All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:58
The Failure of Feminism | Roaming Millennial and Stefan Molyneux
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
Hope you're doing well.
You know, if you haven't had a chance to check out Roaming Millennial, well, you're in for quite a treat.
This young woman has very, very good arguments and observations about a wide variety of social and political issues.
And her website, of course, is at RoamingMillennial.com.
You can check her out on YouTube.com slash RoamingMillennial.
Twitter, a little different, Twitter.com slash RoamingMill, M-I-L, and Instagram.com forward slash RoamingMillennial.
Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Now, you have done some fantastic videos on feminism, on family, on gender and so on, but the one that caught my eye the most recently was the one around families and marriage and children and so on, which when I was growing up was pretty much a taboo topic.
Like, you could find all the horrible STDs that you could possibly get a hold of.
You could get yourself a fistful of condoms at school, no problem, but nobody ever mentioned how important marriage was.
To happy children, happy families and small government, which probably not coincidental.
What was your journey towards?
I know you said when you were a kid, you really liked the idea of marriage and kids and so on.
But what's your experience been of having that particular passion in your social circles?
Well, it's interesting because I actually grew up in Asia and my father's Chinese.
And so, you know, even though I went to largely international schools, I think the social setting that I grew up in was that People generally stay together.
I actually, growing up, none of my peers had parents that were divorced.
And, you know, that was sort of the norm for me.
And it was always considered this given that, you know, your life's journey involves getting married and having kids, providing with them.
And, you know, that's sort of who you build your life around.
And it actually wasn't until I moved to the States and Canada, when I actually encountered this, you know, this attitude of widespread divorce and, you know, questioning the value of family.
And at that point in time, I think I was about 13.
When I first encountered that attitude, it was totally foreign to me and I couldn't understand it.
And you know, it wasn't really a big deal at the time because obviously when you're 13, you're not really discussing marriage and family values with your friends.
But as, as I've gotten older and you know, those conversations have started coming up, it's, it's really struck me how my, my view that, you know, yeah, marriage is okay.
Let's have kids.
It's actually becoming increasingly marginalized.
By popular culture, and that's kind of what I wanted to address in the video.
My reasoning, or at least the theory, is behind why I think this is happening.
And if you ask me, it has a lot to do with the, you know, the entitlement attitude that we have.
Also, you know, third-way feminism.
I think it definitely, people will deny it, especially feminists.
You know, oh no, we don't hate marriage, we don't hate men.
But, you know, if you actually look at what these people are writing, it's impossible to not get an anti-marriage, anti-childbearing attitude.
Well it's funny too because I mean I grew up in a single mom household and there is just a kind of class thing that happens.
There's like this biosphere of father absence that grows up around you because as you know single mom households are very very poor on average and so you end up growing up in these you know rent control rat trap apartments where other people are around who are dysfunctional if they're married or you know single moms usually dysfunctional as well.
So I ended up with this environment where there's this normalization that occurs.
Well this is just Just everyone.
This is just kind of the way things roll.
But then what happened was I actually had a good friend who had, you know, two stable, happily married parents, stay-at-home mom, a very great professional dad.
And I sort of visited that like I was going to another planet.
Like it was...
It was a really wild thing.
They had a house.
Just having a house was astonishing.
I remember opening up, they said, oh, go get a pop.
Now, for me, it's not the worst thing in the world for growing up.
But for me, when I was growing up, not that much pop around.
It was pretty expensive and so on.
And I remember when I did occasionally have pop and have friends over, I had to put like nine pounds of ice in just to be able to have enough pop to feed to my friends.
And my friend was like, I was over at this place.
He said, oh, just grab me a pop from the fridge, from the basement, right?
So I went down to the basement and I opened up the door and there's like crates and mountains of like stuff.
And it was just like, wow, this is like paradise.
And I think that had a very strong impact on me, on just, well, there's another world out there.
And this is kind of the world that you grew up in and you lived in.
So it's interesting that even though this was your world, you felt a lot of the pushback against family.
And I didn't feel the push forward towards sort of stable two-parent households.
And it's interesting just what a common message it is that comes across to kids.
Right.
And I think it's interesting how you mentioned seeing The opposite world that you grew up in.
When I, you know, when I first came to Canada, I was, you know, a preteen and, you know, I had always grown up with, you know, very, very tight-knit family.
We're extremely close.
My family is still very close.
And, you know, nowadays when I get people questioning the value of marriage and family, I just think back to what my life was growing up and compare it to what a lot of my friends' lives were growing up, you know, who did have divorced parents, you know, who did Live with single moms who are struggling to, you know, support themselves and also have time to parent.
And, you know, with that experience, I can't see how people can question the innate value of, yes, having two people doing a job that one person cannot do as well.
And, you know, it's nothing to say that they're not trying or anything like that, but it's just, yeah, two is better than one in the case of parenting.
Well, and for me, There was the divorced kids whose parents were divorced and there were kids whose parents were together.
And there was very much a class thing, like the richer kids came from stable married households and the poorer kids were single mom households.
There does seem to be some truth in that, in that the collapse of marriage has not been Class independent.
So, you know, upper class people are still getting married.
You know, 80, 90 plus percent, they're getting married and staying married and so on.
But among the poorer classes, the working classes, marriage has collapsed.
It's gone down enormously from like the 90s plus percentile to less than 50 percent.
So there has been this odd collapse, but it's been very specific.
To poor families, not richer families.
So then if your parents are together, you end up hanging around a lot with other kids from upper middle class families and so on.
So we're kind of getting less of a cross-pollination, which I was fortunate to experience, but less of a cross-pollination between classes, I think largely as a result of this class-based marriage divide.
Right, and that is a good point because oftentimes, you know, after I publish my video kind of encouraging family values and marriage, I had a lot of people of course commenting on the sky-high divorce rate.
Uh, which is very high in the United States and you know, it's, it's gone down in recent years, which is a great thing, but obviously, you know, I think the stat that goes around is 50% or something of marriages and in divorce.
But I think, you know, when you look at that stat, what a lot of people don't take into account that, you know, if you are someone who waits until they have kids before they get married, if you're someone who has gone to college, if it is your first marriage, you know, and also there are cultural factors as well.
Your actual divorce.
Likelihood is, is very low.
And you know, so I think that really speaks to the fact that there's nothing wrong with marriage as an institution.
