
It's bad for your self-esteem.
Your kid needs you, and you're making the choice.
Like, listen, man.
Sorry to be annoying the way I phrase it, but you've got to get this there.
You've got to get this that for seven or eight years, your father would come home and he would make the decision to turn on the television rather than play with his son.
Now, that is a long time to make the wrong decision.
And again, I know that there were breaks and I'm not trying to paint it all one color.
But in general, you got addicted to video games because you didn't have quality people time.
Right?
Yeah.
So...
Your dad, did you see him in the morning at all, or was he kind of gone when you got up, or was it real rushed?
It was pretty rushed.
I mean, it was just get the kids out the door, and he would drive us to school, so I got to be in the car with him for a bit.
But then he usually didn't get home until maybe 7 o'clock in the evening, and then he was just on the TV until bed.
Right.
And did you chat with him in the morning at all, in the car?
Yeah, we definitely chatted.
All right.
Now, when you're a parent, you're not a parent, right?
No.
Okay.
Now, my daughter doesn't like to be in a separate room.
You know, if we're home together, we're doing something together.
Wow.
Like I'm telling you, that's almost 100%.
You know, if I'm going to the dentist, she's coming to the dentist.
If she's going to the dentist, I'm going to the dentist.
You're going for a checkup, I'm going for a checkup.
We're with each other.
Like the idea that we may be in the same room.
Occasionally, you know, she'll be reading, I'll be reading, but mostly we're, when we just had an epic five-day Monopoly game or whatever, right?
But we are interacting.
Wow, that's...
Because there's nothing lonelier than being in the same house with people who aren't talking to you.
Ugh.
Tell me about it.
Oh, I know.
I know.
Or people who are avoiding you.
You know, it is heartbreaking that your father chooses a television over you and did year after year after year, day after day after day, month after month after month.
Of course he's going to end up depressed.
That is terrible decision making.
That never occurred to me.
Is the TB going to come and visit him when he gets sick and old?
Is he going to prop it up and say, well, you know, that's who I was around, so I'll just bring this television up to my hospital room, stick it by the bed, and chant with it.
That's a terrible, terrible decision-making.
It's very rare, but I literally can't stand it when I'm in the house with someone and we're not doing something together.
Wow.
I'm actually still weird about that, even now.
What do you mean?
I have a male roommate right now, and he's awesome.
He's a great guy.
I did a good job picking him, and we have a good relationship.
But I usually just default to being in my room versus hanging out with him.
Maybe it feels more familiar.
Well, I mean, look, you got a lot of Nintendo skills.
You didn't get a lot of people skills, right?
Yeah.
And, um, whatever muscle you exercise gets stronger and whatever muscle you don't exercise gets weaker, right?
That is true.
And so your father, and again, I know I'm, last time I'll say this, I'm speaking in absolutes, I don't mean to, but it's just, I can't put all the caveats in every time.
Your father, after ignoring you for eight years, how the hell was he going to suddenly make up for lost time?
There's a lot of built up alienation and resentment there.
It is.
I have no idea.
And, and, In retrospect, I don't think he could have.
Of course he couldn't have.
Because it would have been about his needs now.
Right, exactly.
Which, ironically, he did try to do later when I was a young adult, and I rebuffed him.
I wasn't having it.
Cats in the cradle, right?
Yep.
That song.
Our relationship is still strained.
I mean, we get along.
You can't take eight years off a relationship and then resume it.
I know.
This is the panic I want to put into people.
This is the panic I want to put into people.
Look, I'm not saying that you've got to come home and stare at your children without blinking until they go to bed.
I mean, you know, we've got stuff to do and it's a rhythm and all that.
But...
If my daughter wants to watch a show, I'll sit down with her and watch the show.
I'll pause it and annoy her with questions about what's going on, and then we'll enact the show with hand puppets or whatever we're going to do, right?
I mean, I'm part of my child's media consumption.
I'm not like, here, you go watch this, I'm going to go to work.
Obviously, I like to work, I've got stuff that I need to do, but I sit down with her and we'll make it a communal experience.
That almost never happened with me.
Right.
Right.
And so if you keep choosing to not be a father when you have a child who desperately needs you in the house, that is some selfish, selfish shit.
And guess what?
People who are selfish for eight years end up depressed.
Well, of course.
I mean, imagine if I buy a cat and then, oh no, make it a dog, make it some social animal, right?
I buy a dog and never interact with it.
