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April 26, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	Societies rise, civilizations rise, and civilizations fall.
	And we are currently in the screaming memes rollercoaster plunge of Western civilization.
	It is my staunch, if not sometimes desperate hope, that with this amazing communications technology, we can arrest and reverse this cycle, and for the first time in our godforsaken history as a species, we can prevent the decline of something great into something savage.
	To do this, we need more than idealism, we need more than historical momentum, we need more than willpower, we need facts, we need evidence, we need solid scientific realities and mathematical realities in order to plant our resistance to the decline of our culture and civilization on firm ground and give us the lances to resist the oncoming apocalyptic horsemen of history.
	So I'm going to give that to you today.
	I've put a lot of components out in the 10 years I've been doing this show.
	This is a very, very important one.
	And with it, we can really understand what is happening and actually how to fight and reverse it.
	So, when you have a free system, and here I'm primarily going to be talking about the free market.
	When you have a free system, you get inequalities of outcome.
	Now, when you have a totalitarian system, you have the very powerful, the very rich, the elites that have their Dachas on the Black Sea, that have their villas and their international jet-setting yacht lifestyles and so on, a tiny sliver of people at the top of, say, a theocratic dictatorship or a communist dictatorship or a fascist dictatorship.
	You have people at the very top, and then you have a whole bunch of proletariat strugglers at the bottom, And that is the result of massive government power and the capacity to terrorize anyone who disagrees with you.
	I'm not particularly talking about that, although that is the outcome.
	That occurs when we fail to understand what produces inequality in a free market system.
	And so we're going to talk about that now.
	It's really, really important to understand.
	I respectfully request your attention.
	Stop playing Rome Total War, as so many of you did during my presentation on Rome.
	So when you have a free system, You get resources accumulating at the top, right?
	The elite.
	A small number of people own or control a significant amount of wealth.
	The majority of wealth, right?
	So 20% of people own 80% of the wealth.
	And if you go further up and further up, you know, 1% of people own a significant portion of the wealth.
	Of that 1%, it's the 1% of the 1% that hold a disproportionate amount of wealth.
	And this is something that is deeply troubling to a lot of people.
	And I'm going to tell you, you don't have to be troubled by it.
	At least not troubled by it to the point where you're willing to shred the entire reasonable, moral, and peaceful history of your civilization.
	So there's something called...
	Now, it's been pronounced a bunch of different ways.
	Pareto, Parto, and Pareto.
	I'm just going to go with Pareto.
	It's called the Pareto Distribution.
	And it is a square root law.
	And that is a big challenge when it comes to aiming for equality of outcome, equality of income, equality of assets in a free market.
	Now, the Pareto distribution basically goes something like this, in the realm of sort of productivity.
	And here we're talking about arenas of human productivity, not where like everyone is just pulling a lever and it's pretty, pretty static.
	So where there are arenas of human productivity, you know, you can think artistic production, you could think musical talent, you could think of entrepreneurial talent, or coding talent, or in sports it's like number of touchdowns scored, it is in hockey the number of pucks that end up in the net.
	Wherever there is real scope for human creativity and human talent, you end up with this Pareto distribution.
	Now, it's a square root law, and what it says is this.
	Whatever your number of producers, of people producing something in a creative arena...
	The square root of the total workers produces half of the wealth.
	So what does that mean?
	Okay, so if you have nine employees, right?
	What's the square root of nine?
	Three.
	So if you have nine employees, three of those employees are going to produce half of the goods or services or wealth or whatever it is.
	And if you're hunting, right, if you're out hunting, like you're a sort of Stone Age tribe, and you have a hundred hunters, ten of them are going to bring home half of the prey, the meat, right?
	So if you have a hundred employees, ten of those employees are going to produce half of the wealth.
	And as the numbers get higher, it gets even more ludicrous, right?
	So, if you have 10,000 employees in your company, if you have 10,000 employees in your country, 100 out of those 10,000 produce half the goods and services.
	They do basically half the work.
	Now this is something that's really, really important to sort of sit and let digest.
	There appears to be no field in which this does not apply.
	And there appears to be no escape from this general rule.
	So remember, if you have a company with 10,000 people, only 100 people will produce half the work.
	And that is a huge challenge.
	Now, of course, when we lived in small tribes, inequality to some degree was mitigated by two factors, or resentment towards inequality.
	Number one is that the productive hunters would often share their food with others, and that prevented some of the resentment from brewing.
	And number two, everyone knew!
	that joe was the best hunter and and joe would come home with with fish or venison or bear meat every single time whereas everyone else would just kind of struggle so joe was like the hero and people didn't hate joe because joe added to the general caloric opportunities for the tribe as a whole so sharing and a knowledge of what's going on matters and remember of course we are evolutionarily Designed to work in tribes of, you know, maybe a couple hundred people, max.
	So this is really, really important.
	When you start off with a small organization, you know, you think Jobs and Wozniak in a garage.
	Well, it's two people.
	They're both, you know, geniuses and so on.
	As they grow their organization, here's the challenge.
	So because it's a square root, the square root of the workers produces half the wealth, half the productivity, half the output.
	So as you grow a company, and Jordan Peterson has turned me on to this idea, so you can check out his lectures on that as well.
	But as you grow a company, as you grow an organization, what happens is...
	The less competent, maybe you could call them, the incompetent relative to your major producers, incompetence grows exponentially.
	You know, it's one of those whiplash lines that goes up to the stratosphere, right?
	So incompetence grows exponentially, but competence grows only in a linear fashion.
	Competence grows only in a linear fashion.
	And this is one of the things that happens in companies when companies come across hard times or there's problems or a lot of times, you know, the social justice warriors will take over the HR department and create unfavorable work environments for the most creative and brilliant in the company.
	And, you know, when the left or some other problem begins to infest a company, well, if you have, again, 10,000 employees, 100 produce half the wealth.
	And what happens is the 100 say...
	This is really not that much fun to work in.
	And I'm in such demand.
	Whoever can get a hold of these people rules the universe when it comes to economic productivity.
	Everyone else is just kind of supporting them.
	They just clear the way for them to do their work.
	And when too many incompetent people get in the way...