I think it's the ideals that people have when they approach marriage, right?
And you know, it's like any contract.
It's, it's how much work you're willing to put into it.
And the, you know, the sad thing is that it's almost become a vicious circle with the class divide, because, you know, if you're, if your parents are divorced, if you come from a single parent household, you are more likely to exhibit those, you know, those choices yourself later on in your life.
And it kind of perpetuates this.
for a lot of kids' cycle of poverty because they are that much more likely to grow up without financial stability.
And another thing that bothers me about this in particular is the irresponsibility of the money classes of the wealthier classes.
Because the people who are in charge of the culture and academia and the media and so on, they're all, you know, very, very upper class people who are benefiting from the stability of marriages, which maintains their wealth.
You know, as a friend of mine used to call it, asset mitosis.
You know, you get divorced and your family resources get kind of shattered.
So it bothers me enormously that the people who were in charge of the cultural and moral messages that get spread throughout society seem to have a celebration of single motherhood, they always seem to talk about marriage as a kind of prison, marriage as a kind of, oh, you know, this is discontented woman, and she really wants to be an opera singer or, you know, conduct an orchestra, but she's kept at home with these screaming brats.
It's this negative portrayal of family life and marriage and so much celebration.
Back to Kramer vs. Kramer, which is a movie I watched many, many times when I was a kid.
You know, this woman, oh, she can go and have this wonderful life and date a sculptor 20 years her junior and re-envision and re-imagine her life.
And so it frustrates me because it's the poorer classes, the working classes, who are really being damaged by the shattering of marriage.
And the people who are proselytizing it aren't themselves suffering from the same catastrophes.
And so they're passing along negative values that they're not living by themselves that harm the poor and seem to protect the rich.
And I think that especially is a big problem among people in my generation.
You know, so many of these feminist bloggers who are white, upper middle class, you know, definitely come from, the likelihood of them coming from intact households is very strong, yet they're writing these pieces encouraging these women who are now at a point in their lives where they will be making these choices that, no, you don't need it.
And it's like, well, have you experienced what, you know, children who have grown up without fathers, who have been through, you know, this divorce, have you experienced that?
And I'm not to say that, you know, you have to have gone through it to, Be able to write about something, but I think it is very telling that they are coming from a place of, and I don't want to sound like a feminist, but they're coming from a place of privilege, right?
These people, these pseudo-intellectual feminist bloggers or activists, whatever you want to call them, they're not actually the people who are going to be facing the brunt of the effects of single motherhood, of fatherless households.
Just because people misuse the term privilege, of course, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as privilege, of course.
And so I would say that with this issue around privilege, do they even know kids?
Who have gone through divorces?
Do they even know anyone who's got that kind of stuff going on?
And I would imagine that the answer is no, because what happens is there's this sinkhole.
You know, you see these Florida houses get sort of sucked into these sinkholes from time to time.
There's this sinkhole that happens when there is a divorce, and I've seen this happen even in sort of friends of friends.
When there is a divorce that goes on, someone moves away.
You can't afford to live in the same neighborhood.
You know, you kind of get sucked down through the class system and you end up, like this idea you can be maintained in the lifestyle to which you've become accustomed, complete nonsense.
It won't happen because there is This, you know, half goes to the lawyers and then a quarter goes to everyone else each.
So you lose your friends, you lose your neighborhood, you often will lose your school.
And so when your friend's parents split up very quickly, they're not your friend anymore.
And you don't often see the aftermath because they vanished somewhere else.
I think that's very true.
And, you know, anytime they're like you mentioned, these Hollywood films, perhaps that almost glamorize getting divorces.
I mean, I don't know if you've seen Eat, Pray, Love.
If you haven't, don't do it.
But it very much paints this picture of this woman in her mid-30s who's in an unhappy marriage and then gets divorced and is free to live this glamorous, childless life.
What I want to see is a follow-up to that, you know, 20 years later when this woman is all alone, she has no family.
You know, see if she's so happy.
Is this still going to look like this glamorous lifestyle?
I don't think so and I think that's what so many of these young women and young men who I saw commenting on my video, no marriage, I don't need that, like why children?
I really don't think that they're thinking of this in the long term because in your 20s or 30s, it's fine to say, no, I just want to focus on myself.
I just want to have fun for me.
But is that going to be enough for you long term throughout the rest of your life?
And I have to say, I don't see how it could be.
Well, if you don't spend the first half of your life at least thinking somewhat about the second half of your life, well, the second half of your life is going to be pretty miserable.
But those people also vanish from sight, and they vanish from society.
You know, exit husband, enter cats.
You know, there is this reality that happens that...
It's just think of the people in your life.
I mean, this is maybe a little bit more true for older people, but think of the people in your life.
If you're married and you have kids, then you hang around with other kids, other people who are married and have kids.
It's just kind of what you have to do because there's similar schedules, similar requirements and so on.
And what happens is the people who are single They kind of vanish from society.
They don't, you know, the voiceless and so on, right?
They go to work, they come home, they, I don't know, binge watch stuff or take antidepressants, it seems to be increasingly common, but they don't get much of a voice.
And that, to me, is quite interesting.
They kind of get ported out of society.
They're not big movers and shakers often in the media, although they can be.
I mean, Kathy Griffin, of course, is childless.
But for the most part, they do vanish from society and you don't see them.
And I think there's a good reason why you don't see them, which is that there is a push, particularly among whites, particularly among the middle class and above.
There is this push, don't have kids, don't have kids, don't have kids.
And so there is a strong incentive.
By people who are interested in pushing that narrative to hide the other side, right?
To hide the downward slope of life and to hide how miserable so many people are there in that, particularly women, when it's too late for them to go back.
You can't rewind the eggs, right?
Right, that's very true.
And, you know, there are actually quantitative studies out there that have measured relationship satisfaction and overall happiness.
And, you know, even things like health and financial situation and those correlate very Strongly, in the positive sense, toward marriage, right?
So there are quantifiable reasons why marriage is a good thing, but these are things that these people won't talk about.
And I think, you know, what's very interesting is especially now the push toward not having children.
And that's something to me is in a way even more interesting than the decline of marriage, because we're actually at a point right now where our culture is almost eating itself, right?
I mean, if a culture is actively promoting against its continuation, I don't see how things can possibly continue.