Doesn't that kind of make me an asshole?
Yeah.
That's, I mean, some would consider that.
Nobody made you buy the dog.
If you want to come home, if you want to watch TV your whole fucking life, don't have kids.
Good point.
Because your kids need you.
Your kids need you.
Hey, did you have a lot of choices when you were four?
Could you go somewhere else or five or six or seven?
No.
No.
Then you become into your young early teens where you can get out of the house.
You can start roaming the neighborhood.
You can start hanging out with friends.
You can...
Right?
And then he knows the window is gone and he gets depressed.
He knows that he fucked up for seven or eight years.
And he gets depressed.
Because he can't fix it anymore.
Makes a lot of sense.
I had never thought about that.
I thought it was just...
I thought he was just moping.
Like, oh, woe is me.
No, and that's because we don't understand the effect that we have on our parents when we're children.
Especially when our parents ignore us.
Oh, I tell you, man.
Oh, I'll tell you.
I'll tell you the stories.
No, I'll tell you.
I mean, holy shit.
If you want to see dead-eyed regret deep in the face, you look at people who screwed things up with their kids.
Because all of the relief that they got from not interacting with their kids, like all the fun they had from their TV shows and from not being, quote, bored by playing with their kids, right?
All that fun is gone.
It's gone.
It's in the past.
And now they're just left with all of the fucking wreckage that comes out of that.
You know, you have kids when you're 30, well...
They're grown up when you're 45 or 50.
Well, you've still got another 30 or 40 years on this planet.
And you can't go back.
There is no mulligan.
There's no do-overs.
You cannot go back and fix what you broke.
It's true.
You cannot go back and be a good father.
You can't do it.
Because the window of necessity is long gone.
You cannot become a father if you've not been a father.
Right?
If you didn't get enough to eat when you're a kid, there's no point stuffing yourself at the age of 30.
It won't make you taller, it'll just make you fatter.
Because the window is gone.
The window where you needed your father and he could have provided great value and guidance and firmness and love and support and instruction and modeling.
That is gone.
You found your substitutes already.
You've moved on.
You've made do without.
Right?
Right.
And you can't ever be five again.
Needing what you needed when you needed it.
You can't ever go back and fix.
And so if your father withdrew from a significant majority of his parenting responsibilities for seven or eight years, yeah, guess what?
You get depressed.
I've seen it.
I've seen it so up close.
It gives me a facial sunburn whenever I think about it.
You can't ever go back.
You can't ever go back and you can't fix it and you can't reclaim it later.
To be a father is a process of constant interaction.
Right?
Right.
Can I be...
Let me put it this way.
I buy a piano.
I spend eight years not playing it.
Am I a pianist?
No.
No.
I have a piano.
I am not a pianist.
I have a child.
I spend eight years not interacting with that child.
Am I a father?
No.
No, it's not a noun.
It's a verb.
To parent.
Not be a parent.
Anyone can fucking have a kid.
Mice do it all the time.
Right?
There's a child in the house.
She has some DNA. It's not the same as being a father.
A parent is not sex and the provision of food and shelter.
That's not being a parent.
Hell, prison guards do that.
Being a parent is a constant process of interaction.
It's knowing your kids so deeply that you can guide them to better things with a slight and tiny nudge.
You're like, my daughter says, you know, well, what's my favorite this?
And what do I like about this?
I'm like, boom, boom, boom, boom.
I know all the answers.
She's never stumped me once.
And so when she needs a course correction...
It is the tiniest little nudge that I need.
Because I know.
I know how she ticks.
I know how she works.
And she knows how I work.
When I need a course correction, she'd give me a tiny nudge.
And we do.
And that's why it's so easy.
And that's why we have so few conflicts.
But that entwining of personalities is constant interaction that is not blindly repetitive.
And it's actual interaction.
Not we stare at the same screen together.
But it's a constant interaction.
You know, the two trees that grow together are far stronger.
They're the ones that last the storm.
And so you don't understand the degree to which your father's parenting choices affect his happiness and affected his happiness.
But parents who skip out on being parents, yeah, they get depressed.
Of course they do.
He's still depressed.
Because he can't fix it.
And neither can you.
It cannot be fixed.
Now, maybe if you guys have an honest conversation about it, you can come to some kind of resolution that might give you some peace and him some peace.
But you can't undo that.
You can't unsmoke a million cigarettes.
You can quit, I guess.
Maybe it's better for you, but you can't unsmoke them.
