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Jan. 28, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:18
3979 HOT OR NOT?
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You know, once you understand that we are biological organisms seeking to maximize our access to resources pretty much by whatever means necessary, although the most effective way to gather resources as the modern mammal is to invoke morality And thus gain access to the enormous financial redistributionist power of the modern state.
Everything kind of makes sense.
You look at genetics, you look at IQ, you look at biology, you look at resource acquisition, and what we call that a politics and often culture and even religion to some degree, it all falls into place.
It's like taking the Earth out of the center of the solar system, putting in the Sun, everything clicks into place.
The retrograde motion of Mars is understood and The math becomes so much simpler.
So there's a study, I'm bringing something fairly unique to this, but there's a study that's floating around at the moment, I'll put a link to it below, that reports that if you are physically attractive, more physically attractive, then you are more likely to be a conservative.
And if you're less physically attractive, you're more likely to be a liberal, a democrat, A socialist, a redistributionist on the left and so on.
And so the question is why?
Now there's one answer which we'll talk about on the surface and then there's another answer which is much deeper and more powerful which will make tragic aspects and elements of the world make terrifying sense.
First of all, we all know the general correlation that conservative women tend to be more attractive than liberal women, than left women.
I'm just going to use right and left.
It's a little easier for our cross-Atlantic audiences.
So if you're on the right and you're a woman, you're more likely to be attractive than if you're on the left and a woman.
That's a general trend that's been observed.
The reason for that biologically is pretty simple, which is if you are an attractive woman, you will gain more resources from a man than from the state.
Ka-ching! Your daddy Warbucks comes with a ring, not with a voting booth.
And so, that makes perfect sense.
Now, if you are a woman who is dependent upon a man, For your resources, then you want a free market, right?
The more attractive the woman in general, the more intelligent and able the man is who's able to marry her, right?
You know, this is the old... I remember a boss of mine many years ago said, how do you tell a billionaire From the back.
And it was some fat, schlubby guy with this, you know, hot blonde by his side.
And, you know, the old Sam Cooke song, I guess a Gershwin, it's a Gershwin song.
Summertime, your daddy's rich and your mama's good looking.
That correlation many, many years ago set me on that path because it just seems like such a pregnant line, so to speak.
So if you have a lot of resources, then you will gain a physically attractive woman.
That generally is the way that it goes.
And so if you are an attractive woman, you want an environment where the man you choose can have the most capacity to gain resources, which is the free market.
You can choose the most able man, the most competent man, the most intelligent man, the richest man.
So you want a free market. Now, if you're an unattractive woman, you still want resources because biological imperative for your children, for your offspring.
It doesn't really matter if you end up having kids or not.
It's like saying, well, I don't want kids, therefore I don't have a sex drive.
It's like, well, I don't want kids, therefore I don't have a drive for additional resources if I'm a woman.
Now, if you are an unattractive woman, then in weighing the difference between the resources you can gain from a man Versus the resources you can gain from the state, well, you'll gain more resources from the state than from a man.
I got a whole presentation called The Welfare Cliff, which we'll link to below.
Basically, if you're a woman with a couple of kids on welfare, you are gaining the equivalent of $65,000 to $70,000 worth.
of resources from the state just by having children.
So, if you're unattractive, you're more likely to vote for the left.
If you are attractive in a woman, you're more likely to vote for the right because you want a freer market, you want more capacity for the intelligent man you've married to gain resources for your children.
We understand all of that fairly easily, right?
Now, if you're a man and you're more attractive, then you probably prefer the free market because more attractive men tend to do better in the free market than less attractive men for a variety of reasons.
And there's tons of exceptions, but it's in general a trend.
So if you're an attractive man, you know, tall, handsome, tall, dark and handsome, whatever you want to call your particular level of attractiveness, then you want a free market because you'll gain more resources by leveraging your attractiveness, your charisma in the free market than you will.
By running to the government for your resources.
So again, this is one of these basic things that we kind of understand.
Now, I was not satisfied, not satisfied with that explanation.
So then the question is, Is it possible that it's correlation and not causation?
In other words, is attractiveness a proxy for something else?
And as it turns out, it kind of is.
And it's very, very interesting.
Let me tell you how it goes.
Let's just look at intelligence, right?
The failure of humanity to comprehend The bell curve, right?
There's a bell curve of distribution.