Well, I had a Jewish friend when I was younger, and she was not particularly interested in having kids, but man, the pressure that was brought to bear on her was just extraordinary.
I won't even get into all of the analogies, but, you know, there was a huge amount of pressure brought to bear on her, and that is interesting because it does take I think elders to really push the value of parenting, which is not particularly evident to young people, you know, in the full flush of youth and health and opportunity and exploration and so on.
The idea of like, well, you know, it'd be great to get up at 3 a.m.
and have a toddler spit up on me.
Boy, that would be, you know, that sure beats backpacking through Thailand and motorbiking through China and stuff.
So I think it does require older people to push the value, and this is something that I do In my show, because I didn't really think about getting married and having kids until I met the right woman and then it was like, yeah, let's get this going.
And I think it does take a strong cultural push to remind people, and it also frustrates me just by the by, all the people who want massive old age pensions and free health care when they get older and so on, but don't seem to also want to create the taxpayers necessary to fund it.
That seems to be particularly disastrous.
Well, that's why you have to bring in all the migrants who are obviously an economic boon to society, right?
Yes, there's such an economic boom to society that Turkey is threatening on releasing them into Europe because, you know, apparently economic productivity goes hand-in-hand with being considered a giant bioweapon to use to get into the EU.
So no, I mean, there is this lie, you know, well, too many kids, we've got to Overpopulation, zero population growth, don't have kids, don't have kids.
Oh, by the by, we've got to replace you guys with people from the Middle East because, you know, you just mysteriously you didn't have enough kids.
I don't know why that happened, but that's the way it happened.
It's like the ultimate psych moment in Western culture.
And I think we're still kind of waking up to that fact.
Right.
That's very true.
And, you know, so many people who I've heard talk about not wanting to have kids and it's actually selfish to have kids.
They bring up this point of overpopulation.
And that to me is very interesting because I think they have it in their minds that somehow the world is this community that's global, where we all pool resources together.
And if, you know, there's a shortage in Zamibia, that means that us, you know, North Americans have to deal with it.
But that's, that's not how it works, right?
Individual nations handle and manage their own resources and their purchase of other resources from different countries.
We in the West do not have a shortage of resources.
So it doesn't make sense for us in the West to try and be declining our populations.
Like, if we want to talk about, you know, reducing the amount of children people are having in India or Sub-Saharan Africa, that's obviously a different question, but it doesn't make sense for, you know, us in the West to not have children because we have no resources, yet at the same time, invite in foreign nationals to share in our resources, right?
I mean, if we're going to be having new people in the country anyway, why not have it be our own children, which we can raise with our own cultural values?
Yeah, not a lot of zero population growth pamphlets in Arabic.
I think that is one of the challenges.
Or in the, you know, apparently 12,000 African languages.
That, of course, doesn't seem to happen.
And it is one of these things that strips or drops down the breeding rates of, you know, arguably more sensitive and intelligent people.
Because, you know, if you go to Sub-Saharan Africa and you start to talk about, I don't know, the Earth's resources and what might happen in a hundred years, I don't know that you're going to have much of an impact for a variety of reasons.
But if people are sitting there thinking, well, you know, the earth's resources, we do have to be sensitive.
There is a long-term issue.
We've got to have environmental sustainability.
You know, it's the idiocracy thing.
It's like smart people, sensitive people, morally concerned people are going to listen to that.
And given the, you know, intelligence and moral concern do seem to have some genetic basis, what you're doing is you're carving down and declining the highest quality people.
And what happens then in the long run.
Exactly.
And that's actually, you know, what we're seeing in Europe, as bad as it is now, if we look forward, you know, 50, 100 years, the fact that, you know, no native born Swedes are having children, plus they're inviting in populations that are not only are they having more children, they're having them at a younger rate.
So there's going to be an exponential growth of these foreign populations.
You know, I'm of the belief that a country is its people, not just its geography.
So, you know, in a sense, I do think that, yes, Sweden is dying right now.
Well, it's population replacement.
I mean, we can be perfectly frank about it.
It's not even very complicated mathematics to see where these two lines go, and it is a great tragedy.
And the idea that there's this magic soil called Sweden, and you touch down on that, And you just get the last 40,000 years of culture and genetics and philosophy and thought and history and music and art.
You just touch the soil.
Boom!
And it's ridiculous.
And of course it doesn't happen.
I mean, as I say to people, imagine going to Saudi Arabia.
How long do you think it would take for you to become just like people in Saudi Arabia?
Well, the answer is it would never happen.
Unless you were born there and raised there by particular parents.
So it is one of these great tragedies and it is something that I think without the internet would be entirely covered up.
I mean the information that I got about sort of demographic winter and so on, population replacement, never came from the mainstream media.
I think Tucker Carlson has talked about it a couple of times but it is really only because of the internet and that is really a chilling thing to think about that if the internet wasn't there a lot of people would still not even be remotely waking up to this stuff.
And I think it's not just that these stats aren't talked about, but people actively push back against the ideology without even addressing the facts that are causing the concern, right?
Because if you bring up, if you were to go on CNN as a guest and bring up these issues, the idea of population replacement, the idea that no, just changing location from Syria to Sweden does not make you a Swede, does not mean you embrace and accept Western values, they probably Take you off air, right?
I mean, there's this actual push of propaganda toward this globalist attitude that, I mean, I don't know if you've seen the Time magazine cover that actually says, child-free life.
We're actually being indoctrinated to something that is, in the long term, going to hurt us.
And, you know, not only are the facts not being talked about that kind of disprove that, but we actually have this concerted effort to hide them.
Well, of course, everyone is allowed to have in-group preferences, and it's pride.
But if white people or European history people, if they have in-group preferences, well, that's just racism and bigotry.
I mean, and the end result of that is going to be a hideous, hideous kind of conflict.
Now, what kind of responses have you gotten?
I know you've touched on a variety of subjects, in fact, a lot of subjects, which speaks to your Your flexibility and creativity when it comes to thinking.
What kind of feedback have you gotten from the marriage one?
I was having a look at some of the comments.
It certainly does seem to polarize people.
Yeah, it absolutely has.
There have been people commenting that this is the favorite video I've ever done, that this message isn't talked about enough, and that, you know, that was reassuring.
I've had young guys in their late teens and twenties saying, no, I've always dreamed about wanting to be a dad, I can't wait to start my family, things like that, and that to me, you know, it gives me hope.
