The Republic of Ireland held an Abortion Referendum and the citizenry voted overwhelmingly to overturn the abortion ban by 66.4% to 33.6%. Stefan Molyneux discussed the foundational issues associated with this controversial referendum.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
So there's a referendum in Ireland being counted today, which is to open the way to legal abortion in the country, and it's a very big and complicated subject, at least for me, maybe for you, and I'm going to unpack sort of what I think and feel about it in the hopes that together we can achieve some kind of wisdom.
Now, I was born in Ireland, in Athlone, Ireland, and spent a lot of time there growing up.
I grew up mostly in London, but I spent a lot of time in Ireland.
Loved the Irish people, loved the Irish culture, loved Irish history.
Now, there is something really astonishing that happened basically since the 1960s, and that is that Sexual licentiousness and the postponement of marriage and children and so on has become really the norm for people, particularly people who want higher education.
Everyone's told, and particularly women of course, you're told, you know, get your education, start your career, and marriage and family, if they're going to happen at all, will just happen sometime down the road.
And women are not told about the fertility decline, the significant fertility decline that starts even in the late 20s.
They're not taught about the lack of available, productive men in their 30s.
And they're not taught about the growing desperation that they're going to feel when they try to rope a man into a commitment at a time when they have fading sexual market value as the result of aging and growing infertility.
Now, culture as a whole, society as a whole, history as a whole, I mean, when I was younger, I used to sort of think of culture as, you know, it's the dances, it's the traditions, it's the costumes, it's the flags, it's the...
I don't really think anymore it's any of those things.
Or if it is, those things are merely the conduit.
Like the pipes to your house are there to deliver the water.
And what is it that culture is there to deliver?
Well, Culture is centered around one basic fact in this life, which is that human beings take an astounding amount of time and energy to raise from conception to adulthood.
I mean, we are one slow-growing species.
I think there are crystals in deep caves that grow faster.
Stalagmites grow faster than human beings at times.
I say this as the father of a nine-year-old girl only halfway through, and it is a long time.
It's a great time, but it's a long time.
In particular, the sort of nine months or a year after birth, which is sometimes called the fourth trimester.
We basically should ideally stay in our mother's wombs for longer, But we come out of our mothers shortly before our heads get so big that coming out of them, if we waited another five minutes coming out of them, we'd split our moms in two, like two tigers fighting over a dowsing stick.
So... We come out and we're astonishingly helpless and we require 24-7 care.
We require breastfeeding for optimal brain development.
We require touch. And whoever is providing that care, the mom, because certainly for the breastfeeding, whoever's providing that care, It's all-consuming.
I've been a stay-at-home dad for the time that my daughter has been around.
And it is a big, particularly, it's a massive, huge job.
The amount of resources it takes is staggering.
Write a book, easy.
You know, raise a kid. Now that's a challenge.
And this basic reality that...
Human children have the most astounding potential but require the most astounding devotion of resources when they're young.
That's what culture is all about.
Who is going to take care of the children?
That is foundational to what culture is.
That's foundational to monogamy.
You know, the monogamy that...
It's actually more associated in some ways with the matriarchy than the patriarchy.
In a patriarchy, there tends to be polygamy where the top 20%...
Anyway, you understand. So, this reality that for children to...
Well, for culture to continue, then children need to be taken care of.
And the way in which they're taken care of has a lot to do...
With culture, there are some cultures which put kids into religious instruction very early and hard and are very rough and harsh and violent sometimes in the raising of those children, and that's part of that culture.
So, the fact that children require so many resources, the fact that this means that you need a pair-bonded family unit to raise children well.
You need someone staying home with the children, ideally, and you need someone going out and gathering the resources.
And because men don't have the feed bags, it is the men who go out and gather the resources and the women who stay home and breastfeed.
And You know, when kids are little, they're tiny little exploratory death magnets that need constant supervision so they don't tumble down stairs and stick forks in electrical sockets and, you know, all of the other clichés that people use to excuse hitting children, which is unnecessary.
So around this, that sexuality is this incredibly powerful and potent force that produces real-life human beings, and sexuality needs to be tamed.
It needs to be contained.
It needs to be focused.
It needs to be bottled up like a genie so that its wishes and fantasies don't undo the world as a whole.
And this containment and focusing of sexuality within a pair-bonded monogamous marriage, that has been the point.
Of our culture.
That has been the point in many ways of religiosity.
