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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:33:24
My Wife Does Not Respect Me
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Time Text
Anarchists did not try to carry out the genocide against the Armenians in Turkey.
They did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians.
They did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies and slaves in Europe.
They did not fire bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop a nuclear bomb on two of them.
They did not carry out a great leap forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese.
They did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia.
They did not launch one aggressive war after another.
They did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.
In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state.
Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural.
The state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.
It's from the great thinker and writer Robert Higgs.
A fine way to start off the show, I think, this morning.
And I guess one other thing which we could mention that I think is, I guess, somewhat important.
So this is trend in U.S.
cities.
these days where gangs of youth get together and create something called a knockout game.
And certainly in the U.S.
it's all black.
I don't know where it is in the other countries.
Sorry, in New York it's all black.
It tends to be focused on Jews.
And so it says here The dangerous knockout attacks on strangers in large U.S.
cities are leading to arrests.
More officers flooding the streets and more warnings for vigilance among an unsuspecting public.
Perpetrators have dubbed the violent practice as the knockout game, where young people try to randomly knock out strangers with one punch.
Recent attacks have occurred in New York, New Haven, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and southern suburban Philadelphia.
But the violent attacks go back several years.
In 2011, St.
Louis had a rash of incidents, one of which led to the killing of a Vietnamese immigrant.
Some of the assaults are recorded and posted on social media by the attackers.
And what I think is interesting, I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty terrible, that I'm just going to find the quote here.
Yeah, so what they're saying is there are safety in numbers.
Try not to be alone if you're by yourself.
There's nothing wrong for you to decide to cross the street if you see a group of people walking towards you.
Of course that might draw an attack as well and sort of this is paralysis of not knowing what is going to happen next.
And the cops are saying that what we need to do is teach the children or teach the young people more about respect.
Right?
So this is some copy says the attacks are an example of why there is a need for a deeper conversation with young people about respect.
You see respect, we need to teach young people about respect.
Now we as a society, let's look at whether we treat young people with respect.
Well, of course, you're legally allowed to hit them.
How respectful is that, really?
People get divorced all the time.
Women have kids without fathers all the time.
This is deeply destructive to children.
And it's not that these things happen.
People get married to the wrong people.
And divorces happen.
But adultery happens too, right?
But we say to adulterers that what they're doing is not good, what they're doing is bad, right?
That's what we say to adulterers.
And we don't sort of say you go boy power, you be independent of your vows, you go and get your needs met and it's a good thing.
We say to adulterers, particularly male adulterers, you know, you've just, you know, It's really bad what you've done, you've just messed up a family.
And we don't say that to families that break up.
I mean, I guess I mean, to men who leave families, we, you know, often will refer to them as deadbeat dads, but only if they don't give their ex wives money, which they usually don't give because the ex wives are denying them access to their children.
It's about 80% of fathers who have access to their children who give Child support.
And if you're not allowed to have access to your children, then that percentage drops significantly.
And generally, if it's not the courts, right, then generally it's the wife who's denying access to the children.
So there's also this little thing called the national debt.
How respectful is it to have children born into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt?
Because governments wish to bribe special interest groups.
And let's see.
Well, there's religious instruction where children are, their reasoning and thinking capacities are not exactly respected.
Instead, they are bribed with heaven and threatened with hell if they don't conform to a particular belief system, which is patently anti-rational.
Is that really very respectful?
I wonder how their schools are doing, these kids, particularly these kids, black kids in inner cities in America.
How are their schools doing?
Well, their schools are wretched hellholes, literally built by people, the same people who built prisons and how respectful is it for society to refuse to confront Teachers unions and all of the other status mishmash that makes these schools so terrible.
I mean, these kids would be better off out of school than in school, but it's convenient for most people to have the kids stuffed in these hellholes because it allows the moms to work.
It allows the teachers to take summers off and allows the government to propagandize.
Where is the respect for the children in these situations?
70, 80, 90% of parents are still hitting their children.
Forty percent of kids in high school are still getting spanked and we as a society are so bereft of reason, empathy, concern and the capacity for negotiation that we hit children, we take things away from them, we put them in timeouts which are these little temporary invisible jails, we yell at them, we take away privileges This is exactly how they work prisons.
I mean, do you understand that?
This is how prisons work.
And when you put people in prison, they go kind of nutty.
When you put animals in cages in zoos, they go kind of nutty.
It is not a natural environment and coercion, status coercion and state schools and separation from parents and daycare and debt, national debts.
These are not natural environments for children and whenever you put any organism in an artificial environment it goes counter squirrelly.
Now this doesn't mean that there's no moral responsibility on the part of the children at all but I really do want to emphasize that for young people today you know The key to any successful change in society is to correctly identify your enemy.
So, thank you very much for your time, concern, effort and energy.
Oh, my friends, I must tell you something just before we start.
Donations, donations, donations have been a little bit lean over the past week or two.
And I'm not a big one to complain about donations.
I usually don't mention it in any detail more than once every month or so.
But if you're listening, and you haven't donated, I think you should.
I mean, if you're up here in I don't know, what are we in the 2700s or something like that?
Mike does the podcast now.
So it's all become sort of trying to see people from space for me at the moment keeping track of where we are.
But it's it's time for you to donate or to subscribe for the show or to the show.
I will take the money and use it for good.
We've got a couple of expensive projects going on at the moment and it is really important to try and get the documentary finished which is really quite the cash hog and other things that are Going on, if I'm going to go out and do another show with Joe Rogan, I have to pay my own airfare and hotel, which I think is worth it.
I'd like to do a live show in his studio.
I think that would be great.
And all of the other stuff that is needed for the show to continue to run.
Equipment wears out to get a new microphone for the car costs and needed to upgrade some hardware that was really beginning to show its age.
Like my office chair is nine years old and it creaks all the time and I tried putting some oil in it.
It's ridiculous stuff like that but nonetheless it is important.
So if you are listening, if you have donated, fantastic.
If you haven't donated, please do.
If you don't have any money, no problem.
Then you could just share the show and share the love with the rest of the world.
Fantastic.
And oh yeah, the Dan Carlin talk.
Let me tell you something.
So when I was diagnosed with cancer this summer, I was of course prescribed chemo.
I wasn't prescribed chemo by people on the internet.
I won't even tell you the things that I was prescribed by people on the internet, but I decided to go with the chemo and radiation.
And naturally you hear the horror stories about chemo.
So before, like after the diagnosis, but before the chemo started, I recorded a lot of shows and we only had about 10 days between these two events.
But I record a lot of shows because I wasn't sure what was going to happen with chemo, whether I was going to be functional for doing shows at all.
And chemo was running for three months and then there was radiation.
I also didn't know whether the radiation treatments were going to blow up my vocal cords.
Because sometimes radiation treatment, at least what the doctors prepared me for, is sometimes the radiation treatments are so intense basically you get a huge sunburn on your throat and people can not only not talk but they can't even swallow food and so you have to get all these shakes and stuff like that so that you can or sometimes you even have to go into the hospital be fed intravenously and so
after sort of during chemo when I realized that I still was able to function fairly well.
During chemo, then we recorded a bunch more shows.
So we have, I don't know, 30 or so shows that are still in the can.
And we had a great conversation with Dan Carlin the other day, which we'll put out and I've got an interview with Phyllis Schlafly and others that we are going to sort of release.
So if you see cue ball, bowling ball, bald stuff.
Do not be alarmed.
This is simply stuff that was recorded either just before or during a chemo.
So it's not not to be alarmed of what has happened.
I have had some requests for people to sort of an update on on health and disease and all that.
And I will tell you that I am not glad that I had cancer, but I'm glad for almost all the effects of having had cancer, which is a sort of an interesting paradox, I suppose.
And all of the effects of having had cancer and being at least so far successfully treated for having a very aggressive cancer, all those effects have been Very positive.
I feel happier.
I feel even more centered.
I feel like I have access to more compassion and more anger in equal measures, which I think are both useful aspects of a moral core and not even useful aspects.
That sounds like the utilitarian.
They are essential effects, honest effects of having a moral core.
I feel less afraid.
of the future, less afraid of things.
And it's kind of funny, right?
Because, you know, this isn't like, you know, like some illness which is just over.
I mean, I still have to go for my checkups every three weeks and make sure that it's not regrown or regrowing.
And the only way that I'll know is if I develop some sort of other physical symptom or feel run down or whatever.
So the odds of finding it in a scan are so tiny that they don't even bother.
So it is not a disease that ends but it is something that has made me less scared of the future.
You know when you delve into philosophy and you really take that red pill and you really wake up you see what the future is bringing almost inexorably.
And that can be anxiety provoking and there is a kind of panic, right?
Like you're trapped in a truck that's heading towards a cliff with all these other people who are singing Kumbaya and imagining that they're on a road trip.
Well, they're on a canyon fall that is imminent and you're trapped in the truck and you can't get out and there is a little bit of freak out that occurs.
You know, like angry cat in a tiny cage.
I don't really feel that.
so much anymore.
I don't feel that so much anymore.
more.
I think that when you have something that takes away your power, when you have something that is so emphatically what you don't want, it gives you a liberating sense of your own limitations.
I can do what I can to make the world better.
I can fight as hard as I can for reason and truth and virtue.
But after that, it's in the world's hands.
You know, like when I was a kid, I had this helium balloon.
I was about five or six and I really liked, you know, like all kids, I just love that helium balloon.
And some guy came up to me at the fair and said, you can keep that helium balloon or you can enter it into a balloon race and maybe win a bicycle.
And it would be interesting for me as a kid, you know, I grew up really poor, to have a bicycle that wasn't cobbled together from other people's thrown out bicycles, you know, like Adam Sandler's song about the car which has seven different colors that you have to open with a coat hanger.
Well, it would have been interesting.
I would have loved to.
So I'm like, oh, I'll try for a bicycle.
And then he basically just, he took my Yellow balloon.
I still remember the guy.
I took my yellow balloon, he let it go, and I went sailing off into this amazing blue sky.
I don't know, in England, they say this about the summer of 1940, about the Battle of Britain summer, how amazingly blue the sky was.
I don't think the sky is more blue in England, but it's so rare to see it all blue that it just seems like this electric cannon of azure that gets fired deep into your corneas.
And it was this yellow balloon sailing up into this blue sky and of course I realized pretty quickly with this you know as the balloon rose my heart sank and I realized I basically just said to someone take my balloon and throw it in the sky I'm never gonna see it again and I'm never gonna see the bicycle.
I mean he tied some little tag to it before with my name on it or something but basically I realized that my greed for the bicycle had had me lose a balloon.
Of course I never, I mean balloon race what are you kidding?
I mean he could have been just some idiot who liked taking kids balloons, I don't know.
But when you let go of that balloon, the wind takes it.
And to sit there and yell at the balloon, go left!
Go right!
Win that race!
Come on!
You can do it!
Run!
Well, you let go of the balloon, right?
And everything that I do, I blow up a balloon.
I let go of a balloon.
Wherever the balloon lands is wherever the balloon lands.
What people do with philosophy is what people do with philosophy.
The world has never had such exposure to philosophy before.
Right?
We're doing two to two and a half million views a week.
Sorry, a month, two to two and a half million views a month.
And that's the most philosophy the world's ever absorbed in history.
And I mean, it's still growing, of course, right?
With your help.
And that's just astounding.
If the 200, so let's just say it's 2 million.
And let's say only 5% of those listeners, they're not all new listeners, of course, but let's just say 5% of those listeners end up not hitting their kids every month What that means is that your support, your participation in this show has resulted in 100,000 people not hitting their children every month.
100,000 people stopping hitting their children every single month.
And that's assuming it's only 5%.
If it's 10%, that's 200,000 of course, right?
I mean, you tell me what better good you can do with your resources than support a show like this.
Hey, Noah, seriously, tell me if there's a show out there that can result in a hundred thousand fewer parents every month hitting their children, you tell me and I'll go work for them.
That's an astounding amount of good.
And that is how the non-aggression principle can spread.
In personal and practical terms, and children who grew up without being hit, are going to end up being more peaceful in the world and more foundationally resistant to statism.