It's the same in height, it's the same in intelligence, it's the same in attractiveness, musical ability, you name it, right?
And so there is a bell curve and it explains why some people are rich and some people are poor.
It explains why some people are tall and some people are short.
It explains why some people do really well in education and some people don't.
I mean, there's lots of different ways and things that it explains.
And you've got a whole load of hyper-egalitarian philosophies that pretend That say the only reason someone is rich is because he's exploiting the workers.
He's pretty much the same, but he's just exploiting the workers.
And if you understand that, you know, 50 to 80% and in later life, it's about 80%, 80% of intelligence is pure genetics.
You can't earn it.
You can't will it. You can't make it.
You can't educate your way into it.
It's just... It's like, you know, thinking that you can study more and make yourself smarter is like thinking that you can eat more and make yourself taller.
Well, sure, after a bare minimum, You just end up not so much taller, but wider.
So, this bell curve is very real, and the way that it works regarding intelligence and the free market is this, that income is very closely correlated to intelligence, which means that the smarter you are, the more money you're likely to make, which of course makes sense.
So, if you are more intelligent, You want a free market because you're going to be able to leverage your intelligence into resources the best in a free market versus a centrally controlled market.
It doesn't really matter how smart you are anymore in Venezuela, which has got its inflation running, I think, north of 8,000% or something like this.
It's so chaotic. That you can't plan, right?
What is intelligence? It's the capacity to see beyond the horizon of tomorrow and defer gratification, understand the consequences of your actions, put disparate thoughts together into productive unities and so on, and That doesn't matter when you're in a situation of socialized or socialism and chaos and where it's all political pull and who you know and there's a certain amount of sort of raw bonobo dopamine based hierarchy climbing cunning that goes on but it's not the same as the kind of intelligence that really makes and gains resources in the free market.
So if you're smart, if you've got higher IQ, you want the free market because it's going to give you the most resources.
Now if you're not smart, Right?
If instead of having an IQ of like 120, you have an IQ of 85 or 90, well, then you want socialism.
You want the left. You want the Democrats.
You want a big, giant redistribution estate.
Why? Because you can't compete as well in the free market.
And so you want the state to give you resources from the smart people because you can't compete with the smart people.
And it's funny because it's so easy to cure and it's just tragic and horrible.
It's so easy to cure people's delusions about socialism or the left or the welfare state.
It's very, very easy. All you do is this.
You come in to say, Professor Molyneux's class, if I were a professor, and you come in and I would say, okay, This is a course on X and here's how it's going to work.
So you'll work as hard as you can and what we're going to do is we're going to take everyone's marks and we're going to put them into a big bag and then we're going to redistribute all of the marks out evenly so that everyone gets the same marks.
Now, that's real redistributionist at almost the communist level, but let's say you only want 50%.
Okay, well, we're going to take 50% of everyone's marks, we're going to put them in a big bag, and then we're going to redistribute the marks out to everyone else.
We're going to tax at very high levels the very smartest people, and we're going to subsidize at very high levels the least able or the least hardworking people or the least smart people.
Now, if you came into a class and that happened, and I've asked this to kids who were like five and six years old, and they completely understand.
You can do it with Halloween candy, you know, like kids who go the furthest and get the most candy, we're going to take their candy, put it in a big pile, we're going to redistribute it out to all the kids who stayed home playing Minecraft, and everybody understands.
Like, instinctively, we kind of get what happens, right?
And so you'd say, I don't know, we had...
100 students who got an average of 75% last year, so that gives us, what, 7,500 marks to hand out, and we're going to do it, right?
We all know what would happen if you're going to take people's marks, put them in a big bag, and distribute them back out evenly is that people aren't going to bother working that much.
So you won't have 7,500 marks, so to speak, to hand out this year.
I mean, everybody will rely on everyone else.
The hardest people won't want to work.
The dumbest people will work even less, and you'll end up with nothing to redistribute.
And in a sense, everybody will starve to death on marks.
That's what we call Marxism.
It's school marks, not call marks.
But we all understand that this is very simple.
Five-year-olds can understand it, the fact that it's gone on for so long.
It needs to be explained. And the reason that it's gone on for so long is that if you're less intelligent, you want the government to go and take resources from more intelligent people and give them to you.
Why? Because we are resource-acquiring monkeys with very little body hair.
Well, Italian construction workers excluded.