	Of doing, of competent people exercising their competence, then society begins to jam up.
	The company begins to jam up.
	It gets slow motion sickness.
	It gets red tapey, claustrophobic, jammed up.
	And regulations have a lot to do with this as well.
	And so when a company comes across hard times, or internally it starts to pursue things other than productivity and profit, you know, some sort of social agenda, some sort of fake news suppression of the right stuff that's going on in a lot of social media companies, the smart and productive people will often leave.
	Now think of this, you've got a company with 10,000 people, and let's say half of the productive people leave.
	So if only 50 people leave out of 10,000, but you've just lost 25% of your productivity.
	50 people leave out of 10,000.
	You've just lost 25% of your productivity, give or take.
	If 100 people leave, the top 100 people leave in terms of productivity, you just lost half your output.
	Half your output.
	Even though you still have 9,900 out of 10,000 employees, you just lost half your output.
	And then what happens is the next...
	100 most competent people will tend to leave.
	And then, you know, it's like that old thing.
	And somebody said, I think it was to Hemingway.
	He said, how did you go bankrupt?
	He said, well, very slowly and then very quickly.
	And this happens to people as well, right?
	This happens.
	This is one of the problems with immigration, right?
	Immigration from, let's say, third world countries.
	So, the first wave of immigrants are the most competent people.
	And why?
	Because they want to come to an environment, a free market environment, where their talents have full scope for expression.
	You know, you're not going to get that so much in Chad or South Africa or wherever.
	But if you come to a relatively free market environment in the West, then you get these wonderful people, very productive and cultured and intelligent and so on.
	And that gives entirely the wrong impression, of course, about all the other immigrants that could come from that environment.
	And this is how, tragically, immigration, particularly from the third world, also works, or doesn't work.
	Because, remember we talked about this Pareto distribution with regards to the hundred people in a 10,000 person company who produce half the output, half the value.
	Well, if the company runs across hard times, marketplace demand diminishes, or ideology erupts internally that gets in the way of the productivity of the most productive people, they leave.
	And it starts this domino, this snowball effect of when the most productive people leave, the next year of productive people leave, and then everyone has to get out because the company implodes upon itself.
	Now, for the past 60, 70 years, The West has been taking, inviting, bringing in the smartest people from the third world.
	Now think of the third world as a company, a third world country.
	As the smartest people leave, the incentive is for the next round of smart people to leave and the next round of smart people to leave.
	And because this has been going on for decades, what's happening now is everyone is getting out because there's nobody left in the third world To raise the standards and bring those countries forward in time.
	And this is why you have a migrant crisis.
	Look, there's lots of other things as well.
	I understand foreign policy and so on, but this Pareto principle is also really, really important to understand it.
	There will be no end to the migrant crisis as it stands.
	It will only escalate.
	Because the smartest people are leaving the third world, leaving those behind who cannot look forward to any improvement in their standard of living because all the smart people have moved to the West.
	And so they're going to follow the smart people looking for an improvement in their standard of living.
	Who can blame them?
	Wouldn't you?
	But this is the result of both foreign policy and immigration policy that is so threatening to Western civilization.
	And once you understand the Pareto distribution, you understand that something needs to be done now.
	So this is important as well.
	As countries grow in size, then we lose track of who's good at stuff.
	We begin to resent those who have more.
	And this Pareto distribution begins to be even more concentrated.
	Again, if there's nine people, a third of them are producing half the wealth.
	Not too disparate.
	When you start to talk about millions and millions and millions of people, you're talking about a few thousand who are producing half the wealth.
	So is it that surprising?
	And of those few thousand who are producing half the wealth, A tiny minority within those few thousand are producing a significant proportion of the wealth.
	It gets more concentrated as you get down to particular individuals.
	And we can sort of see this in history.
	When you look at history objectively, like outside the lens of, you know, feminist gender-baiting or Marxist class-baiting or whatever, right?
	Minority-baiting.
	When you look at history objectively, you see That there's a very few number of people who are responsible for the significant progress of the species, right?
	I mean, in terms of like the real luminaries that we know of in history.
	I mean, think of Einstein and Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell and, you know, Simon Newton and so on.
	These particular individuals are massive pushes forward in the human experience, in human knowledge, in human expertise.
	And...
	The degree to which these people aren't given scope is the degree to which society will absolutely stagnate.
	Now, it's an interesting question to ask yourself, my friends, which is, well, you took probably a dozen years of mathematics, yet you weren't taught this basic principle, like the 80-20 rule, this Pareto principle, this square root principle.
	Why were you not taught this basic reality of human life and of human existence?
	Well, because schools, government schools, are relentlessly leftist.
	And leftism thrives on you not knowing these basic facts, these mathematical and scientific facts of human existence.
	So, to take an example from music, right?
	I'm just thinking of Gabor Maté's addictions to buying classical music.
	So when you think of the genre of classical music...
	Well, the number of composers who produced half of the genre of classical music is only five.
	Five composers produced half of what we know of as classical music, right?
	Your three B's, your T's and your M, right?
	Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Mozart.
	So only five composers produced half of what we think of as classical music.
	Now, those composers, particularly Mozart, were extraordinarily prolific, and that's very, very important to understand.
	We remember Einstein for general theory and special theory of relativity, a couple other things, but of course he spent decades on this unified field theory trying to find something that explained everything and didn't really produce much of anything.
	Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody, not so much Delilah.
	Anyway...
	So these extraordinarily prolific composers, five of whom make up the entire canon of classical music, well, only 5% of the music that they wrote is responsible for 50% of what is played.
	Right?
	So only 5% of the five people is responsible for 50% of what is played, which is 50% of the entire genre of classical music.
	Sports follows the same pattern, music follows the same pattern, like modern pop music and so on.
	And just think of my own work, right?
	I mean, the number of hit videos that I have is a very small proportion of the total number of videos that I produce, but I understand that.
	I've known this for years.
	You just keep grinding, you just keep producing, you just keep grinding, you just keep producing, and you will, if you have talent and hard work and ability and focus and concentration, all the other things that have to swirl together to produce excellence, well, you will.
	Persistence.
	Persistence is all.
