Jan. 25, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:11
3975 LEFTISTS WANT TO BAN HAVING "BEST FRIENDS"
The regressive left's desire to end personal responsibility and shield people from the consequences of their actions has now extended to children having "best friends" Stefan Molyneux breaks down the recent article "Should Schools Ban Kids From Having Best Friends?" and highlights the lengths the left will go to prevent "inequality."Article: https://web.archive.org/web/20180125174458/https://health.usnews.com/wellness/for-parents/articles/2018-01-05/should-schools-ban-kids-from-having-best-friends?context=amp&__twitter_impression=trueYour 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
Friendship, of course, is one of the truly great joys in human existence.
And an article came out at health.usnews.com just a couple of days ago by a woman named Barbara Greenberg.
And I did check. She's Jewish, which we'll get to in a sec.
And the article is, should schools ban kids from having best friends?
And it goes like this, I'm always fascinated by trends, and I'm especially intrigued by the emerging trend among European schools, and now some American schools as well, to ban best friends.
That's right, some schools are attempting to ban the entire concept.
Of children having best friends.
This to me seems like a Herculean task.
The notion of choosing best friends is deeply embedded in our culture.
Nevertheless, there is, in my opinion, merit to the movement to ban having best friends.
Certainly in life, we all benefit from having close friends and confidants, those who really get us.
On the other hand, there is something dreadfully exclusionary occurring when a middle schooler tells the girl sitting next to her that she is best friends with the girl sitting in front of them.
Of course, this scenario plays out in a variety of ways, but child after child comes to my therapy office distressed when their best friend has now given someone else this coveted title.
Now this is interesting.
The navigation of friendships is really a powerful thing.
It's a very powerful thing. And I remember when I was, I guess I was really first noticed this when I went to boarding school when I was six.
And I remember this manipulation.
Friendship was a form of currency.
That was openly spoke about.
Like, do this for me.
And I even remember there was kind of a sing-song thing.
I'll be your best friend.
It was like, I'll be your best friend.
There was like a little Sam Cooke-style vocal flip at the end.
Like, do this for me, and I'll be your best friend.
And this offering of best friendship was part of a social currency.
And I learned a little bit about the market.
We would trade stuff, trade money and food.
And I remember having, I was really hungry for some food or some sweet, a sweet, and there was a little, it's called the tuck shop.
And I had a little gold plastic train engine that had come off the top of a pencil sharpener, and I wanted to sell it for half a penny so I could buy a little piece of candy.
Nobody wanted it, which, you know, paint was flaking off and it was pretty crappy.
It wasn't really much of a toy. And I do remember, though, this question of friendship and who is your best friend and how manipulative it can be to offer someone I'm your best friend and then take it away.
It is a very powerful way of controlling people and of course the pain of exclusion is important.
The pain of exclusion is very very powerful in the world and it is something that I think is very positive, very positive thing.
Because if a society can be run by ostracism then you don't need a big powerful state.
And of course, this is how society used to work.
So if a woman in the past, long before the welfare state and so on, if she got pregnant out of wedlock, she would be shunned, right?
No hymen, no diamond, right?
If she got pregnant out of wedlock, often the child would either be given up for adoption, there'd be a secret abortion, or the child would be born, and it would be pretended that the mother of the pregnant girl actually had a late pregnancy, and surprise, surprise, and and it would be pretended that the mother of the pregnant girl actually Because without the welfare state, the children, of course, are a huge liability financially, which is important.
I mean, that's what they are factually.
Far more resources, of course, than they produce in the short run, which means that if you want to have children, you need to, if you're a woman, you need to pair with someone who is going to be productive and resourceful and loyal and stable.
So without the welfare state, women choose virtuous men.
And when they have a welfare state, they don't need to.
And so they can indulge in silly, shallow lusts and so on.
And so what I think is interesting is that's just an example of how society used to be run through ostracism.
You know, that old saying that it could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
You know, so-and-so's house burnt down, and he didn't have insurance, and he's lost everything.
We'd better make sure we have insurance.
So-and-so didn't have health insurance back in the day when it was more free.
So-and-so didn't have health insurance, got sick, and is now bankrupt.
And therefore we better make sure we have health insurance.
You take away the downside, you take away negative things that happen to irresponsible people, and people then don't have to worry about things, right?
Like, so there's this thing in American healthcare, which is kind of crazy, which is that you can't be denied for pre-existing conditions.
Now that comes out of the fact that Very, very brief.
Second World War, companies weren't allowed to pay their employees more.
