Sept. 13, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:23
3823 NO RULES
The societal erosion of rules and consequences has led to trends which will ultimately cause a collapse of civilization. Stefan Molyneux breaks down the dangerous consequences of a responsibility free world where people are not held accountable for their bad decisions.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
I don't really know how to talk about this too well.
These thoughts, these ideas have been sort of circling the drain in my brain that leads to the internet for quite some time now.
And for some reason, my teenage years are coming back to life.
You know, you march through life and then there's like this grave in the horror movie where the zombie hand comes out and grabs your foot.
And maybe it's the half-century thing.
I'm going to be 51 this month.
But I'm circling back.
And the one thing that I'm unpacking when thinking about my teenage years It's the extraordinary lack of guidance that I received.
It really is astonishing and astounding.
I was into reading books about an earlier time than myself.
Like, I liked reading Enid Blyton stories which were set in this sort of mythical pre- or post-war England.
And so I guess I was heavily influenced by old-world or old-school values.
I didn't like reading contemporary stuff, and I still don't.
I mean, I'm drawn to the classics because that's where the humanity is, the sort of empty, scraping evacuation of meaning that passes for art in the modern world.
Hey, you don't get virtue, but would you like a bunch of useless orgasms?
Okay, then, are selected it is.
And so I grew up...
Looking into the past where there were still values and looking into the present where those values have vanished.
And it was a puzzle to me as a kid why the older movies, the older stories...
All had values.
All had something to aspire to.
All had social reinforcement of those values.
Like if you went against social norms, if you didn't support your wife and kids, or you had a child out of wedlock, or you had an affair, or you got divorced, there were these negative consequences.
Like you were no longer welcome in polite society.
And there were all of these Little micro-corrections of life choices that were everywhere in society in the past.
And then, probably coinciding, though hopefully not causal, probably coinciding with around the time that I was born, all of this stuff just began to vanish.
Now, I did two years of boarding school, as I mentioned recently, from six to eight.
And there were values there, pretty harshly enforced, I'll tell you that.
I mean, not quite at a George Orwell level, but pretty, pretty harshly enforced.
But there were values there.
And then I do remember going from the sort of patriotism and St.
George and England's finest hour and the noble island rather than the French referred to perfidious Albion situation.
I remember going from there to the amoral ash can of former values known as government.
Schools wherein I spent the remainder of my educational life, all the way up to a master's degree in history, where I had the same kind of amoralism.
And I've really been thinking, and you know what, come to think of it now, just popped into my head, thanks brain, always a party, that it's because I'm really in the phase of teaching my daughter values now.
And maybe in teaching my daughter values, I'm recognizing just how adrift we all were growing up in the 70s and the 80s, with the amoralism, the sort of ice storm key party sexual hedonism, which floated around in the environment that I grew up in, in terrible and terrifying ways.
And now that I'm teaching values, I think I'm really, really recognizing just how unbelievably Adrift and valueless my upbringing was.
I suspect, I suspect yours as well.
And this collapse of the micro-corrections and social enforcement of values was incredibly rapid, incredibly sudden.
You know, like if you look back at the 1950s, there's this cliche, I read this book when I was taking a course on feminism in university called Homeward Bound, you know, how terrible and constrictive and confining this was and so on, right?
But they were politically much more free.
Politically, much more free.
Much, much lower taxes.
And many more job opportunities.
And real, true free speech.
But From the 50s to the 60s, this all began to collapse and decline.
And in the 70s, there was just like this crater of social standards.
There was nothing left. It had gone completely the opposite direction.
It had gone to the point where not only did social standards not need to be enforced, but any attempt to enforce social standards Had you marked as some prune-faced, prudish, church lady, finger-wagging moralist who, you know, awoke every day with the deeply suspicious fear that somebody somewhere was having a good time.
You became...
Like, it went from, you know, benevolent social standards to...
You were like a Salem trial witch hunter if you wanted to impose any social standards.