	I went with my wife a couple of months ago to see a Turner exhibit.
	It's a beautiful, a wonderful artist.
	A Turner exhibit at the Art Gallery.
	And in reading up on Turner, I mean, he was a complete workaholic.
	I mean, all of the other painters would sort of get together and have croissants and coffee and sit and gossip, and he'd just be grinding away, producing work after work after work.
	The guy wanted to paint a storm, so what he did was he had sailors lash him to a mast while a storm was raging so that he could experience the storm.
	I mean, he just worked like crazy.
	And so...
	If you have talent, focus, willpower, and ability, you just do a lot.
	You just do 10,000 hours, which, you know, is Malcolm Gladwell's idea, which has had some pushback.
	I mean, we know this in the arts, right?
	Like 95% of the money goes to like 5% of the people.
	I mean, I've talked a lot about the bell curve, right?
	And the bell curve is like that one that's like bulging in the middle.
	It bulges high in the middle and then sort of trails down on either side.
	Like a bell, obviously.
	But...
	Arguably, this Pareto distribution is even more important than the bell curve, right?
	So, human height is a bell curve, right?
	Few short people, few tall people, most of us in the middle.
	So, height is a bell curve, but it's hard to find a lot of other stuff that is.
	I mean, IQ, of course, has been measured and described as a bell curve, but in a way, that's just because that's how it is defined and measured.
	Almost everything else is this kind of skewed, lopsided situation, this Pareto distribution.
	So, for example, and this is not the most recent numbers, but I'm sure that they're not that much different.
	60% of Twitter messages come from just 2% of users.
	You understand that?
	60% of Twitter messages come from just 2% of the users.
	This is the kind of distribution that I'm talking about.
	At the London Olympics...
	Only 20% of the world's nations won 75% of the gold medals.
	An 80-20 rule.
	In business, in general, there's a rule of thumb that 80% of your revenue and profits are going to come from 20% of your products and services.
	80% of your revenue and profits come from 20% of products and services.
	This show itself!
	Just past 600,000 subscribers.
	Thank you so much.
	Don't forget to donate at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	So it'd be great if we could get to an 80-20 rule and 20% of you would donate for the enormous value that you're consuming from this site that takes a huge amount of time, effort, technology, willpower, experience, and education to produce.
	It'd be really nice if you all went to freedomainradio.com slash donate and helped us out.
	But yeah, 80% of your revenue is going to come from 20% of your products and services.
	80-20, look at health care.
	So, the sickest 20% of people generate 79% of healthcare costs.
	You see that?
	20, 80, 80, 20, 20, 80.
	The sickest 20% of people generate 79% of healthcare costs.
	Now, within this 20% of the sickest people, the sickest 20% generates 60% of the total cost of healthcare.
	And this is why controlling costs in healthcare is a wide variety of challenges.
	A lot of it has to do with improving lifestyle and all that kind of stuff.
	But a lot of that has to do with reducing the cost of supply and also putting the economic onus on people for their own healthcare choices and so on.
	So, when you...
	Get better at stuff.
	It's not linear.
	It's not linear.
	You are getting...
	But particularly in the realm of intelligence and IQ. And intelligence and IQ is indicative but not conclusive when it comes to people's life success.
	It has a lot to do and it's one of the single best predictors of life success.
	It's high or low IQ. But it's not the only thing.
	But when we think about just intelligence, right...
	So, the one in a thousand person, right?
	So, somebody who's in the 99.9th percentile in intelligence is more than 50 times as intelligent as a person in the 50th percentile.
	50 times as intelligent.
	And that really is an astonishing number when you think about it.
	50 times.
	And given that you can't do much to Budge IQ, I mean, I think that you can certainly harness your intelligence better by having philosophy, reason, evidence, and so on, which is why I have worked so hard in this show to make it accessible to the general audience.
	I very rarely have very technical discussions.
	I never or very rarely use logic trees.
	I very rarely...
	Socrates never used the word epistemology.
	That was reserved for Mike Cernovich on 60 Minutes.
	Way to go, brother.
	It's a beautiful thing for a philosopher to see that word used in the mainstream media.
	But 50 times, right?
	So one in a thousand people is 50 times more intelligent than a person in the 50th percentile.
	And 50 is the minimum, more and so on.
	And so when you start to talk about the, you know, one in a hundred million, like the 190 IQs, they're like...
	It's like a different species.
	It's not like a tall guy is like, I don't know, a really tall guy is like a foot, foot and a half or two feet above average if they're like crazy tall, right?
	Like, But you're not twice as tall as the average person if you're a tall guy.
	But if you're a smart guy and that's just one in a thousand, you're 50 times more intelligent.
	I mean, imagine in basketball.
	I couldn't think of a good example.
	Basketball is vivid but not perfect.
	So imagine in basketball if you have one team that's 50 times taller than the other team.
	And let's say the nets have scaled up.
	It's not even an even competition anymore.
	There's simply no possibility of competition between these two things, which is why in the sort of distribution of intelligence, So many resources end up at the top of the IQ scale.
	And again, it's not just IQ, and we'll get into more of that as we go forward.
	But this is sort of a basic reality.
	IQ, or intelligence G as a whole, and the more G-loaded a test is, in other words, the more native intelligence we're talking about, the more genetic it tends to be.
	So certainly by your sort of middle to late life, your intelligence is about 80% genetic.
	And...
	That's just the reality.
	People are born smart the same way that people are born tall.
	Now, trauma and lack of stimulus, maybe even lack of nutrition, Can retard someone's potential intelligence, just as if you don't get enough food, as a kid you're going to grow up shorter.
	But if you get extra food, you don't grow taller, you just get fatter, right?
	It's the same thing with sort of stimulus and so on.
	You know, you won't get smarter.
	You want an environment that's going to allow your intelligence to have its native play, but you won't get smarter with extra attention or anything like that.
	So that's just an important thing.
	If we understand this, then we understand...
	Enormously more about society than we did before.
	And not only do we understand society and how it plays out and how the economy and how the class system and how elites play out, not only do we understand that, but we actually start reversing ourselves from the tragic misdirection of things like exploitation analysis, whether it's through class, through race, through gender, or whatever.