There were wage controls. And so they ended up just saying, well, we'll pay for your health care insurance instead.
And then your health care insurance was tied to your job.
So if you changed jobs, you might have lost your health insurance.
You were covered under... I mean, health insurance should follow you.
It should not be part of your job.
So they passed a rule, of course, a law which said you can't be denied for pre-existing conditions.
And, of course, all that happened was most people said, oh, wow, well, if I can't be denied for pre-existing conditions, then I'll just wait until I get sick, and then I will go and get some health insurance.
You know, I'll wait till my house is on fire, then I'll buy fire insurance, and then people wonder why insurance is so expensive.
So the capacity to ostracize.
You know, if somebody says, I'm really sick, I didn't buy insurance, but I want you to pay me, they ostracize and say, no, no, no, no, we can't do that.
The capacity to say no to people is foundational to society as a whole.
And if you are not allowed to say no to people, if you're forced to associate with people, if you're not allowed to reject people, then you end up with a bigger and bigger and bigger government because the natural self-correcting mechanism of voluntary association is...
Well, it's thwarted. It's not allowed to operate.
It's, you know, banning ostracism is like really, really low controls over price.
You know, like if gasoline is set at a nickel, a gallon or a nickel, a liter or whatever, people just go out and fill up like crazy on gas.
You end up with these massive shortages.
And so if you don't allow the free market of friendships and of association and of disassociation, if you don't promote the free market of inclusion and ostracism, then you take away a foundational mechanism for society to self-regulate.
To self-regulate.
Like when I was a kid, I was born in the 60s.
Oh, now there are police songs in my head.
One decade off.
But I was born in the 60s, so Welfast State was just coming in.
When I was a little kid, I remember there were these Jim Morrison-style bungalows down the back of where I lived in an apartment.
A flat.
And, you know, the guys were always sort of lounging around with their wife beating T-shirts on and undershirts, I suppose, and, you know, guts and beers and all that kind of stuff.
And unshaven and unfiltered cigarettes.
you know, the usual cliches of that.
And that was like, that's where the guys on welfare were and you just, you didn't go down there and they were considered to be kind of trashy and And of course, as more and more people end up on welfare, you get a market for people who have welfare dollars to spend, and then nobody wants to annoy the people on welfare because it might cut into your profits, right? When you unjustly transfer, through force, massive amounts of money to groups, you create a purchasing power within that group.
It's the same thing with single moms, with alimony, with child support and so on.
You're transferring a huge amount of money to women who make 80 to 90% of household purchasing decisions anyway.
So you're force-feeding all of this money to these people and then they end up as a huge base of consumers that everybody needs to satisfy and nobody wants to annoy.
So it becomes very, very difficult to criticize and it becomes impossible to ostracize.
So this question of ostracism If you do something that displeases the group, then they will reject you.
And that is interesting because...
Our relationship to the group is complex, especially if you think for yourself.
Your relationship to the group is complex.
Do you stand up against the group no matter what and then speak truth to the group, speak truth to the mob?
Then the mob may completely disavow you and ostracize you.
And then what happens is you lose, or at least you used to, lose your capacity to influence society, right?
So when it comes to the truth, it's measured doses, right?
It's true that they may need 10 pills, but...
You can't give them 10 pills all at once because it will be bad for everyone involved.
So you've got to stagger it out a little bit.
You've got to advance.
You've got to retreat. Like when it comes to the truth, it's a battle.
Like I wrote many years ago in a historical novel that I wrote a character I respected enormously named Knotted Bob said to a young girl who was raging against the local lord for his hypocrisy.
This is a historical novel in England.
He said, the truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
And it's very, very true. So the dance of the truth with the mob is complex.
And you can see people all the time, they succeed in that dance, they fail in that dance, either because they withdraw from certain topics that need to be talked about for fear of retaliation, or they go too far, provoke the mob's response, and then they have to, well, they get banned, ostracized, or whatever, right?
So it's a complex dance, the mob and the truth.
It is a stormy relationship, and it is, you know, the art of war when it comes to advancing the troops of truth across the trench-flaming, alligator-filled moat of lies that protect the mob from reality.
So... I think to learn this early, you know, do you say the truth to your friends?
If they say, do you think I'm fat?
You say, well, I think you've gained weight.
If they say, you know, I'm really good at drawing and they're not, you say, man, I really think you are.
It's complicated because if you give people too much truth, they will often recoil.
I mean, we have been programmed to have an allergy to basic facts these days.
And if you don't give people enough truth, right?
