Feb. 22, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| My name is Noah Ravoy, and I'm going to be speaking about the 22 Convention today. | |
| That's a convention run by men for women, with the tagline, Make Women Great Again. | |
| It's going to be in Orlando, Florida, from May 1st to May 3rd, and some of the speakers there will include myself and tonight's guest, Stefan Molyneux. | |
| Stefan is the host of the Internet's largest philosophy show, Freedom Main. | |
| Welcome, Stefan, and thank you for joining me today. | |
| Oh, thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. | |
| Excellent. So what the purpose of these interviews is, is to help people understand what the topics that are going to be discussed are and what kind of value that the participants can receive. | |
| So what are you going to be talking about at 22 conventions, Stephen? | |
| Well, I always have this challenge when it comes to speeches because I do enjoy giving me a good barn burner of a soapbox speech, but also I really like hearing what the audience's concerns are. | |
| And so I always ask them at the beginning, do you want to make this sort of a Q&A or do you want me to do a speech now? | |
| Most times people do opt for the speech format, which, again, I like, but... | |
| I sort of miss that audience back and forth. | |
| So I think the big challenge is every loss of knowledge is an opportunity for wisdom. | |
| And the fact is that throughout the West, we have lost masculine wisdom in droves since the 19th century. | |
| you say early 20th century, mid 20th century, with wiping out of men during the world wars, with the banishing of men from early childhood education, with the banishing of men from the home with regards to divorce and just irresponsible parenting on behalf of both with the banishing of men from the home with regards to divorce and | |
| We've lost a lot of masculine wisdom and masculine knowledge, which is kind of a tragedy in a lot of ways, but also provides great opportunity to reshape the world in a more rational context. | |
| So it's terrible when a house burns down, but on the other hand, you can build the house of your dreams if you have the resources. | |
| So that to me is the big challenge. | |
| And people look at the loss of masculinity as a sort of singular cover the sky blackness tragedy, which it's terrible, but it does give us an opportunity to rebuild masculinity in a way that is more rational, more consistent, and since my job is philosopher, more philosophical. and since my job is philosopher, more philosophical. | |
| So I wanted to talk about how masculinity, or I'm going to talk about how masculinity can be reshaped in a way that's, you know, even better than the previous versions, which evolved. | |
| And now things which evolved, this is sort of a conservative standpoint, things that evolve have great value, because there's been a lot of trial and error. | |
| You know, I mean, you sort of look back through history, just about every configuration of human human society has been tried, because in the hurly-burly of competition for resources that characterized tribal and national human society in history, every configuration was tried and every configuration was tried and people figured out whether it worked or it didn't. | |
| So I think it's a very important thing to So I'm sure that children were put in charge at one point through worshipping children as reincarnation of ancestors. | |
| Women were put in charge. | |
| Men were put in charge. | |
| There were lots of different configurations of society. | |
| Yet it always kind of shook out the same way, which was, you know, men doing the majority of the hunting and the battling and women raising the children and so on. | |
| And those were the societies that tended to flourish and survive. | |
| But in the way that human society evolved, it was kind of like my... | |
| I had an aunt when I was a kid, and I spent a lot of time in Ireland in the summers, and a lot of my family was there. | |
| And I remember going on endless walks with her, which I loved. | |
| And I would look at all of the berries and the feathers and the flowers and all of that. | |
| And I would say, how on earth did they figure out which ones they could eat, which ones were poisonous, which were good, which were bad? | |
| And she said, oh, my child, trial and error, trial and error. | |
| And it's like, wow, that seems like now we don't need to. | |
| You come across some new plant, you can test its properties scientifically and see if they're edible. | |
| But there's all this trial and error that went on throughout human history. | |
| And that produces some pretty good stuff. | |
| But it's not really the same as a philosophical reinvention of masculinity and. | |
| So I'd like to talk about that, and also I've dated an unfortunate number of not great women, and now I've been married for close to two decades with an absolutely great woman. | |
| And how I transitioned from thought to goddess is probably a story that bears telling. | |