	We actually start looking in the right direction when it comes to understanding society and understanding Recognizing the limits of what can be solved as far as society goes.
	I mean, malnutrition doesn't seem to have a huge effect on intelligence.
	There have been kids who've been gotten out of crazy malnourished places like North Korea.
	And East Asians have IQs sort of 103, 105 relative to the white European average of 100.
	And even kids who've been enormously malnourished as babies who grow up with the regular old IQ. So this is really, really important to understand, this Pareto distribution and so on.
	I mean, to take an example of Taylor Swift, right?
	He's a very popular pop songwriter and performer and singer.
	It's not just about IQ. It's not just about musical ability.
	So if you look at...
	All the things that had to come together to make Taylor Swift such a phenomenon.
	Well, she's naturally slender, has a great figure, has a beautiful face, has lovely golden hair, doesn't seem to be able to smile.
	She has that kind of Bill O'Reilly half-smirk, half-smile, but nonetheless seems to have an enormously positive spirit, despite associations with Lena Dunham.
	But...
	Think of all the things.
	So she has to have all of the physical attributes.
	She has to have the musical intelligence, the musical creativity.
	She has to have the drive, the desire.
	She has to have the great singing voice.
	She has to have the physical dexterity to be able to play music very well.
	I think she plays guitar.
	I'm sure she plays piano as well.
	And she has to have all of these characteristics have to kind of come together to produce somebody who makes that staggering amount of money.
	And that is really important.
	It's not just IQ, right?
	Look, there are tons of people who have singing voices as good, if not better, than Taylor Swift.
	Like, I remember talking to a producer in the music industry once.
	He said, Good singers are a dime a dozen, but if you can write a catchy tune, then I'm interested.
	Then I want to talk to you.
	And that's important to understand as well.
	So lots of people have Taylor Swift singing voice, but do they have all of the other things that have to come together, which are extraordinarily rare?
	And also the ability to handle fame and wealth without flaming out, without going nuts, without disintegrating.
	As your comet enters the general consciousness, the atmosphere of general society's perspective, you're going to get trolled, you're going to get haters, you're going to get manipulated.
	There are going to be tons of musicians like Billy Joel and Sting all got involved with problems with people ripping them off.
	I think Sting's accountant and someone in Billy Joel's circle took him for quite a lot of money, I think.
	So you have to be able to survive all of that.
	You also have to not, you know, not spiral into drug addiction or crazy vanity or...
	Anyway, so to create a sort of sustainable star model, it takes a hugely rare concentration of various traits.
	Because it's not just intellect, right?
	The Pareto distribution of intellect is only one, like IQ, because there are other behavioral traits that really matter when it comes to significant or high achievement, right?
	So, like the genius, the super-producing person, that is...
	A combination, not just, of course, of high intelligence, but of an aggregation of extreme abilities in general bell curves as well.
	So you have high intelligence, there's an actual technical personality structure, high creativity, you have to have high productivity, high conscientiousness, and so on.
	And so this is...
	It's very rare to be really good at stuff.
	It's extraordinarily rare to be really good at stuff.
	And it also takes humility as well.
	With great ability can also come the temptation of great vanity.
	I'm great because I have X accidental ability.
	I'm great because I happen to be born really good looking or whatever it is.
	You know, I mean, I think, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but I've read, of course, a bunch of times.
	Whenever I hear stuff and I don't check it, I don't know if it's apocryphal or not.
	But somebody asked Einstein, they said, what's it like to be the smartest man in the world?
	He says, I don't know, you're going to ask Nikolai Tesla for that, right?
	Which is, you know, a humility and all of that.
	So, I mean, if you look at At least in France or other places, mostly in France, like the most influential thinkers of the 19th century, or 19th, early 20th century, who influenced, let's just take France for example, who influenced French philosophy.
	We're talking Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger.
	And that's not a lot of people.
	That's not a lot of people.
	So, Knowing that, knowing that it takes an aggregation of extraordinarily rare attributes in one person, and choice, and free will.
	It's not like you're just a product of your genes.
	It's not like your output is like the shaking of leaves from the falling of a tree.
	It's all just physics and so on.
	I mean, there are choices involved, virtues involved, courage involved as well.
	So it's very rare for people to be very good at stuff, which is one of the reasons why When you have a free market, wealth tends to concentrate.
	Now, the difference, of course, is that wealth tends to concentrate in geniuses in the free market according to how they please the majority, right?
	I mean, Bill Gates, very rich.
	The late Steve Jobs, very rich.
	They got their wealth.
	I mean, yes, there's to some degree, you know, patents and to some degree there's IP laws and to some degree there's Collusion with the government.
	I understand all of that, but that's not it.
	I mean, that's all.
	And we'll get to sort of why that happens in a bit.
	But they got, like Steve Jobs got wealthy because he produced things that people wanted to consume.
	Right?
	That's important to understand.
	And when you have a free market, wealth aggregates at the top, but the rising tide lifts all boats.
	And that's just really, really important to understand.
	If you don't have a free market, or the free market gets compromised, you end up with a sort of crony-capitalism, semi-fascistic, semi-feudalistic model that we have now, then you get an additional concentration of wealth without the raising of incomes as a whole.
	Because people then become wealthy through political connections, through getting free central banking money before everyone else.
	Through lending money to the Federal Reserve at more than it costs you to keep it.
	And we can see this.
	As the governments have become bigger and more powerful, as regulations have increased, as taxes have increased, as debt has increased, the national debt is the government hoovering money out of the hands of entrepreneurs and buying votes from rich and poor people in the military-industrial complex and favorable legislation for big capitalists, big corporations, and then also dumping Helicopter loads of cash on poor people in return for votes.
	And that dissolves this sort of rising tide lifts all boats situation.
	And then you end up with widening inequality.
	We can see this in particular since the economic crisis of 2007-2008.
	The rich have gotten richer and the middle class has lost out and the poor have lost out.
	That's what happens.
	That's the more traditional feudalistic model where the king is way wealthier than the peasant and as the king's wealth increases, the peasant's life generally either stays the same or gets worse because the king is not serving the peasant in a free market environment.
	So, Steve Jobs got rich because he pleased people.