So if you give people too much truth, you may have no relationships.
If you don't give people enough truth, then you're not in the relationship.
You're just a kind of passive reflector of their own particular beliefs.
And then you're not there.
And then that's dissatisfying.
So this dance is really, really complicated.
And what's wrong with learning it early?
What's wrong with learning it early?
So she goes on to write, many of you will suggest that our kids should toughen up and become hardier if they learn to deal with the natural shifts in friendships that are inevitable.
Perhaps there is some truth to that.
I just love the way people say that.
Two and two make four.
Okay, maybe there's some truth to that, but let me give you an alternative hypothesis.
It's like, can you disprove that?
Can you, right? However, she says, I'm concerned about the bigger picture, which includes the pain associated with exclusion and the gentle comfort associated with inclusion.
Ah, the pain associated with exclusion.
Yeah, exclusion can be painful.
And you know what? Threatening people with exclusion in order to get them to conform is hideous, right?
So if you're friends with someone and that person is continually, you know, edgelording the friendship, you know, pushing the stakes up higher and saying, well, do this or I'm not your friend, do this or, you know, or they just passively like that you do something they don't like and they just don't return your call.
For two weeks, right? I mean, if it's really difficult and really painful because you want to figure out the people in your life who are using the threat of exclusion to control you, So that you can address that issue because it is not right to threaten people with ostracism just to get them to conform.
Now, this doesn't mean, like, if you have a rational argument about something and somebody rejects that rational argument that's very, very important to you and there's a split in values, the consequence of that is probably going to be a split in the relationship or a diminishment of the depth of the relationship.
So it's not like, well, you can never break relationships.
Of course you can. I mean, Forced association is a violation of freedom of association, but you should not use the threat of ending the relationship in order to force blind conformity to your preferences.
That is absolutely wrong.
And to me, like anytime anybody has ever edgelorded that friendship with me, I'm done.
Like the moment that somebody says, do this, or believe this, or accept this, or support this, or I'm ending my friendship with you, I was like, well, guess what?
You just did. Threats and love?
Sorry. Consequences and love?
Absolutely. Threats and love?
No. No, not at all.
And what's she concerned about?
She's concerned about the pain associated with exclusion.
So it's painful. I don't This avoidance of pain, I don't know.
There is this sort of theories that have been floating around since very early on in human society, which is that it's kind of like seven is a kind of cut-off age.
So in ancient Rome, if a couple split up, which became increasingly easy, no-fault divorce, became increasingly...
Common during the end of the Roman Republic.
Not really just a coincidence.
See, you've got to keep your cell phone contract.
You've got to pay your mortgage.
You've got to pay your visa bill.
Or, man, there's some serious negative consequences.
But you could just walk away from your marriage.
And everyone's like, you go, girl.
And usually it's the girl who is going 70% to 80% of the time.
And what's the number one reason? Dissatisfaction.
Dissatisfaction. I don't really like it.
You know, get a high Visa bill, so you write back and say, no, I'm not paying this.
I'm dissatisfied. I'm dissatisfied with some of my purchases.
I don't really like the interest rate that much, and this font is not working for me, so sorry, writing lipstick, dissatisfied, send it back.
Yeah, good luck with that. But you can nuke your entire family unit.
You can walk away from your, and everyone's like, you go, hey, you've got to find yourself.
You'd be in the pile called, anyway, let me not finish that right now.
That's for an So, yeah, pain.
I don't quite understand what it is to do, like, what's the problem with pain?
Pain is helpful. Pain is useful.
Pain is good. You want to try living a life without pain like a leper.
I don't mean like a moral leper, like somebody who literally has no nerve endings to detect pain on their extremities.
You've got to do this VSE. Thanks, Stephen Ordonaldson.
You've got to do this VSE, Visual Search of Extremities.
Find out if you've hurt yourself. If you cut yourself, you spend your whole life monitoring your extremities because you can't feel any pain.
Pain is like an essential course correction mechanism.
So this avoidance of pain goes back to this ancient thing.
Oh, I did loop back. Now I remember.
It goes back to this ancient thing.
So in ancient Rome, if a family split up, the women would get the kids until they were seven or so, and then the man would get the kids.
Because women were considered to be fantastic at raising toddlers, babies, infants and toddlers, and men were considered essential for raising adults.
And I think this Unity, right?
I mean, I didn't have a child grow within me and breastfeed from me and have that umbilical cord, that unity.
It's impossible for me to imagine just what a kind of symbiosis and unity that is between mother and child.
