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Dec. 14, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:10:16
WHY PEOPLE LOVE LIES! Freedomain Solo Show
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Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from FreedomAin.
Hope you're doing well. Let's do a relaxo chat, Yvonne.
Old school podocast-o-matic, shall we?
I think we should.
I have been mulling over the left versus right thing I just really, really find endlessly fascinating and I've got a couple of new approaches to it that I think is going to be helpful in explaining what's going on in the world at the moment.
Now, Why these stakes are so high is a couple of reasons.
It's quite interesting, right? One of the most destructive, if not the most destructive, lies promulgated in American history, certainly in American political history, is the fine people hoax.
The fine people hoax.
Now, that, of course, as you know, is the idea that after the fracas in Charlottesville that Trump referred to, neo-Nazis, white supremacists as very fine people.
And the question, of course, is always fascinating to me when it's so easy to check a lie.
How on earth can the lie spread so powerfully, so relentlessly?
The idea that half of America loves a guy...
Who loves Nazism or Nazis or Hitler or neo-Nazis?
I mean, this is such a...
I mean, you can't live in the same country.
I mean, this is why the escalation is so high.
So the question is, to me, of course, why would people believe this so deeply, so powerfully, so vividly?
So the answer to that has to do with exploitation.
So, now this is all going to sound judgmental.
I don't mean it that way. I really don't.
This is simply, sort of, think of it as an anthropological examination of a situation.
And the situation is this.
So there are people who gain resources from reality directly.
And then there are people who gain resources from reality indirectly.
And, you know, going back to the evolution of our species, we have the hunter-gatherer male and we have the child-birthing female, right?
And it's, you know, it's hard for us to really get this given how liberated in many ways from both biological destiny and basic socioeconomic reality women have become in the modern age.
It's hard for us to remember just how crippled economically women were for the very survival of our species.
It wasn't anyone being mean.
It wasn't anyone in patriarchy.
It's just the basic reality that, at the very least, half of human beings died before the age of five.
And you needed significant population replacement because even those who survived, some of them would be infertile, some of them would die in war, some of them would fall off a cliff.
And, I mean, if you look at the...
I did a lot of research on the aborigines in Australia for a speech I did a couple of years ago.
Speech series I did. And, you know, the population was still very low, though they had been in Australia for like 40,000 years.
That's just how harsh nature is and how difficult it is to survive.
So simply to maintain reproductive stability of any kind, women just had to pump out kids relentlessly.
Just relentlessly.
And... You know, from the age of sort of mid-teens onwards, mid-teens to mid-30s, they were constantly pregnant or breastfeeding or raising toddlers.
And then, of course, when they would pass into their 30s, when their fertility began to decline, the focus would then shift on their, you know, their firstborns, right?
So, you know, you start having kids at 15, which historically would have been pretty—anthropologically would have been fairly accurate— So by the time you're 30, your first kid is starting to have her kids and she needs your help, right?
And this would just continue, you know, 30, 45, you've got the third generation, you know, 60, you've got the fourth, and you're just kind of plowing along.
And it was not super common to get to old age, right?
I mean, for women, of course, there would be the dangers of...
Childbirth, right? I mean, you've got a breached baby, you've got a wraparound umbilical, you've got sepsis, you've got infections, you've got, you know, whatever, you name it.
It's just a bad scene all around.
And men, of course, would be hunting dangerous game.
There'd be fights with other males and all this kind of stuff, right?
So simply to survive was brutal.
So women as a whole could not themselves do much to gain resources from reality directly.
So, of course, you know, they would teach their kids.
There'd be some berry picking. There'd be some fruits and vegetables.
There'd be, you know, stuff that would help for sure, and it wasn't like it was completely immaterial.
But as far as gaining the excess resources necessary, because, you know, males need a lot more calories than females, and this partly because they're hunting and running and fighting and battling local tribesmen and so on, right?
Or other tribesmen. So, women could certainly generate probably a good chunk of the calories necessary for their own survival and the survival of their offspring, but without being able to feed the males, then the females who did feed their males would end up producing strong warriors that would simply overtake the defenseless females and subordinate them into a new tribal structure.
But women evolved to gain resources indirectly, right?
I mean, how do women gain resources?
Well, they gain resources. I mean, we all know this from the dating scenario, right?
The vast majority of dates are initiated by men and women are...
Taken out on dates and you want to show women your resources.
I remember when I was dating, picking up a girl for a first date, I went to get my car cleaned.
And no, that's not what the kids are calling it these days.
But no, I went to go get my car cleaned because I wanted to show, hey, look, I have a nice car, good resource provider and so on, right?
It's just kind of an instinct that men have.
So women will gain a hold of resources indirectly.
And It's not just a male-female thing, of course, right?
There are people who produce wealth directly and there are people who produce wealth indirectly or gain access to wealth indirectly, but it generally is a male-female situation.
So men are out there and they develop, of course, philosophy follows function throughout most of human history.
Philosophy follows function.
And what I mean by that is if you're out there in the real world dealing with real creatures, real canyons, real spears, real battles, real wars, you name it, well, you don't...
Have a lot of time for this relativistic, subjectivist, murky murk, astrology kind of stuff.
You can't indulge yourself in those abstract, anti-rational philosophies because you simply can't survive.
If you do, right?
I mean, you can't sit there and say, I wonder if the deer that I'm hunting is real or not, or is simply a figment of my imagination, or I wonder if the guy running at me with a spear is part of a simulation and maybe his spear will pass right through me.
Like, you have to deal with fight or flight, objective reality in order to survive.
So, the indulgence in mysticism, the indulgence in Subjectivism comes when you gain your resources according to subjectivity, right?
So the male gains his resources through objectivity, through going out into the real world and getting resources.
The female gains her resources through subjectivity, in other words, through the attraction and the loyalty of The male goes and provides her resources.
And so for her, her resources come from subjectivity.
The man's resources come from objectivity.
Now, again, it's not judgmental.
It's not better or it's not worse.
It's simply just the way that the world evolved.
So when you see Subjectivity rising, relativism rising in society, it's because women's perspective tends to be expanding and tends to be rising.
Because for a woman, for a man to be disliked is a sign of his reproductive fitness.
This is one of the reasons why men generally will out-compete women in everything from sports where it's physical strength to chess where it could be IQ, but it's also to some degree just a willingness to be disliked.
For a man to be disliked is a mark of reproductive success because if you, I mean, obviously if you beat some other guy up, then he's going to dislike you.
If you are hunting a deer and you get the deer and take it home to your family and the other guy doesn't get the deer, then he's going to dislike you.
If you get the prettiest girl in the tribe, then all the guys who wanted her are going to dislike you.
So for a man, being disliked is something like we kind of just have to accept and deal with and roll with.