	You know, whether it was the Apple II, the Lisa, the iPad, the iPod, the iPhone, or his Pixar Studios or whatever.
	He got wealthy because he pleased people.
	He either pleased them like it was enjoyable for them to work with, or he pleased them because he was giving them the tools to increase their own productivity in the market which is sort of...
	and this has been the case since...
	depends how you measure it and what you measure but for the last couple of decades in general the rich have gotten richer but the middle class and below in particular have either stagnated or lost ground and in particular they've lost ground relative to national debt which is deferred losses generally to the poor and middle class So if you have a free market,
	then there is an aggregation of wealth in the hands of the most productive, which is why you generally get an increasing economic growth and people end up dozens of times wealthier over just a half century or a century or more.
	And this is also because when you allow...
	There's no big giant hand that makes or stops all of this stuff.
	But...
	When in a free market, more resources flow into the hands of the rich, well, the rich generally tend to do things that multiply money, right?
	I mean, yes, they'll put some of it into buying a yacht or giant houses or whatever, which is fine, but you can't spend all their money on that, and houses aren't that expensive if you're super rich.
	So what do they do?
	Well, they tend to invest, or they put their money in the bank, or they put their money in investment, right?
	Instruments of some kind, which, again, encourages economic growth and so on.
	So if you have a lot of money in the hands of the elites in terms of intelligence and ability and understanding, they will tend to do things with that money that increase the wealth in society, increase their own wealth and so on.
	However, if you dump huge amounts of money on the poor, what do they do?
	Why has the problem of poverty not been solved despite untold trillions of dollars being poured into the hands of the poor?
	Because it's like a yo-yo.
	I mean, this is what the frustration is for those of us who are looking at the welfare state and what it's done.
	It's like, you know, the yo-yo goes down, comes back up, right?
	So if you bungee...
	All of this money down to the hands of the poor, what happens?
	It just comes right back up to the rich again.
	Because of this Pareto distribution, you can't fight the math.
	It's like trying to fight gravity with willpower.
	You can't fight the math.
	If I jump off a high wall thinking I can fly and I flap my arms vociferously...
	Well, for a moment, I'm going up.
	And then for a moment, I'm doing that Flintstone dangled hanging thing.
	And then gravity takes over.
	Same thing with the welfare state.
	Same thing with drugs.
	Same thing with all these things, right?
	For a moment, it looks like it's working.
	And then reality, mathematics, and physics takes over.
	It's the same thing with the welfare state.
	You take money from the wealthy, give it to the poor.
	And for a moment, for a couple of years maybe, it looks like it's working.
	And then it doesn't.
	And then it gets worse and worse and worse, which is what we're seeing going on in the West at the moment.
	Now, if you give money to the poor, and again, I'm generalizing, but you understand, right?
	I mean, I grew up poor, so I hope people understand that.
	But nonetheless, if you give money to the poor, I mean, just go to poor neighborhoods.
	What do you see?
	Well, you see people who seem to be inordinately interested in hairstyles, right?
	I mean, how does my hair look?
	How does it look?
	And so you see a lot of barbershops.
	You see a lot of beauty salons and so on.
	You see a lot of nail salons and so on.
	And the poor, you see a lot of bars.
	You see a lot of taverns and so on.
	And people smoke and so on.
	So, when you give money to the poor, they tend not to use it in ways that increase social wealth.
	When you give money to the rich, they tend to use it in ways that increase social wealth.
	So, if you take money from the rich and give it to the poor, it's the old paradox, which, you know, the world would be an infinitely better place, a more humane place, and a far more peaceful place if we understood this.
	That if you give extra money to smart people, they tend to have fewer kids.
	But if you give...
	Extra money to not-so-smart people, they tend to have more kids.
	And this happens with the poor as well.
	Oh, look, I've got more money.
	I can get more money by having more kids.
	Well, then they're going to have more kids.
	And that does not exactly add to social wealth, at least in the short run.
	So that is the challenge that we kind of need to understand when examining all of this stuff.
	And it explains so much why it doesn't work to have a welfare state.
	It's also important to remember that while it is true that smart people tend to have smart children and less smart people tend to have less smart children, there is a lot of randomness.
	My particular intelligence comes from a long line of very, very intelligent people on both sides of my family.
	My ancestor was William Molyneux, a great philosopher and Best friend of John Locke on my mother's side.
	I have, you know, award-winning poets and writers of books and so on.
	So a lot of intelligence on both sides sort of concentrates in how I come out.
	However, there is, of course, a bell curve even as far as that goes and a parade of distribution even as far as that goes.
	So there's a fair amount of churn at the top.
	In other words, people who are rich regularly drop into the middle class or even below.
	People who start off poor, as I did, regularly will rise up in the class and so on.
	So there's a lot of churn going on.
	People going in.
	But the overall distribution, the 80-20, the square root, the 10,100, that stays about the same.
	You understand?
	That stays about the same.
	Those numbers don't change.
	Even though people are churning in and out of these distributions all the time, the actual distributions stay pretty stable as a whole.
	Well, I will say that they get worse with a bigger state.
	So if you have a true free market, where it's a meritocracy based on how much you can please your audience, or your customer's audience, like everyone's me, If you have a free market, this churn will happen.
	Everything will stay the same, but people generally get wealthier.
	When you have a big government, then what happens is those at the top use the power of the state to exclude competition, to try and reduce that churn, and they can actually do a fairly good job of it.
	So big corporations, you know, they're fine, pouring lots of lobbying money into various politicians in order to get favorable legislation.
	And big corporations are not hugely averse to additional regulations because they have the legal departments and the accounting departments to handle that, whereas smaller companies tend to say, ugh, forget it, you know.
	Or people don't even want to go into that field because it's too regulated, it's too complicated.
	So when you have a bigger government, you would expect a greater income disparity And we've been seeing that, particularly in America, but also in other places as well.
	And, of course, the whole point of the welfare state is to close that inequality gap.
	It's making it wider.
	So, why don't you know this?
	Why don't you know this?
	How much of society, how much of life does this explain?
	How much resentment does it release you from?
	How much guilt does it release you from?
	Well, I'm going to give you a hypothesis.