The greatest revolution in the world is sheathing your spanking hands against children.
So, Yeah and many non-listeners share the spanking video and the spanky arguments.
I mean the material we put out gets no spank.
No spank shows Jordan Reak and other people, Michael Goldfield, they're all sharing this stuff.
I mean imagine how many people are not circumcising their children because we put out a strong message about circumcision.
Imagine how many women are deciding to breastfeed their children because we put out strong videos about breastfeeding.
The quality of people's lives, of children's lives in particular, through this show is rising enormously.
Enormously.
And really, I would say, that's what it's all about.
So let's move on.
Mike, who have we got first?
All right, Nawal, you're up first today.
Go ahead, Nawal.
Nawal, hello, Stefan.
I was going to say, otherwise I was going to say, shouldn't you be in an aquarium somewhere?
How are you doing?
I'm good.
I was shaking before I started hearing you.
listening to you because you're the third person that I'm going to tell about my problems, but it's not the third person because I'm aware that your entire audience is listening as well.
So I was nervous in the beginning, but now I'm glad I was listening to you.
Well, I appreciate that and I hope that we can be of some help.
What's on your mind?
I have two questions.
I am aware that I need to give you a background after I tell you my questions.
My first question is, how do I deal with my father and society who both have continuously threatened me, but feel that my desire to live by my own values threatens them?
My other question is, how can I work on my relationship with my distant brothers?
Right.
What are the values that are causing problems, do you think?
I was raised in a Muslim town in Israel by Muslim parents and when I became 15 or 14 I started to realize that I'm not that much into the religious ideas but the problem, the real problem wasn't there in the beginning.
The real problem is my father's treatment to me and his violence and his threatenings that didn't stop until this day, like it's still Still there, but when I was 13, 14, 15, it was hell.
It was more than hell to me.
He was very violent.
There was a lot of physical punishment and pain, physical pain involved.
I'm incredibly sorry to hear that.
It's incredibly difficult, particularly in your teenage years, right?
You're trying to achieve an adult identity, you're trying to achieve some independence and to be in a quagmire of violence is incredibly difficult.
I'm so sorry for that.
I don't know right now where I should start telling my story because there's a lot of things.
A lot of things happened and my major concern at this point in my life, I'm 22 by the way, is how can I stop this because when I was younger I couldn't see that it's really wrong.
I was just suffering from it, but I couldn't escape it.
And now after three years of being away from my house in the city, living by myself in the city, I'm not independent, because they are paying my school and all that, but at least I'm physically away from them.
I'm feeling better, but I'm still dealing with threatenings.
Threat was when I announced to my father, to my family, that I have a Christian boyfriend.
And he said, okay, you can do whatever you want, but you know that if your relationship with him is serious, and if it's going to lead into a marriage, you are not going to come back home to us.
And of course it crushed me for about a month.
I suffered a lot and I felt that basically my family died.
Like, that was grieving.
Grieving?
Yeah.
But why, I'm sorry, just help me understand this.
Why would that be heartbreaking?
Because I love my brothers and I have an understanding.
Until age 12, despite all my father's punishments, even during my childhood, I had a great experience in my childhood to be around my grandparents, my aunt, and playing with my brothers and their friends in the yard and being surrounded by... Sorry to interrupt, but when you say your grandparents, do you mean your grandparents on your father's side?
Yeah, we live in the same building.
Okay, and did your grandparents know that your father was violent?
Yes.
And what did they do about it?
Nothing.
But I remember... And they raised him?
Yeah, they raised him and they raised all his brothers to spank their children.
Like, it's not... My father is not different from his brothers.
So, I mean if I were to say to you, like imagine if I was a woman right, and I were to say to you that I'm away from my abusive husband but then my abusive husband tells me that he doesn't want me to come back, what would you say to me?
Look, I know I won't suffer as much from being away from my father, but I would suffer from being away from my brothers and my aunt, because these people are innocent in my eyes.
These people didn't do any harm to me.
Well, I certainly agree with that in terms of your brothers.
I mean, I assume that they weren't abusive to you, but what about your aunt?
Is that your aunt on your mother's side or your father's side?
She's my father.
More time with me during my childhood than my mother did.
And she basically took me with her everywhere.
I was very close to her.
I love her very much until this day but our values are very different now and I'm not as close to her this day.
I'm sorry, you just cut out for a sec there.
Is she your father's sister?
Yeah.
And did she know that your father was violent as well?
Yeah and I remember when she witnessed his violence she would defend me but you know she would just tell him to stop or tell him this is not good but she couldn't stop it from happening again.
Same with my mother.
Right because I assume that It was legal what he did, right?
Yes.
Yeah, I'm very sorry about that.
I mean, I'm not trying to say that anyone had some sort of magic wand that they could have waived and reduced or eliminated the violence against you as a child.
So I don't want to sort of say everybody is equally responsible.
And your brothers were not abusive to you as a child?
No, they weren't.
I had... Sometimes I would fight with my brother.
He's younger than me in one year.
But... No, he wasn't abused if he wasn't... I don't know what you mean exactly by being abused by my brothers.
Well, I mean, they didn't hit or...
hit you or torture you or anything like that?
They would push me or, you know, we would push each other if we get really angry, but it's not something that happened all the time.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, do you think that your, what are your brother's perspectives on your father?
What do they think of him?
They think that he's trying his best.
So they think that he's doing things that are not great, but they feel that he's doing his best.
Yes.
They know that it's wrong to be violent, actually.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's good.
That's good.
good.
Do you think that when they have children and they become fathers themselves, do you think that they will be like your father or not?
It's hard to answer this because on one side, they are not violent in the house, but they are distant from me.
And although they're saying they won't be violent and they're not violent, but they're distant from me and they make me feel like they're not They are violent on some level just because they're distant from me.
And is that because your father disapproves of what you're doing?
I think so.
I think it's very related.
So because your father is disapproving of you, if your brothers are close to you then they will be attacked by your father or your father will be upset with them?
I think so.
Right.
I think this is what they fear because in the last argument with my parents, my brother was there and he said, although I am atheist like her,
I don't want her to do things that would upset my parents, because if my parents are upset, this will shake the whole family and will stop the stability of the family.
Right, so appeasement, right?
Yes.
If your parents are upset.
So don't say things that are going to upset your parents.
Right.
Now, if your brothers remain the way that they are, is it not going to be quite difficult to have a relationship with them if they're distant from you?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I'm very afraid at this point that it will become too late eventually to fix stuff with them.
Right, right.
And did you say that your brother also is an atheist?
Yes.
Well, I got to tell you, I mean, wow!
That's astoundingly impressive.
I mean, that is a huge challenge in your community, right?
I mean, that's actually kind of dangerous, right?
It's very dangerous.
I'm very paranoid sometimes.
You're not paranoid if people are actually, you know, you're not paranoid if people are kind of out to get you, right?
I mean, as a guy in the West, I've certainly received a lot of prejudice around atheism and it is atheists in many ways the most hated and feared minority around and certainly they are the minority that it is fine to hate and fear, right?
You can pass laws barring atheists from office, from holding political office as they've done in some places in the States.
And nobody has any problem with it.
If you were to do the same thing with Jews or blacks or whatever Muslims, then everybody would go nuts.
So we are the kind of group that it's still politically correct to hate and fear.
But still, of course, the number of problems that I've experienced as an atheist would be far less than yours.
And so I just really wanted to tell you how impressive what it is that you and your brother are doing.
It's astonishing.
It's really, for those who've, you know, not tried to do that in your neck of the woods, in your geographical area, it's really, really difficult.
So good for you.
Now, you can't make moral decisions for your brothers.
You know that.
I'm just reminding you, right?
The rejection of violence is at the beginning of things, right?
It's like if I had a father I loved very much and my father spent five years dying of lung cancer because he smoked and then I had a brother who was a chain smoker, it would not be hard to figure out that I was going to set myself up for the same pain again, right?
What I mean is that your brothers, like your father wasn't born being violent.
He was through circumstance and also through choice.
He was, he was turned into and became someone who was violent.
And with your brothers, it's always important to try and figure out which direction people are heading in.
Right?
And that's why I was sort of asking about your brothers, which direction do you think they're heading in?
Are they heading towards your father's way of interacting with children or with people?
Or are they heading in the opposite direction?
Now, if they're heading towards your father, then they need to stop as soon as possible and turn around, right?
And the urgency of that is really important.
Sorry, go ahead.
The interesting thing is I can't tell right now because my brothers are as well distant from my father but they are distant from each other and it makes all of us look like everyone is living in his own world, small world.
Right.
Because abusers separate people, right?
And if your father can separate the siblings, then he can retain his power.
And if your mother can, in other words, cause you guys to not be close, then the parental power is retained, right?
But how can I be certain that my brothers are distant from me because of my father?
Well, first of all, your brothers are distant From you, not because of your father, but because of their choices, right?
I assume that they're adults, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So your father, I mean, unless he's got them locked in the basement, probably no basements where you are, he's got them locked in a shed, right?
Then your brothers are distant because of their choices, right?
It's not all your father, right?
I mean, you're adults.
Now, I'm not saying that it's not incredibly difficult and scary and He's not a brutal and, you know, powerful person, simply because he's a father.
But it's not because of him.
That's to not give your brothers the respect of moral choice.
They have moral choices.
Those moral choices are very difficult, but they still have them, right?
So it's because of their choices.
Now, as you probably know, I am not someone who places any intrinsic value On biological family.
I personally, I place no value on someone because I am related to them.
I place no value on parents because they are parents.
Right?
To me as an adult, philosophy overrides biology.
Right?
That's what I was always taught when I was a kid.
That standards override biology.
In other words, just because you're hungry doesn't mean you can steal.
Just because you want to have sex with someone doesn't mean you can if they don't want to.
Just because you want some toy doesn't mean that you can take it from another kid.
Your greed, your lust, your desire, you must master biology with philosophy.
Virtue trumps instinct.
That's what I was always taught.
I mean, if I grabbed some other kid's toy and said, but I really wanted it, they'd say, well, that's, you know, your desire, your preference, your biology, your grab instinct, your greed must bow to respect for property.
So I was always taught that virtue should trump biology.
Now family is biology.
I mean it's history and proximity and all of that, but family is biology.
And so I was always taught that virtue must be infinitely superior to biology.
And I was also taught not to Ascribe positive or negative characteristics to people based upon their biology.
In other words, I should not think that Japanese are superior because of their biology.
I must also not think that blacks are inferior because of their biology.
So I was always taught to not ascribe virtues to biology and that values must always be superior to biology.
And the last thing that I was taught Was that it is unhealthy to be in abusive relationships.
I was taught that always.
Which is when I grew up, most of the families were broken families.
They were single mother households.
And the single mothers always said, my husband was lazy.
My husband was a drunk.
My husband was yelled at me.
My husband didn't make enough money.
My husband didn't listen to me.
My husband didn't bring me flowers, my husband didn't, you know, I was not satisfied, I was a victim, I was abused, I was whatever.
My husband was not good and therefore I left him and everybody thought that this was a good thing.
Everybody told me that this was a good thing because you should not be in relationships that are unsatisfying.
that are abusive, that are deficient, that are not meaningful.
Like I went to go and see a movie.
I'm sorry to talk about myself but I think this is relevant to your dilemma.
I went to see a movie and I saw it three times with my own money when I was working three jobs.
There's a movie Kramer versus Kramer and the woman left the husband.
The husband was not abusive, he was not a drunk, he was hard-working and Meryl Streep played the woman and Dustin Hoffman played the man and she just left.
She went to go and find herself.
And then she lied about him in court and nobody, she was not a villain.
Like in Fatal Attraction, Glenn Close was the villain, right?
She was like a monster.
But Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer was not a villain.
She was someone to be praised for trying to go and find herself and be authentic and this and that and the other.
So when you put these three things together, that virtue trumps biology.
You do not ascribe people positive or negative qualities based upon biology and that you should not be in abusive relationships.
All the things that I was taught as a kid and then when I applied this to parents half the world went insane.
It's like well you can apply it to husbands right?
You can apply it to races but you can't apply it to parents.
I mean parents are always, people in power are always deeply shocked When you apply the ethics they taught you to the people in power.
