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June 1, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:19
"GO FORTH & MAKE A FAMILY!" Stefan Molyneux Interviewed on the 21 Report
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George Bruno with the 21 report.
We're at The 21 Convention, the Patriarch Edition, and I'm talking with Stephan Molyneux.
Welcome.
Thanks, Josh.
Great to be here.
Absolutely.
We're talking about fatherhood, patriarchs in the light of hope, optimism, and positivity in a world that's degenerate, spiraling down.
How do we remain optimistic?
I saw something that you had put out on YouTube recently about parenting, some great tips, and was reviewing that.
Great, solid stuff.
Absolutely, just total respect for you on that.
And I thought that would be a great topic.
You had said something, conflict should be welcomed.
A peaceful household is not necessarily a conflict-free household.
Yeah, so there's this idea, I think it comes a little bit more from women than from men, that conflict is a problem.
Conflict needs to be repressed, needs to be avoided, and conflicts are an issue.
The closest friendships I have are people that I've had strong disagreements with, we've worked it out, we've resolved it, and we gain the trust of knowing we can do that, and therefore we're free to disagree and both learn from each other's perspective.
This idea of a conflict-free household, I mean I was raised by a single mom, my dad was out of the picture when I was a baby and he was like in Africa and I was in the UK so it was like the entire planet was between us and my mother had this belief that family life should be perfectly tranquil, that there should never be conflicts and so anytime that there was a conflict It was a catastrophe.
You know, it's like rain on your wedding day.
You know, if every day is your wedding day, all rain is a disaster.
And so, it took me a long time to realize, appreciate, and understand the value of resolving conflicts.
If you don't have the capacity to have conflicts with people and resolve them, you can't trust them.
All you're doing is avoiding.
And given that we're inevitably going to disagree, when you avoid conflict, you avoid intimacy.
You avoid trust.
And I think that men's greater comfort with conflict is something that society is really lacking.
I mean, you see all these free speeches, these bannings that went on of men and Laura Looma, of course, as well.
And that's because society is not good at resolving disputes anymore.
We've just been so dispute avoidant that now it's gotten to this hysterical, semi-fascistic level of just banning people for disagreeing.
That's not how we grow.
That's not how we resolve things as a society.
We need that masculine comfort with disagreement.
Yeah, I saw someone, somebody saw a picture of me and Cernovich, and the comments down below, there was one comment that said, I can't believe you would associate with him.
I am unsubscribing.
The comment below that was, wow, you're associating with Cernovich.
I'm subscribing.
So it was this polarization, but I like that.
I like that.
It shows movement.
It shows movement and it shows stiffness on their part.
Well, men are not allowed to have allies in the modern world.
We're not allowed to have groups.
We're not allowed to have sweat lodges.
We're not allowed to have tribes.
You can have a man cave as long as you're not talking to other men about something important and you're just watching some Bruce Willis movie, that's fine.
And so this is why you see, you know, the conference here is under threat.
The conferences to do with men's issues that I've attended in the past were all, you've got bomb threats, death threats, you name it, right?
Because the world, the West as a whole, has become so female-centric that the idea that men can have partnerships, that men can talk to each other, you know, there's this old cliche, and I've known this for years, I've talked about this on my show, that you know a friend of yours who's a man who's in a bad relationship if the woman starts cutting off contact with his friends.
Right?
Because she wants to isolate him so she can go full bunny boiler on him without his friends saying, oh she's crazy, you gotta like get out, or you know, this is not good, and so on.
So this isolation of men in modern society is a reason why these conferences are so important and why they're so opposed.
Because if we start getting together and talking about stuff, well, you know, there's great strength in numbers, so we've got to stay isolated.
You know, we're allowed our video games, we're allowed our solitude, we're allowed our little room, but the moment we start getting together with other men and talking about issues and learning from each other, You know, terrible stuff is going to happen.
Terrible stuff is going to happen.
That's right.