And it is essential when you're Kid is a baby, and your kid is a toddler, yes, they should not experience pain.
Of course not. You baby-proof your house.
You make sure that the handles on the stove are away from the edge.
Because they don't have the capacity to particularly learn, and they're not making any moral decisions.
And the age of reason, or the age of morality, is often considered around seven.
I think science has pushed that back a little bit before that.
But, of course, when your kids get older, yeah, they need to Figure out the consequences of their actions.
You know, a baby can't be rude.
An eight-year-old can. A toddler can't really be insensitive, but a nine-year-old can.
A baby can't be offensive, but a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old or a 15-year-old certainly can be.
A baby can't be verbally abusive.
A baby can't threaten.
But once you get morality, then you need the negative consequences of immoral behavior.
Or you need the negative consequences of moral behavior.
And you learn to do the balance between short-term gain and long-term gain, right?
So you will always, for most relationships, you will gain something valuable in the moment through appeasement.
But you lose something valuable in the long run called integrity, called identity, called actually having a relationship.
You know, a mirror is not a relationship, and if you're just reflecting back to people what they want to hear, you're not there, and you're being manipulative, and you're not helping them.
Everything you do is great, you know.
And again, you want, for toddlers, everything they do is great.
You know, they draw a human being like that little lollipop thing.
Great! It's got the right number of arms and legs.
Good job. You are angry in training.
But when they get older, well, not everything they do is great.
Like, you don't say to your kid, you say to your kid when they first walk, you know, great job, hug, and, you know, but you don't say to your kid who's 10 every time they, oh, good job at the stairs, good job walking down the hall.
I mean, it would be ridiculous, right? So learning to navigate the positive and negative of the social world is very important.
So what's wrong with the pain associated with exclusion?
What's wrong with being excluded?
And the funny thing is too, I don't know where this woman's politics are, it doesn't really matter, but Focusing on whether kids have best friends or not.
I mean, if you're focused on the pain of exclusion and ostracism, then shouldn't you be spending a lot of time criticizing the leftist groups that routinely target people for exclusion and destruction and try and nuke their careers and destroy their reputations and cut their source of income and attack their advertisers?
I mean, shouldn't you really be focusing on that?
I wonder if this woman has written about Twitter and...
It's exclusion of white Christian conservatives from its platform.
It's suppression and shadow banning of that group and other groups.
Well, she hasn't, right?
So it's very touchy-feely, and it's a very early childhood thing.
And you don't reject a baby.
But as your children get older, you have to reject certain behaviors of theirs that are...
Because that's called having responsibility, right?
And they get to do the same to you.
So she goes to say, what do I, as a psychologist, think of this trend where schools are banning best friends?
I have thought about it long and hard, and I say, bring it on.
Let me tell you what brought me to this controversial conclusion.
I'm a huge fan of social inclusion.
The phrase best friend is inherently exclusionary.
Among children and even teens, best friends shift rapidly.
These shifts lead to emotional distress and would be significantly less likely if our kids spoke of close or even good friends rather than best friends.
Also, if kids have best friends, does that also imply that they have worst friends?
I don't quite understand that.
A focus on having best friends certainly indicates there's an unspoken ranking system and where there is a ranking system there are problems.
I see kids who are never labeled best friends and sadly they sit alone at lunch tables and often in their homes while others are with their best friends.
Right. Okay.
So let's talk about a lot of this.
So it's interesting because she says as a psychologist.
Now, psychologist is an exclusionary term.
Like if you haven't trained, if you haven't taken the educational steps, if you haven't taken the exams, if you maybe mentored or whatever, you can't call yourself a psychologist.
Okay. So it's just kind of weird.
Being exclusionary is bad, but I'm a psychologist, which is an exclusionary term.
Again, it's not hugely important, but it's just kind of interesting to me.
And best friends shift rapidly, yeah, because kids are learning how to negotiate The very complex web of truth, honesty, conformity, subjugation.
You know, if someone's making a bad decision, are you supportive?
Do you do tough love?
If your only goal is to never cause your friends any pain, then they're flying blind without social feedback as to how they could correct course.
If you are obviously focused on causing your friends pain, you're a monstrous sadist or whatever, right?
It's complicated, and because things are complicated, just banning stuff isn't going to help.
It isn't going to help at all.
And if kids have best friends, does that also imply that?
So any ranking system is a problem, right?
Where there is a ranking system, there are problems.
This is the massive egalitarianism that goes on.
I don't know if it's the arts degree or maybe feminist or maybe, I don't know, it doesn't really matter.
