Dec. 11, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:17:01
3528 Is Feminism Evil? - Call In Show - December 9th, 2016
Question 1: [0:00] – “It would appear that everything about feminism has undermined marriage in the West. Could it be said that feminism is evil for this reason alone, assuming that marriage is in fact necessary to keep Western (or indeed any) civilization and its traditions going? If feminism is indeed evil, then how are we to cure this evil?”Question 2: [56:30] – “We can all agree that a 3-year-old bears no responsibility for the events in his life, while a 30-year-old bears complete responsibility for the events in his life. At what point does one become responsible for the events in one's life?”Question 3: [1:11:58] – “It is my assessment that the left has destroyed at the very least the nuclear family and consequently gender roles by creating a nanny state. However, it seems that my dear group, the atheists have destroyed any sense of community that extends beyond family and are pushing a sort of hedonistic anarchy. It seems more and more that we need something but being an atheist, the idea of going back is akin to being asked to believe in Santa Claus again. What can we (as atheists) use as a long-term supplement?”Question 4: [2:05:21] – “I've been listening to your show over the years and I think I've identified logical objections that Stefan has with the existence of a possible God. I don't want to make too many assumptions but the first is that he seems to believe matter is necessary for the existence of consciousness, and therefore God cannot exist because he would be immaterial by definition. Why do you think Consciousness is derived from matter?”Freedomain 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.freedomainradio.com/donate
Claire wrote in and said, It would appear that everything about feminism has undermined marriage in the West.
Could it be said that feminism is evil for this reason alone, assuming that marriage is in fact necessary to keep Western, or indeed any, civilization and its traditions going?
If feminism is indeed evil, then how are we to cure this evil?
That's from Claire.
Oh, hey Claire, how you doing tonight?
Hi, Stefan.
Good to be on the show.
Great to have you.
Great to have you.
How are you tonight?
Very well, very well.
It's midnight now, but I'm raring to go.
Well, last time I heard that I was a single man.
But it is, you know, we'll try and keep it relatively succinct for once in my internet existence.
So, I thought about this a lot today, and I have some thoughts, of course, but first and foremost, what do you mean by feminism?
Let's make sure we're kind of on the same page.
Well, I've thought and thought about it too, and I think I've basically distilled its main principle, which is the fact that, you know, it's saying...
It's okay to have sex before marriage.
And that is really the thing that undermines marriage, in my view.
Because I have this sort of price of sex theory about marriage in that, I guess even in the days of the patriarchy, marriage is the most expensive form of sex.
And, you know, if premarital sex is sort of very easy to get, then the incentive to get married is, well, almost non-existent now.
So that would undermine marriage.
So, I mean, sorry, just so I sort of can translate this, because to the younger set, this sounds like you're stepping straight out of a Jane Austen novel.
So, I mean, women had a monopoly on saying yes to sex, and women would only say yes to sex in return for a commitment from the man to stay with them to, you know, as the song says, to love you for the rest of your life.
The ring of the finger stuff, yeah.
Right, right.
Don't hand me low in lines and keep your hands to yourself.
And so when women kind of ganged up in a sense and created this Praetorian guard around the sacred eggs, then women had the right to say, I am not going to give sex until I get a commitment for lifelong monogamy.
And once women start giving sex without the requirement for a commitment, you know, everyone has A tiny little bit of fun, or maybe a lot of fun, and then society collapses.
Is it something like that?
Yeah, yeah, because, you know, the thing is, you know, if it's true that men are mainly motivated by sex and they'll do anything for sex, including marry, if you remove that incentive for them to get sex because they can, you know, have it without having to marry the woman, then why would they?
Having kids, being stuck to one woman for the rest of their lives, well, that's very boring and a very onerous responsibility.
and expensive.
Yeah.
And so, you know, if you say it's okay now, it's okay for everybody to have as much sex as they like, then they'll always think there's something, you know, better around the corner and never commit.
And then, of course, a woman waits too long and then her, you know, no more eggs or they're too old and, you know, her time has come and So, you know, you miss all these opportunities in your life.
And people don't know or they think things are different now and it doesn't matter.
But, you know, women still age at the same rate as we used to age.
And men still want the same things from women.
But we're not allowed to sort of accept this.
Right.
Well, I mean, I wouldn't say not allowed.
It's just that there's a lot of pushback against it.
As I've said for many years, and many other people have said as well, and I'm sure you're aware, a woman's highest sexual market value is when she's young.
Because that's when her fertility and her energy, right?
It's not just fertility.
It is energy.
You know, babies require a lot of energy.
And as a somewhat creaky middle-aged dad, I do sometimes miss the boundless energy of my early 20s to be able to take on all comers and stay up all night and all that kind of stuff.
So there's sort of youth, there's energy, and of course the markers of what we call sexy are in general the markers of genetic fitness for reproduction.
So one of the things that is necessary for children to succeed is the deferral of gratification.
And so why in a time when Fatty, greasy, sugary food is everywhere.
Why is thinness considered to be a mark of sexiness?
Whereas in the past, if you look at Botticelli paintings, I mean, those were some 220 women who were floating around the lily pads.
And of course, when food was scarce, then it was a mark of reproductive fitness to have lots of food.
Yes.
Now that food is plentiful, it's a mark of reproductive fitness to be thin because that means you're able to defer gratification and the deferral of gratification is associated with intelligence.
So, and this is just one of a billion things that we could talk about, but a woman's sexual market value is at her highest when she's in her, you know, early 20s or whatever, and then it sort of starts to decline mid to late 20s.
Now, a man's sexual market value is fairly low in his early 20s because he hasn't proven himself as a master of resource gathering and resource provision.
And so the woman kind of has to take a gamble on how his future productivity is going to be, what his future earnings are going to be.
Now, the man does have to take a gamble because a woman, of course, even though she may have all of the outward signs of reproductive fitness, may in fact be infertile.
And one in ten married couples struggles with infertility.
I think that's a little higher these days than, of course, it was in the past.
Because people are getting married later.
And so, yes, the man may be of great promise.
He may, you know, come from a great family.
He may be heading into a great education.
But, you know, just maybe he finds the demon weed and his life kind of slides him by and the woman is kind of stuck with kids and a dud and so on.
And so, as women age, their sexual market value declines.
And as men age, they have proven themselves, whether they will or won't be reproductive adults.
Sorry, whether they will be productive gatherers of resources for a wife and children.
So a man who's 30, you can pretty much tell if he's going to be a success in the marketplace or not.
There's an old saying that says, a man seen on a bus after the age of 30 has been a failure in life.
And there's a reason for that.
Whereas a woman, of course...
You know, it's the old thing.
Men age like wine and women age like milk.
A woman, of course, who gets older, it's two things.
Number one, she has...
Fewer healthy, youthful eggs, of course, and therefore, you know, risks of non-pregnancy or risks of birth defects and so on go up, number one.
And number two, she has probably, if she's attractive, she has accumulated an excess of sexual experiences which make her pretty unsuited for long-term monogamy.
And I don't know why this is the case.
I'm trying to put it as nicely as possible.
You know, you can't turn a door into a housewife.
I think it rhymes with that.
But...
She has accumulated a lot of sexual partners probably by the time she's in her early 30s, and there's a tragic linear progression.
The more sexual partners a woman has accumulated over time, the more she is likely to divorce her husband, the more she is likely to break up her family and take him to the family court and destroy his life and so on.
So eggs are less valuable, and her heart has become more malevolent and dangerous to be around.
And again, there are exceptions and so on, but These are the big generalities.
So I just wanted to make sure or see if we're on the same page regarding this stuff or not.
Well, absolutely.
Yes, yes.
You've exactly stated my position.
Now, do you think it was the pill or do you think it was the welfare state or do you think it was something else that turned youth into this grabby fleshy orgy of immediate gratification and to hell with the future and my heart and diseases and all that kind of stuff?
Well, I mean, yeah.
I mean, you know, it's a combination of the two, isn't it?
I mean, the pill tells you that, you know, it's okay to sleep around because you won't get pregnant.
And the welfare state says if you get knocked up and have a kid or two, it's okay because the state will provide.
So, you know, you have two things saying it's okay.
Just go right ahead and do whatever feels good.
And people have, and then, you know, now you can't tell them anything because they're not going to stop just because you say, you know, it's not such a good idea after all.
And by the time they realize it, you know, it's kind of too late, right?
Yeah.
By the time it arises emotionally.
That's only 15 years or so, you know, to get, you know, okay, if you're going to be generous about it, before she's 30, to, you know, find a reasonably decent guy with, you know, good prospects.
I mean, I suppose in the old days it was a young man with prospects because, you know, most women couldn't, you know, find somebody who's already, you know, rich and famous and, you know, as well as tall, dark and handsome.
So, as you were saying earlier, she had to take a chance on him.
And, you know, I guess in the old days, you know, they would meet each other's families and, you know, questions would be asked about the background and that kind of thing.
And, you know, the family helped, you know.
Oh, yeah.
You hear nothing except about the evils of arranged marriages.
But I got to tell you, Claire, between you, me, and...
I guess the rest of the world.
Sometimes that doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world because young people are, by mature standards, insane.
They are drunk with hormones.
They make short-term decisions.
Their brains aren't even reaching full maturity for women until their early to mid-twenties and for men until their mid to late-twenties.
And so for young people to make decisions, the most important decision you're going to make in your life is who you marry, if you want to get married and have it.
And really, is a young person, you know, drunk on lust and hormones and so on, are they really going to make the kind of intelligent and sensible decisions that we would want them to make for society to be, for them to have stable, happy marriages and all of that kind of stuff?
Now, because I remember when I was younger, I think young, now I'm 50, right?
There were the good girls and there were the bad girls.
And, of course, the bad girls were like these black hole gravity wells of, yeah, it's fun, but you're going to pay for it.
But the good girls, and it must have been incredible, looking back, there was a girl who quite liked me, and she played cello, and she was a nice girl.
A nice girl.
But for the nice girls to try and compete with the Not always Italian, but often.
You know, the bad girls, the nasty girls, so to speak.
It was really tough.
It was really tough.
It's sort of like pacifism in a time of war.
Being a good girl in a time, you know, when the V-power is being thrown around like a boomerang is a tough row to hoe, I guess you could say.
And this is really frustrating.
Did you get any warnings about, you know, avoid this kind of girl, you know, maybe have fun with them but never marry them, that kind of talk with your father?
No, my father wasn't around when I was growing up and my mom sure wasn't in much of a position to warn me about bad girls for reasons that I've gone into.
Oh, just a few times on this show.
But no, that wisdom has been lost.
You know, where you just take someone who's drunk with lust and you just pour gigantic Niagara sluices of ice cubes down their shorts, slap them around the head with a wet fish and tell them to snap out of their sexual hypnosis because it's going to take them Thelma and Louise style off a cliff.
That wisdom seems to have gone, go for it!
You know, now it's like, go for it!
And the damage it does to your heart, the damage it does to your capacity to have relationships.
We've had lots of women call into the show who are in their late 20s, early 30s, and it's a mess.
They're looking back saying, where did the last 10 years go?
And, as you, I'm sure, are well aware, They look around in their early 30s and who's left?
Who's left to pick from?
Who's left to choose from?
Well, guys who are divorced, you know, who are broke.
Usually those two things are kind of synonymous.
Guys who have children by other women.
Guys who don't really have any real, I don't know what you'd call them, jobs or savings or plans or ambitions or career paths or anything like that.
You're left really picking over the detritus.
In your 20s, you're kind of in the front of the pizza parlor and you can order anything you want and it'll be delivered to you hot and free.
By the time you're in your 30s, you're kind of scrabbling around in a burlap sack out behind the pizza shop hoping that the dump truck to pick up the garbage doesn't come so soon that you can't find something kind of tasty in there among the orange peels and coffee grounds and so on.
It's a really, you know, when it switches, it switches so fast.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Sorry, one last thing.
And then what happens is that the women who are in their early 30s or mid-30s, guys like 10 to 15 years older, are kind of floating around saying, hey, how you doing?
You know, and they're like, I don't know.
It's a real swift.
Because before, they could get guys 5, 10 years younger.
And then within the space of a year or two, boom, they're stuck with, you know, back in the Nazguls.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, but I'm sort of saying also that there are sort of younger men who are quite happy to hook up with older women, knowing that these older women don't want to have children.
And, you know, so there you go with the opportunity cost of being in that sort of relationship.
I mean, in demographic terms.
It's what I mean.
Sorry, you're saying that they want to have sex with older women because the older women don't want to have children?
That's right.
Well, that's a risky game.
Because how do you know that the women don't want to have children?
They tell you.
Well, if they're older than you and they're earning more than you, I guess, you know, they're not going to.
Or maybe, you know, if they're already 40, then, you know, they're probably...
How do you know they're 40?
This is the problem with the casuals.
How do you know they're 40?
How do you know that they can't get pregnant?
We had a caller in recently.
You know, this woman said, oh, I had this issue with my uterus or something like that.
I can't get pregnant.
The doctors have told me.
And so he's like, okay, woohoo, unprotected sex.
And like, boom, it's a miracle baby.
Welcome to baby jail for the next 20 years.
So it is really, really dicey stuff.
And, you know, They said, oh, quote from Jurassic Park, life will find a way.
You know, we are here because our parents decided to have children or decided to have children even if they didn't decide to have children.
Life will find a way.
When a woman gets baby rabies in her 30s, she kind of goes crazy.
It doesn't take a lot of Maury Povich shows to realize that some women can be pretty conniving when it comes to getting their little bundle of joy secured away in the hatch.
It is a brutal experience.
Of course, all of this is solved if old school style ethics and morality simply We're to come back into being, which is to say sex is a wonderful and healthy part of any mature adult relationship.
Sex is essential.
It's a beautiful thing, but it's easily tarnished.
You know, it's like a Ming vase.
You know, it's a beautiful thing, but you don't want to play rope-a-dope or catch with it because you're going to shatter it pretty quickly.
Sorry, you were about to say?
Well, it just occurred to me that if a woman is choosing a husband, she's going to be looking for other stuff apart from him being really fit and hot for the night.
And it concentrates her mind if she knows that she can only choose a husband who...
That her sex partner must also be her husband.
But if it can be anyone, then she's not going to be so fussy.
And I guess marriage is the rule that forces us all, man and woman, to choose more carefully.
And maybe that sort of helps us produce better quality children or care about them and bring them up properly than if we didn't get married.
Yeah, it rewards virtue.
If you want to understand how marriage used to work, think that you could only hire one person to run your business with and you could never fire them, ever.
How many interviews are you going to have?
How careful are you going to be?
You're going to have to be damn careful because this is someone you're going to be binding your life to forever.
But see, the way that this all used to work, of course, as you know, It used to work through ostracism.
Ostracism is one of these incredibly powerful ways of running society that does not violate the non-aggression principle.
To not interact with someone is not a violation of their rights.
And it is not immoral in any way.
It doesn't require a state.
It's incredibly effective because all that requires is that you do nothing.
And the way it used to work, of course, is that when women Or men, but in particular women who were understood, at least in the West, to be the gatekeepers of sex.
People get upset with me when I say, well, it's women's fault.
Well, women are the gatekeepers.
Men will have sex with just about anything that moves, you know, within a couple of days of it being alive.
And women are a little bit more restrained because naturally they pay a lot higher price for pregnancy than a man does.
And so in the past, it used to be that if a woman broke the rules and started sleeping around, there would be a pretty savage ostracism, not just of her, but of her parents.
People would say, we cannot have that family in her house.
We will be stained by association.
We will experience guilt by association.
So we cannot have these...
This family is now...
They're non-people.
They're un-persons.
They are banished from all decent society.
And this used to be portrayed, as you look at Samuel Richardson or other sort of pre-Victorian writers, it used to be considered a very just and healthy thing to do this.
And now, of course, it is tragic and people are such squares and it's just all kinds of repressive and horrible and scarlet women and you've got to have sympathy for the people who've broken the rules.
That's not how it used to be.
And of course, the problem with the welfare state is you're not allowed to ostracize people.
I mean, what are the many problems with the welfare state?
You're no longer, the welfare state violates the basic principle of social cohesion and of social management and the enforcing of social rules is shattered by the welfare state because now you may enormously disapprove of someone's behavior.
Like, stop having children with all these different men.
You may really disapprove, but you can't ostracize them anymore.
And this has taken the last restraint off how societies used to work.
Because people say, oh, you know, in the past, well, you didn't need as big a government.
It's like, well, that's because social ostracism was possible.
There's a reason, and Europe is going to find this out pretty soon, there's a reason why there was no welfare state, mostly.
Between the fall of the Roman Empire and, I guess, Bismarck's late 19th century resurrection of it, there's a reason why.
Because when you have a welfare state, and I don't view the pill as, oh, it was the pill.
No, the pill just gives a woman control over her fertility.
That doesn't mean that she then has to act like a cat in heat 24-7.
It just gives a woman control over her fertility.
And the big problem is the transfer of resources against the will of people who want to enforce moral rules.
You can go and lecture a woman, you know, anywhere near your husband or your boyfriend because she's, you know, bad news, whatever, whatever.
So be policed by women themselves because, you know, men couldn't be trusted.
It's the old question, and it's a terrible question for women to...
To have to answer.
And the question is to put out or not to put out.
To offer up sex or to not offer up sex.
Now, in the past, of course, there was the failings.
There were women joined together saying, no, no, no, no.
We don't give sex without a commitment.
We know that men have a different reproductive strategy in some ways than we do, so we need the commitment in order to give up sex.
And women who gave up sex paid a very heavy price.
Like, sorry, women who offered sex without commitment paid a very heavy price.
And women and men felt entirely justified in banishing them from participation in society because they were cheapening the goods up at auction.
And they were like, excess vagina is like fiat currency, you know?
But, you know, with slightly more lifelong paper cuts, right?
So if you have excess vagina, it cheapens the sexual market value of sex.
And you have to punish people who break those kinds of rules.
And you can't throw them in jail because it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle to have voluntary sex with someone.
But you need to be able to punish them in some way because it is so destructive to have Open and unconstrained sexuality marching its way across the landscape.
It is a drug addiction like cocaine because you get this high.
And I was reading the story about this woman who was in her early to mid-twenties.
She was a Tinder addict, right?
So Tinder is this app where you swipe, see whether people like you or not.
And she was like, oh, you know, every time I feel down, I'll just sit there and check Tinder and people will say if they like what they see and then I feel better about myself and so on.
So it is, I think it's quite addictive for a lot of people.
And of course, a woman wants to be loved for who she is.
A woman wants to be loved for her character, for her qualities, for her virtue, for her integrity, for her wisdom, her counsel, for being a great friend.
