All Episodes
Previous Next
March 11, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:49:21
3616 College Is Death - Call In Show - March, 9th, 2017
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing very well.
You know, the number of professionals who listen to the show should not be underestimated.
In fact, we had one of them call in tonight.
She is a philosophy professor who wants to know how to teach young men and women who are thoroughly, hopefully not Irredeemably infected with cultural Marxism, social justice warrior mania, and all other kinds of subjectivism.
And we had a great role play about how that might be achieved.
The second caller gives you the Freedom Aid Radio listener view from the ground of the Netherlands.
What is going on in the country?
What is the mood?
What is the level of violence?
What are people thinking?
And insights into the upcoming elections.
The third caller wanted to know, why does the price go up whenever the government gets involved in anything?
And we talked about some of the basic principles, but this did transition into quite the rant about college.
I've kind of been on the fence about college for the last little while, but information that I've gathered recently has put me fairly squarely on one side of the fence, and you'll hear what that is.
And the fourth caller wanted to know, why, oh why, Are people so irrational?
Why won't they listen to reason and evidence?
And we talked about some of the principles behind that and tried to find a way to live in the broken record zombie land of people who simply do what they did yesterday and accumulate ex post facto justifications for all of their prior prejudices.
So thanks so much.
Please, please, please remember to go by freedomainradio.com slash donate, donate, donate to help out the show.
We really, really need your help to continue to do the great work that we do in the world.
freedomainradio.com slash donate.
And if you've got some shopping to do, please use the affiliate link.
It costs you nothing.
FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
And don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
Alright, up first today we have T. T wrote in and said, It is becoming increasingly more difficult to teach logic, reasoning, and argument evaluation in the face of feminism and cultural Marxism.
As always, some students take to the study like ducks to water, while others lack interest or capacity.
But the new trend is emotional reactivity when faced with any subject deemed controversial and the immediate attack on any student who questions leftist progressive positions on any topic.
There is an obvious and discouraging lack of student preparation in both reading levels and mathematic abilities.
But how to engage with deeply indoctrinated students while simultaneously improving logical reasoning abilities is becoming more and more of a complex question.
That's from T. Hello, T. How are you doing tonight?
Hi, Steph.
I'm fantastic.
And yourself?
Well, do I have any thoughts on this subject?
I rarely have thoughts on any other subject, so I think it's safe to say yes.
Is there anything you wanted to add to the question before we plunge in?
No.
Right.
The delusions of the young are largely founded upon the foundational delusion that their elders taught them for the benefit of the young, not for the benefit of the elders, right?
Until you can chip away at that certainty, I don't think there's any progress that can be made.
The progress that I made, and let's remember, we measure everything by me, but the progress that I made came about because I began to be suspicious about the value of what I was being taught to me, for me, if that makes sense. but the progress that I made came about because I Sure.
Sure.
When I was a kid, I remember, I was trying to remember today and thinking about this question, like, okay, what was the first thing that really made me go, what the?
And it had something to do with the fact that, you know, when I was a kid, the Russians were legitimately the enemy, not the imaginary enemy, but legitimately the enemy.
And we kept shipping them all this free food.
I can quite understand that myself.
They're the enemy.
They want to kill us.
Let's ship them some free food to make sure that they have enough to eat because all that, right?
And there were some of these sort of questions.
I remember being lectured to by a vice principal, not just me personally, but the whole school.
And he said he had a great gift for us.
And, you know, of course, I thought candy because I was in like grade seven or something.
And it turned out it was a thesaurus.
You know, they gave us a thesaurus and really wanted us to expand our vocabulary.
But it was all of that kind of heavy-handed, well, I'm going to give you a serious responsibility.
I don't think any of you little shits are going to be able to handle it, but I'm going to give it to you anyway because apparently I hate books, you know, that kind of stuff.
And I also remember a friend of mine, who later became an architect, would get so bored in class that he drew these little doodles, like cartoons, you flip the pages, and man, he got caught, and this is public property, this is school property, you're not showing respect for property, and so on.
And I just remember thinking, how on earth could you publicly humiliate this child because of a book?
Like, how is a book more important than a child?
And look, I'm not saying that kids should be doodling in school books or whatever, but there's ways to do it, ways to figure out what's going on.
The same thing happened to me when I was in boarding school.
I think I was seven at this time.
We used to go through these manias in boarding school.
Conquerors was one where you get these chestnuts, you put strings through them, and you try and fight with each other because...
This was a little bit before the old we.
And we went through one phase, which was who could make the best paper airplane.
But paper was in short supply back in the day.
And I remember I had a Guinness Book of World Records, and I tore out a page of the Guinness Book of World Records.
It had old Roman coins.
I wasn't that interested.
And I used that to make a killer paper airplane that could go for miles.
And I was caught, and I was lectured again in front of the entire class, grindingly humiliated and so on, with this idea that, well, your mother worked very hard for this book, and here you are ripping it up and throwing it across the quad like you'd...
Just this grinding down of the human spirit.
And I just remember accumulating all of these over years.
At some point, I just began to think, I wonder if what I'm being taught is for my benefit...
Or for the benefit of those in charge.
And one of the clues, one of the hints that I got was I remember being in a restaurant.
I was pretty young.
It was before I left England, so it was definitely before 11.
I was in a restaurant, and you've probably seen these, right?
They give you these, like, cards to fill out, you know.
Did you like your meal?
Did you like your server?
What was the taste presentation of the food and all that?
And my mom gave it to me to fill out.
And I filled it out.
And I remember thinking, okay, I'm 10 years old.
This is the first time anyone's asked me whether I like something.
I mean, it was one of these, I remember just thinking, wow, they care whether I like it or not.
And I think this is sort of one of the things that pointed me towards the free market over time.
So when it comes to, you can't break indoctrination.
You can only Inflame curiosity, I think, and hopefully the curiosity is the one, is what breaks through the indoctrination.
But I would do, do you want to try like a little role play where you play the annoying students and I play you?
Absolutely.
Okay, so it would go something like this, I would say.
So, you know, you've come to me as a teacher, and I want to be able to teach you something new.
Because if I'm not teaching you something new, really, what's the point of being here?
So I want to teach you something new But first of all, I need to understand how you like what you've been taught already, right?
So, you know, I would sort of ask, you know, put your hands up.
How many people here, like, really kind of have a good idea or really believe that they know what's going on in the world?
What's right?
What's wrong?
What's good?
What's bad?
How to solve problems?
What the problems are?
And that kind of stuff.
And I don't know.
I mean, you teach live flesh people right there in front of you.
How many people do you think would put their hands up?
I would say half to a quarter, not because it was true, but just because that's typically how many I can get to respond to a question.
Right, right, right, right, because they're used to being singled out and attacked.
Okay, so then I would say, have you been told what the problems are, or have you experienced the problems directly yourselves?
How many people, like I would say, how many people have been told what the problems are?
And then, you know, how many people, after that, how many people have directly experienced the problems for themselves?
And then I would say, when it comes to the solutions, have you been told what the solutions are?
Or have you come up with the solutions and tried them yourself?
I think that's a great question.
Yeah, because I mean, I want to know people's Dunning-Kruger effect when they're young.
I want to know what level of certainty people have, because you can't teach people stuff that they're already certain about, which I think is sort of the essence of what you are trying to get at.
So then I would say, what evidence do you have That what you've been educated about is for your benefit, is something that you want, is something that is valuable to you, is giving you the right tools to make the world a better place.
And you'd get some answers, you know, like if people would say, well, we wanted to do all of this wonderful and great stuff, right?
Yes.
Okay, so then I would sort of ask the ask and answer question situation.
So if you sort of pretend you're the enthusiastic student that everyone thinks is going to be the guinea pig for...
Got it.
...attack.
Okay.
So I would say, so what's the evidence that you have that the authority figures who taught you were teaching you for their benefit?
Because you understand that sometimes authority figures teach you things for their own benefit, right?
So if you grow up in a particular religion, then authority figures may teach you that that religion is the best and you should give money to that religion for particular reasons.
If you grew up in communism, they would probably teach you that communism is the best system and capitalism is really bad.
If you grew up in capitalism, it might be the opposite.
So how do you know that you weren't taught primarily for the benefit of those in charge, but primarily taught for your benefit?
Thank you.
That's a great question.
I guess some understanding that the class content was standardized and just assumed that they were probably wrongly assumed that they were trying to educate me to the best of their abilities.
Okay, so the fact that the curriculum is standardized is pretty common throughout most societies, right?
I mean, if you go to a communist country, they will teach you that communism is good.
If you go to North Korea, they will teach you that short guys with big bouffant hair are the living embodiments of some eternal class-based god or something like that.
If you think about going back in time, you know, the ancient Aztecs would have taught you that the ancient Aztecs was great.
Playing football with someone's head is really great, and child sacrifice is really great.
The fact that it's standardized doesn't really answer the question.
How do you know, or by what standard would you judge, that you've been taught for your benefit rather than the benefit of society or the rulers or people in charge?
I would say to do some evaluation based on history and past classics and using my own ability to reason.
No, but if you were a student in the class?
If I was a student, I would be probably drooling and not have any answer whatsoever to that.
Right.
And now this is a very important question, right?
Because there are two forms of education, right?
One could be termed indoctrination, where you are expected to conform to the rules of your society.
And if you fail to conform to those rules, you're punished.
But they're not called rules of society.
They're called the good or something like that.
And then there's another kind of education, which teaches you To think critically and to oppose sophistry, right?
Making a bad argument appear good through emotional pressure.
So, you know, I hope that people come to this class because they want to learn how to think for themselves.
But the first question is, how are you thinking at the moment?
So, what do you think the students would say if...
You asked them how they knew whether they were able to think or whether they'd been indoctrinated or not?
They would passionately defend their ability to think for themselves.
Oh, good!
Okay, good, good.
So what would they...
Give me the speech that an articulate student would make to that case.
Something like, Professor, I have worked very hard and read extensively and formulated my opinions based on my own ability...
To work through them with my mind and feel confident that I am right in my views and perspectives and that they aren't influenced by anyone else's propaganda or agenda.
So if you say that you've read for yourself, what that means is that you did not get taught this in school, but rather learned it outside of school.
Is that correct?
Probably, yeah, with the assignments maybe outside of school rather than direct lecture, sure.
Okay, so, you know, because I would say as a teacher or professor, because I'm dealing with students who are coming from a government school system for the most part, you can put the hands up, most people would, then I have to mostly deal with what has been taught in the government schools.
So forget the outside stuff that you've read.
In government schools, are you confident that you've been taught how to think critically?
As an instructor myself, I absolutely would say they have not.
No, no, just try being the student.
Particularly because so much of the college content these days is framed around this use of the term critical thinking that actually has nothing to do with actual critical thinking.
Right.
So the catchphrase has been rammed down students' throats so much and Incorporated into messages and branding for every aspect of education, regardless of the discipline, that I think that students are wrongly given the sense that they're being taught critical thinking skills when what they're taught has nothing to do with logical reasoning at all.
Right.
It's this sort of Marxist deconstruction stuff that passes itself off as critical thought.
Exactly.
Right, right.
Okay.
Okay, so then I would say the following.
If you were running a store and you wanted to please your customers, would you ask them or would you inquire as to what they wanted in the store or what they liked in the store and at what prices they would want or like those things?
Or would you just fill your store up with stuff and cross your fingers?
I would ask them.
You would ask them, right.
So one of the ways in which you know that a store serves the needs of the customers is that it kind of asks its customers what they want.
Now, some of this is explicit, like you might do a survey before you opened the store.
You might say, you know, if you wanted to open a fish and chip shop, you might say, well, I hope there aren't 12 fish and chip stops on the same street.
You might, you know, so some of it would be marketing ahead of time.
Some of it you would do surveys perhaps ahead of time.
And some of it is just basically through price.
Like if nobody buys some particular product in your store, you'll probably stop carrying it.
Whereas if people buy a huge amount of something else in your store, you'll probably carry more of it.
So there's a conversation that goes on between the store owner and the customer designed to figure out what the customers want.
And that's how you know that it's sort of mutual service, right?
The store owner is serving the needs of the customers by giving them goods and services at a price that they are willing to pay.
And the customers are serving the needs of the store owner by buying stuff and contributing to the rent, right?
Now, I understand, of course, T, that this is going to be a bunch of Marxists will jump up and say, that's not how capitalism works.
It works by sucking out the spleens of Chinese workers to make your iPhone or something like that, right?
But whatever analogy might work.
So then the question I would have to the students is, were you ever asked how you wanted to learn?
And they would say what?
Never.
Never.
They were not, right?
And then the second question I would have is, is there anything that you would like to have changed about the way that you were instructed from the age of, say, 5 to 17?
And that can be a very fertile discussion where they say, oh, more outside time, more hands-on stuff, more group stuff, like whatever it was going to be that they liked or didn't like, and there would be a pretty lively discussion about how things might change.
Potentially have been improved in their education, right?
Because it's just trying to get them to jump the tracks that have been set up for them by the sophists who run the government education systems.
Once they can get a sense that they weren't asked, that their input was not solicited, then they can understand that the school system was not there to serve their needs primarily.
And that can start to give them some, it's like a tip of the spear or a thin edge of the wedge regarding whether they can question what they were taught.
Does that make sense?
Makes perfect sense.
Sort of a first taste of autonomy.
A gap analysis is another way we used to refer to it in the business world, right?
What's your ideal and what was serviced, right?
Now, then I would ask people, how do you know, how do you know, sorry, do you know how the school system originated in the West, like the government school system?
Thank you.
They would have no idea.
Right, okay.
So then I would say, do you think that the school, like, how should a school system originate, right?
Because there's so many different ways to educate kids, right?
I mean, especially now with the internet, there's so many different ways to educate kids.
And I would say, how do you think a school system, like, if you were designing a school system from scratch, how would you go about doing it?
And that would be, I think, a lot of fun to have that kind of discussion.
You put stuff up on the whiteboard and people's different ideas and all that kind of stuff.
And I think there probably would be quite a lot of ideas, right?
Agreed.
Because you want to try and meet students with the stuff that's closest to their hearts.
So you put all this stuff on the board and say, wow, this is really cool stuff.
I love the way you guys are coming up with all these different ideas and so on.
And you could introduce Lancashire schools, Waldorf schools, Montessori, lots of different ways of teaching kids and so on.
And so I would say, okay, so none of this was done.
None of this was done in the education system that you inherited.
The education system that you inherited was actually designed by precursors to Nazi Germany.
It was designed by the Prussian military to produce docile workers and soldiers.
And it was not designed with the input of the children.
It was not designed with the input of the parents.
It was designed to serve the needs of the rulers.
That is a fact.
Anyone can look it up.
You can cross-examine me as much as you want.
But that is how the school system that you inhabited was originally developed.
And then you'd have a nice long pause so that they could absorb that basic little tidbit.
And then a cacophony once they realized what They had just heard, yeah.
Absolutely, right?
So then they're like, what are you saying?
We were raised by Nazis and so on.
It's like, well, no, I'm just giving you the historical facts of how this all came about.
So were your parents consulted on how you should best be educated?
And they would have to say no.