But in general, this is horrible.
The pyramid of meritocracy is anathema to some people.
Where there is a ranking system, there are problems.
Why? Why?
There's a ranking system all over the place in the world.
You can't have any preferences for people.
Does that mean that women have to go out with whoever asks them?
If a woman is asked out by some troll, does she have to go out with him because otherwise that would be exclusionary?
Like you've got to go out with everyone?
Don't think women have ranking systems about how attractive men are or men have ranking systems about women?
Is that bad? I don't know.
It's just kind of weird. Like she gets an article published, that means everyone else doesn't get an article published.
Is that a ranking system?
Well, of course it is. But it's good for her, I suppose.
What about everyone else who submitted an article who didn't get published?
What about their bad feelings?
You understand? But this is nothing to do with the kids, you understand?
This is nothing to do with the kids.
This is all to do with the moms.
This is all to do with the moms.
Because when the mom's children are excluded, the mom feels pain.
And the mom wants that pain to go away.
Now, there's two ways she can make that pain.
There's three ways. One is she could stop caring so much about what other people think of her kid.
Number two, she could figure out what's going wrong with her parenting to the point where her kid has no friends.
And then she could try and figure out, maybe the kid's in the wrong environment.
Maybe they're in a terrible government school surrounded by terrible people.
Nobody wants to be their kid's friend because he's a good guy.
Or maybe he's just socially awkward and she needs to work on helping him smooth out his social skills.
Maybe he grew up without a father and doesn't know how to relate to the boy universe of kids who grew up with fathers.
I mean, who knows?
But it would be self-critical.
It would be like, okay, well, so something's gone wrong because nobody wants to be my kid's friend.
So what can I do to change this, to make it better, to help it out?
And that would be, yeah, well, taking responsibility.
So... I don't know.
That may be a challenge.
Or the other thing is you say, well, my kid not having a best friend or not being best friends to another kid causes me pain so we just get to ban best friends.
That is pretty bad.
That's pretty bad. She says, my hope is that if we encourage our kids to broaden their social circles, they will be more inclusive and less judgmental.
The word best encourages judgment and promotes exclusion.
And so what? What's wrong with that?
Encourages judgment and promotes exclusion.
What's wrong with that at all? I am not, however, an advocate of encouraging kids to have huge groups of friends.
This is the sort of false Aristotelian mean.
And it's designed to sort of sink you into this swamp of goo.
There's this fog of, well, you know, it's a compromise.
It's somewhere in the middle, right?
I mean, to take a silly example, you know, it's like, Well, some people say that we should, you know, axe murder kittens.
Some people say there should be no kittens.
The truth is somewhere in between.
It's like, no, it's just this sort of rank middleism is horrible and is not an argument, and it's a misuse of the Aristotelian mean.
The Aristotelian mean says that, you know, yeah, okay, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but not morally.
That's just in terms of, like, continuums, right?
So he says, well, an excess of courage is foolhardiness.
You know, like, Wonder Woman without female privilege.
Wonder Woman without the state.
So if you go rushing into enemy battle and you get...
That's too much courage. It's foolhardy.
And it's too little courage and you're a cowardice.
You need some balance. Too much anger and you're just like a raging lunatic.
Too little anger and you're a passive soy boy.
So you want to be...
So, you know, as far as the balance and all this, you know, you want to...
You want to love your pets.
You just don't want to love your pets.
So, when it comes to love, right, you want to be attached, you want to love someone, but you don't want to obsess and stalk and be jealous and check all they're doing.
I mean, you need the middle.
You don't want to be indifferent, but you don't want to be obsessive.
You want to tell the truth to the mob, but not to the point where the mob sticks your head on a Spike Game of Thrones style.
So, this is complicated stuff.
But this, well, we should ban...
Best friends, but I'm not saying that kids should have huge groups of friends, right?
So again, it's just like this false middle.
Well, what about the principle? What's wrong with letting children choose who the hell they want to be friends with?
What's wrong with, what are you going to police?
What children say, you can't say the word best friend!
Massive censorship. What the hell is the First Amendment for kids?
Where's free speech for kids? You're going to say they can't say the word best friend?
You're going to police their syllables?
Are you kidding me? What do you think that does?
Well, of course, the whole point is to relieve the mothers of any discomfort they might have for having unpopular children.
It's a socialist subsidy of friendship towards the unpopular kids.
And what it means is that the kids aren't getting feedback on the fact that they're unpopular.
And what does this mean? What is this going to mean?