I remember at last fall's conference, I was sitting next to a woman in the lounge, in the bar, in the lobby of the hotel that we're meeting at, and as the speakers were coming in, we see each other once or twice a year, handshakes and bro hugs, where you kind of bump shoulders kind of thing.
And I came back to the bar, and every time a guy would come in, I would welcome him and so forth.
And she says, oh, are you guys here for the parade?
Well, we didn't know that the 21 convention was scheduled during Pride Week.
Right, right, right.
And the hotel was booked with the Pride attendees.
And she saw men happy to see each other, shaking hands and giving each other a hug.
And she thought we were part of the Pride Week.
I said, oh no, not at all.
I said, we're here for a masculinity conference.
And then she started scratching her head.
It was more feasible for her to think that we were there congregating for the other thing than for meeting about manhood, masculinity, positive masculinity.
Gearing up to be better men, better fathers, better citizens.
I thought that was interesting.
That's an old cliché that keeps men from having honest affection with each other.
If you have any kind of positive affection for a man, you're gay.
And that is something that scares men away a lot of times from being affectionate.
And then you get this stoic, stone-faced, carved-out-of-granite kind of masculinity that is incredibly fragile.
Right?
Because where do we get our strength?
We get our strength from flexibility, from reason, from community, from relationships, from intimacy.
Yes.
And if we have to be isolated, then we become weak.
You know, it's the old cliche that's a good story, right?
Like, you know, one stick you can break.
You put a bundle of sticks together, you can't break them.
So, yeah, we have to be scared away from talking about our feelings at the same time as society says, well, you're not emotionally available.
And then the moment you're emotionally available, it's like, whoa, whoa, you must be gay.
You know, all of these impossible standards that men are subjected to.
And what that does, of course, is it teaches us to forget about the external cues and just, you know, follow your heart and be friendly with people and be positive about the future and listen to and give advice.
You know, one of the biggest topics that I've had in the past is around this question of single moms and dating single moms and so on.
And every time I've touched on it in a show, I get endless comments.
Like, oh, I tried it and it was a disaster.
Now, again, sometimes it works and all that, but it's kind of the exception to the rule as a whole.
Can we share our wisdom about this kind of stuff?
Well, no, because, you see, that's to the benefit of men, as it is talking about divorce problems and problems in family courts and false allegations of, I just did a show with a guy, his father was falsely accused, according to him, by his mother of sexual abuse in a divorce.
Can we talk about these kinds of threats to men?
Well, no, because that benefits men and doesn't benefit women.
And the whole society seems to be around just whatever women need, whatever they want.
We're just these disposable cogs in a big conveyor belt to bring resources to women.
And anytime men say, well, wait a minute, what's in this for me?
How does this benefit me?
You've got to shut that guy up really, really quick, because otherwise other people might hear and respond.
There's no male equivalent of, you go, girl.
Yeah, it is.
We are the worker drones, right?
And we have been throughout history, right?
I mean, men are used as like lead soldiers, just thrown into the fire of war.
You can't have your own... I remember this as a kid, like learning about the Second World War and the heroics of the men.
And I remember as a kid charging down a football field, probably about six or seven, you know, forward for some George, imagining I was in a war.
And you get all this programming that your life is just this empty shell to be used in productivity.
You know, the old reality that in the free, supposedly free market, labor-saving devices for women were invented before life-saving devices for men.
In other words, the men who were down there getting coal, they had washing machines, they had dryers, they had all these wonderful things, ovens for women, before they developed basic ventilation and masks for the men in the coal mines, you know?
And so this idea of just being a worker bee and you're there to produce, you're there to fight if necessary, you're there for resources so that politicians can tax you and give to other groups, this idea that society should listen to men and men should have a say in how things go and that men's needs are important.
You know, you're really pulling the rug out of a very delicate house of cards that people want to keep standing.
Absolutely.
You were talking about sugar in the household and our reaction to it.
You bring up my nemesis.
And that was fascinating.
I never heard anyone talk about that.
Yeah, sugar.