And his choice to dissociate from parenting and to let you be raised by tiny toys from the other side of the world can't be fixed.
It can't.
I mean, I have an adult relationship with him now.
I know who he is as an adult.
And I appreciate what's good about him and what's not.
And I understand what's not, but It's almost symbolic.
It's like I call him because you're supposed to call your dad, not necessarily because I actually want to talk to him, you know?
You're subsidizing him.
Yeah, well, you know what?
I do it because I know it'll hurt him if I don't.
Right.
So your preferences do not exist in that relationship.
You're there serving others, right?
Absolutely.
And then you wonder why you end up in this mess with your girlfriend.
Right.
It's starting to become a little more clear.
Right.
You're there to manage other people's emotions and not have needs of your own.
Yeah.
This whole episode with the girlfriend helped me realize I was a huge people pleaser.
Out of control.
I actually got rid of it mostly.
But I was.
Except with your dad.
Yeah.
Except with my dad.
Did they end up having any relationships with anyone else after they were divorced but not divorced?
Yes, with my mom.
No, with my dad.
And did your mom bring home women while your dad was around?
I'm sorry, did your mom bring home men while your dad was around?
No, no.
My mom told me that she had decided to wait until my brother and I, my younger brother, were in college before she divorced my dad.
And she did.
So, I didn't really have any inkling that anything was happening when I was a teenager.
Even though things were really weird, it just didn't even occur to me because I had so retreated from being in a relationship with them.
I was perfectly content not to hear from them most of the time.
And then only later, much, much later, as a senior in college, I realized, in retrospect, I was like, wow, that's totally not normal.
That was actually pretty messed up.
And so I asked my mom about it, and she spilled her guts and told me everything.
And actually, that was when they got divorced.
They got divorced after I graduated from college.
I think I was 23.
So she stuck it out for like a decade.
But yeah.
So they had no sex for a decade?
Definitely a majority chunk of that.
You know, definitely they could have been affairs, right?
You know, there could have.
That had not occurred to me.
That's a long time.
It's a really long time.
Dang, I don't know if my...
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, I guess my mom could have.
Holy jeez.
I'm going to ask her.
And honestly, I really don't care what the answer is.
Yes, you do.
Really?
Yes, you do.
Do you know why?
Why?
Because your girlfriend screwed around on you, man.
So you need to know if there were affairs in your parents' lives.
Wow.
Especially if it's not discussed.
Because kids know everything about what's going on in a household.
Yeah.
And if it's unconscious, right?
So if there was affairs going on, and it's unconscious, then you're going to normalize affairs, right?
Right.
I'm not just saying this.
I don't think she did.
Just because she was home all the time.
Like, there was not a lot of opportunity to have any kind of regular thing.
I mean, she went to work.
What do you mean she was home all the time?
She was just home all the time.
I mean, like, when she wasn't working, she was at home.
From what I recall.
Oh, dude.
Do you think that people who work don't have affairs?
Do you not know of lunches?
Do you know of conferences?
I mean, are you kidding me?
Okay, you're right.
Damn it, maybe I'm sugarcoating it.
Who knows?
She could have been having affairs.
Ten years is a long time, man.
It is.
And I guess a part of it is that...
Can you imagine going out of sex for ten years?
Oh, hell no.
Ten minutes sounds like for you.
We should probably wrap the call up at nine then.
Or maybe not.
Anyway, I don't know if she did or she didn't.
And I don't know if you're going to get any truth out of her.
But there's some contradictory thing, Will, that you were talking about.
One is that you said that your mother didn't divorce your dad because she didn't want to pay alimony.
And the other was some story about you guys.
She waited until you guys were out of college.
Yeah.
Well, which is it?
I actually don't know.
I'm realizing now you're right.
That is contradictory.
And I don't know if I can reconcile that with my memories right now.
No, these are just, you know, cool questions to ask, right?
Sure.
I mean, I don't, you know, I do age-appropriate stuff, but, you know, I've made a vow.
Like, I'm never going to tell my daughter a lie.
Like, I'm never going to hide anything.
I'm never going to, right?
Always tell the truth.
Again, age appropriate or I can defer or whatever, but I'm not ever going because she needs to know.
You know, I came from a messed up history and she needs to know that stuff because if it's unconscious, it's dangerous.
Whatever we know consciously is much less dangerous than that which occurs in the subconscious.
Yeah.