This is true for the voluntary family, it's true for anarchism, it's true for atheism.
People in power are always deeply shocked, appalled, offended, outraged when you apply the moral lessons they taught you that they told you were universal to those in power.
And parents are, in many cases, the local statism that breeds the big statism.
I'm sure you were taught many of these things as well.
So the question then comes back to what is the value that this violence dominated system has for you in the future?
When I imagine my future, if I have a husband and children, I would like my children to see where I grew up and to have uncles and to have this warmth that I experienced when I was a child.
Well, what kind of husband do you think you're going to get if you introduce him to your father?
This is the man who threatened violence against me for many years.
Let's go over for dinner.
What is a man of integrity who really loves you going to say?
My boyfriend has a difficult time to figure out this question.
He says that If you told me only beautiful stories about your father it would be a great experience to meet him but now how can I?
I know if I meet him I'll be very distant and I don't know even if I can have a relationship with him.
If I want to.
He doesn't know yet.
Right.
Right.
I mean people who are violent with those I love I cannot love.
Yeah.
Obviously, right?
You can't love someone and also love someone who is violent towards them, who threatens them.
What I'm doing right now is, I'm in a therapy by the way, and my therapist told me that It's nice that right now I'm at least trying to understand my parents and get closer to them and maybe find common ground with them.
But what I struggle with when I'm alone is the memories of my father's treatment, the horror that I experienced with him.
the threats on my life like he he's he told me that he would want to tell my brother this happened when I was 14 he said I would want to tell your brother my brother was 13 at that time to kill you but I can't do it because it might ruin my family life so then I might
But I might, you know, just give up on this.
So it wasn't because the idea of his daughter being murdered by his son was horrifying to him from a moral standpoint.
It was because it might disrupt his family life.
Yeah, but he, as well, never, like, he never said, yeah, I was serious about it.
Whenever I mentioned it, I mentioned his threats, he would say, I wasn't, I was just angry.
I wasn't going to do it.
Please, I, I'll never do this to you.
And, but, but it, it doesn't change my, my experience.
I never felt safe.
Not with him, not with anyone else.
No, of course you didn't.
I mean, that's wretched.
That's abominably evil.
I'm incredibly sorry.
I'm incredibly sorry.
And of course, that's not an empty threat in this culture, right?
Yeah, because other women were killed sometimes.
Up here in Canada, there's a guy in jail for murdering his four daughters because they were dating outside the faith.
It is wretched.
It is not an empty threat.
He says it's an angry threat but it's not real.
I can't, in this context, in my hometown, with the news, just think that it's not going to happen.
No.
I mean, if it's not... You can't take the risk, right?
Yeah, if it's not my father, then it could be just some extremist.
Right.
And do your brothers know about this threat?
No.
They don't know about it, right?
No.
Why not?
Why not?
I'm not saying you should or shouldn't.
I'm just curious, right?
I mean, why?
I never got the chance to expose to them those kind of things.
What do you mean?
Well, they weren't there when he was hitting me.
Many times he hit me when they weren't there and told me this horrible stuff.
So I never got the chance to sit and tell them, listen, dad said one, two, three.
It never happened.
But you could have told them at some point over the past eight years, right?
No, because I still don't feel comfortable at just starting a conversation out of nowhere.
Hello, do you know that my father said this to me one time?
Because I don't even have the basic conversations with them.
I don't see them.
They don't call me.
We don't talk.
And when I see them in the weekend, sometimes when I visit my family, we just say hello and just, you know, sit on the table, but nothing more.
Right.
Right.
Well, I think that I can only speak to you from my experience that when I was still With my abusive family of origin, who I did not choose.
And I certainly worked with them for many years to try and have them not be abusive.
When I was with them, my life as a whole was of low quality, to put it mildly.
Because people of quality did not want to be with abusers, right?
I'm talking in particular about my mom.
And I am enormously glad that my wife never met my mother.
I'm enormously glad that my wife did not meet me while I was around my mother.
Right?
Because you can't, you can't undo history.
You can't be a different person.
You can't be someone who never experienced that from these people when you're around them in particular.
And I don't, I genuinely do not believe that my wife would have married me if I had been embedded in my highly dysfunctional family system.
Again, I'm not, I don't know what you should do.
I mean, this is a, but I can tell you what my experience has been, which is your boyfriend's, I mean, if your, if your boyfriend's mother or father had threatened to have him murdered, How would you feel about sitting down and eating with that person?
Not happy.
Well, to say the least, right?
Yeah.
The more you love him, the more you want him to be safe and loved and protected.
And if his primary caregiver threatened his very life, then you would not want to break bread with them, right?
Yes.
But how can you, how can I communicate those things to my family because right now I'm not disconnected from them.
I'm still visiting them every two weeks, every three weeks.
So the question is how do you communicate what?
What is it you want to communicate?
Well, my first question was how to deal with a father and society who both threaten me, but they feel that I am threatening them.
And how can I stop this?
And if I can... Yeah, I don't know how to... I couldn't do it.
But is there a way to...
Stop it by real conversation?
Well, no, because you cannot control your parents.
I mean, you can't control anyone, right?
Unless you're willing to use violence, you can't even control what someone does.
You lock them in a shed, you can control where they go, right?
But you cannot control.
You're saying, how can I make my parents do this or what can I say to get them to do that or whatever?
But you cannot control them.
You can speak the truth as you see it.
You can make the case for different behavior.
But it's like you have a restaurant and you're saying, how can I make people eat at my restaurant?
You can't.
Right?
You can put pictures of nice food in the window.
You can advertise.
You can be friendly.
You can invite people in, but you can't drag them in and make them eat, right?
Right.
You cannot control their behavior.
If you are saying, what actions can I take that are going to guarantee me some outcome with someone, there's no action you can take that will guarantee you any outcome with anyone.
No virtuous action you can take.
Right?
I mean, if someone's running at you with a gun, you can run away or shoot them, right?
But that's not the situation now.
And you think it's the same with my brothers?
You can't control anyone.
You have needs, which I sympathize with.
I genuinely sympathize with.
You have needs.
You want your family to behave in a certain way.
You want them to wake up.
You want them to recognize the dysfunction.
You want them to hopefully accept the responsibility for doing wrong.
You want them to not make excuses like, well I was angry, right?
That's not an excuse, you understand?
Right?
If I go and stab someone and there's no excuse called, well I was angry, oh well then you don't have to go to jail, right?
Well I was angry doesn't, there's no excuse at all.
I mean I bet you it wasn't an excuse that you were allowed when you were a kid, right?
So adults can't claim it either.
But you cannot control anyone's behavior.
You know, you were embedded in a family structure that was chaotic and violent and therefore as a kid you developed, I would imagine, probably, you developed the idea that if you could do things to control other people's behavior then you could stay safer.
You could give yourself the illusion of safety by imagining there were things that you could do that would control other people's behavior.
I've mentioned this on the show before but when I was in my early teens my brother would be my brother and I would be home after school and he would be like we've got to clean the place up because if we clean the place up mom won't be so angry and I never really felt like that was you know I would sometimes do it because otherwise my brother would get angry at me but I didn't believe it like that my mother was angry because the place was not tidy.
I never really believed that.
I believed that she just had a really bad temper and things could set her off and who knows what it was.
But I didn't really believe that I could control other people's behavior.
Like if I found a certain way of doing things or a certain way that I could phrase things that I would suddenly unlock a conscience, unlock virtue, unlock apologies, unlock restitution, unlock better behavior in the future.
You can speak your truth, and people will do with it what they want, but you cannot control how other people are going to react.
You can have some influence, you know, like if you go up and scream at people, I'm not saying you ever would, but if you go up and scream at people, then they're probably not going to react very positively, right?
But if you sort of calmly and positively put forward the truth of your experience, Then people will react how they can react.
But you cannot take ownership for how people will react to you.
That's not your doing.
You are not omnipotent, right?
You are not in control of everything.
You can control your own behavior.
But you cannot, you cannot control the behavior of others.
And if you want to find a way for your family to become good people, Which obviously is a strong desire of yours.
Right.
First of all that won't solve the problem even if your family became good people tomorrow that actually is in some ways makes it even worse because it meant that they could have been good people in the past they just didn't choose to when you really needed it when you were a kid right when you were growing up and so even if you get your wish it won't solve the problems in your family and it will just create new ones and the odds of you getting your wish are slim to none.
You know, somebody who threatens the life of his own daughter at the age of 14?
You know, that's not someone who's gonna wake up tomorrow and be a nice guy.
It's just not.
As far as I know it, a lack of empathy cannot be cured.
But sorry, go ahead.
How was your experience when you decided to just not see your mother again?
Did you suffer from it?
Did you suffer from circumstances?
No, I actually didn't suffer from it at all.
I was hugely relieved.
I was hugely relieved.
But you know the major suffering came from other people who were upset by my decision, who weren't even my family, you know like friends and all that.
It's those people who actually made me suffer more and those people one by one dropped off my socials map to until now I don't have people in my life who don't know the history and the decision and don't approve of it as a necessary Act for my own survival.
My mother made her choices, made her decisions and has the life that she has now.
It's a wretched life.
Nothing I can do about it because I cannot undo the past.
You know if somebody smokes for 40 years I can't snap my fingers and have their lungs be like they never smoked.
They live with the consequences of their choices.
I can't make them better because I want them to be healthy because their choice to be healthy was made 40, 30, 20 years ago.
When they kept picking up cigarettes, their choice to be healthy or not.
It's not my choice now.
And so my mother made her decisions and she had a tough childhood.
Absolutely.
But you know what?
So did I. And I made different decisions.
And I did not suffer.
I do not miss my mother.
I do not have any desire to see her.
In fact, I would pay good money to not see her.
I obviously think about when she might die, but I don't have any illusion that there's a better mom inside my mom, right?
This is this idea of the soul, right?
That there's an uncorruptible, pure, virtuous, perfect part of you that can never be become irredeemably bad or wrong.
But if you're an atheist you don't believe in the soul, right?
The brain is the brain.
The personality is simply the brain and the brain is the result of circumstance and choice.
Genetics, environment and choice.
That's all we are.
Can't do anything about the genes really.
Well actually that's not true because genes switch on and off.
There's some things that you can do about the genes.
As a kid couldn't really do much about my environment at all.
And so all I really have is my choice.
And I cannot nail myself to the cross of other people's bad decisions and follow them down into the living hell that awaits those who do harm against children, whether they like it or not.
I simply can't do it.
That would be like me smoking because my mother smoked.
I mean, that's her choice.
My choice is different.
And I did not suffer.
I am relieved and remain relieved that I don't have to see her.
She was a brutal, manipulative, ugly, violent, vicious person.
And it wasn't my fault that she was my mom.
And why would I have to continue?
to imbibe the buffet of evil because that was those were her choices.
It's time for my life and my choices now and I was I just I listened to what society said.
Don't be in relationships with abusive people.
I'm more gentle than that because I'm not telling you to leave your parents.
I've never told anyone to leave their parents.
What I do say is that I don't think it's particularly healthy To be in abusive relationships.
And if there's psychological evidence to the contrary, I would really be happy to see it and to broadcast it.
If people can find studies and respected psychological experts who say that it is to your benefit to stay in abusive relationships, I would be thrilled to broadcast that.
But that's not what I was told.
I'm so sorry.
Go ahead.
In my society, unlike your society, is that I do feel threatened by my society, not just by my father.
Right.
But it's all related to what, a big part of it is a result of my father's words when he said stuff like, If you do this, if you tell people that you're atheist, your aunts will hate you, no one will love you, even if they used to love you so much.
They will just forget about all that and start to hate you.
And this is the basic, like the basic fears.
But there are more fears, other kinds of threats.
And it's like if I want to just disconnect from my abusers, it means that I should not only disconnect from my father, but only just not go back to that society but only just not go back to that society again. - Okay.
Isn't the whole culture abusive to women, to atheists?
It is.
Right.
And And that's a lot to contemplate.
I get that.
I really do.
But there is, you know, a whole world where you will not be in danger for thinking for yourself.
I mean, you know, there may be people who look down on you, there may be people who want to associate with you.