Were you consulted on how you should best be educated?
And the answer is no.
So if it's not serving your parents' needs, and it's not serving your needs, the fundamental question is, Whose needs is it serving?
And then I would open that up to the class to answer.
And what do you think they would say?
The capitalists!
I don't know.
What do you think they would say?
White males.
Oh, to serve the needs of white males?
Yeah.
Okay, that's a thesis.
And the way that we would answer that question is we would say, if the education system is designed to serve the needs of white males...
Then shouldn't white males be asked what they want out of the educational system?
And I would ask the people in the class, how many have a white father?
Right?
And, you know, however many would put up.
I'd say, well, your father has asked how they wanted the educational system to run.
And what would they say?
No, absolutely not.
No, no.
So then the thesis that it therefore is somehow designed to serve the needs of white males, it's very easy to test.
Were white males asked?
And of course, if white males weren't asked, then it's really not to serve the needs of white males.
It must be for some other reason.
It's a tough question.
I think they might then try to default toward the military or the government somehow.
Conspiracy in that area type answer would be my guess.
That would be fantastic, because they'd be getting closer to the truth, right?
So the question then is, okay, well, whose needs does it serve?
Let's say it serves the needs of the government or the military-industrial complex or whatever it is.
And that actually would be fairly close, right, to the original Prussian model of soldiers and workers and so on.
Okay, so if...
The school system is designed to serve, let's just say, the needs of the government.
If you were the government, like put your little thin mustaches on and your big evil French top hats or whatever, if you wanted to design an educational system to serve the needs of the government, how would you do it?
What would the government like you to think or not to think?
How would it make it easier to rule you?
And what would the content of your education be To serve the needs or powers of the government or the military-industrial complex or whatever, and then let them brainstorm about that, right?
Right.
Great question.
And it would have something to do with...
Not questioning the structure of the society around you.
It would also have something to do with setting people against each other.
And it would also have something to do with not teaching you basic logic, and certainly not teaching you philosophy, but teaching you ideology, right?
Philosophy is, as you know, it's a methodology.
It's not a conclusion.
It's a methodology.
Like science is a methodology, not a conclusion.
And so they would want to teach you conclusions.
They would not want to teach you a methodology.
And so then I would ask, you know, how many people took logic or took philosophy and so on?
And very few people would put up their hands, and then you could point out that philosophy has a hugely positive impact on children when it's taught.
It moves them forward at least one grade for every couple of weeks of instruction.
I've got a whole interview with a professor about this, teaching philosophy to kids.
So I would then say, well, you weren't taught A methodology of thinking, you were taught very specific conclusions, which takes me back to the very first question I asked you, which is this.
Do you know what the problems in the world are, and are you certain that you know how to solve them?
Now, if you were taught conclusions, you weren't taught how to think.
And if you were taught how to think, then you would have doubt about the certainty of your answers because thinking is conditional and thinking is challenging and thinking is very, very hard to get to certainty through critical thinking.
And so the more certain you are, particularly your age, no disrespect to youth, it's great that you guys can jump up and down so high, but it's most likely that if you're confident about all the problems and all the answers or lots of problems and lots of answers, if you're confident, it's most likely that you weren't taught The process of thinking, but you would rather talk conclusions.
The problem is sexism.
The solution is government.
The problem is racism.
The solution is government.
The problem is income inequality.
The solution is...
They all put their hands up and say government, right?
And so here we come back to if the education system serves the government, then its goal would be To teach you that the government should solve problems.
Because that way, you'll keep running to the government and give it more and more power, which is kind of what governments want to do.
Governments want to have more and more power.
It's their high score in the video game called oppression.
But...
So, you know, these aren't big answers or anything.
I'm just sort of trying to chip away at some of your certainties because that which you are uncertain about, you have the opportunity to learn.
But here we have, you know, looked at relatively briefly your 13, 12 years in a system that was inherited from a totalitarian regime, the Prussian regime, that did not ask you or your parents what you wanted or how you should be taught.
You know, and I wouldn't ask them this as a personal question, but, you know, I'm sure that most of you guys know kids who, quote, misbehaved and ended up on psychotropic medications.
And that's an old totalitarian technique, which is the system is perfect.
Anybody who fails to positively conform to the system is mentally ill and must be drugged.
This is exactly what they did in Nazi Germany.
It's exactly what they did in communist Russia that they would say, well, communism is perfect.
If you don't, if you're not happy in a communist country, you must be mentally ill.
So we're going to, you know, stuff your nose full of horse tranquilizers and ship you off to a little padded room.
And so, a lot of the ideas that you've come out of the government school seem to center around, there are problems, but more government power will be the solution.
And if you were to design a system that benefited government and not children, That benefited ideology and power lust rather than critical thinking and reason and evidence.
Then that is kind of the system that you would create.
And then I would say, I have proven nothing.
I haven't proven anything.
I'm just trying to stimulate some questions.
Because the more questions you have for me, the more value you will get out of this class.
And the challenge of philosophy is philosophy...
can undo the very physics that you think is reality.
Because philosophy will go right down to the deep core bone marrow of your belief system and will say, oh yeah?
I don't think so.
Why did you make the case?
And philosophy is like an extreme sport.
It's the ultimate danger sport.
And people have been killed throughout history for asking inconvenient questions of those in power.
Obviously, we're not going to go that route in this class, but we do want to have That understanding of the depth and power.
The more that you're willing to take even your most cherished beliefs and submit them, like have them kneel before the throne of reason and evidence, the more benefit you're going to get out of this class.
But if you're certain that you know the answers and you're certain that you know the problems and you're certain that you know all the solutions, you'll get very little out of this class.
And in fact, I think this class will just be entirely annoying to you.
Because if you're certain, you're not going to want to submit to the kind of Socratic questioning that goes on.
Because, you know, the old story of Socrates was he went around ancient Athens and ancient Greece, and everyone said, Oh, I know what justice is.
Oh, I know what truth is.
Oh, I know what virtue is.
Oh, I know what piety is.
And he'd say, Oh, yeah?
Let's find out, shall we?
And he'd keep asking them questions until they basically crapped their pants and ran to the government to have him put to death.
And...
Without that level of extremity, the more that you're able to chip away at the foundations of what you think you know the better off you'll be and the most value that you you will get out of this class and in fact I would argue that this class if you're willing to do that will be the most valuable class you will ever take in your life and the most valuable time you will ever spend in your life because the whole point of philosophy is to take down everything you think you believe and rebuild it with a solid foundation not of answers but of the right way to
to ask questions.
Saying that type of thing that makes even the hard days bearable.
And you make a really important point that once you lead them sort of forward, you're bringing it into question, otherwise you just become one more voice of indoctrination.
Like they misunderstand the process and take what I'm saying as some sort of unassailable truth rather than as an invitation to themselves engage in this process.
Right, right.
I mean, if you were to, you know, start off, and I'm not saying you ever would, but if you were to start off to say, oh, yeah, what about this wage gap, you know, and you start to dismember it or disassemble it?
I think that's too frontal an assault.
Philosophy, I think, wins not by attacking the walls, but the foundations.
Which is the certainty that you have the answers.
And I find generally attacking the foundations rather than the walls.
If you attack the walls, they just, people strengthen them, they fight and the defenses go up.
If you attack the foundations and give people a sense that their fortresses are not as secure as they think, then they themselves will start to look at the blueprints and the maps and figure out how to strengthen them.
And I think that leads them to better questioning over time.
Agreed.
You've given me a lot of ideas to bring into class and I'm very excited about them.
I could do about a million more, but you want to try and take these for a run and then come back?
Definitely.
Definitely.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
You know, we all grew up with trust in our elders.
We have to.
We have to just to get through the day.
But giving people a sense that some of what they, the knowledge that they have received may not be particularly, have been particularly designed for their benefit, I think is a very powerful question to ask.
And As a teacher, obviously, you want people to be thirsty for what you have to offer.
You don't want to be sort of cornering them and having them fight back like rats in a hole.
And if you can give them some cracks in certainty...
Then I think that is the best way to, you know, first day at least for sure.
And the good thing too is that it may have the potential of doing what could be the most beneficial thing, which is to weed out the people who are just going to be dogmatic headbutters for the entire semester.
And if they're like, oh, wait, we're going to question basic assumptions?
Oh, forget that.
That's patriarchal privilege or whatever it is, right?
However, they'd staple that onto your form.
But the important thing is not to attract the best students as well, but to drive away the people who won't get it no matter what.
And I think that kind of approach, it will provoke a lot of anxiety in people whose identity is so dependent on sophistry that they may not have much involvement.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Thanks.
Will you let us know how it goes?
Absolutely.
I'd love to.
And again, thank you.
Oh, it's my absolute pleasure, and I wish you the very best.
And what a fantastic opportunity kids have to be in contact with you.
I mean, what a cool opportunity.
I think I've mentioned before, you know, not to point out your gender too much, but one of the greatest teachers I ever had was the woman who taught me Aristotle.
She was magnificent.
And so, yeah, just...
Kids, if you're lucky, you'll get in Dr.
T's class.
And I appreciate the call and look forward to hearing what comes next.
And let's move on to the next caller.
Thank you, Steph.
Thank you.
All right, up next we have Taco from the Netherlands.
He wrote in and said, We have less than a week left before we elect who we want to lead our country.
You highlighted the growing problems of immigration and crime in our country, and I'm sure you're aware of the incredibly high price we're paying for the euro currency and the European Union.
But perhaps worse than all of these is our democracy is being undermined.
Two referenda, first for the European Constitution in 2013, and then with the Ukraine referendum in 2016, whereas 61% of the votes were against the association treaty with Ukraine, but, you know, it was ratified anyway.
I've never been very interested in politics until I got pushed into it by the joint coincidence of dating two feminists.
Simultaneously.
And Gamergate unfolding at the same time.
Perhaps needless to say, for some listeners, I'm currently single.
So to get to the point, I've become political, and it's one of the main focuses of my life right now.
It's something that's hugely important to me.
And the closest people are not open to me sharing that part of my life.
My best friend called me a racist that didn't have enough non-white friends and my brother gave me a threat that I should tread carefully about what I say to him in regards to politics.
How do I balance my political engagement and desire to improve the direction with people that seem only interested in bread and circuses?
That is from Taco.
All right, Taco.
Please don't say irreversibly, because I hope not.
I hope not.
Otherwise, I'm selling a bunch of flim-flam.
I was in a bit of an emotional mood when I wrote that.
No, I get it.
And it certainly does feel that way sometimes.
But that, to me, just redoubles my efforts to push back.
So, Taco, do you want to just take a couple of minutes and tell people what is going on in your country?
What's it like on the ground there?
Okay, so it's a little bit like you have in the States, for example.
It's really like there's multiple movies playing in different people's heads.
So this is a really weird election year for us.
I mean, it's not unusual for the Netherlands to have a lot of different parties.
But there's a lot of new parties that are probably going to get at least some seats, which is A very kind of balkanized, divided government in a way.
And obviously it means that a lot of people are feeling politically motivated to not align to one of the existing parties, but to start their own thing.
We've got Deng, which basically means thing.
They're an immigrant party led by two Turkish men who have a double passport and who Are unable to say what they think about the Turkish government because either they'll lose their base or they'll lose the opinion of a lot of Dutch people, I think, if they're honest with what they think about it.
Well, can't they also be prosecuted?
There was a German comedian who was prosecuted for saying things about the Turkish leader, right?
Yes, of course.
And we've got an anti-discrimination party now.
We've got a pirate party.
We've got a lot of different new parties.
I'm sorry, a what now?
A pirate party?
A pirate party.
Yeah.
Well, I got to tell you, I mean, it sounds outlandish, but a little bit of that good old Viking blood might not be the worst thing for the Netherlands to experience right now.
Of course.
Geert Wilders of the PVV, he has been kind of tanking in the polls.
He's been going down a lot, which is probably because he didn't go to debates.
He cancelled a lot of things that he was going to do.
Which some people say is because of the security thing, kind of infiltration in the security team, but because we also have some other people.
So there's a lot of people wondering if he really wants to win or not.
And then, well, there's this new party, Forum for Democracy, which really has this Really energetic kind of things going on.
You see them in debates and a whole crowd is cheering for them.
Even groups where you wouldn't expect them to do well.
I think they're tapping into a kind of new optimism that we haven't seen or heard in a long time, but also a lot of very Solution-driven ideas, like very direct things, things we can do right now to improve things.
They've of course not been invited to a lot of programs.
I think they've been a little bit frozen out by the press on purpose.
Whereas some of these other new parties get a lot of attention, like the anti-discrimination party gets a lot of attention.
Oh yeah, and just for those who aren't aware of how this works, all the parties that are getting a lot of positive attention are the very last people you should be voting for.
That's just one of these simple equations in life.
Whoever the press likes is your enemy.
Yeah, it works like that, doesn't it?
But the different thing about this new party is that it has some very respected people in it.
Like the number two is a very famous lawyer who has been one of the highest profile persons supporting Geert Wilder's party prior, which is, of course, social suicide.
I mean, you have to have a really good position to say that openly.
Right.
I mean, anybody whose reputation is not being radically smeared by the press is also your enemy.
That's one of these things that has become this upside down black is white world.
Whoever the press is attacking is probably your greatest friend.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean.
it's a weird thing to watch.
That's exactly it.
Looking at all these debates, right?
So many debates I've been watching.
And in a lot of debates, I've got to give it to the journalists to at least say these things.
They'll have a debate and then one of the journalists will say, are we looking play fighting?
Like, are you staging something for us?
This isn't real.
In a lot of these cases, they either use really fake language so you don't know what they're talking about, Or they'll have a position that's so close to each other that you're like, do either one.
It's almost no difference the things you two are proposing.
Like, why are you even having a discussion about it?
And they're not talking about immigration, of course, or almost not talking about immigration.
Whereas it's one of the things that when they call people or when they ask people on the street, it's like almost on top of everyone's list.
Sure.
I mean, it's what Ann Coulter and myself and others knew about Donald Trump at the very beginning, you know, more than a year and a half ago, was that if he takes on immigration, he's going to win.
And it's funny how in the Netherlands people haven't learned that lesson, that if you speak openly about some of the challenges of third world immigration, You're going to have a victory handed to you by the people.
Now, you'll have to walk through the fire of the press, of course, and you'll be called all the horrible names in the book.
But, you know, it sure beats being drafted into Second World War, right?
So, you know, it can be handled, right?
Well, that's exactly it, because Shared Wilders was really, from my perspective anyways, I thought he could easily dominate it.
People don't necessarily accept him as a good person or his party, but they know that that's what he stands for.
There's no doubt that that's what he stands for.
So he only had to put the topic in the center of people's attention.
And now we're talking about health care, which is of course also important, and there's also some things going on there.
But it really feels like it's being deflected from the main topics that people care about.
Which is of course reflected in the referendum that's ignored.
32% of people voted.
62% of those people voted against.
They went on with what they wanted to do, not what the people wanted to do.
So that's kind of strange.
Well, it's not strange.
I mean, it's not how you would want it to go, right?
Not how it should go.
Now, do you mean this is the Ukraine referendum 2016?