	I look forward to your comments below, but this is going to be a hypothesis.
	So there used to be a priest class, and the priestly class used to sell you, again, I'm talking mostly in the West, but the priestly class used to sell you paradise in the afterlife, right?
	Exit visa from hell, entrance visa into heaven.
	And then around the 19th century, middle of the 19th century, there was a significant pushback against religion.
	And there was a thinker, a priest at the time, who said mankind is in danger of being laughed out of God.
	And in Nietzsche's famous proclamation that God is dead and so on, there was a real pushback against religion.
	Now, the people who had adapted, I call them languicides, or people who had adapted to the priestly class of selling people a paradise in return for money, in return for control, in return for power, where did they go?
	Well, my argument, I've made this before, I'll just run over it very briefly here, well, they ran to the left.
	They ran to the left, which is one of the reasons why the left is so hostile towards religion, because it's a direct competitor.
	Because when a society becomes free, you get increasing inequality.
	Increasing inequality.
	It's been said many times, important to reflect on, that the poorest person in America has access to almost infinitely more good services and resources than the richest king did in the 17th or 18th or 19th century, even for that matter.
	And that is important to understand.
	So when you get a free society, economically free, private property, contracts, and so on, then you get this inequality.
	And because people don't understand this Pareto curve, and this is partly because of the history of the soul, the concept of the soul.
	Because of the concept of the soul, there's this egalitarianism that is innate.
	To religion, right?
	To Christianity in particular.
	And there's no such thing as a soul that is innately 50 times more virtuous than another soul.
	That would be completely unfair.
	All souls must have an equal opportunity of getting into heaven.
	Otherwise, it's unfair, right?
	However, when you look at the biological reality of, just say, human intelligence, outside the concentration of the other abilities that produce truly productive geniuses, Well, some people's brains are fifty or a hundred or maybe even a thousand times better and smarter than other people's brains.
	And this differences in ability is not just within a population but between populations.
	So different ethnicities appear to have different IQs on average.
	Males are slightly smarter than females and certainly exhibit a wider distribution along the bell curve.
	There are way more genius men than genius women and also way more...
	More, not way more.
	There are some more, less intelligent.
	But men as a whole, a couple of IQ points smarter than women.
	So...
	If you don't know that, then the different outcomes in society appears to be very, very unfair.
	And this is one of the reasons why the left has to hide this information about gender differences in IQ, about human biodiversity, about ethnic differences in IQ. They have to hide it.
	Because if they don't, inequality of outcome is to at least a large degree explainable without exploitation.
	Without exploitation.
	Somebody who has a great singing voice, let's say you don't have a great singing voice, somebody who has a great singing voice has not stolen your singing voice.
	They don't have a great singing voice because they took your singing voice.
	They're just born that way.
	Somebody who has great intelligence didn't Zombie-like or white-like or sturge-like suck the brain out of your skull and use it to pile up their own intelligence.
	And thus, they didn't steal IQ points from you.
	They're just born that way.
	And since wealth is a reflection of IQ, people who have more money didn't steal it from you.
	They actually probably got it by serving you, by giving you things that you want, that you can't do for yourself.
	A great engineer can do things I can't even dream of.
	He can do things in his head.
	He can manipulate things in his head.
	A great mathematician can do things I can't dream of.
	You know, I get a lot of comments like, Steph, almost no edits in your videos, just talking away.
	Well, part of my ability, part of my training, part of my experience.
	So, without knowing...
	The basic facts about the bell curve between genders, between ethnicities, or within each population, which was known in the 19th century.
	This is not knowledge that has never been known.
	It was known.
	The IQ test is more than 100 years old.
	It's been suppressed, because it goes against the new religion of egalitarianism.
	It's blasphemy to the new religion of egalitarianism to talk about biological bases for inequality.
	The word inequality The word inequality itself has a negative connotation, which is ridiculous.
	If people have different abilities, they're going to end up in different places.
	People who have great singing voices and a strong work ethic may very well end up singing opera at the Met.
	Other people won't.
	Is that an inequality that needs to be fixed by somehow...
	Crippling the voices of good singers because you can't transfer.
	You cannot transfer intelligence.
	You can transfer good abilities, which is kind of what this show, clear critical thinking, rational analysis, what this show is all about, but you can't transfer intelligence from one person to another any more than you can transfer singing voices or height from one person to another.
	It's just the way things are.
	So inequality You know, a tall person is unequal in height distribution to an average person.
	Is this a big problem?
	We need a giant government program to fix?
	Well, we can't.
	Can't fix it.
	Can't transfer it.
	You can transfer money, of course, right?
	You can't transfer the source of it, which is, to some degree, at least, intelligence.
	So, offering you an unattainable paradise...
	Is the function of these priestly classes, the new...
	Social justice warrior is a new thing, right?
	What's their game?
	What's the game on the left?
	Well, find any unequal outcome, suppress all biological differences which explain that outcome, and claim that all discrepancies, all inequalities, must be the result of evil exploitation which require giant bureaucracies and government programs to remediate.
	That's the game.
	And it's a very dishonest and very destructive game.
	It provokes guilt and resentment, dysfunction, the wasting of social resources, a praying, a division, a hatefulness of group to group, which is entirely unnecessary.
	Well, it's entirely unnecessary to the peaceful and productive functioning of a civilization.
	It's entirely necessary to the leftists, right?
	To the social justice warriors.
	That's the game.
	Find an inequality, suppress all biological explanations for it, and claim that the only reason it exists is because inequality, therefore, give me power.
	To fix it.
	And of course it can't be fixed.
	It can't be fixed.
	Any more than differences in height can be fixed.
	So, if this Pareto curve, or this Pareto distribution, if that knowledge is suppressed, if human biodiversity, if IQ, if intelligence, if differences between groups is all suppressed, then inequality provokes anxiety in the general population.
	If you believe in something that isn't true and that it's bad, like hell, then you're going to have anxiety.
	And then what happens is this group comes along and says, well, this thing is bad.
	This thing can be fixed.
	And we're going to fix it for you.
	Just give us money and political power.
	You understand, right?
	You've got a problem called going to hell.