Until death do us part.
What God has put together, let no man tear apart.
This is why there were such bans in the past, such either illegality or massive social ostracism to people who broke up marriages, except in the most extreme of cases.
The guy has a brain injury, loses his mind, or whatever it is.
But the people who slept around, the people who Destroyed the marriage, refused to work, got drunk, were heavily centered in society because it's all centered around the resource whole called children,
particularly when they're young. And I was just thinking about this the other day, that when I was a teenager into my 20s, The hedonism that was around was absolutely astonishing.
Absolutely astonishing.
All of the restraints in society, for the most part, certainly in my generation, maybe it was more of a single mom thing.
I was raised by a single mom, so to speak.
Well, she wasn't, so to speak, a single mom.
It was, so to speak, that she raised me.
I was tumbled up, as Dickens would say.
But But all of the sexual restraint, all of the focus on sexuality as a pair bonding mechanism to keep Two parents together for the odyssey of raising children.
I mean, the female brain of our species takes until the late teens to physically mature.
The male brain takes up to a quarter century to physically mature.
And that is a massive investment.
And you have three kids two years apart.
I mean, we're talking over three decades.
I mean, you don't have to raise them all the way to 25, but it's at least two decades, maybe three decades.
And certainly one, 10 to 15 years of really intense effort to keep kids on the right path.
So, I was sold hedonism, but in exchange for what?
I think most of us were sold sexual license.
In exchange for what?
There's always a price.
Always a price when you're offered.
Nothing is for free in this world or the next.
Well, maybe the next. But certainly not in this world.
And my generation, we were offered sexual licentiousness in exchange for what?
In exchange for our culture.
Because you have sexual licentiousness or you have a culture.
The two are kind of opposites.
So I was bribed with my own hormones in order to give up my own history.
In order to participate in the great erasure, the great unlearning of that which took thousands and thousands of years to evolve, it can all, like your reputation, vanish in a very, very short time frame.
So, When you can just kind of sleep around, then the pair bonding gets kind of screwed up.
And then, particularly for women, I think, when the more relationships they have, the less they're able to stay married.
Divorce is dick-dependent.
The more dicks, the more divorce.
No offense to Richard, but...
This reality of what we were bribed with and what we had to give up.
We were bribed with free stuff, right?
Bribed with free healthcare, bribed with free welfare, bribed with free education, primary school and high school and so on.
We were bribed with free daycare for a lot of people, free food, subsidized housing or free house.
We were bribed with free stuff.
And then the question is, okay, well, that's free.
But what is the cost?
What is the price that we have to pay for what we think is free?
Isn't this what the devil always does?
Walks up to you, sneezes some smoke out of his ears, and then says, I can give you the world.
I can give you power.
I can give you glory. I can give you freedom from consequences.
And then you sign on the dotted line, and you enjoy the generosity of the devil for some time, and then the price goes.
The bill comes due.
And right now, we are starting to wake up to the price of the free stuff we got through the welfare state, through fiat currency, through money printing, through debt, through debt, through debt, through debt. We get all this free stuff, but then the bill comes due.
The price comes due.
Why do you need culture?
Why do you need discipline? Why do you need mythos?
Why do you need restraint? Because, particularly in the realm of pregnancy, there are huge consequences.
Huge consequences.
You know, it can take 10 minutes to make a baby that takes a quarter century to raise.
And that imbalance...
Of reward and cost, of stimulus and response, that imbalance, is why there was authority from the elders that said, get married before you have sex.
Because when you have sex and you're married, then the framework for sexuality, the framework for children, is there.
Is there. Be a trapeze artist all you want.
Have a net. Have a net.
So that you don't fall and die.
And when we took all the free stuff, then all of the restraint fell away.
All of the need for self-monitoring, self-management, self-control, it all went away.
And then our elders seemed ridiculous, and our elders gave up on instructing us.
Because they no longer face negative consequences for failing to instruct us.
Because the way it used to work before the welfare state is if a girl got pregnant, or a young woman got pregnant, and she didn't have a father, then either, or didn't have a husband, then the father would be forced to marry the shotgun, right?
The father would be forced to marry the girl.
Or if the father wasn't around, wasn't available, absconded, went back to wherever, then what would happen is...
Well, the parents would have to pay for the upkeep of that child, and their daughter would now be unmarriable.
She would be a fallen woman. She would be damaged goods.