Yes.
Right, so 61% of people wanted to not have an association treaty with Ukraine, but it was ratified anyway.
And what was the story on that?
What was their justification for that?
Well, first, before the vote took place, there was a lot of people being advised, and my dad is one of the people who took this advice, is like, Don't go and vote.
Like, this is politicians telling people don't go and vote.
Because if we don't get enough vote, going to get the 30%, it's the best way to stop it.
And so after the vote had taken place, they said, well, yeah, but a lot of people didn't vote.
So how can we know that the majority would really have won?
Because a lot of, and you hear this argument when you talk about it with people.
No, but isn't there a law that says if, you know, like in America, if you get the majority of the electoral college, you get to be president.
You don't get, there's no backup plan called, well, there are some people that didn't vote and there, like, there's no, isn't there a law?
I mean, isn't there a sort of legal standard?
It's a referendum that's advisory.
Oh, it's non-binding?
It's non-binding.
Well, okay, I mean, okay, so it's non, it's a suggestion.
I think you should not wear that hat.
Well, the person can still wear the hat, right?
Yeah.
I mean, you could, but on the other hand, it might lead to some things.
I mean, our initial war for independence, a lot of years ago, had to do something with a petition, which is kind of like a referendum, that wasn't really listened to.
And it was also a non-minding one.
So, these things can have consequences.
And imagine, like, 31% of people voting, 62% voted against.
So that's about 1.7 million people that are probably pissed off.
Good!
Good!
No, I mean, it's good that it wasn't a more important referendum, I guess.
Because it gives you a sense of where the leaders are.
Now, Otako, what was it like dating these two feminists?
And how did that propel you into it?
And are there non-feminists to date in the Netherlands who aren't from the Third World?
I have no idea, because my whole background, working in the arts, and I'm the son of an immigrant father, From where?
From Indonesia.
Okay.
So he was already part Dutch and he got a Dutch, a kind of Dutch education there.
So I was very much...
The SJWism and leftism It isn't as bad at most places here yet.
It's getting worse.
You can notice it getting worse.
It's coming from places like Amsterdam, Leiden.
It's growing from universities, of course, and growing out from there.
So I can almost notice it.
If I know someone from a certain place, I think, oh, there's a good chance I'll hear some of these things, and then it happens.
You can kind of predict it because of where it comes from.
I had a very positive opinion of feminism.
I never really knew much about it or anything, but it just sounded like something that would be positive and good.
I heard about polyamory, which I think you've covered it once or twice at least.
Yeah, it's a helping hand to STD viruses who otherwise can't get around as much as they'd like.
That's one way to look at it.
And at the time, it sounded like a very positive, good thing, you know?
More to love, that's the kind of dream you're sold when you buy into that.
Like, you don't have to limit your love, there's more people to love, you can share the love.
Sure, yeah, because it's all about your sexual pleasure, not about the continuation of your civilization by actually having families and children.
That doesn't even enter in.
No, of course not.
It's about enjoying your life and having a great time and not having a country in the future.
But, you know, the good thing is you all got some orgies in.
Well, in this case, the girls I was dating, who I... Still have a mostly good opinion of.
I mean, the kind of things we would talk, if we talk about the future, we did imagine, you know, raising children and...
In a situation of polyamory?
Yeah.
I mean, we had a kind of...
Like, they were in a relationship first, right?
The two of them.
Oh, lesbians or bisexual?
Yeah, bisexual.
Sure.
Sure.
And so we grew a really good connection.
And we started dating more seriously at some point.
And eventually, I also started dating her girlfriend.
And we became kind of like triangle.
So you had threesomes with these feminists?
Not so much, because...
What do you mean not so much?
I think that's kind of a yes-no question there.
I believe it's somewhat memorable.
What you asked was, did you have a lot of threesomes with these girls?
No, no, I just said, did you have threesomes?
Oh, I'm sorry, that's what I heard.
I apologize.
No, yeah, I did.
There was a lot more...
Pairs of two things happening.
But you had the occasional threesome with these feminists who dated each other and then were sleeping with you and the three of you sometimes at the same time.
We slept in the same bed a lot more than we had threesome.
Now, did you ever end up having any kids?
I didn't end up having any kids.
How?
How surprising!
How surprising.
No kids.
No kids.
So you don't have quite as much to fight for when it comes to the survival of the Netherlands, right?
You don't have any kids who are going to be facing a future beyond your own lusts, right?
I have nephews and nieces.
I mean...
Yeah, but not your kids.
It's not quite the same.
It's not like you're indifferent, but it's not quite the same.
I agree.
Yeah.
Okay, so you had a lot of sex with feminists.
You didn't have any kids.
And then what?
It started becoming kind of a little bit living a double life sometimes in how I thought about things because at the same time Gamergate was taking place online.
I could see a lot of people that couldn't defend themselves well getting blamed for things they really hadn't done.
And it was something that I just kind of got involved with.
I kind of felt like how I used to protect my little brother.
You could just see something unfair taking place and wanting to do something about it.
You mean the little brother who now thinks that you're a racist?
Well, that was my friend who I was talking about.
Sorry, your brother gave you a threat that you should tread carefully about what you say to him in regards to politics.
I have to say, I exaggerated it a little bit because I wrote it when I was feeling very emotional about it.
But there's some truth in that, so I definitely want to look at it.
That's the brother, yeah.
Right.
And he has apologized by now as well, as if I. So you're half Indonesian and half white, is that right?
Yeah, a little bit less Indonesian because there's some Dutch ancestors on that side as well.
Okay, so you're somewhat Indonesian and somewhat white, but you still don't have enough non-white friends, apparently.
We met in a hip-hop group, which I was the whitest guy there, probably.
Right.
Right.
So, what is it like?
Are there no-go zones in the Netherlands?
I mean, I've heard tell of these things.
Do you spend much time in the sort of migrant neighborhoods or the third-world districts?
Like, last two years, I did educational things, going to high schools.
So, I saw a lot of different high schools in a lot of different areas in the Netherlands.
Which gave me a lot of perspective on the differences.
And it also gave me a different perspective because...
Okay, just tell me the different perspective.
I don't need the whole backstory, for heaven's sakes.
Just get to the chase, man.
We've got millions of people listening and I don't want to waste their time.
So just tell me.
Don't give me the whole backstory.
Just tell me the differences, please.
Okay, so the first year I went, there's schools in a place called Belmer, which is really probably the most ghetto area of the Netherlands, and you'd come into a class And you'd have to rip open a pile of people that's already formed in the middle of the class on top of each other.
And it's not really play fighting.
It's not really all out fighting, but it's fighting.
And you want to go home and someone's car tires have been slashed.
And you arrive at the school and the teacher will say, don't make an effort, it's no use.
Like that's how I was welcomed at the school.
Right.
Which still boggles my mind.
I'm going to assume that that's a little different than when you were growing up.
Yes.
And then you go to different areas.
You go to the north of the country.
And you go to schools, which is probably like 80 or 90% white.
And there's so much trust in these classes.
You know, not necessarily trust towards me, but trust between them.
You know, they're not afraid of looking like a fool as much in front of each other.
They don't feel threatened by each other.
So it was a lot easier to teach things and do things and you don't feel like you have to be a police officer all the time.
I mean, some of the other classes that I mentioned first, you have to almost take a threatening role 90% of the time because otherwise you don't make any impression on them, which is not how you want to teach.
So the first year I I saw all these things, but I was watching it with the other script.
I was watching it with the other movie.
So what I was seeing was, oh, these schools are really badly organized.
They don't have enough money.
They don't get good teachers.
You know, look at this teacher telling me that I don't I don't have to make an effort.
How did they put this teacher here?
Why didn't they get good teachers here?
Right, but of course the good teachers don't want to teach those kinds of students, right?
Of course, but I didn't think about that the first year because that's not how you're taught to think about this.
You're taught to think about this like whether school works or not is solely dependent on how it's given.
I mean, how could it be?
I'm not saying what I think myself, but that's the mindset you're in.
How can it be the people's fault, like the students' fault?
How can it be their fault?
They're coming to school to learn.
That's the argument, right?
Sure.
And, you know, if the IQs were equal, then it would be a challenge nonetheless with language and cultural and religious differences and so on.
But I haven't proven it.
But if you look at the source country's IQ, you're going to understand that the IQs between these two groups are very different.
And this would not be happening if you had a bunch of Japanese kids coming in.
It's just the way of the world that is not talked about, but which explains so much.
Yeah, it explains so much.
Because the second year, I did know about this.
Yeah, because that way you don't blame the students either.
It's not their fault.
Yeah.
It's not me.
You don't get mad at the students.
Well, if you tried harder, or you don't get mad at the teachers.
Well, if you tried harder, it's like, sorry.
It's nobody's fault, except the politicians.
And now the voters, if they choose to continue this stuff.
Yeah, because, and of course, almost nobody knows this.
That's my experience anyways.
Sure.
At least, yeah.
So that's how I saw, and there's definitely...
And sorry, let me just clarify something, sorry to interrupt.
Oh, thank you.
But it's the opposite of racist.
Knowing the facts about human biodiversity, about ethnicity and IQ, or race and IQ, is the opposite of racist.
Because if you suppress these facts and different ethnicities don't get along, that's when you provoke racism.
Because then either people say, well, you know, these people from this particular country or this particular group, well, they're just lazy, or they just don't want to work, or they just don't care, or they're just, you know, you give them moral condemnation, which is unfair.
Or will you say, well, they're exactly the same as the people from the Netherlands, and therefore the only reason that these groups are not succeeding is because the people from the Netherlands are horrible and racist.
Which is a racist statement if the cause of the problem is not laziness on the part of certain groups or racism on the part of other groups.
You're just making up answers to something which IQ disparities explains.
So it is the opposite of racism to put forward this as a hypothesis, and I think a very well-reasoned-out hypothesis, as to why certain groups succeed and fail within society.
If you suppress this information, you provoke the most virulent racism that can be imagined.
I'm going to have to think about that.
It sounds like it makes a lot of sense and I'm going to listen to it later and see if I can process that further.
So then that's the race part of the story and then there's also of course the cultural part of the story.
I mean I have a sister-in-law who grew up in Singapore.
And Singapore is also a multicultural place, a small multicultural island.
Is it?
It is.
It is.
They have Muslims, they have Buddhists, they have Hindus, I think.
And also, of course, different races, Chinese, Indian.
So they have to Get these people to work together in a way.
And she's very positive in general about how it works there.
One of the things they do, for example, is if you go to school, you learn two languages.
You learn the language you have to learn and you learn the language of your own culture.
Which might be Chinese, which might be Indian, Hindu.
I'm not sure how you call the language, I'm sorry.
And there's of course a lot of different Chinese.
Anyways, but they have one problem.
Because there's Muslims.
And the Muslims are not, it's not, they don't want to integrate in a sense.
Because if you have a Muslim person marrying a non-Muslim, the person has to convert to Islam.
Mm-hmm.
And, of course, if a person who is in Islam wants to leave, also causes a lot of problems in different ways.
So that's the only culture that's not able to mix well in the system, which is something that's happening in a lot of countries, of course, these days.
Well, I think it was the head of Turkey who said that, don't integrate, right?
He said to the Muslims who are moving to Europe.
Yeah.
Yeah, and he advises the Turkish people in the Netherlands to keep, this is something I learned today, to keep a Turkish passport.
So most of them have a Dutch passport and a Turkish passport.
So they're going to vote in the Netherlands and they're also voting on the constitution that's being voted on right now in Turkey.
And having a Turkish passport means they're obligated to respond to cold warms, for example.
They can still be drafted.
So people living in the Netherlands can be drafted to the Turkish army.
Right, which is kind of ironic if the Netherlands and Turkey end up going to be at it.
So yeah, just for those who don't know, and I was surprised to hear this, the population of Singapore, 77% Chinese, 14% Malay, 8% Indians, 1% Eurasians, and a sprinkling of people of other descent.
So just wanted to mention that.
Yeah, I didn't know.
So then there's the difficulty with non-integrating Muslims.
And you're saying, I didn't know this, that Erdogan is apparently telling people not to integrate, but I also already knew this because I studied a lot of things about Islam.
And part of that study was how do they talk amongst each other?
So I just go to a forum.
Online, you know, just to see what they, what do they, how do they advise each other to live?
How do they advise each other to take their faith?
Because if you have a discussion with someone who defends Islam, I don't think you get an honest perspective of what they tell each other how to live.
And then you hear people saying, like, you hear someone ask the question, or you don't hear it, you read it, someone asks the question, can you be friends with someone who isn't a Muslim?
And you get a lot of different responses, of course, it's an internet forum.
But the general consensus is, no, you cannot be a friend with someone who does not put Allah first.
But, it's very good if you pretend to be their friend.
Because you might be able to convert them to Islam.
I mean, it explains so much, of course, again.
If you learn how something works.
And it's the same thing with the documentaries that they did in Copenhagen in Denmark.
Like every mosque in their capital advised to journalists that pretended to be refugees, every mosque in their capital advised them not to integrate.
So it's really no surprise that the second generation is less integrated, that the third generation is again less integrated than the second one.
And I mean, it's a kind of, if that path continues, it can only lead to civil war, in my opinion.
Yeah, I mean, people just need to study Islam.
Yeah.
You know, there's lots of great resources available on the web.
You can look up Bill Warner.
You can look up other people.
You can just study it and learn the facts.
And then the behavior is not really that incomprehensible.
It's not like it's a big secret.
I mean, it's not like it's a big mystery.
They're very brazen about...
Yeah, it's not like, you know, like there are certain groups, it's like, well, you have to pass this level of initiation to get the secret code to the entire...
It's like, no, there's none of that.
It's pretty clear.
So now we come back to the Dutch election that's going on right now.
Right.
So we have this problem with Islam.
We have the problem with mass immigration, which is about...
It's hard to get accurate stats on this, of course, but it seems to be somewhere between 75,000 and 125,000 a year, which is a lot of people.
Yes, it is.
Even if we don't let anyone else in, like we stop 100% immigration, for example, which the EU is not going to let happen, unless we can stop them, then we're still part of the EU. Which means that the two million people that immigrated to Germany are getting a German passport,
And can get in the Netherlands without any stopping them because they have a European Union passport.
I don't think they're all 2 million are gonna come here because they get more money in Germany, but it's a possibility.
You know, you don't know what developments are going to take place.
Well, I mean, it's in Holland, 50 to 70% of former Muslim asylum seekers live permanently on welfare.
Yes.
I mean, it's permanent.
And welfare means you don't have to integrate.
Yes, and I saw an interview yesterday, like there's one of the parties that used to be the party of immigrants as well, as well as the laborers, and they're losing all their votes now because there's the immigrant party.
And someone was asked on the street, why don't you support Pei van der?
Why don't you support the labor party?
Why do you support this new party?
They said, well, Last year, Labour was in power, and they lowered the...
How do you call it in English?
Getting money from the government?
Welfare?
Yeah.
So he said, last year, they lowered the welfare that my dad in Morocco was getting.
In Morocco?
Yes.
The Dutch government lowered the welfare that this guy's father was getting in Morocco?
Yes.