You were a moralist. Which was kind of a curse word back in the day.
I think it's coming back now that we realize what has happened as a result of the scrubbing of social values.
But it is just amazing.
I was allowed to date whoever I wanted.
There was no restrictions or guidance, really, on sexual activity other than, you know, the STDs, the crabs can stay.
Don't think you can drown the crabs in a bathtub.
They can stay underwater a lot longer than you can.
I remember all of those horrifying, nasty, you know, genitals as bioweapons classes that we were forced to take in junior high school.
But as far as what it meant to have a quality partner, as far as what it meant to be a good person, as far as...
I mean, obviously, good person in a vacuum of morality, obedience becomes...
The only standard you can fall back on.
Because if you don't self-regulate, then you need to be controlled by authority.
Which is why philosophy is the opposite of totalitarianism, because philosophy teaches you to self-regulate.
When you self-regulate, you don't need a big giant government to pick up your messes and to order you to do what you need to do and to steal from people to give you money to backfill all your disasters.
I just remember growing up in this complete void of values.
This happened, I mean, I was a Christian, a Protestant I was raised, and I've talked about this relatively recently, so I won't go into more here, but there wasn't a lot of values and virtues coming out of the church either.
I remember this funny thing.
Welcome to my stream of consciousness.
I remember this funny thing.
So when I was a kid, I used to go With my mom to this pub.
And this pub had an area for drinking and it had a fantastic area for playing.
Little parts between hedges, fantastic for tag and hide-and-go-seek and all the stuff that I loved to play as a kid.
And I remember there was a streaking phase that was going on in the 70s.
This would be the early 70s because I was pretty young.
And the streaking phase is be nude, right?
And a guy, I remember, you know, the long cliched hair, the Jim Morrison style, Christ emulation beard, and tall and thin.
And he walked into the bar and walked through the garden completely nude.
And everyone clapped and cheered.
Now, I mean, I've been reading stories said in the past, or written in the past, where a woman couldn't show much of her ankle without it being scandalous.
And like, here with this guy's twigs and berries swaying in the breeze, like, you know, a bunch of castanets in a hurricane, and everybody's cheering.
It's considered fun and goofy, and these two worlds...
In my brain, they doth collide, or certainly did, at the time.
And I just remember thinking there was all of this cheering, and there were these hippies who used to come through the house, and they'd sit there, like, they'd sit around the table...
This unwinding reality with this relentless sandblasting language of relativism and subjectivism and whatever you feel.
And there was a very strong...
You know, when you get rid of religion, you don't end up with rationality.
You end up with superstition.
And there was a lot of this stuff going on back in the day, back in the 70s.
You know, all of the... I remember I got into the newspaper for bending spoons with my mind when I was, I think, 12 or 13...
It was all nonsense, of course.
But there was all of this, you know, you put the razor blade under the pyramid and it sharpens.
And then the UFOs are a higher intelligence.
Klaatu had an entire song about this.
The UFOs, which had a mystical element to them, because there was never any particular science involved.
And angels and spirits and ghosts.
And this sort of weird spiritual oneness thing.
You know, like the old joke about, you go to the Buddhist hot dog vendor, you say, make me one with everything.
And then you give him too much money.
You ask for change. He says, no, no, change comes from within.
Thanks, Chris. But this assault on reality...
Epistemological assault on metaphysics, on the nature of reality, that occurred and was a constant stream through my early childhood growing up in London, where these feral, fervid, insistent, contemptuous hippies used to roll through the environment, and I would sit there listening to them.
Talking about the best ways to construct psychic helmets for other people who might be threatened by evil forces.
And they lived with barely one toe in tangible reality.
And they had squirted, like you step on an open toothpaste tube with all of your mind, squirted out into unreality and madness and subjectivism and so on.
That happened a lot. In the culture, suddenly monogamy became repression, and commitment became enslavement, and self-restraint became a lack of self-expression.
Let your freak flag fly, as they would say.