That, of course, is what everybody wants.
Rich guys don't want to be loved because they're rich.
They want to be loved because of who they are.
And women don't want to be loved or don't want to be valuable to someone for mere short-term sexual access.
Because that's very humiliating.
There's a reason why it's called the walk of shame.
And there's a reason why women lash out if they think that their sexuality is going to be that which brings a man in and hooks him in.
And then he just uses her, tosses her aside like an old Kleenex and marches off to his next conquest.
There's a reason why women lash out so much, because we all want to be loved for who we are, but women, when they're young, have this ultimate card to play of having a vagina, right?
Having sexual access availability.
And if they play that card, it's very humiliating because what you're saying is, well, no one's going to like me just for me.
A man is not going to love me for me.
He only loves my vagina.
And that is a very soul and spirit and heart punishing reality to face up to for a lot of women.
It's very painful.
Yes, and the rules are not clear, so people aren't really sure what to do, you know, maybe I should because, you know, I want him to be interested and, you know, and, you know, people are confused and then they get the rules wrong, it doesn't work out and then they get angry.
I mean, men get it wrong too, you know, and perhaps what we need is for the rules to be clearer and for, you know, more obvious punishments to happen when, you know, people break the rules or we're just not clear about it.
What do you mean?
What do you mean the rules to be clearer and what would the punishments be?
I mean, what you were just describing, you know, ostracism, you know, reputational damage, you know, so, you know, some form of punishment needs to be there or we all just ignore the rules.
I mean, that's what we're like.
You know, we don't stop until we feel pain or shame.
And so, you know, unfortunately, that's necessary.
I mean, it sounds a bit brutal, but, you know, I know what I'm like.
Sometimes I just do things until, you know, something stops me.
Or somebody tells me in, you know, very strong terms that, you know, I shouldn't do it anymore.
Yes, what the British would say, that's just not on.
I remember hearing that when I was a kid.
I said this before once.
I was lining up to buy tickets to go and see Phantom of the Opera years ago in Toronto.
I thought I was joining a line, but it turns out that there was one of these annoying gaps in the line.
Of course, I should have said to everyone, are you standing in line?
Are you standing in line?
Anyway, with the woman I was with, we stood in the line to pick up the tickets.
I thought it was the end of the line.
It wasn't.
There was a British man and woman Who gave me that cold-eyed, soul-shattering stare that only British people seem to be capable of.
And I said, well, that's a bit much, isn't it?
And it's like, oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to be a bit much.
So I'm like, I apologize profusely, of course.
And, you know, they then thawed and so on.
We chatted a little bit.
But that's a bit much, isn't it?
And it's just like, how powerful is that?
You don't need guys there with clubs.
You don't need security guards.
That's a bit much, isn't it?
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Right?
So that's how society should enforce its rules.
It's not on.
That's a bit much, I say.
People need to know what the rules are.
I don't think they even know what the rules are.
Well, young people don't know what the rules are because they're young.
They're not supposed to know what the rules are.
They're supposed to be part of the creative destruction that challenges the rules.
They're supposed to be the waves crashing up against the existing rules to see if they hold and they stand.
And it is up to the will of their elders to absorb those body blows of youthful incomprehension of ancient rules.
It's up to the elders to absorb those body blows and to hold fast.
Every young generation crashes like this giant tsunami up against the sandcastles of their elders and if they're made of sand they crumble and if they're made of concrete they stand.
And the welfare state just turns everything into sand.
But what you're saying is that these rules are discretionary, but if they're mandatory, then people will know, you know, if I park there, I'm going to get a fine, so I better not park there, or I better not park there between, you know, whatever time I'm not supposed to park there.
So people know.
But it's sort of, oh, you might get away with it today, but not tomorrow, but I'm not really sure if the warden's coming, you know, and then everybody gets confused again.
So, you know, the rules should be clear.
Well, they won't be clear, because the only clear rules are those that are enforced horizontally through ostracism.
I mean, we're not talking about criminal, I'm not talking about criminal, just like rules that are beneficial for society.
The Muslims have a very clear rule about, you know, a hundred lashes, that kind of thing.
So, you know, it's in their Sharia law.
I know we don't like the sound of it, but it's very clear, isn't it?
Well, and it is not just—we're talking really about the state punishment for deviations from religious doctrine.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Let me finish my thought, and then you can go.
But in the Muslim cultures and in other cultures, there is a very strong enforcement of rules in a familiar sense, in a community sense, in an extended family sense, among friends.
And I'm not just talking about the guys with clubs who, you know, in certain countries sort of run around hitting women who aren't dressed in the— In an appropriate way, which is fairly modern.
In terms of if you break the rules in certain cultures, you will be significantly punished even if the government never hears about it.
Even if there's no charges brought up against you.
And this is the power that they have to enforce their social rules very strongly.
And it frankly gives them an edge and a considerable edge over Western countries which is all just complete mad chaos.
But here's the thing.
The rules are for prevention of disaster, right?
That's why we have rules.
We have rules to prevent disasters.
And they're hard-won rules, and they've sort of been achieved through this huge number of disasters in the world.
And when you take away the negative consequences of bad behavior, What are the rules for?
The rules are to say don't have sex before you get married because you might get pregnant and if you get pregnant you probably won't be able to keep the baby or if you do keep the baby you will be unmarriable.
And even if you don't keep the baby if other people find out that you had a baby then you will be unmarriable because Lots of fish in the sea.
And if this fish you pull out of the ocean has two heads, well, you probably might want to wait for one a little less glowy and radioactive.
And so when you take away the negative consequences, what are the rules for?
The rules are to avoid.
It's sort of like saying, well, if there was some magic pill that you could take that would undo all of the damage of smoking, then what case would you really have For someone, and it was free, a penny or whatever it was, then what case would you really have to tell a smoker who loves smoking to stop smoking?
Why would he bother?
Why would he bother to quit smoking?
Because there are no negative consequences to smoking anymore.
You take a pill every day, completely undoes the damage of cigarettes.
So, what's the point?
If you take away the negative consequences, and by that, again, I'm not to say, oh, well, the pill changed everything.
No, the pill didn't change everything.
Because if you still got pregnant, or if you had STDs, then that would lower your sexual market value.
Because with the pill, you had to get abortion, right?
Well, you didn't have to, but there was, of course, a lot of push towards abortion.
So that a woman could have promiscuous sex, could get pregnant, could have a baby, could abort the baby.
And no one would be the wiser.
Now that, of course, is interesting because in a small town, everyone knows everyone else's business.
You can't really hide these things, which is why women used to have to go away.
You know, you'd go away for six months.
The moment you start to show, you would go away, stay with the relatives, and then, you know, come back or whatever, and everyone would pretend they didn't know exactly what happened.
But now with the big massive vanity trail left by social media addicts, it's pretty easy to find out about someone's history and what they've been up to and how many people they've dated and where they've gone and, you know, if they ever had kids or were ever married.
I mean, it's all over the place.
We count it back to a small...
Town knowledge of the other person.
And I think that is beginning to change things, which is why I think the younger generation is much more conservative, having seen the disasters of let's try a life without restraint and a life without rules.
They've seen where that's taken their parents.
They're massive, shattered craters of families and divorces and fights over custody.
And I mean, it's this big, giant, ugly mess.
And they're like, well...
We now have to try and clean it up as best we can and there's nothing like cleaning up someone else's messes to help you realize the value of certain rules.
Now, sorry, is there something you wanted to add?
Only that, you know, it is the law that limits our immorality, isn't it?
So if we know something's definitely illegal and we're going to get punished if we do it, then we don't do it.
If it's sort of, well, maybe you'll get away with it today, then we might carry on doing it.
So maybe it's better to have clearer mandatory rules about What's allowed and what's not?
What rules?
What do you mean?
Give me an example of rules that you think would be good?
Like, you know, you don't have sex before marriage, and if you do, you know, punishment follows.
Something like that.
But, you know, if it's discretionary, then, well, you know, well, I mean, you can't sort of get back into what it was in the olden days now because, you know, so much effort needs to be made to make the point and enforce the rule and, you know, whatever.
Just get rid of the welfare state.
And the welfare state, and then women who get pregnant will have to give up their kids, or their parents will have to pay, in which case their parents will have a big incentive to keep their daughters from being, you know, the local town penis carousel, right?
So, I mean, if you get rid of the welfare state, then the negative repercussions of untrammeled sexuality fall back upon the individuals, or And I would want this, of course.
I would want to, if it was a free market healthcare system, I would want a participation in a healthcare plan that paid out precisely zero dollars to anyone who got an STD. I wouldn't want to be part of that plan.
I'm happily married.
I'm monogamous.
It's not going to happen.
So I don't want any STD coverage for myself.
And if there are people who are signing up saying, oh yeah, man, I really got to have that STD coverage.
Give me something bulletproof.
Give me something that's going to give me a suit of armor, a space suit.
Give me a hazmat suit.
Well, so they'll pay more, right?
They'll pay more if they want STD coverage and they will all of that stuff.
So in a free market, there's no welfare state.
It doesn't mean that women who get pregnant immediately are thrown in jail or something.
It just means that the financial consequences of them getting pregnant are going to accrue to them and are going to accrue to their parents.
So I would not want to be part of a health care Insurance system that paid for abortions.
Why?
Not gonna need it.
Not gonna need it.
But of course, everybody who wants abortions and everyone who wants to sleep around, they all want everyone else to pay for their abortions and their STDs treatments if they're available.
It's natural, of course, right?
And so they lobby the government and say, well, you got to include this because otherwise you're square or whatever it is, right?
So there's ways that you accumulate the negative consequences of bad behavior to the individuals.
And last but not least, You've got to get rid of old age pensions, government old age pensions.
Because what happens, and we'll talk about this a bit more with a caller later, but very briefly, one of the reasons you have children is so that you have someone, you have people who will hopefully be interested in helping to take care of you when you get older.
They are your pension.
They are.
This is how it used to work, right?
You used to pour your money into your children.
Your children would grow up wealthier than you were because the economy used to grow.
I say this to the younger people like this.
It used to happen.
So the economy used to grow.
So you take money, you pour it into your children.
They end up wealthier than you would have been if you'd saved that money or even invested it.
They end up wealthier and then you get more money and more resources.
You get not just the money, but the person who's going to come over and hold your hand and help you deal with the effects of aging and all that, right?
And so the people who don't have children Who didn't have children.
I guess they could save a lot of that money, but generally they wouldn't, right?
Generally they just blow that money, right?
So they'd end up really broke when they were old.
And if they hadn't got good health insurance, right, then you'd look at those people and say, ooh, I don't want to end up like that.
No matter what happens, I don't want to end up like that.
So, I mean, it's not the only reason why you'd have kids, but it was an important reason.
Your kids are your pension.
Your kids are your helpmates when you get older.
Now, the government, of course, steps in and provides the resources that children would have provided to people if they didn't have children.
They provide the health care, they provide the pensions, they provide the nursing care, they provide the old age home care, like whatever, right?
And so, in a sense, what's the point of having children if you get all of the comfort and money benefits later on in life if you don't have children?
You know, children, they're a lot of work.
They can be messy.
They can get up early.
They can get sick.
They're very expensive.
And this is the other thing, too.
Marriages make more money than singletons, right?
Of course, right?
I mean, marriages make more money than singletons.
But of course, if the single people end up taking money from the married people, because single people make less money than married people, and so married people pay more taxes, so you take all the money from married people, you give it to single people, so that single people don't end up being sad, lonely, broke, old when they hit the last eighth of their life.
And so, yeah, I mean, you get all the benefits without any of the costs.
So all of these weird things that have happened that have completely skewed everybody's rational perspectives on what is important and necessary, you know, I don't think more laws and more government involvement in this stuff is going to do anything but cause more problems.
Well, I suppose you're just saying, you know, when bad stuff happens, you know, after the thing is done, people will eventually learn not to do it.
But that might be a bit slow.
That's all I'm saying.
So, you know, if you just say, no, you can't do it, and if you do it, you get punished, then people might get the message sooner.
That's all I'm saying, really.
Because, you know, we all think we're going to get away with it, don't we?
You know, whatever thing it is that...
We know we're not really supposed to do smoking or whatever.
All the rules of our elders are mere blind prejudice and so on.
And there's this weird thing that goes on, particularly in the left, and you probably see it all the time, if you look when it certainly is, there when you look for it or learn how to look for it, which is they just psychologize everyone.
Like in America, they say, well, why...
Are white people voting for Trump?
Well, white people are voting for Trump because white people are angry that they're losing control and that the society is becoming more multicultural and they're lashing out.
They just come up with this...
There's this thing that happened in the mid-20th century where Marxists gave up trying to prove that Marxism worked because it didn't and it doesn't and it never will.
And so instead they turned to psychologizing their opponents and trying to sort of explain, well, you see, it's because of this, that, and the other.
The reality is that...
Goy Marxists are reacting to difficulties with their father and Jewish Marxists are reacting to difficulties with their mother.
But that's a topic for another time.
That's not even just my opinion.
It's the opinion of a lot of analysts.
So, of course, it's all projection, as you would expect from people in the left.
So, there's all this psychologizing that goes on, and if you don't have a good argument, it's easy to psychologize, and it's easy to say, well, the old people, they're just squares, and they don't have any good reasons for their rules, and they're just stuck on these rules, and let's just be free, and so you just psychologize everyone who's got these rules, rather than saying, hey, I wonder why these rules exist.
I wonder why these rules exist.
And...
Psychologizing is the habit of the emotionally immature.
Rather than dealing with arguments or evidence, you just make up stories wherein other people have emotional or mental health issues and, hey, bingo, bingo, bongo, you're certainly correct without having to actually work for it.
But I don't know.
Feminism is not evil.
Feminism, it's just words.
Feminism is just words.
Arguments is just...
Ideas.
There's nothing evil about ideas.
And this is why free speech is so important.
Sorry, Holland.
Are you sure that they're not evil ideas?
I mean, you know, like Nazism and, you know...
No, no, no.
Nazism, listen.
Nazism was a series of arguments.
It wasn't until they got control of the state that it became evil.
Their ideas, I think, are absolutely wrong.
I think there are ideas that are corrupt.
I think there are ideas that are ugly.
But evil is in the action.
Because if you start to think ideas are evil, then you inevitably get into censorship and control of people's capacity to speak freely and debate even the worst ideas.
The worst ideas need to get the greatest sunlight.
And Nazism, we only know about Nazism.
Because they gained power, they gained control of the state, were able to bring the power of the state behind their ideas.
It was the violence of the state that was evil.
It was the violence that they inflicted on others that was evil.
But if you look at the ten points of the Nazi party, I mean, most of those have actually been enacted in the West already.
If you look at the major points of the Communist Party in the 19th century, they've all been enacted with maybe one or two exceptions in the West.
And Marxism is an unbelievably horrible and wrongheaded ideology.
But if it's just Marx muttering in a library, who cares?
If it's Marx muttering to his friends, who cares?
If it's people publishing little journals where they argue these, who cares, right?
But it's when people don't have a strong counter-argument and these people get a hold of the awesome power of the state, that's when things go wrong.
But that's the fault with the state, not with the ideas.
The ideas in and of themselves harm no one.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Okay, you know, I sort of think, you know, sometimes, you know, if you have an idea and it's not a good idea, then I suppose you could say it's evil.
Because, you know, it's obviously, you know, not a good idea.
And it might be safe to call it evil.
Well, no, no, sorry.
Sorry, just to be clear.
Ideologies, right?
You can have an idea saying...
Some guy could have an idea that he wants to hire a hitman to kill his wife.
Okay, that's a pretty bad idea, and that you should not wait for the violence to manifest in order to act against that person to prevent the murder, right?
But feminism is an ideology.
It is a way of attempting to explain things in the world, right?
So there have been significant biological disparities between men and women, as you know, throughout history.
Women throughout history have basically gone from puberty to childbirth to death.
I mean, childbirth, breastfeeding, child raising, childbirth, breastfeeding, child raising, childbirth, that rinse and repeat until you die in childbirth or die probably quite gratefully in your 40s after your eggs run out of juice.
And so because Women were disabled, creating more human beings, and because so many human beings died, infant mortality throughout history was ridiculously high.
So women basically had, you had to have, in order to just maintain your tribe, women had to be pregnant for like 20 years straight, from like 13 to 33.
Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, because so many of the children would die.
So women just, you know, it was like some horrible assembly line where most of the iPads come out broken.
To get two iPads, you've got to make like 15 iPads or something, right?
So women didn't end up with a lot of political power.
And women didn't end up with a lot of economic power.
I mean, they did, but indirectly, right?
And they did politically even, but indirectly in that they would cancel their husbands and so on.
And so the fact that Men were out there, you know, fighting and battling and hunting and doing all that kind of stuff and women were disabled by having babies meant that there was a big disparity in males and females.
And this goes not just in terms of economics or in terms of politics, but it also goes in terms of basic genetics, the genetics of the brain, right?
So women tend to be clustered more around the median Whereas men are more around the extremes, right?
You get more brilliant men and you get more retarded, homeless, idiot men, right?
That's just the way that it works in terms of the scattershot.
Men have a much more positive relationship to risk than women do because women have to feed children and you don't want to do a lot of risk when it comes to that because kids need to be fed regularly.
Whereas, of course, a man who risks, like winner take all, seize the day, right?
This is stuff that comes out of men.
It doesn't come out of women for the most part.
What comes out of women is babies, and babies are not like, seize the day, let's roll the dice, let's double or nothing, right?
That's not how you can run things when you have a kid, because they need to, kids, they need to be fed.
And of course, if a man risks and wins, then he gains significant resources to the point where he can get a higher quality woman and his genes are going to be passed along that much more efficiently and so on.
So, all of these disparities that fundamentally arise out of biology and scarcity...
So feminism bundles all of these things together, all of these basic facts, and says, no, women were just oppressed by evil men.
I mean, it's kind of like, it's a religion.
It's just that it's got its gods, it's got its devils, it's got its angels, it's got its demons, it's got its Lucifer, it's got a Lucifer, a giant penis, right?
So they just, they have this complex, we have this complex thing called society that was produced out of scarcity and want and brutality and And war and rape and voluntarism and all of the hunting and failure and cold and heat and climates and farming and I mean just massive complicated stuff that came out of a wide variety of biological and social and political and economic factors.
That meant certain people and certain genders had roles to play in the maintenance of the tribe.
And it was more efficient because of that.
I mean, you know, you have this division of labor.
Like, you know, women did their women things and men went to war and work and whatever.
And, you know, the empire expanded.
And now, because everybody's trying to do each other's job and they're not doing it that well because they're not, you know, equipped for it, then, you know, it becomes less efficient and, you know...
