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March 10, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

14:34

4315 Thought Bites: Winter Is Coming!

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	Hey everybody, Stephen Molyneux from FreedomAid.
	Hope you're doing well.
	This is ThoughtBytes.
	We're going to talk about the brain and how it came to be and why things are going so wrong in Western societies at the moment.
	So first thing to understand about the human brain, it is a ridiculously expensive organ.
	It's about two or three percent of our body weight.
	But it uses about 20% of all of the energy in your body.
	I mean, it is a huge furnace that your body just throws resources at, which means, of course, that it has to pay off in some significant manner for evolution to have found it valuable to throw that many resources.
	It's even worse, or I guess you can say better, when we're babies.
	When we're babies, our brains consume 75% of our energy needs.
	So we're just throwing the logs of calories and breastfeeding milk and so on into the brain to grow it, to grow it, to grow it, because it pays off so much.
	But let's go way back and figure out where the differences in some cultures have arisen from.
	So if we go way back, like 10 million years ago was when some apes learned to walk Upright.
	Now that's a wild thing to do and was a huge fork in evolutionary terms because when you walk upright you're presenting less of your body to the Sun.
	Right?
	I mean you've got a broad back and so what that means is that you can use more water to run and cool the brain rather than run and cool Now when you walk upright, you can go travel longer, you can travel faster than the quadrupedal apes.
	And another thing that walking upright does is it frees your hands for tools, right?
	So rather than just fashioning whatever you can find around like Jawbones 2001 style, you can make tools and carry them with you because you're not on all fours or half on all fours.
	Also, when you are on your hind legs, you're walking upright, you can see further, which means you can find prey better.
	You can also detect predators better.
	So it's a very huge advantage to be able to do that.
	And also, when you walk, On two legs and you're a nursing mother, you can use one arm to hold the baby upright ape, so to speak, against your breast and you can then use the other hand to forage for nuts and berries and roots and all that kind of stuff.
	So it's a pretty wild thing.
	Simply going from all fours or half and all fours to walking upright is a massive opportunity for the brain.
	So what happens is, if you devote more of your resources to growing the brain, then what happens is you end up with better tools, you end up with better weapons, you end up with better hunting strategies, and that allows you to get more meat.
	The meat is so calorie-dense and calorie-rich and protein-rich, it's pretty important for the brain, right?
	The omega-3s and all.
	And so, when you grow the brain, you end up with better weapons, better hunting, better tools, Which then allows you to hunt and get more meat, which allows you to grow the brain more, which allows you to have even better tools and so on.
	So it is very, very important to understand this sort of switch.
	Now, this didn't happen in all climates equally and the selection pressures were very different.
	We're just going to basically talk about sort of Northern Europe versus say something like Sub-Saharan Africa.
	Now, Seasonal climates tend to strongly select for intelligence.
	And the reason for that is that when you're facing down a season, like brutal cold, nasty winter or just those perpetual chilly springs and fall that happened when I grew up in England, it's man versus nature.
	You know, the old conflict, man versus man, man versus nature, man versus himself and so on.
	This is man versus nature.
	Now, when you're facing man versus nature, that selects for intelligence.
	The other conflict which tends to happen in warmer climates is man versus man.
	You're competing with other tribes for the best fruit trees or the best places where you can get nuts and berries and so on and so when you are in a warmer climate it tends to select for aggression rather than intelligence and this is One of the reasons why you have different groups that have different levels of criminality.
	Whites all over the world have about the same level of criminality.
	East Asians all over the world have about the same level of criminality.
	Blacks all over the world have about the same level of criminality.
	It's very important as well.
	One of the big differences in regards to how local climate conditions affect brain development is important.
	It also affects family development.
	So in a warm climate there's food year-round and it's relatively easily available.
	And what that means is that the mother does not need the father in order to survive.
	It's a very very important point because there's food year-round, you can Hold the baby in one arm, you can build simple structures to protect your babies from predators and then you can go out and get food.
	So you don't absolutely need, I mean it's better if you do, but you don't absolutely need the man to survive.
	Now in a colder climate, well you kind of do need the man to survive because you've got long winters where you simply can't get food, at least not easily, and so you have to have a man to survive.
	Now this is in sort of layperson biological terms, of which I am of course one, this is called the dads versus cads spectrum, right?
	So if you don't need a man in order to have your baby survive, then you can just choose the coolest, the tallest, the most handsome, the most charismatic, the most glib, the fastest talking, the You know, most wheedly-deedly kind of guy, the guy with the best game, because you don't need him to stick around.
	You can raise communally, you can have a sort of matriarchy, so to speak, and just raise the babies that way, and you know, you're going to do okay.
	And that's also partly because in warmer climates, what is going to kill your babies tends to be something that intelligence doesn't really help you with.
	Right, so if some lion just comes and eats your babies while you're out hunting, it's not like intelligence is going to do a lot for that.
	Or, of course, the big killer in the tropics is disease, right?
	And it's not like your intelligence is going to do a lot to help you with disease, especially if you don't really have soap or certainly antibiotics or anything like that, penicillin.
	Your strategy, of course, is just try and have as many babies as possible because you can't do much to ensure that they're going to survive.
	Now, in northern climates, in the colder climates, you can do a lot to help your babies survive, which is really important, which is why you have multi-story structures, it's why you have better walls, it's why you have bricks and so on, because you can do a lot to help your babies Survive.