And if you kind of look at public figures who are willing to bear being disliked, I mean, a lot of them are men.
And that's simply because we've evolved that we sort of embrace being disliked as a mark of reproductive success.
Why am I disliked by some people?
Because I have been very successful in promulgating philosophy throughout the world.
I mean, three quarters of a billion views and downloads is really...
There's been no bigger injection of philosophy in the history of the world, right?
And there's technology, of course, even more than me.
Whereas for a woman, of course, to be disliked, what does it mean if a woman is disliked?
If a man is disliked by other men, it probably is a mark of reproductive success.
If a woman is disliked, though, she doesn't survive.
Because if no man likes her, then no man will provide her resources, no man will give her babies and protect her babies, and no man will be loyal to her and so on.
So if the woman is disliked, it's really, really catastrophic.
And if the man is disliked, it's probably pretty good.
I mean, it's kind of a bell curve there.
You've got to get into the Aristotelian mean in terms of being disliked.
If every single person in the tribe loathes you, then you won't have any reproductive success.
But if a man tries to please everyone or tries to please a large number of people, then he simply will lose out.
And if a woman, like this is the nice guy's finish last kind of belief, which is some real validity, evolutionarily speaking.
But if the woman is disliked, no man's going to like her.
Now, let's say she's liked by men but disliked by women.
Well, if she's disliked by women, she's going to spend the majority of her time, while the men are out hunting and battling, she's going to spend the majority of her time with other women.
And because men have been, to a large degree, and again, this sounds pejorative but it's not, have been serfs or slaves or livestock animals to women throughout most of history because the men have to go and produce ten times the resources to take care of a wife and children than he would if he was alone.
The grave danger for the woman is that other women will trash talk her reputation to the point where her bond with her provider is threatened, right?
So you have to get along with other women for a number of reasons.
You need to sit with them a long time.
You need to raise your children with them.
You need to transfer values with them.
And also, you know, when you are busy, they're going to need to watch your kids.
They're going to need to take care of your house, your hut or whatever it is, right?
So there's going to be a collective element of To women and so your need to get along with other women is kind of important, right?
You need them to help you and also if they turn against you then they can start spreading lies about you which could interfere with the bond your provider has and thus threaten your entire family.
So for a woman to be disliked is very, it's much more uncomfortable.
It's kind of hard for men to realize for the most part How uncomfortable it is for women to be disliked.
And again, lots of exceptions.
Lots of exceptions out there, but this is a general trend that I think is worth noting.
The way that men fight, of course, is through force, which is why when men are in ascendancy, speech is allowed.
And I don't mean the ruling class of men who rely on the mysticism of the priests in general to legitimate their rule by saying they're appointed there by God and so on.
When men as a whole are in ascendancy, then they like free speech because free speech is preferable to violence, right?
And if you don't have free speech, then you tend to end up with violence.
And so men prefer free speech to violence.
And so when you have men in charge, you get free speech and you also get a banning of, you know, rape, theft, assault and murder.
And that tends to be the major focus because men fight with weapons.
They fight with fists and swords and so on, right?
Now, when women are in ascendancy, what happens is because women fight with language, they generally don't punch each other.
They generally spread vicious rumors and so on.
For a woman, the great danger is negative.
Language is negative. Speech.
And therefore... When women gain in ascendancy or feminine ideologies or matriarchies as a whole gain in ascendancy, then what you end up with is you end up with less concern over, say, the First and Second Amendments and for free speech and the right to bear arms because women say, well, I'm not really much at risk from weapons, but I am at risk from language.
And therefore, I don't care that much about protecting the right to have and bear arms, but I do care about language being used against me.
And that's why you see this pivot away from First and Second Amendment protections to violations of those.
And you end up with this concept of hate speech.
And hate is an emotion that men can survive as a whole.
Certainly from other men, it's necessary.
But hate is not generally an emotion that women can survive.
So when a man looks at hate speech laws and is like, what's the problem?
So people are upset.
Who cares?
People get mad at things you say.
Who cares, right?
Well, for a woman comes at it differently.
For a woman, keeping what she would call hate speech legal is for a man like saying, okay, you can now go beat up other men, right?
Because that's how women wage war, through language.
And again, this is all just analysis without any particular judgment, just a, you know, the facts, the facts on the ground, so to speak, right?
So putting this together with the basic reality that since really the post-war period, say really since the 1930s, since the post-war period and then in particular after the 1960s, I'm talking about the New Deal of the 1930s, the old age pensions of the post-war period and then the Great Society, the welfare state of the 1960s.
You have women as a whole, and the welfare state is the single mother state by and large.
Again, tons of exceptions, but that's generally the way that things go.
So you've had the creation of people who survive based upon what?
Well, based upon language.
Based upon language, really, really important to get that.
That's how they survive. They survive based upon language.
And the language tends to be around, and you can see this all over the place, right?
It's very easy to see. The language tends to be around the marginalized, the vulnerable, the excluded, the outcasts, the, you know, and because you have this this Perception of environmental determinism or...
Because the fundamental question that society needs to grapple with is, okay, why do people fail?
Why do people fail?
Now, on the left...
It's not that they believe that people fail because of environmental issues.
And I don't mean like the environment.
I mean if you're poor, if you're racially marginalized, if you're whatever, right?
Then you are going to fail because of external factors.
The factors beyond your control.
It's just the environment. You grew up in a poor neighborhood.
You went to a bad school. Your older brother got arrested for drug possession and next thing you know, like you've got nothing to live for and no future and blah, blah, blah, right?
So why are you a worker and not an employer?
Which is, of course, prejudicial because employers work harder usually than workers.
I know that having been in that situation many times.
So why are you a worker and why are you not an employer?
Because the assumption is that being an employer is better because you see all the trappings of wealth but none of the hard work that goes into it and dangerous work sometimes that goes into it.
So you say, okay, why are people not as wealthy?
Right? That's a big question.
It's an important question. And society, yeah, you're going to find some way to answer it or not.
There's going to be some way that society answers that question.
Now, On the left, because we are material beings, the left is generally atheistic, or at least agnostic, certainly doesn't really believe in the soul.
And so on the left...
You are a material being and are subject to material forces and, of course, material forces are generally shaped by environmental factors, right?
When it gets cold enough, water turns into ice.
When it gets warm enough, water turns into steam, right?
It's just the environment acts upon material objects and there's no magical ghost within the creature, the being, the human, that can surmount environmental determinism.
And so when you let go of God, you let go of The soul, the spirit, and therefore, for a lot of people, you let go of free will and you become a determinist.
It's got Adam style, right?
And so, if you do badly for the left, it's because of environmental factors, and therefore, if you do badly because your family was poor, then if you give the poor family money, then they will become just like the wealthy family.