It's a big problem, of course.
Sugar is the pornography of the buffet.
And so sugar is a big issue.
Men are incredibly frustrated and thwarted.
We've got a society.
You need a license to do everything.
Things are very complicated.
You need to know people and you need to get the right permits.
I remember seeing this guy who was weeping about Star Wars.
A trailer, right?
And I get where he's coming from.
Because in the Star Wars universe, you're just swashbuckling.
You're out there doing cool stuff.
You can make things happen.
And there's not like, well, I'm going to need this form in triplicate, and then you've got to have this corporation fill out this form, and then you need this legal approval.
And that just zaps men.
We are adventurous, and we want to go out and explore and conquer and risk.
And this society has become so averse to risk that it's now become anti-masculine.
Like, there's a fascinating thing.
People can see this on the internet.
Go look at playground structures from 100 years ago.
Interesting.
It's fascinating.
See, now playground structures... I mean, I'm a dad.
I go with my daughter to the playgrounds.
They've got this soft, squishy... Yeah.
You know, and everything's... The ground-up tires and the... Yeah.
It's all soft and it's all low down and nothing's too... You go to these... Remember the monkey bars?
Yeah, monkey bars.
You could die on those things!
Oh yeah!
And now, like if you go back and you look at these people, the kids who were out a hundred years ago, these things just went halfway to the sky, you know, one drop and you're ding-ding-ding your way down to like some brain injury and the kids were fine and they got more exercise and they learn how to manage risk.
But, you know, it's like that internet meme where the dad's throwing the kid up in the sky and, you know, What's really happening is the kid's like this high above the dad.
What the kid feels is this high.
What the mom sees is that high because women are very cautious.
And it's a beautiful thing.
We need that risk.
We need that caution.
But now society's just become so claustrophobic and so safe-obsessed.
That men almost don't have any particular scope, which is why they pour so much energy into video games where you don't need forms in triplicate.
You could just go and risk and take.
But it's all artificial and it's bad for you in the long run.
Again, I like video games, but you know, it's become a bit of a real sink for young men in terms of productivity.
And that's because achieving something on the screen is so much easier than trying to go out and achieve something in the world.
In real life, yeah.
Modeling behavior for children.
You talked about reasoning with your kids as opposed to because I said so, because I'm bigger and stronger and louder than you.
That really impressed me.
Expound on that.
So there's been this cliche that has been developed about, you know, men, you know, we're big bullies.
We're patriarchs.
We just, you know, like Big Daddy in some Tennessee Williams play, we just like thump around.
The history of men has a lot to do with philosophy, a lot to do with reasoning, a lot to do with the development of common law, and how to negotiate in a society where people disagree strongly.
Because, you know, for men, We had duels, you know?
If you and I had some big disagreement, we'd need to find some way to reason it out.
Otherwise, we're going to end up, you know, one of us is going to end up with a big hole in him and, you know, falling over sideways and bleeding into some gutter.
So, because men have had physical threats for disagreement, we've had to find ways to negotiate without that.
The feminine approach, and again, this is very general, there's lots of exceptions, but the feminine approach tends to be if you have disagreements, You spread poisonous rumors about the person until they lose the will to live, and there's not that kind of direct, you know, they're not going to have duels, and there's not that direct confrontation.
So this idea that men are just these big bullies and so on, you know, talk to any teenage girl about whether they fear more the boys or the girls when it comes to their reputation and their social standing and their happiness.
And so I think that once men are taken out of society, we lose this capacity to negotiate, which is why you get these incredible ugly hit jobs from the media with people they disagree with.
That's a feminine thing in general.
And it's why you have banning people.
It's why you have the whole concept of hate speech, you know, because men can negotiate, we can reason.
And I think for the most part, men We don't like to lose, but we recognize the benefit of losing an argument, which is that we have something better than before.
And for women, it feels almost too humiliating, I think, for a lot of women.
So when men get shuffled more and more out of the public square, you end up with these massive, tangled, complicated disagreements that you can't resolve with reason and evidence.
