3120 On the Brink of War and Economic Collapse | Bill Whittle and Stefan Molyneux
For many decades, two main reproductive strategies have been recognized by biologists - this is referred to as r/K Selection Theory. When you look at humanity through the lens of reproduction strategies – things quickly begin snapping into place and a battle for survival is revealed. In the area of public discourse, these two survival strategies battle for ultimate supremacy. Bill Whittle joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the various political positions and attitudes – including how they are shaped and explained through r/K Selection Theory.For more from Bill Whittle check out:Website: https://www.billwhittle.comAfterburner: https://www.billwhittle.com/channels/afterburnerPJ Media: https://www.youtube.com/user/PajamasmediaAmazing Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgxlp2UJI5ISpecial Thanks to Anonymous Conservative!Website: http://www.anonymousconservative.comBook: http://www.fdrurl.com/anonymous-conservativeGene Wars: r/K Selection Theory [P1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8N3FF_3KvU[P2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLlTW2Ie-_Y[P3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V06JBpW6O7IDr. Jim Penman Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9dcXOGD3foFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
I have Bill Whittle on the line and, of course, in your video.
You want to see him because he is five pounds of handsome in a four-pound bottle, which is always nice to see.
He's a writer, film director, TV editor, even an instrument-rated pilot.
We did, of course, try to get him to do a show from the air, but he said that background noise would be a problem.
You really, really want to check out on PJ Media, Afterburner and Firewall.
They're two great, great shows with production values that makes me wonder what I spent my money on.
And you can keep up with all of his work at BillWhittle.com.
Thanks, Bill, so much for taking the time today.
That's my great pleasure.
I'm a huge fan of your show and a huge fan of this thing we're going to talk about today.
Okay, so for those who want to, we'll sort of go into the background here.
Bill's got talks about it.
I've got a three-part series called Gene Wars, G-E-N-E, of course.
But when I was sort of hunting as to why, after spending about 30 years trying to reason people into stuff...
I wasn't sure I was having as much traction, to put it as mildly as possible, as I was hoping.
And since I've had a lot of interest in IQ and genetics and ethnicities and so on and gender differences and had a whole bunch of experts on the show all talking about genes and the biology of belief and so on, I began sort of hunting for differences and came across a book called The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics, How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans.
By a fellow, I'm not sure this is his real name, Anonymous Conservative.
That would be pretty cool.
That's right.
Otherwise, he might have some conversations to have with his parents.
And so you want to check out anonymousconservative.com.
It's a really, really good book.
And it blew my mind.
And then I did some searches for other people whose minds have been blown and, of course, came across Bill, which is a great pleasure because I've been watching, you know, Afterburner and Firewall for a long time.
And it turns out that you had sort of come through a similar route or at least came to a similar epiphany.
I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.
Well, I have the same exact background as you did.
By the way, I went to British schools just like you did.
And so that's a heck of a launch.
Singing God Save the Queen every morning in a blazer and a school crest and a school tie really gets you motivated in the morning.
But like you, I'm a student of history and like you, I was mystified, frankly, at this cyclic rise and fall of civilizations.
And long before I got into any of the details, just looking at history, that amazed and puzzled me.
For example, you would think that when the Romans reached the peak of their powers and Hannibal's been defeated and Carthage has been destroyed and they've sown salt into the ground and nothing's ever going to grow there again.
You would think that at the moment of the Roman Empire's maximum success, that's when it would take off.
That's when we should have had Romans on the moon a thousand years ago, right?
I mean, that's what should have happened by any rational explanation.
But it's not what happened.
It's not what happened to the Babylonians, or the Egyptians, or the Phoenicians, or the Romans, or the Greeks, or the Spanish, or the French, or the British, and now us.
Something manages to bring down a civilization at the peak of its powers.
At the one time when you would think it'd be most successful and most immune, Something brings it down.
Now, the one thing I did know was that it came down from within.
Abraham Lincoln said, you know, the idea of a giant, you know, striding across the ocean and drinking from the Ohio is just, if our fall comes, it's going to come from within.
And obviously, you watch the Roman Emperors watching the decline of their civilization.
Nobody knew why.
Everybody knew that it was happening, but nobody knew why.
And then our friend, Anonymous Conservative, basically, who, as my understanding is, was a microbiologist, was looking at the way bacteria grow and the way that certain organisms succeed in life.
And success means passing your genes down to the next generation as far as biology is concerned.
And he realized that there were two reproductive strategies that virtually all organisms use and that he could make a case for these reproductive strategies being emplaced in the human consciousness.
Right, now...
This comes out of E.O. Wilson, who's still alive and fantastic.
E.O. Wilson came up with this idea that there's R versus K reproductive strategies.
We don't need to go into why the letters are there.
But the R reproductive strategy occurs in a place where there's lots of abundance.
There's no shortage of food, no shortage of resource, but the limitation is predation.
So think of mice in a field with owls or foxes.
In that environment, you're never going to run out of food.
But you could get eaten at any moment.
And so your primary and most successful reproductive strategy is to bang literally like rabbits.
Hit puberty early.
Have as many kids as humanly possible.
Don't invest in your kids.
Just do this scattershot.
That's your best.
Because if you wait...
Then you could get eaten and then your genes run out.
Whereas if you are on the predation side, the K side, the organisms that are usually larger, more complex, more sophisticated, it's really important to wait and not reproduce like crazy because hunting is a lot more difficult than running away.
And you're, of course, limited in your consumption of resources because the rabbits run away.
And so you have to all get together as a pack and hunt.
You have to wait for signs of intelligence or companionship with the tribe, a success within a hunting party and so on.
And so you have to wait.
You have to delay sexuality.
Sexuality has to be less...
Insane, less Miley Cyrus, I think, is the modern way of pointing it.
And so you have to wait, you have to see reproductive fitness, and then you have to pair bond, have fewer kids, and invest enormously in your children.
And those two different strategies, he points out, can be seen not just in terms of, well, it seems to fit the ideologies between liberals and conservatives, or those on the left, or those on the right.
I mean, I'm just happy because we have a worldwide audience, so liberals means different things in different places.
But a socialist versus capitalist and so on.
Collectivist versus individualist, that's the most solid definition I've seen across the board.
Yeah, perfect.
Okay, we'll stay with that.
And so he says that this doesn't just seem to fit the ideologies, but if you drill down into the biology, then you can see physiological differences between collectivists and individualists, between the R's and the K's, which go a long way towards explaining why reason doesn't work.
It's like you're trying to talk a badger into being an eagle.
And, you know, I've certainly had my hobbies.
That isn't one of them.
But if it was, I think I'd realize how futile it might be.
Let me back you up just a little bit because when I try to explain this to people, one of the big problems they seem to have is that we're going to use a lot of analogies with the animal kingdom because they're great analogies and we'll talk about rabbits and wolves and all the rest of it.
But a lot of people have a hard time understanding how this applies to human behavior, especially human civilization.
So I just wanted to start off by making a point that needs to be made about humans just in general as a species.
So just a quick quiz for you.
If you ask the average person who had any kind of zoological background whatsoever, what's the fastest land animal, Stefan?
Cheetah!
That's right.
What's the deepest diving mammal?
Sperm whale!
And the highest flying animal?
That I'm not entirely sure of.
Peregrine falcon?
Tern?
Some seabird?
Actually, you're wrong on all three.
The fastest land animal is humans.
The deepest diving animal in the world is humans.
The highest flying animal on Earth are humans.
And they're the winners on everything.
If you were to ask somebody what humans eat for diet, you would be able to say everything.
Everything.
Tree bark, fungus, insects, rodents, vegetables, minerals in terms of salt.
We eat everything.
And the reason I bring these things up is because you have to understand that the human being, the homo sapiens sapiens, is a programmable machine.
The reason we're so successful is because we're programmable.
And the reason we have such conflicts in the world is because different societies are running different programs.
And if you don't start from that assumption, when you talk about people behaving like rabbits or societies behaving like rabbits or wolves, it doesn't make any sense to people.
When we talk about a strategy, a reproductive strategy, that works on bacteria, works on rabbits, works on killer whales, dolphins, apes, wolves.
When we talk about a strategy, we're not talking about the genes having a plan.
I know you know this, just for the readers or viewers who may be coming to this new, when we talk about a strategy, we're just saying over billions of years of trial and error and selection, certain approaches succeed and other ones are selected out.
So those strategies are what we talk about when we say an R strategy or a K strategy.
It's a successful way to push the genes downstream.
Now, what we really get down to with humans is fitness.
And fitness isn't physical fitness, it's the ability to adapt to an environment.
When an ecologist tries to determine how many organisms are going to be in a specific ecosystem, if there was nothing else on the map, you'd just be an exponential line.
They reproduce and they grow and they grow and they grow.
But there are other things limited in there and there's carrying capacity and predators and all the rest of it.
So just to get that out of the way, as you've said and as you've said many times on your show, there are two ways for a being to be successful in an ecosystem.
One is to have a very high reproductive rate and one is to have a much higher fitness rate.
Much more competitive and adaptable and so on.
Yes, you can look at rabbits as an example of an R-selected species because rabbits on an infinite plane of clover are a perfect example of ideal R, and then wolves in the frozen northwest in the middle of winter are a perfect example of K. And I didn't mean to bring you back to that, but I know I've had a lot of people get stumped on that business about, well, which one do we behave like?
Well, we behave like both!
And people change, and societies change to adapt one strategy under one set of circumstances, And when the circumstances change, then the whole society goes to another philosophy and another set of values.
And that's what brings civilizations down.
Well, okay, so one of the challenges with animals, of course, is they don't usually have the ability to radically alter their environment, right?
So wolves don't grow a bunch of rabbits, domesticate them and grow them in a pen to have them as a meal whenever they feel like it.
So that is very, very foundational.
And your point, of course, about technology extending human beings was great.
But For human beings, we have the capacity.
There's not enough food around.
Okay, well, we'll go farm.
We'll go hunt.
We'll domesticate animals.
We'll turn foxes and wolves into dogs that can help us.