| because it's what every man who wants a family hopes to do, is to follow the breadcrumbs to quality femininity and sort of lock it in for the deal, so to speak. | |
| So those are sort of the two things that I'd like to talk about. | |
| And with any luck, I will do also what I did last time at the 21 convention, which is to hold a seminar where it really is straight up Q&A, you know, just sitting around table and jawbone about what the audience is most interested in, most needs from a philosophical standpoint. | |
| Yeah, that's one of the things you can't get just from looking something up online or watching a video is that interaction with people where you can ask your questions that affect you and have some personal value. | |
| Even you can phone into a call-in show, as you do, and many people have got a lot of help through those call-in shows, not just the people that called in, but the people that said, that's a lot like my situation. | |
| But it's really powerful to see things live. | |
| You know, there's a reason why people go to see music live and why they say it has more of a impact on them. | |
| It touches their heart. | |
| And so seeing someone speak live, it's going to have a different effect on someone than seeing them online, which is still powerful, but not quite the same thing. | |
| Well, and of course, I do really appreciate the fact that you guys at 22 Convention have agreed to allow for and fund the flashpots, the dancers, the confetti cannons, the balloons, all of the stuff that goes into the Molyneux experience life. | |
| So obviously, the fact that I will be breaking out in a lion bikini cage dancing outfit, all of that, that's the kind of thing you just don't get. | |
| Thank you. Thank you. | |
| I mean, the audience may thank you or not, but I thank you enormously. | |
| Yeah, if you've ever seen a Prince show live, you kind of know what we're going to be doing. | |
| So, you know, something along that line. | |
| Yeah, it is interesting, too. | |
| You mentioned the wisdom of men that's been lost over time. | |
| And when you gather wisdom by trial and error, as you mentioned, it tends to suit very well a certain place and time. | |
| And when it's not based on universal principles, when things change, then you might end up following a path that wasn't working before. | |
| For example, Being adverse to risks made a lot of sense when we lived in a super risky society where you hunt the wrong way, you're going to get trampled. | |
| Nowadays, incremental failure is how we get success. | |
| You want to learn to read, it's incremental failure. | |
| You want to learn to be good at a job. | |
| Most careers require a lot of incremental failure on your way to success. | |
| And so the mindsets have had to change with that. | |
| I meet a lot of people that say I'm unable to face minor failures and that prevents me from bigger successes, but that mindset might have worked in another time and place. | |
| And so, as you mentioned, basing on philosophy, basing on universal principles really helps. | |
| Unfortunately, a lot of this has also been obscured and in the absence of good ideas, lots of ideas flourish. | |
| Well, sorry, the reality is as well that I just talking about this on Twitter last night, that women tend to be worry warts. | |
| And there's nothing wrong with that. | |
| I mean, because women traditionally were in charge of early childhood and, you know, toddlers wobbling around on unsteady legs around wild animals and cliff edges are just constant death magnets. | |
| So women are constantly concerned and worried about things. | |
| And of course, because women tended to be the nurturers of the sick, They were concerned about every sniffle and every stumble and all of that. | |
| And, you know, anybody who's watched sort of failed videos with a woman in the room, the guys are laughing and the women are like, oh, he could have broken his neck, kind of thing, right? | |
| And this is a generality, but it's kind of true. | |
| And so what happens is because of that hypercaution, that's around the zero to seven years scenario of raising toddlers, men who grow up without fathers end up with an elevated sense of risk and danger and end up very cautious in the world. | |
| But because men have a desire to hunt and fight and explore, they end up going to a safe, imaginary, dangerous environment, so to speak, which is generally video games, not even sports usually, but video games. | |
| And so this, I think, because we want challenge, risk, combat, victory, defeat, and all that kind of good 300 spotter stuff, we are drawn to that. | |
| But because we've got an attenuated sense of risk and danger, we try to do it in an enclosed, safe, pixel-based environment, which satisfies to a very sad degree our desire for lust and glory and contest and conquest, but doesn't give us anything at the end other than a lot of wasted years. but doesn't give us anything at the end other than I think it's like I was just did a call-in show last night with a woman whose husband has spent 10 years in not working, playing video games all night, arguing on the internet, and sleeping all day. | |
