Nov. 10, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:15
3890 We Really Need To Talk About Sexual Harassment Allegations
A recent bombshell report by the New York Times which cited five women who claimed that Comedian Louis C.K.engaged in sexual misconduct, including masturbating in front of them. With the nearly unprecedented rate of high profile sexual assault/harassment allegations following the Harvey Weinstein revelations, Stefan Molyneux explains how the erosion of law, justice and socialistic standards have created this horrific situation.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
Whether to snobler in the mind, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them, to die, to sleep, No more.
And by a sleep to say we end the heartache of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, to die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream.
All right, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death, our dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.
Must give us pause.
There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietest make with a bare bodkin?
Who would Fardles bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but at the dread?
Of something after death.
The undiscovered country from whose born no traveller returns puzzles the will.
It makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all.
And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.
No, I'm not talking about Europe. The essence in there is the law's delay.
How terrible the law is.
You can read Bleak House from Dickens, where he talks about the Court of Chancery.
There is a law case that has been going on year after year after year.
And I think some guy blows his head off because he can't figure out the paperwork.
And it just goes on and on and on.
The law's delay... Has become a great paralytic and something of great suspicion to the average person in the West in particular, maybe in other places as well.
It's not my wheelhouse in particular.
There are some things the law can handle and there are some things the law cannot handle.
The law cannot handle word versus word.
The law cannot handle he said, she said stuff.
The law cannot find proof beyond a reasonable doubt when it's word against word.
Now, if a man says that he was robbed, okay, maybe he's missing something.
Maybe he got beaten up.
Maybe there's something that could be done.
Maybe you can get someone to confess. Maybe there are witnesses.
If a woman says she was raped and she's beaten and her vagina is torn and, okay, well, then we...
But if it's like, well, there's no physical evidence, there's no...
Witnesses, it's just one word against another.
The law cannot handle this.
And in the past, a huge amount of human society was devoted to avoiding those situations.
So when it came to harassment and so on, people weren't allowed, men and boys and girls, like in terms of teenagers, right?
They were chaperoned.
you weren't allowed in your dorm room with a boy with the door closed, one foot had to be on the floor at all times.
So there were rules to try and prevent just this kind of mess from piling up.
Now we have taken away the big rules of responsibility for sexual impropriety in that if a woman gets pregnant outside of wedlock in the past, she would go away, the kid would go up for adoption, the boy would be forced to marry her.
There would be all of these repercussions that limited this kind of sexual irresponsibility.
Now, of course, with the welfare state, it can be a very good career option in terms of getting resources.
So that's all gone away.
That's all gone away.
And so now there's this old saying.
It says, if you get rid of the big rules, you don't end up with no rules.
You end up with an infinity of tiny rules.
And that is kind of how things have played out.
And we are, of course, seeing now, I was just thinking of Louis C.K., not me, although the photos are not wildly dissimilar, but Louis C.K., the comedian.
He had a whole movie that was going to come out, and it's been put on hold because the New York Times story came out about how there are allegations that over the years he has cornered women and masturbated in front of them and You know, just kind of gross stuff.
And I don't know, it's just, it's a weird thing to get your kink on for me.
It's just a weird thing to get your kink on.
But, you know, I guess he's made a public career of being the middle-aged, you know, overweight, divorced slob who can't get ahead.
And he seems to have quite a focus on masturbation in his shows and in his mock TV interviews and so on.
It's a big thing.
It's a big thing. I don't really claim to understand it that much.
It is humiliating.
And I guess that humiliation, this constant cry for help that seems to come out of a lot of people in the arts, that constant need for self-humiliation, which is really the foundation of his act, has now played itself out in a very public way.
And because I assume, I assume that he did not deal...
To the necessary degree, with the humiliation that he experienced as a child, there is this repetition compulsion that may have escalated.
Who knows? Who knows if the stuff's even true, but this is what the allegations are.
And it's fascinating to me.
Like, we got rid of all of these big rules about, you know, Mike Pence, right, says he doesn't have dinner with women who aren't his wife.