We'll do all of this stuff.
And where this shows up politically, which I think is really fascinating, is that if the R-selected gene set flourishes in a system of infinite resources, of far more resources that are necessary to survive, Then through the power of government, Those people who are more R-selected can create an environment wherein the R-selected gene set work really well.
And a very brief example of this is single motherhood.
So in the past, of course, according to my deep historical research into season three of Downton Abbey, single mothers, and I even remember this when I was a kid, single mothers were considered to be not really that good.
And what society did was it would render them largely unmarriable.
And they would have to usually give up their child for adoption, which, by the by, is actually the best outcome for the child to have.
You talked about this on a previous show.
The term you used that was such a great term was what the Victorians used, and it was the deserved poor versus the undeserving poor.
People who were disadvantaged, because let's say you've got a young mother and she's got five kids and her husband's killed in a coal mining accident.
That's the deserving poor.
That person needs help.
A woman who would be promiscuous and had four kids by four different fathers would never get any help in that kind of case-selected society.
Right.
And so you would be ostracized until you conformed and you would experience, and there were ways to redeem yourself and so on.
And so single motherhood, which is one of the quintessential R-selected phenomenon in the world, right?
Because the fathers are just spray and pray, right?
More sperm than eggs in the general equation.
So they just have sex with a whole bunch of women or rabbits or whatever it is.
And then they don't take much care to invest in their kids.
So the way that society used to contain the spread of the R gene set was to severely punish the mothers who engaged in R-style behavior and then move the children out of the R-selected environment so that the children's epigenetics, which is the degree to which our genes change based upon in the environment, it would be like containing, and this sounds like a strong way of putting it, but I can't think of a better way to put it in a moment.
It's like containing a contagion.
In other words, we don't want the R gene set to spread.
And so we take the women who've had the R selected behavior, we move the children out of the environment, and we inhibit their reproductive success to keep this plague of R selected genes from spreading too much in society.
I think you still need a few.
I like, you know, certain bands that are on the edge, you know, you need a bit of wild creativity.
But this now, what's happened, of course, since the welfare state, is that our selected behavior of single motherhood is incredibly enriched and enhanced and funded and subsidized to the point where you're taking money out of the hands of responsible women.
and men and putting them into the hands and resources and genetics and reproductive rates of irresponsible men and women.
And that is not just changing the politics or the voting patterns or the incentives, it's actually changing the fundamental gene set within society. - Yeah, and I don't think, I think it's much, I think the fast reaction is not so much the gene set as the meme set, the idea that a meme is a logical gene, it's a thought that's passed the idea that a meme is a logical gene, it's a thought that's passed on through So let's just kind of talk for a second about what some of these characteristics are, R characteristics versus K characteristics.
If you're a rabbit, let's say, on an infinite field or clover, rabbits are extremely highly R-selected species, and so they have a certain series of behaviors and a certain series of survival strategies.
And the first one, obviously, is a high reproductive rate, means they just have lots and lots of kids.
So they basically have a very low investment in their children.
They are very promiscuous sexually.
They sexualize at an early age.
The parent rabbits don't care what age the young rabbits start having baby rabbits, because the more rabbits, the better.
That's the entire strategy.
But one of the several interesting things about an R-selected species is that it has a very small ability to detect Threats in terms of intraspecies threats.
For example, if you have a group of 20 rabbits on a field of clover and another 20 rabbits come into the field of clover, the rabbits just move over.
There's no reason to fight the other rabbits.
There's more food that you can possibly use.
Let everybody come in.
It's kind of an open border, kind of a society, because if resources are endless, which they appear to be for rabbits on a big field of clover, Then it doesn't matter how many intruders or immigrants or whatever coming to eat the resources, because resources are infinite.
If, on the other hand, you have a pack of wolves in the frozen northwest in wintertime, and you've got 20 wolves, let's say, and there's just barely enough food for those 20 wolves, those wolves have to do everything exactly the opposite.
They can have very few kids.
They have to invest years in their kids.
They pair bond for life.
Because they have to teach these pups how to hunt.
And if 20 new wolves come into that environment, pretty soon there's only going to be 20 wolves.
They're going to fight to the death because there's no ability.
The carrying capacity is so low that they can't accept these kind of things.
So how does that reflect itself in terms of what we see in politics today?
We are a K-selected species and civilizations on the rise are very K-valued.
They're very much like wolves.
Cooperation is important.
Warrior clans are important.
Honor codes, behavior codes, legal codes, very important.
Tradition is important.
You know, this kind of conservative sort of value set is important because it provides stability and structure for us to raise fit children.
But as resources become more abundant, I think it's not so much a gene as a psychological attractor, People's behavior changes in the presence of abundance.
And the great thing about this theory, tying it into biology, is it explains what I think you and I probably knew on some level to be true for half of our lives, which is that it is success that kills a culture.
It's wealth and abundance that destroys a culture from within.
It rots the moral structure of the society.
And until we have this biological analogy For the fact that our selection is a successful selection if resources are infinite and unlimited.
But our argument is, the argument that you and I make and many others make, is they may seem infinite now.
They're not.
They may look that way.
But we have the ability to see into the future and say, this isn't going to last forever.
And when it doesn't last, it's going to get ugly.
So let's stop doing this.
Well, I want to layer in one additional part to what you said.
I, like yourself, are probably big fans of capitalism, success, competition, and so on.
I don't think it's wealth that causes the problems.
I think it's wealth plus the state.
Because if you have wealth, what generally happens is the acquisition of wealth is closely related to IQ, to intelligence.
And the graph that you can see are very linear that way, that as IQ goes up, income goes up.
And so what happens is in a free market environment, those who are smarter, and smarter generally is associated with more case-selected, those who are smarter accumulate more resources, and then they have more children, which thus spreads more intelligence.
And intelligence is one of these goods that over the last couple of years of research and in talking to a bunch of experts, I completely missed.
For like most of my life, it's so embarrassing.
I completely missed it.
What an incredible resource intelligence is in a society, and how unequally it's distributed among the population.
It's a full smart people.
Direct one-to-one correlation with crime and IQ and success and IQ. Absolutely.
It's the correlators.
No question about that.
So it turns out that most of the people who wrote comic books were incorrect.
And that, of course, is always a huge crash in one's ideology when you can't trust Marvel screenwriters with their depictions of evil genius, in that generally the smarter people are, the more moral they are, the more responsible they are, and so on.
And so the challenge is, in a free market environment, those who have the smarts get the money, have the most kids, and generally Over time, again, nobody's talking eugenics.
We're just talking freedom.
But freedom has a eugenics component to it, inevitably.
So smarter people are able to afford more kids, gather more resources, and that's how intelligence is supposed to spread throughout society.
And so that wealth is no particular problem.
That wealth is feeding the spread of case-elected behavior, higher intelligence.
But with the state...
Because the R-selected people often outnumber, or at least significantly, they're a significant portion within society, they can vote to take away the resources of the K-selected people by pretending that they're the same as the K-selected people, because K-selected people have this very strong in-group preference.
You're my kin, you're my tribe, you're my family, you're my kind, so I'm going to give you resources.
So they pretend we're all the same.
They take the resources from the K-selected people, feeding the spread of the R-selected gene set and the R-selected mindset, And that I think they can only do through the power of the state because K-selected charity is, as we pointed out, very selected upon the deservingness and the involuntariness of your catastrophes.
You want to help people from accidents, but you don't want to fund bad decisions.
But through the state, people can use the power of the state to redistribute income from K's to R's.
And I think that component of statism is key, not just the wealth.
I will call your Newtonian physics and I'll raise you an Einsteinian relativity.
Everything you say is absolutely true and what I'm about to say negates none of it.
You're absolutely right.
But the reason I say that wealth is what destroys the society because your point is exactly right.
It's not the wealth.
It's the state.
But my argument beyond that would be it's the abundance that allows the state.
And I say allows the state because why would rich people allow?
Poor people or incompetent people, why would individuals who succeed, these millionaires and successful people, why would they allow a large state to grow?
They didn't allow a large state to grow right up really until the 70s and 80s.
And it's because there's so much abundance now.
There's so much prosperity that rich people can't afford to have 70% or 80% of what they make taken away from them and still remain extremely comfortable.
It's this super abundance of wealth.
If you were to talk to a rich person 100 years ago and he had four horses on his carriage, let's say, and somebody stole those four horses, he'd want them hanged.
Because that's a significant, it's taken away as transportation.
My horse is 360 horses in my car.
When you have a certain level of abundance, you're willing to part with more and more and more of it because it impacts you less and less and less.
And that doesn't mean it's not the problem because it is the problem, but you have to ask yourselves, why do the successful people over time allow a state that robs them blind?
Why do we allow it?
And I think we allow it because It's not having a life or death impact on us.
Yeah, and I think that the big challenge and the insight for me was recognizing the degree to which jumping off of the gold standard and coming up with, you know, print what you want.
You can print money, but you can't print gold.
Exactly right.
Right.
You know, that's exactly right.
So what happens is then the K selected reaction to the expansion of power or the incursion of something that's going to take away resources occurs when it's a zero sum game.
In other words, 20 new wolves come in and boy, if only one out of two can can make it in the long run and I'm going to fight for my tribe.
But with with fiat currency, what happens is and we all know this, right, which is that the Rs go to the Ks and say, well, look, we can help the poor and it costs you nothing.
Now, if it costs you nothing, the K reaction to the incursion of government power isn't triggered.
That's the tripwire.
That's right.
Is it going to cost me resources that are significant, right?
Now, if we want to help the poor people and what we're going to have to do is double your immediate taxes tomorrow, then the whole lie of government falls apart, right?
Because if government wants to promise you $500, they've got to take $1,000 at least, probably more.
That's exactly right, yes.
But if they can print the money, if they can borrow the money, and if they can just magic it into existence, then it flows all of these resources into the Rs, but it doesn't trigger the reaction of the Ks.
That's exactly right.
And by the way, the single greatest thing the government did to not trigger the K reaction was payroll deduction.
