July 26, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:49
3759 CLASS WARFARE | The Daily Argument
The balance between financial resources and the ability to successfully reproduce the next generation is incredibly well known and understood. Stefan Molyneux discusses the connection between intelligence and wealth, contrasted with the various tactics used to acquire resources via coercive means. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
Hope you're doing well. Are you ready for today's daily argument?
Let me tell you, it's a late night doozy for me.
So, let's talk about cycles of history.
Now, the only thing that matters fundamentally in human society is intelligence.
There are two ways to describe the inevitable inequalities that accrue whenever society becomes free.
See, when a society is oppressed, when there's big governments or aristocrats or tyrants and so on, everybody's equal in misery and resentment and terror.
There's not that inequality that provokes that Nietzschean kind of resentment, what Rand used to call the hatred of the good for being the good, the hatred of the competent for being the competent, the hatred of intelligence for being a successful competitor against dumbness.
Smart people, in general, out-compete dumbness.
Now, there are smart genes in human society and there are dumb genes and they're in competition with each other for resources.
The problem being, of course, that the smart genes produce a lot more resources in a free society than the dumb genes do, which means that In a free society, women will flock to the men with the most resources, you know, in general, by the by.
You know, there's a lot of, I guess, Oscar Wilde-style rough trade that goes on for some women, but in general, smart people in a free society outcompete dumb people.
And what happens is, over time, smart people not only out-compete dumb people, but over time, smart people make dumb people redundant.
Unnecessary. I mean, look at automation.
I mean, when you were a farmer back in the day, how many not smart people did you need to wander through your wheat fields with a scythe and a bag to pick up your wheat?
Well, you needed a lot. But then you get a combine harvester, and then you get fertilizer, and then you get all other threshing machines, all other kinds of farm machinery, and you invent winter crops like turnips that allow you to use the land year-round, and you just run out of utility for people who aren't that smart.
And look, I'm not talking...
I had my...
Series of idiot jobs when I was younger.
You know, I cleaned offices.
I had a paper route and I cleaned cars and I was a waiter and I worked in a hardware store and all.
I mean, fine. They're fine on your way through to two better things.
No problem with them whatsoever.
But the problem is, of course, that smart people out-compete dumb people.
They get more resources than dumb people.
And they end up inventing machinery that replaces dumb people.
So the dumb genes kind of freak out and panic.
And what do they do? How do they get resources in a society where the smart people get the babes, right?
The smart people get more resources and the smart people have more kids, right?
Because as automation replaces less intelligent people, less intelligent people will have fewer and fewer kids because they have less and less money.
And so freedom, I mean, this is all a little bit of hyperbole, but not a huge amount.
I mean, really putting this in exaggerated terms, really get the impact of this.
Freedom, economic freedom in particular, the free market capitalism is like an extinction level event for the dumb genes.
You understand? They can't compete.
They're replaced. They're being pushed out, crowded out.
And smart people, smart men make lots of money, marry smart women.
They have smart kids. And lots of them, because in a free market, if you're wealthy, you can afford to have more kids.
And the dumb people have fewer opportunities, they have fewer resources, and they have fewer kids.
So the free market is like an extinction-level event for the dumb genes.
And like all genetic sets, they fight back, right?
This is an old principle of biology that think of a red and a gray squirrel.
Racist! Two subspecies can never inhabit the same geographical area for long because they compete over the same resources and one will eventually push out the other one that will against win against the other.
And so what happens is inequality raises the sexual market value of high intelligence.
The free market raises the sexual market value of high intelligence.
Liberty Think of free speech.
Free speech raises the social impact of the articulate, the prepared, the well-informed, the intelligent, the good debaters, right?
They have a disproportionate level of social influence compared to people who are not smart, not articulate, not prepared, lazy, whatever you want to call it.
So what do the dumb genes do when faced with the extinction-level event of the free market.
Now please understand I'm not talking about eugenics or anything like that.
I'm just talking about the natural tendency of getting resources, having more kids.
It's not extinction like we're gonna round them up or anything.
It's just extinction like over time there's lower sexual market value, less utility, fewer opportunities and so in the free market smart genes win, dumb genes lose over time.
So what do they do?
Well I think it's pretty clear what they do and they're winning for the most part.
So what they do is they say, well, what we need, you see, is democracy.
Do you understand? What we need is democracy.
Now, what democracy does is it no longer differentiates between smart people and dumb people when it comes to influencing state policy.
It raises the sexual market value of dumb people by creating an agency of force that takes resources from smart people and gives those resources to dumb people and please understand smart and dumb it's not like yay positive and yay negative it's like tall and short it's not a moral judgment it's just a reality that there's IQ and there's a bell curve and so on right and so by inventing a democracy one person one vote they overcome The resource accumulation problem of the free market and high IQ people inventing more,
creating more and being more economically valuable.
So then what they can do is they can gang together and they can use the power of the state to take resources from smart people and redistribute those resources to themselves.
They can overcome The natural sorting selection of the free market to assign higher sexual market value to smart people and lower sexual market value to dumb people because now being dumb has with it the advantage of free money.
And look now suddenly as a dumb person You're going to have high sexual market value or at least higher than you had before, right?
So this is really the cycle of history that we're in right now.
And I'm sort of approaching its endpoint for better or for worse in one way or another, in one direction or another.
We're sort of seeing where this is going from here.
And so when you think of things like, you know, Marxism or socialism and so on, Don't think of it like economic determinism or your relationship to the means of production or caring for the poor or anything like that.
These things don't really matter.
The rise of the free market in the 19th century coincided with the rise of socialism.
Why? Well, because the free market worked spectacularly well throughout a lot of Western countries.
Because, I mean, think of it in America, you had to be Economically successful in order to have a vote.
In other words, you had to have some stake in property rights in order to vote.
And the basic argument was, of course, that the poor outnumber the rich and if you give everyone the power to vote away property, then the poor are going to vote away the property, the rich deliver it to themselves through the power of the state and everyone's going to end up poor.
Well, you know, absent massive productivity and absent the computers and the internet which has staved off the collapse of the welfare state for a couple of decades now, but not forever.
That is the cycle of history.
When you have this demand for one person, one vote, then what you have to do is find an ideology to cover up.
Dumb people's desire for what they not only have not earned but cannot earn, which is the resources accumulated and magnified by the intelligence of the brilliant.
And so when you have this resentment, when you have this existential gene panic of an extinction-level event called human freedom, then there's a huge clamoring and a huge demand for a philosophy which justifies that resentment and calls inequality injustice.
Inequality is not natural, according to this Marxist philosophy, this leftist philosophy.
Inequality is not natural.
Inequality is not just the distribution of intelligence across the bell curve.
Inequality results from injustice.
And that way, the intellectually and morally bankrupt can say, we're not using force to make up for our own deficiencies.