| And that's not good. | |
| That is not the way that things should be playing out for men. | |
| But of course, you know, the devil is not just in the details. | |
| The devil is in the distraction. | |
| Because what happens is you get this sense. | |
| It's like pornography. Like you get this sense, oh, wow, I have a sexual relationship. | |
| No, you don't. Oh, look, I'm achieving things. | |
| No, you're not. It's just on screen. | |
| And then what happens is because you get this drip-drip sense of achievement and sexuality, you don't go looking for the real thing, and then you lose out on that skill development to the point where, you know, I mean, a lot of my friends, I grew up with a single mom, I grew up in a single mother environment, I called it the matriarchal manners, you know, just this rent-controlled, cheap-ass apartments with a lot of single moms. | |
| And some of my friends, when I was young, they didn't go through that... | |
| They didn't run the gauntlet of just asking girls out when you're in your teens and being rejected and trying to figure out where you land in the sexual pecking order. | |
| You know, everybody wants to be at the top, but you should start at the top and work your way down until you can get some dates. | |
| And those who went through it, I think, I know, now having... | |
| Now that I'm in my 50s, I've sort of seen the long arc of this storyline. | |
| The young men who did pursue that horrible experience of asking girls out and all of that, a lot of them were encouraged either by older brothers or other males that might have been around. | |
| But those who didn't, You know, with maybe one exception that I could think of, they never caught up later. | |
| I mean, there's some things you can catch up on. | |
| You know, you didn't get a big career going in your early 20s, maybe your late 20s, early 30s, you can kind of run and catch up. | |
| But if you miss that window of just asking girls out and being rejected and all of that, I guess you find substitutes or you just give up or you're too afraid to do it later or you start to get too shy because it's one thing to be a stumbling, bumbling fool when asking a girl out when you're 15. | |
| It's quite another to be doing the same thing at 30. | |
| That's really harsh. | |
| And of course... That is the big challenge as well. | |
| How can we encourage boys to go through that gauntlet, that fundamental gauntlet of masculinity, of learning how to ask girls out and learning how to ask the right girls out rather than what I did and maybe what you did too when you were younger, which is to go for the hotties and ignore the qualities. | |
| It's interesting, too, that you were raised by a single mother, and yet you turned out very well. | |
| And women can really, I think, benefit from understanding what went well with you. | |
| What did you do to overcome that disadvantage that you had at the beginning? | |
| Because a lot of young men are raised by single mothers, and for a lot of women, that's the pool they're choosing from. | |
| There isn't an opportunity for every woman to marry a man that was raised in an ideal situation. | |
| And so it's good for them to hear your experience and you talk about what you did differently. | |
| Well, yeah, and I don't want to sort of be that movie trailer that gives away the whole movie, so I sort of won't go into all of the details. | |
| But, you know, and the funny thing too is that not only was I raised by a single mother, But my primary philosophical influence when I was in my teens was a woman, was Ayn Rand, the Russian-born writer and philosopher, novelist and philosopher. | |
| I was also heavily influenced by Ann Coulter and other people when I was older. | |
| And so I've had a lot of sort of female influences, but... | |
| Philosophy is kind of a masculine pursuit in general for a variety of reasons. | |
| We can get into perhaps another time, but it's kind of a sausage fest, frankly, if you look back at sort of the history of philosophy. | |
| And so that has been very, very helpful. | |
| And the other thing, too, is that... | |
| If I'd have had the male influences in my life that my immediate family provided, I don't think I would have actually done as well because it's one thing to get no impression of masculinity. | |
| It's quite another thing to get a bad impression of masculinity. | |
| It's one thing to be a clear glass of water It's another thing to be water with something bad tasting in it, because that's really kind of impossible to get out. | |
| So I had a kind of uniquely blank slate, and I was drawn into the masculine world of philosophy through a woman initially, and then I started reading the male philosophers, or just the philosophers who were famous, who were almost all... | |
| And having that kind of masculine influence was interesting. | |