So, I think that's the one group you can still make jokes about.
No, probably not. Oh well, give me your offense in the comments below.
It's not the first time, it won't be the last.
So we can understand this.
It's the same thing with political freedoms.
Like, if you're not smart, you don't really care about freedom of speech.
Because you're not going to have an original idea your whole life.
You're not going to get passionately wedded to an ideal or an abstraction and so what does freedom of speech matter to you if you've got an IQ of 85?
It doesn't matter that much.
In fact, you kind of can't compete in the battles of verbal agility and logical reasoning and evidence gathering and debate and you can't really compete.
You still want your way because there's a Dunning-Kruger effect where when you're dumb you don't know that you're dumb and you certainly can't evaluate.
The utterances of smart people if you're not smart yourself.
And it's not just intelligence, it's skill.
You know, give me a video of some guy performing surgery.
I don't know if he's doing a good job or not.
I guess I can figure it out of the patient flatlines.
But even then, he might have just taken on a really difficult case and done the very best.
I can't judge surgeons because I don't know what the hell is surgery.
A good surgery or bad surgery has no knowledge or skill in that.
So if you're not smart, you think you're smart, and you think that smart people are kind of dumb, and you want to shut them down through free speech restrictions because you can't compete with them.
And so you want to take their free speech rights away, which gives you more prominence in talking because you're not going to offend, you're not going to startle anyone with originality or good arguments or take on controversial positions and so on.
If you're not smart, you don't really care that much about freedom of speech.
You don't really care that much about property rights.
In fact, if you're not smart and there's a big redistribution of state around, you want violations of property rights because resources are going to be accrued and created by smart people.
You want those resources for your children.
And so you want their property rights to be violated.
Now, smart people have an interest In keeping their property rights, and one of the things that smart people do that's not smart is, in a sense, bribe through the welfare state and unemployment insurance and old age pensions, you bribe people who are less conscientious, you bribe people who plan less so that they don't revolt and take your stuff by force, you know, Lenin style.
That's Vladimir, not John.
I think I look like one.
I can't remember which one it might be.
So this is why when the population dumbs down you begin to lose abstract freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of association, you begin to lose property rights because the state creates a very distortionist mechanism for resource acquisition in that you can vote for resources rather than go out and earn or create those resources.
So if we understand all of this then we can put it all together in one big massive supernova of illumination Bowtie, and we can look at the basic realities.
My question was, what if, just what if, what if it's not physical attractiveness fundamentally that is driving people's focus on free markets and property rights and small government, freedom of speech, all of the sort of classical liberal ideals?
What if physical attractiveness is a proxy for something else?
Those of you who watch this show for a little while know that I'm not entirely unacquainted or uninterested in the question of what's called G, raw human intelligence, which can be measured fairly well through IQ tests and, in a sense, through the market as well.
Now, the question fundamentally becomes, why is something or someone physically attractive?
Why? Is it because they have a freckled forehead and a scraggly beard?
Well, obviously, that's job one.
But no, seriously, why is symmetry important?
Why is lustrous hair? Why is the right hip-to-waist ratio?
Why is the narrow waist and the broad shoulders for men and so on?
And why is this attractive?
Healthy teeth? Well, of course, we understand that physical attractiveness is a proxy for reproductive fitness.
Why are obese women Unattractive because obese women have irregular menstrual cycles, have difficulty getting pregnant.
The babies are more likely to be born obese or to be born with a predilection towards obesity.
It's one of these epigenetic switches that goes on if you become obese.
They have difficulty cleaning themselves, less healthy as a whole.
So it is There's reasonable, same thing if you're too skinny, right?
Like if you're too skinny, I guess you look fine in a Christian Dior waterfall dress, but as far as reproductive fitness goes, men are turned off by obesity and by extreme thinness, also because women who are very thin, anorexics know this, right?
If you're too thin, your body loses its capacity to have menstrual cycles, pregnancy becomes hard, you don't have enough Body fat to help feed the baby while you're sleeping and it's a huge, a huge problem.
Of course, men prefer young women to older women because younger women of adult age are more fertile and more likely to bring a healthy child to term than women who are older.
So, I mean, we all understand this.
Genetic, like, one of the big attractiveness factors is evenness of the features.
Like, if you can slice the face vertically in two and photocopy it on, like, side to side or have a mirror up against it, that's considered to be very attractive because that indicates Good, healthy genetics.