To me that's fine, you know, that's great.
You know, if people don't want to hang around me because I think for myself, well, thanks for saving me some time, right?
I don't want to be around people who are upset with me for thinking for myself.
But there is a whole world where you will face far less threat for what you think and who you are, for the best parts of yourself.
And that's something certainly to contemplate, I would say.
Thanks.
But it's not your job to make your family better.
It seems to be very hard to make parents better.
For sure.
Because, you know, they've had the power of authority for so many years.
Unless that's part of the relationship at the beginning but and listen I'm so sorry I do have to move on to other callers but I just wanted to say I mean your courage is like a supernova.
Your courage and integrity is incandescent and you should be amazed and proud and incredibly respectful of yourself for the choices that you're making and what you're doing.
It is amazing and I salute you for And I can tell you how much I respect you for your strength in doing that.
Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
And do drop me a line and keep me posted if you can.
And Mike, who do we have up next?
All right, Don.
You're up next today, Don.
Go ahead.
Hi, Stephan.
I just want to thank you for all the great work that you do.
Um, I'd like to just kind of tell you, um, some of the stuff that's been going on with my wife lately and just generally get your opinion.
Cause I'm kind of at a loss, uh, on where to go from here.
Um, can you hear me?
Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Okay.
Um, so about two years ago, my, uh, wife's mother died, um, pretty unexpectedly and tragically.
And, um, Uh, a few months before that happened, I'd got a job where I could work from home.
So, um, you know, she really wanted to come back home and be with her dad and help him out.
And, um, so we dropped everything and, you know, move the family back and sold the house and, you know, kind of went against all my, my best judgments and, um, you know, made it happen, even though it was, it was a big blow to the resources and, you know, family as a whole, but we're down here now.
Sorry if I missed that.
Why does your father-in-law need so many resources?
Well, I guess he was extremely close with his wife and I saw him together.
He also has multiple health issues and she just wanted to be down here for him because picturing him alone is almost impossible.
I mean, he can't get around very well.
Emotionally, he's had problems in the past and this has been quite a blow to him.
So, I mean, being down here has been very beneficial to him.
I mean, I can't deny that.
All right.
But since we've come down here, my wife has just started showing very serious signs of disrespect and just lack of affection towards me.
I mean, the lack of affection and stuff goes back later, but This kind of stuff that's happening now is extremely hard to deal with.
The most recent thing that happened, and there's been others, is that about a month ago we went to a party and, you know, she got drunk and just started blatantly flirting with, being extremely grabby and touchy with, you know, all these other guys that were at this party.
Wow.
To the point where it was blatantly obvious.
I had people apologizing like, Jesus Christ, I can't believe she's doing that, you know, etc.
I wanted to get her to, you know, go home with me and the guy that she was speaking to when I went up there said, you know, who are you?
Where do you live?
And I'm like, well, I'm her husband.
And she said, well, I don't like to mention that to people and started laughing and everything.
And I was just, I couldn't take it.
So, I went to leave and I wanted to bring her with me and she protested but I got her out of there and she went back to the party and I couldn't stop her from going back so I sat in my truck in the driveway waiting for her to come back you know having a beer and just waiting and when she came back she was with a group of guys
Well, there was multiple people, guys and girls, and I could just hear her over there talking about how much she thought it was a pain in the ass, and that I can't tell her what to do, and she's gonna do what she wants to do.
What she was saying two ways.
She was saying to other men that she was flirting with how you were a pain in the ass.
Yeah, yeah, and that I couldn't tell her what to do.
Oh my God!
Are you kidding me?
And I'm watching this.
Wait, wait, wait.
What are you doing?
In this one situation or overall?
What are you doing?
In this one situation or overall?
Oh, my God.
Just let me finish this.
Okay, so I'm sitting there and I'm about to get up and go over there and grab her.
And as I get up to go, she leans over and starts kissing this guy.
And that's when I said, hey, what the hell are you doing?
And the guy ran off and she came over and tried to play it off like it was nothing or that I didn't see what I saw.
Basically the story from this point on is that she was so drunk she doesn't remember what she did, and I don't know if I can believe that.
You know what they say, in vino veritas, in wine there is truth.
You don't become a different person when you get drunk.
That's exactly what I said.
I don't get drunk and strangle kittens.
I haven't been drunk in 30 years, but I didn't become a different person.
Yeah, and that's what I told her.
Which means that you are more, in a sense, yourself.
But go on.
Exactly.
It lowers your inhibitions, but it doesn't change your values.
And I told her that.
No matter how drunk I get, I would never do that.
It's just not who I am.
Okay, so what's your question?
Okay, so we've since gone to therapy, and the therapist is trying to make this out to be that the reason she's doing this is because she doesn't feel like she's getting enough emotional, I don't know, backing?
from me that she doesn't get enough affirmation from me and that getting it from strangers I guess is what is more impactful to her because I guess her sense of self or her self-esteem is so low that she constantly needs feedback from people.
I guess I'm just not doing it enough.
Now when we went I went to therapy the first day and I told her, the therapist, about all this stuff that's been happening.
The entire first session was how I needed to improve myself to prevent it from happening, and I couldn't believe it.
Look, it's often the case that when you go to marital counseling, that if the man is having affairs, that the marital counselor will say to the woman that she needs to lose some weight and make herself more pretty.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
I'm kidding.
That's what I told her, too.
After that first session, I was so devastated because I was already victimized.
My life was upside down because I really do love my wife.
And when she did that, it just tore me up.
Oh, my God.
The second session... Okay.
No, no.
Okay.
I got to stop you there.
Okay.
Tell me wonderful things that you love about your wife.
Oh, I think she's – her work ethic and the way she is, like her strong-willed mind has always been kind of inspirational to me.
I'm sorry, strong-willed mind?
I'm not sure what that means.
If you have a strong will, that means that you can overcome your impulses, right?
So getting drunk and hitting on guys and dissing your husband, that is not evidence of a strong will, right?
Well, unless you really, that's just what she wants to do.
Look, I won't lie to you.
I mean... No, I get that that's what she wants to do.
Did she not make vows to you?
Yeah, I know.
She did.
Yeah.
Right.
So if you're going to make vows to someone and then you go and break them, that's not called strong-willed.
Right.
I mean, that's called selfish, right?
Yeah.
But that's not like... A strong will is when you need to overcome temptation, which is to drink more and flirt with guys, right?
Because you're an attention... I don't know.
But that's not strong will.
That's just being selfish.
That's doing what you want.
Let's hear another one.
What else do you love about her?
I like the way she is with the kids, the way she handles the kids.
She's an awesome mom.
She doesn't do this kind of thing in front of them.
This is purely between the two of us.
So she doesn't disrespect you in front of the children?
No, whenever this kind of thing... Well, jeez, I actually have to go back on that.
How could you do that?
I don't know if you want to hear about it, but yes, there was a time.
I'm happy to hear about it, if you're okay with sharing.
This is all pretty anonymous.
We were at one of our friend's weddings, and the reception was in this bar-slash-food place, and when 9 o'clock rolled around, they didn't want to eat kids in there, you know?
She was having fun with her friends, so I told her, you know, go ahead and finish up.
Talk with your friends.
I'll take the kids out to the car.
We had a TV and a movie player.
Just wrap it up and come on out.
Well, she left us in there for over three hours.
And I had to eventually get the kids and physically go get her so we could leave.
Hang on a sec.
Sorry, sorry.
That's difficult for sure.
But what I want to understand is How does she speak about you or to you in front of the children?
Oh, she doesn't say, you know, disrespectful things in front of my kids.
Like, you know, she's never done anything like that.
Okay.
You know, verbally to put me down in front of them or, you know, degrade their opinion of me.
No, she's never done that.
All right.
Good.
I'm kind of at this point now where there's no effect.
How old was she when you got married?
She was 24.
Okay, so she wasn't like you got married when she was 18 and she never had a going out phase, right?
No, no.
I proposed to her, we lived for two years together, you know, and I really, I guess in retrospect I should have asked harder questions during the whole vetting process, you know, but I really thought I had a pretty good handle on who she was before we got married and, you know, it was great in the early years.
Now, what was your relationship, sorry to interrupt, what was your relationship with your mother like?
Oh God, it was pretty rough.
My mom and dad Divorce very early in my childhood.
Um, I never really told me he just never came home.
He was in the Navy and, uh, he was gone for long stretches at the time and he just stopped coming back home.
Um, after that happened, we were, we were in very poor straights.
We were very poor.
Um, and my mom was working multiple jobs and she hired this babysitter for us.
And, uh, for many months.
The babysitter's son, um, he started molesting and eventually raping me.
Um, and, uh, I was so messed up with that.
Um, I repressed a lot of those memories and they didn't come out again until, um, we actually went on vacation and she went and saw this babysitter of ours many years later.
I mean, when I was a teenager and, and all those memories started just, they, they all came back like in a flash, started to have nightmares about him.
It was a mess.
Um, I'm sorry to interrupt.
I just really want to make sure I understand this part.
That's an incredibly grim aspect of the story.
So how old were you when you were raped by the babysitter's son?
Six to seven.
And in what way were you raped, if you don't mind me asking?
Uh, it was started off with just molestation, um, but progressed from there to, you know, penetration.
And, you know, I don't want to get into details, but it was, it was bad.
Was it penetration with his penis or with objects?
Yes, it was.
To which or to both?
To his penis.
And how old was he?
He was a teenager, early teens.
God Almighty.
I'm so sorry.
My God, that's just beyond horrifying.
I'm incredibly sorry.
I mean, it's horrifying what you're talking about.
Now after that, we, I mean, that went on for a while and now it's ridiculous because, you know, the way I got it to stop was simply threatening to tell somebody.
But he was real threat, you know, at the time and I was just scared.
And I mean, when I, the first time I said I was going to tell someone, he stopped.
I mean, it's ridiculous that went on for so long.
But anyway.
So, well, I guess my question is, hang on, hang on.
So my question is, did your mother notice any change in your behavior when you started being molested and raped?
I would assume not because, I mean, I was young, but when I finally started, when the memory started coming back and I started to just flip out, I told her about that and she seemed pretty devastated about it all.
She seemed not to have an idea that that had happened.
And apologized big time for going back there on our vacation.
But to be honest, I had somehow my mind had blocked that stuff out until I started walking up to their doorstep and it was just like an explosion.
I can't describe it.
Were you told by, I'm sorry to interrupt, but were you told by the boy, by the rapist, that if you told he would harm you?
Uh, no.
No, there wasn't ever any threats of violence that I can remember.
He just... So just help me understand why... Sorry to interrupt.
Sorry, go ahead.
It was just, like, while it was going on, it was just forceful and a little violent, and I think the threat of violence was kind of implied, you know?
But is there any reason why... I'm trying to understand this.
Why you didn't tell your mom at the time?
And please understand, I'm not trying to blame you at all.
I'm just trying to understand.
I mean, my daughter can't miss a step without telling me about it, like on the stairs.
And I'm just trying to sort of figure out why this wasn't something you told your mom about at the time.
Again, I'm not trying to say you should have.
I'm sure there was good reasons.
I'm just trying to understand what those reasons are.
I think it was just because I wasn't very close to her.
She worked a couple of jobs and I didn't see her that much and I think from a very early age I kind of felt like I had to watch out for myself and just kind of deal with my own problems.
I mean it sounds kind of absurd at such a young age but I just kind of always remember feeling that way.
Right.
Another question I had, which you may, of course, not remember because you were six or seven, but how, when you had a babysitter, how were you left alone long enough for this to happen?
Well, it was like a kid mill.
This woman had a ton of kids over there and this son of hers, you know, he had his own room or whatever and, you know, it was just I'd get led back there one way or another, or we'd be isolated or whatever.
And even today I wonder how she possibly didn't know, but it always seemed to be around the same time when she started cooking lunch for everybody.
And, you know, it does.
So her daycare was kind of like a rape farm for her son, right?
Now that you mention it like that, it does make me just cringe to think how many other kids he might have got after.
I just don't know.
Why do you think he's still doing it?
I have no idea.