But on the other side, you have these women who are saying that they don't see the value in marriage and that they don't want children, but it doesn't make them a bad person, they just You know, don't like the idea of things like commitment and taking care of someone, which I mean, I'm not sure how you reconcile that, but okay.
And then you have these guys who are complaining that marriage, you know, only benefits the woman.
There's nothing in it for the man.
And that it's just this ploy that women have come up with in order to suck resources from them.
So yeah, like you said, it's very, very polarizing.
And I think what's interesting is that not only are women being convinced against it for this set of reasons, it's patriarchal, it's going to limit your freedom, things like that.
But men now are also under the impression that, or at least obviously not all of them, some of them are under the impression that marriage was created by women in order to, like I said, attach ourselves to men.
So, you know, it seems like both genders are now under the impression that marriage was a sham created by the other in order to enslave them into some form of servitude.
But it is servitude.
And I mean, to be perfectly frank about it, of course, the woman is going to give up some options and choices if she chooses to have children.
I mean, you know, the belly gets big, the belly gets small, the boobs get big, the boobs get small, and you spend a whole lot of time not getting much sleep.
And, I mean, as far as... I was an entrepreneur, and that's like slightly second to the amount of time and effort and energy it takes into being a parent.
I mean, it is...
a full-time job more than a full-time job that goes on for well your whole life but intensely for probably 20-25 years so it is a big deal and a big time commitment and of course women are going to give up opportunities when they choose to have children absolutely but so is the man There's no better way of breeding resentment than to say, well, the other person in your partnership is getting everything they want, and you're getting nothing you want, and it's totally... And you can stoke this Iago-style resentment into people very easily.
And there is the argument, of course, that say, well, women invented marriage because otherwise, when a woman got infertile in her 40s, a man would just trade her in for a younger model.
So women invented it so that they could get monogamy and stability through to their old age.
And then women say, well, men invented marriage so that they could get free housekeeping.
Not free.
You get paid if you're a housewife.
So I want to get paid as a housewife.
It's like, well, if you're a housewife, are you paying half the bills?
No, you're not.
You've got a husband who's paying the bills and you're getting paid through that.
So stoking this resentment is so easy.
And I wish that there was more voices like yours and mine to some degree, just out there pushing back and saying, anyone can convince you that you're hard done by if You don't listen with a critical ear, but it's really, really important to remember that, you know, marriage is a partnership.
Everybody makes sacrifices and everybody gets enormous benefits, not least of all society as a whole.
That's so true.
And what I think people have seemed to have forgotten from what I've seen is that marriage is a partnership, right?
I mean, these men complaining about women taking all the resources.
Do you not consider taking care of the children, if she is a stay-at-home wife, to be a valuable contribution?
You know, there's women complaining that a child is nothing but a sense of burden and responsibility.
What was your relationship like with your parents?
Was there nothing positive that you saw from that relationship that you would want in your own life as an adult?
Right.
And that – the accumulated wisdom that took tens of thousands of years for us to develop and, you know, billions of years for evolution to process as a whole, it is amazing to me just how quickly all of that accumulated knowledge can vanish.
I mean, how – you know, how to – Negotiate.
How to have positive win-win outcomes.
How to deal with conflicts.
How to work together as a team.
Who should make sacrifices and how is all that negotiated?
That is something that if you grow up with it, it becomes like second nature.
You know, like if you grow up with English or you grow up with Japanese, then it's just second nature.
Whereas learning it later in life can be enormously challenging for people.
And all of this, like the work ethic, it's like how do you negotiate a job?
Well, if you have two generations of people on welfare, boom!
That's gone!
That is gone, and how hard is it to resurrect that knowledge?
And the same thing with marital skills.
When we have a giant welfare state and we basically penalize women for having men in their lives.
A woman gets much more in welfare, in fact, may not get welfare at all if A man is living with her, so basically the state is paying the woman to get rid of the father of her children.
And then the boys grow up without that masculine influence.
They grow up without seeing.
You know, we don't learn to love as adults by being loved by our parents.
We learn to love as adults by watching our parents love each other.
And if that's not present, so much accumulated knowledge and wisdom can be erased enormously quickly.
You know that old thing, it's a lot easier to bring down a house than it is to build it.
And this slow assembling.
of human skill sets can just be erased within the space of a half century.
On the outside, it can be even shorter.
And I think we're waking up to what's very precarious and what is being lost.
Right.
And what I thought was interesting talking to some of these anti-marriage advocates was how little they seem to understand of what marriage actually represents in someone's life and how a married couple actually functions specifically.
So many people have described it as just this, you know, government piece of paper.
And if you look at the, you know, statistics that compare marriage to cohabiting couples, you can see that it is so much more than that, right?
I mean, I'm not one who, you know, is particularly concerned with how governments recognize marriage, but, you know, the idea of committing to someone as a family member and being in that relationship for the long haul, it does change how you interact with your partner.
You know, I think these people who have only ever seen perhaps cohabiting couples or, you know, they didn't grow up in this family relationship, they're not able to recognize the difference because they've never actually seen it in play, right?
And I think it does make sense to have something like marriage where it's a formal commitment to your partner.
Because, you know, unlike the other members in your immediate family, like your parents or your siblings, you're not related by blood to your romantic partner.
I hope not.
I mean, that would not be ideal.
But enough about the Middle East.
So to me, this idea of a formal commitment, you know, a pledge to say like, yes, we are together, we are starting this family now.
Um, I think that that is super important and people, people can say, it's not necessary.
Oh, if we love each other, why does it matter what, you know, what it's called?
Why does it matter whether we, we, we make this formal or actually, you know, vocalize the fact that we're going to stay together.
It's like, I mean, you can believe whatever you want, but the stats speak for themselves.
We actually look at the statistics between.
Married couples and cohabiting couples, we see that they are very, very different, right?
If marriage was nothing more than a piece of paper, that wouldn't be the case.
But if we look at married people, they have a lower rate of infidelity than cohabiting couples.
They have a lower chance of actually separating and a higher chance of reconciliation if that is the case.
There's also overall higher levels of reported satisfaction in the relationship and happiness and lower levels of reported abuse in marriages, right?
So there are key differences between cohabitation and marriage.
And it extends beyond the idea that, you know, the state is just there to kind of sign off and say that they agree on your love, because that's not at all what marriage is about.