And therefore, if middle class children do better than poor children, if you give poor children or the families of poor children enough money that they get at least to the lower middle class, then you will be improving the outcomes enormously, right?
So that perception...
of environmental determinism is what drives across the world resource allocation of tens of trillions of dollars like tens of trillions of dollars like this big giant inverted pyramid sit upon this premise of the argument that because it's environmental factors the poor cannot be blamed for poverty and the rich cannot be admired for wealth It's like saying that,
you know, guys who are bald are immoral, and guys who have hair are immoral, or women who are short are immoral, and women who are tall are immoral, right?
Women with dark hair, you understand.
These are all just genetic factors, right?
And so, you have to believe that That if it's environmental factors, then a poor person can't be blamed for being poor anymore than someone can be blamed for being born with a genetic illness.
Like, nobody sits there and says, you know, poor Michael J. Fox with his multi-decade Parkinson's and so on, that, you know, well, he got that illness because he was an immoral guy.
Okay, he smoked, but who cares, right?
I don't think that's a cause of Parkinson's.
And assigning moral qualities to purely amoral environmental factors is...
I mean, it's wrong.
That's funny because they deny morality, but then they say it's wrong to do that.
But you understand, you can't...
It's going back to the days where people thought that someone with epilepsy had demonic possession, and they had demonic possession because they had succumbed to temptation, and therefore epilepsy was a mark of evil, of corruption in the soul.
You understand, that's not a reasonable perspective.
It's not a moral perspective. It's a very primitive perspective, right?
So... If you remove free will, then the problem is, of course, you can neither learn from the rich nor the poor, right?
So you can't say, oh, well, you know, the old thing that the right trots out, which is, you know, pretty accurate, which is saying, okay, like if you grew up poor, you just have to do three things to not be poor.
All you have to do is three things.
Three things. Number one, finish high school.
Number two, get and hold a job for at least a year.
Number three, don't have a child out of wedlock.
That's all you got to do. Now, of course, the cause and effect of that is kind of interesting, right?
Because you say, well, you just do these three things like it's a blank slate, right?
Just do these three things and you won't be poor.
But of course, people who do those three things probably have more intelligence than people who don't, right?
Everybody knows having a child out of wedlock is not a great idea.
But if you lack impulse control and you're kind of spontaneous in your thinking, so to speak, Or everybody knows that finishing high school is probably a pretty good idea, but if you're not smart, you probably don't really think about that or you can't do it.
Everybody knows that getting to keep a job for a year is a good idea, but of course, if you are low impulse control, you're kind of lazy, you get mad at the bosses, you get resentful when anyone tells you what to do, then you just don't get a job or keep a job, right?
And so... Again, the cause and effect is complicated.
And I've really been arguing for many years for just a more nuanced and detailed view of cause and effect in human society.
But when you are a materialist, if you don't believe in gods, you don't believe in souls, you generally don't believe in free will, then you can't look at the poor and say, well, those are bad decisions.
And you can't look at the wealthy and say, those are good decisions, because then what you do is you go to the poor and you say, you know, don't make as many bad decisions and start making the good decisions that wealthier and more successful people make.
No. That's somewhat true.
I mean, philosophically, scientifically speaking, that is somewhat true.
It is certainly somewhat true that people can make better decisions.
We can study the more successful people in life.
We can look at the decisions they make, and people can make better decisions.
There's no question of that. I mean, and this is not my opinion.
It's not just a free will thing.
We know that. We know that for sure because even if we say the IQ thing, 80%, you still have 20% to work with, and 20% is a lot.
20% is a lot. I mean, to take a silly example, imagine if there was an exercise that you could do that would make your penis, if you have one, one-fifth longer.
I mean, would you do that exercise?
I don't know, maybe. But 20% is quite a lot to work with.
Oh, 20%. Well, 20% is the difference between a 60% and an 80%.
Right? I mean, that's...
That's pretty good. A 20% boost in IQ takes you from average to close to genius.
A 20% boost in IQ, that's pretty important.
And so there are certainly things that you can do.
You don't want to blame the least intelligent for their life choices because they're not really choices.
And you don't want to necessarily morally praise smart people for doing well because they didn't, you know, in general they did not create their own smartness.
But nonetheless, there are certainly things that you can do.
You don't design society for the extremes.
It's kind of one of the things, if you look at how adroit I am with philosophy, with abstract thinking and so on, I used to feel annoyed with the school system that I was just so out of place there and it's like, well, no, you can't design a school system for someone like me.
I mean, you really can't.
It's like designing society for guys who are like eight feet tall.
You've got to design for the average and the eight foot tall guys are going to have to stoop and they're going to be uncomfortable and I mean, even everything's for right-handed people, 10% of the population is left-handed, right?
So you can't design society for people like us.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
It's like designing society for people with an IQ of 70.
You've got to accommodate, of course, but you can't make that as your central place to aim.
It doesn't make any sense.
So... The...
Pretend helplessness is very, very important.
We see this again. Single mothers talked about them before.
I'll talk about them again. They're very instructive.
And I say this with sympathy. A lot of women are propagandized and all of that.
But you're single mothers, right?
So they make a mistake. They roll the dice.
They have unprotected sex with a guy.
He's hot. He's cute.
They're drunk. Whatever, right? Smart and funny.
Smart and funny. Cute and funny.
And they get pregnant and they don't have an abortion or whatever it is, right?
So how do they gain resources?
So remember, women are adroit at gaining resources through abortion.
Through language, through manipulation, through, right?
It's funny, I remember this.
I was just telling my daughter this the other day.
I remember this incident that happened when I was in gym class.
I was probably in grade 7 or grade 8, maybe grade 8, I think.
And the boys and the girls were divided, and the gym was divided.
They put these dividers down in the middle of the gym.
The boys and the girls were divided, and the boys did wrestling, and the girls did wrestling.
Dance. And it's funny because I was a pretty small kid until mid-teens, right?
So this is shortly before my growth spurt.
And at that point, you know, at that age, having kids wrestle, boys wrestle when some of them have hair on the back of their hands and other people have yet to have their voice dropped, it's kind of unfair, right?
Yeah. Anyway, so long story short, I got an elbow to the face and had a busted lip and my tooth was wobbly and all that.
And it was pretty bad, right? And there was one of these, you know, Willie the Gardener kind of Scottish guys.
Walk it off, you'll be fine.
And he was like gouging around in my mouth trying to wiggle my teeth and his fingers, I remember this so distinctly, his fingers tasted like tobacco and like not even cigarette tobacco, like rolled tobacco and his breath smelled like tobacco and he was like, you're fine, you're fine, you're walking off.
Like what the hell is walking off going to do with my lip?
But anyway, so I just basically went through the day and took a couple of days, ended up healing, I was fine.