You know, people with different sized eyes and, you know, whatever, just flappy ears or one flappy ear, one non-flappy ear.
It indicates, I mean, I guess, British or European royal family levels of inbreeding slash Middle East.
So this question of reproductive fitness is very important.
So my question is, since intelligence, certainly in the modern world, has become increasingly important for reproductive fitness, Could it be that there's a relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence?
Very, very interesting question.
Now, the conjecture would be something like this.
It's not directly physical attractiveness that leads you to want a small government and a free society.
It's not physical attractiveness.
It's just that physical attractiveness is a proxy For intelligence.
In other words, being smarter is having good genes.
Having sort of facial symmetry and a pleasing body shape and all of that is also indicative of good genes, you know, healthy teeth, lustrous hair, clear eyes, you know, clear skin, all of that stuff.
Now, if that's the case, then the closer relationship is not between physical attractiveness and a thirst for the free market, but intelligence and a thirst for the free market.
Now, another hypothesis would be something like this, that rich men tend to marry beautiful women, so that means that they're bringing in physically attractive genes into their gene pool.
If it's a boy, that's helpful.
That's helpful because physically attractive people do better in society as a whole.
There's a premium, you pay more.
I mean, as a webcaster, I've never heard of this phenomenon.
So if it's a woman, then she's going to be more likely to attract a rich man if she herself is physically beautiful, and therefore she's going to have more resources for the offspring and so on.
And so this handsome prince thing has a certain amount of cachet to it.
So that reality is kind of important.
Now, if rich men, intelligent men, are marrying beautiful women, then you would expect there over time to be a positive correlation between intelligence and beauty.
In other words, if somebody was more physically attractive, you would then expect them also to be more intelligent.
And I would argue that it is intelligence that drives our interest in the free market.
And there's some significant indications for this.
There are estimates, and it's tough to do, but there are estimates that the average IQ in ancient Athens was 125.
Now we're south, I think, of 100 in the West now as the result largely of third world immigration.
There's some indications that in the 19th century in England, I mean, people were ferociously intelligent.
This is based on reaction tests, which are somewhat correlated to IQ. IQ replicates down at the level of reaction times.
It's astonishing. You watch East Asians who have the second highest IQs on average in the world.
Watch them on those like dance machines at Palladium and the blurred legs like a Flintstones car racer and you're like, okay, well, I can't replicate that.
So, or I guess Obama catching a fly.
Who knows? So, this idea that the free market was developed or freer ideas were developed or greater civilizations were developed during a time of high IQ, well, that is quite common.
One of the A big problem in the West, why the West stagnated for a long time, was that through Catholicism, the priests and the monks, who were often the most intelligent people who could learn multiple languages and had great verbal skills and dexterity, the smartest men in Christendom, prior to Martin Luther and the Reformation, the smartest men were not allowed to breed, right?
They were celibate. As priests, they were celibate, of course, as monks.
Compare and contrast this to say the rabbis in Jewish communities, those rabbis had more children on average because they were venerated and they were super smart and so on.
And this is why you see, on average, Jewish Ashkenazi Jew, Jewish IQ rising by a third every generation.
So after a couple of hundred years, you have the 15-point gain on whites and about the 10-point gain on East Asians for Ashkenazi Jews.
It's just who gets to reproduce.
And of course we can understand that the welfare state by taking money from smarter people and giving it to less smart people is fundamentally skewing the genetics of the entire society.
And people didn't know this really.
We kind of knew it instinctively, but people didn't know this explicitly or scientifically.
I don't think the knowledge had not been developed.
The human genome hadn't been mapped.
The work led by the Chinese on the mapping of the genetics of human intelligence was still decades away.
So when the welfare state came in, people thought, well, let's just help the poor out.
At least that was sort of the surface story and the reality that you're fundamentally changing the genetics of the society, that it is eugenics and genetic engineering at the most fundamental and wide-reaching levels is One of these unbelievably bitter lessons in history that I hope we can learn before it's all too late.
So, to the hypothesis, what if physical attractiveness is a proxy for intelligence?
And it's intelligence that is correlated more so.
Well, one of the tests would be something like this.
What is the relationship between intelligence Physical attractiveness and intelligence.