Well, this is general tension, I think.
When people are relatively low quality when it comes to marriage material or husband or material, wife material, father of my children material, they have two choices, right?
Number one, they can improve themselves, become better, become wiser, become smarter, whatever it is.
But the other thing they can do is just create an environment where lower standards don't matter as much.
And by promoting living together, it's It means that people are going to give each other much less of the once-over, much less of the kick the tires, slam the doors kind of thing, when it comes to settling down with someone.
If you know it's going to be forever.
You know, you don't care that much about a burner, but you care about a three-year cell phone contract.
You don't care that much about the hotel room, but you care about the house you buy.
You don't care about the rental car, but you care about the car that you buy.
And so by promoting this kind of let's just Be in the same living space.
Let's just share air molecules and toilets.
And that's exactly the same.
It means that you're not going to have a higher standard for people.
And people who are lower quality kind of want that because then they get to shack up with people without having the extensive performance review that would come from somebody who really thinks they're sitting down and settling for the long term.
Right.
Absolutely.
And some people who are in cohabiting relationships will deny that it's They're doing that because they're afraid of commitment or because they don't want their commitment, right?
They'll deny it, like, no, no, we are in this, this is for real, long term.
But when you actually press them about what their issues with marriage are, so many of them will bring things up like, oh, well, you know, if we want a divorce, it's much more complicated and, you know, I could be at risk there.
It's like, well, I think just with that attitude in and of itself, if that is the attitude that you have toward your partner, you know, that a divorce is perhaps imminent and that not only would, would you separate, but that they would actually actively try to People aren't afraid of commitment.
That's just a misnomer.
They're afraid of judgment.
They're afraid of judging and being judged.
They're afraid of evaluation.
They're not afraid of commitment.
They're afraid of the raised standards that commitment necessitates.
It's just a misnomer.
They're afraid of judgment.
They're afraid of judging and being judged.
They're afraid of evaluation.
They're not afraid of commitment.
They're afraid of the raised standards that commitment necessitates.
I think so.
And with our, especially, you know, my generation, so much of our attitude is just do whatever you want, be free.
There is no right, no wrong.
Everyone pursue their own good and it will all be fine.
And we've actually, so many people are uncomfortable now with saying like, actually, this is statistically, quantifiably a more stable path, a more financially solvent path, a path that's going to lead you to greater long-term happiness in your personal life, which is exactly what marriage does.
But it's unpopular to say that now, and you can't bring up the importance of marriage without being seen as actively attacking people like single mothers or kind of people who just don't want to get married.
It's like, well, I don't see what the harm is in pointing out this objectifiably beneficial relationship to society, but so many people, they take that as a personal attack on who they are, their own morality, the way they're living their lives.
I mean, if that's your reaction, there's nothing I can do about it, but these are the facts.
Well, you see, it's just because you're so horribly insensitive.
See, that's the real problem.
You know, like, I remember when I was a kid growing up, there was a lot of, I mean, people wanted to speak out against smoking, but everybody was so concerned about hurting the feelings of smokers.
And people really wanted to speak out about the patriarchy, but they were so concerned about hurting the feelings of patriarchy.
People really wanted to speak out about white privilege, but they were so concerned about it.
Okay, none of this happened, right?
So, if this idea that we can't speak out against single motherhood because it will upset single mothers, it's like, that's ridiculous!
Of course you can speak out against people who don't exercise.
It doesn't mean you hate lazy people, it means you want them to be healthy.
You can speak out against people who are overweight, that doesn't mean you hate Overweight people or you want them to hate themselves.
It's because you care about smokers that you talk about the danger of smoking.
It's because you care about people's hearts and you want them to be happy that you talk about the dangers of cohabitation.
And it's because you care about people and don't want them to die young or have horrible joint pain for half of their lives or back problems or bed sores that you talk out against Being overweight.
This idea that when you criticize people it comes out of hatred is so ridiculously hypersensitive.
I have no idea.
It's like people without skin saying, you're only hugging me because you want to hurt me.
And it's like, I don't understand how criticism that is, you know, just, fair and fact-based is perceived as coming from anywhere other than a place of love.
But it's been turned into this weird, vicious attack upon people.
I don't understand it fundamentally.
Well, we're living in a society of moral relativism, right?
We can't possibly comment on what may or may not be better for individuals and society because then it looks like we're passing judgment and we can't possibly do that unless it's to white cishet males, of course, then we can go nuts.
Yes, because nobody ever says, well, you are a horrible racist to someone, to someone abstract.
You are a horrible racist.
Maybe I don't particularly like that.
But hey, if that's your thing, man, live and let live.
Everything's fine.
You know, and it's like, oh, the relativism is very relative, because there's certain vicious absolutes that don't even brook any questioning or evaluation that the mob uses to attack people.
And that seems pretty Morally absolute to me, but then there's all this other stuff that's really soupy and vague, and people don't even seem to be bothered that much by this contradiction.
It would drive me crazy!
Right, and it drives me crazy all the time, right?
I can perhaps respond to this feminist video, which everyone received very positively, but then, you know, when I'm speaking out about the same issue, but just from a different perspective, all of a sudden I'm the one who's spreading hate and being critical of people's life choices.
Like, let's be clear here.
Both of us are commenting on people's life choices.
The only one who's being attacked for it is usually the person who's on the more conservative or right-leaning side, or perhaps even just not pro-social justice side, because it's unpopular to question that narrative nowadays.
Well of course if you're Kathy Griffin and you receive death threats, which is terrible, it is the worst thing in the world.
But the fact that if you're not, if you're a public woman who's not on the left and you receive these kind of threats all the time, well nobody really talks about that because they have their, I mean they have, the left says that in-group preferences are very bad but all the left has is fundamentally pretty vicious in-group preferences.
So that's something I don't take particularly seriously.
And there is also this weird thing which is You know, you're just a vicious hater and you hate so-and-so and you want to condemn so-and-so and it's like, okay, so if I bring up legitimate fact-based criticisms of certain ideas, I'm somehow viciously criticized, attacked and undermined because criticism is bad.
And that just, it's another one of these, I hate that you're a hater.
It's like, first of all, I'm not a hater.
I'm just bringing facts because I want people's lives to be better.
The only person who's the hater is the person calling someone who's bringing fact-based arguments to the social discourse a hater.