Why would he be getting welfare in Morocco?
Well, I know.
It's actually a scam that's taking place quite a lot, especially from...
It's organized pretty much by Moroccan people, and it's given to a lot of Romanian people.
They invite someone from Romania to come to the Netherlands to go through the whole process of immigrating.
And then once they've gone through the whole process, they're entered as living somewhere, they go back to Romania, they have a bank account, and they get money.
They get welfare money and they split it between the people who organized it and the person living in Romania.
Which is lovely that this is taking place.
So I'm not someone who makes a lot of money.
So I don't pay a lot of taxes, but I would still like our country not to throw their money away.
I think that's a very stupid thing to do.
This is obvious that I'm saying it, but it's...
You get the feeling like you're living in a mad world so often.
So those are some of the things that are going on in the Netherlands.
And this...
Then there's this new party, Forum for Democracy, which is led by a law philosopher who's written six books.
And I think, I'm not sure if they're translated to English.
I don't know if you read French, but it's been translated to French at least.
My French reading, I had to learn how to read French for my master's, but I'm a little rusty.
But sorry, go ahead.
Okay, no.
He wrote a book called Okophobia, which basically means fear of the house or fear of your own culture.
Which I think is a very important idea to have, to have this as a word.
You know how they use the word trans and cis?
Like to denote someone.
So I read a book in the feminist bookstore that I went to with someone who was, at that point my girlfriend.
And I read an argument for why the word cis was important.
And the argument basically went, if you have something called trans, But you don't have a word for the opposite side, then the word trans is something like that's the other.
That's the other ring.
That's something that's outside.
That's something that's weird.
That's something that's outside.
But if you have a word for both things, then you can both kind of other the other person and it balances out.
Sure.
And of course we have the word Islamophobia being thrown around all the time.
Like if you want to stop immigration, you're Islamophobic.
Even if you just say, I want to stop immigration, oh, you know, so even in the accusation, you admit that there's a lot of, at the very least, you admit there's a lot of Islamic immigration taking place.
Well, and I mean, if you're very sensitive to people of non-traditional sexual orientations and gender orientations, I'm not sure I see how compatible that is with sort of fundamental tenets of Islam.
Well, don't you know they're victims, Stefan?
They're the biggest victims in the world, so I don't know how you can say anything to criticize them.
Well, I guess if colonialism is bad for the West, isn't it bad for everyone, like taking over other people's countries and expanding your ideology?
If it's really bad for the West to do it, I'm not sure how it's really great for everyone else to do it.
That's a mystery that I'll probably never quite understand.
And I mean, we've forgotten how, well, when I say we, I don't mean you and me, but we've forgotten how powerful religion is.
Oh yeah, no, it's not just religion.
We've forgotten how powerful anyone who believes in anything can be.
Because what in the West do we believe in anymore?
Nothing!
We believe in appeasement.
We believe in bowing down.
We believe in not telling the truth.
We believe in fear.
We believe in conformity.
We believe in nothing.
And that's why we can't stand.
We fundamentally compromised our greatest values long before the immigrant crisis, long before the migrant crisis.
And the reason why the migrant crisis is happening is because we compromised and destroyed our basic values generations ago.
The welfare state should never have been allowed to stand.
It should never have been allowed to rise.
Private charity, community charity, religious charity, Christian charity, neighborhood charity, family charity.
That should have been the barrier between the unlucky poor and their poverty.
But the idea that we're going to assign the government the power to move trillions of dollars around from one end of the economy to the other...
And it's not going to be used to buy votes, and it's not going to be used to excuse people from their own bad decisions, and it's not going to cause the disintegration of the traditional family system to the point where, you know, you're making hula hoops out of two feminists and banging them six wives from Sunday on a seamy bed.
So, the wages of sin is death.
This is not a migrant crisis.
It's not a migrant crisis.
It's an immorality crisis.
It's a self-betrayal crisis.
The migrant crisis and the associating demographic and cultural challenges does not result from a failure of enforcing borders.
It does not result from a failure of allowing too much immigration.
It results from the welfare state.
If I spill a whole bunch of honey on the ground, it's the honey that brings the bears.
Not the bears' fault!
And so...
There is a great opportunity in the West to examine the roots of this crisis and say, where did we go so wrong that we have ended up in this situation?
Now, the great temptation, and I understand it and I may even accept it in the short run, the great temptation is, okay, close the borders!
Close the borders!
Sure, that buys us perhaps a little time.
Perhaps ten years.
Perhaps.
But what do we do in those ten years?
Do we just sit there and say, whew, we've solved the problem, now let's get back to spinning our way around various vaginas.
No.
No, no, no.
You buy a little time, and what do you do?
You figure out what went wrong at the base of things to the point where the entire history of the civilization may be threatened.
And it's not immigration.
Immigration is a symptom.
The problem is the violation of property rights, the violation of personhood, the violation of integrity that allowed us to slither down the slippery, slidey pathway towards socialism that starts with the welfare state.
Just imagine.
I was just talking about this today.
Just imagine.
Let me take you back on a journey.
Actually, I sent this book proposal out decades ago.
I was 25, I think I was.
So it's a quarter century ago, I sent this book proposal around saying, we need to deal with the welfare state.
I sent it to publishers.
And of course, nobody was interested.
Nobody cared.
It didn't matter.
I mean, it was crazy.
And my friends were like, oh, it's mad.
Who cares?
It just helps some people.
You want them to starve in the streets.
All right.
Now imagine, in some alternate universe, 25 years ago, publishers had accepted this book.
I had an outline, a whole thing.
Publishers had accepted this book against the welfare state.
And let's say that some orderly transition away from the welfare state towards private charity had been organized.
Well, The reversal of the decay of the family would have occurred, right?
That would have reversed.
The decay of the family and the restitution of the family to its stable center of society would have occurred.
The national debt, national deficits, it's the welfare state.
Now, in America, it's somewhat also the military-industrial complex.
But for most of the West, the debt and the deficit is the welfare state.
And therefore, we would have paid off most of the national debt.
Families would be stronger.
Charity would be stronger.
More people would be actually helped rather than locked into these horrible migrant-attracting dungeons of permanent underclasses within society.
Imagine.
Where would the migrants go if there was no welfare state?
They would not come to Europe.
They would not be coming to Europe.
If there was no welfare state, You would not have all of these dysfunctional people who've made terrible decisions because there's a welfare state and are now surviving in that welfare state as a result of those bad decisions and enabling themselves to make more of those bad decisions.
You wouldn't have created this giant, massive horde of people desperate to vote for more and more and more and more government all the time.
You would have a society that respected property rights.
You would have a moral society.
You know, people say, well, why has Europe lost pride in its history?
Because Europe sucks!
And has for generations.
Europe is like a dead body washed up on the shore of history.
And everyone says, well, why isn't he putting on any sunscreen?
Because he's dead!
Europe betrayed all of the precious liberties carved out of the height of humanity and the carrion-feasted body of history.
Europe betrayed those values generations ago by creating This syrupy, trapping the poor like prehistoric flies in amber welfare state.
The massive, forced, immoral, evil violation of property rights that is undermining and destroying society.
It's not the politicians!
It's not the politicians!
It's the voters!
And the voters have been bribed.
And the voters have become sentimental.
And the voters have been backed into a corner where it's the welfare state or general starvation, they believe, and have accepted this false dichotomy.
You know, Ingrid Kalkvist was on this show.
And I like Ingrid a lot.
She was talking about how great Sweden was in the 70s.
You could do anything.
Everything was wonderful.
Everything was great.
Sure.
Sure.
Of course it was.
Fucking boomers.
Of course it was.
Because if you borrow like crazy, you don't have to work.
But then what happens is your kids end up inheriting the debt.
Europe betrayed itself generations ago.
This is the outcome of the self-betrayal of Europe.
And Europe had the example of the late Roman Empire.
Bread and circuses, entertainment provided by the state, and welfare, and multiculturalism.
But multiculturalism has a lot to do with the welfare state.
Why did you need a welfare state before you had multiculturalism?
Because multiculturalism is financially not effective, not efficient.
So once you have the welfare state, you can pay people to come in and you can pay people to pretend that they can live peacefully side by side when all of the data and all the evidence shows that it decays social trust and all the stuff I've talked about a million times before.
Everyone surrendered their conscience to the state and said, you take the money of our children and And you take care of the poor.
I don't want to get involved.
It's messy.
They're smelly.
Sometimes they have bad breath.
They have halitosis.
I don't know what they eat, where they sleep, what happens.
I don't want to get involved.
Let the state take care of it.
I don't feel like getting up early and go to church.
I don't feel like getting to know my neighbors.
I'm going to sit home with my TV dinner, stuff my face, get fat, and watch the boob tube till my eyes dribble down my cheeks.
And this laziness, this deference, of course, to what women want.
Women will choose, in general, security over liberty.
And nobody pushed back.
Oh, but we've got to please the ladies.
Right.
Yeah, because they're really going to be pleased at the future of Europe.
I'm sure of that.
So, it just frustrates me.
If people had listened...
To Ayn Rand regarding the welfare state, or to Milton Friedman, if people had listened, if people had accepted the arguments which were very clear and very well validated, morally, economically, empirically, if people had listened in the past,
the welfare state would not have come into being as a fundamental violation of every precept, of every principle, of every goal of That the West and all moral societies had bended themselves towards, which is not just a man's home is his castle, but a man's wallet is his castle.
Keep your robot statist hands out of my goddamn wallet.
Let me help people as I see fit.
Because I have a private incentive for people to get better when my money is spent.
All you assholes do is wallpaper people's houses, their tin shacks, their mobile homes with money to buy their votes and trap them in dependence upon these mechanical, slowly dying, blood-soaked state robot udders.
A fiat currency.
So Europe betrayed itself generations ago.
Europe decided to go for the cheap and easy out.
Europe decided to go for the redistribution to satisfy the ladies' welfare state.
Sweden, 800 years.
800 years, no welfare state.
A few years after women get the vote, welfare state!
Why didn't people push back?
Why didn't they stand up and say, ladies, you're kind of new to this.
Let me explain to you how it works.
Let me explain to you why we don't want this.
And people didn't push back.
They didn't fight back.
And...
I didn't know.
I don't know.
I wasn't there.
I can only tell you about what I've known, which is that I've been talking about the evils of the welfare state for 34 years.
34 years.
And everyone says, Steph, you're crazy.
You're just a nasty guy.
You just want people to suffer.
He's like, yeah.
How are they going to do over the next little while, everyone?
Oh, you see, you want the heroin addict to get less heroin and eventually no heroin?
You just want him to suffer?
Well, what are the alternatives?
We're seeing what the alternatives are.
That if you create this giant prize of welfare...
You know, in Sweden, a family, a migrant family on welfare...
Gets over $3,200 US a month.
How much do you think they're getting in the Middle East?
You can't blame them.
Of course not.
I mean, if I could go someplace and I could get 10 times the income for not working...
I mean, can't you completely not blame people for taking money for free?
It's not free!
Well, it's free for them.
That's the point.
No, no, I'm not talking about the migrants.
I'm talking about the Europeans.
Everybody knew it was a sleazy deal with a syrupy devil to give the government this kind of power.
Everyone surrendered their money to the government, their health to the government, their income to the government, their children.
To the government.
Yeah!
Let's give kids to the state to raise them.
Because, Lord knows, the state has been just such a wonderful entity all throughout European history and around the world.
Hey, you remember that government that started the first world war which killed 10 million people and 20 million people more when the Spanish flu hit at the end of...
30 million people.
All these European governments started all these wars that killed 30 million people.
Hey, how about the Second World War?
Ooh, we got an extra 10.
40 million people.
How about 100 million people dead through communism?
Oh, you could go on and on.
And it's like, hey...
These homicidal maniacs at the top of the pyramids of state power, these people who wield political power like Smorg wields his fiery breath, how about we give our children to these people to raise?
Wouldn't that be great?
How about these people who care so much about humanity that they've...
Poured a quarter of a billion people into the woodchipper of disassembling state power in just 100 years.
Let's give them the power to help the poor.
Let's give them all the healthcare in the world.
Let's give them all the charity in the world.
Let's give everyone everything who's an asshole.
Why?
For God's sakes!
I can understand in the late 19th century, when Western Europe had been largely war-free, For 70 or 80 years.
It's the fall of Napoleon in 1815.
Okay, but dear God alive, in the 1930s?
In the 1950s and the 1960s?
After two world wars?
Yeah!
Let's give the government more power!
Because it only got fucking half of Europe killed in the span of half a century.
Sure, let's give them the kids.
Let's give them everything.
Because they've just proven themselves to be so wonderful and so benevolent and so helpful and so great.
Send it all over.
Send them the kids.
Send them the money.
Give them all the power to create money.
Give them all the power to regulate everything.
Give them all the power to make a third of the population dependent on stupid bullshit pieces of paper government licenses so that they can draw breath and make money.
Yo, let's give the government the power to redraw all the lines in the family.
Let's give them the power to raise the children.
You want to know why Sweden is dying?
Because like 99.9% of Swedish children grew up in daycare.
And bonded with the state.
You think they have the power, the capacity in any way, shape or form to push back against and resist the state?
The state is their parent.
They can't restrain the state because the state is literally their giant maternal tit.
And they are as strong with the state as a baby is with its mother.
You handed your children, Swedish moms, gotta face it.
You handed your children over to the state to be raised.
You took the 40 pieces of silver.
You betrayed the Jesus of your principles.
And now you claim to be shocked that all you have raised is hell on earth.
So that's what I would like to learn to be able to do.
What?
What you're...
In a sense you're making all these numbers and facts and turning it into something that people can feel going on.
And you're able to channel it in a way to, I think, awaken people to Well, it's just that Europe can be saved, but we gotta go back to principles.
The West has to go back to basic principles.
Private property, security, privacy, independence, and skepticism of state power.
We have to shrink the state.
We have to control the state.
We have to say to all the people dependent on the state, sorry, it's really bad.
It's really bad.
And it's a real shame.
I'm sorry that you became dependent on the state.
Um...
You know, of course, that it couldn't possibly last.
You know for a fact that this can't possibly last.
You're going to have to find alternate arrangements.
You're going to have to start contributing to your community, and you're going to have to start sharing responsibilities for childcare and so on.
You'll figure it out.
You're smart people.
It'll all work out.
But Europe has taken a seriously bad turn into socialism, and socialism leads to decay.
Socialism leads to the softening of spines.
And we have to stop enabling people in their bad decisions.
We have to start treating them as adults.
Sorry, single mom, you had a kid with an unreliable dad.
You have to own that.
You have to find some way to make that work.
I'm sure society will help you.
I'm sure people will help you out.
But you've got to start pretending that you're an adult so that you can be an adult.
And the alternative to that relatively small suffering could be the very end of the West as we know it.
And so for me...
Europe is dead, but Europe can come back to life, but it's got to go back and rediscover the principles that made Europe Europe in the first place.
You know, John Locke didn't say, hey, you know what would be excellent?
Let's replace the monarchy with a big, giant-ass, massive-borrowing, money-printing, fiat-currency-based, wealth-transferring, leviathan state.
Wouldn't that be great?