What did your father think of the girl you wanted to move in with?
He liked her.
He liked her until that happened.
So he's a shitty judge of women.
Yeah, he's pretty bad at it.
So that should have been a warning flag, right?
If my father likes her, she's bad news.
I wasn't even thinking about that stuff at the time.
I know, but this is what I'm talking about.
Oh, sure.
No, I do.
These are the patterns you need to know, right?
Yeah.
What did he think about you moving in?
With her.
You know, I didn't even ask because I don't value his opinion.
Right.
And in retrospect, I wish I had because he probably would have said that sounds like a terrible idea.
Right.
And of course, being a father means you don't wait to be asked.
Right.
Right?
Yeah, but he doesn't...
It's my doctor's job to tell me if I have high blood pressure.
I don't have to pester her or him to say, do I have high blood pressure, right?
Right.
Yeah, so I didn't check in with him, or my mom, or really anybody.
I just made the choice.
Because you grew up alone in a room, so why the hell would you ask anybody else for anything?
Yeah, I know.
Super Mario ain't gonna help, so you fly blind.
You fly without the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of human and tribal evolution, you just fly blind.
Yeah, I definitely did.
You shoot your penis like a grappling hood, hook at some available vagina, and in you go, right?
Reeled in.
Yep.
I'm telling you this, man.
My daughter wants to move in with some guy.
I'm further up his butt than a proctologist.
Ironically, some of the guys I worked with at my job were, like, cautioning me and I just ignored them.
Well, it's very painful to think that strangers or relative strangers have more knowledge and value to offer us than our own family, our own parents.
That's why, you know, unless we're conscious of this stuff, right, you're going to avoid taking advice from your friends because...
That reveals the advice you're not getting from your parents.
It's very painful, right?
Yeah, that never occurred to me.
You know, I remember I broke up with a woman when I was in theater school.
I was like, I was good-ish, but certainly not.
It was not my thing, fundamentally.
I liked it, but it was not my thing.
And a girl that was living with the time, she...
She broke up with me.
And I was upset.
And I was working at a restaurant.
And I had friends.
I had family.
Nobody seemed to care.
And there was this wonderful Hispanic guy who worked there.
I can't even remember where he was from.
But a really, really nice Hispanic guy.
There were some great Chinese guys in the kitchen.
No problem.
I would say, I need some food really quickly.
No problem.
They would sit down and explain to me the Chinese newspapers that they were reading and everything that was going on.
And there was this Hispanic guy And he said, my friend, how is your heart?
You look sad.
How is your heart?
And I was like, I'm a wasp.
I have maybe an abacus and possibly a ledger.
A heart, I don't know.
Can I order that?
Does it come from Guatemala?
I think it does.
But that's a simple thought.
We didn't have a long chat about it or anything, but it was a really, really nice thing to hear.
But it was painful because this guy I just worked with was asking me how my heart was doing.
My friends and my family weren't.
They don't ask.
My family doesn't ask.
Even now they don't.
Right.
I mean, who's shown more interest in your heart and your history and your life?
We've been talking for, what, an hour?
Or you've had 31 years with your family?
Past hour, really.
Right.
And how much have you learned about yourself that could have been provided at any time over the last 31 years from your family, as opposed to me, who's coming in cold?
Quite a lot.
Right.
That's very sad.
It is.
I should never be able to do this.
Right?
Do better than your family.
Man.
No wonder I'm...
I've had this kind of malaise for most of my adult life.
I hate to use this stupid word, but it's kind of getting triggered right now.
I'm realizing now, consciously, it's regret over not having had a real family for most of my childhood.
In some way, I've been liked.
I've been very well liked and I've been fortunate to have that, but On some level, I've just always been a loner.
I've always kind of felt excluded.
No, no, no, no, no.
You've not been a loner.
Come on.
You've not been a loner.
You've been alone.
It's not the same thing.
And you've been alone because you were rejected.
This is simple, basic fact.
Your father comes home.
He heads to the television.
He is rejecting you.
He is rejecting you.
And funnily enough, after eight years of rejecting a helpless and dependent child, or two, since you have a brother, you get depressed.
You're not a loner.
You adapted to loneliness.
You're right.
It's a good distinction to make.
I do like people.
Loner sounds like it's your nature or that's just the way you are or something like that.
No, I'm actually gregarious.
I just have this weird emotional habit of not seeking time with others.
You are gregarious, but it's empty.
Yeah.