And that's another contradiction that people don't seem to be able to unravel that much.
And again, it's just this blind, charging, vicious mob from time to time.
Absolutely.
I've actually, in my time on YouTube, I've lost count of all the groups that I supposedly hate and I'm trying to actively marginalize.
I mean, right, people of color, queer people, also white people somehow.
Just, you know, all of these groups and I often get told that I'm just bringing negativity to the internet.
Why can't I just be more positive?
And, you know, that's coming from people who just want to pat themselves on the back about how great their life choices are, right?
But if we actually want to make this world a more positive place, I do think it is important to Bring up the areas where we need to be doing better.
Bring up the areas where, you know, we are falling short of reaching our potential.
You know, if you raise the sales quota, the bad salespeople are going to complain.
If you raise the standards, the people who don't fit into those new standards as well face a choice.
They can either attack you and get to withdraw your raising of the standards, or they can become better people.
And I think it's a toddler thing.
You know, I mean, it's a tantrum thing, and it has a lot to do with how people are raised.
And this doesn't mean they're blind sympathy.
It's, you know, an explanation, of course, doesn't necessarily mean sympathy for its manifestation, but I just view this as a tantrum.
They want the standards to remain lowered, so they're going to attack anyone who raises those standards in the same way that the kid wants candy but shouldn't get it.
And, you know, I'm sorry if you have to have a tantrum in order to not get the stuff that's going to make you fat, give you diabetes, and rot your teeth, But you can't have it.
You can't have your lowered standards, like they're not healthy, they're not good, they're not good for you, and it's going to be uncomfortable in the short run.
And this goes, which I think is a good topic you've talked about too, which is this sort of body positivity movement and so on.
It's like, I'm sorry you can't have your excess weight and your health together.
You can't have your excess weight and your physical attractiveness together, you know, for the majority of people.
There are a few people, of course, it fetishes or whatever.
It's not my fault.
You see, oh, don't shoot the messenger.
If you shoot the messenger, the facts don't change.
You know, if you're overweight and you throw your scale off the balcony, it doesn't change how much you weigh.
And this weird thing where if you're going to have to raise standards, like as you point out in your videos in America, Two-thirds of people are overweight and one-third of people are obese.
I mean, three times more people dying from obesity than from malnutrition.
These are just facts.
I'm bringing facts saying, no, if you're overweight, you're expensive to society, you're at risk of dying and breaking the hearts of your loved ones, especially if you're a parent.
You don't really have the right, in a way, to be overweight and smoke and drink if you're a parent because you've got kids who depend upon you, who rely upon you.
It's one thing if you're on a desert island or whatever.
I mean, you know, who particularly is going to chase that around?
But when other people are forced to pay for your lifestyle choices, it's a little tough to say, well, I'm just going to do it my way because it doesn't end up being your way.
It ends up being your way and everyone else having to pay for it.
Absolutely.
And that's something that, you know, I've been accused of and I'm sure you have, too.
I've been accused of being authoritarian and that I'm trying to tell people how to live their lives.
Right.
I mean, and if you make a video explaining to fat people like, hey, this is not healthy, people will accuse you of trying to fat shame them or trying to get them, forcing them to lose weight.
And to that, I kind of say, well, yes, actually, that would be great if you would lose weight.
I'm happy for you.
I encourage it.
But there's this idea that not only should people be allowed to do whatever they want without any thought or consideration for how it might affect other people, right, with the choices for marriage, even their choices with their own personal health, especially for systems that rely on, you know, taxpayer funding, not only should they be able to do whatever they want with taxpayer funding, not only should they be able to do whatever they want with no concern, but they should also be And there are so many articles now that are, you know, applauded.
Applauding single mothers.
Applauding childless women who choose not to get married.
Applauding the obese supermodel who miraculously has managed to make it past 30 without suffering major heart disease.
And it's just our attitude that we want to be pat on the back and we want to be told how amazing we are.
And if anyone ever tries to criticize that character and reject them, And I think I've noticed this being a stay-at-home dad and spending a lot of time around moms as well.
And this is part of the gender differences that I think is important for people to understand, is that when you are the parents to a very small child, you know, toddlers and so on, you don't criticize your baby when he or she is learning to walk, right?
You're, yay!
You know, you're encouraging, you're positive because They're trying to do something.
They've never done it before.
And this general positivity and encouragement and enthusiasm is very appropriate for babies and for toddlers.
You know, there used to be this old, I think it's a Jesuit idea, that your age of reason is around sort of seven or eight years old.
You really start to get your moral responsibility and you really have to be aware of and responsible for your own decisions.
And I think because there has been such a lack of fatherhood in society, we have the situation where everyone gets a trophy, everyone's like, yay, participation and so on.
And that is something that I think women are fantastic at, being positive and encouraging to babies and toddlers and young children.
But there does come to be a time, and I think the fulcrum is a little bit more towards manhood at this point, where not everyone gets a trophy.
You're going to lose, you're going to be bad at stuff, and you need to be able to toughen up.
I think what's happened is in education women have taken over in a lot of sort of cultural reinforcers women have taken over and it's become this very much encourage everyone be positive about everyone and everything that they do.
And I think that's creating a lot of very thin-skinned people who have not been told by people in their life, you're not good at this.
You know, like every kid that your picture makes until the age of seven is wonderful.
And after that, you do have to start saying, well, you know, I thought this one was better here.
You got something you need to learn this and so on.
And that, I think, is a difference that because we've delegitimized fatherhood a lot in the West, we've got this mindless cheerleading in a way that's great for young kids, but it's not appropriate into the teenage years, and I think then has people unable to handle negativity or criticism when they get older.
And I think, you know, regarding how you raise children, I think kids nowadays, and definitely my generation, has not been raised in the mindset that sometimes hard work is its own reward, right?
If you succeed at a football game, like do you really need that trophy telling you to do a good job?
Or can you just say, "Hey, look, I did a great job and I'm happy with this.
I don't need some external validating force because I'm comfortable, and I'm satisfied with what I've done myself." And just with the marriage statistics, for example, I have all these agri cohabiting people trying to defend the validity of their relationship.
You don't really hear that from married couples, right?
I mean, when someone's happily married, they're just happily married.
They're satisfied with their relationship.
They don't feel the need to get this external validation, you know, with the body positivity force.