	You've got an offer called getting to heaven.
	And we can fix it.
	Just give us money and resources.
	And in the past, at least, political power.
	And now we have this problem called inequality.
	This is the hell.
	We have this heaven called egalitarianism.
	And just give us money and power and we can solve it for you.
	But it can't be solved.
	Let me put it this way.
	Inequality can't be solved, but inequality is not the same as poverty.
	Because if we allow intelligent people to keep resources and grow the economy, then you may have a lot of inequality.
	It may even widen.
	But everyone's getting wealthier anyway.
	The only way to solve poverty is to allow for greater inequality.
	Whereas, of course, on the left, they say the only way to solve poverty is to reduce inequality, which can't work.
	So, this sort of explains why those on the left who, you know, claim to be secular, claim to be scientific, and, you know, those on the left get completely insane and enraged about what they call climate change denialism and anti-scientific approaches of people on the right and so on.
	But, of course, there's...
	Denying the science such as it is behind global warming is relatively innocuous compared to denying the science of human biodiversity, of different brain sizes, of different levels of IQ, of different connections of white matter, between genders, between ethnicities, and so on.
	That's much more significant science denialism than happens as well.
	For instance, denying the fact that certain cultures allow for and sometimes even encourage cousin marriage, and cousin marriage over time leads to a 10 to 18 point IQ drop.
	That seems quite important and denying that is denying science that is far more directly important than anything to do with the temperature changes over a couple of decades or a century.
	So, women, in general, tend to be a little bit more on the left than men, particularly single women.
	Single women, of course, are concerned that life choices might lead to problems because they don't have a husband who can provide resources should, you know, they get pregnant or whatever.
	So they tend to want to marry the state and tend to be a bit more towards big government.
	But I think there's also a deeper reason.
	A lot of people have noticed that as women have taken over more and more of the educational systems in the West, competition has tended to diminish.
	And, you know, everyone gets a trophy, everyone gets a ribbon just for showing up, the participation ribbons and so on.
	And win-lose, highly competitive situations tend to diminish.
	Well, women don't experience as much intellectual disparities as men do.
	If women are mostly girls, mostly hanging out with other girls, if boys are mostly hanging out with other boys...
	Boys very quickly know that some people are really, really good at stuff.
	Other boys, right?
	Like, I mean, I used to play Dungeons& Dragons with my friends, shockingly all male.
	And, you know, one of them has gone on to be a professor of economics.
	One of them has gone on to be a professor of engineering.
	One of them has gone on to be a great writer.
	I have gone on to do this philosophy show.
	I mean, but we all had very different abilities, right?
	I couldn't do the math and engineering of one.
	I couldn't do the mathematics and detailed economic analysis of the other.
	Other people couldn't match my sort of spontaneity of language skills and storytelling and explanatory skills and so on.
	So we all knew that we were great.
	And then there were other people in our group who just really weren't that much good at anything.
	You know, one of them went on to be a sort of mid-range accountant and so on.
	So we experienced great pillars of differing abilities, and we also experienced great highs and lows of differing abilities just in a local group.
	And this was the second, generally the big second round of friends that I had, the first round of friends I had.
	I mean, I don't even know if they even made it out of the neighborhood, and certainly if they didn't, well, I shouldn't talk about it all, but let's just say they were very, very different from the second group.
	Friends that I had.
	And so, because there is this astonishing number of high IQ men relative to women, I think women just don't experience the highs and lows of intellect as much as possible.
	So for women, it's a little less understandable how there are such disparate outcomes in society.
	And where women do see this physical...
	Discrepancy is in, you know, female beauty, female attractiveness.
	There's a bell curve there as well.
	And they see that, but they don't really see as much the intellectual disparities that occur in the world.
	And so this failure to understand the concentration of abilities that is extraordinarily rare, the fact that This Pareto distribution, this tiny minority of people carrying the weight for most of society's productivity produces such an enormous amount of resentment and confusion and splitting and aggression and frustration and rage and it
	allows all of this baiting to occur between various social groups that is really catastrophic.
	It's really, really catastrophic.
	And it really promotes the growth of the state.
	Because, of course, if there's a problem called inequality that arises from immorality, from exploitation, then it's unjust and immoral.
	And what happens then is you end up with this It's kind of a funny thing.
	I mean, it's so parallel to religion in so many ways.
	You know the old saying, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
	All who would follow me, says Jesus, sell everything you own, give it to the poor in order to follow me.
	This idea that wealth is guilt, that wealth is exploitation.
	Well, of course, when we were a warrior culture, when we had kings and queens and nobles and aristocrats and so on, then sure, it was much more predatory.
	It was predatory.
	When you have a free market where you gain wealth by serving the needs of the majority, or at least a fairly wealthy minority, then it's not that way inclined at all.
	It's not exploitive.
	It's not exploitive.
	And...
	If you can get people to believe that wealth is a sign of sin, then it's easier to guilt the wealthy into giving up their wealth.
	It's a form of moral pickpocketing, where you don't even have to bump into someone and say, excuse me, and snatch their fob watch.
	They'll cough up resources in order to alleviate their guilt.
	So, in the religious scenario, if you are wealthy, Then you are bad, and you must give money away in order to become better, and people are happy to pick that up, and it's a great way to get money if you're not particularly honest, or if you wish to deny these basic realities of biodiversity.
	And it's the same thing, of course, on the left.
	It's the same setup, right?
	That if you are wealthy, it is because you have exploited people and you're a bad person, and therefore you must give money to other people because you're immoral.
	Now, I actually have some sympathy for this viewpoint, and I want to sort of touch on this as well.
	Because if intelligence abilities, this constellation of magic that produces genius and extraordinarily high abilities, if that is to a large degree genetic...
	Then people are not wealthy just because they work hard.
	Trust me, I had lots of low-rent jobs when I was a teen and in my 20s.
	You work pretty hard as a waiter.
	It's tiring stuff.
	Especially back in the day when people used to give you change, walk around like chainmail armor with all this stuff stuffed in your pockets of your apron.
	But this...
	Reality, with this parade of distribution, people end up wealthy partly because they're born lucky.
	They're lucky.
	They're lucky.