Yeah, and it's a sociopathic view of the universe.
In the sociopathic view of the universe, there are no individuals, there are only categories.
I mean, this is a fundamental important thing to understand, I would argue, about people who are founding these kinds of systems.
And to a sociopath, there are no others.
There are no people.
That are individuated and there's no understanding that other people are like you.
Look at Chairman Mao, right?
Tens of millions of people starving after he collectivized the farm and he just, he ranted at them to just eat less and they, you know, this was gonna help them prevent them getting fat.
Now, he himself You know, they had to have special fish packed in ice bags and like marched a thousand miles to be boiled just perfectly so that he could get all the exact food that he wanted.
And so he was a very fussy eater and wanted his food prepared in a particular kind of way and, you know, kind of got a little chubby.
Whereas the peasants were just this one big giant category of him.
And it was Vanessa Redgrave, a famous British actress who was a Trotskyist and a Marxist and who gave way too much money to a sexually predatory Anyway, but she basically said there's a criticism of Marxists, which is that we love humanity in the abstract, but we're not close to or don't like any actual individuals, right?
And this is a, to me, kind of a I'm not calling her a sociopath.
I'm just saying in general this idea.
It's a kind of sociopathic view.
The only thing there is is categories.
People, bipeds.
In the same way that if you and I are at the zoo and we're looking at a bunch of apes, what do they look like?
They look like a bunch of apes.
We don't think of them in particular.
Oh, this ape likes this and this ape likes this characteristic because they're just kind of these big blobs of apiness.
And to crazy people, this is how human beings look.
We're just kind of this big blob of Of humanity, not individuated, not individuals at all.
And they don't recognize that everyone is like themselves.
I was just thinking of, you know, because of what you were saying, what Stalin said about one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic.
So, you know, if there's too many of them, we just, you know, can't think about them anymore as individuals.
Right.
And so when we have this issue where the people who come up with these kinds of systems can only compel others if they view them as big giant ape blobs.
Like bald ape blobs.
That's all they are.
To be moved around like chess pieces.
You don't sit there and say, well, where does the knight want to go?
Or where does the pawn want to go?
Or the bishop or the rook?
You just, well, I've got to move them here to get this.
And I've got to move them here.
And I've got to do this defense and mount this attack or whatever.
And so to the power hungry, to the creators of these kinds of systems, we're not humans.
We're just blobs to be moved around, to be manipulated, to be controlled, to be yelled at, to be punished, to be terrified.
Yeah, and the end is the satisfaction of their own grandiosity and their own power lust.
Like the young Chairman Mao, well, before he was Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, Was actually in a province for quite some time where there was horrible starvation going on.
Horrible starvation.
His companions who were there were continually writing letters home about how unbearable and awful it was to be around all these people who were starving to death.
Literally starving to death.
Like stepping over these stick bodies in the street.
I mean, horrible.
He wrote countless letters.
Not once did he mention anything to do with starvation.
Didn't mention anything at all.
His concerns, his thoughts, books he was reading and so on.
But nothing.
Nothing about...
It just doesn't register.
Doesn't register at all.
And so people come up with very, very bad ideas.
Very cold ideas.
Ideas where they will invite you to Become part of a classification system rather than to individuate yourself, right?
So in feminism, they say to women, you are victims.
And they say to men, you are oppressors.
Now, this only works, of course, if women aren't victims and if men aren't oppressors.
This is the kind of paradox.
And it's not that hard to figure out.
It's very easy to get it once you see it.
Which is, if women really were victims, then feminism wouldn't exist.
Because genuine victims Don't think, you know, they can't do anything.
People like, for instance, if you read The Gulag Apikalago, right, or A Day in the Life of Ivan Dinizovich by Solzhenitsyn.
Now those guys were victims.
In the Soviet gulags, they were victims.
And that's why they didn't have any real revolts.
They didn't have any real change.
They couldn't, right, they were real victims.
Real victims.
And so they couldn't do anything about it.
They couldn't organize marches.
They couldn't hold signs.
They couldn't scream about the evils of Stalinism because they'd just get killed.
They were real victims.
And so the fact that women have a voice, can complain, can hold their signs, can yell, can write their books, can have their academic tenure position, means that they're not victims, by definition.
And of course, if men were brutal patriarchal authoritarians, like Stalin was, forget the patriarchal, but a brutal authoritarian like Stalin, if he sees dissent, he kills it.
Like, he will just kill it.
He will murder it.
Same thing happened with Now, the same thing happened under the Nazis.
I mean, if you spoke out against the regime, you would be dragged out and shot in the street like a dog.
Now, that's oppression.
That is authoritarianism.
That is dictatorship.
And so if women genuinely were victims, then they wouldn't be permitted, they wouldn't even think of speaking.
And if men were these brutal patriots, they would just go out and kill women who disagreed with them, right?
And listen, this is not...
In the non-West, that's not entirely unheard of, right?
And so it's all nonsense, and it all relies on the fact that women aren't victims, and it all relies on the fact that Western men are very nice, right?
I mean, there's an old saying which said, where was the Gandhi...
In Soviet Russia.
Because Gandhi, of course, was organizing all these peaceful protests and all this resistance.
Where was the Gandhi in Soviet Russia?
Well, he was dead.
Because the British were fine with this kind of protest.
The British were fine with this kind of freedom of speech.
The British didn't just round up any dissidents and shoot them.
And so naturally, all we think about is how evil the British Empire was and how nobody talks about Russia anymore, except to imply that they're somehow They stole the election from the Democrats because it's hard to look in the mirror and see wild incompetence.
So they're just bad ideas.
The ideas are not evil because the ideas can't do anything to you.
The ideas can't...
If you don't act on them.
Well, of course it's the acting that matters.
Right now, in...
In religion, in some religions, the thought is the deed, right?
Like if you look at a woman with lust in your heart, you might as well have committed, it's a thought crime, right?
But that's not reality.
A man can think all the terrible thoughts that he wants.
It harms no one.
He can even tell other people his terrible thoughts.
He can go to a therapist, he can tell his friends.
It harms no one.
However, the moment that man acts in a violent manner, on the basis of his thoughts, we condemn his actions, not his thoughts.
Because the law can only deal With empiricism, it cannot deal with philosophy.
The job of protecting mankind from bad ideas is not the job of the law.
The law is there to protect you from bad actors, from bad actions.
It is not there to protect you from bad ideas.
It is the job of the philosophers to protect society from bad ideas.
And they have been doing a very, very bad job over the past 70 years of that.
Yes.
Are there any philosophers you admire, Stefan?
Contemporary philosophers?
Yes.
Let me think.
Alive philosophers?
Yes.
It depends what you mean by philosophers.
There are certain thinkers I enormously admire for their adroitness and their perception and their courage and their resolution and so on.
Would you call them formal philosophers with systems that go all the way through metaphysics and epistemology and politics and ethics?
No.
But very robust and good critical thinkers and men Of action, which is sometimes a little lacking in the realm of philosophy.
I'd have to think about that.
There are none who spring to mind.
There are certainly philosophers that I admire, but most of them have been dust for a lengthy amount of time.
Alright, is there anything else you wanted to...
No, thank you very, very much for dealing with all my points.
Oh, thank you.
I'm glad we made it through.
Good job.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Claire.
You're welcome back anytime.
I appreciate the call.
And let's move on to the next caller.
Bye.
Alright, up next is Greg.
Greg wrote in and said, We can all agree that a three-year-old bears no responsibility for the events in his life, while a thirty-year-old bears complete responsibility for the events in his life.
At what point does one become responsible for the events in one's life?
That's from Greg.
Hey Greg, how you doing?
I'm good, Stefan.
How are you?
I'm well, thanks.
I'm well.
I don't know that I was told a three-year-old bearing no responsibility for the events in his life.
It depends what you mean by the events.
I guess there's an assumption in the question that there's always the outlier that, you know, well, there's some things that a three-year-old has control over and there's some things that a 30-year-old doesn't have control over.
But I guess the idea is that in hearing some of your other callers over time, People talk about things that happened in their childhood and a common response is, well, that's not your fault.
Your parents did that.
They had control over that.
They should have prevented that or monitored that situation.
And then when a 30-year-old says, well, I don't know how this happened in my life, and the response is often, well, no, you do know how it happened because you got yourself in that situation.
My question is that at some point in life, and maybe I think my opinion is that it's maybe a gradual progression, but you've It's happening to you, and you begin to make things happen in your own life.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts of when and how that happens.
Right.
Do you have any kids, Saphir?
I do not.
Right.
Well, the first test that I have for moral responsibility is...
Does the child deploy a moral rule against others, right?
So, for instance, if a father promises his child, tomorrow we go to the candy store, and the next day the father says, I'm not taking you to the candy store, what would the child normally say?
You said you were going to take me.
Sorry, you're doing some kind of swishy thing, or it's like something's going on in my ear here?
Is your microphone rustling around, Greg?
It seems like it's scraping on something.
It's like somebody's sandpapering my brain, and that's my job.
Is that better?
Yeah, thanks.
Okay, so the child would say, well, Dad, you promised.
You promised.
And so the child would use the leverage of the Father's promise to To extract compliance with the behavior the child wants, i.e.
going to the candy store, right?
Dad, you promised!
Right?
So the child now has entered into the realm of keeping his word.
Why?
Because he's expecting his father to keep his word.
He is now using a moral rule against his father.
Or against, you know what I mean?
Like he's putting his father under the umbrella of a universal moral rule which says you should keep your promises, right?
Solving them accountable.
It's holding him accountable, right?
So now, the moment you hold somebody else accountable and you say, you should change your behavior based on this moral rule, you are now subject to that moral rule.
Because it's universal, right?
Right.
Okay.
So, this is important.
The moment a child says to another child, right?
Like, if you've got any exposure with kids, you know, they love contests, they love competitions.
So, What you do is you say, you line up five kids, and you say, we're going to have a race, right?
And you say, one, two, three, go!
Now what happens if one child goes on two?
You cheated.
All the other kids say, no, no, no, you cheated.
You cheated.
So then, the child is now subject to The rule of not cheating, right?
And the child can't say, well, I didn't know it was wrong to not die.
I mean, the moment they start using rules on others, that's when they hold responsibility for that.
Does that make sense?
It does, yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
So it's more of a, as soon as you become aware of your responsibility or the rules, to put it easily, That's the point.
As soon as you become aware of a certain rule or a certain social connection...
As soon as you inflict the rule.
As soon as you inflict the rule, you're subject to the rule.
Okay.
I don't know if you've ever seen this.
It's a pretty funny movie.
It actually came out when my wife and I were dating.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Now, in that movie, the sort of mischievous Greek brothers...
There's a guy there who's not Greek, and they tell him some Greek words to say...
To his future mother-in-law, right?
And he thinks he's saying, you know, nice baklava, whatever it is, right?
But instead he's saying, great tits, or something like that, right?
Now, who does she get mad at?
She gets mad at her family members.
Yeah, she gets mad at the brothers through feeding these, quote, offensive lines to this guy.
And he is trying to be nice and repeating the words, but they don't mean what?
What he was told they mean, right?
They mean nice tits rather than good spanakopita or whatever it is, right?
And so she's getting mad at the men who know the language.
Not at the guy who's repeating the sounds and who doesn't know the language.
Now, if he spoke Greek and went up to his future mother-in-law and said, nice tits, well...
That would be a whole different matter, right?
So here, he does not hold responsibility because he doesn't have the facts.
He doesn't have the information.
He doesn't have the knowledge.
Now, once he has that knowledge, wow.
That's a big difference, right?
So once you display knowledge, you are now responsible for that.
Last example, I had Janet Heimlich, who I think was the granddaughter of Right.
Right.
But if I really have been trained and I know the high-middle maneuver, some guy's choking and I don't do anything to help him, well, I now have responsibility, right?
I mean, so for instance, let's say I have a kind of philosophical mind and energy and charisma that can genuinely save the Western world and hopefully the world as a whole.
You know, I know how to do it.
I know what needs to be done.
I have the capacity to do it.
And let's say I say, nah, it's a little stressful sometimes and some people don't like me when I do it.
I'm kind of a dickwad, right?
Like, I mean, if you know the Heimlich and you don't save somebody who's choking, Can of a dickwad.
And if you know how to save the world and you don't, can of a dickwad.
So hence we're having this conversation.
So yeah, the moment everybody wants to pursue knowledge and people love to control other people through universal standards.
Love to control other people through universal standards.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's what universal standards are for.
But they then cannot complain That, like, if their own behavior is then censured for the same universals that they use to control other people, of course, right?
Right.
So 36, why no kids?
Ah, boy.
Don't have to.
I'm just, I'm just, I'm kind of curious.
Uh, first marriage was, uh, uh, let's see here.
How do I explain this?
Um, Extended adolescence, I guess.
Your first marriage was extended adolescence?
No, no, no.
I'm sorry.
Ignore the first marriage part.
Extended adolescence, I would probably say.
That would be the short answer.
Why do we need the short answer?
Because the long answer would be fairly detailed and personal.
Right.
Do you want kids?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what's your plan?
I'm trying right now.
Oh, you're trying right now?
Yeah.
Well, not this very...
Right now, like on this call?
Not this very second, but...
Now, this explains the rustling sound we heard earlier.
I'm thrilled and touched.
Please turn on your webcam.
All right.
All right.
Okay, so best of luck to you.
And I hope that works out.
But yeah, just the moment people...
Use a moral rule to control other people.
That is a boomerang.
The stick's sharpened at both ends.
So that's when they are responsible.
Now, just very briefly, in terms of life circumstances, that is a different matter.
So, you don't choose your parents, but you do choose your date.
So, if your parents are bad to you, Well, you're a victim, right?
You didn't choose your parents.
Your parents beating you up or raping you or neglecting you or whatever it is, right?
Then, well, you're a victim.
You didn't choose that.
But then when you become an adult, if you go around choosing people who treat you badly like your parents did, well, now you have choice in the matter and you have responsibility.
And if you disliked the way that your parents treated you when you were younger, now you are responsible for learning.
How to avoid those situations and how to be a better person.
There are a few exceptions to all of this, though, insofar as propaganda is really, really tough to overcome.
Propaganda is really, really tough.
We were just talking about feminism with Claire earlier, and You know, if you're told of patriarchy and meanness and viciousness and, you know, men just went around clubbing and raping women throughout history who cried and rolled into fetal positions and tried to protect their precious eggs and so on, right?
I mean, if you get that narrative, it's really, really tough to break out of it because the evil that is done to people through propaganda is really one of the greatest sources of dysfunction in the world as a whole.
So, you know, when a young person calls in and they have been propagandized and they've not received any different information or any counter-information or they've been really programmed to view any counter-information to the leftist narrative as evil and that kind of thing, right?
Well, I have a certain amount more patience with that, of course, because that's not them inflicting moral rules on others that they then have to be subject to themselves and they didn't control Their social environment, right?
So just about everywhere you go in the West, if you go into the arts in particular, you're going to get into a bunch of lefty garbage, right?
And the kids didn't control that.
The kids didn't create that.
And they don't really have much alternative.
Now, the internet shows like this and other people's conversations on the internet, that is creating a different situation where now there's choice, where before there was only compliance and So now people are more responsible for getting out of their echo chamber, but I do have a lot of sympathy and a lot of patience for young people who have just been so relentlessly propagandized and scared out of being able to think.
And so that I think you need a certain amount of, you know, people say to me, oh, Steph, you're so patient talking to people who have bad ideas and so on.
It's like, well, You know, if you would be patient with a caveman who showed up at the CERN laboratories or whatever, right?
Some super collider, you'd be patient because you'd never seen it before, didn't know what the hell it was.
So when it comes to a young mind heavily propagandized and broken under the wheel of false narratives, introducing them to reason is, you know, don't scare them off, right?
It's a flashlight.
It's not going to eat you.
I mean, so that's sort of where I have more patience now.
If people still keep resisting facts and can't argue back, then I get a little less patient, which is maybe a fault, maybe a virtue, I don't know.
But that's sort of my particular thoughts.
And Greg, does that help clarify things at all?
It does a little, yeah.
I guess the other part of the question is, or the other angle I'm approaching it from is, What you just described is basically me growing up and up until about three years ago before I really started for my own self examining.
I'm in this situation and I feel this way and I react that way and just sort of stumbling from one situation to the next without ever analyzing.
What do I know?
Why do I react this way?
Why am I motivated in situation A to do action B and so on?
That is helpful.
I have sympathy for women who are not told about the importance of having children when they're young.
It's tragic.
The left doesn't want smart people to have children because if you don't have children, you don't work as hard to defend your culture.
You don't work as hard to defend your civilization.
Right.
Because it's probably going to be fine until you're dead, and you don't have an eternal great chain of being, and you don't sort of sit there and say, well, you know, I'm 50, maybe I'll live for another 20 or 30 years, or maybe I'll be like John Glenn the sky welfare whore and live to be 95 or whatever, but maybe I'll just live for another 20 years.
Society will make it another 20 or 30 years.
It'll make it, and then I'm dead.
But, you know, you've got kids, you've got to start thinking about generations into the future.
Your kids are automatically going to extend your time frame by at least a half a century.
And so, given that struggling for civilization is all about sacrificing pleasure in the present for hope in the future, the shorter you can shrink people's time frame, the more they're going to give up their culture.
What's the point of fighting?
And so you'll notice that the cultures with the most children are the cultures with the longest time horizons.
The cultures willing to make the most sacrifices, the cultures least afraid, Of personal sacrifice, even to the point of life.
It's the most fertile cultures that have the longest time frame and thus will win in the long run unless something changes and fast.
And I don't just mean everyone having kids, but in terms of understanding all of that.
I have a lot of sympathy.
People have been lied to a lot.
And undoing that is a challenge.
And it's not your fault if you're lied to.
Even if you're like 23 or 24, okay, you should have been on the internet.
You should have read some different opinions by then.
But if you've had this monoculture all the way around you, and you basically lived in the giant government program called indoctrination, which pretends to be education, your whole close to quarter century, you know, it's kind of tough.
You know, if somebody who's...
A supposed Marxist in Russia in 1952.
I mean, what are their choices?
They haven't read any Friedman.
They haven't read any Ricardo.
They haven't read any Adam Smith.
They haven't read Rand or Rothbard or von Mises.
They have no access to other information.
And so, are they really a Marxist?
No, not really.
They're just doing what they're told.
All right.
Well, thanks for the call, Greg.
I appreciate it.
Best of luck with splitting yourself off into a tiny shard of eternity.
And I'm sure we'll talk again, but thanks for calling in tonight.
All right.
Thank you, Scott.