And so you end up running to the government, you end up With hit pieces trying to destroy people's reputation, or when men are trying to get together at this 21 convention, you end up with threats that are designed to shut down the whole thing.
You know, violent, violent threats.
And that's, you can't run a civilization that way.
Yeah, yeah.
What would you say are the most important things that we can tell our kids?
A lot of dads here are going to be watching this.
Most important thing?
Men matter.
Men matter foundationally.
The civilization that we have It's a complex combination and we've just taken out half of the whole equation.
So yes, it was built by men and those men were raised by women and they were fathered by men, right?
But the entire sort of basis of our civilization, I play this game with my daughter sometimes in Canada, if there's an ice storm, you know, if we're driving around and it's late at night and we'll say, hey let's spot the women up there.
You know, on the hydro lines, you know, repairing things, and we've yet to see one, right?
I mean, and every time we see some oil rig, you know, it's like, can we spot the woman in the oil rig?
But it's kind of out of sight, right?
Like, who is it who we deal with mostly in cities?
You know, service workers or daycare workers, teachers, a lot of women, and that's great, and women have a lot to contribute.
But everything we walk on, you know, the roads, the buildings, all the infrastructure, like, the women will choose the taps, but the men build the sewage systems.
The taps are kind of useless without the sewage systems.
And so, men really matter, and when men have built a civilization out of, you know, blood, sweat, and tears, what generally happens is then the aesthetics of that civilization get taken over by women.
And women make places beautiful.
Don't get me wrong.
I mean, guys, you know, we like a TV and a couch.
That's about it.
And women make things beautiful, and it's a wonderful part.
But in the beautification of the civilization built by men, what happens is the male contribution gets taken for granted.
And men really matter.
They matter when it comes to parenting.
These statistics, I'm sure you know them as well as I do, George, these statistics of what happens on average to children who don't get fathered are catastrophic.
Absolutely.
And lack of Fatherhood, or lack of father presence, is an environmental toxin.
If something came in, like there was a gas that was seeping into people's households that produced the promiscuity, and produced the aggression, and produced the dropping out of school, and the drug use, and all of this stuff, we'd be like, we've got to stop our whole society, find the source of the leak of this toxin, and we've got to seal it up, because it's It's damaging children enormously.
Father absence is incredibly toxic for most children.
I mean, there's some bulletproof kids who get through it okay, but for most children.
So, you know, the men really matter.
And even in the maintenance of our civilization, there's this general slowdown that's happening these days.
You know, planes falling out of the sky, potholes increasing, you've got water problems in Flint.
There's this arc and momentum that men have when they propel a civilization and build it.
You get this arc, you're like, you know, if you're going up in a plane and your engine cuts out, you still go up for a little while, you know?
But then, you know, eh, right?
So men really matter and there's a whole cadre and propaganda mill in society that's constantly telling men, you're toxic, You don't matter.
You're negative.
You're basically just broken women.
If you were just like women, everything would be wonderful, even though, historically, female rulers initiate war a lot more than male rulers.
It's something that people don't usually know.
So this idea that the ideal is women, and however men Yes.
from that ideal is negative and the problem has to be fixed. - Yes. - Absolutely wrong.
If you look at how all of this stuff is communicated, it's all, almost all of it is on infrastructure built by men.
So without men, we don't have a civilization.
Without women, we don't have beauty in a lot of ways.
So it's a great compliment to each other, but taking men out of the equation, well, what happens?
We know what happens.
It's that when men get taken out of the equation, women get married to the government, you end up with socialism and everything falls apart.
True.
You did a great series on that, too.
That was wonderful.
Thank you.
Loved it.
And I've been talking to a lot of young men.
And I'll say, so when are you going to have a family?
Not here, but in my practice and in my travels.
And a lot of young people are saying this, and you might have heard this as well.
I wouldn't want to bring a child into this world with the way the world is.
And I think to myself, you know, there's never been a better time, or there's never been a good time to bring a child into the world.