And if you want to know what that's like, go back to the beginning of this call when it comes out and listen to you describe your father.
It wasn't that you were lying, but there was very little truth in it, and that's the gregariousness.
I see.
It's pleasant.
It's convivial.
It's inoffensive.
It's empty.
And it's not a criticism in any way, shape, or form.
This is what was necessary.
I don't take it that way.
Right.
Right.
This is what is necessary.
The great test of love, as I've mentioned before, is inconvenience, right?
Are we allowed to be inconvenient to those who claim to love us?
In other words, are we allowed to be in a state of mind or to have feelings or to have thoughts that are difficult or unpleasant or negative for those around us?
Are we allowed to be inconvenient?
And my question is, are you allowed to be inconvenient to your friends?
Are you allowed to be down?
Are you allowed to be thoughtful in a way that is uncomfortable for them?
Are you allowed to talk about things like, you know, I don't feel that close to my parents or whatever?
Are you allowed to be yourself?
Yeah.
Which sometimes comes with inconvenience for others.
Yeah, I can with my friends.
You can?
I can.
I try to be mindful not to be only depressed with them because that drains on a person, but I can.
Alright, if you can, you've been 31 years, right?
You've got, I don't know, 10 or 15 years of fairly good friendships, so why is all this stuff coming in this conversation as news?
What the hell are you calling friends?
I, uh...
I didn't check in with my friends before making choices before this incident with my ex.
One of the things I concluded from that was, wow, I need to really be asking my friends before I make major choices.
Right.
Because they're not dicknapped, right?
Right, exactly.
They could see what I couldn't see.
And then we have to have the humility to subject ourselves to their judgment, right?
Yeah.
I'm pretty good on that, I think.
So as far as this woman wants her deposit back, right?
Right.
Well, I can't tell you obviously what to do.
I can only tell you what I would do.
I'm all ears.
Just give her the money and cut her loose.
Don't give her a hold over you.
Don't give her a reason to float around.
Don't give her a reason to come back.
Don't give her a reason when she gets pissed off to...
I mean, just give her the money and Put her in the rear view.
Hit the gas.
Okay.
I don't know if it's like a thousand bucks or five hundred bucks or two thousand bucks or whatever.
Could be some of the cheapest money you've ever spent because imagine if you were married.
Oh my god.
It would be my parents part two if we were married.
Right.
I mean this is about the cheapest lesson you're ever going to get.
Wow.
Okay.
Well, this actually happened a year ago, so I felt that I should give her the money, but I didn't.
And I said, I'm not giving her the money.
But it's not should like a moral thing.
No, here's what I mean.
To me, if she's on another man's penis, I think that your ethical...
I don't have to have higher ethical standards than those I'm dealing with.
That's just a sure mark to be a sucker.
Sure.
And, you know, once she's, you know, once she's plowing foreign dick, I feel that kind of all bets are off as far as integrity goes.
But anyway, go on.
No, and she was actually very manipulative towards the end of her living with me.
And so, something that I wrestled with...
Because it's dragged on a bit, right?
Yeah, it was like a little over a year.
This cheating thing happened a few months into a 12-month lease.
What, you lived with this woman for a year?
Yeah.
After she banged another guy in your bedroom?
It was terrible.
But it's not terrible, it's your parents.
Their relationship broke up and they kept living together.
And your relationship with this woman broke up and you kept living together.
Yeah.
How could it be otherwise?
It's unconscious.
No, I know.
I would not be at all surprised if it turned out that your parents ended up stopping sleeping together because one of them had an affair, in which case the circle would be complete, right?
Yeah, it would.
Then everything would have been mirrored the same.
Yeah.
I mean, if I could go back, I would have just asked her to leave at that moment and said, look, I'll give you your whole deposit.
I'll even pay for the movers.
Just obviously you don't like me.
Get out of here.
Well, I'm not sure that I would give her a choice.
No, I know.
Your stuff's on the front lawn.
If you want to go onto the front lawn, you're welcome to.
But you're not sleeping here anymore.
You're not coming back into this house.
She was on the lease, so it could have been legally weird.
But I feel you.
Yeah, you know what I mean.
I know exactly what you mean.
Or you say, well, you're getting out.
She's like, I'm staying.
It's like, okay, then I'm leaving.
That had occurred to me as well.
Yeah.
Were you hoping to get back together with her?
No, I... Did she continue to have more boyfriends troop through?
Yeah, she...
