Stefan Molyneux breaks down the origin and evolution of the average frequently triggered snowflake social justice warrior. 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
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Welcome to your daily argument. | |
| This is going to be an exhumation of the evolution of the snowflake. | |
| Now, to understand the fragility, the hysteria, the... | |
| Crazy Blanche Dubois escalation of emotional hyperreaction that characterizes a lot of people, younger people to some degree, people on the left and so on. | |
| It's sort of important to understand where it comes from. | |
| This is relatively new. | |
| You know, there's an old saying that says, hard times create strong people, strong people create good times. | |
| Good times create weak people. | |
| Weak people create hard times. | |
| Now, that, of course, is in a statist society, in a free society. | |
| That would be, well, it would be sustainable. | |
| You wouldn't necessarily have to have all of this end of empire massive redistribution of trillions of dollars and tens of millions of lives. | |
| When you look at how somebody grows up to be hysterical, to have this sort of rubbed roar like they've had a cheese grater over their heart, you push a button, they explode. | |
| How does that come about? | |
| Well... There's two things, I think, that have happened that have helped to generate this kind of hypersensitivity. | |
| The first, of course, is the daycare generation. | |
| I've talked about that before, which is that there's this story that, boy, if you ever want to be really fulfilled, don't suckle for, nurture, and care for your own babies. | |
| Dump them off at a low-rent daycare and let... | |
| A rotating phalanx of underpaid people ignore your children for you. | |
| And you should go out and you should sit under fluorescent lights and squeaky chairs and you should sit yourself into basically resembling a snail with a back problem, an S-shaped jellyfish of spinelessness and you should pick up your paycheck and you should then give half your paycheck to the government and you should give the other half of your paycheck to your daycare providers and that's what we call an enriched life. | |
| Well, this, of course, has all turned out to be a lie. | |
| There's also, of course, this argument, well, you know, you have your career now, have your kids later. | |
| Of course, politicians want you to do that. | |
| Because if you have kids now, you're out of the workforce, you're not paying taxes, and governments have to provide more services at schools and so on, right? | |
| So the politicians want you to have kids later. | |
| The downside of that, of course, is, well, literally the downside of that could be, but, you know, increased birth mutations, difficulty conceiving, and, of course, a lack of ability to have a larger number of kids than maybe one Also, another thing that happens is if you have your kids in your late 30s and your early 40s, | |
| then what happens is At the same time that you're caring for the next generation, your parents will likely get ill, get limited mobility, need a lot of help and support and time and resources and money and driving around and doctor's appointments and specialists and so on. | |
| So you really are juggling two generations to the diminishment of everyone and it becomes an exhausting and debilitating experience. | |
| But what does that matter? | |
| Politicians want their taxes and they don't want to spend money, so... | |
| Have those babies later, and don't worry, everything will be just fine. | |
| Oh, you didn't have enough babies? Welcome in, third world. | |
| So, the daycare generation where there's a lack of bonding. | |
| A lack of bonding is very foundational to not having emotional resources to withstand opposition. | |
| So if you've had highly conditional love, and there's no love like a mom's love, there's no love like a primary caregiver's love. | |
| I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad for a year, so I'm a little bit off the bell curve, but I can live with that. | |
| There's no substitute for it. | |
| If you're loved for who you are, if your existence causes someone to light in your early years, you get a powerful foundation for resisting disapproval for the rest of your life. | |
| And I know this because my own My childhood, I had a caregiver, not my mother, but I had a caregiver with whom I had an extraordinary bond. | |
| She even named a later child after me. | |
| We had such a strong bond. That has given me a lot of resources with which to resist disapproval and further the cause of philosophy throughout my adult life. | |
| And those people I know who didn't have that early consistent bonding, who had the highly conditional approval. | |
| Like if you're in a daycare, I haven't worked in a daycare. | |
| If you're in a daycare, particularly with babies, I never worked with babies, but I saw it sometimes. | |
| If you're in a daycare, you have no time to play with the babies. | |
| I mean, you've got six babies, five babies, whatever. | |
| Well, they're going to poop every hour, so you've got to spend 10 minutes to properly change a baby. | |
| So that's 50 minutes out of your hour right there, assuming that they don't all poop at the same time. | |
| So you have no time to play with them, to interact with them, and so on. | |
| And they've seen this, you know, in Romania, when I think abortion was outlawed under Ceausescu, they put a bunch of babies in daycares. | |
| And the babies had food, they had milk, they had the right temperature, they were in cribs, and there were just these blurry old copies of Lion King playing on the TV all day. | |
| And, you know, a significant proportion of them grew up to be completely nuts. | |
| And they were adopted by other people sometimes, and they just like throw kittens out of windows and, you know, headbutt the stove and beat up people and just crazy. | |