It's not just that these overweight people are trying to say that it's okay to be heavy.
They actually want people to actively tell them that they're beautiful, right?
Health at every side.
They need to hear that they're healthy.
They need to hear that they're beautiful.
If they were that healthy and beautiful, why would it matter, right?
Couldn't they just be content in that and of itself?
And obviously, no, they can't because it's not the case.
Well, and the other thing too is that everyone imagines that, I don't know, like the swimsuit models and so on, that they have a perfect life and they never worry about their looks.
Of course they do.
I mean, when you're being paid $10,000 an hour, if you get a pimple, it's a complete disaster.
Or if you gain four pounds, you know, like, I mean, so everybody, you know, it's...
It doesn't matter where you are in life.
There's always more to aim for.
There's always dissatisfactions.
It's just part of the human condition.
It's why we don't live in caves anymore.
People got bored of living in caves, and it was gross, and it was kind of disgusting, so we got dissatisfied with that, and then people get dissatisfied with everything, and that's natural.
Our ability, we have a civilization because we were dissatisfied with all of the effects of not having a civilization.
But people want to live this life where you don't experience negativity.
You don't experience dissatisfaction.
You never look at yourself and say, oh, you know, maybe I put on a bit of weight or maybe, you know, I'm slouching too much or whatever.
Of course, everybody has that.
That's the human condition.
And trying to scrub it away is like the communist goal of trying to scrub away inequality.
You end up with this totalitarian mindset, which then somehow ends up being, we saw this, as you pointed out, with Sadiq Khan, who's banning, who's banning sexy or, you know, attractive female images on the subway or in public transit.
And you.
You can't do it.
You can't fight biology.
I mean, people are different.
The communism's goal of perfect egalitarianism never works because people are different.
And people have different levels of attractiveness.
It's just the way that it is.
Some of it's under your control and some of it isn't.
And this idea that we can all end up with the same feelings and all of those feelings can be positive is a utopia that I think leads us to a special kind of hell.
Definitely.
And I think, you know, it is fair to say that this This attack against marriage, this attack against actual healthy bodies, it is just, you know, a thinly veiled Marxist effort, right?
I mean, people don't like looking at people who have more wealth than them because for some reason that makes your own wealth less valuable, even though, I mean, I rarely, if ever, when someone asks me how I am, ask how they are first and then base my answer upon that.
I'm better than you, thank you!
Not as good as I am, but that's what these people are doing.
They do it with wealth.
They do it definitely with body image, right?
So many people now get offended when they see this, you know, gorgeous supermodel up on a subway, even though, I'm sorry, but she exists.
Whether or not you're looking at her and, you know, not seeing her isn't going to make you look any better.
And, you know, I think very much the same way with marriage as well.
We have these happy couples and then, you know, these people who are struggling with their personal lives.
And instead of trying to examine what they could do better, what changes they could make, they feel the need to attack the institution that's made these people successful.
That's very, very tragic.
And I'm also amazed if people said, you know, smoking is cool, we shouldn't say anything negative about smokers because it's going to hurt their feelings and make them uncomfortable.
You know one out of two long-term smokers dies from smoking and that's blood on your hands to some degree.
It's not to say that other people don't have free will.
Of course they do and people can choose to listen to this.
But the reason that people make these statements and start these movements like body positivity and you know healthy at any weight or whatever is because they know it has an effect.
You are changing people's minds.
You are supporting them continuing unhealthy lifestyles and they're likely to die sooner because of you.
It is amazing to me That there's not any sense that there could be a risk involved, any sense that maybe they're doing the wrong thing, any sense that the basic biological medical science of the dangers, as you point out, obesity is in some ways worse than smoking.
And so there doesn't seem to be any, well, you know, there could be these negative outcomes, maybe we should temper this, or, you know, when you see these, it's in America, you see these commercials for, you know, wonder drugs, you know, and then there's some guy who takes a deep breath and then rapid fire some Klingon nonsense about all the dangers of whatever is going on.
There doesn't seem to be any star.
Well, remember, you will die earlier if you pursue this.
You know, there's no doubt.
It's just, like, absolute.
And that kind of absolutism, this lack of nuance, this lack of balance, to me, it's just a mark of a propagandist and a sophist and someone you should probably steer clear of.
Right.
And you see this in the idea that you can't criticize someone unless that actually means you hate them.
And you can't want to improve yourself if you actually love yourself.
Because if you love yourself, that means you're perfect and there's no point in trying to be better, right?
There's absolutely no room for improvement with that mentality.
There's no room for nuance.
There's no room for acknowledging our own faults, right?
Everyone is perfect all of the time.
All lifestyles are equally legitimate.
Nothing is abnormal, even when it's statistically outside of the norm, right?
you know, make comments about things like that or even bring up statistics that might somehow paint a lifestyle or choices less beneficial or even less common.
Well, and the idea that you can't make collective negative statements about a group, which I agree with actually in general, but as a white male, the idea that there's this great sensitivity to making people feel excluded or hurting their feelings or making them upset at the It's like, well, apparently, you know, my group is responsible for all the negatives that ever happened all across the planet, including probably the death of the dinosaurs, which I'm sure was because they saw through the tunnel of time at how bad white male colonialism was going to be.
And so the idea that, you know, as a white male, when people say, well, you got to be sensitive to the feelings of other groups.
It's like, where have you been for the last 50 years where I've been demonized as being part of a particular group, sexist and racist and patriarchal and a male chauvinist pig and so on.
It's like, if you weren't there defending my group, I'm not sure why I should care that much about your group.
Right.
And it's not just that it's, you know, we We have to be very sensitive to these marginalized and oppressed groups, but we also cannot be sympathetic to the majority groups, right?
It goes both ways.
When I, in my marriage video, I actually, I was talking about the West's declining birth rate, and I mentioned, as an aside, because it's statistically accurate, that this was especially a problem among white Americans who have, you know, a birth rate well below what is needed to replace the population.
And I got a shocking amount of people accusing me of being racist for bringing up this fact, which at first I was really confused by.
Like, you know, just by mentioning, hey, by the way, whites have the lowest birth rate statistically accurate by any measure, people were actually, you know, accusing me of being racist.
Like, oh, well, well, why does that matter?
Why would you bring it up?
Like, what point are you trying to make?