Alright, well up next we have Bob coming back to the show.
Bob wrote in and said, It is my assessment that the left has destroyed, at the very least, a nuclear family and consequently gender roles by creating a nanny state.
However, it seems that my dear group, the atheists, have destroyed any sense of community that extends beyond family and are pushing a sort of hedonistic anarchy.
It seems more and more that we need something.
But being an atheist, the idea of going back is akin to being asked to believe in Santa Claus again.
What can we, as atheists, use as a long-term supplement?
That's from Bob.
Hey Bob, how you doing?
Excellent, excellent.
Nice to hear both of you.
I feel like...
I feel like my brush with fame.
I see you on the internet all the time.
Alright, alright.
Use as a long-term supplement.
So, atheists.
Lordy, lordy.
So, to me...
Okay, so get rid of religion, then what?
Get rid of religion, and then what?
That's the big challenge, right?
It's like, if the boat has sunk, and I'm in a life raft, and the atheist says, oh, this life raft is substandard, and then starts hacking at the bottom of the life raft with a hatchet, I think I have every right to say to the atheist, and when we sink, then what?
What have you got to replace the life raft that you are currently hacking to bits because you find it substandard?
And that is the great assholery of, and hedonism, I think you're right.
I mean, I may quibble over the word anarchy, but the hedonism, it's like, fine, fine!
Smash the reason people used to believe in the rules.
Fine!
Okay, I get it.
There is an irrationality at the core of religiosity that is a challenge for the more rational and empirical.
Fine!
So get rid of the reason people believed in the rules.
But recognize that you're also getting rid of the rules.
And what do you do to replace the reason people believe in rules?
Now, of course, my whole argument is universally preferable behavior.
It's a free book on ethics with no gods and no governments, which people can get, obviously, for free at freedomainradio.com.
So my conscience is clear that I have acquitted myself with honor in saying, okay, let's not go with gods, let's not go with governments, But here's why we should obey rules and we should be good.
Because the purpose of religion is to give less intelligent people a reason to confine their own behavior.
It's artificial deferral of gratification.
You're going to get punished and rewarded if you obey these rules.
Now, not all the rules are great, but how do you get less intelligent people to obey rules without Joe Sky Daddy?
And the fact that the atheists have seemingly shed Like, used every conceivable effort to dispel the Sky Daddy.
Fine.
Okay.
But now, what?
You hacked apart the life raft that kept people on the sunny side of the shark-infested waters Now what, assholes?
Now what?
Because it's the rules that we need.
God, I think, in many ways was a means to the end for those rules.
And again, the people who've got more God, the people who've got more deferred of gratification, more children, right?
They're taking the West apart.
And they're going to win.
And a lot of it has to do with atheists taking down the structural support for the rules that organize society without finding any reason or any way to replace people's adherence to those rules.
That's sort of my brief take on it, but what do you think?
So, I think everything there was pretty consistent with what I think.
However, you touched on something that I also find quite interesting, and it is that One moment.
It is that, I can't even say the East, but the non-West is demolishing us.
They're outproducing children, outproducing us as children, and their belief system is pretty darn solid.
And our loss of our belief system, what they like to call Judeo-Christian values, I don't really like to merge those two, I'll just say Christian, has left us Without a shield.
Has left us without a...
Yeah, Judeo-Christian is tough because you get the nagging waspy dad and the nagging Jewish mom, and those two together, it's not good.
So let's just go with the Christian, Greco-Roman Christian, or whatever you want to call it, but sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, certainly.
So yes, and that lost us a sort of shield, because back before, they were Muslims, and then the West were Christians, and it was very clear, we can't let them bring that here.
And now, especially the left, oh my goodness, the left, is hell-bent on trying to convince everyone that there is no difference between Islam and whatever branch of Christianity.
Well, no, no, no, there is a difference in that Christianity is worse.
Right?
Because the leftists embrace Islam and violently trawl Christianity.
Certainly.
I was one of these people when I was a lefty.
Please don't tell anybody.
And I never said that it's worse.
Well, honestly, I think I might have because in my mind, at least the Muslims really adhered to their book.
And honestly, that's kind of the problem.
Yeah, the best we can hope is a lack of fidelity to the text.
I don't know about this.
Please be hypocritical.
Exactly.
So, wherein the Bible has Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus, which are pretty hardcore, nobody really reads that.
And everyone basically just pretends the Bible is John 3.16 about a thousand times.
Well, and the Bible is not a complete political system, right?
The Bible is theology, not politics.
Oh, certainly.
Actually, that's very true.
You actually have all types of...
Oh, okay, okay.
Well, again, that's mostly true when you are concentrated on the New Testament.
If you concentrate on the Old Testament, you can do a pretty good job in picking out how to tax people and kill people and things of that sort.
Sure, but I mean, that's the whole revolution of Jesus, right?
I mean, that he's saying, okay...
Some of that stuff in the Old Testament.
Don't get me wrong.
God, great guy.
Founder of all things.
He was the original RSVP to life.
Come join the party.
But we're going to just change direction a little bit.
A little bit less eye for an eye.
A little bit turn the other cheek.
So we're going to be a little bit less, drown the entire world and kill everyone who disagrees with me, even the babies in the womb.
And now we're going to be just a little bit more...
That he who is without sin cast the first stone.
So that was, you know, it's in progress, and I've got a whole conversation that's going to come out with Dr.
Duke Pesta about the ethics of Jesus.
But, you know, you do have to recognize, as you know, in the Christian world, that there's quite a break with the Old Testament.
Otherwise, really was the point of the New Testament, if there was no change in direction, right?
Certainly.
I do want to say something here, and I imagine this might get some I never really heard you talk about Ben Carson, but I absolutely loved Ben Carson, and he was my favorite candidate.
I think I told you that I bet on Trump last time, a year and a half before he won.
And Ben Carson was my preferred candidate at the time, even when I bet on Trump.
Not Donald Trump, but Dr.
Ben Carson...
I thought he was an impeccable candidate, and this is a bit of identity politics, I am black, and I wanted a black man to come in and not be Obama and say, oh, we can have a black president who doesn't just rob us.
So that's what...
That man, I tell you, Obama, he's taken a lot of vacations.
You know, he's really, as far as golf game improvement over the course of a presidency...
I gotta think that Obama is pretty much number one.
I mean, that is a lot of focus.
Over eight years, he might have most improved golf worldwide.
Most improved golf game.
And you know, so it's a smoking crater of an economy.
There are drone strikes all over the world, and there's a catastrophic refugee program.
But at least his par is significantly, significantly better.
And it's hard, you know, it's hard to avoid the fact that it was a month ago, Donald Trump became the president-elect.
I think it's fair to say that he's done a lot more for American jobs in four weeks of not being the president than Obama has in eight years of being the president.
You know, I actually attempted to find something comparable for President Obama within eight years that compares with just the carrier situation.
And I actually was...
Pretty sad that I couldn't do it.
It is tough, to be fair, it is tough to save American jobs when you're busy race-baiting and causing riots by turning the races against each other.
That's a full-time gig.
George Bush took a lot of vacations, but...
Not all of them on Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno and, you know, we didn't get to watch his vacations on The Tonight Show and The View and stuff like that.
Oh, yeah.
No, Bush was terrible.
I mean, you know, as you know, it's not just Obama.
I mean, Bush...
Obama didn't start...
Exactly the same kind of massive new wars and so on, although there's a lot of poking of the hornet's nest and it was under his watch that Libya and Syria and Iraq all collapsed into the god-awful pre-medieval sectarian nightmare slaughterfest that's going on at the moment.
So, yeah, no, I hear what you're saying, you know, and it's the same thing with Herman Cain, right?
I mean, Herman Cain was, to me, a far more impressive candidate than Obama.
You know, if we're going to play the identity politics game here for a sec, which is a real part of life, I would much rather see Herman Cain in then.
And of course, Herman Cain, he's full-blooded.
He's not like this half and half thing.
That man was black all the way.
And this is why he had to be destroyed.
Because if he'd run against Obama, you got full black running against half black.
And if you want identity politics, then he would be the first real black president.
Well, actually, you missed something there.
Obama is not half black.
I mean, African people are obviously black in a way, but he's not half black American.
I mean, he's actually half white, half Kenyan.
You know, he didn't have a slavery background.
So I think he tapped...
He's got one really slow leg and one really fast leg.
Kenyan are nice.
But anyway, we're totally good off this.
Back to...
No, no, no, hang on a sec.
So, because the Kenyan thing, you know, as far as the sort of black experience goes, you know, half Kenyan grew up in Hawaii to, like, fairly rich parents, went to private school and so on.
I mean, the guy's not exactly straight out of Compton, right?
No, no.
And he did extraordinarily well in pretending he was.
I remember his early speeches...
When he talked about growing up, he knows what it's like at the African-American experience and all of this stuff.
It's a lot of surfing, I hear, at the African-American experience.
A lot of surfing, a lot of luau, a lot of beautiful weather.
Hanging out at Harvard.
Yeah, that's really the African-American experience.
I mean, who in NRA, sorry, who in NWA was not, you know, On the Harvard Law Review.
I mean, pretty much all of them.
Dr.
Gray, you don't get to be a doctor out of nothing.
Exactly.
All right, but no, I want to get back.
So before I forget, so I keep this some sort of continuity.
Ben Carson was a extremely religious candidate that I loved.
And it made me rethink.
And I think this is where my question kind of originally emanates at least about a year ago or so.
And it made me think, why am I so hard on religion?
Because I was almost Christopher Hitchens not too many years ago.
And Ben Carson and other people really started making me think about what our atheists really have to offer.
Because I don't know if you've ever seen Ben Carson's family.
That's about as American dream-ish as it gets.
And he's ultra.
Ultra.
He has a picture of Him and Jesus, a painting of him and Jesus at his house.
He's ultra-religious.
And so anyway, that's what kind of led me to this question.
Well, okay, so, I mean, I've got the truth, we did a show, the truth about Ben Carson, and you're right.
I mean, him and religion, that's not a long-term relationship.
I mean, they are shacked up.
I mean, he's, you know, he believes that angels gave him the answer to one of the tough tests on his, I mean, in his college.
He's got, you know, to me, it's like right on the edge.
But here's the thing.
Let me just ask you this.
It's nothing to do with identity politics, man, but Do you think Obama's really that religious?
I never really quite got the sense that he was.
If Marxism was a religion, maybe.
But I just never really got the sense that he was all too serious about it.
I mean, I don't get the sense that Donald Trump's that religious either, but Donald Trump is like, yeah, I'm not that religious.
Of course, he's like, the Bible's a good book.
Yeah, I read it.
Okay, next question.
I believe I would have sold the Bible if it wasn't for all these subsidies of people putting it in these drawers in these hotel rooms.
But no, so I would like to say that in a lot of Obama's early works, it looks pretty clear, a pretty clear case might be made, that he simply joined Jeremiah Wright's church to Get into Chicago politics and be at the right church.
And he was very critical of the Bible in some speeches.
You know, he went to Leviticus and stuff to try to compare it to Islam.
And when he's not in a speech about how Christian he is, he does seem to be actually an atheist, honestly.
And I think he might have...
Oh, sorry.
Sorry, but a lot of the Jeremiah Wright stuff was like, hey...
Those are pretty bad white people over there, aren't they?
You know what I mean?
There was a sort of love your enemy stuff that came out of Jesus that didn't seem to be wholly embodied in the Jeremiah Wright rants.
Well, yeah, so that's...
And I've heard you talk about this double standard.
Donald Trump is now responsible for some people related to people related to Steve Bannon.
But President Obama is not responsible for the Black Panther Party, the group criminal...
Black Lives Matter is joining him at the White House on a regular basis.
Yeah.
Who did you say was?
Black Lives Matter, and of course, you know, if we don't want to get all black-white about it, I mean, this crazy guy, Bill Ayers, one of the terrorists in the Weather Underground, as far as I remember.
I mean, this guy was all over Obama's early campaign.
So he's got some pretty questionable people that he hangs with.
You called them Black Lives Matter.
I just called them Criminal Lives Matter, because they only care when The worst of the worst criminals get shot.
Isn't one of their founding heroines like some cop killer who's on the FBI's most wanted list?
Oh my goodness.
I can't remember her name.
No, I can't remember her name off the top of a minute.
I don't think it's Jennifer McPeace Flammer, though.
But it's, yeah, it's been a while.
But anyway, anyway, we're getting so much to talk about with Obama.
But, uh...
Well, so, and this is the funny thing, right?
So, like, what, 95% of black Americans voted for Obama.
And that's wonderful.
That's, but, you know, 58% of white Americans vote for Trump.
Oh, my God, evil white racism.
And it's like, oh, come on, can we not do this?
Yeah.
Oh, no, it was more like 99 when Obama ran.
It's 95 with Clinton or 95 with...
Whoever was before Clinton.
Now, it usually hovers around 95%, but it was closer to 99 when Obama ran.
Boy, there's some people out there who are saying that they voted if they didn't, right?
I mean, you just have to at that point, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Oh yeah, I voted for him, totally.
Obama, all the way.
Even if you didn't, what are you going to do?
So, but back to the atheist replacement.
Oh, the Carson, the religion thing.
Yeah, sorry, I dragged you off course there, but go ahead.
So, you had a recent thing called...
Rights are wrong.
And I had been regularly reading and trying to get a handle on ethics since I was probably 18.
And I'm currently at the states where none of them make any sense to me.
And I don't use the words right and wrong.
None of what?
None of them.
The words right and wrong are simply meaningless to me.
Now, of course, I'll use them in a math problem or something like that.
But...
I've come to that point, and I think I've also come to that point because of atheism.
What is his name?
Christopher Hitchens debated this guy.
Who was his name?
William Lane Craig?
He debates all of them.
William Lane Craig, yeah.
And one of the things he did is he'd argued for the existence of God by saying...
That God must exist because moral standards exist.
Because if you believe there are moral standards, there must be a place to get moral standards.
If there are no moral standards, there's no place to get moral.
So then that refutes your atheism.
I'm not saying...
That is a bad argument, though.
No, it's not the best argument.
However...
And I didn't like his swarming...
It may be true, but it's not valid.
But go on.
Yes.
But I don't like...
And I didn't like his swarminess or his wordplay either.
But I kind of like that idea that morals must come from some place.
Like when you spoke to that guy about rights...
And you kept trying to get him to say, well, from where do these things emanate?
They don't exist anywhere.
And so because of this, I've had this problem with ethics where I am currently still in a state where there simply is no such thing as right and wrong.
And for most people, especially new atheists, young atheists who are captivated by the Sam Harris's and the Richard Dawkins of the world, And the Thunderfoots, I guess.
Oh my goodness, that guy.
But the people who are captivated by them, if they are convinced that there are no ethics, then how?
I mean, because if they're atheists and their ethics are gone, then what the hell?
Then what do they do?
Well, there's nothing to defend, right?
Relativists will always lose to absolutists.
And relativists can say, well, my position is more rational, so what?
That the absolutists have the entire weight of, let's just say it's a crazy belief system.
They have the entire weight of a crazy belief system behind them.
They're willing to sacrifice happiness for future benefits.
They're willing to sacrifice their lives.
I mean, relativists will always lose to absolutists, and the only The only defense against irrational absolutism is rational absolutism.
It is not this pull your atoms apart relativism and say, well, I can't find the moral rules inscribed on any carbon atom and therefore there's no such thing as morality.
You can't win.
You can't win that way.
And atheists have taken down the borders.
Maybe say, oh, you know, the women, they're not very good at patrolling the borders.
And so, okay, maybe it's true.
But to me, The atheists come out of the communist movement, not to say that all atheists are communists, although they too tend to lean left significantly as I talk about in Why I Was Wrong About Atheism, but the atheists in general have taken down Christianity and they've also taken down nations.
There's a reason why the highly secular European society is without borders.
You know, the Soviet Union didn't die, it just went underground and popped up again in Brussels.
The USSR reshuffled its letters and came out as the EU, as the European Union.
So the internationalism which comes out of the leftism or the Marxism, Of the atheists has been resurrected in this no borders, everyone's the same, everyone's interchangeable nonsense, where somehow people from Somalia are completely interchangeable with people grown up, Europeans who grew up in Brussels.
I mean, the blondes in Sweden are completely interchangeable with people from Syria.
There's no difference.
It doesn't matter.
Right?
And this madness, it's complete madness.
I mean, it's funny because the left says, you know, well, everyone's interchangeable, everyone's the same.
But you try being a conservative and getting a job at a leftist newspaper, they'll...
No way!
It's like, what?
They say, oh, well, people will assimilate to a new political system, no problem.
It's like, Jesus, these goddamn lefties aren't even assimilating to Donald Trump.
That's the same system with a new guy.
And they're unable to assimilate.
got to recount and rebel and we get illegitimate and they can't even adapt to the same system with a guy they don't like and they're expecting people from the middle.
Crazy.
But sorry.
Yeah, so the internationalism thing, the borderless thing, the secular thing, the relativism thing, the no free will thing too, right?
This is a bit of a Sam Harris thing where, you know, because he dives so deep down into the bare bones matter of the species and can't find any free will in there and apparently has never heard of emergent properties.
You know, he's very much into determinism.
So, you know, you get determinism, you get internationalism, you get relativism, you get no ethics, and you're suddenly completely defenseless against more robust, more certain, more aggressive cultures.
Wow, that's actually a...
I guess I've seen it a bit, but that's why they can just...
Basically storm through and do whatever they want.
I haven't seen it that clearly as I do right now.
But I was thinking...
I was thinking more along the lines...
Well, I guess I was thinking along that line.
I was thinking about just stable culture.
As in, the West was incredibly stable, incredibly nuclear family-centric.
And then three, I think, three wrecking balls came through.
One...
A nanny state of the government, well, let's just say welfare.
Two, feminism.
And three, atheism.
Now, the first two I am extraordinarily opposed to, but the third I'm not.
I'm an atheist, and I'm thinking, how do I get in line?
How do I get things back to some kind of amazing state where everything was exceptional?
That's exceptional.
Atheists have a particular inability to see suffering.
Because they're materialists and because they tend to be on the determinist side and because they tend to be on the left side.
And in the left side, we are fundamentally shaped, if not entirely constituted, by the economic environment we grew up in.
Economic determinism is foundational to Marxism.
Marxism is little more than economic determinism.
Your relation to the means of production is blah, blah, blah, right?
And so atheists have a very tough time Seeing people fail.
Because what they do is atheism is pathological altruism because it refuses to grant full moral autonomy and responsibility to people, partly because of the lefty economic determinism and partly because of the pseudoscientific materialism where they can't find free will and they can't find a conscience and they can't find this abstract ghost called moral responsibility.