But that very day when I was sort of sitting out, I was, of course, like all the guys at that age, I would sit out so I could watch the girls because there was a little gap in the divider between the two sides of the gym and I'd sit and watch the girls.
And one of the girls tripped while she was doing some dance thing.
And of course, you know, the phys ed teacher rushes over.
Are you okay? Do you need to go to the nurse?
Are you okay? Can you move this?
Here, let me lift your leg.
Can you move your ankle?
Wiggle your toe. Are you okay?
I was like, oh my God.
Same planet, different worlds, right?
That's just the reality of the situation.
Men get to walk it off even if they're missing a leg, whereas women get fawned over, girls get fawned over if they trip.
And of course, she was fine, right?
It's just the reality, man.
It's not a judgment. It's just the reality.
So, women are going to gain resources through language.
And so single mothers, of course, will gain resources if people sympathize with them.
And, of course, you can't afford to sympathize with men too much, right?
Because men are the ones who actually provide the resources that you give to women based on sympathy, right?
So you can't afford to sympathize with men too much.
You know, the reason I was told to walk it off was that, you know, let's say I'm out there hunting with a bunch of men, right?
And we're hunting some dangerous animal.
And, you know, I trip or I turn my ankle or whatever.
It's like, well, they need me. I got to walk it off.
Like, they can't indulge me. They can't, oh, are you okay?
You just stay here. Somebody will stay here with you, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no, no. Walk it off, man.
You got the same thing in a war, right?
Like, walk it off and fight, right? And...
Whereas, of course, with women, it's a different story, right?
So you can't be too indulgent with men.
You can't, oh, are you okay? Do you need to go to the nurse?
Can you be like... Because just as an instinct, men got to get up and walk it off, right?
Because you need them in the battle or fight or to get resources, hunting or whatever, right?
So... For a man to play helpless doesn't get you anything other than contempt, but for a woman to play helpless, of course, gets you resources, right?
Which is kind of how society gets paid.
So a woman will say, oh, I became a single mother because the man fooled me.
And he didn't fool me because I'm not smart.
He fooled me because men are untrustworthy, men are bastards.
He fooled everyone. There was no way to know.
I was a victim. Now, she doesn't say that for any philosophical reason, you understand.
She says that because it works.
The three big words in philosophy.
Number one... Two phrases are three big words in philosophy, right?
Number one, compared to what?
It's true, compared to what?
It's real, compared to what?
It's moral, compared to what?
Number one. Number two is because it works.
And most people, their ideology follows what works.
In other words, they will say whatever moral platitudes or philosophical platitudes that they need to say in order to Again, access to resources, right?
That's how they roll.
It's what they do. Again, not a judgment.
But philosophy has generally grown as a method of taking resources unjustly, right?
That's what it was for. So taking morality, which is used to justify the powers that be and used to justify massive transfers of trillions of dollars of resources around the world, trying to change philosophy Which is pretend justice for theft into real justice for virtue.
It's not really what it's designed for.
My philosophy evolved to gain resources.
It did not evolve to provide justice.
It's like taking the king's The king's legal court is there to justify the king's predations and control of the population.
It's not there to provide justice.
What are you, crazy? You're using the thing for its entire wrong purpose, which is why there's so much blowback against what I do.
It's because I'm trying to say, oh, so you're into virtue, you're into truth, you're into morality.
Fantastic. Let's start doing that.
People get really, really mad, right?
You know, when society says, oh, we really care about our children, everything for the children, then I say, okay, well, how would we design a society if children were actually as important as we say?
Well, we wouldn't throw them into debt.
We wouldn't hit them. We wouldn't throw them into terrible schools.
We wouldn't let them get bullied.
We wouldn't do all of these.
We'd do none of these things, right?
But you see, people only say we care about children so that children feel obligated to obey society.
It's a control thing.
It's a power thing. It's not anything to do with an actual virtue.
So when you say, oh, you know, society, well, for the children, we care about the children, say, okay, well, let's make that real.
It's, oh my God, no. It's not, you know, it's a counterfeit, right?
So you understand it's a counterfeit.
You know, if somebody comes in with a If you have a counterfeit bill and you have a counterfeit detection machine, you know, they get mad at you, right?
Because the bill is there.
It's a fake bill to pretend you have value.
It's the same thing with morality and philosophy.
It's not designed for a truth.
It's designed for the appearance of truth with the undercover of exploitation and control, right, and bullying.
So just, you know, I haven't made that argument for a while, but, you know, it's okay to play a couple of the greatest hits once in a while, right?
Got some new listeners and all that, so you might as well be aware of all that and explain sort of why everything happens, right?
So, a woman, of course, will say, it was not my fault that I became a single mother.
I have no responsibility.
I have no free will.
It's all that rat bastard of a guy who had sex with me.
He promised he would be with me forever, and then he ran off.
He didn't, right? And even, like, no matter how, the guy could have been a criminal.
The guy could have been, like, had every conceivable thing.
Sign of pathological dysfunction.
He could have had a subscription to Mother Jones, any number of things, right?
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
She's still not responsible, right?
And it's not that she doesn't believe that she's responsible.
It's nothing to do with that.
The form follows the function, right?
The form of the argument follows the function of the resource transfer.
So it's not that she doesn't believe that she has free will at all, right?
Because if somebody says, I'm not responsible, I can't judge.
Like if women say, oh, you know, well...
Women can't judge who would be good fathers for their children.
They can't possibly say no.
They can't defer gratification and wait until they're married or in a stable relationship with a good guy to have sex.
If the 18 forms of birth control, they can't possibly be expected to use those.
If this was actually the case, then if women...
Genuinely didn't have free will, couldn't make any judgments, and in the most important and personal decision they'll ever make, which is who to have unprotected sex with, the most important decision they will ever make, they're completely helpless and have no capacity to judge, right?
Well, then we'd say, well, look, if you can't even choose the father of your children, how can you choose the leader of your country?
Now, of course, the moment you say that, then women will say, no, no, no, we have free will and we're very good at judging things.
Like, we can't possibly judge Who will stick around if we have a child?
We can't possibly judge that, but we can certainly judge abstract political, economic, and social issues presented by politicians.
So we can be totally fooled by a guy who busts a nut in her vagina, but we're completely clear-eyed and have deep levels of acuity when it comes to politicians making promises.
So, again, women don't want to give up free will.
I mean, it's cold.
Pro-life versus pro-choice.
Women say, we want to have the choice to keep or not keep the baby growing inside our wombs.
We want to have that choice.
Now, of course, you can't be pro-choice unless you accept the reality of free will.
But you won't accept the reality of free will if it means, well, you're responsible for Having a child with a man outside of wedlock, right?
And therefore, giving you more resources is just going to make your life worse.
Well, it might make your life materially better in the short run, but it's going to make your life worse in the long run.