She conducted most of her dating outside the apartment after that.
Most?
Yeah, most.
But not all?
No, not all.
I mean, I moved on to date as well, but it was just...
It hurt me in my gut every time I knew she had a guy over.
You think?
No.
Yeah.
How pretty was this woman, man?
She's a seven and a half.
And if she's your type, she could be a nine and a half.
She's like one of those.
She's a seven and a half?
What are you, a fucking troll?
No, no, I'm a decently handsome guy, I think.
Yeah, you're a tall guy, decently handsome, you gainfully employed.
What the hell are you doing living with sloppy seconds from a seven and a half?
I have no idea.
Part of the issue is that I didn't understand how ruthless girls can be.
I truly loved her.
And I know that she truly loved me.
Oh, fuck me.
I was clinging to that.
You didn't just say that.
Oh my fucking god.
I am so glad we got to this part of the conversation, Will.
Damn.
You just like came evil in my mouth.
I'm just telling you that.
So are you going to say that she never loved me?
Is that what you're getting at?
Oh my fucking god, are you not asking me this question, are you?
Holy shit.
I'm afraid that Nintendo did not give you a good job teaching you about hypergamy.
No, holy god.
Oh my god, really?
Love?
Yeah, I would...
Love?!
I was pretty dang sure that we loved each other.
Okay, all right.
I'll play.
I mean, maybe that didn't...
Okay, Will.
No, no, I'll play.
I'll play.
What did you love about this lovely young lady?
We had a lot of similar interests.
She's very caring.
Oh, you fucking didn't.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
I'm sorry.
I'm really trying to play.
Oh, my God.
She can be.
She's really caring.
So she asks when you're coming home before fucking other men in your bed, you know, so it's not too upsetting.
Yeah, that was pretty bad.
And then she only sometimes brings boyfriends home to fuck them in your bed after she fucked a man with your bed.
But she's pretty caring, right?
Right.
Like your dad was pretty cool, right?
Right.
No.
She...
Oh, you can't.
No.
Seriously, man.
You can't.
You can't use that word.
You can't use that word caring.
I felt cared for.
I will say that at points.
She was manipulative.
You said so yourself.
She was.
She was very manipulative.
She would be nice.
Yeah, no kidding.
You know, a fucking car salesman cares a lot about me when I'm thinking of buying a car.
Hey, would you like a coffee?
Hey, can I give you a foot rub?
Hey, is there anything else I can do for you?
Would you like some water?
Hey, you need to use the washroom?
Take your time.
I care.
Okay, I see your point.
Hey, does this involve a place to live?
Yeah, great.
Hey, do I get really cheap rent?
Okay, great.
Yeah, she was fine with that.
Yeah, you know, you go to a timeshare meeting, you know, they'll be pretty fucking nice to you.
Yeah, salespeople are super nice.
Yeah, absolutely.
A lot of politicians are pretty nice to you.
They are.
A lot of whores will be pretty nice to you, because so will waiters, right?
Yeah.
So, I don't know where the hell you're getting caring, and also she bangs other guys in your bed when she thinks you're not home.
Well...
That's not caring, man.
That's not even in the neighborhood.
That's not in the same universe.
That is like an opposite world.
You can call that caring, but we need a different word for it.
Well, she was running game on me then.
Yeah.
And she's pretty good at it.
She's pretty good at it.
And I wanted to be told.
No, no.
She may or may not have been pretty good at it.
It's just that your mom didn't teach you about girls like this.
And then there's the big question.
Why did your mother not teach you about girls like this?
Because she was one?
Don't ask me.
You have the answer.
I guess because she was one.
Well, I don't know.
If you're telling me that's what it is.
She had a lot of...
It sucks to say this.
There were a lot of similarities between my mom and the ex.
In a number of ways.
It is kind of uncanny.
So, good God.
I think I've been sugarcoating my memories.
This is why your dad liked her, and your mom didn't warn you about her.
Yeah, same thing.
I mean, if your mom's manipulative, what's she going to say?
Oh, this girl's really manipulative.
Really, Mom, how do you know?
I don't know if she's like me.
How's that going to work?
No, it's not.
I don't even know what she would have said if I had checked in with her.
She probably would have liked her because this girl, she was awesome first impression.
Great first impressions.
Well, there's a danger sign to begin with, right?
Anybody who's an awesome first impression is usually playing you, right?
Sometimes.
Did you sleep with her after you caught her cheating?