Now Christians, on the other hand, they're bitching when it comes to seeing people suffer.
They are fantastic at it because what they say is, Serves your right.
You know, atheists have a very tough time because, oh, it's all your pinball bouncing around your economic determinism and you don't have any free will and there's no such thing as ethics and there's no such thing as a conscience, so stuff just kind of happens to you and I have, you know, I have, um, sympathy, right?
So, you know, there's two kinds of illnesses, right?
There's the kind of illness where you did really stupid stuff.
You know, you stayed up too late, you didn't get enough sleep, you drank too much, you smoked too much, you didn't exercise, you ate like crap, and you get sick.
Now, sorry, and 70% of illnesses are lifestyle related.
So, that's too bad for you.
And in the same way, yeah, some people end up poor.
And you know why?
Because they're stupid and they made bad decisions.
And by stupid, I don't mean low IQ. I mean, that may be the case, but they just, they made bad decisions.
Guys said, hey, we really should get some education.
They're like, nah, I like to party.
I'm going to go out.
And so they end up broke.
And that's the choice that they make.
And they had a lot of fun.
And they enjoyed themselves.
And now the fun that they had can't be transferred to the hardworking people.
But the money the hardworking people make can be transferred to the wastrels.
So Christians, because you have moral autonomy, you are not bound by your economic circumstances.
You are not determined by By your relationship to the means of production.
You know, what do the leftovers say?
What chance did he have?
He grew up poor.
Economic determination is a boom right there.
It is your environment, your economic environment that determines where you're going to go.
So if somebody is poor in middle age and they grew up poor, well, what chance do they have?
All of the millions of people who get out of poverty and all the rich people who fall into poverty, they don't fit the equation, so they just vanish.
They don't exist.
in these people's universe but Christians give you full autonomy moral responsibility you are not determined by your parents wallet when you were a child you are not doomed to be poor if your parents are poor you're not rewarded with eternal wealth because your parents are rich you have your choice and the material shit doesn't matter that much anyway because our goal is immaterial it's heaven not riches so it doesn't matter even if you're poor who cares you can still get into heaven in fact It's easier to get into heaven, right?
Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
The Christians are able to look at suffering, at people who made bad choices and are suffering and say, serves you right, it'll do you good.
But atheists, it rips them into, oh God, there are these things that are bad that are happening and it's not their fault.
It's not some guy who smoked and made stupid decisions with his health who gets sick.
It's a child with leukemia.
Surely that child did not do anything to...
And of course the child with leukemia didn't cause it.
But the atheists can't look at suffering.
It's very girly.
They can't look at suffering and say, you make stupid decisions, you make your bed, you lie in it.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
If you do stupid things, you're going to get stupid outcomes.
But Christians are much more okay We're seeing people suffer and what's interesting is that Christians are more charitable as well in many ways so they're charitable to people who are unfortunate but they're very cold-hearted and rightly so to people who make stupid decisions and screw up their lives because they have to serve as a warning to everyone else but atheists are less charitable and also have this giant squishy soft spot and view everyone as a victim and everyone needs to be helped which is why they tend to be so lefty and so interventionist when it comes to the welfare state they can't give people Their own moral autonomy,
their own conscience, their own free will, and say, eh, you screwed up.
That's what happens.
You don't study for the test, you get an F. Okay.
I definitely took some...
Oh, doubt dripping off his words.
No, no.
There is no doubt.
I actually really like that.
I have to digest it a bit more, but I really like that idea of how you contrast them.
And your foundations are extraordinarily clear.
However...
That is the diagnosis.
What's the prescription?
For an atheist who looks around at all of his atheist friends and sees a bunch of bastards who just want to make fun of Christians and not have children and not build families.
Yeah, they're trolls.
Yeah, they're trolls.
Well, I mean, I've got this whole book.
It's free, free, I tell you, Bob, called Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics, where I lay out the case for objective morality and With no reference, of course, to a god and no reference to obeying the dictates of a state, just from first principles.
I put it out probably, it was one of the first articles I wrote, so it's close to 10 years, and I've had countless people take swings at it, and they've all failed.
They've all failed.
I did hear, okay, so I heard you say UPB several times in a video, an older one that I hadn't seen.
I was listening to an older one for some reason a few days ago.
And I was thinking, what in the world?
And then finally you said universal preferred behavior.
And I thought, what?
That's not a real term, is it?
And I looked it up.
And so I will.
And I didn't have time to look it up in depth in that moment.
But I will look that up because it sounds a bit like, and I hope not as impossible to read as the moral landscape.
I don't know if you've seen, read that book by Sam Harris.
I have not.
The moment that Sam Harris went determinist, he became incomprehensible to me.
Like, I've read a bunch of Sam Harris books, elegant writer, good public speaker, I like the guy, but there's things I can't understand.
Like, how he's for open borders, I can't possibly fathom.
Oh, certainly, certainly.
He's kind of fallen off my wagon, too, in the last, I don't know, two, three years, especially with his Some incredible insults of Donald Trump.
He goes a little far beyond.
I totally understand Donald Trump is a wild man, and he might say it himself.
But Sam Harris goes way too far.
Sam Harris, I don't know what his politics are, but Donald Trump is the least religious president who's been around since I don't know when.
So shouldn't this be kind of a step in the right direction?
Donald Trump is skeptical about radical Islam.
Last time I checked, maybe he's changed his mind since then, but I don't think so.
Last time I checked, Sam Harris, a little skeptical about radical Islam.
And so, I mean, this and many other reasons.
I just...
Donald Trump is my litmus test for people.
Are they indoctrinated?
Are they crazy?
Are they inconsistent?
And again, it's not like no criticisms are justified in Donald Trump, of course.
I criticized him for a variety of things over the last year or two.
But yeah, I don't understand it.
Was he pro-Hillary?
No, no, he wasn't.
Well, yes, he wasn't pro-Hillary, but he just called Donald Trump severely more dangerous.
More dangerous than Hillary?
Yes, and that, I mean, I was literally scared that Hillary Clinton would win at the end, because you probably remember, the media went on just full-court press mode.
They just went, just blitz non-stop for the last two or three months.
And it was just, I had never seen anything like that in my life.
And so I was actually really afraid that Hillary Clinton might actually win.
But anyway...
So he preferred Hillary to Donald Trump?
I believe so.
Don't quote me on that.
He was definitely critical of both people.
Don't quote me on that.
I'd have to go look it up.
Well, the other options are like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson.
Well, that's just crazy.
So he's sort of pro-Hillary by default.
Like, he just really, really disliked Donald Trump.
And again, what were the issues?
Was it the fact that he wasn't religious enough?
Well, it can't be that.
Was it because he didn't recognize the dangers of radical Islam?
No, because, I mean, Sam Harris has been talking about that for years.
I mean, I don't I don't understand.
So Donald Trump has this game that he does, and I think it's brilliant, where he'll say, let's say that 37% of the rapists in Texas are Mexican.
Let's just say they are, okay?
Just for the sake of argument.
And the media won't say this.
They will never say that number.
What he'll do is he'll go out and say...
39% of the rapists in Texas are Mexican.
And then they'll go, no!
37% are!
It's this extraordinarily good game.
He says thousands of Muslims were celebrating on 9-11, right?
And people were like, no, it wasn't true!
And they're like, no, actually, here's the report.
No, here's another report.
Oh, here's the same newspaper that said it wasn't true.
Here's their article saying...
And then it's like, no, no, no, come on, it was only hundreds or dozens or whatever.
Exactly, exactly.
Boom!
How many times do I play this game?
I mean, he's like Lucy with the ball with Charlie Brown every single time.
And he openly says, I'm into exaggeration because that's how you get people's attention and then the truth shakes out.
Absolutely.
He wrote about this in a book.
He wrote this whole strategy, like, what is that, 25 years ago?
Yeah.
Well, anyway.
And Sam Harris was extraordinarily critical of that and how much he lies and how pathological he was and all of that stuff.
And I really, I was angry at Mr.
Harris because I did not want Hillary Clinton in the White House, period.
No matter what.
And so I kind of, you know...
What I do, the least I can do, is not give the people any views and stay away from them at all costs.
Like the Young Turks, for example, I will not click on a video link of theirs, no matter how provocative the title is.
I just won't give them one extra view because they are a nightmare.
I sent them a letter once saying, please stop trying to help us Black people.
Please stop trying to tell us we're all victims and tell us that The cops are out to shoot us all, because now we openly fight the cops back, and then of course they shoot us.
So anyway, getting back to...
Goodness gracious, so we really got off a tangent on Mr.
Hill.
No, no, we were talking about atheists and the sort of lack of moral center that they've excavated out.
The moral center, moral certainty, and moral self-reliance of Western civilization, which is fine.
You know, I had a tumor cut out of my neck, great, but they didn't take my head off as well.
They sewed it up and I'm back, right?
I mean, scoop out the bad stuff for sure, but don't imagine that everything's fine after that.
Don't imagine that you have shut down the reason why people believe in rules and the reason why people have certainty and meaning And then what are you going to replace it with?
Anti-Trump determinism?
Which is, of course, a contradiction.
I mean, it makes no sense.
Yes, I still don't know what the answer is.
I know a person, the smartest person I've ever met, who is an atheist who goes to church.
And he doesn't really believe in it, but I think he made a decision that it's the best thing for his family and his community.
And I can certainly see that.
I can certainly see that.
And I'm sorry, I think I mentioned this book once before, but I wanted to mention your phraseology.
It reminded me, it's a book by Jason L. Reilly, R-I-L-E-Y, called Please Stop Helping Us, How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.
It just came out this year.
It's a really, really good book.
Oh, yeah, I think I heard of that.
Oh, my goodness, sorry about that.
Yeah, I've been...
I've been begging.
I've been sending letters because I get so frustrated.
Trevor Noah and the Young Turks are probably the absolute worst of the absolute worst for me.
And I beg them.
I send them a letter.
I say, look, please stop.
Just stop.
You're not helping anybody.
Well, they're helping some people, right?
They're certainly helping their audience with their virtue signaling and their belief that blacks can't make it without the help of non-blacks and all that, right?
Well, no, I guess that's true.
They're helping their wallets, I guess.
But anyway, so what are my multiple choices here to do about my supplement to theist communities, basically?
I guess that's really what I'm lacking.
Well, here's the question.
I don't have an answer as yet, but it's a question that's been floating around in my head.
And the question is this.
I always thought that the choice was between, say, atheism, Christianity, Islam, you know, maybe a couple of Sikh or whatever, a couple of other ones, right?
But what if the choice is simply between Christianity and Islam?
Well, that's a pretty simple choice.
If If the choice is between, are you there?
Yep.
Okay.
If the choice is between Christianity and Islam, then there really is no choice, honestly.
I mean, one is a belief system of subjugation, the other has some wacky ideas, sure, but the people pretty much know how to act.
Right.
Wow.
So, you know, you're right.
I mean, I've thought about this as well.
Like, if to save Western civilization, could I become a Christian?
Let's just say, in some completely obviously grandiose way, I sort of woke up one morning and say, if I become a Christian, the West is saved.
Well, could you?
Let's say that it came to that.
Let's say that you knew that that was what was going to happen.
Then...
Praise the Lord!
All right.
Praise the Lord, I'll take five wafers.
All right.
Well, no, I guess you...
You give me the hardest...
I don't know if you remember my call last time, but you give me very difficult choices here.
It is a tough choice.
I would...
You know, I have had such positive interactions with Christians lately.
You know, they...
It is a slow-fuse love bomb.
And, you know, they've had every reason to dislike me, and a lot of them have been incredibly positive.
And that's hard to ignore.
I'm an empiricist, right?
Who is the group?
Which of the groups that are behaving the best these days?
I've got to tell you, for me, kind of Christians.
You know, the atheists are sitting there saying, well, what do you mean you're...
You're going to take legal action against a baker who doesn't want to bake a gay wedding cake?
Are you kidding me?
The Christians are kind of failing it.
Unless that's a Muslim bakery.
Let's be clear about it.
Right.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So who is behaving the best these days under the greatest provocation, under the greatest scorn, under the greatest assault?
Culturally.
I mean, when was the last time you saw a religious person positively portrayed in a Hollywood movie?
A Christian, I mean.
No, no, that doesn't happen anymore.
They're either rubes or borderline abortion clinic bombers.
Right, right, right.
Or they're, you know, secret gay homophobic twisted American beauty style.
But so the amount of...
Trawling that Christians are experiencing.
I mean, the left, they don't care about homosexuality.
They care about trawling Christians, which is why they, if they cared about homosexuality, they'd have some issues with, I don't know, certain religions that don't seem to be very pro-homosexual.
Are they pro-women?
No.
Are they anti-family?
Because family is an effective means of transmitting Christian beliefs.
So the left is just relentlessly, and it has been for like a couple of generations now, is relentlessly trawling The Christians.
And the government is relentlessly trolling the Christians.
And who is behaving with the greatest dignity and restraint?
It's not the atheists.
It's not the atheists.
Because the atheists have yet to answer.
There is an existential threat facing the West, and the atheists aren't talking about it much.
At all.
Yeah.
Well, you and I. Are you actually an atheist?
Would you call yourself an atheist?
Well, I mean, I'm a philosopher.
I have to go wherever reason leads me.
But I certainly have taken a bit of a...
Let's just say I've had a slightly greater focus on pragmatism these days than I had in the past, because there's no time left for abstractions, given the demographics and given what's happening in Europe.
I mean, there's no time for these abstractions, and let's work it out over a generation or two.
Time doesn't exist anymore.
No, you're right.
There's no time to sit and argue...
The finiteness of God, you know, sitting with tea and cookies when there's war outside.
I totally understand.
Oh, and to me, it's the neighbor test, right?
Let's say I live on a street and the house next door is up for sale, and I hear, the only thing I hear about is that a bunch of Christians are moving in, or a bunch of atheists are moving in.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Oh darn, there's going to be a nativity scene next year.
Right?
That's the scary situation for the Christians.
They have an over, way too dramatic nativity scene.
No, I mean, I gotta tell you, like in the past, yeah, I mean, I don't believe in the existence of a God.
And I actively don't believe in the existence of a God.
And that's where reason and evidence has led me.
And I can't wish...
Consequences in and out, right?
I mean, if you make up business profits, you're a fraud.
And if you make up conclusions, you're a sophist.
So I have to go with reason.
Yes, I do not believe.
But if I knew next door we're moving in a bunch of atheists or a bunch of Christians, before I'd be like, oh, please let it be the atheist because, you know, We'll be so sophisticated together, but now?
I gotta tell you, a bunch of lefty, hedonistic, economic determinist, no conscience, no ethics, no, I don't know.
Oh my goodness, that's a question.
Okay, okay, before I go, and I want to make sure other people have time here, if you were to have Do you raise children, new children, with this exact idea in your mind?
Do you raise them Christian, or do you do what atheists basically do, which is just say, have at it?
Sorry, was that the question?
I'm waiting for the question, Mark.
Otherwise, you've got to be Spanish and put it at the beginning of the question.
Well, I'll ask it again.
Maybe I wasn't clear.
No, it's not theoretical.
I mean, I can't teach children things that I don't believe are true, right?
And again, I'm not teaching existence or non-existence of God.
It's just the thinking.
How would we reason these things out?
So then what you're actually, what you're tacitly advocating here is a kind of cultural Jew, right?
I'm not sure.
Maybe, maybe not.
What do you mean by that?
I don't understand.
So...
A very large percentage of Jews are not believers, but they still practice all the traditions, they still have their whole in-group situation.
That sounds like what you're possibly advocating.
Yeah, look, I mean, I'm down with at least half the Ten Commandments.
Like, I'm batting 500 when it comes to eternal law agreement with Christians, and the ones that, you know, it's fine if they don't have any other false gods before, that's fine.
If they're down with it, thou shalt not kill, and steal, and great.
You know, fantastic.
It'd be nice if rape was in there, too.
But anyway, so I'm down with all of that kind of stuff, and I'm a very strict moralist.
I mean, I do not brook immorality in myself.
I do not brook immorality in those around me.
You know, a falsehood from everyone is something to be strictly monitored and pushed back against.
I mean, I'm a very strict moralist.
Old school that way.
I am perhaps even Jesuitical.
I'm not sure how far you'd go.
But I'm a very strict moralist when it comes to those things.
And I would probably have a lot more in common with Christians than I would with atheists.
Certainly when it comes to ethics.
Because I spend a lot of time talking about ethics with atheists.
And outside of objectivists who are kind of a different category of atheists in some ways...
It gets real goopy real quick.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I'll leave you with two things really quickly.
One, I was with two colleagues, two new people I don't know very well, and they're both Christian and they're both conservative.
I'm in Texas.
And one of them was giving a book to the other, and the book was a refutation of the theory of evolution.
And how it disproves evolution throughout the book.
And so, of course, I couldn't help it.
I didn't say anything.
I just said, let me see that.
So I kind of took it and just, you know, bit my tongue.
And I thought, is this my future?
Do I have to deal with this kind of stuff?
But look, I mean, the question of evolution.
First of all, you know, I mean, it's tough.
I'm a big fan of Ann Coulter.
She's been on the show.
And she's got some really good arguments.
You know, it's not...
Of course there are people who are idiots who disbelieve in evolution, but there are people who are idiots who believe in evolution, right?
There are some good arguments against it.
I'm not saying they're valid, but it's not just, you know, like that movie, I think it's Jesus Camp or whatever, where they're like just chanting, how do you know?
That's not...
There are some...
There are some holes and there are some good arguments against it.
I'm with Richard Dawkins, greatest story ever told.
I mean, I'm there with it, and I'm fine with all of that.
But here's the thing.
Would you rather be around Christians who believe in evolution or atheists who are opening up the West to its disintegration?
Oh, I see what you're saying, yeah.
Again, you're kind of forcing me into a corner there.
No, I'm not.
Look, I'm not pointing out that this is where we are.
Yes.
I mean, if the leftists...
I think we touched on race and IQ in the past, right?
So, is it worse for Christians to not believe in evolution?
What the hell does that change about the world as it is?
What does it change at all?
Other than the fact that they're trying to rescue the soul...
Which is free will and a conscience.
They're trying to rescue the soul from blind natural mechanisms.
I understand that.
So, them rejecting evolution has them able to see people suffer.
It has them reject the welfare state.
It has them promote charity.
It has them do all of these wonderful things that I completely agree with.
Okay, if you've got to jettison evolution to get there, There's worse things in this world.
On the other hand, no, on the other hand, we have people on the left denying any race and IQ differences, denying any differences between men and women, denying the fact that women have babies and that might have an effect on their lifelong earnings.