I mean, every era.
There's never been an ideal time.
Yeah, yeah.
There's never been an era that's been ideal.
And there's this darkness, there's this pessimism that's amongst men, young men right now, What would you say?
How would you speak to those men?
How would you give them some optimism, a boost of encouragement about building a family?
Because young men are not building families anymore.
They're not building legacies.
What would you tell those men?
Can I tell them?
Tell them.
Tell them directly.
All right.
Yes.
Okay, so guys, I completely and totally understand where you're coming from, and I'm not going to just say that all of your caution and all of your concern is misplaced.
It's not.
There are real challenges in the world, but here's the thing.
You're alive, and the fact that you maintain your existence means that you're happy to be alive.
Now when I was growing up, if you're like a young younger than me, which is not that hard these days, but when I was growing up we were told about all the environmental catastrophes and they were much more imminent than the global warming stuff that's going on at the moment.
We had like acid rain, hole in the ozone, we were going to run out of plants.
When I was a kid we were going to run out of oil, there was going to be worldwide starvation and famines by 1980.
I remember this when I was growing up in the 70s.
So we had all of that plus we had imminent nuclear Catastrophe.
Imminent nuclear war where all of your math skills were going to end up as some shadow on a wall because the Russians were going to drop the bomb or the Chinese were going to drop the bomb.
Nonetheless, my mom had kids.
Nonetheless, you struggle through it and if you give up, If good men of conscience give up on having families, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, insofar as if all the good people give up, the bad people take over.
So don't let that happen, and don't let the joys of family be taken away from you by propaganda, by fear-mongering, by bad people.
You have a great Deal of power and positivity and virtue to bring to the world.
The fact that you're alive even though your parents had the living crap scared out of them by a bunch of propagandists is a good thing, right?
You're happy to be alive.
And when it comes to money as well, because that's like the big thing.
We're the first generation, you're the first generation, growing up poorer and with fewer prospects than the boomers, right?
Than the elder generation.
But here's the thing.
You're still the second richest generation in history.
Out of the 300 or 500 or 700 generations that humanity has existed, you came in second!
That's not the end of the world.
That's not too bad.
People had kids during the fall of the Roman Empire.
People had kids during the Black Death.
People had kids during the Spanish Inquisition.
Greeks had kids in Greece when they were Christians, when they were ruled for 400 years by the Muslim Ottoman Turks.
There's always been a reason to not enjoy life, to create life, to experience the joys of parenthood and the joys of fatherhood.
There's always been a reason.
Don't let the fear-mongering, when you're still the second richest and second greatest opportunity generation in human history, don't let people take that away from you.
You'll find a way to make it work.
Some things you have to do with way ahead of planning, right?
You want to build a bridge from one side of a canyon to another?
You've got to plan that.
You've got to build it like crazy.
You've got to meet in the middle.
You can't drop one rivet without threatening the whole project.
That's not how family works.
How family works is you find someone you love.
You're a good enough person that bad people are repelled by you and good women are attracted to you, which means you're not going to get pillaged in some divorce court.
I've been married for 17 years, so I kind of know what I'm talking about with regards to that.
But with family, you take a running leap You jump and the bridge gets built through your momentum.
That's the way it's always worked.
Your income will go up when you get married and your income will go up when you become a father.
That's just the way it's always worked.
So if you're going to wait for the perfect bridge, which is what people tell you to do because they don't want smart good people having kids because they want dumb people to rule.
Just take that leap across the canyon as all humanity has had to do throughout history under far graver threats than we face right now.
Just take that leap and you will find it amazing how much power and support you will get simply from taking the risk because the greatest risk is to not have children.
The greatest risk is to not experience the joys of parenthood because then the second half of your life in particular Kind of a bleak and empty and lonely place.
So fulfill your destiny.
Have those kids.
Save the world.
Another message of hope, positivity, and optimism from a father, Stefan Molyneux.
Thank you, sir.
Great pleasure.
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