| And of course, I was much more drawn to Aristotle rather than, you know, Socrates or Plato. | |
| Plato in particular, of course, being gay. | |
| Not the greatest masculine influence known to mankind for a straight guy like me. | |
| So for me, just getting into the world of philosophy was hugely interesting. | |
| Hugely important because that is about the most masculine pursuit that you can get that has a direct impact on your life. | |
| There are other masculine pursuits like physics or mathematics which tend to be skewed towards males, but they don't have really quite as much impact in your personal life as philosophy does. | |
| Yeah, unless it's time for your yearly tax return. | |
| The mathematics is going to have not a lot of help when you're deciding who to marry. | |
| I did know an accountant once who would pick his dates based on what he thought was the best financial outcome. | |
| It didn't work out well for him. | |
| Wow. Yeah, I mean, most men objectify women according to their physicality. | |
| The fact that he would objectify women according to their bank account is striking. | |
| And that's just another example of trying to use expertise in the place of instinct, because when we don't have instincts that serve us well, we tend to overthink things, which is like trying to win the... | |
| Daytona 500 in first gear. | |
| You're going to burn out your motor because you're using the wrong equipment for the wrong task. | |
| And the challenge, of course, when your instincts are pointing you in the wrong direction. | |
| We know that young men who grew up without fathers have problems with promiscuity. | |
| They have problems with addiction. | |
| So their instincts are kind of pointing them in the wrong directions. | |
| They tend to have heightened and overattaching sex drives. | |
| And so your instincts are kind of pointing you in the wrong direction. | |
| So the way that you try to compensate for that is to overthink things in the opposite direction, which leaves you kind of paralyzed. | |
| Like you're pushing back against a lawnmower that might run you over. | |
| It's like, OK, well, you're just kind of stuck there because the lawnmower, like your sex drive, ain't running out of juice anytime soon. | |
| And you're just stuck there in opposition to yourself. | |
| So for me, the big challenge was to try to find a way to float the abstractions down to my instincts, down to my gut, down to my, you know, the manly center of your manliness or whatever you want to call it. | |
| And the same thing would be true for women, of course. | |
| And that's why for me, the relationship between Abstract reason and the deepest emotions is just about the most fascinating thing that there is, because I didn't want to live a life where I set up my intellect in opposition to my emotions. | |
| In the Greeks, this was sort of the Apollonian versus Dionysian. | |
| Dionysus is the god of wine and sex and instincts and impulse and so on, and Apollo, the god of reason and abstractions and the sort of higher self and all of that. | |
| I don't like the mind-body split. | |
| I really dislike the mind-body dichotomy where your reason leads you one way but the devil of your flesh leads you in the opposite way and you spend your entire life in battle with each other. | |
| No, no, no. I'd rather be battling evildoers and the powers that be than fighting myself over my instincts. | |
| So trying to find a way to get reason and emotion to line up like salmon's in a swift current was the big challenge for me and that's one of the reasons why when I do my call-in shows or when I do my seminars... | |
| People bring up very sort of emotional or deep or passionate or personal topics. | |
| I'm like, yeah, that's entirely within the realm of philosophy. | |
| Because philosophy is not supposed to set up these spears angled against the horses of your nature and just have you fight yourself forever. | |
| That's just a way of paralyzing yourself and letting the powers that be roughshod over the whole world. | |
| Absolutely. It paralyzes you. | |
| It's very often at the root of a lot of people's lack of motivation is that dissonance between their emotions and their reason and their rationality. | |
| Thank you very much, Stefan. | |
| Well, listen, thanks a lot for the questions. | |
| Again, I want to lift the skirt a little, not do the full Monty. | |
| So I just wanted to remind people, please, please come out to the 22 convention in Orlando, Florida. | |
| On May the 2nd to the 3rd, I will be there. | |
| I'll give a speech. I'm sure we'll be getting into seminars and Q&As. | |
| And I love to sort of sit down and break bread and chat with men about what's important to you. | |
| I'm a lovely guy, up close and personal, just as I am on the Internet. | |
| So please go to the website link. | |
| I will put below fdrurl.com forward slash 22. | |
| That's fdrurl.com forward slash 22. | |
| Thank you very much, Stefan. |
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