	Now, I do believe that if you're born lucky, and I consider myself to have been born very lucky, when I think of the constellation of abilities that came together, I mean, not least of which is a fairly pleasant speaking voice and so on.
	My accent.
	My tour of the colonies accent that confuses many people.
	Because...
	You have lucky characteristics.
	You know, you roll high on the genetic dice roll.
	Well, it's not exactly earned, all of the good things that you have.
	And I don't believe that the state should force you to redistribute, because that is to say it's immoral.
	It's not immoral.
	You know, if someone makes a lot of money because they're tall, they have rapid-fire muscles, and they're conscientious and hardworking and have the IQ to be a basketball player, okay, then there's work, of course, but there's also some luck involved as well.
	They're tall, fast-fire muscles, but...
	So it's not immoral for them to make a lot of money.
	It's not like they've stolen it from someone.
	However, that aggregation of income is partly fortuitous.
	It's at least partly based on good fortune.
	My capacity to do what I do, yeah, there's hard work and there's been struggle and courage involved and all of that, but some of it, for sure, is just how I was born.
	Now, this used to be called noblesse oblige, which is the idea that if you're born lucky, you owe something to society.
	You owe, at least to some degree, the service of your abilities for the good of society.
	I have always taken that very seriously, which is one of the main reasons why I do what I do, why I take on these challenging and controversial subjects and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous trolls and so on.
	I mean, because I view my aggregation of capacities as...
	As somewhat fortuitous.
	And because it's fortuitous, I owe something back to a society that just doesn't happen to be as lucky.
	I mean, to take a silly example, perhaps, but I think illustrative.
	You know, if you're the tallest guy in the village, and you're the guy who can reach the apples higher up in the tree, you could eat them all yourself, but you didn't earn your height.
	It's just the way you were born.
	So, you know, maybe have some for yourself, but hand it out to people who, just by accident, aren't as tall.
	I think that is fair.
	Now, you don't want to starve yourself and you don't want to hand everything you have to the people who are short because then everyone ends up shorter over time because the tall genes don't reproduce and so on.
	So, state redistribution, that requires that people think that the aggregation of wealth is immoral.
	Which, in a religious context, it to some degree is because it means that you're over-focusing on the material and so on.
	But in the leftist context, you are wealthy because you've stolen from other people.
	It's not...
	They call it the redistribution of income, like it was just somehow distributed evenly and then it got aggregated to one person because they cheated and then you've got to give it back and reparations and welfare state and so on.
	But it's not.
	It's not immoral.
	It's lucky, to some degree, and that may create an obligation, but it's not an enforceable moral contract because you did something wrong.
	The tall guy didn't do something wrong.
	He didn't steal the height from the short person.
	And this failure to understand all of this is creating desperately negative situations.
	Desperately negative situations.
	I mean, one of the reasons the migrant crisis is happening, if not the major reason, The migrant crisis is happening is because of the welfare state in Europe and other places.
	And the welfare state relies on a repudiation of biodiversity, a repudiation of the Pareto curve of abilities, a Pareto distribution, sorry, of abilities.
	And so this fundamental misapprehension of why there is inequality and why wealth concentrates has created this redistributionist system that is potentially going to take down Western civilization as a whole.
	And that, you know, as I've argued before, to some degree that can be ascribed to growing powers of women politically, right?
	Sweden, for 800 years, survived without a welfare state and got one within a decade or so of women getting the vote.
	It's just the way that these things work.
	So, what do intellectuals sell you as paradise if you don't believe in the soul, you don't believe in heaven, you don't believe in hell?
	What do they sell you?
	Well, what they sell you is egalitarianism, is the paradise of equality.
	And this explains why there's such hostility to biodiversity arguments.
	Why you've not been taught about the Pareto distribution, right?
	Because if human inequality significantly results from biology, intellectuals cannot sell you equality.
	They can't, there's nothing to sell you.
	There's nothing to sell you.
	And recognizing that when you start to talk about this kind of stuff, you are threatening the income and power, which they're addicted to, of a significant number of people, is one of the reasons why there's a lot of hostility towards these ideas.
	In the religion of egalitarianism, which is served by the priesthood of the left...
	This information literally is blasphemy and they react to it exactly as you would expect all superstitious people to react to information that undermines the value of the pseudo-goods they're trying to flog on mankind.
	So, if people are generally equal, then inequality results from exploitation and It's therefore a moral problem.
	It's an immoral outcome to a moral problem that the left offers to solve with political power.
	In the same way that if someone steals your bike, you call the cops, the cops go to the person's house and get your bike back.
	They stole it from you.
	It's an immoral situation which needs to be solved by state power.
	It's the same thing with inequality.
	It's a moral problem according to the left.
	Exploitation needs to be solved with state power.
	And then you're absolved of that sin.
	If you have done the unpardonable sin of gaining wealth, then you're absolved of that sin by subscribing to leftist ideologies, by becoming guilty, and then society, particularly for the top, becomes this self-flagellating monastery where you have to punish yourself for success.
	And that is really, really important to understand.
	You see how much this all explains when you get down to it.
	So...
	This information, I hope, illuminates a lot for you.
	It certainly helps me sort of understand why society is the way it is.
	It also explains so much in society, not just about why it is the way it is, and how we can't fundamentally solve or fix it.
	At least political power will just make it worse, as we've seen.
	But it also explains why there is such hostility towards certain ideas and why the left continues to function as a pretty historical religion that is addicted to the power it gains from suppressing essential information.
	While claiming to be for science and free speech and open inquiry, they do remain a cabal opposed to basic facts about society, reality, biology, intelligence, and so on.
	Because once people understand that, Once you understand this, you can finally be free of guilt.
	You can experience genuine compassion, noblest oblige, a desire to serve the species rather than be fearful of the mob that forever is stoked with resentment and comes to steal your life, your fortune, and your future.
	We can finally have a compassionate society based on mutual respect rather than a predatory society based on lies.
	Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio, thank you so much for watching.
	I look forward to your feedback and comments below.
	Please let me know if you'd like me to elucidate on this further.
	Please don't forget to go past freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
	Very important, absolutely essential, and very, very much appreciated.

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