And this turning inside out of the mental or artistic world of my childhood compared with this vivid encircling and encroaching madness, literally madness, like a lot of these people went crazy.
Later in life. This was not shit to be dabbled with.
I really, really got that sense.
Like, they were in the fun phase of the addiction to unreality.
Like, woohoo! No standards, no rules.
I can do whatever we want. I can pursue my dopamine addiction with base sensual stimulation from here to eternity.
And I can set myself up as the conqueror of mere...
Material, reality. I can set up this alternate platonic universe where will and desire are all you need for fulfillment, right?
Self-actualization.
Nothing to do with virtue, nothing to do with honesty or integrity or courage.
Well, the courage that was portrayed was the courage to reject.
Any limitations on behavior.
And the enemy was not the madness that was approaching them, like the old painting of the horse thundering down the train tracks towards the train.
This was what was approaching like a slow-moving spiral bullet Of hysterical consequences was going to splatter their brains, and it did to a lot of them, as I found out later.
It went crazy. Too many drugs, too much meaninglessness, too much anti-rationality, because they weren't just irrational, it's one thing.
Anti-rational. They had found their enemy, and their enemy was truth.
They had found their enemy, and enemy was integrity, reality, materialism, restraint, facts.
And I remember thinking, what a strange thing that the stories that I'm reading, the art world that I inhabit, existed not long ago, a decade or two at most.
And then this nightmarish world, and to me it is a nightmarish world, When you use the power of language to undo the reality that first gave us language.
We get language because we see things in the real world.
We identify them. They're consistent.
A tree is a tree. A clock is a clock.
We see these things and they're consistent.
And it is that very consistency that gives rise to the possibility of language.
You can call a cloud a cloud, but there's no word for the shape of a particular cloud over time.
It's going to change. That which has no form cannot be described in language for long.
The language could not arise to undo reality if reality was not stable enough to give rise to that language.
So using that which is derived from reality to undo reality, it's like taking the weapon from somebody trying to act in self-defense and killing them with it.
And The intensity of the anti-rationalists was matched very much by the older generation's boredom and dissociation when it came to education.
I remember the history teacher was a real slow talker.
Like hypnotizing.
Nothing to say. Nothing to say.
It took history for years.
Nothing. No lessons out of it.
Nothing of value whatsoever.
It's criminal. The realities that are kept from the young for the sake of keeping them dumb and complacent.
Mere bugs in the muddy footprints of stomping power.
And so the rules were gone.
Gone. Just vanished.
In the space of like a decade.
The rules just vanished. Now people say, I'm the life of the party.
People say, That I have the rational hatred for the welfare state.
But to me, a lot of this had to do with the welfare state.
The reason we have rules is to avoid negative consequences.
And when those negative consequences are removed, the need for the rules is removed.
And then wishing rules becomes mere prejudice.
It becomes a petty, useless, tyrannical form of self-repression or repression of others.
When the negative consequences are removed, the need for the rules is removed as well.
Very few people study on the last day of junior high school because there will be no tests for months.
So when the negative consequences are removed, you know the old thing, watching some video in science, is this going to be on the test?
If it's not going to be on the test, you don't really have to pay attention.
There won't be any negative consequences for not paying attention.
And so in the space of...
A decade or less with the welfare state saying, okay, well, if you mess up, if you have a child out of wedlock, well, we'll pay for it.
As long as the father's not around.
We will pay you to be a single mother.
Well, then, what is the need, what is the visceral, immediate need to promote female sexual responsibility?
Or male sexual responsibility, for that matter.
It vanishes. And therefore, the teenagers are set adrift on a sea of hormones and lust and confusion.
And those who wish to encourage self-restraint have very quickly run out of negative examples to point to.
There's this old comedian from years ago.
Who had this little bit about how mom's voices went really hushed when they were talking about something serious.
Like, you better not climb on those rocks or you're going to fall and end up like Billy who can't even sign his own name now.