No.
There were times when I wanted to, but I was a bit disgusted by her.
A bit?
I was very disgusted with her.
I didn't even want to see her.
I would just not be home a lot.
The environment was poisonous in the apartment.
It sucked.
It was terrible.
Right.
And you were back to your childhood home, to some degree, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Wow, I managed.
Isolated, not wanting to interact with people, avoiding home.
Yeah.
I managed to recreate the conditions of my childhood.
I manifested that.
Well, you didn't do it alone.
No, I know.
This was a team effort, my friend.
No, I know, I know, I know.
I'm just saying in kind of a more spiritual sense that, wow, that's what I managed to manifest, you know, was that.
You never loved each other?
No.
I hate to tell you, I hate to be blunt with people as far as this goes, but, you know, time's ticking away.
Life's ticking away.
And, you know, one of the ways that you know that you didn't love each other is that she fucked around on you and you stayed in this torturous relationship for, what, ten months afterwards?
We actually broke up but kept living together.
Of course, just like your parents.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I did actually have another girlfriend towards the tail end of living with her, who was way better, actually.
Well, another story, but yeah.
No.
Okay.
Are you still with her?
No.
Good.
Because if you were, I'd get her on the phone and say, are you fucking kidding me?
This guy's living with the woman who slept around on him and they're still in the same apartment and you want to fucking date him?
Are you kidding me?
What woman of quality would say, yeah, that sounds great.
I'd like to get involved in that.
That sounds really healthy.
None.
Right!
So if she's better, I can't even imagine what this first monster vagina troll was all about.
Well, to the second girlfriend's credit, I didn't tell her about the first.
Oh, I don't know that that's to her credit.
Because then she doesn't even know if you're lying.
What?
I didn't volunteer it.
Hey, I could lie to her and she didn't even know.
She was a way better person.
She puts up with liars.
She doesn't even know the difference between a liar and a truth.
And she doesn't even ask why I'm living with this hot woman.
Oh, we're just roommates.
Really?
No tension.
Was she ever over when this other woman was around?
Did she ever express there might be some tension in the area?
Yeah.
Yeah, she actually picked up on that.
She did?
Okay.
So she picked up that you were lying through your fucking teeth about your history with this semi-ex you were living with, right?
Yeah.
And what did she do?
Nothing.
Right!
She stayed.
She stayed?
She knew you were lying through your teeth about your ex.
Oh, she's just a roommate.
You were lying through your teeth to her.
And she's like, well, I sense that there's something wrong, but fuck it, he's tall, I'm in.
Yeah.
No.
She was not better.
Much.
Okay.
Sorry, man.
I gotta shake you out of this underworld.
It's okay.
It's okay.
That had not occurred to me, and that's a very good point.
And then you lose respect for her because she's not calling you out on your obvious fucking lying, which would be like, dude, she's just your roommate.
Give me a fucking break.
What's the real story?
Oh!
Oh, okay, so you're still paying significantly more rent.
You're still living with her.
She screwed around on you.
She's still screwing around on you, even though you're kind of broken up, but you're living together, and this all seems normal to you, and yet you lied to me about it.
She would, like, there'd be a fucking 36, 24, 36 shaped roadrunner hole in the wall, right?
Yeah, you know, any...
Get the fuck out of this.
Get the fuck out of this nightmare, right?
Any good woman would have bounced.
You get it, right?
Yeah.
You get it.
And the reason you need, like, you can't have in your back pocket, well, I'll just fucking lie.
No, yeah, if it's uncomfortable, yeah, I'll just lie.
Yeah, I don't...
That is so desperately unhealthy.
Because it splits you, right?
Yeah.
Because you know the whole time that you're lying to her face.
And you know that she knows.
And she knows that you know that she knows.
And everybody's faking.
Right?
You can't have that as your backup.
Well, okay, I could tell the truth, but that's uncomfortable.
Plan B is always just lie through my fucking teeth about really important stuff to a woman I claim to care about.
That can't be your plan B. You can't have that.
I mean, you can, but then you'll just be involved in shitty relationships and you're going to end up divorced and sucking alimony dick for the rest of your life, right?
Can't have that.
Can't do it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
And I don't mean wrong like finger-wagging wrong.
Yeah, yeah, there's that.
But I mean wrong like, holy shit.
This cannot be your standard.
You know I'm going to say that, right?
Yeah.
It's not a shock.
That's okay.