That would be just fantastic.
That would be such an improvement over what we've got.
No.
It's like, let's not take the monarchy and replace it with a democracy.
It's even worse than a monarchy.
At least a monarchy has to keep the kingdom solvent for his children.
At least occasionally you'll get a good king.
With democracy, it's always idiot greed rule.
So there were rights that were supposed to be there at the center of European civilization, inviolate rights, inviolate rights.
That was what was supposed to be right there at the center.
Life, liberty, property.
That was supposed to be it.
It's not that complicated.
It's the Holy Trinity.
Life, liberty, property.
That was the original part of the American experiment, but they had to change it to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to appease the slave owners.
But, you know, life, liberty, property.
That's all it's about.
And it's not that complicated.
The betrayal of all of that, the betrayal in particular of property, is going to be the end of Europe, unless it wakes the hell up, turns around, goes back, picks up those values, and reestablishes them with the improvement of doing it consistently this time, rather than piecemeal, ready to crumble like it was done in the past.
All right.
Thanks very much for the call.
I appreciate it.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, though.
I appreciate you calling in, though.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Up next, we have Matty.
Matty wrote in and said, Based on my simple observations, it appears that any time the government becomes involved in financing something, the price goes up exponentially.
College and Rhodes come to mind.
Why is this?
I have considered several possibilities.
Governments are large and unwieldy, and it can be difficult to notice when money is misappropriated, making it a target for the unscrupulous and criminal.
Government budgeting is based on how much is spent, so departments tend to have the incentive to spend above their budget just to keep their funding and have a shot at getting more.
Or is it just that the government officials and bureaucrats have no incentive at all to make sure that money is used efficiently as possible, since the money isn't theirs and they are unlikely to be fired or even reprimanded for misappropriating it?
That is from Matty.
Hey Matty, how you doing?
Hello, I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm well, thank you.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that those are all certainly part of it.
Is there any particular government program that you find more disturbing than others?
I would not say so.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I would say that everything that you have there, it makes perfect sense.
And the other thing, too, of course, and this is something that's sort of under...
Well, underrepresented.
It's the sort of public-private partnerships.
PPP. Public-private.
So we think of like how there are universities and then Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 60s signed this first sort of student loan.
The federal government's going to start guaranteeing student loans and so on.
Then, federal government guarantees of student loans leads to a massive expansion in the student loan industry, which leads to massive enrollments in colleges, massive growth in colleges.
So money starts flowing in to colleges through that.
Now, that's not direct government funding in a way, but it's indirect government funding.
And...
That has the effect of destroying universities, right?
Because again, I've said this before, you don't send people to college to make them smart.
Smart people used to go to college because they were smart enough to get in.
Now, college has been dumbed down to the point where it's all just about, you know, chanting.
This is library!
It's just about chanting nonsense slogans and yelling at people and throwing bricks at conservative speakers and their audiences and so on.
And so the amount of money that is being spent on bureaucracy in universities is going completely through the roof.
It's mad.
It's grown far faster than direct contact professors have grown in the university.
So there is Lots of reasons why.
You know, there's four categories of money spending, right?
And each with descending responsibilities.
So the first is when you're spending your own money on things for yourself, you tend to be very careful.
When you're spending your own money on things for someone else, like a present, you tend to be a little less careful.
When you're spending other people's money on yourself, you tend to be even less careful.
And when you're spending other people's money on other people, well, there's no need for restraint.
And, you know, imagine, like, you have a cell phone, right?
Yes.
Right.
And I assume that they're fairly cautious about using data because they don't want to go over and pay the overage fees, right?
Now, yeah, so, I mean, if you can imagine, right, like, I mean, if...
If everyone's cell phone became, well, it's now unlimited data.
You can just use all the data you want.
Then people wouldn't, you know, turn their data off when they left and then turn their Wi-Fi on when they came home just to make sure they didn't accidentally leak, you know, a $30 worth of data by one Google Maps lookup or something like that, right?
So when things are limited, you tend to conserve them and you tend to manage them and so on.
And when things are unlimited, then you tend to use them.
A huge amount.
And so that is natural if things are unlimited and if you're not, you know, especially if it was unlimited and free, you know, I mean, the Obama phone plan makes a whole lot more sense once you realize that the CIA wanted to expand its spying capacity.
So it's like, sure, give them free surveillance devices.
I mean, phones.
Sorry, phones.
I meant to say phones.
And so, yeah, there's lots of reasons why this government spending generally goes up.
What incentive do you have to reduce it, right?
If you try to reduce spending in a particular government department, you're going to face a lot of opposition.
And what is the cost-benefit for that opposition?
Like when I was a manager, I had to fire people from time to time.
And that's because...
Well, I was a part owner of the company and responsible to the other employees who worked hard and wanted to keep morale up, and I wanted to make sure that the customers were satisfied and we weren't overcharging for our products, which you do if you have a lot of deadwood floating around that you have to pay.
You have to end up charging more for your products.
And I mentioned morale, but morale is really important.
important.
If you've got a bunch of hard workers and there's a couple of people around just dragging down the productivity, they drag down the productivity of everyone else around them.
Like it's like a bad worker is not just a bad worker.
Think of like an assembly line.
If there's just one guy on the assembly line who's working half speed, then you have to slow the whole assembly line down to half speed because, right, so it's a ripple effect.
So I was on the hook and actually personally, I had to sign these guarantees for huge amounts of money when we needed to make payroll and cash flow was a challenge.
Like, you may have the money coming in, but it's not there yet, right?
And corporations sometimes have like 90 days to pay you, but payroll is every two weeks, so you've got to have the money there.
So I was sort of personally on the hook.
So I'm willing to do the difficult thing and sit down with someone and say, it's not working out, sorry, we're going to have to let you go, and here's why, and do it in a way that's helpful and positive.
And I'm doing that because I have personal stake in the matter.
It matters to me.
Now, if you are in a school and the school is overspending in something, I mean, what is your incentive?
If you cut the spending, you don't get to keep any of the money.
But you sure as hell will run into a huge amount of opposition.
People who've, you know, laid love their entrenched nonsense jobs of paper shuffling and surfing the internet for $75,000 a year or whatever.
Well, they're going to fight back like crazy against you.
So what rational incentive could you conceivably have for taking on that kind of fight when it doesn't benefit you at all, but just makes your life more difficult?
I mean, people aren't stupid.
I'm not saying you are or anything like that, but why would you want to get involved in that kind of conflict?
And some still do, God bless them and all, but if you're a principal and there's an underperforming teacher...
It's easier to shuffle that teacher off to some other school than it is to fire the teacher, which, you know, will take months and will be very difficult.
And you'll have a lot of hearings and you'll have a lot of paperwork and a lot of hostility from the union and from the teacher and from all of his friends.
And the teacher who you're trying to fire will try and rouse up everyone against you and make your life even more difficult.
You know all of that stuff, right?
So there's just no incentive, right?
I mean, it's...
It doesn't make any sense.
And it's the same thing if you're on Medicare.
If your kid has a sniffle, sure, why not call an ambulance and go to the emergency room?
It doesn't cost you anything.
You don't have to pay for it at all.
And why wouldn't you get the best?
If you've got some old jalopy and some beautiful new stretch limo that can take you to your home from wherever you are, And they're the same price or they're both free, why would you take the jalopy?
That would be an act of self-contempt.
Like, why are you going to take the limo?
Without price, everything becomes greed and vanity and overuse.
So then now recently there's been a lot of talk with Bernie supporters about free college.
And I assume that the price would just continue to rise anyways.
Well, not for the students if it's free, right?
Obviously not for the students, but for everyone paying for it, you know, if it's coming from the taxes.
It's not going to cost less suddenly because the government is involved, but it will probably go up in price.
Well, that's not the greatest problem, though.
That's not the greatest problem.
And this just shows you the great dangers of people either being idiots.
Or what is the greatest problem?
The greatest problem.
So let's say that there are Bernie supporters out there and lots of people out there.
It's like, free college!
That's fair.
That's just.
That's right.
Should we have to pay for our own education?
It's a human right, whatever it is.
Like sorry, like I'm sorry that you're either completely stupid or just so indoctrinated that you can't think about anything.
Because the simple fact of the matter is this.
If college becomes free, everyone will want to go.
If everyone goes, college degrees become meaningless.
If everyone can go, then college degrees have to be dumbed down to the stupidest people who want to go, which means that the value of a college degree will go down proportionately.
It will go down to the point where a college degree will be a negative.
Because in the past, when you had to be really smart to get a college degree, then a college degree meant you're smart, you can plan, you can work hard, you can study, you can follow through, you can have a four-year plan, you can graduate.
Yeah, you'll be a great person to hire.
But if college becomes free, I'll tell you what will happen.
Idiots will swarm into college.
No disrespect, but you know, people who just shouldn't be in college, who should be out doing trades or other things.
Perfectly wonderful, perfectly fine thing to do in society.
Not everyone is college material, just like not everyone is MBA material.
Doesn't mean you're a bad person, just the way it is.
So idiots will swarm into college.
And college will then devolve from, wow, you can cut it in a really demanding discipline, to what kind of idiot wastes four years of his life taking nonsense stuff that's been dumbed down by idiots and doesn't even know what a bad decision that is.
College will go from a plus to a minus.
College will go from something that you look...
That someone has avoided it rather than that someone has taken it.
Like, wow, you went to college?
I mean, I've seen that curriculum.
It's really, really basic.
And why on earth would you want to go to college if you're not being challenged, if you're surrounded by idiots, if it's been dumped down, if there's all this leftist indoctrination, why on earth would you bother going to college?
I'll tell you this.
I mean, if I was still hiring...
I would really, really not want to talk to anyone who had an arts degree, for sure.
Like, oh my god.
You've got to be kidding me.
I was kind of on the fence.
I've been on the fence, and then, you know, I read No Campus for White Men, and I read...
A bunch of other stuff that was written about college.
And I guess it's official now, folks.
I guess it's official now.
I am withdrawing my advocacy for all but absolutely essential college.
Okay.
You want to desperately be a lawyer because you love working 80 hours a week and then being unemployed.
Okay.
You desperately want to become a doctor because you love nothing more than either going to work For Dr.
Keith Smith at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma or spending the rest of your life filling out paperwork and getting sued.
So maybe there's something you need to do.
You've got to be an engineer.
You've got to go.
Okay, go.
Go.
Because you're not going to have a lot of social justice warrior stuff in there.
But you're God alive.
If there's the time...
Tiniest, tiniest, tiniest sliver of a possibility that you can do what you want to do without going to college and you still go to college.
I'm sorry.
You have made a giant, colossal, massive mistake.
College.
Non-essential college.
Is now a black stain on your judgment, as far as I'm concerned.
Do not go to an arts degree.
Do not go for anything out of the very boner-hardest sciences that you absolutely need, or some piece of paper which the government won't let you practice what you want to practice unless you go there.
Do not go for anything that is not empirical.
Do not go for anything that is not objective.
Do not go for anything that That is not scientific.
Don't even think about it.
It's indoctrination.
It's crap.
It's going to cost you time, money, emotional stability.
You're going to be surrounded by insane people.
Like I just did this daycare generation presentation, just really a chat.
Oh my God!
The people you're going to be surrounded by, they're unhinged.
I'm sorry.
A lot of it's not their fault.
It's a daycare and bad education and so on, but...
You know, the average high school student in America these days has more mental health issues than the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.
Like, they're crazy.
Just crazy.
And you're going to be indoctrinated, especially if you're a white male.
You're going to be indoctrinated to hate yourself, or you're going to just have to grit your teeth and fight.
Why would you pay to be abused?
Why would you bother paying to be abused for four years to come out with a degree...
That, I think, any intelligent employer is going to say, oh, really?
You, what, public relations and political science?
Why?
Why would you want to delay adulthood?
Why wouldn't you just go out and work in the field?
History?
Do you not have a library?
I mean, this is way back.
Two Good Will Hunting days, right?
Like the Will Hunting says to this college derp head, you just spent $100,000 on an education you could have got for $1.75 in late fees at your local library.
And that's when you needed to go to a library, and Matt Damon had fewer jowls.
This is...
Now you can go online, you can go to the internet, you can listen to this show, you can listen to other shows, but the lectures are all online.
Just go and dig in and learn the knowledge.
You don't need to go to college anymore.
If you've got any brains, not only are you way smarter than the people around you, and you're just going to be like saying, uh, no, that's a pull door, not a push door.
No, you turn the lid of the pickle jar counterclockwise to open.
No, the bunny goes around the hole to tie your shoe, and then in this way, I know, I know, you grew up with Velcro, it's really, it's tricky.
No, you have to recharge that before you yell at it again because it can't listen to you when it's dead.
Well, okay, the CIA can, but it can't.
And this is what you're going to spend.
But that's not the worst part.
The worst part isn't if you've got any brains at all how much smarter you're going to be than the people horizontally.
If you've got any brains at all, you're going to be way smarter.
Than your professors, your teachers.
I mean, come on.
Come on.
You've seen what goes, what went on with the dangerous faggot tour, right?
You've seen what goes on with Ben Shapiro goes to try and speak.
You saw Charles Murray going to try and give a speech.
And they put some female professor in a neck brace.
And they're pounding their asses down on Charles Murray's car.
And then Charles Murray's like, Oh, I understand.
What...
Ugh.
Ugh.
Ugh!
History!
Hey, how would you like to study the history of how having white balls makes you evil incarnate?
Do you feel like paying $75,000 to be sold?
You're evil white man, you're evil white man, you're evil white man.
Just put that on a loop and play it to yourself for five years as you slowly go insane.
It's going to save you a whole lot of money, but you're going to kind of end up in the same place.
Why?
Why would you bother?
Why?
And...
Why on earth, why on earth would you want to put yourself in a situation where to succeed, you have to conform to abuse?
Why?
Why?
See, you don't pay to join the mafia.
They pay you if you're in the mafia.
Okay, you have to conform to evil, but...
At least you're getting paid.
Why would you pay to join the mafia and then go around breaking people's kneecaps when you found that an abhorrent thing to be doing?
Except in this case, it's even worse.
You're paying to join the mafia and you're breaking your own fucking kneecaps.
with the kind of spoons that you used to play old-timey old mcdonald head of arm right it's gonna take a while and it's gonna be painful maybe they'll give you a spork if you're lucky so why would you want to bother with any of this because there's this illusion Right?
This robbed from the past illusion.
Well, you gotta have a degree or nobody's gonna take you that seriously.
Bullshit.
Bullshit.
If you need a degree to give you confidence, you don't have confidence.
You don't have...
It's like saying, well, I'll feel beautiful once I've had plastic surgery.
No, you won't.
You'll feel uglier because you've surrendered to the idea that you're ugly to the point where you're willing to have your face carved up by a bunch of predatory high-profit butchers because of your insecurity.
You will wear the surgery scars as a monument to your insecurity and your unhappiness.
Oh, I know this.
I knew a woman who, oh, my nose is too big.
I'm going to have a nose job.
Well, she had the nose job and what changed?
Absolutely nothing.
And that is where you're going to be.
You're going to be in this hellhole of indoctrination and idiots surrounding you.