If there is a relationship and if it's a positive relationship then it's certainly likely that intelligence drives more a thirst or desire for small government and free markets and free speech and so on because if you're intelligent you can make the most use of these and you will get More resources in a free market than you will through the welfare state or through government work or whatever.
So I did some research and I found some information.
I love being right all in one day.
So here's some notes.
And this is a study that was done in the United Kingdom.
So very briefly, in the United Kingdom, attractive children are more intelligent by 12.4 IQ points.
Okay, now that is...
Huge. That is a huge difference.
That's close to an entire standard deviation.
So the difference between, say, whites and Hispanics in America is about this, right?
From about 100 to about 87, 88.
And the difference between whites and blacks is about 15 points, right from 100 to 85.
So this is astonishing.
In the United Kingdom, attractive children are more intelligent by 12.4 IQ points.
That is astonishing.
.381. Incredible.
Now, in the United States, the correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness is somewhat smaller, but it is still certainly and solidly there.
So the association between intelligence and physical attractiveness is actually stronger among men than among women in both nations, and they've controlled for social class, body size, health, and so on.
So attractive NCDS respondents, says the report, are significantly more intelligent than unattractive NCDS respondents.
Attractive NCDS respondents have the mean IQ of 104.23.
Whereas unattractive respondents have a mean IQ of 91.81.
That's a 12.42 IQ point difference.
And a correlation coefficient of R equals 0.381, which is pretty large for any survey data.
Now, here's something that's interesting.
Interesting to the point of blowing my mind, at least.
The correlation between physical attractiveness and intelligence In this NCDS is exactly the same down to the third decimal point as the correlation between intelligence and education.
Isn't that fascinating?
So the correlation between physical attractiveness and intelligence is 0.381.
And the correlation between intelligence and education is 0.381.
I mean... Still believe we have free will.
Still believe we have free will. I mean, this is incredible.
I mean, yes, I'm sure there's some coincidence, but...
So the survey says, everyone knows that intelligence and education are very highly correlated.
What they don't know is that physical attractiveness is equally highly correlated with intelligence as education is.
So in other words, if you want to estimate someone's intelligence without giving them an IQ test, you would do just as well to base your estimate on their physical attractiveness Let me just read that again because it's really, really important.
Now, here's the...
It's not a huge difference, but I wanted to mention the gender difference.
The association between physical attractiveness and intelligence is stronger among men than among women.
In the NCDS sample, the attractive women have a mean IQ of 103.64, and the unattractive women have a mean IQ of 92.25.
The difference between them is 11.39.
This mean difference implies a correlation coefficient of r equals 0.351.
I mean, that's astonishing.
For the men, the attractive men in this sample have a mean IQ of 105, and the unattractive men have a mean IQ of 91.39.
The difference between them is 13.61, which is almost one full standard deviation in the IQ distribution.
So, with the men, the difference between attractive and unattractive It's 13.61, which is almost a full standard deviation.
And this correlation coefficient of R equals 0.414 correlation, which is very large in any survey data.
Now that is astonishing.
I've often thought that it would be really helpful.
It would never happen, but it would be really helpful if we just had our IQs printed on our foreheads.
Or if Our head size correlated to our intelligence in some obvious manner.
I mean, we see it with height, right? We look at all these NBA players, the basketball players, and we say, wow, those guys are really tall, you know?
And we don't sit there and say, well, it's weird that there aren't more Chinese people in the NBA, because, you know, Danish people are tall, Chinese people on average.
Tend to be shorter. And so, because we can see the height very clearly, and it's the same thing with physical attractiveness.
We don't wonder why some, you know, ugly fat person is not a runway model.
We look at that, we can see that, you know, immediately imprinted.
Now, there are proxies for IQ, and those proxies are, you know, verbal ability, they are math ability, they are income a lot of times.
There's a wide variety of things that are kind of proxies for IQ. Or intelligence, so G. G is a better way of putting it.
And so, but what we do is we look at that with, oh, there's a lot of really rich people, and we say, oh, well, they must be rich because they've stolen from everyone else.
It's the same. They just stole the pie.
They stole the slices of pizza pie.
Everyone else has left hungry. As opposed to, If we had their IQs printed, we'd see that the rich people often have higher IQs and the less rich or the poor people have lower IQs.
What's interesting as well, and this is a bit right on the edge of where the data supports, so, you know, take this with a grain of salt, but what's interesting is that the unattractive women have a mean IQ of 92.25.