What it means, of course, is that the kids grow up with this massive subsidy of, you know, when you've got to bring Bobby to your birthday party and you can't call Sally your best friend and you've got to blah blah blah.
Well, what happens is they then don't correct Their social skills at all.
They don't fix, they don't change, they don't improve, they don't self-reflect, nothing gets improved upon.
So then what happens is, with this massive subsidy of social engagement, they end up launched out into the world where there's no school board to ban words.
They get no First Amendment, so to speak, and then they get launched out, they get no free speech, they get launched out into a world, but there is free speech.
And they're completely unprepared.
It is so cruel. But the important thing is, appease the moms in the moment.
Come on, we all know it's the moms who care more about...
My friend doesn't have...
My kid doesn't have any best friends.
Right? So, yeah.
Oh, but you don't have huge groups of friends.
It's like... I don't know.
I want them fine to not thrown in prison.
Because, you know, thrown in prison would be crazy.
It's like, well, in fact, there is research, she says, suggesting that adolescents who have a small group of close friends fare better emotionally than those who are part of a larger social circle.
Hmm. Wow.
I wonder if she's written a lot of articles about how terrible and toxic a single mother environment is for most children.
Because that's...
I wonder if she's written a lot about IQ. Because, you know, research is so important.
She says, so what is a parent to do with these attempts to turn best friend culture upside down?
First, you should certainly not forbid your child from having contact with her best friend.
I'm sorry I shouldn't laugh. Well, because that would be crazy.
Forbidding your child from having contact with her best friend.
That would be nuts. Nor should you march into your child's school and tell the administration that they will not and should not attempt to bring this new trend into the school.
Instead, take a moment and breathe.
See, she's basically saying, don't panic, right?
So the very idea, this is how much, you know, if you want to figure out what it's like to be a woman, if you're not a woman, you know, take all of your stimuli and turn it up to 11, you know, spinal tap style.
Take particularly negative stimuli.
Like women score way higher than men on neuroticism, right?
And, you know, it's good and it's bad, right?
It has its strengths and its weaknesses.
But if you want to know what it's like to be a woman, just every stimuli, just dial it way up.
Way up. And you'll have some sense of the overstimulation that sometimes...
Take a moment and breathe. Take a moment and breathe.
Okay, but breathing is not an argument, right?
Okay, I hope that they haven't not been breathing because that would be kind of fatal.
So then consider making a bit of a shift to your vocabulary and talk to your children about the importance of having close friends.
Put less emphasis on popularity and having best friends.
Less emphasis on popularity and having best friends.
Well, there's networking in life.
Being popular is important.
I mean, if nobody liked me, I wouldn't have a show.
If nobody liked what I talked about or the way I presented or anything like that, other than the, you're so arrogant, because you said smart people stay up late, which statistically is true.
It's just bell curve anyway.
But... Put less emphasis on popularity and having best friends.
In other words, become an artificial environment that's a continuation of the womb so that your children don't have to deal with voluntary relationships in the real world.
They don't have to thrust and parry in the social dance of friendship and conformity.
Create an artificial world for them that has much less negative feedback than the world they're going to go into in the real world.
And that way, what?
You get to escape some discomfort in the moment and some change and some responsibility at the expense of really crippling your kids' social skills in the long run.
So, great.
Think of all the wonderful opportunities you may have missed if you socialized exclusively with only one friend.
Now, they get false dichotomy, right?
I mean, nobody's saying your best friend could be your only friend, but anyway.
Does this mean, is she like against monogamy then?
Because monogamy is definitely having only one partner for your life, right?
I mean, maybe she's in polygamy, I don't know.
But the interesting thing too, like, so I mentioned she was Jewish, and exclusion is bad.
Now, there are some religions or some belief systems that There's no test to get in.
I mean, you know, Islam you can convert to with a couple of sentences.
You can convert to Christianity, no problem.
You can become an objectivist, a libertarian, you name it.
You can declare yourself those things.
Judaism, though, it's a big deal if you're not born into it.
Like, it's a big deal to convert.
It's like years, you've got to be examined, you've got to be cross-examined, you've got to learn a whole bunch of stuff, foreign languages and Torah, and so it's a big deal to convert to Judaism.
And I just, when it comes to inclusiveness is good, exclusion is bad.
I just wonder if she's written about Judaism as a whole.
But I guess to ask that question, well, that's pretty much to answer it, right?
Sven Molyneux, thank you so much for watching and for listening.
Please don't forget, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help me out with the show.