It's going to be bad for your kid, and it's going to twist all of the incentives for everyone else, other people, to have kids this way.
So the plate helplessness, right?
You have to... You have to, like the armadillos, right?
Or possums. There's the possums that play dead.
Armadillos roll into a ball.
But possums play dead.
And why do they play dead?
They play dead because that way they won't get eaten, right?
And they have no particular philosophy about it other than I can't get away and I don't want to get eaten, so I'll play dead.
Do they exude a scent or something like that that makes them smell bad or something like that?
So... If you don't get your resources directly, but you get them through manipulation, then whatever words you can utter that will maximize the likelihood that you're going to continue to gain resources, you will say those words, right?
I mean, if you had a magic spell, right?
Let's say some abracadabra word, right?
And every time You uttered that magic spell.
You got $1,000, right?
Or $100 or whatever, right?
And maybe you could only do this like once a day or something like that, right?
Okay, so what would be your first note every morning?
It would be, say that word, get you $100, get you $1,000, whatever, right?
That would be what you would do.
Of course, right? And so you and I, assuming that, you know, it's like a majority of men in this show, right?
So you and I, We don't have a magic spell that gets us $1,000 a day or $100 a day or whatever, right?
For women, single moms and so on, let's see here.
So they get about $72,000 US, $100,000 Canadians.
They're getting about, I don't know, $8,000, $9,000.
So it's $300 a day, something like that, $250 a day, $300 a day or something like that, right?
So let's just say $200 a day, right?
So if you had a magic spell that got you $200 a day, free and clear, tax-free and all that, right?
Well, you would say that magic spell, right?
Of course you would. And it's the same thing for women, right?
It's a magic spell. And the magic spell is, it wasn't my fault.
It wasn't my fault.
Now, of course, logically...
If something isn't your fault and you have no free will, then you're not a moral agent and you should not be politically free, right?
I mean, this sounds harsh and all that.
I'm just talking logically, right? It's not I think everyone should be politically free, of course.
I'm just saying that the logical consequences of saying I have no free will, I cannot choose, I'm not responsible, I'm a victim.
Well, the people who genuinely can't choose, people who have significant cognitive deficits, defects, like they can't live alone, they can't pay their own bills, they certainly couldn't do taxes, they can't get a job.
Those people generally are not given full political liberty and so on.
If you can't be independent, if you can't make your own choices, if you're not responsible for your own life, then there are particular consequences.
You know, of sound mind and body, right?
If an old guy has dementia, we don't respect his will because he doesn't have the capacity to enter into legal agreements.
He's too easily manipulated and so on, right?
So if you have a genuine cognitive deficit that would be recognized legally that says, well, you're not responsible.
You have no free will.
You have no moral choice. It's also the insanity defense in a crime, right?
You couldn't tell right from wrong at that particular moment or in general.
And we have that, of course, when children commit crimes that we don't consider them to be, if they're very young, morally responsible and may look more at the parents and so on.
But if you can keep it compartmentalized, right?
So if... And these two things need to be kept compartmentalized, obviously, right?
Because if...
And again, it's not just women, lots of men on the welfare state and lots of men on the rich guy's welfare state called the military-industrial complex and other things, right?
But just again, to take the general pattern, right?
If women say, well, I can't possibly choose the father of my...
Children, I just can't choose that.
I can't morally judge someone, even when it's as personal as who's going to be the father for my children.
Then, of course, you would say, well, the whole capacity to vote comes into question.
And again, it may not be for all women, but it may be for women who have organized their life so badly that they've got to end up taking everything from the taxpayer and all that.
But you see, of course, the only way you get...
The products of no free will, which is I'm a victim and society should pay for me, right?
The only way you get those products is if you have perfect free will when it comes to your voting and your judgment of politicians, right?
You understand? Because if we say to women, or to anyone, like, okay, if you're so bad at living that you've ended up on the welfare state, then, you know, you can't vote for the welfare state at least, right?
Because it's a conflict of interest, right?
Well, then it wouldn't work, right?
So you have to have Zero responsibility in who fathers your children and whether they stay or not, but you have to have 100% responsibility and maturity and free will and wisdom when it comes to voting, right? Because you don't get one without the other.
I mean, the welfare state would not maintain itself if people dependent on the welfare state weren't allowed to vote for it, right?
Which would, again, general conflict of interest.
You understand all of this, right?
I have so much sympathy for people who get trapped in these kinds of situations.
You wouldn't believe it. You wouldn't...
I mean, part of my anger towards all this kind of stuff is...
I mean, I've seen my mother got trapped in this kind of system and it was absolutely appalling.
Absolutely appalling what it did to her life.
I mean, it destroyed her. It destroyed her.
And so, yeah, I mean, frankly, perfectly frank, I'm going to be honest with you guys.
I take this pretty personally. I've seen people...
Get destroyed through the welfare state.
And it's absolutely brutal.
It's absolutely brutal.
Because they're never allowed to hit bottom and therefore there's no incentive for them to change if they don't have that observing ego thing going on.
No capacity to develop it really, right?
So when you become dependent, believe it or not, I'm going to tie this back to Charlottesville.
Just hang in there. I appreciate your patience with this.
Very important stuff though. So when you become Dependent on people.
Then you have to kill your empathy.
You have to kill your empathy.
I mean, obviously we think of this with slave owners and slaves, right?
I mean, you think of the Muslim slave trade where they would take millions of blacks from Africa and the reason there aren't that many blacks in the Middle East is because the Muslims would castrate the black males, right?
And I mean, obviously, taking someone as a slave and castrating them means you can't have any empathy for them.
In fact, you have to hate them in a way, really hate them.
It's not even you can be neutral.
So when you exploit people, you have to dislike them.
You have to dislike them.
It doesn't work otherwise. You can't maintain it.
If you genuinely have empathy for them, right, then you can't exploit them.
You care about them, right?
You may love them or you may feel positively about them, but you can't...
Exploitation is hatred. It's contempt, right?
So then the question is, okay, so how did the Charlottesville, the fine people hoax, why did it spread so much?
Is it because it's true? No.
It's because it's necessary.
It's because it's necessary.
Because the people on the left as a whole Because they believe in economic determinism, and not because of any abstract values, but because a belief in economic determinism gets them sympathy resources, right?
So they end up exploiting the productive people.
They end up voting to take money away from the productive people.
And so because they're exploiting the productive people, More so on the right than on the left, right?
And listen, not being economically productive is not a bad thing.
It's the reason we're all here, right?
Because again, women had to give up economic productivity in order to raise children during a harsh environment and so on, right?
I mean, there was a time when humanity was down to like 10,000 people.
During the depths of the last ice age, we were within a head's breadth of not being around at all, right?
Pretty harsh. Who knows after the Great Reset?
Maybe not 10,000, but not that many.