Now, single mothers, it is reported, have IQs in the low to mid-90s.
Now, that's fascinating.
Because if you're not a smart woman, then it makes more sense for you.
You'll get more resources, more money, by having children and going on welfare.
Whereas smart women won't want to do that because they'll get more money if there's a free market.
And if they either make the money themselves in the free market as smart women, or they marry a man if they want to stay home with kids, and their husband will be very smart.
And their husband We'll end up making more money in the free market.
So either way, smart women want free markets and less smart women want government redistribution.
Now, again, since intelligence is so genetic, if we are paying, in a sense, less intelligent women have more babies, we're simply Ending up with less, well, more or less intelligent people in the world.
I wish that was a better way of putting that. You understand, right?
We're having the lower IQ genetics photocopy at the expense of the higher IQ genetics.
And this is one reason why everything is going so poorly.
This is why the smart people are having fewer babies.
To one degree or another, and the less intelligent people are having more babies.
So it's not that the birth rate is low, it's that the birth rate is skewed.
Because intelligence is genetic, the way that it would work in the free market, because this is important to understand, the free market is for the completely peaceful, non-coercive, general and genetic improvement of humanity because In a free market, if you're smarter, you gather more resources, like the Jewish rabbis.
And you have more children, because you can afford more children.
Now, there is a battle, I understand, right?
Because there's been this big war against motherhood, like, oh, you're too smart to be dependent on a man, or there's this weird belief that motherhood can somehow be replicated by often minimum wage foreigners in some institutional fluorescent light.
We're Lord of the Flies, lowest common denominator, kids sociopath rule.
Daycares and schools and so on, but being a parent, and I hope that I've helped push back against this nonsense considerably, being a parent is a very, very big deal.
Being a parent is very demanding intellectually.
Being a good parent, I mean, being a parent who hits and yells and so on, screams at their kids, it doesn't take any, it takes about the same level of skill as pounding meat to tenderize it, but if you want to be a negotiating parent, if you want to help stimulate Intelligence and curiosity in your children, then being a good parent is a very big challenge.
It's kind of funny how this is viewed from the outside.
There was an article on my recent appearance at the Night for Freedom, where this writer, she was writing and saying that I, Stéphane, have been a recluse.
You know, it's like, well, I've been raising my child.
I've been a parent. I don't know if it's not a recluse.
Anyways, it was a close. And so there is, of course, smart women have more options and can go be lawyers and doctors and such, as the old country song goes.
But nonetheless, there will in general be the opportunity in a free market, more resources will accrue to smarter people who then have the option.
And without propaganda, I think, would take the option of doing that, of having more kids.
And less intelligent people will accrue fewer resources.
And therefore, in the long run, we'll have fewer children.
And again, this is nothing violent.
It's nothing coercive. It's just, it's like the dating market, right?
I mean, it's all voluntary, but there are significant effects down the road.
Because also, I'm sure you understand that this goes a long way towards explaining things like if you look at feminist rallies or you look at the sort of so-called pussy marches and so on, you're not seeing the most attractive of women.
And you understand that Biologically, their genes want to reproduce as much as the hottest woman or man does, and therefore they are on the left.
They generally are for big redistributionist welfare states because that's how they're going to get resources.
So this sort of cliché of fat acceptance and lots of tattoos and weird-colored hair and so on, that has become almost a signal To reduce your level of attractiveness to the point where you're accepted by the left as one of them, generally on the lower IQ side, generally on the less physically attractive side, this works for men without resources as well as women without looks, that there is a kind of brutal Darwinian aspect.
To all of this and it explains why you generally don't see very attractive women in these pussy marches and it also explains why you don't see generally very attractive men in left-wing groups as a whole.
It is a way of signaling that you have a low enough attractiveness and perhaps even the low IQ associated with being less attractive and you are signaling to everyone else where you stand politically.
It's kind of like a tribe and they have to band together.
Because the individual in the free market has great power, but for less attractive lower IQ groups, it has to be tribal, it has to be.
This is another reason why individualism continually tends to lose in a state of society against collectivism because it is the individual who gains value in the free market through the application of his or her rationality and intelligence and so on.
But the less attractive lower IQ groups tend to band together because the only strength they can gain is the strength in numbers.
So I think that's important to think about and to start to understand what politics is, particularly the politics of the left and the right.