I mean, luckily when we went back, this was years ago, when we went back to see this lady who had babysat us, He wasn't there and it's, I'm so grateful that I didn't get to see him again because I don't know what would have happened if I would have actually saw his face.
Right.
I have no idea.
Right.
Now I know that's, I know that's bad enough, but then, you know, after, you know, my mom dated a bunch of different guys and she finally ended up with my stepdad, uh, who was just an abusive, Ass.
And, uh, he ended up beating me physically pretty, pretty regularly until I was actually old enough to, to fight back.
Um, so, you know, not, not a good shot of just to cross across the board until I was old enough to kind of fend for myself and get out of the house.
And did your mother know that you were being beaten by your stepdad?
That one she did.
Yeah.
Yep.
She, she knew about that.
And what did she do about that?
Just not much.
You know, told me that I shouldn't talk back as much as I do and, you know, not to egg them on and all this other stuff.
There was a constant power struggle between the two of us.
So this is why I'm very sensitive about blaming the victim, right?
So your mom basically said that you were the cause of your stepfather's beatings.
Yeah.
And you see what's happening with the therapist as well?
You, you see, are the cause of your wife's being a jerk, right?
I know.
I definitely drew kind of like an association between those two events.
It always seems to come back on something I'm doing wrong to get negative responses from people, I guess.
Well, you see, welcome to being a man in patriarchy, right?
I mean, this is what happens to men.
Right.
Women get excuses, men get blame.
If a man is promiscuous, if a man cheats on a woman, then he's an asshole.
If a woman cheats on a man, it's because he's not paying her enough attention.
Right.
I even confronted the therapist with that.
I said, if I came in here and it was the exact same story, but the sexes were reversed, there's no way he would have told my wife to improve herself so I didn't do it again.
There's no way.
So anyway, I know it's a lot of backstory, but I'm kind of in this relationship with my wife now where if things don't change, I don't know if I'm scared to death of ever leaving because I love my kids so much and I'd be afraid of her doing something like my mom did and bringing some jerk into the equation.
I didn't treat the kids right and that I'd have to You know, deal with.
My alternative is, if things don't change, is to just basically say, well, you know, live without the, you know, love coming back my way that I'm giving out and just live with that.
And no affection, but for the benefit of the kids and just kind of stick it out.
And I don't know if that's very healthy either because, you know, I'm still very much in love with her.
She's told me she's not in love with me anymore.
Um, When did she tell you that?
Well, before the big event, I actually talked to her and I said that, you know, I'm picking up that, you know, things have really cooled off, that you're not, that you seem kind of angry at me.
You know, what's going on?
And she said that she just didn't think she was in love with me anymore, that I didn't stick up for her enough, especially when it came to my family.
She's had problems with them and that she just, Didn't love me like that anymore and, you know, since then it's been pretty... I've just felt really pathetic, you know, like it's like chasing someone around that you love a lot that just doesn't shoot anything back your way.
I mean, I feel like a jerk, you know, since she said that and... And how long ago was this?
This was earlier in the year, in the summertime.
Wow.
Do you think she would leave you?
No, I think that's the sick thing.
I think she's fine with the status quo.
I mean, I'm kind of like a doormat here.
I'm not going anywhere.
And obviously, I made it clear that, you know, regardless of what she does, my feelings are going to change and she knows I love the kids too much, you know, and she's where she wants to be now.
We've moved back to where she's from and I'm just in a bad spot, you know, all the way around.
Do you think that she's regressing to worse behavior because she's around her dad?
No, because I just don't see him as a negative influence.
Not in this sense.
I don't know why that would cause something like that.
No, I don't know either.
I'm just wondering about the... No, I'm just thinking... Yeah.
Yeah.
And after this had all happened, we were, you know, we've really been kind of talking about the nature of our relationship and, you know, now that we're in therapy and everything.
And, you know, I realized, I guess I've always known, Um, that in order to be, you know, intimacy is dropped off the face.
Sex comes maybe once a month.
And, you know, even at a subconscious level, I knew that, you know, if I, if I wanted to have sex with my wife, it would follow, you know, this basic plan.
We got to go out.
I had to get her drunk and then she'd actually touch me.
And outside of that, there's, there's nothing.
I mean, not, not even like the casual holding of hands or, or kissing.
And, and when I admitted that to myself, I actually told her, I'm not going to initiate anything anymore.
I'm not doing this anymore.
I feel, I feel gross.
Um, and that's not what I should be doing.
So man, I, I'm just kind of at a loss.
I just kind of wanted to get your opinion on things.
I mean, leaving is, is terrifying to me.
I don't want to do that to kids.
I know how damaging it could be, but at the same time, do I just kind of suck it up and, and put all of my needs aside for the sake of my kids and just kind of stick it out?
Well I can't tell you obviously anything about that.
I can tell you a few thoughts that I've had over the years about a relationship with women.
You've probably heard the term – actually, I hadn't heard the term before I sort of started listening to this stuff.
But there's a term called hypergamy, which means that women basically want to marry up.
Right, they want to, they're always looking to use their attractiveness to hook an alpha male, right?
And that's just biological and all that, right?
It's the same reason that men are attracted to women in their 20s, right?
Because they're fertile and blah-di-blah-di-blah, right?
And so we all understand that about men, that men have roving eyes and look for young fertile women and so on, right?
Because our genes don't know anything about marriage contracts and monogamy and shit like that.
They're just like, make more, make more, make more, make more, right?
It's like this photocopier, even if you turn off the power grid, unplug it and throw it in the water, it's still trying to make photocopies, right?
I mean, it's just this blind photocopier.
And so women are, in general, programmed to marry up, to date up.
Now, that is just the way of the genes.
Nothing wrong with it.
It's not a negative judgment in any way shape or form.
It's just the reality, right?
And if you become a doormat, then a woman will generally lose sexual interest in you.
For a man, becoming a doormat is like the equivalent of a woman putting on 150 pounds, right?
Right.
It just goes against the biology of attraction.
Now, I'm not saying that's all there is, right?
I mean, I've read people have, married people have great sex into their 60s and 70s.
So, I mean, I'm not, it's not a negative, it's just that in terms of sexual attraction, if your wife views you as a doormat, then her sexual attraction, if she's not philosophically inclined, her sexual attraction will die on the vine.
Women, generally, are sexually attracted to alpha males.
That is not controversial.
That's throughout the entire mammalian kingdom.
They're looking for dominant males.
If you become a submissive male, then she will lose her sexual attraction for you.
Right?
Right, yeah.
Again these are all gross generalizations and I will exempt my wife and daughter from all of these but these are just gross generalizations.
So women will strive to control a man because women like to be in control of their environment because women are nesters, right?
I mean this is why malls exist and this is why you have more pillows on your bed than any human being could possibly want to sleep on, right?
Women are necessary.
They like to control their environment.
Women, with regards to their environment, women like to get their way.
Now these two drives are at odds, right?
So women want to be bossy at home and they want a man who's dominant, right?
Yeah.
And so a woman will try to control your environment and try and tell you what to do and try and control what it is that you want to do.
And if you let her do that, she will lose her sexual attraction for you.
Right.
And this is all in the absence of self-knowledge and philosophy.
You know, this is basically us as bald apes, right?
So there's lots of exemptions from all of this kind of stuff, right?
Yeah.
So you must live your values in your relationship.
You know, just say no.
Nancy Reagan was right, just about the drug called estrogen.
Just say, just say no.
You know, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that.
Be independent, say no to stuff.
And I mean, the number of times I've heard, you know, just in private conversations or emails, you know, like my wife is a nag.
It's like, but she's only a nag because you're listening.
Mark, just say no.
There's a book that my therapist gave me called Man's Fear of Women, which I think is an important book to read.
There are dog breeders who know this, that the female dogs will just suddenly rush up to a male dog and start biting him.
And the male dog will simply turn his shoulder to them so they can't really get any purchase.
He will never attack them back, but he won't let their random attacks injure him.
And so women will get angry and women will slam cupboards and women will be upset. - I don't know.
And you don't engage with that, right?
You rise above it.
Now, again, my wife doesn't do this.
I mean, and I wouldn't be married to her if she did, but you are married.
You're in this situation, right?
So if your wife is pre-self-knowledge, then you have to understand the biology of attraction, because you can't rely on the philosophy of attraction, right?
And what is going to be attractive to your wife is you not hanging around in the parking lot waiting for her to come, but just going home.
Right.
I mean, you're just sitting there waiting for your wife to, oh, if you can finish flirting with the guys, honey, I'll drive you home.
Dear God, dear God, she'd much rather have sex with the jellyfish because that's the amount of spine you're showing, right?
Yep.
Yeah.
With this last event where she ended up kissing this guy, the only reason I wanted to go, but the reason why I actually didn't was because I was afraid that she was going to not come home at all.
I had no idea.
I mean, the way she was acting was the worst it's ever been, you know, right in my face.
I got it.
But understand, that is because she can.
Right.
I know.
Right.
So most people don't have, most people do not have internal standards of behavior.
They just don't.
Why is she doing this?
Because she can.
Now part of why she can is because you live in a society with a state that is astoundingly pro-woman and anti-male.
Right?
So if she did decide to blow up the marriage, you'd be fucked, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that even if she hasn't thought about it consciously or she hasn't definitely said anything to me, you know, vocally, But she's gotta know.
It didn't start until we came down here.
She knows that not only am I completely adverse to divorce for the sake of the kids, you know, so any threat I say of leaving is kind of empty because I'm too scared to leave the kids and if anything were to happen now that we're down here in Florida, I'd be stuck in a state that I have no family, no friends, and I just, you know, she's where she wants to be, man.
She's got all the cards.
Right, so this is in terms of proximity to her family resulting in, you know it's funny how we always say the power corrupts but we never think of this in terms of women and divorce and the family courts and so on, right?
I mean the fact that women have so much power in marriage to detonate a man's life is, we never think that that corrupts but of course it does, right?
So, I mean, obviously, ideally, you know, self-knowledge and this and that and the other, and I'm certainly not saying, you know, yell at her or anything like that.
I'm not saying be aggressive towards her at all, because that's just another form of weakness.
But you have to step out of the being dominated sphere.
I mean, basically, you just, you can't be that walking along the sidewalk staring at the ground holding your wife's purse while she goes shopping, broken-shouldered married guy, right?
Right.
Right.
I mean, you can't.
It's just that the price is going to be your sex life, right?
Right.
And the only reason that we're actually, I've been imploring her to go to therapy for a long time, especially grief counseling, you know, for the loss of her mom, but she's always denied wanting to go.
The only reason she's out there that we're actually going now is because after this last event, I told her that I would leave if she didn't take the effort to set up the appointments for us and actually show that she cared at all.
And she did.
She did set that stuff up, and, you know, it's the only reason we're actually addressing the problem, because I actually did draw an ultimatum.
I don't know if she believed it or not, but she went through with it, so.
Yeah, and, you know, are you happy with the therapist?
The way that she handled that first visit, I was so, like, Wounded by the way she approached it.
I'm not real sure that I'm going to stay with her.
First of all, you are not happy with the therapist and you need to change your therapist.
Right.
Just straight up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, seriously, this is what I mean by this is assertion without aggression.
You know, I found it.
I'm not paying someone 150 bucks an hour to tell me that my wife's flirting is my fault.
And you can say to her, that's disrespectful to you.
I'm not going to have a therapist disrespect both of us.
She's disrespecting me by blaming me for your drinking and flirting, and she's disrespecting you by not giving you ownership for what you're doing, but instead blaming me.
Yeah.
So no, I'm not paying for that.
I'm not paying for a sandwich that someone spits in.
Not doing it.
Yeah.
Right.
And I knew that you were going to say that exact same thing.
You know, to the few people that I've shared this with, and that we're going to marriage counseling, and that they've all said, well, that's the way it always goes.
You know, you think that you're being victimized, but so does the other person.
When you go in there, you know, you get advice that you may not think is wise, or goes against all of your preconceived notions that might shock you.
I was just making sure that maybe... Oh no, listen, for a man to be blamed for the wife's wrongdoings is not exactly Unprecedented.
You hear this all the time.
Does the therapist know that your wife has a drinking problem?
After we were there for a few minutes, I told her what had happened.