Like, that's how insane it is.
And those people are advocating incredibly destructive social programs.
So I can't care that much that Christians don't believe in evolution.
I believe in evolution, but where they get to for me is a lot healthier than the crazy science denial that goes on on the left.
Let's not even talk about global warming, let's just talk about some of the other stuff.
Their crazy science denial is really destructive.
The science denial that goes on because people are skeptical of evolution What has it changed?
They're not advocating any policies about it.
As far as I know, maybe they want creationism taught alongside evolution.
Fine.
Okay, fine.
So you have an opinion and an opposing opinion.
Can we get capitalism taught in government schools?
Can we get, you know, like...
Can we get opposing opinions that are a little bit more important?
Anyway, that's...
I don't want to say, like, it doesn't matter, but as far as, oh, they believe in evolution and that's how they rescue conscience and a soul and virtue and voluntarism and all these kinds of things.
Fine.
I don't agree, but I love the place you end up.
Whereas the science denial on the left ends up with incredibly destructive policies that are, like, shredding the entire social fabric of the West.
Yeah, all right.
I... You've given me a decent, compelling argument here.
I'll do some cost-benefit.
I'm pretty sure the cost-benefit will land on the side that you're advocating, but I don't know.
But do me a favor.
Do me a favor, please.
Sorry to interrupt.
But yeah, do me a favor.
Have a look at this book, Universally Preferable Behavior, and tell me where it's wrong.
Okay, so before...
Come on back, and we'll do a no-time limit just...
Rip it apart.
Absolutely.
I actually tried to start to write a book like this myself.
As soon as I lost ethics, as soon as I lost right and wrong, I started to write what was like the moral landscape when I was younger, and I never finished it or anything.
But no, I'd love to read it and I'll follow your exact advice there.
And before I go, I have to tell you something.
Please pat yourself on the back for Being part of saving the United States, because it is absolutely my ardent belief that people like you, Mr.
Bill Whittle, Mr.
Shapiro with his Trump hatred, are collectively responsible for saving us from Hillary Clinton.
So give yourself a pat on the back for me.
Thanks.
It's nice that people are debating whether Trump is appointing the perfect cabinet rather than gearing up to be drafted for a useless war against Russia.
So, yes, I appreciate that.
Thanks very much.
I've always enjoyed our chats.
And, yeah, please come on back.
I want good old-fashioned materialistic moral nihilism to take as many baseball bats to UPB as possible, and we'll see if it's kept standing afterwards.
So, thanks, Laf, for your call.
Of course, I appreciate that enormously.
And let's move on.
Alright, up next we have James.
James wrote in and said, I've been listening to your show over the years and I think I've identified logical objections that Stefan has with the existence of a possible God.
I don't want to make too many assumptions, but the first is that he seems to believe matter is necessary for the existence of consciousness and therefore God cannot exist because he would be immaterial by definition.
Why do you think consciousness is derived from matter?
That's from James.
Oh, hi, James.
How you doing?
It's like we've just planned these.
Thanks, Mike.
These calls in perfect sequence.
Unfolding like the chapters of a story.
I would say it.
Dump Star Wars.
Dump Star Wars is the newest chapter.
But anyway, hashtag Dump Star Wars.
You should look that up.
Mike Cernovich is all over that, and I think it's going to be interesting.
But sorry for the interruption.
How are you doing tonight?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm well, thank you.
Well, I'd certainly say it's no accident, but that's of course my worldview that we're having this conversation after the last one.
I just want to start and say that I agree with you on 99% of things in your show, and I read recently your book, Against the Gods.
And so I think you obviously have four main points in the beginning of logical objections against the existence of a god.
And I kind of wanted to mostly focus on the consciousness one.
That's why I did a lot of my research on.
And if we have time, we can go into other ones as well.
But I just want to kind of foremost thank you for kind of opening my mind on these things.
I really didn't consider these things before.
So just kind of looking into them was a joy in and of itself.
And maybe I can present a decent argument here.
Right.
So the question about consciousness and its relation to matter is, to me, Very simple, and I apologize for that term.
When I say very simple, it sounds like, well, then you'd have to be an idiot not to get it.
I don't mean that at all.
I mean, the argument is quite simple, and that means it could be completely wrong, right?
So I just want to put it out.
But the argument is basically we only ever encounter consciousness in proximity to a human brain.
When the human brain is removed, there is no consciousness.
When the human brain's electrical and biochemical energy dissipates, there is no consciousness.
So if we have Gravity only in relation to mass, right?
Where there's no mass, there's no gravity, and the greater the mass, the greater the gravity, and the closer you are to the gravitational center, the greater the gravity, then we would say that gravity is an effect of matter.
In the same way, if we only have consciousness next to the couple of pound wetware of the human brain, then we would certainly have to say that consciousness does not Reside in our finger, in our toenail, in our ear, our hair, or anything like that.
It does result, reside in the human brain.
We can certainly imagine a head lifted off a body and somehow kept alive, that there would still be consciousness in that.
However, if we take any other body part other than the head or the brain and attempt to keep it alive, if you could keep someone's finger alive, it would not be their consciousness that would be there.
So consciousness is specifically Attached with and associated with the effects of matter and energy in the human brain, which is why I say that to have consciousness without matter is like saying I have gravity without mass, that gravity is an effect of mass and consciousness is an effect of matter.
Yeah, I don't disagree entirely.
I think that the logic you have is sound.
It follows.
It makes a lot of sense.
But I guess the perspective I look at it from is one that is completely 180 degrees, you know, rather than consciousness being an emergent property of matter.
It would be completely the other way around.
And so, you know, I think that from what I've looked into, and again, I just want to say I'm not a neuroscientist or anything like that.
This is all stuff I've just kind of researched.
There's a lot of neuroscientists out there that are indicating a 180 degree perspective on what was previously thought about consciousness being rather than an emergent property from matter the other way around.
The whole Newtonian physics idea that it has to be derived from matter to do the argument from complexity and all that.
So I think that, you know, and I'm going to quote some people like Sam Harris and stuff like that, but I guess before I wanted to go there, I wanted to know what your definition of consciousness was.
I'm not sure.
What do you mean by definition of consciousness?
I guess how would you define it?
You know, what does it mean to you?
Are we in doubt about what we're describing?
No, I just...
You're not talking about a car or something, right?
No, no.
I don't think we need to define something that we are both in agreement and everybody around is, you know, our capacity to think, to reason, to communicate, to verbalize, to be creative.
I mean, all of the sort of faculties of the sort of higher mind that goes on in the neofrontal cortex, that would be sort of...
But, you know, because the problem is that defined consciousness.
I don't know.
We both...
We know what we're talking about, right?
I mean, if we're both talking about a car...
Do we need to define the...
I mean, you know what, maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm not sure why we would need to define it.
No, the only reason I ask is because, you know, when you Google, you know, what is consciousness, you do get a variance of answers.
And I guess, to me, you know, I think that it's obviously, to quote Sam Harris, it's an irreducibly subjective experience.
It's the only reality that we know.
And some people like...
Wait, wait, it's the only reality that we know?
According to, that's the Sam Harris quote.
Wait, so, hang on.
Because that's a lot of metaphysics and epistemology packed into one small sentence.
Right.
And I don't want to sort of brush past that.
And of course, you know, Sam's not here.
Sure.
It's certainly, consciousness is not the only reality we know.
I mean, how about that thing called reality?
Right.
That seems somewhat important as well.
I mean, of course, we have our subjective experiences.
Right.
And, you know, if we're looking at two pictures of old men and one of them looks like your father but not my father, you're going to have a different emotional experience to that picture of an old man because he looks like your father, not mine.
So, we're both looking at a picture of an old man and...
That's in reality.
Our different emotional experience, I don't know what it means to say consciousness is the only reality we know.
I mean, the subjective emotional experience that you have is part of your consciousness, and that's part of your history, but not part of my history, which is why we wouldn't have the same emotional reaction.
So we're both seeing the objective thing in the world, but having different subjective experiences of it.
So...
I don't know what to say.
Consciousness is the only reality that we know.
Again, Sam's not here, but I just wanted to sort of point out that that is a big challenge when it comes to sort of understanding.
Sure, and I don't agree with him.
I guess that's sort of what I was trying to get at, is I just wanted to make sure that we agree on What it is and what it isn't, because certain neuroscientists will say different things about it.
Some people will say it's illusory.
It's not real.
Some people will say it is real.
Okay, let's not...
We can't possibly go around beating the bushes of incoherent thoughts from people who aren't here and think we're having a discussion.
Let's talk about what you argue for and what I argue for, because otherwise we're calling witnesses who can't take the stand.
Yeah, I understand.
So...
Obviously, I agree with you.
Consciousness is our subjective experience, and we compare it to the real world as we see it.
No, I never said consciousness was our subjective experience.
Oh, sorry.
No, because some aspects of consciousness are our subjective experience, and some actions of consciousness are our objective experience.
So if I look down and I say, oh, I have a sunburn.
Well, my subjective experience is, I guess, discomfort, although that would probably be pretty universal.
But the fact that I have a sunburn is subjective.
I'm looking at it, registering it in my consciousness.
It's not a purely subjective thing.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah, you know, I... So I guess for...
I'm sorry, I'm...
I'm trying to gather my thoughts here on this.
We know what we're talking about when it comes to consciousness, right?
So our capacity to think, to reason, to experience the world, and it is composed of objective and subjective, of unconscious and conscious, right?
I mean, to me, consciousness doesn't just mean the conscious mind, there's the unconscious as well.
Right.
Although, of course, if somebody's in a coma, I guess you could say their unconscious is running, but they haven't achieved consciousness or whatever.
But it's just, you know, we think, we do, we act, we reason, we communicate, and so on.
These are all operations of consciousness.
I don't want to get too much into...
I'm trying to wrap it in a particularly precise form of definition because I don't think that really helps us when it gets to God.
The question is not what is consciousness, which is sort of a boring question to me.
We kind of know what it is and trying to define it as just kind of a...
Language game, it's always going to be limited because language is a product of consciousness and therefore can't expand to encompass all of consciousness.
So language is always going to be incomplete when it comes to a discussion of consciousness, but we kind of know what we're talking about anyway.
So let's just continue on with that.
Okay.
So again, I guess the question of whether consciousness is an emergent property of matter is You know, just in the research that I did, you know, looking into what neuroscientists were saying about it, I wasn't really able to find a whole lot of information on anything conclusive within neuroscience that says, you know, aha!
No, that's easy, though.
I don't care what neuroscientists said, it's easy.
All you have to do is show consciousness without a brain.
Or, yeah, you say artificial intelligence, but nobody's going to say that artificial intelligence or a computer is a god, right?
So, all you have to do, if you want to sort of detach consciousness from matter, is to show consciousness without matter in proximity.
Or to show consciousness without matter that would normally produce consciousness.
Like if you have a talking bush, a bush does not have enough neural complexity, of course, or any neural complexity really to produce consciousness.
Or if you have a rock that can speak to you telepathically, or a rock doesn't even have any organic...
elements or any particular organic elements in it.
So if you have a rock that can tell, then you have consciousness in the rock without the matter that would naturally support it.
If you have, what's even better, a vacuum that can communicate with you, then you have consciousness without matter.
So this is not, this is a very testable hypothesis.
Is consciousness an effect of matter?
Well, if every single time you experience consciousness, it is with a particular set of matter around, i.e.
the human brain, Then sure, then until proven otherwise, consciousness is an effective matter.
And of course, if you have a hypothesis behind it, not just that it is empirically an effective matter, but why it would be an effective matter, then you're that much further ahead in terms of having a conclusive hypothesis that is valid.
Right.
And I guess...
I was looking into situations where was the potential for consciousness separate from matter or absent the brain and there are a bunch of medical cases out there of people who lack You know, like a frontal cortex or lacked, you know, only fluid in the brain or near-death experiences and things like that.
People who weren't registering any physical brain activity but who were able to recall situations and things like that.
You know, I was able to find...
Wait, wait.
Hang on.
Hang on.
Sorry.
Again, we're kind of...
I wish people would go slow.
Sorry.
You know, we're trying to excavate the entire human experience.
So, are you saying that there are people who are missing a brain who had the effects of brain?
Yes, yes.
You said people that just had water in their skull, but they were able to reason?
Yes.
There's one case that I found.
What?
Hey, you can look it up, Stefan.
Okay, give me a reference.
Give me a reference.
I'm trying to stay open-minded.
Not so open-minded my brain falls out, but okay.
So somebody without a brain in his head had the effects of consciousness in some sort of objective, reportable manner.
Yes, and to be fair, there was a brain stem, but let me see if I can find the...
A brainstem.
Okay, so they're leftists.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, give me a reference.
I call high skepticism on this, but maybe that's my prejudice.
I think there was a student, his name was John Lorber.
Last name spelled how?
L-O-R-B-E-R. John Lorber, brain.
Can I do a search on that?
Yes, I believe so.
Let's see.
I think that's his name.
Ah, okay.
In 1980, the British pediatrician, John Lauber...
Oh, so he's the...
Alright, let's see here.
Yes, I'm sorry.
I think he was the doctor that...
Yeah, he was the doctor.
...opened his head, yeah.
Okay, in the 1970s, a British pediatrician, John Lauber, re-examined in adult life the brains of people who had been treated as children for hydrocephaly or water on the brain.
Also one of the lines from my favorite song, Somebody to Love.
In these children, the circulation of fluid in the ventricles of the brain is blocked, yet fluid continues to enter the brain, so the ventricles expand and brain volume increases.
In early life, the skull bones allow this expansion, and enlarged head may be the first sign that all is not well.
By inserting a small tube or shunt, surgeons are able to drain off the excess fluid, so relieving the pressure.
If successful, the ventricular expansion is reversed and head size returns to normal.
When the operation is carried out early before the skull bones begin to fuse, a child can expect a normal life.
Taking advantage of new brain scanning technology, Lorber anticipated that the adult brains of treated hydrocephalics would appear normal.
Okay, wait here.
So, okay, I mean, okay.
Let's see.
Almost the entire skull is filled with ventricular fluid and there remains only a small surrounding rim of actual brain tissue.
Given the extent of tissue loss, it is astonishing that he is alive.
This is some dude he is doing his scan on.
Yet 60 of the 600 cases Lorber studied displayed such extreme brain scans.
Ventricular fluid occupied at least 95% of cranial capacity.
Half of Lorber's 60 cases were of above average...
Or above normal intelligence as determined by standard IQ tests.
The central scans in the figure, virtually indistinguishable from the severely impaired ones on the right, are representative of this group.
So instead of the normal 4.5 cm thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or The cranium is filled mainly with Cerebrospinal fluid.
I can't say whether the mathematics student has a brain weighing 50 or 150 grams, but it's clear it's nowhere near the normal 1.5 kilograms.
Of course, when Lorber presented his findings at a conference in 1980, He was met with much skepticism.
Journalist Roger Lewin related in science how experts had pointed to difficulties in the interpretation of brain scans and had even declared that Laura's style is less scientific than it might be to the accusations that he was being overdramatic.
Blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
TV documentary.
Let's see here.
Let's see here.
Part by part.
A brain of a white-collar worker.
French neurologists reported a massive ventricular enlargement in the brain scan of a civil servant who was married with two children and had come to them with relatively mild neurological symptoms and responded to treatment.
Okay, so I obviously can't become an expert on this right away, but it certainly does seem to be that the brain is smaller than normal and this guy claims that the brain has less A volume than normal, but that it still is able to produce a normal consciousness, is that right?
Correct.
Okay, so that is not a repudiation of the thesis, right?
If we say, because it would be, as I said, you'd have to have consciousness that showed up with no matter that would support consciousness present.
This is still consciousness in relation to a brain.
And I obviously can't become an expert on this or figure out what's true or what's false, and it sounds like it's not particularly verified, right?
I mean, this is one guy who published things, and again, maybe it's true, but there's still a skull and there's still some brain matter in there which is producing consciousness.
I don't really have an answer as to how much brain matter is necessary to produce consciousness.
But I do know as far as neuroplasticity goes that people who've lost significant sections of their brain can train, other parts of the brain can take on more of this sort of brain activity and sort of make up for what's missing and so on.
So these are, you know, it's fascinating and I really, really appreciate you bringing this up.
But it just shows to me that the brain is really, really cool in terms of its ability to produce consciousness even when brain matter is less present than it should be.
Sure.
Yeah, you know, you're right.
Obviously, there's matter there, so I can't...
It's kind of difficult to say that matter is not existent.
There's clearly matter there.
Your argument is still valid.
And I guess the other things that I was looking into were, I think the main argument that I saw was from near-death experiences.
And I think in those particular circumstances, these were people who reported, you know, I think there's thousands of cases of these that were people who reported some form of consciousness, despite the fact that they were either brain dead medically at the time or,
you know, even when hooked up to an EEG or whatever, there was There was zero brain activity, but yet they were able to recount conversations that happened in the room or some type of idiosyncratic behavior from the doctors that were performing on them.
I don't know if you've ever looked into things like that before?
Well, just to be clear, this is people whose brain has ceased to function.
They've got no brain activity going on.
But they are able to, or they claim that they're able to report conversations that occurred in the room, even though they had no brain activity, which would indicate some operation of a soul, right?
That the soul would be a non-material methodology of perceiving and remembering about the world.
Yes.
And although the physical brain was not functioning, that they're able to perceive and recall conversations.
Yes.
And...
Extraordinary claims, as we know, require extraordinary evidence, right?
Right.
This is not that.
Right?
I mean, this is not a double-blind experiment which would prove these kinds of things.
Is that fair to say?
I mean, it's anecdotal.
Sure.
I don't deny that it is anecdotal, but I think that...
And again, this is just what I... I've run online, so I have no experience with it.
But there were literally statistics from thousands of cases where people were able to report things.
And again, it's between if the doctor said something and then the patient was able to come back and say, well, you said this, and how could you have said that if it's brain dead?
So I don't know if you would count that as verifiable in terms of the doctor that reported that experience, but that's sort of...
Okay, but here's the thing.
And look, I don't mean to sound overly skeptical.
And look, I make claims, you know, like we should have societies with no governments, right?
I make claims that people find shocking beyond words.
So I'm not one to say, well, all shocking claims must be dismissed out of hand.
I mean, it's kind of my stock in trade in some ways, right?
Don't hit your children.
No discipline in that sense.
So I have no objection to extraordinary claims at all.
I mean, that's...
Kind of my gig.
That's kind of where philosophy takes you, but there is a bias that is significant here.
So, for instance, if the doctor is religious, then the doctor is going to have a bias towards believing that the person has had an out-of-body experience, that there was a soul in the room, and that the person can have the ability to recall conversations when their brain was dead, right?