Everybody made fun of him, and now, of course, there are all these people who, you know, well, you were alone with this woman, and now there are these allegations, or you're alone with this boy, and now there are these allegations, and so on.
And the truth cannot, like, it's just, it's an epistemological thing, word versus word.
Even if somebody is known to be a truth teller, even if somebody is known to be a liar, It's really, really tough to get beyond a reasonable doubt, which is a good standard.
And so the law can't handle, fundamentally can't handle these kinds of things, which is why you had this Title IX stuff on colleges where a woman could accuse a man of sexual misconduct or rape or whatever.
And then with the, you know, it just seems believable.
He can't get a lawyer.
Like, you can't confront your accuser.
I mean, you've got to lower the standards.
Because the law can't attain certainty in the he said, she said stuff.
And therefore, you need to either work to prevent this stuff from coming about, which would mean imposing some sexual restraint upon the young, which would mean imposing consequences on their elders themselves.
For failing to restrain youth sexuality.
In other words, if your daughter gets pregnant, you now have to pay to raise the kid and she's going to move in with you and she's going to be kind of unmarriable because for a variety of reasons.
So, this whole, how do you prevent rather than cure?
The law can't cure.
The law can't bring people back to life.
The law can't unrape people.
The law can't unsteal.
I mean, yes, you can restore property and so on, but they can't.
It's what Marie Henlund said about Gomeshi.
Like, I may be able to win against the charges that are brought to you, but I can never make you the person who was never charged.
So, society used to be about prevention, and then that which slipped through society's cracks, the attempt would be to seek punishment through the law.
But because we no longer seek as a society to prevent as much as we're used to, then the law is overwhelmed.
And we've got cases in some inner cities that they just...
people die, they move away, witnesses, I mean, it just...
Conviction rates are just ridiculously low in certain areas because we're overwhelming the law with what it's not designed for.
And as a result, the law is no longer considered a valid instrument for many social problems.
And so what's happening is, because the law is so slow, and it is, oh, let's have another investigation.
Oh, you know, you see this when the law tries to deal with High-powered political operatives.
I mean, it's just ridiculous how slow it all is, how exhausting it all is, and how, even if you're innocent, what have you won?
I mean, you've had the accusations against your character, you have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending yourself, and you're never found innocent, of course.
You're only found not guilty. It's the best option.
And of course a lot of people are being railroaded into plea deals by threats of excessive punishment or significantly greater punishment to the point where very few people have any legitimate faith in the legal system.
And so what's happening now is we have this sort of online accusation mob rolling around, smashing up reputations.
And that's what happens when you cannot gain Sucker, you cannot gain justice through the law anymore.
Then you get the mob. You don't get the law, you get the mob.
And that's kind of what's happening now.
To fix this as a whole, you know, we just need to start respecting the basic tenets of Western civilization.
Thou shalt not use coercion to redistribute income in the form of taxation or personally, right?
It doesn't become a magically different thing when the government has the gun.
So, the solution is a big challenge, but it's important to understand what's happening now.
We have this mob. And this is why I started off with Shakespeare.
This goes back... Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, this frustration with the slowness of the law, that the law exists to serve itself, that the lawyers exist to serve themselves, that the lawyers do not exist to serve the needs of the couple divorcing, but to fill their own pockets.
It's not universal, but there's certainly a lot that goes on that way.
And there's this constant theme that the law gets ridiculously inefficient.
And that's partly because it's just a government system, so it's going to get worse and worse.
But it's also because we're trying to burden the law with challenges that used to be resolved in a social manner.
You know, as I said before, when I was a kid growing up, you'd never call on the teacher.
You'd never call on the authorities.
You would deal with your problems interpersonally with the other kids.
But, you know, now there's a lot of everyone running to...
Authority in an attempt.
We've got the law now attempting to create equal outcomes for disparate groups in society, ethnicities and genders and so on.
How on earth is that possible?
I mean, you can protect property, you can protect persons, and you can expect people to fulfill their contracts.
Do not initiate force and keep your word.
With theft being a form of force initiation.
So the law can handle that.