That was an old joke when I was a kid.
If you slip and fall on those rocks, don't come running to me.
If you break your legs, slip and fall, break your legs, don't come running to me.
And what used to happen is if a woman had a child outside of wedlock, And kept the child, then she would be unmarriable for the most part.
She would be sitting at home with her parents with no particular life, and her parents would foot the financial bill for raising the child because she would be unable to work.
And so because the parents would have to pay out the $200,000 to raise the child, the parents had at least $200,000 and general social Self-respectability, social standing, social status to lose if their daughter got pregnant outside of wedlock.
And so they had an incentive.
They chaperoned. They instilled the virtues and values of sexual restraint in their daughters and their sons.
And the boys knew if they got a girl pregnant that they would have to marry her.
Or like leave town forever or whatever.
And so the boys had sexual restraint as well.
And this, you know, gap between the sort of 50s and the 70s, the Ritchie versus Fonzie almost, well, the difference was the welfare state.
And now you could say, well, the difference was birth control, but why giving women more control over birth control would result in more single motherhood makes no sense whatsoever, fundamentally, right?
Here's a way you cannot have children.
Oh look, women are having more children irresponsibly.
It's the welfare state.
Come on, it's not the technology.
And this complete collapse of micro-correction social feedback, this complete collapse of examples to point to, Saying, if you date this boy and you get pregnant, you're going to end up like so-and-so, right?
Like that girl in the movie Grease.
She's like, ah, I'm really worried.
I feel like a broken typewriter.
Why? I skipped a period.
Right? I'd be pregnant.
No father.
No husband. Well, father, no husband.
And so you couldn't point because these women now were set up.
We got free healthcare, they got subsidized housing, they got food stamps, they got SNAP, they got welfare over time.
They were set. So how can you say, don't end up like so-and-so when so-and-so is making more money by pumping out illegitimate children than her sister who has a job or who's going to college?
Don't end up like This girl, who gets to breastfeed, have adoring children around her, not have to work, not have to take care of a man, not have to do any of those things.
And with that, you get a massive collapse in female skill sets.
And that's, you know, the sort of modern women...
Often useless. They can't cook, can't clean, can't, you know, the men too, right?
Men, they can't fix cars, they can't, they don't know how to repair a lawnmower, they can't build a wall, they, you know, they can get to level infinity on video games, but as far as practical, useful things to do.
And so, when women didn't have to sell their skill set on the free market of marriage, Then women could become useless because they received money for just being irresponsibly sexual.
And so this entire edifice, which took tens of thousands of years to develop a female skill set, because then everything became humiliating.
I can hear the people out there cooking and cleaning.
Are you saying that all women bring to the...
Right, come on. Don't go there.
Don't be drawn into that narrative.
We're trying to speak reasonably here.
But how to run a household, it's a big job.
Especially if you have a couple of kids.
It's a big job. And it's a skillful job.
And this value has all vanished.
All of this accumulated wisdom of how to run a household, of how to cook, to clean, to raise children well, to participate in the neighborhood, to have a tight-knit social community.
Well, multiculturalism has killed that to a large degree, but all of this skill set has vanished.
And now women, what do they have to offer?
Well, they have to offer sexuality.
They don't have to offer companionship or quality homemaking or excellent parenting or any of these things because they're not on the market anymore.
They've married the government and they don't have to provide anything to the government except their votes, which they're more than happy to do.
And voting once every couple of years is a whole lot easier than running a household.
And so because there were no negative examples for irresponsibility, irresponsibility became self-expression.
And restraint became repression.
Self-control became self-destruction almost.
And why shouldn't it?
Negative consequences.
Like if there was a pill that cured all the effects of smoking, would you nag people to stop smoking?
Just pop a pill. Casapenicures, all the effects of smoking.
And you might, you know, sort of, if you don't like the secondhand smoke and so on, but the consequences would be much less dire.
And so we have this amazing generation that's grown up.
Men, like, what are we evolved to do?