So, because we now have about half the population That is dependent on the manipulation and bullying and threats of force through taxation and so on against the other half of the population.
There's guilt involved in...
Like there's not guilt if you're a woman and obviously you're not that economically productive but you're raising children.
And so you are absolutely essential to survival of the species.
So if you are a woman and you're not that economically productive, you are still providing a massive service, which is the continuation of the human race.
You are running the guy's household, your husband's household, you're raising his kids, you're combined kids and all of that.
So not being economically productive doesn't generate hatred.
However, if you are And coercively exploiting people, well, guess what?
You're going to end up... You have to dislike them enormously.
You have to think that they're bad people.
You have to think that they're bad people.
And, you know, although it's diminishing in America, it's pretty clear that, you know, whites pay still the majority of taxes.
And, you know, there's a lot of exploitation of that whole welfare state system, some by whites, of course, and some by non-whites.
And so where's the anti-white sentiment coming from?
Where does the Charlottesville lie come from?
It comes from if you exploit people, you feel guilty.
And you feel guilty because you have empathy.
Because you sit there and say, well, how would I like it if people were hanging off my wallet?
And I wasn't able to have that many kids because so many people were taking my money through taxes and I couldn't...
They were having tons of kids and I couldn't have that many kids.
You wouldn't like that, right?
And so how do you battle...
Your guilt. Well, the way that you battle guilt is through hatred.
What you have to say is, I'm not exploiting people.
I am taking back what was stolen from me.
So, you know, with the rise of the welfare state comes the rise of feminism.
Why does the rise of feminism come?
Well, because women say, well, I'm taking money by force, taking resources by force through the power of the state.
And I'm taking, of course, men pay the majority of taxes, women take the majority of welfare.
And so I'm taking money from men.
You see, again, the form follows the function.
I'm using the power of the state to take money from men.
I feel bad about that.
So, how do I deal with that?
Well, there's two ways to deal with it.
Number one is stop taking money from the state, but, you know, that's not really a very viable option.
Again, that's like asking someone not to cash a winning lottery ticket, right?
Because, you know, it's not good for the economy, right?
You don't want to do that. So, your only other alternative when you're exploiting people, if you don't want to stop exploiting them, or you can for whatever reason you believe, Is you have to demonize them.
And you have to say, well, as a woman, the reason that I'm taking all this money from men is because men exploited women throughout history and I'm just taking it back.
I'm just getting it back.
Why are men? They make more than women, right?
So this is the wage gap, right?
To understand the wage gap. The wage gap is, you know, women make 67 cents to 70 cents on the dollar for men.
It's all nonsense. Oh, yeah, yeah.
And this is why I don't really work at this level anymore.
It's so boring. It's so boring. Because you get the facts.
It doesn't matter. Because, you see, the whole purpose of resentment about the wage gap between men and women It's not because anyone believes it's true.
It's not because they look at the data.
It's not because they do an analysis of the economics.
There's nothing to do with that. The reason why people have a desperate need to believe in the wage gap is so women can take money from men through the power of the state and feel justified and feel self-righteous.
You understand? The ideology follows the greed.
The desire for the unearned breeds greed.
The necessary covering justification that it's not that I want the unearned.
It's that, you know, men have stolen from women throughout history, and therefore it's perfectly fair and fine for me to take it back.
And by the way, it's a man's fault that I ended up as a single mother anyway, and like...
You want the stuff.
You want the free stuff, so to speak.
Free in quotes, right? You want the free stuff.
And so you have to invent an ideology that justifies it.
It's all it is. All this modern stuff, all this relativism, subjectivism, postmodernism, it's all nonsense.
It's all what magic words do I have to say to get resources and feel justified in doing so.
And so, when you look at resentment to Christians, Christians tend to be pretty responsible, pretty moral, right?
Look at males, tend to be the most productive in society.
Look at whites, tend to pay most of the taxes, at least in the West.
And that's going to change, but, you know, that's sort of where it is right now.
And there's a lot of exploitation.
And so you have half the population dependent upon the productivity of the other half of the population.
Now, that used to be females on males, and it was very productive and very positive, very good for society and good for children and all that, right?
That's not the case anymore. There's a bunch of strangers with their hands in your wallet through the power of the state, right?
I understand that. So, why do people need to believe that, in general, the productive population Half of the country are Nazi worshippers.
Why? Because you can't have empathy with people you're exploiting.
You can't. Empathy is the opposite of exploitation.
Exploitation is the dehumanization of the other, the demonization of the other, and the belief not that you're stealing someone's bike, but that you're stealing your own bike back.
This is why other cultures will come to the West and they'll say, oh, well, the West only became rich because they stole from us and therefore we can take stuff from the West.
They understand. You want free stuff and the only way you can get free stuff is to coercively exploit others and therefore you have to dehumanize them in order to avoid the guilt that would interfere with the exploitation.
It's all that's going on.
This is why, to me, politics has become increasingly boring.
It's just become increasingly boring because The ideology is the shadow cast by greed.
And the greed is facilitated by the coercive nature of the state.
So, arguing the ideology, you know, like arguing the wage gap with a woman who's got three relatives who are female who are dependent on the welfare state, It's got nothing to do with the ideology.
The ideology is required for the exploitation to continue.
Now, if people didn't want to exploit, they wouldn't need this ideology.
So they want to exploit and the best way to allow exploitation to continue or to encourage exploitation to continue is to dehumanize those who are being exploited.
And, you know, this can be done by the Jews throughout history.
The Rwandan Hutsis and Tutsis did it as well.
The Slavs had it done to them by other groups, and whites have it done to them now.
I mean, it's just boringly predictable.
And dealing with it at the level of...
Well, see, I mean, there's a question, right?
Why didn't Trump just play this...
The recording of the Charlottesville thing.
We need to have a press conference, play this recording and say, stop lying.
Because Trump himself, you know, again, a great disruptor, a great exposer of the deep state and all that.
But Trump himself is, you know, bribing his way back to re-election in many ways as well.
And I talked about this You know, in shows with Peter Schiff, I talked about this in solo shows.
I mean, the amount of borrowing that Trump was doing, the amount of money printing, I mean, come on.
So how is he going to...
See, if you take away people's capacity to hate who they're exploiting, you know, the big fantasy, right?
The big fantasy is, oh, we see, but if I take away...
People's capacity to hate those they're exploiting, the exploitation will stop.
Nope. The exploitation is a force of nature.
It's gravity well. People don't give up winning lottery tickets.
people don't give up free stuff.
They find 20 bucks on the sidewalk.
They don't put a rock in it and say, I'm sure somebody with more need will get it.
They'll pick it up.
People don't give up free stuff.
And again, it's not a moral fact.
It's a fact of nature, a fact of reality, right?
So why do people justify the state?