| And it's really horrible and tragic. | |
| That's obviously an extreme situation, but nonetheless, the effects, though diminished, are still present. | |
| So there is that daycare generation. | |
| Now, when you have the daycare generation, when you don't have that early consistent bond with the primary caregiver, with the mom in general, then what happens is... | |
| You are so fearful of disapproval that you're very easy to control. | |
| I mean, powers that be, governments, in a sense they love getting kids into daycare because it makes the kids dependent upon the approval of those in authority. | |
| And this is where virtue signaling comes from. | |
| This is where compliance with crazy beliefs, rationally crazy beliefs, this is where it comes from. | |
| Oh, Jennifer Lawrence said this. | |
| This must be good. You can't think for yourself. | |
| All you do is look for whoever you perceive has the most power in a particular cultural or business or social environment and you conform to that person and call it virtue. | |
| That's what you've had to do because you've not been loved for who you are. | |
| You've not found the treasure of your own existence and you've not been given the emotional strength. | |
| To resist disapproval and therefore further and forward the cause of civilization and virtue in the future. | |
| So that's number one. Number two is, and this is particularly true for boys, but it's certainly there for girls as well. | |
| In general, lots of exceptions, but in general, there was sort of this thing in the past that women were great at raising children. | |
| Children, like toddlers, babies in early childhood, but then men were kind of needed to raise adults. | |
| And I can sort of understand that. | |
| You know, you have the baby in your womb, you suckle the baby, you become one with the baby, and this blurring of ego, which is necessary for good caregiving when you are a mom with a newborn, means it's very hard to be critical. | |
| It's very hard to be critical. | |
| And therefore, you either are not critical or hypercritical. | |
| You can't sort of find that balance. | |
| And you see, you know, I spend a lot of time around moms as a stay-at-home dad, and the moms are all like, yay, good job, excellent, well done, you know, and that's great. | |
| That's what you need when you're learning to walk and you're learning your first words and you're learning to spell. | |
| I mean, you need that kind of enthusiasm. | |
| And then there's kind of like a pivot, you know, like you walk over the seesaw and you go down the other side. | |
| There's a pivot where you need to be criticized for things that you have done wrong or done badly, where you could do better. | |
| You know, like some kid learning how to walk, you give him enthusiasm because he really wants to do it, and we assume he's doing the best that he can, and nobody's going to criticize him for failing because he's doing the best he can with what he's got. | |
| But there does come a time where laziness can kick in and inattention can kick in and you have some choice in the matter. | |
| And in my experience, mom's just not so great at that. | |
| And this is one of the reasons why male teachers are so popular and male teachers elicit the best work, certainly out of boys and to some degree out of girls. | |
| Now, the girls in particular, and I talked about this relatively recently, the girls in particular are marked way high by female teachers. | |
| There's a female in-group preference where boys areicky and girls are fantastic. | |
| And from the age of four onwards, according to some studies, girls think that they're better than boys, think that they're, you know, all of that and a ham sandwich on the side. | |
| And that is catastrophic. | |
| If you can breed vanity in people, then vanity is a false self structure that causes the collapse of the true self. | |
| It's like building a structure, like building girders around a building, and then the girders stay up, but the building collapses. | |
| And so if you can get people to think that they're great without causality, if you can get them to be vain, to not earn their self-respect or their value, then they're dependent upon the approval of authority because disapproval literally threatens existence. | |
| It feels like you're being wiped out of existence if somebody criticizes you. | |
| And of course, if you're told that you're perfect, then everyone who criticizes you must be wrong. | |
| Must be wrong. Must be wrong. | |
| Can't be right. It's mean. | |
| It's inappropriate. It's wrong. | |
| You must hate all women if you criticize anything about it. | |
| You understand, right? And this kind of vanity allows you to reject criticism, and it allows you to legitimately attack, in your own mind, legitimately attack people who criticize you because they're just being mean, they're being horrible, they're being hateful. | |
| Because you haven't learned how to handle criticism because your vanity has been puffed up by social promotion in grades, by not being allowed to fail, by not being penalized for showing, turning in late work, and often by not having a job anywhere close to the free market at all in your teenage years. | |
| So this does produce very, very fragile people. | |
| I don't know how much they can be strengthened. | |
| Certainly, opposition is important to help. | |
| You know, our souls grow like muscles through resistance. | |
| But if you can understand how this kind of stuff grows and in what way it grows... | |
| Then at least we can have, I have some sympathy for the people who have this kind of hysterical reactions to things. | |
| That doesn't mean that I'm not going to disagree with them because I have to commit to the truth, but it means I do have some sympathy for where it came from. |