And by the way...
Should you be in possession of a penis of the albino kind, said penis may be dragged into a hearing room and you may get into some serious shit when you can't even have a lawyer present and you can't actually confront your accuser and you can't do, I don't know, any of the basics that common law has had as your privilege for many, many hundreds of years.
Why?
Because some crazy bunny boiler said, he raped me!
Or, or, here's another one.
I've got another one for you.
Maybe some minority gets upset at your particular perspectives, and what they do is they punch themselves in the face, Ed Norton Fight Club style, and then blame you.
Because apparently just about every hate crime in the known universe is self-inflicted bullshit these days, and it's all a hoax.
Just go Google hate crime hoaxes and scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.
Forget it.
Why would you want to do it?
I don't care who's paying.
I don't care how much time you have.
I don't care how much you want to delay adolescence.
My God, you understand?
Going to an arts degree college these days is going to make you sick.
It's going to make you indebted.
It's going to paralyze you.
You're going to graduate, even if you graduate with no debt.
You will be four years behind the curve of people who went out and got a job.
And if you can't get a job in the field that you want, make the job in the field that you want.
Do you know, at least half the people I have on this show, I have no idea what their education is, and I could care less.
The only people I know who's, like, they have their education is if they're a professor or they got a doctor or something like that.
Most people, I don't care.
I don't care.
What degree does Paul Joseph Watson have?
I don't care.
What degree does Alex Jones have, other than Nostradamus, Doctor of Prognostication for Infinite Spying?
I don't know, and I don't care.
Do I have a degree, a PhD in philosophy?
No, I don't.
Good, because if I did, I'd be much more boring.
I know that I have to fill that deficiency and gain credibility, so I've got to work harder.
I've got to work harder.
I'm telling you, employers are going to get hip to this if they're not hip to it already.
You went to college?
What are you, an idiot?
Why?
Can you not hack it in the real world?
Do you just love to be surrounded by idiots?
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry we're not surrounded by idiots here.
And so you probably won't fit in very well here.
Or you get a college degree...
In the arts, and you get that on your resume, on someone's desk, do you know what the average employer is going to think?
Ooh, leftist social justice warrior.
Ooh, we're basically going to have to build a conveyor belt from their cubicle to human resources because they're going to go and launch complaint after complaint after complaint after complaint after complaint after complaint.
And they're going to cause problems and they're going to say, oh, you're being exploited by that capitalist boss bastard in the corner office.
What does he do?
He doesn't type.
He doesn't produce any code.
He doesn't make things.
He doesn't make any...
He barely even makes any phone calls.
What's he doing in there all day?
I don't know.
Keeps his blinds so you can't see the reflection of his monitor on the window.
Why don't any of these windows open by the...
Oh, God.
Corruption!
Class!
Ha!
You're going to have some commie agitator in there stirring up a whole bunch of shit.
In your workforce.
Why?
Because they went to an art college and they got indoctrinated.
It's going to become a negative.
And the more people they just dump and pump into college, the more negative it's going to become.
Now, if Trump does stuff that he's talked about, which is sort of cutting this student loan guarantees from federal government and so on...
If college is starved of the dumb money, like the idiot subsidy, then they'll have to stop being more exclusive in who they choose to get in.
And that is a consummation devoutly to be wished for.
I don't know if it's going to be enough to save college, because there's this show, and the number of people, I can't even tell you, I couldn't even count the number of people.
Who've written to me over the years and said, I learned more in like five podcasts from you than four years in college.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so this sluice of dumb money that they're being handed, it's like monopoly money for children.
Hey, kids, feel like LARPing at being a scholar?
We can help you out right now.
We've got safe zones.
We've got rooms with beanbags and We're good to go.
Probably six to eight minutes to join the rest of your body because it's sort of like fly fishing.
You're using a comeback.
So you can jump back.
Your skeleton will jump back through your body fat and your land whale extremities will then whiplash back into you.
So it might take a little while, but then you can scoop up all this stuff.
You can scoop up your belly.
You can put it on a wheelbarrow.
You can wheelbarrow it into a safe room where you can screech autistically about how free speech is raping and killing you and how much you want to kill people you disagree with because you're all about diversity and tolerance.
And there won't be any clapping.
Don't worry, if you're up there and giving a public speech, we won't startle you with any visible sounds of walrus-like applause.
Jazz hands, we'll solve all of your problems and you won't be startled.
We're not going to shock you with any actual learning.
What we're going to do...
We're going to take all of the deep-seated paranoia and prejudice sewn into your very soulless cavity by trauma, by neglect, by being unloved, by daycare, by physical unattractiveness, all of that stuff.
We're going to take all of that and we're going to wad it up into a tight conceptual ball And then we're going to put it in your belly and teach you how to squeeze your butt muscles so it comes out of your belly button like a cannonball and lays waste Serious Sam style to everything in your path.
And that we'll call an education.
Why?
Because we've got a whole bunch of dumb money and we're going to use the dumb money to spend it on dumb people so everyone can pretend you've learned something.
But all you've learned is how to make yourself even more unappealing than you were before.
That was a mouthful.
You played Serious Sam?
I did!
I did.
Only the second.
But you do play it.
That cannonball was pretty fun.
Actually, on the topic of college and where my question came from is I'm taking a one-unit online political science class that is a requirement for graduation.
Oh, God help me.
And it's not too bad because I can do it on my own time.
And it is...
California government.
I live in California.
And the first thing I noticed is it's nearly impossible to figure out where government money is going.
It's hard to find out how much they spent.
It's hard to find out who they sent it to.
And it's hard to find out What they spent that money on, and sometimes even where it came from.
Did it come from this bond measure?
Did it come from this tax?
Which taxes that are supposed to be going to schools and bonds that are supposed to be going to schools have gone up a lot recently, but they're claiming your education is worse and worse than it ever was before.
Yeah.
It's kind of a mess.
What's your point?
I mean, this is California, right?
This is taken for granted, right?
Beautiful weather, unholy vortex of political corruption.
And...
I'm going to an anomalous college that is, I think, 54% male?
46% female?
Yes.
It has, if not a majority male, and almost majority male students.
And there have also been complaints about minority and...
Yeah, just minority professors leaving and stuff like that.
And then when Milo came to speak...
The president of the college sent out an email saying that actually because of free speech we have to let people speak.
And they always say it was such regret.
My hands are tied by basic ethics.
I'm real sorry, but we're going to have to let the Nazis speak.
By the way, Samantha Bee...
First of all, just personally, she's quite insane.
When you see her imitating people, she's mental.
But she made fun of some guy's supposed Nazi hairdo.
And as it turns out, the guy's battling stage 4 cancer, and that's why his hair looks that way.
There was a guy that was physically attacked recently because they said he was a skinhead because he had some genetic condition that made his hair fall out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's kind of a mess.
Well, listen, I mean, I'll put my minor caveat in just for the new listeners.
You know, I'm hugely influenced by female thinkers and all that and a huge amount of respect for female intelligence.
But on average, women are not as smart as men.
On average.
And we're talking, it's not huge, but it's not inconsiderable.
Sort of three, four, four and a half points IQ. If you test men and women early enough, like before the age of 15 and so on, then it's pretty much equivalent.
But what happens is, as men and women age, that which is more complex takes longer to develop, right?
Which is why it takes forever for human beings to learn how to walk, but they can end up doing gymnastics.
And female brains stop developing In their early 20s, the male brain stopped developing in their late 20s.
And when you go up in IQ, it doesn't matter much in the average, but when you go up in IQ, there are just way more men than women in higher IQs.
And, you know, around 100, it's pretty much one-to-one.
But when you start looking at IQs of 130 to 150, there are two and a half men for every woman.
And it gets even more extraordinary when you go higher.
So when you start talking about IQs over 150...
There are 3.7 men for every woman.
When you start talking about IQs of 160, there are almost six men for every woman.
And when you start getting even higher, 170 plus, there's 10.4 men for every woman.
And IQs over 175, there are 18 men for every woman.
And over 176, you can't find women.
So division by zero.
Can't get the ratio.
And this, so when you're starting to talk about, you know, as we had a caller in the other day who was asking, you know, why are there so few female directors?
Well, I think to be a really good director, to be a really competent director, you probably need an IQ of, you know, 160, 170, because you've got to be not just artistic and know how to tell a great story and know how to motivate actors and know how to get great performances out, but you've got to be Into the finances, you've got to be a good manager.
You've got to be maybe a good writer.
There's so many skills that have to come together.
To make a great director, I've got to think that it's at least 170.
It's my guess.
I don't know if anyone's ever been tested.
But okay, so if we're talking about 170, then there will be 10 men for every woman just in that IQ band.
Now, if you point out also that a lot of women will take time off from their careers to have babies and breastfeed and be good moms, which is a wonderful thing to do, then there's going to be that much fewer women.
And also when you factor in the fact that men have additional testosterone that makes them more aggressive and assertive and so on, then you're going to end up with more.
So to me, if there's 10 men for every woman in IQ 170 plus, and if that's what you need for successful directing, even if we discount all the other things, then if a female director wins an Academy Award every 10 years, yeah, that's about right.
That's exactly where it should be in line with IQ.
And this is the big problem.
As women, this is hard to miss, right?
Like as women become 50 to 60 or more percentage of a college, the intellectual standards plummet.
Thank you.
Why?
Because, you know, there are fewer women at the higher IQ bands than there are men.
And so when you start to get a lot more women into college, the standards have to go lower than if you had an equivalent number of men in college.
People can get upset if they want.
It's very boring.
But these are just the facts.
And it helps.
The reason I say this kind of stuff is not just because I enjoy everyone saying that I'm sexist or whatever.
The reason that I say this stuff is to help women.
To help women understand that men are not just waking up figuring out how to oppress women and how to hold women down and how to make sure women never become directors.
I mean...
Christ Almighty, we've got tits to fantasize about.
We don't have time for all of that stuff.
And men are...
We're happy when you succeed, but we can't change the bell curve.
We can't change the IQ curve, and we can't change the fact that women are the ones who get pregnant, and women are the ones who, if they want to be good moms, have to breastfeed.
We can't change that.
And so if you're being told the lie that men and women intellectually are just identical, despite the fact that men's brains are...
Like, 8% larger than women's brains, even when you correct for body weight and size and so on.
And men have much more neural connections than women and so on.
And again, there are genius women and there are, of course, lots of idiots.
But I don't want women to sit there and think, well, you know...
There should be 50-50 directors, male and female, because otherwise there's patriarchy and sexism and I hate men.
It's like, no, no, it's not men's fault that nature evolved us with different mental capacities.
It's just not my fault.
It's not your fault.
It's just the way things are.
And what it does when you have this kind of information, it allows you to do something wonderful, which is to relax into the giant hammock called the truth.
Relax into the giant hammock called facts.
And this way, you can let go of your resentment.
You can let grow.
You can let go of this giant colossus demonic phallus hanging over the world called evil patriarchy.
And you can get mad at Mother Nature.
She's a chick.
You can get mad at her.
I'm sure she'll be able to handle it.
But it allows you to deal with reality.
And it allows you to not be paranoid.
And it allows you to fall in love with men again.
And it allows you to fall in love with nature again.
And it allows you to fall in love with diversity again.
The diversity of abilities between men and women.
Yeah, women are better at some things and men are better at some things.
It's just that IQ happens to be something that particularly at the high end, men are better at.
And it's nobody's fault.
It's just the way things are.
And it allows you to not look at all statistical disparities as evidence of some evil patriarchy, but allows you to say, wow, we're better at different things.
Isn't that great?
We're like jigsaw puzzles that fit together very nicely.
Isn't that wonderful?
It allows you to let go of this Marxist, blue-haired, tattooed-faced, feminist, blood-smearing, I've got a tampon hanging out of my ears for incomprehensible political reasons.
It allows you to let go of Of that evil tribe of pussy hat wearers that currently seem to be in charge in Sweden.
It allows you to let go of all that frustration and that resentment.
It allows you to embrace the differences.
As I was told when I was growing up, it allows you to embrace the differences between the genders, to learn to love men again, the men who want you to do well and who want you to succeed, but can't give you the brain cells that some of you need.
And just as you can't give us some of the abilities that you have, then maybe we'd be better at.
Like, Keeping lists in our head and organizing basic households, things like that.
I'm not very good at that stuff at all.
We are complimentary.
No man is out to get you.
We'd love it if you succeeded more, but we can't siphon off parts of our brains and give them to you.
So it allows women to relax into reality, to learn to love the world again, to learn to love men again, and to stop feeling like victims because evolution.
All right.
Well, thanks for the question.
I appreciate it.
And we're going to move on to the next caller.
Have a lovely night.
Thank you.
Yeah, night.
Alright, up next we have Richard.
Richard wrote in and said, People such as yourselves often say that facts don't care about your feelings, and there is no such thing as your truth or my truth, only the truth.
While I agree with this premise, there are times within the human context when we lie for the greater good.
How is this reconciled?
Secondly, is how people perceive you important in the context of truth.
For example, calling somebody an arsehole because you don't like the facts they're presenting is definitely not an argument.
Mike, could you just say arsehole again?
Arsehole.
No, the R is very important to the British.
Yeah, the R is very, very important to the British.
Apparently, Mary rode to Bethlehem on an arse.
Anyway, so...
I'm sorry, what's your name again?
It's Richard.
Richard, how are you doing?
I'm great, Stefan.
How are you?
I'm great.
I'm great, thanks.
Do you have this conversation floating around your own personal life?
Yeah, it's kind of trying to understand how we got to the place where we're at, where...
The same group of people will claim to be all about the facts, fact check everything, but those same groups of people will blatantly lie and believe myths.
It's almost like a cognitive dissonance thing, you know, it's just two opposing things going on.
Is it though, do you think?
I mean, the left, they say that the end justifies the means.
They say that There's no such thing as absolute truth, but they want particular things in society.
I mean, if you look at the dedication of Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals, he dedicates it to Satan himself.
And they say, we don't have any rules, but we find it very useful to hold our enemies by their own standards, right?
So I don't know that they're being hypocritical if, and again, I'm not saying that all leftists subscribe to this, but I don't think they're being hypocritical if, in general, they say that the ends justify the means and then they manipulate facts to achieve their ends.
It's also to do with, like, people in general.
You know, like, we're taught, you know, lying's wrong.
But then there are times when you do lie.
You know, for the greater good.
Okay, let's start with that, because that's an interesting question.
Give me an example of a lie that would be for the greater good.
Well, I was trying to think of examples, and I tried to stay away from things that were like life and death, because, you know, they're kind of...
Yeah, they never happen, right?
Yeah, but let's say, for example, one I did think of was, say, if you were on a passenger airplane and one of the engines failed...
You know, plane was fine.
It's not going to crash.
But should the pilot tell the passengers or should he keep that to himself?
You know, like something like that.
You see like in TV and movies and stuff, you know, a disaster happens or whatever and the authorities decide not to tell the people, you know, because of panic or whatever.
Right.
You know, what's better?
Is it better that the people are told the truth, or is...
No, I mean, certainly that's...
No, listen, in that situation, if the plane is flying fine and there's no particular danger, why would you bother telling people?