Because if you had to write a check every April 15th for all of your taxes, there would be a revolution in this country.
The reason they get away with taking so much is because it never actually enters your hands.
You may be making $500.
Let's say you make $1,000 a week.
If you go home with $600, that's all you ever see.
And you actually get money back at the end of the year.
Hey, I get a refund.
Look at me.
I'm so lucky.
If you got the entire $1,000 and at the end of the year you had to write a check for $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 or whatever to the government, there'd be a revolution.
So that's one of the reasons they get away with it.
But yes, I think that's exactly right.
The state has figured out a way to not trigger this reaction.
It's the boiling frog analogy and all the rest of it.
But actually, Stephan, you know, when you get right down to it, you were talking about intelligence and wolves.
We talk about wolves and rabbits, the whole thing.
When it ultimately gets down to brass tacks, it comes down to competition.
It comes down to the difference between two different kinds of people, the people that can compete, do, and the people that can't compete, won't.
And if you can't compete, you have to have a strategy to succeed.
The genes want to get pushed through anyway.
So if your classic model is Gary Cooper and Woody Allen, and Gary Cooper is going to get all the girls, then what does Woody Allen do?
Well, Woody Allen has to have a strategy to get those R genes selected.
So maybe he's more clever, maybe he's more interesting or funny or whatever.
Most of the time he kind of waits till Gary Cooper's out in the next county saving somebody else's bacon and then he makes his move, you know.
But it is a strategy that these people have.
It's just a non-competitive strategy.
So you get into things like capitalism.
Capitalism is extremely competitive.
Competitors like capitalism because they get a chance to maximize their own gains.
People who can't compete hate capitalism and they would rather live a lower standard of living so long as nobody did better than them.
Then have to compete.
And of all the things that this book pointed out to me, the one thing I thought that was the most interesting and disgusting at the same time was the—we're just going to use common labels.
We talked about individuals and collectivists, but we can say liberals or progressives.
It's the liberal, progressive, collectivist attitude towards policemen and warriors.
That's what's most interesting to me.
You would think that people who are terrified of opening a penknife would love the police and the soldiers because they're defending them.
We can't compete.
We don't want to go out there and learn how to fight.
We don't like to fight.
Guns terrify us.
You would think, logically, back to your point about reason, That would be the progressives and the liberals who would be on their knees worshiping the police and the military for protecting them.
But what Anonymous Conservative is saying in his book is he's saying, no, our selected people want our warriors to be killed because if our warriors are killed, it culls the internal competition.
It takes our competitive males out of the mix for them And it makes it better for the R-selected kind of, you know, girly men back home.
They do better when our warriors are out there fighting their warriors and being killed.
They like it.
Likewise with the police.
The reason that liberals hate guns so much and the reason they want gun control, they don't understand the reason, but psychological magnet is.
On some level they realize that conservatives are competitors and if conservatives are allowed to defend themselves with guns and violence because they're fit enough to be able to do that, Then they realize on some level that pretty soon all the predators are just going to be going after the R's.
If the K's are allowed to defend themselves, there's not going to be any predation on K's.
There's only going to be predation on R's.
So they hate the police, and they hate guns, and they hate self-defense, and they hate all of these things that to us are just second nature.
Because since they can't compete, since they will not defend themselves, they're too frightened, they're too whatever.
Therefore, nobody can defend themselves.
If I can't defend myself because I don't have the guts or the skill, then nobody can defend themselves because if they are allowed to defend themselves, I'm going to be selected right out of the gene pool.
Yeah, I mean, if the rabbits can get all the teeth removed from both wolves and rabbits, well, the rabbits are fine.
They can just gum the grass, you know?
And even though predation is taking all of them, even now predators are taking wolves and rabbits, then the rabbits succeed because they reproduce faster.
They can fill the vacant slots much more quickly than the wolves could.
Of course they want to pull the teeth from the wolves.
Now, this goes a long way.
And again, this is a very, very dark part of the human soul that we're exploring here, at least from the case-elected perspective.
It helps to me explain something that a number of thinkers in the conservative camp have pointed out, which is that...
Liberals are really great at losing wars.
And this provocation that they'll sort of start wars, get things going, and then it'll be a complete disaster and they'll flop it out.
And you can see this happening in a variety of U.S. conflicts.
What's going on right now in the Middle East where the U.S. has provoked unbelievable dislocation in the region to the point now where I would dare say largely our selected population is flowing into the formerly K-selected Europe that can't seem to find a spine to say no.
But there is a very dark part of the R personality which knows that it cannot fight a K. But what it can do is it can provoke foreign Ks to attack domestic Ks.
And the R's have more in common with foreign K-selected people than their own domestic K-selected people.
If they can set them at war with each other, then that opens up more avenues for the R's to spread.
Exactly.
This is the biggest point, I think, in terms of the topicality of us having this conversation today.
This is the great point to make.
First of all, when we talk about RNK being genetic, I think humans succeed because both of those genes are in our physical bodies.
And that the psychology of the culture is what activates some, and among individuals, too.
One of the great points AC makes is that play is such an important time.
Physical play, we don't do that anymore.
That's why we're one of the many reasons we're turning so okay.
But when you had people out playing Little League Baseball like I did— Wait, turning so are.
I think you were going to say turning so are.
Okay.
Let's not confuse people.
Sorry about that.
When I was playing Little League Baseball, not everybody got on the team.
And I got on the team.
I was the worst player on the team.
And we went 0-10.
But the next year we went 10-0.
And basically what he's saying is that play, physical play, is what allows – it's like a simulation for how people are going to do in life later, whether they're going to be competitive or not, and that the competitors – Look, I would rather lose by the rules than win by cheating.
That's just how I'm built.
But the point I'm trying to make here with the invasion of Europe is, with these Muslims, is it's a psychological attractor, but it's not hardwired.
And, Stefan, Europe is going from R to K so fast that we can't even keep track of it.
These people...
From K to R. From K to R. My God.
I know, I know.
I get the word salad sometimes, too.
I was right.
No, no, no.
I was right.
Europe with this Muslim invasion is going from R to K so fast because they now perceive that this is in fact an actual threat.
This wolf is at their door.
They are no longer willing to buy this multicultural argument that, no, it's just a different culture, it's a difference of opinion.
When these people come in here and they see the kind of rioting and they see the kind of rapes and murders and garbage and assaults and demands, All of a sudden, these formerly rabid European socialists are looking out their own windows down on the street and they're seeing this mayhem and violence.
And they're realizing there is an external threat and there is an existential threat to our way of life.
And they are rapidly becoming case.
Can't buy a gun in Europe.
They're gone.
They're off the shelves.
They're calling for all the things that we knuckle-dragging racist conservatives here in America have called for.
They want secure borders.
They want IDs.
They want a police force.
They want to be protected from the murder and the rape that's coming in in this invasion.
And that entire culture is going K like that.
The United States went very heavily K on 9-11.
I mean, when you saw those buildings come down, this end of history, Clinton era kind of, nah, it's just smooth sailing from now until forever.
No.
There are enemy packs of wolves that want to come in here and kill us and the population which never had to even deal with these things before now suddenly has to make a decision.
And the decision for most of us was, okay, let's respond to this threat.
But the one thing I do want to just touch on very quickly, because I'm so interested as you are in the psychology of this.
When you hear American liberals say, no, no, no, it's a big misunderstanding.
In fact, the reason that Al-Qaeda or ISIS exists is because of us.
It's because we're in the Middle East and we're romping around in their ground.
And if we would just stop doing it, then they'd leave us alone.
What that basically is, is it's a psychological control mechanism of a person, I don't know what other word for it, is a coward.
And basically what the coward is saying is, I refuse to accept that there are people with an ideology that wants me murdered.
Therefore, it's my ideology that's the problem, and I can change my ideology, you see?
I have the power to change that.
So if we just stop doing what we're doing, we Americans, then These strange people won't want to kill us anymore.
And it makes them into reflections and robots.
They're not real people.
They don't have a real agenda.
They just act on our initiative.
I think it all comes down to physical cowardice, frankly.
So much of this politics is just the politics of people who are afraid to fight and will do anything other than fighting.
And as you say, our selected people would rather see our warriors culled and lose to an enemy because submission is something they're very good at.
Well, I mean, that's a mouthful and a half.
I mean, I'm with the founding fathers in terms of trade with all, entangling alliances with none.
I'm very, very keen on that particular strategy.
Certainly the U.S., since the Second World War, rushed into a bit of a power vacuum and tried to throw its weight around the world as the world's policeman.
That certainly did create a number of disasters.
And one of the things that I have felt very strongly from my youth...
I grew up in England in the 60s and was born in the mid-60s, grew up in the 70s, where the Second World War was talked about.
And it was the Second World War.
I've got a whole analysis I haven't published yet of Chamberlain versus Churchill as R selected versus K selected.
But one of the things that occurred in the Second World War, which was at least on the Allies' side, a thoroughly case-selected war, in that it was total war and it continued until there was unquestioned submission and occupation of the foreign countries, The idea that you can have a sort of war is very R-selected, in my opinion.
It just provokes, you know, you go poke a hornet's nest and then, oh my goodness, I got stung, how terrible!
But the case-selected war is, man, we don't want to go to war.
Do you know why?
Because if we go to war, we are not going to stop until we have removed the threat in its entirety in whatever godforsaken way we have to.
And this idea that you can go in and muckety-muck about, oh, we're going to go fund some people in Libya.
We're going to ship some arms to Syria.
We're going to go and do this.
You either, in the case-selected world, if you're going to go to war, you go to war until the threat is completely and totally eliminated.
In the R-selected world, it's like, we're just going to play around a little.
We're going to fund some stuff, put some boots on the ground, which really is the worst possible situation to be in.
It's the most casualties for our side, right?
Eleven years in Vietnam, 50,000 men killed.
Vietnam could have been ended.
Look...
The world has not seen America fully angry since August of 1945.
That's the last time America has been genuinely angry and genuinely at war was August of 1945 and everything since then has just been playing around like you said.