The law can handle, well, you signed this contract, so you've got to obey the contract.
Because that's objective. This is the contract you signed.
Did you keep your end of the bargain up?
Nope. Boom! Okay. Done.
We've got something objective. Right?
Did you kill this guy?
Standing over his body with a smoking gun.
Okay, we've got something objective.
Did you steal? Well, we've got the footage.
You don't have an alibi. Okay.
The law can deal with facts.
The law cannot deal with assertions.
And people are so frustrated at it now.
I mean, there's this whole arbitration and parallel system of dispute resolution that's occurring because the law has become so inefficient.
But because we've asked the law to do what it can't do, the law can't do anymore what it should do.
And as a result, we get these rampaging mobs and That is a terrible thing.
And, you know, one of the reasons why, and it's interesting to see Hollywood caught up in all this kind of stuff, and it's really important to understand how paralyzed Hollywood is at the moment.
It's paralyzed. You've got movies in production, but they've ripped out Kevin Spacey.
They're putting Christopher Plummer in.
Now instead, reshooting all his stuff, Louis C.K.'s movie has been put on hold, the premiere.
I mean, everybody's like, oh, God, what if our leading man gets accused of the whole, you know, what is the replay value now of House of Cards?
Do fewer people want to watch it knowing what's being alleged?
I don't know. And so everyone is really concerned now About not just the actress, but the producers, the directors, the financiers, the who knows?
Who knows? Everything's on hold.
Everyone's paralyzed. And that's partly the result of the fact that Hollywood has not done a great job of criticizing the legal system.
You notice in Hollywood movies, the judges are all very sympathetic.
Like, the judges are always right, and the lawyers are always yammering, and the judge is always like the school mom who quiets down the unruly siblings, called the lawyers.
And that's because Hollywood and the studios would go up, would use the legal system a lot to enforce property rights, to enforce contracts, and to fight against, you know, encroaches on government power.
So they didn't want to be known as a studio that would criticize judges.
So the judges are in general pretty perfect on movies and television.
And so people haven't had a strong sense of how the justice system as a whole.
You can have bad lawyers. You can have a bad system.
And also, I mean, the way they portray things, you know, it's like, we filed a lawsuit.
And then the next scene, you're in court.
It's like, nope. That's a year or two or three later.
Just talk to Mark Stein. Anyway, so...
They have allowed this predatory, you know, assuming these allegations will be validated in some form or another, or not, who knows, but let's assume that there's some that are true.
Well, they've allowed this predation to go on, and as I said before, you know, you turn on the lights, you see the monsters, you keep the lights off, you become the monsters, because you want to hunt in darkness.
So this is the sort of outcome of allowing this predatory behavior to go on for so long, and if not criticizing the legal system, And now everyone's paralyzed.
And it's fascinating to me, because in order to get projects approved now, you actually have to be a good person.
I would assume. Like, you have to be...
Like, how's Mike Pence looking as a film producer now?
Doesn't have dinner with women who aren't his wife.
How does he look now? I think he looks pretty good, wouldn't you say?
Because it's not believable or credible, then nobody's gonna...
I mean, again, not all of the allegations are true, and there are people for whom allegations would be true who aren't being criticized in this way and so on.
But in terms of being safe, Hollywood now...
If there was an environment where the scuzzballs and the grabbers and the harassers and the rapers and all of this alleged stuff, if it was an environment where those people succeeded, well, now there's an economic environment where those people won't succeed.
Because if there's a whiff of allegations, you're not getting hired.
You're not going to be put on the project because nobody's going to want to spend years of their life getting a film project going or a TV show up and running to the pilot phase and then find that the whole thing damn well falls apart.
You can't get insurance. Who knows what's going on behind the scenes?
Entertainment industry is completely paralyzed, and what that means now is, whereas it seems like brutality and dominance and sociopathy were the trump cards in Hollywood in the past, now, given the risk of public accusations of severe, if not downright criminal, immorality, now a market is opened up for good people in Hollywood.
And that is potentially a massive win in the culture war.
So if you are a good, honorable, decent person, now's the time.