I mean, they can't do anything about it, and they're not in any danger.
It's just going to make them freak out for no good purpose.
But you're not lying.
Yeah.
Right?
Withholding of information is not the same as lying, right?
I think it depends on the intention.
I think, like, whether it's malicious or, you know, whether it's for what you perceive to be a good reason.
Well, no, no, sorry.
Hang on, hang on.
There's a moral problem with lying by omission if you're expected to tell the truth and if the other person has the expectation that you're telling the truth, right?
Yeah, so if they believe that you would be telling the truth.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I mean, if someone asks you something specific, and you just kind of fudge and bury something, then that clearly is conscious, right?
Yeah.
But if, let's say, like I've done this show, I very rarely will get a headache, right?
But every now and then I'll do a show, I've got a headache.
Now, I haven't, I think one time I said I have a headache.
But so I don't announce it.
Am I lying to the audience by not saying I have a headache?
No.
I mean, if I can do a good show with a headache, then I'll do a good show with a headache.
But I'm not lying to someone because there's no expectation that...
I have to say every minor physical ailment I might be in possession of when I do a show.
Does that make sense?
In those instances, yeah, I definitely wouldn't be lying.
Sorry, let me give you another example.
Now, if I decided to do an opposite show, right?
Like, if I decided to be mean in a show or to be anti-rational in a show, But I didn't announce that as my intention before or afterwards.
That, I think, would be lying.
Because people have an expectation that I'm going to be rational in the show, or strive there to, right?
But if I've suddenly decided to reverse my methodology for some reason, then I should say that, right?
Like, let's say it was April Fool's or something like that.
I mean, it's at least afterwards, I should say, right?
Something, right?
And so if people have a rational expectation of consistent behavior, and then I break that consistent behavior, I think that is something where I should say, well, I've made a decision to do something different and blah-de-blah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, definitely.
You know, like I've said, I think anger is very healthy.
So if I get angry, I'm not breaking my rules of behavior.
But if I do something that egregiously breaks my rules of behavior, and I've made that sort of conscious choice to do so, then I think I owe it to the audience to say why I'm doing what I'm doing, right?
And so this aspect of things, I think, is sort of how you build up trust and this kind of stuff, right?
Yeah.
So lying by omission, I think, is important.
If it's expected or if it's something that other people have an assumption about that you're changing or violating, then I think you owe them that explanation.
But none of that is occurring in the situation you talk about with the airplane where one of the engines goes down, right?
People are expecting to have a calm flight from A to B. That can still occur.
And now, of course, if they can see that the engine stops, you probably want to say something.
Yeah.
But if they can't, then you're not breaking a pattern that they're in anticipation of continuing by withholding the information from them.
So let me just bring it round to something recent and political.
I didn't really want to bring politics into it, but you can't...
I mean, maybe that's just my bias, but you can't talk about lying and fake news without talking about leftists.
They kind of go hand in hand.
Let's take the Jeff Sessions thing that happened recently where he met with a Russian ambassador, but when he was asked at the time during the campaign, he said he hadn't.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm going to use a counter for that.
No, no, no.
Let's get the facts more clearly.
Mike, do you want to jump in on this?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I know the facts, but yeah.
No, hang on.
Mike studied this a little bit more.
We were trying to decide whether to do a show about this.
Mike, if you're there, if you wanted to go over this particular one.
Yeah, Jeff Sessions was asked by Al Franken about We're good to go.
He was giving a speech and he came off stage and briefly greeted the Russian ambassador in a crowd of people.
And apparently now this is massive collusion with the Russians.
So Sessions has just put in a...
I think it was the other day he put in a statement amending his testimony to clarify it.
But he was answering in the context of prolonged collaboration as a Trump campaign surrogate between the Russian government or the Trump campaign as a whole and the Russian government.
He was answering about that and if he knew anything about that or had been involved in that.
And he said no.
But it did come out that he had met the Russian ambassador twice, once very briefly after his speech and once as part of his normal duties.
So the question wasn't to Jeff Sessions, have you ever met with the Russian ambassadors?
The question was, are you involved in ongoing collusion or collaboration with Russian officials?
And the answer to that is clearly no.
And then, of course, the left-wing media played this whole gotcha game of, ah, you met with the Russian...
But that wasn't the question.
And so, yeah, if you want questions...
And this is sort of to do with perjury and so on.
It is up to the job of the person who's asking the question...
To clarify what he or she is looking for.
You can't ask a question like, if I said to you, hey Richard, are you involved in a long-term relationship with such and such a lady?
And you say, well no.
I can't then later say, well, have you ever had a meeting with her in your office?
Or have you ever shook her hand after a speech?
That's amending the question.
That's not fair to ask you whether you are involved in a long-term relationship with this woman.
And then I changed it.
Well, what I actually meant was, have you ever shaken her hand?
Well, that's not what I asked in the first place.
So there's no perjury involved if you don't clarify your question.
And it's not fair to ask a question of collusion and then change it.
So as the media did to say, well, he's misrepresenting or lying because he didn't talk about these flyby meetings or pass by handshakes or whatever.
So is that sort of what you mean?
Well, yeah, I mean, it's great that we clarified that because I think some people might not have I've heard about the recent one where it's like they all met at this ball, but it was basically a hello, next, you know.
Sorry to interrupt, but if somebody said to me, have you ever had a long-standing relationship with Michael Caine?
I would say, no.
Now, it would actually turn out that I sat next to Michael Caine in a movie theatre during the premiere of one of his movies many years ago when I was dating this woman who was working at the Toronto Film Festival, and so I saw a lot of films.
By the way, the Sin Compassione, the Spanish-language version of, I think it was made in Brazil, Of Crime and Punishment was fantastic.
I've got to watch that again at some point.
But no, so I don't have a relationship with Michael Caine.
However, I did sit next to his giant bulk in a movie theater, watching him watch his movie.
So, you know, clarification time would come up.
It's completely unacceptable how you've had your massive collusion with Michael Caine from me.
We need to have a conversation after the show.
Oh, no!
Mike's engaging at a Caine mutiny!
Oh!
There's a joke for people who know old movies.
Anyway.
Sorry, Richard.
Go ahead.
Yeah, it was just that, like, I kind of understood that it was within context.
You know, I think most people did, you know.
Maybe it was questionable for some, but generally I feel that most people understood it was within the context of the whole surrogate of the campaign type.
But then, yeah, the Senate, she says, nobody meets Russian ambassadors in that job.
I've never met Russian ambassadors in the 10 years I've worked there.
But then we find tweets of her tweeting, oh yeah, I'm meeting Russian ambassador today.
Yeah.
And there's photos of her doing it.
So, like, on the one hand, you've got leftists trying to claim that Jeff Sessions deliberately lied when asked a very vague question within context of campaign.
And then you've got this lady popping along, literally lying through her fucking teeth.
And nobody cares, except for people on the right.
It seems as if, and I'm really generalizing here, but the left-wing media really seems they're at a place now where Only relevant facts matter.
So all this bullshit about fact-checking Donald Trump during the campaign and fact-checking this and that, they only really fact-check when it's relevant, when opposing facts are presented.
No, but the left doesn't care about facts.
The left, they don't care about facts, and they openly state that.
It's all about the end justifies the means.
See, the way that the leftist mind works, if I can use the word very loosely, is something like this.
Jeff Sessions is Hitler.
Now, whatever we have to do or say to keep Jeff Sessions from becoming Attorney General, or if we fail in that mission to prevent him from becoming Attorney General, everything that we can do or say to undermine his authority as Attorney General is perfectly justified.
Why?
Because Jeff Sessions is Hitler.
Right?
So once you have these hysterical, maniacal exaggerations of the imaginary immorality of your enemy, then the end justifies the means.
And this is, you know, if you could, it's the old if you could kill Hitler question, right?
Before Hitler, you know, this is standard sort of narrative, the question that people have.
Well, if you've defined someone as literally Hitler, does a white lie matter in terms of keeping Hitler from achieving his nefarious goals of whatever they imagine the Republicans are about to do, namely enforce the law?
So the left has made it very clear in their massive exaggerations and extrapolations of the imaginary evils of the Republicans that they will stop at nothing because they're in a fight to save the last shreds of civilization from the encroaching Nazi hordes of Republicanism, right?
So, the moment that they start talking about the basket of deplorables of racist, sexist, Islamophobic, homophobic, blah blah, well, these people are just, like, the leftist projection is that the right is irredeemably evil, and who cares about niceties?
When it comes to defeating irredeemable evil.
I mean, in the very exaggeration of this imaginary immorality, they have clearly signaled that they have no intention of respecting truth.
So the left would look at her and say, well, given that Jeff Sessions is so evil, yes, it was worth trying a lie to discredit him.
Yeah, it was worth it.
Okay, so you lied, but he's irredeemably evil.
So, you know, your lie versus his irredeemable evil is like trying to find a sunspot on the sun with your bare eyes, right?
Yeah.
It's baffling, to be honest, definitely.
No, no, I'm explaining it!
What's baffling?
Why is it baffling?
No, it's just baffling that people still behave.
Can I read something?
I was looking before.
I was on Scientific American, and I was looking at an article they wrote that says why people fly from fax.
And they had a really interesting study that they did.
It's very brief.
They basically sat down.
It says 174 American participants.
And For one group, they said that same-sex marriage, there's scientific facts that say same-sex marriage is equal to or better than opposite-sex marriage for raising children.
And they told the other group that it's actually bad for same-sex marriage child raising.
It's actually negative compared to the opposite.
And what they found was that People who believed in same-sex marriage-raising couples that were told that it's scientifically proven to be detrimental, they made it a moral argument and said, well, it's not about facts, it's about morals.
And the group that was told, oh, factually, scientifically, it's actually better for them, those people said, yeah, obviously it's not about morals, it's about facts.
Sure.
And it's the same thing.
It's almost like the facts don't even matter because they've already made up their mind.
Oh, we've got a whole presentation called The Death of Reason about all of this.
Here's an interesting little tidbit, right?
So the Democrats, you see, they're so concerned about foreign influences over election that, of course, Hillary Clinton's happy to take tens of millions of dollars from the Saudis and to hand over a quarter of America's uranium production to the Russians because they're so concerned about Russia and foreign influences and so on.
Russia's largest bank has confirmed today that it hired the consultancy of Tony Podesta, the elder brother of John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, for lobbying its interests in the United States and proactively seeking the removal of various Obama-era sanctions.
Huh.
So Russian influence over the election.
Well, the brother of the guy who chaired Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was hired by Russia's largest bank to lobby for its interests in the United States.
Do you think that the brother of the chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign might have been able to get through to his brother and ask him for a favor or two, theoretically?
But you see, they're very, very concerned about Russian influences on the American election and electoral process.
It's just shocking, don't you know?
Right?
So, yeah, absolutely.
And this is, you know, I'm just finishing up the, well, I finished the first draft, just working on the second draft of my book, The Art of the Argument.
And I'm, you know, I've got a big section ripping up sophist, but I also wanted to sort of say where sophistry comes from.
Sophistry comes from the absence of reason.
If you don't know how to reason, what do you have to do?
You pick a team based on emotions, and then you just blind yourself to anything that goes against that team's narrative.
That's where this stuff comes from.
You have a team, and the team that you're on holds your allegiance, and you tell yourself that your team is the best.
Like if you're in a football team or a Soccer team or whatever, then you say, my team is the best, I want my team to win.
You kind of understand.
Like I remember when I was a kid, my friends and I used to go Saturday mornings for 10 pence, 10 pennies, I guess about a quarter.
We used to go and watch a bunch of cartoons and usually one short movie in a theater near where I grew up, near Crystal Palace in London.
And The first sports movie I watched was about, you know, the plucky underdogs in, I think it was a soccer game and so on.
I don't know.
This is a very vague thing, but this was around 1975, 1976.
No, actually.
Yeah, 1974, 1975, or something like that, if anyone knows.
It's a short film.
I think it was black and white.
Anyway, let me know.
Also, by the way, since I'm talking to the Borg brain, when I was a kid, I also watched a movie, I think it was again shot in black and white, about a fight, a sword fight in Scotland in the Middle Ages.
And it was one of these things that was deeply shocking to me, because I'd seen a whole bunch of war films, but you know where.
It's like the Cowboys and Indians films when you grow up, and the You know, the Indians, they get shot and they just kind of jump off.
There's no blood spraying.
There's none of this Saving Private Ryan gallons of red thing.
But they just kind of jump off and it looks all very clean and clinical.
I remember watching this movie.
It was playing in a library.
And it was a sword fight.
And, like, guys got stabbed.
And they were, like, writhing around on the ground.
And it took them, like, hours to die.
And they just kept going.
And this guy's still alive.
And he's, you know, he's coughing up all this blood.
And I just remember thinking, oh, my God, war is, like, vicious and brutal and ugly and gross.
And if anybody knows of that film, please, please let me know.
I would like to watch it again and see what it's like 40-plus years later.
Anyway, for me.
But I remember watching this sports film.
The plucky underdogs who trained and became very good.
And of course you root for them because they're the kids you know.
They're the kids you see interacting.
They're the kids you find out about their home lives.
And the other kids are just these blanks.
You know, just these faces.
And usually, you know, mean, ugly faces.
You know, the mean guy in Karate Kid.
And so naturally you end up rooting for the underdogs who are going to win or whatever, the Mighty Ducks or whatever they were.
I mean, that's a skating film, but you know what I mean?
But it became very clear to me, like I was watching it and just on the way out, I remember thinking, yeah, okay.
But if the camera had been on the other side of the field, then I'd just be cheering for those kids because those kids have their story and those kids have their history and those kids want to win.
And so, you know, if you follow one side of the sports team, then you want them to win And if you follow the other side of the sports team, you want them to win.
But there's no morals particularly involved in it.
Not only because usually the sides are morally equal.
It's very rare that you have the evil team versus the virtuous team.
But also it's sports.
It's not a moral engagement.
The wins or the losses have nothing to do with ethics.
So this is the way people operate.
In the absence of philosophy, in the absence of morals, in the absence of ethics, in the absence of reason and evidence, they pick a team, usually for emotional reasons, and then they support everything that supports their team and reject everything that denies their team.
And the reason we're so good at this is that this is basically the essence of tribalism.
And it disappoints me, to be honest, because I like to think that People inherently change their views when presented with new information, but that's not how it plays out.
Before Brexit, I was a bit of a leftist, to be honest.
And it was actually one of your videos that made me vote the way I did and changed my viewpoint.
I got a letter through the post, I think it was off Richard Branson, and he was like, you know, vote Remain, it's going to be great, lads.
And I was like, yeah, I might vote Remain, you know.
And the missus was like, well, you know, look into it.
So I did.
And I voted leave.
Richard Branson?
Yeah, he was marketing, you know, for Virgin as a businessman.
He was saying like, you know, everyone has to vote remain.
Why was he?
I don't know much about Richard Branson other than the fact that he looks like a very gay pirate.
But why?
Why would he care?
I mean, what was he?
Is he some globalist guy?
And don't even get me started on John Cleese.
Oh, I'll do a rant about that later.