So the reason that our selected individuals like a long war like Vietnam or this nonsense in the Middle East now is because it keeps pulling our warriors out of the gene pool.
Our competitors are sent over there to die slowly And just continuously, when we fully know that if we were to exercise all of our will and power, we could end the situation with ISIS probably in a weekend if we're really serious about it.
You know, we really could.
And we may watch Russia do it because there are a lot more case-elected than we are now.
We may actually watch Russia actually show us what it's like when somebody's seriously going after this threat.
You're absolutely right.
It is a psychological empathy with and sympathy with the enemy that increases their chance of pushing their genes forward.
If all of the competitors are taken out of the gene pool through war, They're what's left.
And if they have an overlord, that doesn't really matter to them.
They like overlords.
So if it's a Japanese overlord, let's say we lose the war in the Pacific in World War II and the Japanese are running America.
Well, how is that good for an R-selected person?
It's great for an R-selected person.
All of the heroes are dead.
All of the competitor K's are dead.
They died on Iwo Jima and they died in Okinawa.
And now there are Japanese K overlords, but who gets to mate with the American women that are left?
The cowards, the uncompetitive ones.
That's a strategy.
Of all the many examples in biology, the one in the book I think is most interesting is the cuttlefish analogy.
It was just so crystal clear and he kind of leads with it.
For those viewers out there not familiar with it, a cuttlefish is an extremely intelligent animal, a very intelligent animal.
And the way they breed is the females find nesting spots down on the floor of the ocean.
And the males get locked in combat above the females and the strongest males then win the fight.
The weaker one is pushed away and the strong males go down to mate with the females and that's heavily K-selected.
But small male cuttlefish who are just genetically on one side of the bell curve that are not strong and not able to fight, what these males do is they pull their tentacles in and they make themselves very small until they look exactly like females.
And since they look like females, they just simply slide right through this boundary layer of warring males that are out there fighting for fitness.
And these kind of treacherous sort of males act like females, just go down with the rest of the females, and then they start mating and they start pushing that R gene through.
And it's this kind of subterfuge and this kind of, you know, I think the thing that's most interesting about this is that if case-selected creatures like wolves have a series of codes and laws, because if two wolves are fighting and one of them wins, you don't want to kill the other wolf.
Once one wolf surrenders and throws his neck, it deactivates, instantly shuts down the dominant wolf.
And so case-selected societies like growing societies have great respect for law and codes of honor and tradition and these kind of things.
But rabbits and these, you know, and these hiding cuttlefish, they think laws are for chumps.
And what we're seeing in American politics today is we're watching the left use our laws, our decency, and our honor codes against us to get through that layer of competitiveness and sneak in.
And they're using our honor codes and our restrictions on our competitive behavior against us in the way that AIDS gets into the body through the immune system.
And our sympathy for those who are hard done by is then extended to include everyone, no matter what.
And there's this narrative of no free will, of choicelessness.
Like, I mean, I put out these videos, highly critical of single mothers because I care about the future of the species.
And everyone's like, well, the men just ran away.
What's their responsibility?
It's like, women have always been the gatekeepers of sex.
And so if a woman decides to have sex with a guy who's unreliable...
That's on her.
I mean, of course there are unreliable guys.
Everybody knows that guys want to have sex more than they want to commit when they're young in particular.
So putting responsibility on people for the choices that they make and saying, look, choices have consequences.
We're not going to fund bad decisions through force.
If you want to pay for people voluntarily, that's your deal.
But we can't use the power of the state to redistribute income from responsible people to irresponsible people because that will end civilization.
And the thing that drives me crazy, Bill, is, man...
I don't know.
I mean, you've obviously been working in this field for a long time, and we can see the black storm clouds of social disintegration slowly rolling across the landscape.
They're not so slowly anymore, yeah.
Yeah.
And they're not so subtle anymore.
They're very, very clear.
And, of course, I've been raising the alarm for 30 years.
You've been in it for decades, too.
And that's an annoying part of being case-elected.
Because if you're case-elected, you see disaster.
And, you know, we'll get into sort of the agricultural roots versus the hunter-gatherer roots of this.
But literally feel like there's this Nietzschean analogy that the guy's just running around saying there's this danger coming and everybody, nobody cares.
Nobody, you know, they will even admit the facts, but it has no emotional resonance in their emotional apparatus and the physiology behind that is fascinating.
Let me just say one thing about this single mother issue with the fathers running away.
You know, conservatives, when we talk about Talk about being a wolf-like kind of a culture as opposed to rabbit culture.
Most people look at that and go, oh, rabbits are nice, sweet, and cuddly, and wolves are mean and vicious and nasty.
But it's actually just the opposite.
Wolves have an incredible amount of dedication to their young.
They're very caring.
They're very social.
They have codes and laws and so on.
The genuine compassion, the actual compassion when it comes to something like single motherhood is to say, you should probably be voting for conservative politicians because not only Because if you're a deadbeat dad, if you're the kind of guy that just basically impregnates 15, 20 women and just runs around bragging about it, in a conservative case like the culture, there are pressures on that male by other males.
Other males will say to him, this is a dishonorable, low, mean-spirited, Chicken shit way of going through life and we are going to make sure that you don't do it anymore.
So we're not going to hire you.
We're not going to participate with you.
We ostracize you.
You are a dishonorable man with no character and there's no place for you in the society.
And so what we're talking about here is actual compassion.
We don't want to see single mothers stuck in this situation.
We have actual compassion.
We want to make actual changes.
What the state wants to do is they want to give them an alternate, you know, a metaphysical daddy who's going to supply all of their needs in exchange for them voting.
It's a vote plantation.
We want two hours of work from you every two years.
That's all we want.
Once you go down to vote for us and then we'll take care of everything else for you.
But let's get to this threat thing because we do feel like profits.
Can you not see what's happening if you print this money?
Can you not see what's happening in the disintegration of the social fabric?
One of the things he talks about is there's actual brain structure differences between collectivists and individuals, liberals and democrats versus conservatives and republicans, whatever you want to call it.
And it has to do with the part of the brain called the amygdala.
And very briefly, it's so well accepted that this difference exists that liberals say, see, conservatives are ruled by fear.
They're fear centers of their brain.
Everything they do is ruled by fear.
Maybe that's good.
Yes, there are dangers in the world.
There are limitations in reality.
You want to be scared when there are dangers.
Now, technically speaking, the amygdala is not the fear center.
The amygdala is the threat recognition center, and it triggers the fear response.
It's not the fear response, it triggers the fear response.
So an example of what the amygdala does, as in the book, is if you're walking through the forest on a little path, and all of a sudden you hear a rustle of grass and a twig snap, and next thing you know there's a panther on your back.
If you survive the encounter, next time you're walking through the forest, you hear the rustle of grass and the twig snap.
You don't have to wait for the panther to be on your back, and you don't have to think about it.
Your threat conditioning center now understands that that is a serious problem.
And parenthetically, I just love this, That snapping twig thing is so deep in our subconscious that many times in horror movies, audio mixers will put a snapping twig sound in there before the slasher comes out just because it's a natural trigger.
You don't even hear it.
So once you're exposed to that threat, you begin to appreciate threat awareness.
And we wouldn't be here without the amygdala.
It's more pronounced in conservatives because we can see threats.
A guy who's a member of SEAL Team 6, let's say, doesn't get hysterical and go into weeping fits because some kid chews a Pop-Tart into the general shape of a pistol because his amygdala response is tuned to a level where, is somebody actually shooting real bullets at me?
Not this second.
Then things are probably more or less okay.
And by taking competition out of the system, by having a play where everybody wins and nobody loses, where we're going to have safe zones and we're going to have safe spaces and we're going to ban hate speech, what we're actually doing is we're reducing every single person's ability to measure a threat to the point where if you see something that looks a bit like a weapon, you melt down into tears and they have to call the ambulance.
Okay, so this is important because the fear center thing is important.
I mean, obviously, rabbits run like crazy when a wolf is chasing them.
And, you know, if you ever see prey species feeding, you know, they're constantly like, what was that?
What was that?
Like, they're jumpy.
Yeah, but the second the predator leaves, they go right back to eating the grass, right?
They don't do anything about the predator.
But there's no problem down the road that they're not thinking about the predator tomorrow.
It's like, is something chasing me right now?
If not, I'm going to eat and screw and eat and screw and then maybe just mix it up a little screw and eat and screw.
But however, for the case-selected species, there's a difference between fight or flight and anticipation anxiety or looking over the horizon.
And you think of agriculture, which is a very case-selected thing to get involved in.
In agriculture, you can't eat your seed crop.
Like, you've got to keep your food for the winter, and you've got, you know, six months or five months of the year where you can't get any food particularly.
I mean, you get some from your domesticated animals or whatever.
But you've got a whole big pile of wheat, and you've got to keep it to plant in the spring.
And this is why there's Lent in the spring, and you don't eat and so on.
And because you can't eat that.
If you eat that, you're going to have a full, happy, burpy winter followed by mass starvation in the summer and fall.
And planning.
Yeah, that foresight and planning is really, really important.
Frontal load of activity, baby.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, this neofrontal cortex stuff, which has increased six times relative to the three times brain mass increase over the past couple hundred thousand years.
And it has to do with anticipating future planning of resources, which is a very case-selected thing.
So what the R-selected people only care about, and we're generalizing, but, you know, forgive us for printing with a board brush, is The R-selected people care about the welfare check this Friday.
The K-selected people care about the economy in two years or five years or ten years.
And that difference where the R-selected people really doesn't even cross their...
They'll admit it, yeah, there's a problem and so on.
But you can watch the Democrat debate, and it really was astounding.
You watch the Democrat debate.
They never once mentioned the national debt.
Like, not even once.
No, of course not.
And there's no single mothers for controlling the National Debt Association that I'm aware of.
But in the conservatives or among the Republicans, national debt, big problems, structural issues, foreign threats, all of the stuff which is over the horizon but essential to think about.
If you are case-selected and you eat your seed crop, you die.
That's it for your gene pool.