Because they want free stuff.
Why do they resent the patriarchy?
Because men have to be exploited to get free stuff.
Why do they dislike whites often?
Because whites pay the majority of the taxes.
You understand.
Why do they believe in the Charlottesville hoax?
Because it's a whole lot easier to believe that you're taking money from Nazis than you're taking money from nice, good, decent people.
And disrupting these lies is very important.
It's dangerous, right?
Because if you take away people's justification, you provoke a moral crisis within them that is extraordinarily destabilizing to society.
If you say, you know, of course Trump supporters aren't Nazis and Trump never praised Nazis, of course not, right?
Well, then it's pretty tough because then you still have this need to hate the people you're exploiting.
And the media, of course, is just feeding this stuff to people.
And that's the profit model, right?
The profit model is we will feed you the intellectual drug that allows you to continue to exploit people and use the power of the state guilt-free to get stuff.
For nothing, right? We will continue to give you this drug, this drug that allows for free stuff.
We will continue to supply you with the magic spell that gets you 200 bucks a day.
Free and clear, tax-free.
I mean, it's a pretty good business model, right?
I mean, it's like that old cartoon, like hard truths, nobody's lining up, comfortable delusions, the lineup goes for miles, right?
So I'm saying to people, no, you're exploiting people, you're using the power of the state, it's immoral, it's unjust, it's wrong.
And that provokes, of course, feelings of great guilt and anxiety, right?
You feel bad. People feel bad.
It's really hard to get rid of the conscience entirely, right?
And other people come along and say, oh, well, no, but, you know, these people stole from you, and men stole from women, and whites stole from non-whites, right?
And then you say, okay, well, we're just taking it back, right?
It's like the old thing, if you see a kid grabbing a bike from someone's lawn and riding away with it, and it's not his house, right?
You know it's not his house. You see some kid grabbing...
Bike riding away with it, you get mad at the kid, right?
Don't tell someone's bike is like, no, no, dude, I've been looking for this bike.
Here's my receipt. Here's the serial number.
This is my bike. Here's my name on it.
Here's my ID. Whatever. I was going to prove it to you, right?
Your whole perspective changes.
Now, instead of being mad at the kid, you admire the kid.
Oh, good for you, man. Real initiative.
You go and get your bike back. You take the risk.
Rob back from the robbers, you're a good guy, right?
Just think of your perspective.
If you switch from the kid's a bad guy, he's a thief, to he's a good guy, he's defending his property.
So, just look at these hatreds, these targets.
It's the productive people who are being targeted because they have to be exploited and people don't want to feel bad about it.
And this is what's going on, right?
And as long as that exploitation continues, and it's not going to end voluntarily.
Nobody ends this stuff voluntarily.
Nobody would be elected saying we're going to end the welfare state.
I mean, even Trump is a pretty free market kind of guy.
Where it's like, oh, we don't touch social security, we'll increase it, we're going to give everyone stimulus checks, we're going to write, I mean, there's no money for that, right?
There's no money for any of that stuff.
But, yeah, you just, you can't, you can't take away.
It's like somebody who's in genuine pain.
You know, like poor Bill Mitchell post, they put him half to death and cracked his chest to take out a bunch of space aliens from his lungs or whatever.
I may be paraphrasing a little here, but something like that.
I mean, you know, significant pain post-operation and he's, you know, like most people, he's wrestling with how many painkillers do I take?
Is it addictive? And so on. And if you try and take away people's self-justifying hatred of the other in order to exploit the other, right?
If you try and take that away, they literally feel like, okay, they have chronic pain and you're taking away their painkillers.
And they get mad at you, right?
De-platform you and try and shut you up.
Because... Why people get mad at me is I provoke their conscience, right?
I provoke their conscience by saying, no, let's not demonize the other.
Let's not use force.
Let's not exploit. Let's not rip off people.
Let's not take coercively things without justification.
Let's give moral responsibility to everyone.
Well, they get mad at me because I'm provoking their conscience, right?
And they think by deplatforming me, they can silence their conscience.
And of course, they've simply added one more wrong to the prior wrongs they did and their conscience is going to get even worse.
Okay, they don't see that right now, right?
So on the right, they say, look, everyone has a soul created by God and we're all equal in that sense and therefore anyone can do anything because the soul is immaterial, created there by God.
So there's an egalitarianism on the right that comes out of the concept of the soul, and it doesn't take into account the biological reality of limitations of IQ and brain size, that kind of stuff, right?
So on the right, they go too far on the free will argument, and I disagree with that.
Not everyone can do everything.
And on the left, they could go too far with the determinist argument, and that is also very damaging.
And on the right, they do it to some degree because they want to feel that their successes are somehow earned.
In other words, if everyone could be successful, if everyone can be successful, then those who are successful have done really well.
And so there is a certain amount of vanity in that.
And I want to temper that vanity because it's pretty destructive, right?
I mean, the guy who just happens to be seven feet tall with really good rapid-fire muscles and strong knees, okay, he can, if he wants, he can just get literally a leg up on being a basketball player, right?
So he gets into the NBA. Does he sit there and say, well, you know, anyone from my neighborhood could have gotten into the NBA? No, that's if you're not tall or you don't have those fast-firing muscles or whatever it is, right?
You just happen to have a bad injury by accident or your knees give out or something through no fault of your own.
Now, of course, the guy who gets into the MBA has worked hard and he should be admired for that hard work and the dedication and, you know, like Michael Jordan still doing his free throw practice an hour or two a day when he was in his prime even, right?
I'm not trying to take away achievement and success because there is free will and we do have responsibility in how well or happy we do to some degree.
But on the soul side of things, on the Christian side of things, I think that's too much of a blank slate.
It's too much of an anyone-can-do-anything kind of thing, and that comes out of the soul, right?
Because the soul is immaterial, and the soul is not bound by genetics, right?
So, on the right...
And this goes back to a guy...
Oh, gosh, I was in my early 20s, just starting out in my career with computers and...
So I went to a guy who was an accountant.
I'd known him before.
And he wanted a home network installed.
Wired. This is back before there was wireless Wi-Fi and all that, right?
So I installed a home network for him, right?
Now, he took me into his house, and it was a beautiful place.
Beautiful place. Like, stunning.
I mean, the guy had to be a multimillionaire or whatever, right?
And I saw this when I was in Africa.
Friends of my father's, my late father's now, my friends of my father's, these houses just went on forever.
I mean, just literally, you just walk and walk and walk.
It went on like wings and it went on forever, right?
Multi-multi-millionaires. And I remember very clearly, it's just burned in my brain, right?
And now, 30 years later, more than 30 years later, it's pumping up in a podcast, right?
I mentioned this before, but you know.
In this context, I get these bookmarks in my brain.
I have to go back and revisit.