And it would be a disaster.
The parents would have to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise the child, and then would have to deal with the daughter who couldn't get married, and their family reputation would be thrown into disrepute.
And this might even spill over to siblings, right?
And so because the negative consequences accrued to the parents, the parents damn well instructed.
The children exercised authority because society had the power of ostracism, which is to disengage from people whose behavior you significantly disagree with.
Society had the power of ostracism, the power to say no.
Ostracism, if you want to understand the power of that, think of societies where they're arranged marriages, where young people are just forced to marry each other, versus a sort of free you can date, you can say yes, you can say no, all that kind of stuff.
So when we have the power of ostracism, when we were free with regards to each other, we always think it's freedom with regards to the state.
It's freedom with regards to each other.
If you disagree with what I do and say, you should have the right to disengage.
Do not support me.
Do not fund what it is that I'm doing.
If you like what it is that I'm doing, then you should have the freedom to fund and support what I do, which you can, by the way, at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
But once we lost through the welfare state, we lost the power of ostracism.
We lost the power of managing each other.
Through positive and negative feedback.
Because the welfare state means it's impossible to ostracize irresponsible people.
It's impossible to ostracize sexually licentious people.
It's impossible to ostracize unwanted pregnancies.
It's impossible to do all of that.
People all think it's about the pill.
It's about the welfare state. So...
We lost...
Like this lack of continuity that has been remarked upon from the boomers...
To the millennials, this lack of the transfer of hard-won and accumulated social, romantic, sexual, and familial wisdom.
Well, why bother?
Why bother? If you have become an atheist towards the religion of your own culture, then you don't take your children to church, so to speak.
If culture is there to protect us from negative consequences, but the welfare state steps in and says, you won't have to suffer those negative consequences.
In fact, I'll give you more money if you have more illegitimate children.
And there's no point transferring the knowledge.
Very few people study these days to become VCR repairmen or how best to replace the 2K memory in a Commodore PET. It's kind of computer.
It's via calculator with the screen, but why bother transferring knowledge to people to protect them if they really have nothing to be protected from?
If you are an atheist or an agnostic, I doubt that you spend a lot of time warning your children about the dangers of Satan or demonic possession or temptation from the devil.
You don't. And it is, I think, foundationally true.
I know that correlation is not causation, but I think I'm making a reasonable case.
I think it's foundationally true that when you are shielded from the consequences of bad actions, you no longer have a need for culture.
I mean, very few people are philosophical.
Trial and error hardens into the tough fabric we call culture.
You try things, you fail. You try things, you fail.
You try things, you fail. Oh, this succeeded.
Okay, we're going to create a myth that supports that.
Because philosophy was in general banned throughout most of human history.
I know that there's a history of philosophy, but it's really a history of people whose writings were allowed to be propagated by the rulers and the priests.
So, Why do you need to transfer knowledge if negative consequences don't occur?
And this great giving up of the hard-won lessons of monogamy and pair bonding and being home to raise your children.
I mean, what happened? Well, what happened was, through the welfare state, more responsible people were forced to pay for less responsible people.
Those less responsible people ended up not spending that much time interacting with their children.
Whereas the more responsible people most parents these days strongly feel, and there's reason to understand why, that both of them have to work in order to pay for, to a large degree, the people who aren't working.
And so, the smartest, most ambitious people have less time around their children.
The less smart, more irresponsible, and less ambitious have more time around their children, which they don't really spend interacting with their children very much.
And thus, our love for our children evaporates.
And if there's one thing that I would talk about with regards to the West, it would be this foundational issue.
Our love for our children has significantly diminished.
Also, our respect for our parents has significantly diminished.
We feel that they don't have much to teach us because We view them like, I don't know, maybe like the penny-pinching generation that grew up during the Great Depression in the 1930s and, you know, hung on to a dime with a double-fisted grip.
And say, oh, well, you don't need that anymore.
Or there's a line that's always stuck with me from Eugene O'Neill's play about his actor father and morphine-addicted mother called A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
It's a very apt title.
His father is constantly worried about the lights being on.
I mean, I know this one. I grew up where you got cold and you had to feed money into the meter to get any heat.
And if you didn't have any money, you didn't get any heat.
And he says to his father, he says, Dad, I've shown you the math.
Leaving the light on costs virtually nothing.
I'd have turned that light off. You seem ridiculous, right?