Right.
So that's one possibility.
The second is, I don't know how accurately these conversations Would be reported.
So, for instance, I would imagine that the conversations in an operating room, in an emergency room, the conversations when someone is dying and they're trying to revive them, that the conversations would not be random.
They would be very specifically focused on trying to get the person to stay this side of the grass, right?
To stay this side of the grave.
So now if it was a random conversation, in other words, let's just take a really silly example.
So someone goes brain dead and then they launch into random, they're handed topics to talk about that are random.
You know, what do you think of Dadaism?
How do you like Star Wars?
What do you think of Pachelbel's canon?
Is it overrated?
Like, whatever it is, right?
It could be any number of things, right?
Well, what is the chemical formula for potassium?
I mean, now, if they had random conversations handed to them and the person came back, and prior to anyone interacting with that person reported on those random conversations with significant accuracy, that would be quite something, right?
Yes.
But so the one possibility is that, you know, I've watched, and maybe you have too, I've watched in my day a not inconsiderable number of medical dramas.
And in those medical dramas, they're saying a whole bunch of stuff when the person is dying, you know?
I need you to push 20 of epi stat, whatever, right?
And...
So when somebody who, I assume, has watched some television or has watched some shows about medical dramas when someone's dying, comes back and says, I heard this, I had this memory of this conversation, it's not like they haven't been exposed to it before, just in medical dramas.
It's a possibility, right?
And so these are not random conversations, and they are conversations that the person who's dying Would have been exposed, or most likely would have been exposed to in the past through just media consumption.
So it's not a double-blind experiment at all, right?
I mean, this is what they'll be talking about.
I've heard people talk about this before.
I come back and have a memory of this conversation.
That's not, it's not exactly a random guess, so to speak, right?
Yeah.
Right.
And I guess, you know, speaking about the, you know, the specificity of these conversations or, again, idiosidocratic behavior, you know, just to throw out one example I was reading about, one guy in particular who went under, and he, you know, according to him, he was outside of his body observing the whole procedure, whatever, and he told the doctor afterwards, he asked him separately, privately, Why are you flapping your arms like a chicken during the procedure?
And I guess the doctor apparently got embarrassed and asked him, how did he know that?
And who told you that?
And then he went on to explain that what he was essentially doing was he was trying to motion to his assistants I know it's anecdotal, but I was reading a lot of things about that that were relatively specific about people who were able to recall things that shouldn't have been able to otherwise recall these very specific behaviors or conversations.
Now, maybe it's me just watching a bit too much of Gregory House, but I will tell you this, my friend.
I'm just giving you this as my...
Maybe it's a bias or whatever.
People lie a lot.
If people didn't lie a lot, we wouldn't need philosophy.
We wouldn't need half of science.
People lie a lot.
And the number of people I've met...
Who claimed to be psychic?
Not anymore, right?
But when I was younger, I must have met maybe a dozen people who claimed to have psychic abilities.
And you could say that they really believed that they had these abilities.
And I would say, okay, great, let's test it.
I'll get a deck of cards, you know, and you can tell me what you see.
No, it doesn't work that way.
So people make claims about a lot of things.
And this is why we need the rigor of science and the rigor of double-blind experiments.
And people may be entirely sincere about what it is that they're saying.
They may 150% believe it themselves.
You know, when I started using this essential oil, my psoriasis cleared up.
Boom!
And they may genuinely believe that this essential oil cleared their psoriasis.
Maybe it did.
But most likely it was just spontaneous remission and a coincidence, right?
Right.
So people lie, obviously, and people also misrepresent while having pure motives or so.
This is what they genuinely believe.
Now we have a very strong incentive To, like you say, oh, well, people confuse cause and effect, and they...
But we have a very strong...
So let's say I have psoriasis, and I take this essential oil, and my psoriasis clears up.
Well, what I'm worried about is my psoriasis coming back.
Now, if I believe I have a cure for my psoriasis, then I'm not going to be as worried about my psoriasis coming back.
Now, if me not worrying...
Low is the chance of my psoriasis coming back.
In other words, if my psoriasis is related to stress, then if I believe I have a cure for my psoriasis, I'm going to relax about it.
And guess what?
My belief in a cure becomes a cure.
So there is evolutionary adaptation that is very positive and very helpful to irrationality, right?
To a confusion of cause and effect, to just making mistakes about why things happen the way that they happen.
Right.
So if one group of soldiers, let's call them soldier A, soldier group A and soldier group B. Soldier group A, and it's going to be a battle the next day, so soldier group A believes that God is on their side, and the worst thing that can happen is they get killed and go straight to heaven.
Soldier group B doesn't believe in any of that stuff, doesn't want to be at war, and knows that, or believes that death is the end.
Well, Soldier Group A, who believe in God and life after death and God is on their side, is going to sleep well because they have much less to fear the next day.
Soldier Group B is not going to sleep as well because they have a lot more to fear the next day.
Who's going to perform better on the battlefield?
Soldier Group A. They slept better.
They slept better.
Who's going to have more courage on the battlefield?
The people who are terrified of death or the people who view death as a pathway to the divine and to eternal paradise?
They're going to fight better.
These are just two examples off the top of my head.
There's six million more we could talk about.
But there is an evolutionary value to irrationality.
It gives people strength and purpose and meaning and it allows them to believe that they're in control of events outside of their control.
So, the question for life after death is something like this, or near-death experiences.
Did the person come back from their near-death experience having solved an equation that no mathematician had ever solved before, that was important and recognized, like a Fermat's Last Theorem or whatever before it was solved, right?
Or did someone come back with the cure for a disease That no one had ever heard of?
Or did someone come back with some physics equation that was essential that physicists had been working on forever and they had no training in physics?
In other words, did they come back with knowledge that in no way, shape or form should they reasonably be expected to have?
Well, that would be something quite remarkable.
And if that happened on a regular basis, we'd say, well, okay, there's something really wild going on here.
They come back with things that are in the room.
They come back with things that are not beyond...
Like, if you have a soul, and the soul touches on the mind of God, then if you have a near-death experience, and your soul leaves your body and touches the mind of God, shouldn't you come back with something remarkable, rather than, here's what was said in the room?
I would definitely agree with that.
I mean, there's...
And again, this is all just...
I looked into, but of the percentage of people who reported having near-the-death experience, the majority of them, like 80% plus, experienced coming back saying, you know, having things like experience, you know, oneness with the universe, a greater feeling of joy, greater love.
So it seemed to affect them in some way.
And that I completely agree.
Can you imagine the amount of endorphins that are released by the body when you're dying?
Can you imagine?
I mean, it is a unique experience to be dying.
To actually...
You know, when I was a kid, I used to...
It's ridiculous.
I used to have this thing where I really, really wanted to know what it was like to fall asleep.
To lose consciousness.
How fascinating.
To feel myself sliding down the black well into sleep.
Do you think I ever had any luck?
Every single morning, I'd be sitting there saying, am I asleep yet?
Am I asleep yet?
Am I asleep yet?
Next morning, oh man, I missed it again!
It drove me crazy.
You can't grab it.
It's like those little fluffs of air, you try and grab them, but the wind in your fingers pushes them away.
But when we die...
We're actually knowing what it's like to fall asleep.
Like, I will get my wish.
I will get my wish.
One day.
Hopefully in the distant future, but I will get my wish.
Which is, I will know what it's like to fall asleep because I will die.
I will be sliding down into non-existence.
And I can be fully conscious of the end of my consciousness in the way that you can't be every night when you experience a little death called sleep.
So I don't...
I can't imagine what crazy stuff is going on in the brain when you're dying.
I mean, it's full emergency, all hands on deck.
Like, pump you full of whatever.
Because I imagine that the brain itself doesn't know what you're dying of in particular.
Maybe you're being eaten by a lion and it's going to flood you with, like, emergency, super-duper, you know, frail old ladies lifting cars to get their grandsons out from being pinned underneath.
Who knows what crazy stuff is going on?
I'm sure they do know, right?
Like, how much...
Mind-altering chemicals are pumped into the brain by the system, by the body system in the last moments of life, in a wild attempt to change the course of the next few seconds, which is the end of everything.
So I know that there is some crazy stuff that goes on in the brain when it's dying.
And the idea that that's another universe is a challenge for me.
Go ahead.
And I think that in some instances that's probably true.
But again, you know, in some of the ones I looked into, these people were fully brain dead.
Like they actually died and then came back maybe a few minutes later or whatever the case, or maybe somebody who was in a coma or whatever the case.
So So I think in some instances, I think it's fair to say that there were at least, again, what I looked into is that there were instances where there wasn't brain activity going on.
So it's kind of...
And what?
In these near-death experiences.
No, I understand that.
And they experienced a typical conversation, which they'd probably seen a bunch of times before in movies and television shows, about what surgeons do when someone's dying or what doctors do when someone's dying.
This is not a very powerful experiment.
Right.
Again, if they had random topics, which they never would, you can't ethically ever do these experiments, right?
If they had random topics, that would be another matter.
But they don't.
They have very similar topics, as you would see portrayed in television shows or movies.
Right.
And again, some of the examples I saw were specific, but I understand that they're, you know, do we believe these people?
Do we not?
I get that.
I'm not trying to present this as fact or, you know, hey, this is proof for God or anything like that.
Have you ever, I'm sorry to interrupt, but have you ever had it where, when you think about your own personal history, have you ever had it where you don't know if it happened to you or you were told a story about something that happened to you?
I find this, for me, it's the case with my early childhood.
Yeah, I've experienced that.
Yeah, it's like, I don't know if this really happened to me, or if I heard the story so many times that I have a memory of something that was implanted by other people's description of something.
Like, when I was a kid, I went missing.
Poof!
I vanished.
I was not beamed up to be probed by UFOs.
What happened was, my family was playing hide-and-go-seek.
And I crawled into a tiny...
I'm very competitive, as you can imagine.
I want to win philosophy forever!
But I crawled in behind a couch, like a tiny impossible sliver.
I wedged my way in there.
I sank sort of half-floated down the back of the couch.
And people took so long to find me that I fell asleep.
Now, I slept...
I had a roommate once who's like, you pound on the door, you can ring the phone, he never woke up.
But I slept the sleep of the very young...
And I was gone.
Now, I heard this story a whole bunch of times, you know, about how freaked out everyone was that I had just gone missing and nobody could figure out, right?
I was that good at hiding.
Yes, I won!
Now, I have a memory of being behind this couch.
I'm sure I don't remember it because it actually happened, like, in my memory.
It was just a story that was told to me so many times.
Now, I would wonder, I would be curious about the people who had these near-death experiences.
Have they read on other people's near-death experiences?
Do they believe in a soul?
Do they believe in an afterlife?
And so on, right?
And it doesn't mean that everything they say is false.
It just means, are they primed?
In other words, if you'd read a whole bunch of Stories of near-death experiences about what happened and what people remembered and so on.
And then you came back.
If you read a whole bunch of them, even when you were younger, maybe you hadn't read them in a long time, I could see how the brain might kick things up into similarly.
You say, now what about all the people who come back from a near-death experiences and says, you guys were talking about Pablo Picasso, right?
And they're like, no, no, we weren't.
We were telling someone to push Epi or whatever, right?
Whatever was going on.
And...
We don't remember all the times where people come back from the dead or from near-death experiences.
They come back and they're wrong about what's going on.
Because that doesn't fit any particular narrative.
But, you know, I've had this conversation with listeners before.
It's like those dreams.
You know, like, wow, I had a dream that I was going up an escalator and the sun was in my eye and a crow cored to my left.
Well, you have that dream, and then the next day, nothing like that happens.
And the next day, nothing.
And then you have all these dreams, but the one time you have a dream, and then the next day you go on, the sun is rising, crow calls to your left, boom!
Wow!
Then you make that connection, right?
But it's, you don't remember all the times your dreams didn't come true, but you sure as hell remember that one time where it seemed to come true, right?
Right.
And, you know, so people say, oh, my life flashed before my eyes.
Well, that's kind of a Perception that that's what happens.
There's nobody who doesn't know that, right?
Who's least grew up in the West.
And, oh, I saw a bright light, family and friends and so on.
Well, yeah, okay.
I can believe the bright light happens.
I mean, what the hell's happening to your visual nerve centers during the time that you're dying or your body believes that you're genuinely dying or is going through that experience?
I, you know...
It's a challenge to really hang your hat on this stuff because it can't ethically ever be experimented on.
Right.
And I think, you know, to kind of just bring it back, I think what's, you know, as an open theist here, it's difficult for me to look at something like the problem of consciousness or whatever you want to call it and say that, well, you know, God just simply can't exist.
I think that when I read that in your book, I did what I thought was at least some honest looking into and seeing if I could find examples of where that may or may not be the case.
But you want it to be true, right?
Well, of course I do.
Yeah, of course.
No doubt.
And look, don't get me wrong, man.
I'd love for it to be true.
I mean, it would be fantastic to think that I could live forever, to think that I'm going to surmount the mere physical.
Like I wrote in a novel many years ago, A woman who was hanged.
And whether she fell into eternity or simply landed on a flat mattress of meat was a fundamental question.
The idea that I would live forever, the idea that the people I love and who love me, that we would be united in ghostly, tendril, octopus arms for eternity under the loving arms of an all-powerful, all-good, all-glowing God to be in bliss forever, to...
To speak with Socrates and jam with Freddie Mercury.
I mean, what a wonderful thought.
It is a wonderful thought, don't get me wrong.
It's tempting.
It's tempting as hell.
I think how we answer this question is important in our lives.
And I also think it's important to recognize that you have a thirst for this.
And so you want it to be true.
And listen, don't get me wrong.
I have those too.
I'm not, oh, I'm floating above all of this, right?
It's what Milo says.
You know, Milo says, Milo Yiannopoulos says, of course, he says, of course I'm biased.
But I'm honest and open about my biases.
The left pretends to be objective.
They pretend that they're into facts.
They're not.
And screw you for calling me a white supremacist.
It's a great moment.
But, um, we love, we love us a tasty slab of peroxide at Milo.
But, um, You want it to be true, and so you sought out information to confirm what you want to be true.
And I don't think...
It's not a criticism.
This is just how people are.
You have a very high burden of disproof for things that you want to be true.
As do I. Now, things that I don't believe are true.
This is what we all have to watch out for in ourselves.
Things I don't believe are true.
I don't have...
I'll be honest.
I don't have a high...
A burden of disproof for things that I don't want to be true.
But things that I do want to be true, it's pretty easy to convince me of things that I want to be true.
And it's pretty hard to unconvince me of things that I want to be true.
And it's pretty easy, things I don't want to be true, it's pretty easy to convince me that they're not true.
So this is all natural.
We can't overcome it.
We can't escape it.
And I don't want to spend my entire life fighting it, and neither do you.
Because we have to take a stand somewhere.
And if you're the only person trying to act on pure rationality and pure empiricism, you're not going to get anything done in your life because you're not going to have any particular momentum, right?
Because radical Humean-style doubt can always infect your brain.
So, yeah, there are things that annoy and offend and bother me that are proposed.
The peak oil and stuff like that.
Peak oil.
Oh, it's going to be a disaster.
We run out of oil.
There are things like the number of environmental lies that I've been told my entire life that actually did poison my childhood quite a bit.
When you're told when you're young that the world, you're going to starve to death by 1980.
That the world is going to be underwater by 1990.
That there's gonna be no oil.
That the civilization's gonna collapse.
There's gonna be no food.
No water.
It's all over.
Like, after a certain amount of that bullshit, it pisses you off.
Like, fuck everyone for telling me all these disaster scenarios.
Fuck them all.
I don't believe a fucking thing that these people say anymore.
Because to believe it is to be paralyzed and to toxicify your life to the point where you say, well, why have kids?
It's all going to be, all going to be underwater.
Hello, baby.
Welcome to the world.
I mean, what a terrible existence to live in.
So, for me, because I've been lied to so many times, I'm not putting you in this category.
For me, I've been lied to so many times by so many different people for their own particular agendas at the expense of my life and my happiness and my fertility.
Because I've been lied to by so many people about so many of the same damn topics.
This government program will work, right?
I mean, I just, I don't believe any of it anymore.
I just don't.
I mean, and I think that's healthy.
I genuinely think that's healthy.
You know, I just, I can't be like that rat who's like, I want a pellet, a buzzer.
I want a pellet, a buzzer.
I have to learn from things, right?
And it's like the racism overload, right?
They've short-circuited the word racism and sexist and homophobic or whatever.
They've just short-circuited those words over the last, well, over the last couple of decades, but in particular with the Trump president.
They're just Completely overloaded.
Those words have no meaning anymore.
Like the word that you repeat over and over again until it just starts to sound strange even to your own ears.
Racism?
Racism!
Yeah, there's another one.
You're a racist!
It's like, ah, shut up.
I don't care.
Everyone's a racist.
Nobody's a racist.
It doesn't...
I mean, who cares, right?
I mean, I don't care.
You know, I'm with Reverend Jesse Lee Peters on this.
I judge behavior.
I don't care about race.
I judge behavior.
And...
So I have lived my life and invested my life in mortality, in falling not to an eternal embrace of an infinite God, but falling to a flat mattress of meat and being food for worms.
Now, I'm invested in that because I've lived my life that way.
You have lived your life for eternity, to some degree, right?
I mean, there's obviously, I mean, I want to live on after I die in the minds of the world, and you, of course, have to do pragmatic things in the here and now that aren't necessarily, you've got to pay your taxes, right?
I guess that's renda under Caesar.
But we have both invested a lot, which means, and rightly so, that you have a very high burden on Of disproof about your God thesis.
And I have a very high burden of disproof about my atheist thesis.
And that's exactly as it should be.
I agree.
And I hope it doesn't sound like I'm hiding my bias or trying to be at least open about it.
But at least in the research that I did, I wasn't able to find anything conclusively.
And I don't know if you have, and that's kind of why I asked.
Obviously, there's a lot of evidence that you've shown correlations to consciousness from the brain, but I couldn't find anything that conclusively stated that it is an effective matter that we know for sure.
And so I think that's the only point I was trying to get across is that I just honestly couldn't find it.
If you can link me or show me somewhere that kind of...
You know, empirically verify that this...
No, I can't, because you're talking to me, not a fridge, right?
Right.
So if you want to talk to my consciousness, you have to get my head involved.
Right.
You have to get my brain involved, right?
And so it's sort of like saying, I need for you to prove to me that gravity exists.
Are you sitting down?
Does your bum feel weighty?
If every time you want to talk to someone, you go and speak to the holes that lead to their brain, their ear holes or whatever, then you are assuming that consciousness is related to matter, and brain matter in particular.