But if you are selected and you say, well, I'm going to hoard a bunch of grass for next year...
Why?
Because the grass will always be there.
You live in Africa or whatever it is, right?
So it's always going to be there.
There's no point hoarding and saving.
And there's no point deferring gratification in any of your appetites, whether it's food or sex or any place.
Deferring your gratification is a disaster, whereas for Ks, indulging your gratification is a disaster.
Correct.
And it's that K-selected behavior that makes civilizations and art-selected behavior that destroys them.
That's exactly, precisely correct.
One of the best ways I ever heard this put was pretty simple really, and I don't know if it was our friend AC, but somebody said the difference between liberals and conservatives is conservatives would rather worry now and be safe later, and liberals would rather be safe now and worry later.
And it's really just that simple.
You can't keep printing money without the economy collapsing.
You cannot allow You can't put a million or 10 million or 100 million Muslims, especially jihadi-type Muslims, into Europe and have Europe remain Europe.
And we know this is true.
Everybody can see it who chooses to look at it.
But it's the amygdala response, I think, Stephan.
Facing threats is not fun.
It's not a pleasant experience.
It develops all kinds of negative biological responses.
Your stress levels go up.
You feel a little sick.
When you worry about things, it's not pleasant.
And the question then becomes, should you be doing this unpleasant thing, yes or no?
The liberals will say that conservatives just live in this state of fear because we're mean.
Our response is, no, these are actual threats.
And if these threats didn't exist, I wouldn't be responding to them.
I don't do this just for fun, but because we have the courage, it comes down to that word again, you know, because we have the intellectual courage and the physical courage and the moral courage and the emotional courage to process unpleasantness now, we do it so that we can avoid this unpleasantness in the future.
We have this ability to look forward.
And this is the essence of Kay.
Do you mind if I trot that antelope analogy out just real quick?
I would be shocked and disappointed if you didn't, so please take your time.
This is a great analogy.
All I really do, I've just been good at explaining things.
I don't, I'm not really, I'm not, you look at a guy like AC and what he's done here is just an amazing body of intellectual work.
So my small contributions to this are the ability to help make examples that are maybe a little bit clearer.
So just to give you an idea, our viewers an idea of just how case-selected humans generally are, at least certain bands of humans.
Let's take a very R-selected species like antelopes, and they're in the savanna in Africa.
And there's a huge herd of antelopes, and antelopes are extremely R-selected creatures.
So let's just assume that these antelopes have human consciousness and human language.
That's all.
They're still in an antelope body, but they have human consciousness and the ability to speak.
What the antelope strategy is to say, look, Right now, as in our selected species, their strategy is we're going to get up in the morning, we're going to go up and eat that endless field of grass out there, and we're going to have all the sex we want, we're going to have all the food we want.
It is true that there are lions out there, but there are a hundred of us and only one lion, so our chances are one in a hundred, plus the lion usually misses, so they're less than that.
And what our selected really says is, you know, I don't have to outrun the lion, I just have to outrun Stan.
Right?
As long as there's a weaker, slower, younger, older, sicker person in the herd than me, my chances are very, very good, so I'm not going to worry about the lion.
I'm going to go out, have all the sex I want, eat all the food I want.
When the lion comes out of the bushes, I'll deal with it then, I'll run like hell, and my chances of going down are pretty near zero for a while.
And just to add to that as well, if the lion takes down a young gazelle or antelope, Well, it's not really affecting the gene pool too early to breed.
But if it takes down an old one, and especially an old female, well, too late to breed, so it doesn't really affect the strength of the herd.
Right.
And if it takes down a young little baby gazelle, you don't have any attachment to that baby.
Is it your kid?
Probably not.
Maybe.
I don't know.
I had 50 kids last year.
I don't know if it's mine or not.
Who cares?
It's not got anything to do with me.
So this is the R-selected mentality at work.
Now, if you were to take a group of conservatives from some small town someplace, and just regular conservative people, K-selected people, and transfer their consciousness into our selected herd, and we wake up one day, guys like you and me and a bunch of our friends wake up, and we're on the savannah in Africa, and we look around, and we're antelopes.
Okay, now we're in real trouble now because our value set is so different.
These are our wives that are being taken down by these lions.
These are our kids that we care about and love and nurture that are being killed by these damn lion, right?
So what would we do?
Well, we'd get together in the morning and we'd just call a little meeting.
We'd say, all right, look, here's what's going to happen, fellow antelopes.
From now on, we're not just wandering out there across the field.
We're moving in convoys.
We're going to put the big, strong males on the outside, females inside of them, young on the far inside.
We're gonna move in a group.
We're gonna have lookouts posted.
We're gonna be taking care of things.
And when that line comes out of the bushes, The females and the young are going to run one way, and the rest of us, the other 30 strong males, are going to go right at that lion, and we're going to hit him with our hooves, and we're going to hit him with our horns, and we're going to stomp that son of a bitch into the dust.
And then we're going to go find out where his lion cubs are, and we're going to stomp them into the dust too.
And we're going to make sure there's no lions within a hundred mile radius of us and our families that we care about.
And the second that we see a threat, we're going to put together another hunting party of antelopes, because we've got these big nasty horns.
And we're gonna make sure those predators go someplace else, and if we see one, we're gonna launch a group of 40 antelopes until it's gored to death.
No problem.
And now our children are safe, and our wives are safe, and we're safe, and we can relax a little bit out on the savannah.
Not completely.
We've always got lookouts out there.
But we're not victims of predation.
It's an entirely different way of looking at life, and it's successful.
It makes civilization.
And it protects the weak and it protects the sick and it protects the old.
Because it basically is saying there is a burden on the young healthy males not only to protect themselves and outrun the lion, but on the contrary.
We have a group obligation to the sick and the weak and the young to sacrifice our healthy lives if necessary, because we can outrun any of these people if we're just gazelles, right, or antelopes.
We can just outrun them all.
That's our selection answer.
But we're going to say, no, we're going to pool together, and some of us may die killing that lion.
That may be true.
But once the lion's gone, the rest of us are safe.
It's the same thing with our culture today.
And the reason that never happens with antelope is if you get rid of the lions, they eat all of the vegetation and starve to death.
But we have a different set of choices, of course.
And they get stupid.
Yep, that's right.
And they get real stupid.
Well, of course, if they killed off the lions, they would end up being more case-selected and they would change their behavior.
I'd like to talk a few other places where this shows up, but in particular the etiology of how this grows, because the realm of competition in childhood is generally—I mean, there's academics to some degree, but it's evolved historically as sports.
And when you were talking about the K versus the R's, the R's generally not good at sports.
And one of the ways that it works, sports, of course, is that I've been involved in sports my whole life.
And you are ferociously trying to beat your opponent.
And then when you're done, you shake hands.
And you go and you get a drink and you say, well, that was a great game.
Here's some tips and so on.
And it's always reminded me of the way that...
That dogs fight ferociously and then when one submits, they all trot off back to the pack and they lick each other's wounds and they're all friends again.
This idea that competition is not destructive.
In fact, some of the people I've become the best friends with are the people who I've had strong competitions with.
And it's been a real pleasure to see that.
You match your wits.
People I've had debates with, I've stayed friends with.
People who I've had strict competition with in sports have become great friends.
That's something that doesn't really happen to the R-selected people.
And the R-selected people, for a variety of reasons, some physiological, some psychological, probably some familial, Don't like the competition.
They can't compete.
And they resent the case.
You know, like the alpha who is, you know, the jock who's really smart, the cheerleader getting quarterback or whoever it is.
They really, really resent that.
And they create these separate subcultures, you know, like goths or punks or whatever, where they can sort of be the alphas in a sub sort of social sphere.
That's right.
And I think that this avoidance of competition, the studies that have shown that people who are collectivists generally have a stronger tendency towards depression, and competition makes them exceedingly anxious, very anxious.
And that's because, that's their body's way of saying, you can't win, so please don't compete, because if you compete, you could get injured, and that's going to further reduce your capacity for reproductive success.
And so this depression, which is a form of competition avoidance, creates It strengthens the fight or flight response when you see competition.
So then when these very R-selected, somewhat depressed, conflict and competition avoidant people who've never seen the true joy and value of competition, when they look at the free market, it horrifies them.
It sure does.
Because they always talk about the free market.
Like, you know, if you win the sales contract, you mutilate and eat the opponents.
Like, it's just competition.
You either win or you lose.
And the team play is, the reason why the wolf submits to the alpha is because by doing that, he's helping the team as a whole.
We all had this when we were kids, right?
So I grew up playing soccer and tennis and so on.
And in soccer in particular, you don't hog the ball.
Anybody who hog the ball would not stay on the team for very long because everybody wants, I've gone all the way through the defense and I've scored the goal and they'll talk about this for months if not years.
But you have to pass the ball for the good of the team.
You have to surrender your glory for the sake of the good of the team.
And so submitting to a better player or a player who's in a better position.
Now, if this guy's really good at getting through the defense, you pass to him as soon as you can, and then you as a team win.
This idea that surrendering or losing in a competition is good for the team, is good for society as a whole, is really important.
And I think you only learn that through sports.
I don't know any other particular way that you can.
Like chess is too solitary, computer programs too isolationist, and...
It doesn't really work.
You can pass some things in some video games.
It doesn't really work.
So the idea that when somebody loses out, you know, this death of a salesman thing from the Arthur Miller play, that this guy never gets any sales.
Well, good, because he's terrible at what he does.
So the sales should go to better people, and that's for the betterment of society as a whole.
But for that idea that for the good of the tribe as a whole, you have to be case-selected for that even to be on your radar.
This is exactly right.
Wolves hunt in packs, and so wolves have to have a series of codes and laws and behaviors that are enforced.
Human warriors are groups of case-selected individuals who are willing to subsume their individual egos for the greater good, form warrior-type packs.
And you could make the case that a smart business is a pack of warriors where everybody's got an objective.
They're unbeatable.
You simply can't beat case-selected individuals who are willing to cooperate for a greater good.
They're unbeatable.