Men are evolved to work, and women are evolved to have babies.
And now we have, at least in America, what is it, 90 million people out of the workforce.
Men don't work and women don't have babies anymore.
And then we say, wow, our lives are strangely meaningless.
Our lives are strangely empty.
I'm depressed. I'm anxious.
I don't have any purpose. Purpose comes from danger.
Purpose comes from risk and reward.
And we've set up a society where rewards are diminished and risk is eliminated.
In so many areas.
Reward is diminished because you just get taxed to hell and gone and risk is reduced because if you make a mistake, if you're irresponsible, if you do something wrong, what happens?
You get paid. Like average woman in America with a couple of kids on welfare, she needs to earn like $70,000, $80,000 in salary to just match the benefits she's getting tax-free from the government.
So when... It's a harem situation, you understand?
It's a harem situation, wherein the women don't have to stay trim.
Why is obesity increasing?
Well, partly as a result of immigration, and partly as a result of the fact that women don't have to stay trimmed to keep their men, because the government's going to send them their checks anyway.
No danger of being left for somebody thinner and more attractive who takes care of themselves, and this is one of the reasons why, among whites, the life expectancy is diminishing.
You don't... I mean, I want to stay attractive to my wife.
I exercise and, you know, take care of my teeth and all of that, so...
But there's no negative consequences.
No fault divorce.
Do what you want. No fault divorce.
It was important in the past to find out who broke up the marriage, who was the irresponsible one, who was the immature one, who cheated, who was the addict, who hit, who beat, who what.
So that you could say, that person is a warning.
Don't do what they did. But when you've got a welfare state, what does it matter?
Who caused the breakup of the marriage?
Because no negative particular consequences accrue.
And in fact, for the women with alimony and child support, positive consequences can accrue from all of that.
And so I was launched, like so many of us, out into the world with no guidance.
Other than, in a sense, the gravity well suck you under the black sea of despair guidance of consequence-less hedonism.
It's actually a pretty good song by Great Big Sea.
But anyway, just hedonism.
Nobody cared who I dated.
Nobody cared...
That I was going to marry the wrong woman.
Because the consequences did not accrue to my community, to my family of origin, to those around me.
Other than, you know, in a very abstract way, taxes go up, but not viscerally.
Like, when there are no negative consequences to those around us, or when the negative consequences don't accrue to either them or to us directly, we kind of stop caring about each other.
And I have this conversation a lot with people who call into this show.
Well, you know, I got involved with the wrong woman and then I ended up marrying her and she divorced me.
She took me for everything I had. It's like, where was your family?
We're like, oh, well, I don't want to get involved and you can't tell people stuff.
And it's like, you used to be able to.
You used to be able to tell people stuff and they had to listen.
Because the parents had authority, right?
The woman, their teenage daughter gets pregnant and they say, well, first of all, they'll say, we're not paying.
You get pregnant, the man's going to marry you.
You get pregnant, you're going to have to work and raise a kid on your own.
We're not paying. Now, whether they did or didn't, if she believed that, she's like, okay, negative consequences.
So they cared who she dated.
They cared who she had sex with or whether she had sex at all.
And that's gone.
Now that future generations of banks for enslaved taxpayers are going to pick up the bill for everybody squirting their seat around like a spray-and-pay version of Unreal Tournament, consequences have vanished.
Concern has vanished.
Care has vanished. Protection has vanished.
Standards have vanished. You can't rebuild them.
All rules of self-restraint look like irrational Neurotic repression in the absence of negative consequences.
You know, if your kid's walking along the edge of the road and they're young, you'll say, stay away from the road!
But if they're just walking down the middle of a lawn, do you say, stay away from that end of the lawn?
That would just look weird, right?
Because there's no negative consequences.
Why would you want to stay on the straight and narrow?
Well, you want to do it if you're walking on a beam and that's the game.
But if you're just walking on a lawn, follow this line.
Why? Makes no sense.