Sexual restraint, monogamy, getting married, and then having sex...
That's old values.
That doesn't mean anything anymore.
It doesn't matter anymore. And so the boomers have nothing to teach and the millennials feel like they have nothing to learn.
And each generation has decayed.
There's a bounce back now where people are really seeing the price.
Because when you turn your children from manifestations of your love for life and your love for your spouse, when you turn children from manifestations of a love for life into fundamentally We're good to go.
I mean, certainly in America, kids are born into over a million dollars worth of debt and unfunded liabilities, and it's great.
The whole population of the planet is tens of thousands of dollars in debt, every single human being.
It's horrible. So when you, your children become collateral that you use to borrow against because you don't One to pay for what you want to consume in the here and now.
Government promises you all this free stuff, but there is no such thing as free.
If the government says, I'm going to give you $500 worth of benefits, it has to tax you $1,000 to pay for those $500 worth of benefits.
So you very quickly understand the game, the con.
The government doesn't add value.
Government is overhead, subtracts value.
So they say, well, we're going to give you this benefit.
We're going to have a war in Vietnam and a welfare state at the same time.
Oops! Sorry, we have to decouple gold from money so we can print as much as we want and now your earnings will never go up, but your debt constantly will.
This horrible belief that you can get something for nothing means that you shift the burden Onto your children.
And how do you look your children in the eye?
This is something I genuinely cannot figure out.
I mean, if you can help me, please let me know what it is in the comments below.
But I can't figure this out.
Like, how do you look at your kids?
And say, this is a great system.
You've got terrible schools.
Mom and dad both have to work to pay for everyone else.
You're massively in debt.
Oh, and we're going to lie to you about the value of a college degree.
That's effectively giving you a debt vasectomy.
Or a gender studies based hysterectomy because you can end up spending so much time paying off your debt that you won't be able to get your life or your family started until your eggs are so old you're going to give birth to dusty pterodactyls.
How do we have a system that treats children as financial objects to be Sold at auction to bankers in China and Japan and other places.
How do we have a slave market of the unborn?
Selling off their future earnings to foreign banksters so we can stuff our faces in the here and now.
Call ourselves a society.
And we want people to respect our society.
We want people to, hey, you really should emulate us.
We prey on our children like dishonest, financial, ink-sucking vampires.
Want to be like us?
Bet you don't. And this brings me to Ireland.
Ireland. I know.
It's a long voyage, but I live in Canada, so, you know, it's a long way across the rhetorical Atlantic.
Hey, look, I'm delaying it even further.
So this means that it's likely that relatively soon Irish women will be able to kill their unborn babies in their wombs.
And there are, I mean, you can see this if you do a search, there are Women who are screaming with joy, who are cheering, who are ecstatic at this self-detonating murderocracy of the hesitant womb.
Now, I know it's a complicated moral issue, and I've talked at length before about my solutions regarding this issue, and I'm not a statist, so I don't believe that the law is the solution.
But nonetheless, it is extraordinary and unsustainable how much deference there is towards female wishes in the West.
It's absolutely unsustainable.
And this idea that now women have the sole right of arbitration over the survival of their children, or whether they become mothers or not, of course it should be accompanied by An opt-out clause for fathers who don't want to be fathers,
so that the fathers can opt out of being fathers, and then they have no right of visitation, they have no financial obligations, because why is it that women can solely choose whether to become mothers, but men can be forced by the choice of the woman to become fathers, in the real sort of practical sense?
And it won't solve anything.
It won't solve anything.
Because this is the reality, is that once the woman decides to give birth to her child, hundreds of thousands of resources and thousands of hours need to be poured in to help that woman raise the child.
And it's either going to be a father, voluntarily, or it's going to be a taxpayer, involuntarily, or more likely.
She gets resources from her newborn child by selling, through the state, her child on the eBay auction block of foreign banksters.
Sure, we'll lend you a little money, take care of your kid, but your kid, when he grows up, belongs to us.
You get him while he's young, we'll get him when he's older.
And how can this be sustained?
How can this be... Processed.
Children need resources.
And once we view, or once our system requires that children be collateral, rather than loving expressions of our joy of life, we have a system that can't last.
And as far as this sentimentality goes, It is a strange world to live in when you think about it.
When the Irish can have a referendum on killing fetuses, which lowers birth rate, but not one population in the Western world is allowed to have a referendum on, say, third world mass migration into their countries.