Like, why do I remember this? Oh, because it's something really important.
It's kind of the dance I have with my unconscious, right?
So, this guy, when I said, oh man, you've got a beautiful house, he smiled pretty smugly.
And he said, yes, yes, God has been good to me.
God has been good to me. Now, that sounds like humility, but it's really not.
And it bothered me. Of course it bothered me.
You know, why is God good to him and his kids?
Why was God bad to my mom?
I said, ah, well, my mom sinned.
It's like, well, this guy didn't grow up under the Nazis in the Second World War.
So, it sounds like, oh, well, God has been good to me.
It's like, yeah, but God still chose to be good to you, which indicates some kind of virtue, and he chose to be bad to me by putting me in the environment that I grew up in, right?
You can say, oh, yes, but God was strengthening you and testing you.
Okay. It still wouldn't be my choice.
I mean, you can get good things out of being abused as a child, but nobody sits there and says, hey, let's make child abuse illegal because it's going to make some people really strong.
No, thank you. That's not right.
That's not right. It's like saying, let's make sure that we pay bullies to bully kids because it's going to make them robust and strong.
So, his statement that, yeah, anyone can achieve this, but through my pious virtue, God has chosen to grace me with a multi-million dollar mansion, right?
Now, of course, he had a challenge, which was why was he successful and other people, materially, right?
Why was he successful and other people weren't?
This goes back to the Price Law, Pareto Principles.
Sometimes Jordan Peterson has talked about that before.
That in any meritocracy, the square root of the people involved produce half the resources, right?
10,000 people, company, 100 people produce half the resources.
And of those, only 10 produce half of those resources.
So 10 people out of 10,000 produce one quarter of the entire resources.
It's just the way it works. It works in every field.
So, yeah, how do you do well?
Why do you do well and other people?
Listen, I've had to deal with this too, like, until I was deplatformed for provoking the world's conscience.
Why was I doing so well and other podcasters weren't?
Now, I could say, yes, this has something to do with my moral courage.
This has something to do with imagination and creativity and I sing and I do rap songs and I will, you know, make jokes and And do lots of live streams and chat with people on a regular basis.
And lots of people who work pretty hard at their podcasts and just not quite as...
Oh, well, I had a good accent. I have a pleasant speaking voice for the most part.
And so, yes, some of it has to do with the choices I've made and the work that I did.
And some of it was moral courage for sure.
And some of it was the brain I was born with.
And that I did not earn.
The... Fact that I happened to be born as an English speaker when English was the language for a long time of the internet.
The fact that I have an accent that people will listen to.
The fact that I have a pleasant speaking voice which people will listen to.
And actually kind of listening back to my novel, which you should really check out, freedomain.com forward slash almost listening back to my novel.
It's like it's a very flexible instrument for different characters and different voices.
It's really, really cool, right?
I happened to be born with the voice. Yeah, okay, I took some voice training.
Quite a bit of it. I took years of voice training, actually, in theater school.
So I have some... I could use it a lot and it doesn't generally break, although it got pretty close in the recording of almost.
So, you know, why am I successful?
Yeah, some of it's my choice. Some of it's my courage.
Some of it's my commitment. Some of it's my hard work and my good work ethic and all of that.
Yeah, absolutely. And some of it is just blind genetic luck and chance.
Right? So it's complex.
It's environment, genetics, free will.
Right? It is very, very complex.
Now, we want to encourage the free will side as much as possible, but not to the point where we say the guy who's five foot tall is responsible for not getting into the MBA. We want to encourage as much free will as possible, but not to the point where we get blowback from people basically knowing it's bullshit and it's kind of abusive after a while.
We just give everyone free will, no matter what, right?
The guy with spina bifida is responsible for not being a ballerina, a ballet dancer.
You push the free will argument too far, and it really does become abusive, because then you're blaming people for things outside their ability.
We could say that the smoker who gets lung cancer has some significant degree of responsibility, but if you're Andy Kaufman and you get lung cancer and you never smoked, well, this is bad luck, man.
I have done a good deal to earn the success that I had.
And, you know, may have again at some point.
Depends where the world goes. But I certainly didn't earn it all, man.
I'm certainly not responsible for all of it.
Oh my gosh. My gosh.
Which is why I try to give back as much as I possibly can and bring philosophy to people in a way that's comprehensible and engaging and hopefully enjoyable.
Right? Even making funny sounds like...
Right? So, I will try and do all of that.
Because I didn't earn all of this.
And if you look at your own life with a really...
You know, cold, lizard-like, skeptical eye.
Yeah, there's stuff you should be genuinely proud of.
Really is. Stuff you should be genuinely proud of.
And there's stuff that you're just lucky with.
Or unlucky with. Could be that way too, right?
I just got cancer.
It's just unlucky, right? So, the left and the right.
Yeah, there is some economic determinism.
There is. There is. There is.
And by that I mean a child growing up very poor is going to be different from a child growing up middle class.
Maybe better, maybe worse, whatever.
It's just not the same environment.
There is some economic determinism.
There's some material determinism.
If you grew up in some Aborigine tribe in the middle of nowhere and you speak some odd clicking language, you know, the odds of you becoming a very successful podcaster is pretty low.
Is that your fault? No, it's not your fault.
Could you overcome it?
Yeah. I mean, you could, right?
Depending on your level of intelligence and all of that, you could go and, oh, I've got to learn English or I've got to learn some more common language and I've got to get myself a mic and I've got to get whatever, right?
You could overcome, but there is some, not determinism like nobody has any free will, but environmental influences are important.
And in that, with the left, I'm like, yeah, we're down with that.
I'm down with you, brothers and sisters and others.
I'm down with that. We can't just say that it's all free will.
It's all, everybody can do everything.
That's putting too harsh a burden on the people who don't succeed or have a tough time to succeed through no fault of their own.
It's like saying to Michael J. Fox, man, you really screwed up your career as an action hero or a leading man or a romance guy or whatever because, you know, you got Parkinson's.
I think he's got Parkinson's or something like that, right?
Or, you know, Bruce Willis, man, you shouldn't have chosen to go bald.
That's a bad idea, man. You know, that's tough.
So, yeah, as with many things, the truth is in the middle.
The truth is in the middle. To say, well, we all have a soul and everyone can do everything.
No. That's not fair.
That's not reasonable. To say everyone's a victim, we have no free will, that's not reasonable either.
And that's why, you know, Nuance dies in, or is rather killed, in a time of increased polarization.
And, you know, maybe it's a fool's quest to try and pull these two extremes closer together, but nonetheless, we do go with facts, reason, and evidence to try and help people understand the world and to have You know, correct amount of compassion and responsibility in equal measure.
Thank you so much for listening.
Let me know. It's been a while since I've done one of these.
Very nice to sit and chat with you guys.
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