You're telling me this because you need someone to say to you, stop, right?
I guess so.
You know, right?
You can't have this, well, I'll just lie to her.
No, and actually, I have since, again, that was a while ago, I have since, I've attempted to be, I try to mean what I say now, and not lie.
Well, did you tell her and apologize to her?
No, we ended up breaking up.
We weren't together very long.
So call her and say, listen, I'm not saying we get back together, but I've got to tell you the truth because I lied to you.
Because she may not be aware that she's easy to lie to.
She might not be aware that her instincts were correct.
If you falsify other people's existence, you screw up their instincts, which are very important to navigating.
We're all in minefields, and we're all in big cactus farms, and we're all running around, and when you screw up people's reality by lying to them about something that important, you're blindfolding them, but they can't stop moving.
So they're just going to run into more cacti.
So call her and say, you remember that tension you felt?
Sorry, I lied to you.
You were right.
I was wrong.
I did the wrong thing.
I am so sorry.
It was terrible.
I will do that.
She was a sweet girl.
She deserves to know.
Well, sentimental adjectives aside, we loved each other.
She was great.
She's sweet.
I don't even know what that means.
But she's got her own issues if she's willing to be lied to and not call you on it.
Yeah, that makes sense.
So, well, I felt that giving her money was the right move.
Like, I felt it in my gut.
Yeah, as long as it's not kind of like a shakedown, right?
Because then you're blackmailed or something.
You just end up paying more.
But, you know, if this puts it safely in the rear view and you can hit the gas, that would certainly be my suggestion.
But, of course, you know, it's your...
Yeah, if it's like, okay, here, right?
It's not like, hey, I want to borrow and just come back, right?
Right.
But, you know, if it's a done deal, like if it's a year in the past and everyone's moved on, then I wouldn't chase her down and force money into her hand.
But if it's something that's floating around and she's bugging you for it, yeah, maybe it's worth doing.
I certainly don't feel you're morally obligated to do it.
Stealing from her or anything like that, right?
I mean, you already subsidized her rent, right?
And did you continue to subsidize her rent?
You continued to subsidize her rent after she fucked the other guy, right?
We did not renegotiate.
Which I am ashamed to admit to you.
Right.
And that was actually a big part of what fueled me not giving her money.
I almost wanted to somehow cosmically compensate for being taken advantage of for so long.
I wanted to stick it to her on the way out and punish her for taking advantage of me.
Right.
Yeah, I tell you, that's a pretty entitled set of ovaries.
Sure is.
You're like, yeah, okay, I did fuck another guy in our bed, but if you could just keep subsidizing my rent, that'd be great.
Listen, how was the call for you?
I mean, I know we raced through a whole bunch of stuff, but how was it for you?
I mean, thank you for asking.
It wasn't easy.
It dragged up a bunch of things that I've really not thought about in a while.
And it made me feel really sad.
But I think that's healthy because it's a sadness that I've suppressed.
Yeah, you know, a lot of mental dysfunction is considered to be the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
I don't mean the conscious avoidance, but you normalize it, right?
Right.
Pretend you're not safe.
But go on.
And I think my big takeaway from this is I need to get a therapist, like, for real.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, maybe a male therapist.
Oh, yeah.
Actually, I've had therapists in the past.
They were all female.
And I think that's a big part of why it didn't work for me.
So I will make sure to do that this time.
Yeah, there is a little bit of closing ranks and sisterhood and, you know, white males are the only group that never acts collectively.
It's just the reality.
Yeah.
Sad, but we're working on it.
That's the dang truth.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, will you keep us posted about how things are going?
I will.
All right.
And I appreciate your honesty in the call.
And I appreciate you going with the topics because I know some of them were a bit of a rock and roller.
No, no worries.
I don't know what I thought I would get out of this, but what you've given me has been incredibly valuable, and thank you.
Good.
Good.
Fantastic.
Because, you know, if you end up being a dad, be a better one.
You can do it.
Oh, I will for sure.
Thanks, man.
Yeah, no worries.
Thank you.
No, finish your thought.
I was going to say, I will make sure that I know that I need to heal some things before I become a father, and I will...
Make sure not to do it before then.
Because I don't want to repeat this stuff.
Right, right.
Yeah, definitely you've got to get some stuff sorted out so you can get the right woman.
But thanks a lot, everyone.
Thanks to all the callers.
It was a real pleasure to chat with you as always this evening.
And freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful evening, everyone.