	And in particular, of course, the cultivation of livestock.
	About 10,000 years ago, animals were domesticated in some parts of the world, and you had the invention of agriculture and so on.
	So intelligence, when you have colder climates, really helps.
	Now, I want to sort of point out, because this comes up a lot, the Inuit in the very, very north, these selection pressures aren't the same.
	So for instance in the Inuit the growing season is too short for agriculture to be effective So it has the same kind of selection pressures that you would normally have in the In the tropics, I just want to sort of point point that out because people get confused about that quite a bit so in Colder climates, you have to pair bond for your babies to survive.
	And what that means is that the women who chose the cats rather than the dads, who chose the, you know, the sexy, cool Fabio types, the alphas who are going to play around and abandon them, well, they generally died off in the winter because they didn't have a man around to feed them and protect them from cold and predators and so on.
	And so what happens is In the northern climates, you end up with more stable pair bonding because women choose stable, reliable, decent, moral, productive providers as a survival mechanism.
	And that's how white people and East Asian people in general evolved.
	So that's really, really important.
	So pair bonding genes tend to get passed on in colder climates, but abandonment genes or the cat genes tend to not.
	And so In the northern climates, prior to birth control and the welfare state, women had an enormous amount to lose from indiscriminate sexuality, from sleeping around, from riding the carousel, as it's sometimes rather costly called, and so there was a lot of focus and emphasis on controlling, in particular female sexuality,
	in order to establish the pair bond before sexual activity occurs, which is why the institution of marriage and monogamy and so on was so important because polygamy doesn't work in a cold climate because a man does not have the genetic requirement or advantage to invest a huge amount of resources, some of which are quite dangerous to obtain, like going hunting and so on.
	He doesn't have a huge incentive to invest resources in children that he doesn't know for sure are his.
	And so monogamy and sort of the scarlet letter punishment for women who slept around and had a man raise another man's child and so on.
	This was very strongly focused on as a negative, as a big, big problem.
	So prior to birth control and the welfare state, women had the most to lose from this indiscriminate sexuality.
	And you can see this even, right?
	So the pair bonding in East Asians is even stronger than the pair bonding in whites.
	And East Asians developed in even colder climates than whites did in Siberia and so on, originally.
	So you really, really had to have a man.
	And this is why even sexual drives between the races follow this pattern completely.
	So here's why things are falling apart.
	I mean, this is why Suicide rates among white males are high.
	This is why depression and anxiety among white women in particular is absolutely staggering.
	I mean, ever since feminism came along, which basically said that women should act like men, which basically denied all of the evolutionary requirements and pressures for whites and East Asians, although East Asians don't seem to listen quite as much to the feminist stuff, probably because of a higher IQ.
	But women have gotten progressively more miserable over this time and the reason for that, I mean there's lots of reasons, don't get me wrong, but I'm trying to sort of point out the dusky corners of illumination that people haven't really peered into here, is that it's a very strange situation that has occurred in the West.
	It's fascinating.
	So the welfare state creates a sense of tropical abundance in a scarcity culture, right?
	So much of East Asians and whites and culture and religion and myths and morals and so on have developed around this basic reality that for roughly half the year, food was very, very hard to get.
	And it was really, really cold.
	So it's not just about food.
	It's also just about heat.
	Firewood, right?
	I mean, your babies will freeze to death unless you have a man out there.
	You know, it's possible to gather nuts while you're holding the baby to your boob, but not when it's minus 10 out.
	And you certainly can't be going down cutting trees, going around cutting down trees and getting heat from that or digging up coal or anything like that.
	So this scarcity that has characterized white and East Asian cultural and biological development ran smack dab into the welfare state.
	Now the welfare state creates, it's even more lush than a tropical environment.
	Because in a tropical environment you still have to go out, you have to get the bananas or the papayas or whatever it is.
	But the welfare state, like the check, just comes to your house and your free health care and your free education for your kids.
	It creates a hyper tropical sense of abundance that collides insanely with the scarcity history of whites and East Asians.
	And that is really catastrophic.
	It is really catastrophic.
	When you develop in a scarcity culture, if you then end up in a hyper abundance culture, well, first of all, your morals are going to fall away.
	Like what's the point, right?
	In terms of scarcity mindset, like if you believe that everything is free, then the only reason you would deny something to someone is because you're mean and you hate them, right?
	And this is why, when you understand that things are not free, then denying things to people makes perfect sense, right?
	If there's food everywhere, and you say no to one of your kids for food, it must be because you dislike that kid, right?
	But if food is really, really scarce, and if you give that kid too much, the whole family starves before spring, then saying no to that kid is because you love them, not because you hate them.
	And this is one of the things where we say, well, if you don't have the welfare state, the poor are going to starve.
	And it's like, But it's funded on debt.
	It's funded like there's no money.
	It's all a shell game.
	Every human life on the planet is sustained by $30,000 in debt.
	If you care about people, you say no to them.
	But when you have this wild fiat currency-driven, debt-driven tropical abundance colliding with a very cautious and meet-out-your-resources-carefully kind of culture, Everything falls apart.
	And that's why a Western culture is one of the main reasons why Western culture is dying out at the moment because we have this Game of Thrones style, right?
	What do you get?
	14 years of summer followed by 14 years of winter.
	Well, we've had the summer of fiat currency and debt.
	But I mean, everybody who understands math at all really, really understands my friends.
	We had a long summer.
	A fall summer.
	An Indian summer, you could say.

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