She asked if she'd ever gotten blackout drunk like that before.
She said no, except for college.
And as soon as she said that, we dropped that issue entirely and started talking about what I needed to do to improve myself.
Do you think that your wife has an alcohol problem?
I don't know.
I mean, I think After a certain number of drinks, she seems to lose all respect for me, but like you said, I'm sure... How often does she drink?
Oh, I think we both drink a couple of times a week, but not to the point of getting drunk.
I mean, we usually have wine with dinner and things like that, but... Do you drink every day?
Well, ever since this has happened, I have to be honest, I've been drinking a hell of a lot more, you know?
Okay, well, obviously don't do that, right?
I hate to say it to be that blunt, but don't do that.
Right.
Right.
But, um, you know, comparing the way that we, we act when we have drinks is like night and day.
I mean, I don't, I don't ever act out.
I just, I don't, I don't want to, you know, I don't even drink around the kids.
I mean, this is all after, you know, all the responsibilities taken care of and the kids are down.
I usually tie one on before I go to bed, you know, but when we're out, Without the kids and especially if she's around her friends or whatever and she starts having too many drinks, it's all bets are off.
Well, I mean therapy works best when you're not drinking, right?
I mean if you ever show up drunk to a therapist's office, the therapist won't see you because you can't.
Because if you're self-medicating, then you can't change that much, right?
Sure, yeah.
I would certainly suggest for both of you To not drink particularly, like at all, like not wine at dinner or nothing.
Don't drink while you go into therapy.
I mean, obviously, as far as drinking goes, like I'll have a beer or two a week.
Usually it's a light beer.
Yeah.
And I've sort of had wine maybe once a month.
I think it's fine.
You know, I don't, it doesn't really change my behavior too much, but I'll have, I don't think, I mean, I haven't been drunken since I was like, I don't know, 20, 36 years or whatever, right?
26 years.
But as far as drinking as part of a regular thing, that's just not a good idea, right?
It alters personality, particularly if it changes who you are, right?
And if you're doing it for self-medication because you're unhappy, then that clearly is not particularly great, right?
Yeah.
So maybe you can make a deal with your wife and say, look, I've read or whatever.
Let's not do while we're drinking.
And I would suggest just don't.
Okay.
All right, man.
Well, I appreciate all the good advice and we'll see how it goes.
Best of luck to you.
I would definitely, you can post on some men's rights forums.
You know, you grew up without a dad and your exposure to men was pretty shitty.
Right, you had a rapist babysitter's kid, you had a beating up, you had a series of, I assume, pretty trashy men float through your mom's vagina, and then you had a stepdad who beat you up, right?
So, you don't have a model for how to be a good man.
Well, I've always told myself I've got a lot of examples on what not to do.
And everyone, you know, I pride myself on being a good dad and I really think that I am.
And everyone seems to agree with me.
Kids are number one in everything in my life.
So completely polar opposite to the example that I was shown.
So at least there I'm not repeating any kind of cycle.
That's great.
And good for you.
That is something to be enormously proud of.
But you don't have a good model for husbandry, right?
Right, right.
And were you also in your early 20s when you got married?
I think you said your wife was 24?
Yeah.
And I'm a few years younger than she is.
So I was in my early 20s as well.
Yeah.
And I mean, for people who have had really traumatic histories and I mean we're two for two right in terms of brutality and in childhood and the show call in today.
Today I would strongly recommend therapy before marriage.
Like individual personal therapy.
Go to therapy, get the help that you need to process your history and then get married.
But don't get married before that.
It is tricky.
You can't really change the plane after you are in the air.
So I just want to sort of mention that.
Good for you for what you're doing with your kids, and I'm sure that you can find a way to better things.
But get a therapist who's, you know, read your Warren Farrell, read some Men's Rights stuff.
I think it's important and helpful.
And don't go to a therapist who's going to ignore your wife's drinking, and simply focus on how you're deficient.
That is not respectful to either of you.
So thank you very much.
Let's move on to the next caller.
All right, Greg.
You're up next.
Greg, go ahead.
Hello, Stefan.
How's it going?
Well, Greg, how are you doing?
Good.
I appreciate you having me on the show.
I wanted to ask your opinion or get advice from you on dealing with the dramatization of hedonism in the lifestyle of college students.
All right.
Interesting topic.
Go on.
So this is my second year in college.
I'm a sophomore.
I just started dating a year ago and since I started college and I mean I've always run into the problem of people just not finding me fun or like not as interesting because I don't want to go out and party and get drunk and you know underage drinking and you know.
I just find it difficult and I don't think anyone really values virtue or morality or keeping good in society.
As a college student at least.
I mean, the state and the media doesn't help that at all.
Like your video on the philosophy of television and how hedonism is really dramatized and seen as this great thing when hedonism is great for the moment but doesn't work out in the long run.
Yeah, no, I'm with you.
I mean, when I went to college, I'd already been working up north as a gold banner for a year and a half and I just, whoa, I really didn't get the degree to which people just went to college to get shit-faced and, you know, not connect, right?
And I remember, yeah, I was going out with this woman wanted to go out with me and I was like, it was like the third or fourth week of college and I was like, no, I'm starting to work on a paper.
I got a paper due in a month.
She thought I didn't want to have anything to do with her and I was like, no, I'm paying to be here.
I worked hard to save up the money to come here.
I didn't come here to kill my brain cells.
It's tough.
It's tough for people.
It doesn't help how much financial aid that the federal government gives to us, giving us free grants and loans that you don't have to pay back right now, and people lose sight of things that, you know, this is not free, and you're here to work, not to have fun, and people lose sight of it, and it's just, I don't know, it's kind of discouraging.
I mean, I want to have a relationship.
get some experience with dating and stuff in college, but I just can't find anyone that's actually virtuous at all, really.
Sure.
Yeah, and I mean, for some reason, people find it, you know, shit I did when I was drunk stories, they find them really funny.
And it's just a confession of alienated tragedy.
You know, like, I got so drunk that I did this, that, or the other.
Stupid shit, right?
And I mean, you don't hear this from epileptics, you know, like I had an epileptic attack so bad one day that I punched a bus driver or something, right?
But there is this glorification of the self erasure of addiction.
And it is because people don't know how to relate to each other.
You know, families don't talk to each other.
Most families don't even have dinner together.
Parenthood is very rushed.
And exceeding the part-time affair when two parents are working and people don't know how to relate to each other.
Kids learn how to talk by talking to adults.
They don't learn how to talk by talking to other kids.
And we put kids in daycare, we put them in schools where they're all relating to each other.
They don't actually learn how to have a fucking conversation.
How could they?
Yeah, yeah.
And so you get these kids, they don't know how to relate.
They don't know how to talk to anyone.
They don't know what truth is.
They don't know who they are.
And so there's this anxiety panic that sets in and a lot of alcoholism is due to social anxiety and social anxiety is due to kids not learning how to talk with each other, how to relate, right?
Yeah.
And so, you know, go ahead.
Last year I started taking a bunch of philosophy classes and ethics classes and I learned about existentialism and Soren Kierkegaard and I mean that really changed things for me.
I try to talk with philosophy with people all the time.
No one wants to even talk about religion, politics, philosophy.
No one ever wants to talk about it.
It's this touchy subject that you can't talk about because you might offend someone.
I can't ever hold a real conversation because no one wants to talk about anything I want to talk about.
Well, no one wants to talk about anything, right?
Yeah.
Social networking is like a limited face-to-face conversations almost altogether.
Again, that's also due to social anxiety, right?
Yeah.
Like pornography addictions are due to social anxiety and video game addictions are due to social anxiety.
Now, social anxiety is twofold.
First of all, it's being anxious because you don't know how to talk to people.
And secondly, it's because there aren't people worth talking to.
Yeah.
Right?
I get it.
I understand.
I understand it.
I really do.
It is a great challenge.
It is a great challenge.
The people who are really, really focused on drinking, every time you socialize drunk or every time drinking is a core part of socializing, you're just not learning something you need to learn, which is how to interact with people while being yourself, right?
Yeah.
How I Met Your Mother, the woo girls, you know, the girls who pound on the table, lift up their arms, go woo, you know, it's really gratingly annoying shit.
Like, I don't care how pretty the girl is, when she does that kind of stuff, it's like, oh my God, that's just so retarded.
It's so sad.
And it's just a confession of nobody has interacted with me.
You know, being a dad, I hate to pull the D card, but being a dad and seeing a wide variety of kids you know my daughter knows and so on.
I mean you can see just how deep personality goes you know it's like the trees roots go right to the center of the earth right to even before the kids were born and when you see someone as an adult you can see if you've been a dad and of course it doesn't take that as well I saw that before I was there I see more clearly now you can see just how their history has just made made them their history their environment and so on has had so much to do with who they are.
Now and people who need to drink in order to socialize are basically saying I have no identity and I wish to avoid that.
So I wish to have an excuse for having no identity and I will call that alcohol.
I wish to have an excuse for having no connection and I will call that alcohol.
I wish to have an excuse for never having a real conversation with someone that doesn't expose the trauma of my history and I will call that alcohol.
And there is also such hostility in alcohol as well.
I mean, you go to a party and people are getting drunk and you say, no thanks, I'm having soda.
And people are like, hey man, come on, don't be such a prude, you know?
Yeah.
It's like if you don't want to have a threesome, you're like a prude.
You know, and it's like, come on, don't, don't be ridiculous.
Having standards is not the same as being repressed.
So I just wanted to.
Yeah, I totally agree with you.
Also, I dated several different girls so far, since I transferred to this university, and none of them ever want to actually commit.
It's like, you know, I don't really want to be in a committed relationship right now, but I mean, we can still be friends with benefits.
I'm like, what?
It's just like, I can't lower myself to that.
I mean, you know, Sexual gratification is nice and all, but I mean, there's more to sex than just physical pleasure, and it's... people just... I just can't wrap my head around people these days.
It's kind of disconcerting.
Well, no, I know what you're saying, and it's like trying to date Young women is like trying to have a conversation with someone at a party who's always waiting for someone more interesting to talk to, like their eyes are wandering all over the room and you're like trying to get them to focus on you and you know they're kind of going to give you a little bit of attention but not much because they're looking.
So women are willing to settle for a guy for the moment because they're looking for someone better.
Again that's something to do with hypogamy.
Unfortunately, unless you're like the Brad Pitt bad boy, and even then, you know, they will only commit to you for the sake of status, right?
For other women, right?
A lot of what women do is for other women, right?
Women don't dress for other women.
I mean, if women dress for men, they'd wear band-aids over their nipples.
That's about it.
Maybe only if it was cold.
And so I think that it's important to recognize that women in North America are, you know, kind of messed up.
I mean, they're probably messed up all over the world.
I just, you know, I've dated women from a bunch of other cultures, but women from North America in particular, a lot of them are on antidepressants there.
And the way that they, the time of their greatest sexual attraction and power is in their early to mid-twenties.
And they just waste that on idiots, like guys who won't settle down, who are players, who are, you know, they're just like pretty boy status stuff and all that.
And then they sort of wait until they get into their thirties and then they start to And then you know who wants their used up sloppy seconds as the MGTOW movement sort of puts it and again I think it's kind of harsh.
I think there's some you know some need for empathy and that it's not like men are making all these great decisions either but women aren't basically reminded that if they want to you know get married and have kids then they need to find a stable guy and they should do it when they're younger rather than older.
You know what is what is sold to people in a state of society, particularly a democratic society, what is always sold to people is immediate gratification.
You know, take this money, your grandchildren will pay the debt.
You know, we'll have these regulations and you know, don't worry if you can't have a job in 10 years because there's too many regulations.
You know, lobby for these government powers, you'll make some money, you'll kill the economy in the long run.
Statism and particularly democratic statism is all about gratification of the movement and screw the future, right?
Which is why you end up with these, you know, we will indulge your lust for revenge rather than understanding after 9-11 and we'll start wars that will cost you six trillion dollars and murder a million Iraqis, tens of thousands of Americans and kill the economy.
But right now we're going to indulge your war lust by going to go and have a fight, right?
Yeah.
Going to go have a war.