And so they have to be circumvented by what do the R's do if you're facing a group of warriors?
Well, you have to beat them.
How do you beat them?
You can't beat them in combat.
You know you're no good in combat.
You have to beat them through subterfuge.
You have to beat them through treason.
You have to beat them through using their rules against us.
You have to beat them by sneaking in the back door and letting somebody who can beat them, enemy warriors in, and that's how you win.
Or by constantly programming compassion for the enemy, which causes hesitation in combat.
Right, and not only compassion for the enemy, but also by programming the idea into the culture rhetorically that The very values of courage and strength and honor and integrity are archaic or useless or mean or cruel or whatever and appealing to the case-selected sense of compassion, which we have.
Liberals say they're compassionate, but that's an assertion.
It's unearned moral superiority.
They don't do anything to earn their compassionate level.
They don't contribute charities the way that conservatives do.
I guarantee you that a housewife in a church in Des Moines, Iowa spends more time helping actual poor people than a liberal in a skyscraper in We're good to
go.
They're not negative traits.
It's the case-selected traits that protect the weak.
It's the case-selected traits that defend the defenseless.
And this is where we have to make the fight, I think, is we have to show that this case-selected thing is not just this Darwinian, you know, the strong survive and the weaker left in the ditch to die.
On the contrary, it's the fact that the competitors have built-in compassion and codes, like you were talking about with the dogs that get into a fight and so on.
You know, I mentioned this earlier, but back to what you're talking about competition.
Certain progressives can't understand what I'm about to say.
I said it a little while ago.
I would rather lose to somebody better than me and play by the rules than beat somebody by cheating.
Because I learned something from losing and it makes me better.
I've done a lot of public speaking and I'm a good public speaker and I've seen a lot of people out there and most of the time I'm falling asleep.
Every now and then I'll see somebody who's like kicking ass.
And my response is not, screw that guy, that guy, we've got to destroy this.
It's like, how is he doing this, you know?
I just want to learn.
I want to get better.
He makes me a better competitor.
And, you know, it all comes down to what you're talking about with competition and play.
I was the worst player on my Little League team when I joined.
They put me in right field.
I got better because I got to play.
And then I played first base and we went out from 0-10 to 10-0.
Now, it doesn't The winning is not important.
It's the ability to understand.
This is kind of what you're saying.
It's the ability to understand that failure is not only not the end of the world.
Failure is the great educator.
Failure is the teacher.
Failure is what allows us to become better in the future.
And the more we fail and the more comfortable we get with failure, so long as we don't get to love failure, but the more comfortable we are with making mistakes, The more risk-taking we're willing to do, the more audacious we are, the more persistent we are.
And all of these are extremely successful qualities and they're being bred out of our society just as fast as our little legs can take us.
Right.
And there is, along with this, I put this cycle up and I'll just go over it very briefly here with regards to how this sort of feeds on itself.
Childhood success, and particularly in the realm of competition, and again, childhood success in terms of competition doesn't mean that you have to be in organized sports.
It can be pickup games.
Or it could be that you, you know, I remember when I was a kid, we had our little dirt bikes and all that.
And I remember for like an hour and a half sitting in the mall parking lot with my friends when we were 12, trying to come up with a name for the gang, right?
And I think I ended up coming up with a name that everyone was like, yeah, and you get this real rush.
So it could be, you're just really good at organizing.
I'm sorry?
What was the name?
I don't know.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember now.
The star comets, or I don't know, some kind of cool space thing back then.
Yeah.
And so it could be that you're really good at organizing games.
You're really good at it.
So it's some sort of success, some sort of capacity to influence others in a voluntary way.
But that, of course, requires the glorious anarchy of unstructured childhood, which has definitely gone out of the window, much to the detriment of society as a whole.
Now, everywhere you go, it's 20 bucks and everything's organized and everyone gets a turn and there's not that competition.
Among kids because there's this idea, well the kid is sad if he can't win and it's like, well yeah, but that's essential to society as a whole because you have to be able to deal with not winning in order to be able to actually win.
So if you are successful in competition as a child, then you're very happy to pursue competition as an adult.
Which means that you're happy accepting unequal outcomes.
And that is really important.
We have a very finite amount of resources in society, and we need to move those resources to people who are best able to manage and grow them.
You give the spear to the guy but the strongest arm, and that way everyone's safer.
And you give the farmland, so to speak, over time in terms of accumulation, you give the farmland to the best farmer, and that way everyone gets enough to eat.
Allowing resources to accumulate to the most competent is really, really important.
I mean, I like to sing, but I'm not going to fill any stadiums with my singing gifts because there are way better singers out there.
And they're the ones that should get the stadiums because that way there's a music industry that I get to copy.
So if you have childhood success, you then are happy pursuing competition, which means that you're comfortable with unequal outcomes.
You like the free market and therefore you don't have big giant government subsidies, which then creates strong families.
Strong families contribute to childhood success.
And so there's this virtuous cycle that occurs.
If you look at what happens on the collectivist side, it's quite different.
Childhood failure leads to competition avoidance.
Competition avoidance leads you to want to have intervention to ensure equalities of outcomes, which leads you to socialism, which leads you to the welfare state, Which leads you to weak families, which then further fosters childhood failure.
And we see the outcome, of course, from kids of single moms and to some degree single dads where they've been studied.
I mean, it's a complete disaster.
Drug use, promiscuity, hypersexuality, STDs, alcohols.
Oh, high suicide rates, high criminality, high nicotine use, high alcohol use, earlier and earlier sexual, even earlier and earlier puberties, right?
I mean, this is how basic it is that if you grow up and single moms are the ultimate are selected Petri dish and factory.
And kids who grew up in single mom households enter puberty physically a year or more earlier than other families because nature is preparing them for an R-selected world.
The absence of a father is one of the fundamental programmers of the R-selected gene set.
It fundamentally alters how the whole cycle of society goes and it would be really nice if reason and evidence could interrupt this cycle but I'm somewhat less optimistic about that than when I first started.
Given the immunity that people have to reason and evidence, it seems like this has to be disrupted through some sort of external challenge or catastrophe.
The absence of a father is also the single greatest determinant of who's going to end up in prison for violent crimes.
More than race, more than IQ, even more than social background, it's lack of a father.
These young males are not socialized.
They don't know how to channel their naturally inborn aggressive tendencies, and they end up going into crime because they've never been taught how to be men.
They just grow up as males.
You know, when you're talking about preparing a society for socialism, what you really do is if you give everybody a participant trophy and nobody gets a first place trophy, Then you are prepared for the equal outcome of a brain surgeon getting the same salary as the guy who, you know, smoked doobies out in back of the 7-Eleven.
If basically, if you're willing to say in childhood that the guy who hit six home runs gets the exact same trophy as the person who sat on the bench, then you are basically preparing them for a life where the guy who spends 25 years becoming a brain surgeon and investing all of that time and effort should get the same salary as the guy who basically is goofed off and done absolutely nothing.
So that's how that works.
It's so simple, really, when you see this theory, when you understand these things, it actually is like the difference between being in a maze and looking down on a maze.
You begin to understand how these mechanisms work and the outcome they have.
And it's astonishing how predictive this is in so many ways.
You cannot, we all know that this can't continue.
All of us who are able to, who are not able, it's not the word, willing, those of us that are willing to look at the outcome of these trends in history and the outcome of these trends just through logic and simple fundamental reason, knows that what we're doing will not last.
And we are screaming at the top of our lungs.
And the great irony here, Stephan, is That if the society does collapse, the people who will be most likely to survive are the case.
The ones who are screaming about we have to stop this are the ones who will be most likely to survive.
The ones with the guns, the ones who tend to be more rural than urban, the ones who have the ability to grow their own food or to hunt or whatever.
They're the ones that are going to survive, not the other way around.
The great irony is, if you want to use just the standard labels, is that conservatives are trying to fight for a conservative world because a conservative world allows liberals to survive.
If society goes away, if this K-built civilization goes away, there will not be any progressives, there will not be any liberals.
If we're farming now, if we're sitting around burning tires, eating rats on a spit, Right?
The amount of need for graphic designers and people who specialize in medieval renaissance poetry is going to go way down.
And what we're going to need are warriors and farmers and engineers.
And so the big irony is that we're fighting for a society that allows us to have our selected individuals in it.
I want a world where there's a Woody Allen.
I just don't want a world where Woody Allen's values Become the norm because that society is going to be taken over by people who look at Woody Allen and say, this isn't going to be very hard.
Right.
Now, if there was...
I keep going, I'm actually going to work on a presidential speech for funsies.
You know, what I actually want a president to say, and you had a wonderful, wonderful speech about...
Oh, sorry, his name escapes me for the moment.
What Mitt Romney should have said.
And that to me was fantastic.
And we'll put a link to that below.
It's such a great speech that people should really absorb it.
And your passion and commitment to the speech was very moving to me.
It was four days after the election and I had about 20 minutes of preparation.
I didn't know what was going on that night.
So I was in the moment.
Oh yeah, and you could see the liveliness of that.
To me, when speakers are speaking in the moment rather than reading, I mean, that's always the best.
So if you could give a speech to the R-selected people to sort of disabuse them of the paranoia and the fantasies they have that somehow if Ks win, they're going to put them in the microwave or something.
What is it that you would like for if you could give your sort of fantasy speech if you were given, you know, 10 minutes or whatever on a podium and everyone in the world could hear?
What is it that you would most like to get across?
Because to me at the moment, the great danger is that we end up in the enemy camps, right?
I would really like to avoid that as much as possible because, you know, there's nothing more gruesome than a civil war.
And a civil war between Rs and Ks is very brutal and won't end well for the Rs in general.
And so, but the only alternative to that kind of conflict is to try and find some way to get through to them.
And I've been sort of racking my brain.
I've not come up with as much as I'd like, but I know you've been thinking about this as well.
What would you like them?
I'll give you complete, you know, as long as you want, but what would you really like for them to understand about the world that they're facing and the choices that they could have?
Okay, I would do basically three things.