If somebody leaves a jacket behind, you don't have a conversation with the jacket, right?
And you picked up the phone or the Skype and you used material technology.
To get in touch with me.
You didn't say, well, you know, Steph's elbow is going to be in the room, so I'll chat with that, right?
You specifically waited until my wetware pound and a kilogram and a half conscious brain was available for conversation.
And so for you to say, and this is what you do with everyone, and this is what everyone does with everyone.
I mean, if I said to you, you're going to have a meeting with so-and-so, but they're not going to be in the room, and they're not going to be available by phone or any other way of communicating, then would you say, well, that's not a meeting?
I'd say, well, no, their soul will be there.
It's like, I'm sorry, that's not a meeting.
So if the way that everyone works is the same, then I don't think we need to find some sort of specific disproof for it.
In other words, if you say, look, I've got an anti-gravity machine, I don't need to run around proving gravity.
You need to prove your anti-gravity machine.
And so if you're always trying to talk to people In relation to their brain, then I don't need to prove to you that consciousness is an effective matter because that's how you live anyway.
That's how you communicate.
That's how you work with people.
You need your words to go into their ear holes that lead to their brain, right?
I think it's...
No doubt it's related.
The burden of proof is on you.
I understand.
I hope it doesn't seem like I'm trying to wiggle my way out of a difficult argument, because it is a difficult argument for me to try to show the opposite.
I don't think that I'm trying to prove the opposite, but rather just that I simply couldn't find at least conclusive evidence that it was in effect.
I agree with you that it's related.
And I think that there's kind of no way, it's inextricably related, right?
That our consciousness, at least as far as we know, as far as you interact, it has to be related, just as you say.
But I guess for me, it's not, I guess it's just not enough.
And maybe I'm totally blind here and someday I'll wake up, you know, but I don't see it as enough for me to just discount the potentiality of a conscious immaterial being, if that makes sense.
Right.
And I respect that.
You should not give up your beliefs easily.
You should not give up that which you hold dear easily.
You should not give up that which you have founded fundamental life decisions on easily.
You should...
Fight tooth and nail to maintain what you believe.
And I respect you for that.
I mean, to roll over because of this particular argument, I think would be premature, right?
We've had a conversation.
And you've opened...
I didn't know that there were people who were missing parts of their brain.
One guy was...
He only tested 75 on the IQ test.
But I didn't know these things.
I appreciate you bringing these things to my attention.
I will look more into that because I find that stuff really fascinating.
One of the writing...
When I was younger, I studied acting and playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada for a couple of years.
And I had a writing teacher, and one of the assignments he gave me was Oliver Sacks, the doctor, a neuroscientist, or whatever he was.
He worked with brain dysfunctions.
He had a young sailor who had no memory beyond a few minutes.
And he had me write this character, which was kind of interesting.
And I wrote it because what happened was he was an alcoholic.
And alcohol damages memory.
I think in particular long-term memory if you're an alcoholic.
And I wrote this.
I thought it was an interesting approach.
So what I did was I wrote a story of his character.
And what happened was he was an alcoholic.
And he kept destroying more and more of his long-term memory until he destroyed the memory of his first drink.
And then he was no longer an alcoholic.
And that's why his memory loss stopped.
Because he had erased his entire history as an alcoholic and therefore had no yearning for alcohol.
So, you know, he'd been an alcoholic for 10 years and then he drank like crazy.
And then he erased the first year, first two years.
And after he'd erased 10 years, he had no memory of ever having had a drink.
And that's why he was perpetually at the age of 17 or whatever he was before he had his first drink.
And he would occasionally look into the mirror and be completely shocked because he still thought he was 17.
He lived in this weird Buddhist world of now.
With no progress.
And I do find this stuff, the brain stuff, is really, really fascinating.
And so I appreciate you bringing that stuff to my attention.
You've heard my arguments elucidated.
And I think we say, good for the interaction.
And no, you should not, certainly not on this basis of this conversation, give up that which you treasure and hold dear and has been a foundational principle for how you organize your life.
But, you know, we both keep looking, right?
Can I ask you one question?
Sure.
Honest question.
So, you know, essentially, you know, you're telling me, and correct me if I'm wrong, but...
When there's kind of an overwhelming or at least maybe we'll call it a 51% of evidence that's leading towards a certain conclusion, that empirically it's going to probably weigh out versus something that doesn't have as much proof.
And, you know, in the last call you mentioned about the existential kind of reality of the morality of Christians and how they live their lives and how that looks in the real world.
And I guess my question to you is, how do you...
It just seems like in one sense you'll say, well, you know, I don't have enough proof or the burden of proof is on you.
But then when it comes to something like the reality of morality within Christians, Within Christians and how they live their life, it's kind of like, well, you know, I don't really...
I don't have enough proof for that either.
Am I making sense with my question?
No, no.
The fact that...
Look, I accept, of course, that people's beliefs have huge effects upon their lives.
I mean, how many Amish die of lung cancer?
Very few.
Because they don't smoke.
If I remember rightly.
So if you say, well, if you don't want to die of lung cancer, you should be Amish.
Well, because very few...
Okay.
But the fact that very few Amish die of lung cancer doesn't live a healthier life in many ways, it doesn't mean that God exists.
It means that their beliefs have a specific effect upon their behavior.
Now, if you take away God and they say, well, to hell with it.
You know, I'm going to smoke like crazy.
So take away the belief in God and now they're dying of lung cancer.
By the fistful, that does not mean that God has become validated or invalid.
It simply means that, yes, there are particular underlying beliefs.
Now, the fact that Christians behave quite well in the modern world, and given the provocation, you know, you think of these sort of precious snowflakes who need hug rooms and bean bags and puppy videos because they might hear an opinion counter to their own,
while Christians are constantly facing the cheese grater Of god-awful anti-Christian culture and materialism and relativism and being portrayed as doofuses and idiots and rapists and molesters and repressed people and people who hate dancing and happiness and homophobes.
I mean, boom!
I mean, it's horrible.
And the Christians, of course, it's the new lion in the In the Colosseum, right?
It's just the cultural hatred being poured upon Christians is astonishing, and the response of Christians is, I think, a tad mild at times.
I think Christians like myself, the reason why we kind of tend to flock to you, no pun intended, is because of your dedication to the truth.
And again, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think that the truth itself, being that it is kind of an abstract, I would say, metaphysical concept, if you will, the fact that it requires us to adhere to something that is objective beyond our own subjective experience,
I think is what Is what makes people like myself open to evidence that you present, to your train of thought, because you have subjugated your will to something greater than yourself, and I think that that's what really links us.
Well, I think that's very astutely observed, and I would say that the humility of Christians is very much something that I respect.
The arrogance of the people who say, oh, there's no free will, or it's all materialism, or everything's relative, I mean, that to me is an extraordinarily arrogant series of statements.
And the humility of Christians, I think, is mirrored in the humility of the true philosopher, who...
I want things to be true.
I want things to be a certain way.
But you do have to subject yourself to that, which is an objective standard.
And of course, for Christians, it is the doctrine and the will of God and prayer and so on.
And for me, it's reason and evidence.
There's a lot more in common that I would have with the approach of subjugating yourself to a higher purpose and a higher goal than the mere hedonism of the moment, which really does seem to be taking down Western civilization pretty quick, although of course we work hard to try and reverse these things.
Right.
Do you think, and I don't want to jump around topics here, and if there's other callers, I don't know how long we've been on this call for, but, you know, in your book Against the Gods, I think it was your fourth objection had to do with God cannot exist because that which exists has to be something tangible.
I can't remember the exact quote, but It has to be empirical or measurable.
If you say something exists, right?
Right.
Then it has to be measurable in some manner.
Right.
And so the same would have to apply to the truth, correct?
But the truth doesn't exist in the way that God would be claimed to exist.
Because God is not an idea, God is not a concept, God is not a set of rules.
God is an entity that has existence in some manner.
The truth is not something that has existence in some manner.
The truth is a standard within the human mind, but it does not have existence in the empirical world.
The scientific method doesn't have existence in the material world.
Numbers don't have existence in the material world.
They're concepts within the mind.
It doesn't mean they're subjective.
But they don't have existence in the material world or the immaterial world.
Like, we don't say, well, here are six coconuts, and there are six physical objects that exist in this world, and then there's the number six that exists in an alternative universe.
We recognize that six is a category within the mind that doesn't translate into a physical entity in the real world.
That doesn't mean that the number six is arbitrary, and we can put 12 coconuts and say that there are six coconuts.
It's not arbitrary, but it doesn't exist in the objective world.
Right, it's abstract, right?
Right.
I guess the difficulty I have with that is that it's, you know, and again, it's just, maybe it's the words that I'm having, I'm struggling with that you wrote where, you know, I believe that the statement is true, that truth exists.
Because if you say, and you know this, if you say truth doesn't exist, then is that statement true?
And if the statement's not true, et cetera, et cetera.
So I guess it's, you know, To me, it either does or it doesn't exist.
I don't know how that works for you.
What does or doesn't exist?
Truth.
Yeah, I don't think truth.
No, truth doesn't exist.
It doesn't mean there's no such thing as truth.
It doesn't mean that truth, as a standard, doesn't exist.
So, if I say that I'm six feet tall, I don't have the number six written on me anywhere.
I'm not divided into six sections.
There's no physical six foot, but that doesn't mean I can say I'm twelve foot or four foot.
It is an objective measure.
And the tape measure exists in reality, but the number six foot does not attach to me in some physical way, right?
Like if I get a mole, I got a mole, right?
It's attached to me in a physical way.
But the number six foot doesn't attach to me in any particular way.
Right.
And I'm not trying to be cute here, but I guess I struggle with that.
I'm sure you've heard this.
If you say the statement, truth doesn't exist, is that a true statement?
The question there is not truth.
The question is the word exist.
Right.
A rock exists in a tangible way.
We can measure it.
We can weigh it.
We can bounce a light off it.
We can check the spectrograph.
We can write...
We can look at it in infrared.
We can check its magnetism.
There's six million different ways to verify the tangible physical existence of a rock.
I can't say that the truth, and no one can say that the truth exists in the way that a rock exists.
Now, what people then say, well, if it doesn't exist in reality, it's somehow arbitrary and subjective.
No, no, no, no.
If it is something that is derived from reality, it is not arbitrary or subjective.
So, for instance, a statue exists as a three-dimensional form.
A shadow, the shadow of a statue, does not exist in the way that a statue exists.
But that does not mean that the shadow is arbitrary.
Like, if you have a statue of a guy and a horse, you can't have a shadow of a giant pumpkin.
The shadow is going to be of a guy and a horse.
But the shadow doesn't exist in the same way that the statue does, but that doesn't mean it's subjective and arbitrary.
Right.
The shadow has to match what's casting the shadow.
The truth has to match what's in reality.
Yeah, I get what you're saying.
I guess what it comes down to is that...
When I think of the word exist, to me, because of my beliefs, I don't attach matter to existence.
To me, obviously, it's possible to exist immaterially.
So I guess I have no problem saying that statement, but I understand what you're saying.
We're kind of getting into the Bill Clinton argument here on what is is, but if the word exist has to be in reality, then I understand what you're saying.
Right.
Now, God as a concept exists, and the rules God puts forward exist in the minds of people.
And they're not subjective or arbitrary.
Like, you can't say, well, the 11th commandment is thou shalt kill, funnily enough, right?
I mean, you can't just make up things with regards to religion.
There are mysteries and so on, but you can't just make things up.
And so, all of the rules exist, and it's the rules that I respect.
The source of them remains problematic for me, but I would rather people follow the right rules for bad reasons than the wrong rules for good reasons, if that makes any sense.
Right.
So, I'm just trying to clarify your thoughts on this.
I've always wanted to ask you.
So, do you think that truth has a...
I'm not trying to allude to anything here, but do you think that truth has a source if it doesn't exist in kind of a physical way?
Truth has a source.
Well, the source would be the integrity and fidelity of the human mind that is attempting to describe or formulate or create a hypothesis that is valid or true.
So it's dependent on the mind?
Yes, and the mind is inherently prone to error, which is why you need an objective methodology for determining what is true and what is false.
Because the mind is inherently...
The mind is inherently subject to error.
So the mind is not the source of truth.
The mind is the source of a hypothesis or an argument or an idea, which is most times wrong.
You know, this is the way it is, right?
I mean, even Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of plays that never became that famous and wrote a whole bunch of sonnets that never became that famous, but you know, five or ten of each, right?
And Dickens, right, like eight novels out of whatever, how many dozens that he wrote.
So the mind is the source of potential truth, but it's the objectivity of the methodology of philosophy of reason and evidence that determines whether your hypothesis, your argument, your statement is actually valid or true.
So the mind is not the source of truth.
The mind is the source of potential truth.
And if it goes through the rigor of philosophy, then it has the potential to become true until...
Evidence contradicts or whatever.
And I don't mean conditionally true like, oh, you know, two and two is going to make five tomorrow.
I don't mean that.
It's nothing like that.
So, no, the mind is not the source of truth because that to me would be narcissistic and grandiose to say, I am the truth.
And this is the vanity I think that a lot of materialists fall into.
That they don't understand that the mind is generally the source of error.
But if you work very hard, you just might get something that's true.
Right.
It's like saying free will doesn't exist.
Well, is that a true statement?
And if it is a true statement, then you've broken the bonds of subjectivity and determinism, right?
So I think that...
I get what you're saying.
I guess I'm just struggling with, you know, again, I have to kind of go back to what I think the source is.
Is there an objective truth?
What is the objective standard for truth?
We obviously know that there's ways to measure it with empiricism, with existential reality and all that, but I can't The first standard is logical consistency.
So a hypothesis to even be potentially true must be Because when you're describing something that's true, you're describing something that is in the nature of reality, of empirical reality, and empirical reality is not self-contradictory.
And therefore, if your hypothesis about material reality is self-contradictory, it can't possibly describe material reality, which is not self-contradictory.
I'm talking about the sense level.
The quantum stuff is a whole other thing.
It's got nothing to do with philosophy and certainly nothing to do with ethics.
So, which is really the whole point of philosophy is ethics, in my point of view.
Like, the whole point of medicine is to actually cure you, not to just spend a bunch of money.
Well, I guess that's the point of government medicine, but...
So, the...
The methodology, first you must have rational consistency.
You can't have a self-contradictory hypothesis which then turns out to be valid.
So if you have an argument that says Socrates is both mortal and immortal at the same time, Socrates is both a bachelor and a married man at the same time, well clearly you've messed up somewhere right at the beginning.
And you can't say, well this action, the same person, the same circumstance, same time, It's both perfectly moral and perfectly immoral.
Well, you've got a contradiction and you...
So you have to have internal consistency first.
And then, if you have internal consistency, you can put it to the empirical test.
And the empirical test in science is the most important thing.
The empirical test in ethics is supporting but not definitive.
So, for instance, I think that communism is a bad theory.
And the free market is a good theory.
The fact that communism in general leads to death and destruction supports the idea that it's a bad theory.
But if communism at some point did not lead to death and destruction, that would still not validate, that would not validate or invalidate the theory.
So for science, the physical test is the whole thing, because all you're describing is a physical test.
But with ethics, you're trying to convince people to be good, which means that there's no objective empirical test for the outcome of an ethical theory.
In general, you'd like to think that, right?
So, in general, if you have a cure for a disease, Then you've got the hypothesis, you've got it all worked out, how it works biochemically and all of that, and you test it on whatever you test it on, you finally give it to people.
Not everyone has to be cured 100% for the disease, for the cure to be valid, for the cure to work.
I mean, because some people, sorry, doesn't work.
Biochemically or whatever, they're not compatible.
Or some people forget to take the medicine.
So you can't say, well, the medicine, unless it cures 100% of the people 100% of the time, is invalid.
Because there's choice involved, there's subjective biochemical differences with people involved and so on.
And people might have been misdiagnosed.
In which case, it's an illness that mimics the illness they think you're curing.
So you get the thing, right?
So with ethics, you're proposing a system of thought that is designed to convince people to be good.
In the same way that a marketing campaign is convincing people to try and buy something.
But the marketing campaign is not a failure if not, well, not 100% of the people who saw one ad 100% of the time bought the thing that we wanted, right?
You're trying to convince people, so if you can increase sales through a marketing campaign, it's generally, if it's cheaper than the money you spend, right?
If you make more money than you spend on the marketing campaign, it's a profit, right?
But with ethics, in the same way, you're trying to convince people to be better, to be good, to be consistent.
So you have to have an internally consistent theory, and then you have to have history kind of back you up, and that helps a lot.
But in the end, it comes out of human choice.
And this is very, I mean, this is what Christianity would say too, right?
Christianity would say, Jesus is the way, Jesus is the light, Jesus is who you should follow.
The truth.
The truth.
Jesus is virtue.
What would Jesus do?
But not 100% of the people who hear about Jesus must be 100% virtuous in order for Jesus' arguments to be valid, right?
Because there's free will, right?
You're trying to make people, but never convince people.
Don't kill, don't steal, don't honor your promises and have fidelity to your spouse and all.
But the validity of the arguments that Jesus makes is not dependent upon 100% of people following 100% of the time.
However, if you make an argument about physics, well, sorry, you need 100%.
You gotta bat 1,000, right, for that stuff to work.
When it comes to ethics convincing people, hopefully you can get a trend.
Right, and if I recall, the third test of truth is the experiential relevance, which I think is what you're talking about.
It has to play out in the real world, what you're proposing, right?
Yeah, some people regretted the end of slavery.
I mean, some slaves regretted the end of slavery.
They loved being slaves.
There's no bearing on the ethics of slavery.
Well, I don't think it ever ended.
Yeah, well, the formal, you know.
In your face kind.
Yeah.
Alright, listen, I'm going to close things down, if you don't mind, and I'm sorry to, I'd love to keep chatting about this, but it has been a bit of a long show.
I'm unusually sitting down for this one for a variety of reasons, so I'm going to get off my butt and try, I can't feel my legs, unless I'm a guy in an Unreal Tournament video.
But I really do appreciate the call.
Thank you everyone so much for these wonderful calls about these Excellent, excellent topics.
I tell you, I love you guys, the smartest audience in the known universe in this or any other age.
I genuinely believe, because all the other ages we'll have in the future will have the benefit of this age in this conversation.
So thanks everyone so much.
Please, please, do help us out.
Do help us to continue to do the great work that we're doing in the world, doing our part to save civilization itself.
You can help us out at freedomainradio.com slash donate also.
Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
You can use her affiliate link should you have any shopping to do.
Please help us out at FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful weekend, everyone.