And so this hedonism that you talk about is fundamentally statist and democratic in nature.
It translates into all of the sexual dysfunction and screwed up relationships.
But there is this rank hedonism that is part of statism.
Yeah.
You're bribing you with the future to satisfy the present is the essence of democracy.
And it translates into a wide variety of other areas.
And this is the lesson that people imbibe.
You know everyone complains about the young but it's all society had 20 years to instruct the young.
If the young are screwed up look in the mirror goddammit and that is really important.
Somebody just asked a good question, are men in their 30s who are not virgins considered sloppy seconds?
Well I think that promiscuous men in their 30s would definitely be highly suspect to get married and settle down with.
I think that's important.
What would you say would be the best way to combat this, not just in personal relationships, but at a wider scale as well?
Well, you know, if you're looking for a needle in a haystack, you better get a metal detector, right?
Which means that you better exercise your values as quickly as possible and as deeply as possible, right?
So you can read Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, to figure out how much you can understand about people in the first five seconds.
And you just have to be ruthless.
You just have to be ruthless.
Which means, oh, you want to go partying?
Bye.
Yeah, I do that.
Oh, you get drunk a lot?
Bye.
Oh, you don't read books?
Bye.
Oh, you don't want to discuss anything of intelligence?
Bye.
You adjust, you know, you don't keep sifting the same bowl of sand that you've sifted before, right?
If you're looking for gold, you recognize that 99.9999% of your time is going to be not finding gold, right?
Yeah.
And so you just keep looking, you keep looking, you keep moving and you keep looking.
Makes sense.
It's just some of my hobbies and interests get in the way of actually getting to the matters at hand of a good relationship.
I mean, I'm huge into gaming.
My major alone is game design.
I mean, that gets in the way of the actual virtues.
I'm like, �Oh, this person likes this.
They must be like me,� and then I run into a dead end once I realize that's not a virtuous person.
I need to find a way to find out if they do have virtue besides their interests.
Well, yeah, but don't think that you bring your interests.
To the relationship, and the relationship has to absorb your interests.
A lot of those interests have to do with not having virtuous people to chat with, right?
Everything's a competition, right?
I used to play a lot of video games, but chatting with my wife is more fun.
So that's what I do mostly now.
I haven't, you know, played a little bit of Candy Crush once in a while.
Chatting with my wife is more fun than playing video games.
So it wasn't like, well, listen, I have to do, you know, five hours of video games a week and my relationship has to absorb that, right?
It doesn't.
My relationship has changed my hobbies, right?
Okay.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
I mean, um, really don't know what else to say actually.
Um, yeah, I guess that's it.
That was really helpful.
And hopefully I can figure out a way to sift through people quicker, even though that sounds so shallow.
Sorry, what sounds shallow?
Just like to sift through people quickly, you know, like toss them aside once you realize that they're not good people.
I mean, sometimes it's hard to find them.
Why is that shallow?
I guess it's because some people just put on this face When you first meet them, I mean, when you first meet a person, they're not usually their true identity.
When you first meet them, they kind of like put on a show to get you to like them or whatever, you know, like the first date always goes where nothing serious is ever discussed in like the first date or anything like that.
Oh no, but that's your choice.
No, no, look, look, you can find people very quickly, right?
You can find out whether they're worth dating.
You can find that out within five to 10 seconds.
You may not believe me.
You may not believe me, but it is true.
And it's been well established.
It has been well established that your first impressions are correct.
And what happened, but now you see this, there's a huge industry of denying first impressions.
Well, you have to really get to know someone and sometimes the social face of people on it, you know, isn't really who they are.
You've got to spend time with them, figure out who they are, learn who they are.
But this is all bullshit.
This is all just a trap that shallow people use to keep worthwhile people around them so that they don't feel shallow and useless.
Right?
It's nonsense.
It's nonsense.
You can figure out who somebody is in the first five to ten seconds.
And this has been very, this is not my opinion, this has been very well established and repeatedly proven in endless experiments.
It is not shallow to judge by appearances.
People tell you who they are in the first five to ten seconds and I have yet to meet a case where that has not turned out to be the true overall and I'm trying to give you the wisdom of experience and tell you that it's the way things are.
It's not shallow at all.
Now again there's a huge industry in society trying to convince people of quality that they should not judge people who have low quality.
But they should give them a chance, get to know them, figure them out, blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
You know, the hooker with a heart of gold, the guy who's in prison who's actually a good guy, Nurse Jackie who really cares about her patients, you know, there's all of this stuff about don't judge by appearances, right?
Yeah.
Don't judge by appearances.
Throughout school and childhood, I've always been taught repeatedly, don't judge a book by its cover, you know, this and that.
Yeah, I see what you're saying now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I realize it now.
No, no, no.
It's a funny thing.
It's that if you buy a book called Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover, can I tell you how long the marketing people figured out what cover to put on the book?
Not very long.
Not long!
Really?
They did a lot of market research.
They figured out where to put the book and they figured out what the spine should look like and what the cover should look like.
People spend a lot of time on book covers and then they'll sell books.
Don't judge a book by its cover.
Yes, judge a book by its cover.
So people are asking me what to look for.
Now that's a big topic.
Maybe I'll do a whole show on that.
Let me just give you a couple of things.
So first of all you look for how they present themselves, right?
There's a psychiatrist who deals with abused women.
And he says that he always asks the women, what sign did you have before you dated him that he was going to be an abuser?
And there's always something.
You know, he had endless tattoos.
He had facial piercings.
He was unemployed.
He was, he smoked a lot of drugs or whatever, right?
There were all these signs that this was a problematic personality structure.
Right?
So you look at how the person presents himself or herself.
Now, if a woman presents herself, She's really put a lot of time and effort into her physical appearance.
That tells you something about her.
That tells you that she wishes to be judged by her physical appearance.
And that tells you something about her view of the value that she brings to the table as far as her personality goes.
Right?
It means that she wants guys to find her physically attractive and that tells you about her sense of value for herself.
And the same thing is true of guys as well, right?
Guys with big arms and six-packs have spent a lot of time in the gym and not a lot of time on self-knowledge, right?
And that's very, very important.
Do they make eye contact?
Do they have inappropriate laughs, laughs about things that aren't funny?
When you ask any kind of question, do you feel at peace with the person or do you feel that they're trying to, that they're kind of hysterical and trying to control the conversation?
Do they feel compelled to tell jokes all the time?
Are they actually able to have a relaxed, curious conversation?
Do they ask you questions about yourself and really listen to the answers?
I mean, these are things that you can get in the first few minutes.
And sorry, somebody just pointed out, yes, And if they have no personal hygiene whatsoever, that also tells you something, right?
Do they have bad breath?
Well, that tells you something about their level of self-care, right?
It's the meat.
This is an Aristotelian meme, right?
You don't want to be obsessed with your personal appearance, but recognizing that there is value in personal appearance, you also don't want to go to the opera in track pants, right?
A sense of appropriateness to the environment, a sense of how you land for other people, it's very important.
I can tell you almost everything about somebody before they open their mouth.
So.
I mean your one video on how a man's heart is murdered was – spoke to me more than anything because you posed several questions in there saying – In your childhood, were you ever really asked about your opinion on how you feel about something?
I've noticed that in my relationships with girls that I've dated, that they don't really pose any questions of interest towards me.
I'm being the inquisitor the whole time, and they never seem to have any interest in me.
But yet they continue to date me.
I'm like, what is going on here?
And I see that now that you've said that.
They're just using me as a status quo until the better guy or more interesting guy or whatever comes along or whatever it may be.
It's just, your videos have spoken to me a lot about that, this topic in particular.
It is hanging yourself with your dick to do that, right?
I mean it's self-humiliating to spend time with women because of their sexual attraction when they don't take interest in you, right?
Do not give women power over sexuality.
This is fundamental.
I mean if there's just one thing I could say to guys, do not give women the power over sexuality.
Your sexual desire should not lead you to give women any power whatsoever at all in any way shape or form.
Right?
I mean, I say this from bitter experience, right?
Like, I mean, I was paying bills for a woman I was living with and it didn't take me too long to realize that I was actually just paying for sex, right?
Because I wouldn't do that with a roommate, at least not for a very long.
And what was the only difference?
Well, the woman was having sex with me, right?
And I went like, Oh my God, I'm actually just paying for sex.
Well that's a bad idea.
How disrespectful to her, how disrespectful to me.
So I stopped doing that and then we broke up.
Thank God, right?
Yeah, that's good.
No, do not add one iota of value to a woman because she has a vagina that is disrespectful to her as an individual.
No matter how much she may be used to that or think that they're nice, don't do it.
A woman's potential to have sex with you adds nothing to her value.
Don't change it.
You know, think of a woman like you think of a man.
I mean, you wouldn't bring flowers to a man, you know, if you're going out with him.
I mean, I guess if you both like flowers and he brings you flowers sometimes, then bring him flowers sometimes.
Absolutely.
But you shouldn't be you plus, right?
Yeah.
It's the you plus that is so devastating to relationships.
Right?
So don't be you plus a nice car.
Don't be you plus money.
Don't be you plus Whatever, right?
And don't let the woman be woman plus sex.
It's just about women and just about men.
And the idea that you will lower your standards because a woman has a vagina that you might get access to is deeply disrespectful to the woman's potential and it does reduce her of course to an orifice.
I'm very much on don't sexually objectify women.
I think that's wonderful.
I think that's great.
That's what I was taught.
Don't sexually objectify women.
Fantastic.
Okay, then I'm going to treat you like sex is meaningless and it adds no value.
I don't mean sex is meaningless like it has no meaning emotionally.
I just mean that sex does not change the equation between myself and a woman in any way, shape or form.
And so if you're hanging around with women just because they're sleeping with you and you would never hang around with them if they're men, then stop doing that.
Sorry to be annoying and tell you what to do, but it's not inconsistent with your values, right?
Yeah.
Because it also, it really lowers a woman's need to grow if she gets coined from vagina, right?
Yeah.
And I've noticed that.
That I would date girls, you know, just to see, oh, maybe they are better than they actually are.
And they're not these just shallow people that want money or attention or whatever.
And I, I begun to realize that in the last girl I was dating and I just kind of like, I'm like, I was really nice about it.
I'm like, you know, you're not, you're a really great person and all, but you know, I don't think we would work out.
And I'm like, I wanted to say, you know, you're a terrible person and you were very materialistic, but I'm like, I, I just can't bring myself to be mean to people like that.
Like just tell them that they're terrible people.
I, I don't know what a way to say it to them that wouldn't, you know, like totally ruin any friendship that was left there.
You know what I mean?
Are you saying that you're afraid of losing friendships with really terrible people?
No, it's not that.
I don't even talk to the person anymore, but I mean, I like to end things on a good note so I'm not just like hated and you know, you know, rumors get spread around and things just turn into a mess.
Okay, well then say it's out of fear of trawling rather than, you know, that's fine.
I mean, you don't have to tell people the truth.
You don't owe people the truth at all.
Yeah.
The truth is, I mean, something has to be earned, right?
Yeah, I understand.
Anyway, yeah, so I mean, I'm sorry that the world is the way it is.
We're certainly trying to change things around here, but the reality is you just, you've got to be ruthless and don't waste, you know, opportunity costs.
Every time you're dating someone who's trashy or empty or shallow or useless, you're just acclimatizing yourself to that and you're not finding the right person and you're making yourself less fit for the right person when she comes along or when you find her, right?
That makes sense.
And I'm wasting resources at the same time, too.
Yes, you are.
Time and resources.
Opportunity costs is one of the great breakthroughs of rational thinking, so use it in dating for sure.
All right, let's do one more caller.
I know we're going a little over.
I appreciate everybody's patience.
There have been, of course, some pretty involved calls so far, so who's next?
Thank you for your time.
You're very welcome.
Best of luck.
All right, Chris R., you're up next.
Go ahead, Chris.
Cool, thanks for having me.
My apologies in advance for not having a headset.
I was trying to set one up, and I failed miserably with my Bluetooth device that I use for driving.
Oh, I'm getting a message.
Other Chris.
Go ahead, Chris.
We can hear you.
Oh, which Chris are we going with?
You're up.