And so, all of this accumulated wisdom and rules and common sense and care and love and guidance turned to ashes and And reconstitute themselves as this irrational, hippie, reality-hating phoenix that pecked to death anyone who tried to say there was something worth conserving in the old passions for self-restraint.
And it was hard to argue against all of that.
And this is why...
When I talk about female responsibility these days, I mean, I talk about male responsibility as well, but you kind of focus on the stuff that's not seen a lot more than stuff that is seen.
Everybody knows the term deadbeat dads.
Father absence is well understood as a social problem.
But when I talk about female responsibility, people view this as sort of What, anti-female?
No, no, no, no. First of all, a lack of responsibility on anyone is going to lead to an unhappy life.
If you want to be happy, you have to pursue the actions that will result in happiness.
This is a bit of a, you know, you could say it's pretty obvious, right?
Of course. If you want to be healthy, you have to pursue the things that keep you healthy, right?
Exercise, eat well, get your checkups, and all of that.
If you want to be happy, you have to do the things that lead to happiness.
Happiness is an earned state, like health.
And to be happy, the first thing you have to accept is responsibility, is self-ownership.
Because if you think that your health has nothing to do with you, you will never pursue the actions that will result in health, which means that you will follow hedonism, which means you will not exercise, you will eat crap, and you will be unhealthy.
And so you have to have self-responsibility in order to become happy.
Happiness is an earned state that goes against our immediate pleasures in the moment, just as health is an earned state, and eating well is an earned state that goes against our immediate pleasures in the moment quite often, until you refine your tastes.
I love exercising now.
But... The reason that I assign people responsibility is I want to give them the opportunity to be happy.
And if you're not responsible for your life, you can't ever be happy.
Because even if good fortune hits you, you didn't create it, you didn't earn it.
It's found money. It won't sustain you.
This is why lottery winners don't end up any happier.
Many of them much more miserable within months to a year.
But it's really impossible to preach responsibility in a consequence-free world.
People can just shrug and ignore you and laugh at you and scorn at you and spit on you.
Women don't need men because so many of them have married the state.
And so they can scorn men all they want.
They can spit on men. They can girl power.
Girls rule the world. Men are pigs.
Men are chauvinists. Men are patriarchs.
Of course. Because they get the money.
For men, whether men like it or not, because men pay the majority of taxes and women receive the majority of benefits.
So they use the power of the state to extract money from men and give it to women.
So why on earth would they need to respect men?
You don't buy flowers for the prostitute.
You don't woo her Cyrano de Bergerac style with flattery and sonnets.
Why? Because you already paid. You already got what you wanted.
It's guaranteed. Now, if somebody else is paying for the prostitute, Male resources is the definition of their sexual market value, and when governments strip men of their resources through the power of taxation, they're stripping men of their sexual market value, which is why men are much less interested in relationships these days.
So, this untutored nature of my upbringing, it took me a long time Of crashing around hedonism.
Of crashing around self-gratification.
Of throwing bricks into a canyon and think I'm building a home to live in.
Of random actions.
To respect and recognize the need for structure, for rules, for self-restraint.
That's gone from our culture now.
It's starting to come back as this next generation is looking at the survey of radical subjectivism and hedonism.
And not just the collapse, but the...
Not just the destruction, but the hatred of existing social rules.
They're looking at that and saying, that did not work.
It's different. Again, I don't know what the word is.
I think there's a word in German for it.
I'm sure there is, but it probably would be more syllables than an Aztec nickname for a Welsh village.
But, you know, if you turn your car and your car doesn't start, it doesn't work.
If you turn your car and your car explodes, that's quite different.
That's like... The opposite of working.
It's not working, it's like blowing up.
And the absence of social rules has not just turned into a lawless society, it's turned into a cancerous, pathologically self-destructive society.
And there are those of us out there trying to resurrect the rules It's a tough job in the absence of consequences, but we need the rules, and we need to spread them, and we need to understand them.