The first thing I would do is I would warn them about the dangers of the path that they're taking.
I would say that, you know, the National Socialists in Germany, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, they murdered 200 million people.
And they didn't come to power saying, hey, we're going to come in here and murder everybody.
That's not how they came to power.
They came to power saying, we're going to have jobs for everybody, we're going to reduce income inequality, and we're going to have free health care, we're going to do all these things.
But what happened was, if you look at how they succeed, the way they have to succeed is these societies historically have demonized the successful.
The Nazis demonized the Jews, and they did it because they hated the Jews, but they hated the Jews because the Jews were out competing them.
They were better at things than the rest of them were.
And what they basically said to the German people was, you know, we blame the Jews, we all hate the Jews, and we know how horrible they are, but if you join the Nazi party, or at least if you go along with us, if you vote for us, we're going to take away these businesses from the Jewish business owners, and we're going to give them to you.
And then eventually, when we're putting people in cattle Yeah, some people had some, you know, some second thoughts about it.
I don't know about this, but what they're finding out is, oh, this lovely apartment just opened up and I'm going to move into it.
It was formerly a Jewish family.
Now it's mine.
So we're going to take away from the successful and we're going to give it to you.
In the Soviet Union, they did it with the kulaks.
A kulak, the word means tight fist.
And all a kulak was was a farmer who was just a little bit better than the other farmers.
He may have been a farmer who was successful enough to have hired a guy who wasn't successful.
Maybe he had an ox or a cow, one or two horses.
Well, the Soviets said, no, these people are taking more than their fair share, so we're going to take everything from them, their seed corn included.
We're going to starve 10 million of them to death.
And it's all about envy.
It's all about taking stuff from other people.
Once you show that that is the history of the societies, then I get into where I think I really live.
And that is to take this example to something that young people today can understand.
So, for example, if you think that it's just to To take the Marxist philosophy from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
I tell the story of a speech I did at Oberlin College where seven out of ten people in the audience said they were socialists.
I said, okay, socialists, what kind of phones do you have?
I hold up my iPhone, you know, it was at i5 at the time.
He said, well, why do you want to know?
I said, well, don't worry, I'm not a Democrat.
I'm not going to steal them from you.
I just want to know what you got in terms of your phones.
So they're holding up droids and they're holding up, you know, LGs and iPhones and stuff.
I said, okay, those of you that are socialists, I want you to bring your phones down to the front of the room.
I'm not going to take them.
I'm not going to steal them.
We're going to put them in a box.
We've easily got $2,000 worth of electronics here.
And after we're done with this dog and pony show, all of us together are going to go to a pawn shop in Cleveland and we're going to get $2,000 for these phones.
That's $120 bills.
We're going to drive through the streets of Cleveland.
We're going to redistribute that wealth from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
And we'll do some good.
You'll get a chance to live up to your philosophy.
And literally, you could watch them just see the sparks coming out of their heads.
Well, hold on a minute.
This is my phone.
And I'm thinking, yes, it is.
Oh, we won't split hairs.
Technically, it's your dad's phone.
But yeah, it's your phone.
So they're all in favor for wealth redistribution as long as it's somebody else's wealth being redistributed to them.
But when they have to distribute their wealth to somebody else, all of a sudden they're rock-ripped capitalists.
They're William F. Buckley.
At the same kind of an argument with a guy who said, well, you're making some good points, but you can't possibly think that a person should have five homes when other people don't have any houses at all.
It's disgusting, isn't it?
And I said to this guy, how many sons do you have on your iPhone right now?
What do you mean?
How many songs have you got?
I don't know, 750?
Do you really need 750 songs?
Do you listen to 750 songs at the same time?
You know, every one of those songs cost a dollar.
Couldn't you get by on 50 songs and take that $700 and give it to poor people and help them out that way?
Why do you need 750 songs?
It's disgusting.
I'm ashamed to be in the same room as you.
Don't get me wrong, pal.
I don't want to be living in a world where I can tell you how much music you can buy with your money.
But you're making the exact same decision as that guy did.
He's just making it on a larger scale.
When you bring these things down to people's day-to-day existence, they realize that they are in fact doing the things that they've been told are demonic.
And it's not demonic that you should spend your own money On your own music.
Now, if you want to spend $750 on helping poor, that's your business.
Congratulations.
Knock yourself out.
But no one should be making you do it.
And suddenly, they get it.
So just to wrap up your argument, if I had 10 minutes, I would say, listen, let me give this to you in a nutshell.
And I wish I could claim this.
You're kind enough to say that you didn't want to take the antelope story, you know, because you have an honor of honor.
I'm the same way.
I wish I'd come up with this.
It's the best analogy I ever heard.
But I heard Dinesh D'Souza say this.
And maybe he didn't even come up with it.
But basically, the conservative position is this.
Let's say to everybody in the country, let's say that the total population of America consists of 100 people.
It's a nice round number.
We can just get our hands around a number like 100 people.
And let's further say that 10% of the population is incapable of pulling this cart.
We've got a cart full of stuff that we're pulling down the road and you have to work.
But let's just say that 10% of the population, what Victorians would call the deserving poor, Can't pull the cart.
They're too old.
They're too sick.
They're too young.
They've got birth defects.
They've got infirmities.
They've got the flu.
They're tuberculosis.
Whatever.
10% of the population is incapable of working.
We conservatives would say, of course these people need help.
We're not going to just shoot them and leave them in a ditch.
We can put 10 people in the cart and 90 people can pull 10 people just about the same as 100 people pulling them.
You really won't feel the difference.
Now the problem is, as we're going down the road and somebody says, you know, I got a little bit of a blister here, I think I'm going to get in the cart for a while, and then they don't get out of the cart.
Now we got 20 people in the cart and we got 80 people pulling.
You still can manage that.
But the problem, Stefan, is all of a sudden some son of a bitch realizes and he starts going down the line, he says, listen, vote for me and I'll get you a seat in the cart, okay?
You don't ever have to pull again.
Vote for me, I'll get you in the cart.
And people think, well, I'd rather ride than the people without any morals, right?
The Rs, saying, well, yeah, okay, sure.
So they vote for this person.
Now you've got 50 people in the cart and 50 people pulling, right?
Now you're in real trouble.
And I don't know what the exact number is, but when it gets to the point when there's 70 people riding and 30 people pulling or 80 or 20, then the 20 people up front who stuck there because of their own code of behavior and decency and hard work and values, there's going to come a point when those people are going to say, you know what?
Screw this.
This is ridiculous.
I am not going to pull 80 people or 70 people or 60 people who are perfectly capable of walking.
They're just going to drop the cart.
They're going to walk away.
And the point I would make to young people is that the great tragedy in this is that the people who were hurt the most are the 10 people that couldn't help themselves in the first place, because now nobody's pulling the cart, right?
That's all we're seeing.
We have compassion and charity for people who are in genuine need, but people who are not in need getting on the free train It means that sooner or later it's going to collapse and the people who cannot do it for themselves are the ones who are going to suffer the most.
If you really care about the poor and the disadvantaged, you should be in favor of hard work because that's how you can continue to pull poor and disadvantaged peoples forever.
But once you start signing up for free benefits because they're there, it's over.
When you can vote yourself money out of the treasury, it's over.
And we don't want that to happen because we like poor people and sick people and weak people.
We think they need to be protected.
That's actual moral superiority and not just unearned moral superiority.
Very, very well put.
I don't really have anything to add to that other than, well, I guess, yeah, the one thing I would say is, of course, as more and more people ride on the cart, it gets more and more unpleasant to pull it, and therefore you're creating different incentives, right?
Yeah, and when you become a chump, When you're a chump for pulling the cart, when the smart play, and not only the smart play, all the social proof is, what's the matter with you, man?
You know, when it becomes a point where you are a chump for working hard, then the collapse will happen instantly.
And to kind of wrap this up with a bow, this is the cycle of civilization, right?
This is how it works.
People work hard, they sacrifice, they have this foresight you were talking about with the seed core, and they have the ability to discipline themselves.
We're not going to eat this, even though we're hungry, because if we do, we're going to starve next year.
All of these case-selected, cooperative, honor-driven values, warriors, traders, all these traders, not traitors, All of these case-selected values build this civilization where resources become so abundant that people assume that resources are there forever, that we just can print all the money we want to.
Why not?
Free healthcare.
By the way, this is an important point.
If healthcare were free, Stephan, I'd be a progressive about healthcare.
What kind of a jerk would I have to be if I said, no, no healthcare for you.
I don't like the way you look.
You don't look like me.
No healthcare for you.
If it were free, if it were actually genuinely free, you'd be in favor of free healthcare, and so would I. But it's not free.
It costs money.
Now we have to talk about how best to pay for it.
Now we're conservatives again.
But this is kind of it, right, is this perception that resources are unlimited, that everybody acts in their own interest, and in their own interest now, and everything that made the civilization in the first place falls away, and you're back in the dark ages, and the R's are taken out of the gene pool like that, and we're back to, you know, we're back to eating rats over You know, spits on burning tires, and I don't want to go there.
Well, yeah, I mean, real compassion is smart.
There's a kind of emotional sentimentality that finds suffering unbearable to look at and must be alleviated at all costs.
And, I mean, it's sort of an instinct, Bill.
I don't really have a science behind this.
I suspect it's true.
I can't prove it.
But I think that the absence of fathers and families has created a...
Female wrap kids in bubble wrap, you know, make sure they don't ever get hurt.
And I mean, I'm a dad and my wife is, you know, my daughter wants to jump from the fifth step.
And I'm like, yeah, go for it.
What's the worst could happen?
You turn your ankle and then you learn your limitations, right?
Whereas, of course, my wife is like, no, throw herself in front and shield the child from any negatives.
And I think that's a beautiful part of female nature.
I think it's a beautiful part of male nature, the compassion versus the, you know, test your limits kind of stuff.
I think that we've kind of gone pretty far down the road as a society of finding any suffering unbearable.