But sorry, go ahead.
Steph, you might not know this, but Richard Branson was hanging out with Barack Obama right after he left the presidency.
So, yes, he's Mr.
Globalist, man.
Oh, is he?
Okay, okay.
Yes.
The whole Brexit campaign was just a circus of politicians and celebrities getting together, like the U.S. election.
So you had all these celebrities, all these businessmen coming out of the woodwork, like Richard Branson and the boss of Sainsbury's or whatever was involved.
The guy who owns JCB was for leave, so he was campaigning for leave.
And bosses were sending emails to their employees saying, you know, make sure you vote Remain.
Otherwise, you might as well not bother working here.
Things like that.
But essentially, I was going to vote Remain because I was just a blind zombie to everything.
I always voted bloody labor.
Well, it's also, you know, cohesion is good.
Keeping the family together is good.
It's like a divorce.
That's bad.
I mean, it's just that emotional stuff that you get, right?
Yeah, we'll be friends.
I can go and get some wine.
The people in Brussels are like my family because they care so much about me.
But I watched Brexit the movie and I watched a couple of your videos, Steph, and it was like, wow.
I didn't realize it was like this shit.
I could do nothing else for the rest of my life and still die a proud man because of a couple of things I've done in this area.
But I really appreciate hearing it from the ground.
Thanks.
Yeah, so that started my journey, basically.
And I'm at this stage now, because I've always been a fan of science.
Like, empirical evidence is like, you know, that's what you need.
Empirical evidence, you know, absolute truth.
But you know, most scientists don't do it that way, right?
Yeah, I mean, something has to be falsifiable for it to be scientific.
No, no, what I mean is that, sorry, most scientists don't follow the scientific method.
In other words, there's an old saying in science that science advances one funeral at a time.
Which means that there's all these people who believe in a particular paradigm, some new paradigm comes along, and nobody changes their mind, they eventually just die, and then the younger generation takes over, and that's how science advances.
I can see that, to be honest.
I can see that.
And this is government science, you understand?
I mean, it's not the way things work in the free market.
It's just when government runs science, you get all of this crap.
Yeah, because they have like financial investment.
Yeah, well, you know, the free market makes you change.
You know, I mean, if I was an academic, I could still be waffling on about a stateless society, which, you know, is still my ideal and all of that.
But, you know, I kind of had to get out of the av-retirer because there were things that needed to be done in the world much more immediately in order for that other conversation to continue.
But, yeah, I mean, I don't have the luxury of perfect consistency to ideology because I'm market facing and things need to be done.
And if Hillary Clinton had gotten in, things wouldn't have been able to be done very long or very easily.
And she would have harmed my friends.
Yeah, I think we dodged a bullet there for sure.
And I know you had Cassie J on for the Red Pill movie.
Didn't you?
You had her on.
I watched that yesterday.
I came out.
That is another example, I think, of where, you know, there's these actual facts, empirical evidence that say these things, you know, proof that the patriarchy isn't what feminists think it is.
And yet it's just ignored, you know?
I struggle with it sometimes and I wonder, like, what sort of dickhead believes something And then is told the opposite, shown data, and then goes, oh, yeah, but, you know, it's, you know, I feel like it is what it is.
I feel it in my bones.
But why do you think, I mean, I hate to use this sort of evolutionary explanation, but you did talk about science.
Why would we have evolved that?
The capacity to have fidelity to reality over social acceptance.
We're a social animal.
We require social cooperation to survive, to exist, to have children, to all of that.
So why would we have evolved to champion empirical reality and objective reason over social acceptance when social acceptance is necessary for us to live?
Yeah, I think you might have touched on that in one of your videos.
That rings a bell.
Yeah.
It kind of leads in with my second question as well, which is a bit of a smaller one.
You don't want to get kicked out of the village, basically.
It's almost like a survival instinct to follow the group.
If you're an outspoken thinker, I think like you said in the past, if you were seen as being treasonous because you had political ideas that didn't gel with the king or whatever, You know, it was bad.
And we saw it, you know, early science back in like early Renaissance times, you know, Galileo and stuff like that.
They were really mistreated because it went against the church.
It went against what people thought, what people reasoned.
And I just thought we'd evolved past that, to be honest, you know.
You know, with scientific evidence and, you know, data and statistics.
But here's the thing, Richard.
You're complaining that people don't change their beliefs according to reason and evidence.
But the reason and evidence is that people don't change their beliefs according to reason and evidence, which you're rejecting.
Yeah.
I mean, a physician heal thyself, if you know the saying.
Actually, yeah.
That's right, yeah.
I'm just...
I've just proved myself a prick.
No, no, not at all.
You've just proven that it's difficult.
You want to believe that people change their minds based on reason and evidence.
And listen, Richard, I'm totally there.
I mean, I spent even the first year of, I don't even know how many years of my public intellectual life I spent on that basic idea, saying, well, no, no, no, I have the facts, I have the reason, I have the evidence.
So I understand that people might kick and scream a little bit, but they'll come around, and it's like, nope.
I had to, like, dig deeper and try and find out the reasons why.
So I completely understand where you're coming from.
And I have been there, and I occasionally drift back there myself still.
But I don't think anyone ever went wrong underestimating the irrationality of the species at times.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just a weird thing, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
And what's weird, of course, is that there's this double-think that happens.
People don't like to think that they're prejudiced, so they do like to think that their beliefs are reflecting reason and evidence, right?
So they claim, with the exception of religious people and the exception of other kinds of people who have the word faith, and, you know, not to diss that in the moment, but they don't say it's objective scientific reason and evidence because of X, Y, and Z. They'll say there's indications and so on, but they won't generally claim that the existence of God is predicated on objective reason, science, and evidence.
They'll say it's a matter of faith, right?
It's a revelation and so on.
But most people, particularly on the left, they don't usually have the word faith.
They portray themselves as reason and evidence-based, right?
What was communism?
Scientific materialism is considered to be science.
And if you look at the social sciences, if you look at the way that the left portrays things, they portray their beliefs as being derived from reason and evidence, right?
Right.
And so, like as I was talking earlier, they say, well, women are half the population, therefore women should be half the high achievers in the top fields, right?
But then when you look at the bell curve and you realize that there are far more men than women at the highest levels of intelligence, You'd think that they would then say, oh, okay, well, that's actually facts that would have to help me adjust my thinking, but they don't.
Even though the left doesn't have faith in the metaphysical sense with regards to a deity, they have faith with another deity called radical egalitarianism, which is also appeal to the least.
And what that means is that anything which goes against their Faith in radical egalitarianism.
They wish away.
They just wish it away.
They magic it away.
Because it interferes with their faith.
Now, their faith is predicated on resource transfers, right?
And that is the big challenge.
When you have a superstition based on resource transfers, it's very, very tough to battle.
Because, you know, the old saying goes, it's very tough to make a man understand something when his entire income depends upon him not understanding that thing.
And so women get a lot of resources from the state, and the way they get those resources from the state is they say, well, women and men are exactly the same, with all the same economic opportunities, all the same investment into work, and all the same intelligence.
Therefore, any numerical discrepancies between men and women must be due to sexism, which is wrong, and therefore you need to fix it by taking resources from unjust sexist men and giving it to us, right?
Right.
So the radical egalitarianism is a lever by which resources are taken away from men and given to women, because that's just so independent and modern and feminist to use the power of the state to take resources from men and give it to women.
Anyway, so you have this radical egalitarianism, which is both an ideology and a methodology for transferring hundreds of billions of dollars from men to women, trillions of dollars worldwide.
And so if you're going to sort of oppose this radical egalitarianism and say, well, you know, there are gender differences in brain size, there's gender differences in neural connections, there's gender differences in availability of individuals to the workforce because of women and kids and breastfeeding and pregnancy and so on, and there's differences in testosterone or aggression and so on, And so this explains everything, almost everything to do with outcomes.
And if people accept that, then they have to stop running to the government to get a whole bunch of free stuff.
And asking people to support The revocation of a superstition that is enormously profitable to them is virtually impossible.
The financial incentive is just follow the money.
Forget the ideology.
Just follow the money.
The ideology is like the person who bumps into you so the pickpockets can steal your watch.
If you chase after the person who bumped into you, you're not going to find the watch.
And if you chase after the ideology without looking at Que bono?
Who benefits?
Follow the money.
Follow the money trail.
And you'll find out what the real motivation for the ideology is.
Well, like in the Red Pill movie, it says that men actually have a higher risk of dying of cancer than women have.
And that risk increases if you remove all gender-specific cancers.
It goes up to like 58% or something.
And And yet breast cancer is the one that's massively funded.
Sure.
Not, you know, prostate cancer.
And it's one of them things where they're presented with information.
Like the facts are, you know, more men are successful.
You know, there's more men in the workforce in higher paying jobs or whatever.
But the assumption as to the cause is they might as well have pulled out of a fucking book.
It's completely baseless.
It's almost as if they've gone, what's the biggest thing that we can pretend exists and we don't have to prove?
Do you know what I mean?
There's no evidence for it because, like in the Red Pill movie, society is built on the forced gender roles of both genders.
I'm supposed to go out and protect my family, raise my family, provide day or night.
Rain or shine.
That's my job.
So with that as an evolutionary trait, you would assume that there would be more men in those jobs because it's our role, if you know what I mean.
So they ascribe the gender roles as because of the patriarchy rather than the other way around.
The reason why there is a male overabundance within the workforce is because of the gender roles.
It's not nefarious.
It's just the way it is.
This is how we've evolved.
But it has to be an evil thing.
It has to be a ghost in the ether somewhere.
That's because it's profitable to portray it as an evil thing.
Because then you can run to the government and say, well, you've got to do all these things to give us all these preferential bonuses, right?
Right, so graduates of the Harvard Business School, right?
Harvard Business School is the top business school in America.
At least it was when I was younger.
Maybe it still is or whatever, right?
So women who've graduated from the Harvard Business School, only 30% of them, sorry, 30% of them aren't even in the paid workforce.
And only 56% of them work full-time.
Well, that was a waste of money.
Well, yeah.
Of course.
What a fucking waste.
Of course.
Now, if you're a manager, right, and you've got a young man and a young woman coming in to your office, and they both have wedding rings on their fingers, right?
So they're both married.
You've got a young man and a young woman coming to your office, and they both want to have engineering jobs that are going to require a lot of travel, a lot of overtime.
Who are you more likely to hire?
Probably the bloke.
Why?
Probably be more willing to do, you know, the overtime and all that.
Right, and the woman may get back.
My guess, you know.
And the woman may get back.
Yeah, I mean, if we're just, you know, taking out all the variables, you know, that makes the most sense.
Right, now...
Even if the woman says she doesn't want to have kids, she might change her mind.
And this is nothing against women.
I mean, I'm very glad that my mom was pregnant.
It's provided me a whole lot of oxygen consumption that otherwise would not have occurred in this particular room, which never would have been built.
But now this is unfair, of course, to the women who are dedicated and don't want to have kids or don't want to interrupt their work.
And, you know, I understand it.
It's a drag.
It's a drag.
And so women don't want to face the negative perceptions of potential employers if they are married and want to have kids or whatever it is.
I understand that.
I understand that.
And so what can you do in that situation?
Well, of course, one thing you're going to do is you're going to make it illegal to ask a woman if she wants to have kids.
You're going to make it illegal to ask about her future plans with regards to any of that stuff.
And you're going to make it illegal to discriminate against women because they might want to have kids.
And so what happens is then women get jobs that maybe they otherwise wouldn't have gotten, and then a lot of those women will end up having kids and leaving the workforce and so on.
And I know women who are like this, women who were trained in technical fields, who became full-time moms and so on.
In which case, society's, you know, got an educated mom, which is great, but, you know, we're short one engineer or a mathematician or a computer programmer or whatever it is, right?
It's just...
It's just the reality that women like to have babies, men like to become fathers, and you can't be a good mother and work full-time.
It's just the way it is.
But if you follow the money, then you say, okay, well, if you talk about radical egalitarianism and then you say, well, fewer women are being hired into high-demand fields, then I mean, I know this.
I know this.
I manage this.
Young men will work all night.
And some young women will as well.
But the moms and the dads, they had to leave.
I don't blame them.
I'm glad.
I didn't want them to stay.
You've got children.
Come spend time with your children.
But it's a reality that they're just less productive.
And at least, you know, in the sort of high-tech field in other areas, maybe more so.
And I didn't discriminate in any way, shape, or form when it came to this stuff.
But I can understand the sort of economic arguments from an abstract sense.
But this is just the reality of you can't be in two places at the same time.
Yeah, I agree.
Because, you know, there's this argument that comes up.
It's like, well, you know, if there are fewer women at the highest level of the executive...
It's got to be glass ceiling.
It's got to be...
It's sexism, which is sexist.
I mean, not only is it sexist against men by claiming that they're sexist against women in general, but also it's sexist against women.
Look, the women who make it to the top of the business profession, you know, like the Carly Fiorinis and so on, more power to them.
I'm not sure she was that great a manager because HP lost a huge amount of money.
But, you know, she worked hard.
She started as a secretary.
She ended up as head of the company.
Fantastic.
But why do they think that all women are like them?
Do all women have to be that ambitious?
It's the old thing.
You mistake the world for yourself.
Lots of women.
And I've known these women and I've chatted with these women.
They're like, yeah, I go to work, but I kind of want to be home.
Like, I go to work and I enjoy working part-time so I can be home.
I want to be home with my kids when they get home from school.
I want to be available for them.
I want to know what they're doing.
I want to know who their friends are.
I want to be involved in their lives, especially when they're teenagers so they don't go drifting off the path or something like that.
Now, these women are voluntarily choosing to spend more time with their children rather than more time climbing the corporate ladder.
Are you going to tell them that that's a bad decision, that that's a wrong decision?
Well, if you're a workaholic who doesn't want to spend time with their kids in particular, or at least prefers work to her kids, or you're just a workaholic and you've got to go work because you're compelled to do so for whatever dysfunction you have, well, that's your choice.
Now, maybe you don't have kids or maybe you just don't spend that much time with your kids.
But who's to say whose choice is better?
I mean, I think spending more time with your kids is generally a better idea.
But the idea that, well, I sacrificed everything to climb the corporate ladder and other women didn't and therefore those women need to have, you know, government remedies for their choices.
It's like, no.
They don't need government remedies for their choices because their choices are just different.
Exactly.
I thought at the end of the day it was all about Women being able to choose, you know?
Right.
I thought that was the original point.
Right.
Well, women are able to choose, but somehow they must all end up the same.
Yeah, you've got to be the same.
Makes a lot of sense, Steph.
All right.
All right.
Well, I'm going to close off here.
Thanks everyone so much for your calls tonight.
Most enjoyable.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to chat about deep and important issues with the planet as a whole.
Please, please, please go by freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out this most important conversation in this most critical juncture in the world.
freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Help give me the resources to finish up this book.
It's very, very important.
And I promise you, it's going to be a great book.
And please use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
And last but not least, you can follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
Have a great night, everyone.
I'm sorry, I just rebooted for a moment there.
Have a great night, everyone.
Thanks for the calls.
▲
Export Selection