And, you know, I, I don't even recognize the thinking there, but From what I can gather, they don't like that I am perhaps encouraging white people to have more babies, or pointing out the fact that white Americans as a group might not have things as easy in terms of the law as other groups.
It's a shocking mentality, but yeah, it is unpopular to actively sympathize with white people, just as it's unpopular to not actively sympathize with people of color.
Well, no, there's a lot in what you said, and I think it would tie into this basic idea that people are trying to convince white people not to breed.
I mean, let's just be honest, because it's generally targeted at that.
Like, I mean, imagine if you said, you know, a happy child-free life.
And you had some Middle Eastern couple or some Indian couple on the cover.
People would go nuts saying, oh, you're saying that these people shouldn't have kids?
But I mean, but if you put a white person on there, it's, you know, it's, it's just, it's natural, which is a shame, of course, because white people and in particular, white males are generating the taxes by and large that a lot of other groups are feeding off of.
So I don't think that they necessarily want to do that particular operation on the goose that's laying the golden egg, but that may be a topic for another time.
But it is astonishing because if you take the racially charged elements out of it, which again, when you bring up basic facts to do with ethnicity and people say you're racist, you know, if you were a biologist and saying, okay, well, we've got a lot of black bears here or brown bears, and we've got a lot of polar bears here and the polar bears aren't having that many kids.
Polar bears aren't having that many cubs is probably a better way of putting it.
And you publish this in a journal, people would say, well, you know, we certainly don't want the polar bears to become extinct.
Maybe we can find some way to encourage them to have more kids or whatever it is, right?
But instead, if you sort of say, well, you know, these particular bears having lots of cubs and these particular bears not having that many cubs, people say, you're only publishing that because you hate these bears.
And it's like, that would just be such an irrational response to a basic biological fact.
And it's become such a trigger, such a tripwire for people, and I think the whole point is, you know, it's designed to be so we can't talk about basic facts when it comes to ethnic differences, but it is a shame because it is so anti-scientific, so anti-humanistic, and so hostile to whites in particular that, I don't know, I just don't think people are gonna, I don't think they really think where this particular stuff leads and what might come at the other side.
And I think there is a concerted effort to demonize these types of conversations, right?
Because, you know, if you do bring up this fact and population replacement, things like that, people are going to call you a Nazi for sure.
It's crazy conspiracy theorists.
There is actually a movement that exists called Breed Out the Hate, you can find it on Twitter, hashtag Breed Out the Hate, that encourages white people to race mix with non-whites or not have children entirely.
In order to hopefully weed out the systematic oppression that their race as an entirety apparently brings.
You know, I'm mixed race.
I have no problem with race mixing.
I don't care.
But the fact that there are people who are actively pushing that as an agenda in order to eliminate the white race is ridiculous.
And obviously, I think these are the extremists among the social justice warriors.
But it is happening, and the fact that we can't even bring it up, I think, speaks to how indoctrinated our entire culture has become with this anti-white rhetoric.
And it's not that we think that these are mainstream views.
The problem is they're not being called out by the mainstream.
The problem is they're not being highlighted and it's not being pushed back against by the mainstream.
And yeah, try that.
Try that with any other group.
Try and convince, well, you know, you Jews, you gotta start having kids with non-Jews because Jewish hatred.
I mean, good Lord!
It is weird, you know, when you're in a targeted group and everyone else is cheering it along while claiming that they're against marginalizing and racism and sexism.
But if you're in a targeted group, and it's really hard for people not in this targeted group to get it.
Although, as you say, you're race mixed, you're in a targeted group because, and it doesn't matter, doesn't matter that you're race mixed, doesn't matter that you're female, it doesn't matter.
Because if you're not on the left, you're going to be in a targeted group.
And I sort of really want to remind people of that because, you know, the left regularly goes after even even blacks, blacks who are, you know, very successful.
Clarence Thomas, right?
Supreme Court justice.
They went after him full till boogie and were really harsh.
With the guy and Sarah Palin, of course, very successful female politician, Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, Ann Coulter, all of these people, well, that you'd think that be somewhat in protected groups, but they're not because they're not on the left.
And that's the big division.
And this is what I think we need to really understand this message I want to get out there.
I mean, if you're a black and you think that you're safe from being attacked by the left because you're black or if you're a woman, you're not!
If you're not on the left, you're going to be targeted sooner or later.
And this is why, to me, it's all about ideas and ideology.
I don't particularly care about the race or the gender or whatever it is.
I do care about where people's mindset is and that those of us who aren't hard left, we need to stick together because It doesn't matter where you are.
If you're not on the hard left, you're going to get hit or targeted at some point or another.
And that's where we need to be, I think, more allied than we have been before.
Right.
And I would agree.
And regarding people who, you know, women, members of the LGBT community, you know, especially this applies to Blair White, who is a YouTuber here, who is trans and, you know, even people of color.
To think that you won't be targeted by the left because, you know, I'm one of you guys who you apparently care so much about.
I think that that's completely false and I think what we've seen is that the left actually goes after these people harder and more viciously than they would a white cis male because these people break the oppression narrative.
And they break the narrative that society is holding them down, that the right is this evil racist entity that is going to reject them, you know, that you can't be successful because of this systematic, I guess, marginalization that's going to keep you down.
And so they feel the need to try extra hard to delegitimize you, because otherwise, right, if the left isn't there to provide, you know, all of these benefits, all of these goods, which Women, people of color, LGBT people would apparently not be able to achieve by themselves, then what use is there for them, right?
Yes, no, the left is very into diversity, unless you happen to be a black Republican, in which case, destroy!
So I really want to appreciate the time that you've taken to chat with me today, and I really, really want to encourage people, encourage people.
Don't just go check out, like, subscribe, and share, but don't just go and check out this fine lady's channel at youtube.com forward slash Roaming Millennial.
Again, we'll put that in the notes to the show.
twitter.com forward slash twitch twitch sorry twitter because of OCD twitter.com forward slash roamingmill and instagram of course dot com slash roaming millennial great videos high production quality um uh and again you have to if you blink you miss the jump cuts we were just talking about this off the air she's got this she completely holds position That's something.
And it's like she got lasers.
It's amazing because my jump cuts are like from one side of the screen to the other.
It's completely different.
So but great, great, concise and powerful arguments on a really great variety of topics.
I really appreciate your time today.
Thanks so much.
For sure.
Thanks for having me.
▲
Export Selection