And really, this is why, you know, when people come to colleges who say stuff that people don't like, they literally have hug rooms and you can go and sit in a beanbag and watch puppy videos and so on.
Yeah, that's so funny.
Oh, this literally is like Blanche DuBois hysterical.
It's like, oh my god, I saw a turned ankle in a 19th century novel and everybody faints.
This is simply making us hysterical.
It's an amygdala that never had to deal with losing a Little League baseball game.
And so now they're going out into the actual world and they're having these high-level hysterical breakdowns over trivial things because they never had a chance to develop them.
Over what was a trivial thing.
The whole idea of play is that if you fail at play, it's not the end of the world.
It's not the end of your career.
It's not your wife and family being thrown into a pit.
You lost a baseball game.
So now you have to deal with defeat.
You have to deal with failure.
And you get to be better at dealing with defeat and failure later on.
You're absolutely right.
Absolutely.
Yeah, this feminization or—and again, I don't want to sort of—feminization equals emotional hysteria.
I don't want to sort of get that cliched.
But I do think that there is a kind of toughness that men bring to child raising that has become somewhat absent.
And I was just reading this article about one of the director of missions for— These major colleges say she keeps getting these hordes of people coming in, these young men and women, who on paper are like incredible, you know, they volunteer, straight A's and all this kind of stuff.
But then they get to school and they're outside of a more rigid structure that occurs when you're still living at home and in high school and so on.
And the level of mental health problems, the depression, the anxiety, the panic attacks, the phobias, the flame-outs are huge and unprecedented in her experience.
And this idea that we can be safe by being protected is a crazy idea.
And it's very seductive in the moment.
It's like saying, well, I don't want to go to the dentist because the dentist is going to hurt me.
And it's like, well, you go because you don't want to get hurt more later.
That's right.
And accepting a small amount of suffering now to avoid a lot of suffering later is something we kind of lost track of, I think, in this society.
These are people who would rather have a low-grade toothache for the rest of their life than face the...
They just don't have the courage to go to the dentist and have a few moments.
It's not really, you know, in recovery with, you know, anesthesia.
They don't...
You're absolutely right.
They don't want to face the pain now.
They'll deal with a little bit of pain forever and it's appalling.
And, you know, when you talk about protecting people...
I think a great analogy for this is that our selected way to avoid your children drowning is to make sure that there's a lifeguard and a sign and a rope around every body of water on the face of the planet.
That every single puddle, every single pond has to be roped off, fenced off, placarded with state-approved lifeguards and you're not allowed there after hours.
The conservative answer to avoid your children from drowning is to teach them how to swim.
And if you teach them how to swim, then this isn't a problem anymore.
You don't have to lock everything down.
These kids are smart enough to know how to I get it.
They fall into a pond.
They could swim their way out.
But this is, again, it comes down to competitiveness.
And the term, I think the right term is fitness.
It's not necessarily physical fitness, at least in the modern era.
It used to be physical fitness.
But in the modern era, it's the ability to adapt yourself to a situation and to be the master of the situation.
And that's why we like competition, because we feel like we can succeed.
And see, here's the ultimate problem with this, Stefan, is that everybody can succeed.
If this theory, if this RK theory meant that genetically or racially or whatever reason, people were locked out of the game, I wouldn't want anything to do with it.
It may be true.
That wouldn't affect it.
If it were true, it's true.
There's nothing I can do whether I like it or not.
But I wouldn't be behind it.
My theory is that as we take these things that make...
We were once such a case society, I don't think human nature changes.
This doesn't change.
It changes over hundreds of millions of years.
So the fact that we could at one time be an extremely successful, gentle, disciplined, caring, safe society...
Means that we could be one again, that everybody can win through this system.
You know, they talk about the rich get richer and the poor get poor.
No, the rich get richer and the poor get richer too.
And these people would rather live in a state of uniform misery because they're so locked into this idea of competition that somebody's doing better than them.
But if you grow up with the idea of competition, Which is so demeaned by these R-selected weenie rabbit people.
It's like competition is terrible.
No, no.
Competition is good and competition allows you to become the most person that you can possibly be.
It's ennobling and it's okay to lose.
This is ultimately what it comes down to, right?
We talk about these emotional problems.
These people's fear of failure and the shame that they seem to experience when they lose.
I never felt that shame.
I didn't like losing every game of the first year I played, but I never felt ashamed.
I never was ashamed of myself.
Our coach said, well, we'll go down and get a Slurpee.
We'll get him next time.
Okay.
Well, and it's tough for people to understand.
I've made this case on my show before, and again, it's one of these short circuits that hopefully open up new avenues of thinking for those on the left, is that, you know, rich people are a big problem.
It's like, but the only reason that you can get a $100 cell phone is that somebody was willing to pay $10,000 for a cell phone 20 years ago.
And if there aren't rich people who are the cutting edge of where new technology gets sold to, when it's too expensive for the general population, if those people aren't around, you simply won't have any progress.
Because all new progress is very expensive.
And you need rich people to consume it in order to bring down the price for the masses.
And again, this is just like the idea that you can benefit from somebody being in your society who's wealthier than you are is incomprehensible.
And I saw this when I was a kid.
You know, I grew up in a very poor neighborhood and not too far over there was a neighborhood full of doctors and lawyers and people who had lots of stuff.
And I was like, okay, I'd like to go there.
That looks great.
I think, you know, I'm glad that there's some place to go because if we were all poor, what the hell would I have to aim for?
Right.
But I think other people don't feel that way when they look at that disparity.
Let me just give you one little analogy that came up a while ago, long before I was thinking about this RK stuff.
But I thought it really got to the nature of the way people look at things.
There is a gene for envy, apparently.
There is apparently a biological envy gene and a so-called fairness gene.
But this I just kind of came up with.
So just give me a quick second here.
Let's say that you work in an insurance company and you're on the 13th floor and there's just nothing but 100 cubicles there.
You're just one of these people in a corporate farm.
There's 100 cubicles.
You've been working at this insurance firm.
Insurance company as an agent for 20 years.
And it's Friday afternoon, and you're sitting there, you're getting ready to go.
And all of a sudden, the president of the company and the chief financial officer walk up to you and they say, Stefan, got a minute?
Yes.
Stefan, you've been working your butt off for 20 years now.
I know you may not think we didn't notice, but we did.
We've been watching everything that you do.
And we've been so impressed with your hard work over time that what we decided to do, just out of the blue, was we want to give you a bonus check of $100,000.
Tax has already been paid on it.
It's just a way for us to thank you for your hard work.
And they give you the check, or we'll deliver the check on Monday.
And you walk away.
What's your reaction to this?
Your reaction is, oh my god.
You immediately begin to think of all the ways that your life is going to improve.
Maybe you'll pay off your student loans, maybe you'll get that jet ski you always wanted, or the round-the-world vacation, or you get to put your kids through college.
You think about all the things that you can do.
And you're filled with joy, right?
Because your life has just gotten better.
You're filled with nothing but joy.
So, you go out and you tell your co-workers, and you say, you'll never believe what just happened.
The owner of the company came by, he offered me, he gave me a check for $100,000 free for all the work I did, and everybody else on the floor said, He came to us and made the exact same deal, but he gave us $250,000.
See your face?
Now what do you think?
What's the matter?
Why did I do as good a job as those guys?
That's right.
And now you start thinking, now you're not thinking about what you could do with $100,000.
You're thinking about what you could do with $250,000.
And you start thinking, you know, goddamn it, that Susie, who comes in late and who I'm always covering for, she gets $250,000.
I get a crummy, measly, 100 grand tax free.
That's not right.
That's not fair.
How come this guy, you know, and this guy's an alcoholic, for God's sakes, and I have to fix his reports, and he gets $250,000.
I get a measly, crummy, crappy, no good for nothing, 100 grand.
If you set up that deal so that everybody had to agree or nobody gets paid, there are people out there.
There are people out there that would forego a bonus of $100,000 because they are incapable of seeing somebody else doing better than them.
And this is a great analogy because, look, I feel it too.
I mean, I feel it.
It's like, I only get a...
But see, this is the difference between us and them.
If you concentrate on how much better your life is, it is a net gain of $100,000 to you.
I'm not going to give that up because somebody else makes $250,000.
I worked for this company once and they had no money and they weren't getting any jobs and I got a salesperson in there and she wanted 15% and she got us a job.
It turned out her 15% was the single biggest paycheck because everybody under budgeted everything.
But they said, well, we can't pay her this or we're not going to pay her in the future.
I don't care what she makes.
If I've got a job and I want $50,000 and that person charges $4,050,000 and they take the $4,000,000 and they give me the $50,000 I needed to do what I need to do, okay.
Right?
This is the essence of it.
It's a lack of envy.
And I think the final thing that you can say in terms of the morality of the capitalist argument is it makes me the master of my own destiny, right?
I'm not a raft floating down the river of life.
I go the directions I want to go.
I control my destiny.
If I want to work hard and make more money and build my education and my skill set, I can.
If I want to just goof off like certain individuals and just smoke doobies on the beach in Hawaii and hand out forms in Chicago, I can do that too.
That's your choice.
I'm not here to tell you.
But that's really what it is.
And forcing people to run the race slower than they can so that everybody crosses the finish line at the speed of the slowest runner, which is what socialism is, is unfair, it's immoral, and it's evil.
Well, I, of course, really, really appreciate the chat.
I want to, of course, remind people, you've got to go and watch Bill's speeches and his presentations through Afterburner, the other stuff you do for PJ Media.
Hugely recommended.
And, of course, BillWhittle.com is where you go to get the latest.
A huge pleasure.
Thanks so much.
And, again, go to AnonymousConservative.com to get this guy's book.
You know, give him some cheddar because he's been working really hard on the hamster wheel of original thought, and we want to give due credit to him.
A real pleasure, Bill.
Thanks, of course, so much.
I hope we can do it again.
Thank you, Stephan.
We have, you know, a lot of what we do at Bill.com is membership-based, so if you want to become a member, you certainly help us get that message out there.
I've been a Doug fan forever, and I'd love to do this again just at your earliest convenience.