Well, you're talking, so let's keep talking.
Wonderful.
Okay, well, I had a story to share, I guess.
I'll try to keep it as brief as possible in the name of time, and also a question that I hope – it's a bit of a critique, but I was hoping it could be more of a clarification than a sort of conflicting debate.
So I was actually at first really skeptical of the arguments about Childhood abuse and abusive parenting and all of that.
Perhaps because it was sort of emotionally rubbed me the wrong way, as I'm sure it does most people who hear this and think about their own childhood and love their parents and et cetera, et cetera.
But I left the military first and then I left college for similar reasons to get into truck driving.
And my trainer for the company grew up in inner city black community in Indianapolis.
He grew up on the streets.
His father had abandoned him when he was very young.
His mother beat him with extension cords, among other things.
And he grew up in foster homes and I tried to talk to him in this sort of Ask what his opinions were of people, because he was very skeptical about relationships generally.
He talked about how he didn't have any friends, he just had associates.
He was a very nice guy to talk to, but he almost lacked empathy.
It was almost as if he was an artificial sociopath, which was really strange to talk to someone who was so cynical about human relationships like that.
And of course, in the process of driving, I've been listening to lots of audiobooks.
One of the books I listened to recently was Into the Wild by John Krakauer, which talks about the story of Christopher McCandless.
Perhaps you've heard the story?
Yeah, I've seen the movie.
The author goes into his relationship and one of the reasons he abandons his family was because of a, I don't want to say abusive, but a father that lied to him about his relationship with his mother and that made him feel as though his entire life up until that point, which was a rather good childhood as far as childhoods went back in the 80s.
Felt like a fiction to him and he ran off into the wilderness in an attempt to to find himself and truth and beauty and that kind of thing So it was interesting to see that that sort of thing in action But and I would go into more detail but in the name of time, I guess we'll go into the criticism I I first thought of this when you were talking about warfare
And the analogy came to mind when you insisted on calling things by their proper name, namely calling violence, violence.
And you had previously said it's important that we be precise in our language, right?
That we call things not just by their proper name, but by their most specific name.
And in calling violence, violence, that seems to me, to be the opposite of that, that we're becoming more generalized.
It would be as if I were to go into the woods with my sister, and she says, Chris, look, there's a rabbit over there.
I would say, no, that's a mammal.
That's very different, obviously, than if she were to say, oh, look, there's a bear over there.
Well, no, sorry, you couldn't say, no, that's a mammal.
You can say, that's also a mammal.
But you can't say it's not a rabbit, it's a mammal, because a mammal is a rabbit, right?
It's a subset.
Yes, of course.
But in calling the intervention of, say, I don't want to go too much into warfare, because I'm not exactly sure what I think about Iraq.
I'm actually quite divided between what you say and what Christopher Hitchens has said.
But we would agree.
Right, that no matter what the effects, the intention, no matter how horribly things turned out, of an intervention designed to protect people from genocide is a different kind of violence than holy jihad or the desire to wipe an entire nation of people from the planet or something to that effect.
There are different kinds of violence, correct?
It's a big question.
So, of course, I don't charge the US government with the intent of genocide.
Yes, of course, absolutely.
That doesn't really matter, right?
Because it's only the effects that count, right?
Like if I say I want to help someone who's choking to death, and I stab them in the throat with a butter knife and I have no training as a surgeon, what do my intentions count?
I mean, I'm still stabbing someone in the throat and they die.
It doesn't, it certainly doesn't matter in terms of what the effect is, but I think it... No, hang on, hang on.
Sorry, let me just finish this part and then I'll let you go on.
Sure, right.
Now, if I keep going to stab people in the throat with a butter knife whenever I see them coughing or choking, And I keep saying that I am trying to save them.
At what point do my justifications become a little hollow and people will understand that I'm saying I want to save people but really what I want to do is stab them in the throat with a butter knife, right?
Certainly.
And I was actually thinking kind of along the same lines.
It wouldn't change the effects of the action or wouldn't change the unjustified nature of the action.
But it would, I think, go about or change, I'm sorry, how we would go about talking to people who would support that thing.
Correct?
We wouldn't say it's false.
Sorry, sorry to interrupt.
I'm sorry.
I apologize for interrupting.
But you said, well, you're swaying between my points and Christopher Hitchens points about the legitimacy.
And I mean, Hitchens has fantastic arguments about how evil Saddam Hussein was.
And I've no doubt, I mean, the man was just completely evil, homicidal psychopath for sure.
For sure, but it doesn't matter.
See, the whole point of a free society is if Christopher Hitchens wants to go and fight Saddam Hussein, then a free society will not prevent him from doing so.
If Christopher Hitchens wants to go and send his money to start an army to go and fight Saddam Hussein, then a free society will not prevent him from doing so.
And so the issue is not whether we are for or against the war in Iraq.
The issue is people should not be forced to pay for it.
Certainly, and that's actually a point I'm going to be defending in an argument about anarchism versus what you might call minarchism with a libertarian buddy of mine on Google Hangout in a week or so, so that should be interesting.
But my thinking wasn't so much about the actions and the justifications themselves, because there is no real good justification as far as I can see for coercive force.
Oh no, I think there should be, right?
There certainly could be.
I mean, you know, if a woman is being, some guy's going to rape her, I think she should shoot him, right?
Well, certainly, but that's not the initiation of force.
That's a response.
Yes, but you said the use of violence, and I just want to be sort of, again, if we're going to be precise.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That was a slip on my part, my mistake.
Yes.
No problem.
Absolutely agreed.
I think it would change that justification that people might be wrong here and not evil
There's a point, maybe I missed the nuance there, but when I listen to you talk about the recent video you did on the ghosts of war, for example, or in previous talks about warfare and about hitting children, insisting on calling spanking hitting, which is true.
But at the same time, it's more general and less specific, because hitting could refer to spanking a child in retribution, or it could also refer to drunkenly beating them with a piece of extension cord, or something to that effect, as is often advised by the more religiously inclined.
Well, sure, I mean, okay, but you say hitting a child in retribution, what does that mean?
Well, I can only remember one time when I was spanked as a child, and that was when I was eight.
I don't even remember why I did it, but I ended up pouring a glass of water on my parents' bed.
They were not very happy about that.
Not that spanking is funny, but when my dad spanked me for that, That's not the same kind of hitting as a parent who returns drunk in the home in the case of goodwill hunting, for example, and puts a wrench and a flyswatter or whatever on the table and says, pick one for me to beat you with.
Or in the case of my truck driving instructor who was beaten by his mother with various objects out of basically just pure malice.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't understand.
So if I say spousal abuse, I think everyone understands that they're gradations, right?
That they're what?
There are gradations, right?
So Sean Penn tying Madonna to a chair and torturing her for hours is severe spousal abuse, right?
And hitting your husband or your wife once is spousal abuse, but it's a different degree of spousal abuse.
Like when I say theft, it refers to stealing a candy bar as well as the Federal Reserve, right?
I think everyone understands that because you're using a category, it's like I use the word mammal, it doesn't mean that all the mammals are the same size, right?
Certainly, yeah.
But how we react to those different instances is going to be different.
So calling something a mammal, you know, I'm going to react differently if I see a hungry bear in the forest versus a rabbit.
Mammal is not a moral category.
It's a biological category.
Certainly.
It's an analogy.
Right.
So when you talk about hitting, it is definitely hitting.
Are there different degrees of hitting?
Of course there are.
Are they all immoral?
Yes, they are all immoral.
It was immoral for your parents to hit you for pouring water on their bed.
Yes.
Right now, does that mean that they are as immoral as somebody who whips their children with extension cords?
No, of course not.
Does it mean that they're as immoral as somebody who hits their children every day in the same way?
Of course.
I mean, serial killers are worse than murderers.
That doesn't mean that one murder is okay.
And people who compulsively and repetitively hit their children are worse than people who hit their children only once or twice.
That doesn't mean that hitting your children once or twice is okay, right?
Certainly, certainly.
But it might change how we go about talking about the subject, particularly with people who have been hitherto unknowing perpetrators of this kind of immorality.
Calling someone evil, at least in my experience, because I've in the last two years gotten into tons and tons and tons and tons of debates about religion, about free expression, most recently about feminism.
People tend to cringe when they When they're told outright that they're evil, or that they're a part of an evil machine of some kind, and that kind of shuts down the conversation, which is sort of the first battle.
Yeah, I don't generally call people evil.
I think that's not very precise, right?
But certainly actions are evil.
And also not having knowledge, not acting, When knowledge is easily available, acting without that knowledge is really important, right?
And you are morally responsible for not having knowledge when you are performing important actions, right?
And so if I stand back with somebody who's, you know, choking and say, don't worry, I know how to handle the situation, everybody stand back, and then I don't know how to handle the situation, I've done a pretty grievous wrong, right?
Particularly if that person dies.
Because I've claimed a knowledge in an essential situation that I do not possess and it prevented other people from saving a person, right?
It's the same thing with parenting.
If you become a parent and you have not read up on parenting and you have not figured out the latest and greatest stuff to do with parenting and you just act out your own shit, then you are responsible for that.
You are responsible for the lack of knowledge that you have.
And people say, well, I'm doing the best I can.
Well, the question is, why is that your best?
You know, did you prepare for it?
Did you get it?
I don't know, probably 50 books on parenting before.
I took entire courses, you know, before I became a parent.
I mean, you have to do that to drive a damn car, drive a snowmobile, drive a boat, right?
I mean, God, this is an old argument from a great film called Parenthood, where a young Keanu Reeves basically says, you know, you need a license to drive a car, you need a license to own a dog, but any butt-wielding asshole can become a parent.
Well, that's kind of important.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Somebody in the chat room is saying, who the hell are you to tell me how to raise my kids?
They're not your kids.
They're our kids.
Because when you raise them, you turn them loose in society and we have to deal with the shit that you've done as a parent.
So yeah, they're not your fucking kids.
They're our kids because they're going to grow up and they're going to interact with everyone else in the world.
That's just not, you know, this is just selfish nonsense.
They're not your kids.
They're society's kids, unless you're going to turn them loose on a desert island or you live on a desert island, in which case I assume you're not having internet access to talk in our chat room.
So anyway, sorry, go ahead.
Certainly.
No, no, no.
I definitely see that people are knowingly or unknowingly wielding the future in their untrained hands, which is kind of a scary thought.
Particularly in seeing the inner city areas of Chicago and Louisville and Atlanta, Georgia.
It's terrifying to see.
And to hear the stories of the people who've been there, who've been abandoned by their parents, been beaten by their parents.
My trainer was also telling me stories of various women he knows who have been having children for the subsidies that they get.
Yeah, people respond to incentives for sure.
I mean, it's funny how people say, well, you know, we need to have sin taxes to reduce cigarette consumption and so on.
It's like, but they don't think that taxes on productivity lower job creation and so on.
So it is, I mean, it is funny.
And there's actually been quite a lot of studies that have shown that when you reduce welfare, that people's moral behavior improves in society.
This is just one of these facts that you're just not going to find out a lot about.
Anyway, so let's get to a final point, if you don't mind, because I'm getting a little hungry.
Oh, right.
Well, I didn't want to wait too much of the time.
That was pretty much the question I had.
I don't want to take more time with a long story that goes along with what the other people have said before.
I was particularly struck by Noelle's story, because she reminds me of a Muslim girl I've been talking to recently, who still is Muslim, but I did manage to convince her to go to therapy, and she's going through a kind of mindfulness based cognitive therapy session with her wonderful sounding therapist based on the abuses her family and community has heaped upon her, which is tragic to hear about.
So my condolences there, but I'll try to keep things short since we're already keeping the time in mind.
Well, I appreciate that.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much to Mike and to the callers for calling in.
Brave, resourceful, honest, powerful, essential calls.
I'm often just trying to catch up with the integrity and courage of the listeners.
So, thank you so much.
fdrural.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out.
I really strongly suggest that you do.
Don't consume without reciprocity.
That's not good for your conscience, I think, in the long run.
So, fdrural.com forward slash donate if you'd like to help out and have yourselves a wonderful week until Wednesday.
Well, I guess we'll be chatting again.
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