The politics of the right, the politics of small government, the politics of free speech, free markets, freedom of association, political liberty, personal liberty, those politics give the greatest scope for the smartest people to accumulate resources, to create jobs, to create businesses in the long run, and not even that long a run, like in a matter of five years or so.
The free market produces enormous benefits for the poor.
Enormous benefits for the poor.
You know, it's like when cell phones first came out, and they were like the size of a Kleenex box, and you couldn't stand under a tree, or you wouldn't get a signal, and you'd go and point them at the sky.
I still really clearly remember a friend of mine calling me from a car for the first time, and I had this image of this big giant wire running after the car.
And they were like, I don't know, I guess in the modern equivalent, they're like $20,000 or $30,000, and people went insane.
My God, only the rich can afford them.
It's totally wrong. It's bad. And now you can pick up a burner for like 40 bucks, right?
And it works even better than the original cell phones from some years ago.
If smart people are given free rein in the free market, they produce goods and services and reduce prices and expand opportunities even for everyone.
IQ is literally the rising tide that lifts all boats, but there's a bit of a delay, of course, right?
And we would expect smart people to understand that delay, and we would expect less intelligent people to not understand that delay.
A failure to defer gratification is foundational to lower intelligence and to success in life, right?
This is the marshmallow test. You've probably heard of it, where they've done this test many, many times in many, many different cultures and countries, and it's always the same.
You take a kid, a toddler, And you say to him, you put in front of him one marshmallow on a plate and you say, you can have this marshmallow now, or if it's uneaten in 15 minutes, I'll give you two.
And then some kids just stuff their faces and some kids grit their teeth and clench their fists and put their heels in their mouth or something and don't eat the marshmallow and then get the second marshmallow in 15 minutes.
It's a fundamental deferral of gratification that occurs very early on in life, capacity to do it.
And then they follow these kids through life and, lo and behold, it's a massive predictor of success.
Do you have the capacity to delay gratification?
Do you have the capacity to put a condom on and not get a girl pregnant in your teens?
Do you have the capacity to get and keep your first job for a year?
Do you have the capacity to defer drugs and partying and finish high school?
That's all you need to do to get to the middle class, right?
Don't have a kid before you get married.
Get and keep a job for a year.
Finish high school. You're done, right?
But if you don't have the capacity to defer gratification, then you're going to make all kinds of catastrophic mistakes.
And when you aren't that smart, you need more immediate feedback, right?
And this is what the free market provides.
Anyway, that aspect of things is really, really important.
If we understand that politics is, in general, and the way it's played out I think is pretty clear, it's not about really niceness, it's not about kindness, it's not about helping the poor, it's not about sympathy.
It's about resource acquisition, just like every other mammal, every other carbon-based life form on the planet seeks to minimize expenditure of energy and maximize resource acquisition.
And the welfare state and redistribution state, even things like foreign aid, even things like affirmative action and so on, are very clear.
Very clear. In terms of what they're doing.
They are groups that either feel they can't or perhaps even objectively can't on average compete in the free market attempting to grab the resources of those who are more successful and transfer it to themselves.
And this explains so much in life.
Once you understand this, it takes away this moralizing veneer.
That is occurring in politics all the time.
And once you strip this moral veneer, racist, dreamers, you know, sympathy, help, charity, kindness, helping the poor, helping the sick.
Once you strip it of all of this nonsense, and not that morality is nonsense.
I'm very much a moralist.
I've got a whole book on secular morality called Universally Preferable Behavior.
I hope you'll check it out. freedomainradio.com slash free.
Very much a moralist.
But what goes on in politics at the moment, and you strip down the language and just look at it as resource acquisition.
There's intelligence, there's attractiveness, there's education, but the fundamental thing, I think a strong case can be met.
I'm not saying I've proven it all conclusively, but I mean, please continue.
If you're interested, I'll keep going on the topic, but it simply is, if you have the smarts, You want the freedom.
And if you don't have the smarts, you want political power to give you resources.
Strip from the more successful at the point of a gun.
Your genes are using politics to get resources.
If your genes are high IQ, you want to get resources in the free market.
If your genes are low IQ, you want to get resources through political force.
But it's just about the acquisition of resources Try not to think of it any other way.
That is not looking at things very clearly at all.
Thank you so much for listening and for watching.
I look forward to your feedback.
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It's going to be quite a year, I'm telling you.
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