Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Sept. 24, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:26:00

STOP BULLYING YOURSELF! Locals Livestream 23 Sep 2021

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Okay, well, hi everybody.
	Just here at freedomain.locals.com.
	If you haven't subscribed at Locals, I would appreciate it if you would.
	I've got a deal on at the moment, like 12 months for the price of 10?
	Yes, that's right. And I'll be ending that tomorrow.
	Why? Because it's my birthday and I'm feeling arbitrary.
	So, what questions?
	Are you against stoicism?
	I am not sure how it would be rationally possible to be against stoicism.
	Stoicism... Is a deep-seated acceptance of the negatives and problems in life.
	And I have no idea really how you could be against that because it's not a moral argument.
	It is more an argument for personal psychological aesthetics.
	And the question of how much do we accept evils?
	How much do we accept evil as an integral part of the world?
	And how much do we fight against it?
	That is the ultimate Aristotelian question, for me anyway, and I think for most people.
	If you say Satan runs the world, evil is part of human nature, the poor will always be with us, the evil will always be among us, then you tend to try and just roll with society and not attempt to push back against it because pushing back against evil is like getting angry and fighting against gravity.
	Which becomes increasingly important as you get into your mid-50s.
	But anyway, so I would say that on the other hand, if you fight against evil with the full force and openness of every fact at your disposal, they will just destroy you, right?
	And let's be reasonable about these things.
	So I think for me, the fight against evil is somewhere in the middle.
	The two extremes both aid evil, right?
	So if you look at someone like Joseph McCarthy, the great senator from Wisconsin, right?
	So he and Richard Nixon fought against communism back when communism was still in its infancy in America.
	And Joseph McCarthy got destroyed, physically destroyed.
	He died in his 50s, I think, largely from stress.
	And while, of course, Nixon lived longer, he was also destroyed in terms of his reputation.
	And people still talk about McCarthyism like it was some kind of weird paranoid conspiracy theory, which it wasn't, of course.
	So that's not particularly...
	You can just get destroyed, particularly if evil is gaining control over the power of the state.
	It becomes... And it's not, I say, oh, well, I'll martyr my, but that doesn't, what happens, because you end up having history rewritten about everything, and you end up discrediting your cause.
	So not fighting against evil, not great.
	And fighting against evil with every piece of eloquence and force and, no, sorry, eloquence and facts at your disposal tends to be a fool's quest.
	So it is a dance.
	It is a big, big dance.
	All right. Find it hard to have a decent conversation with women.
	They just make no sense.
	So... Women are human being.
	Men are human doing. So when women are young, they have the experience, and it's not imaginary or anything, they have the experience of providing great value just by existing, which is why, as I talked about in the live stream last night, women focus on becoming ornamental and men focus on actually getting things done in the real world.
	And there's nothing wrong.
	You can say, oh, one's better than the other.
	That's just how people evolved.
	It's just how the world evolved.
	So there's nothing wrong with it.
	And so for women...
	You think of the woman I dated when I was younger.
	Very pretty. Very pretty.
	And you know what very pretty means for men?
	Lower your standards.
	Lower your standards of reason.
	And this woman believed that she was psychic.
	She just was psychic.
	Now, I, of course, said, oh, the amazing Randy has like a million dollars sitting in a vault somewhere for anyone who can prove psychic abilities.
	You know, hey, I'll go splits with you.
	Let's fly and go collect this million dollars.
	You just have to show that you're psychic.
	To which, of course, she responded, as everybody does, it doesn't work that way, man.
	It just doesn't work that way.
	In other words, it's not under anyone's control.
	So, why is it that women tend to be into more irrational things?
	Because guys want to have sex with them and therefore will not...
	Speak too much sense to them for fear of being rejected.
	And that is just part of life.
	It's part of nature. And women do wonderful things in the world.
	They raise children. They keep households together.
	They pass values, or at least used to, from one generation to the next.
	But the basic reality is that women don't have to make as much sense when they're young because they're pretty.
	And because men allow this to happen, right?
	So... Are you still intending to have a presentation on the book of Revelation?
	I am. I want to do the bookends, right?
	I want to do Genesis and Revelations.
	And I'm just...
	I'd like to...
	I'd like to do an analysis of the book of Revelation slightly or at least shortly before I can just point out the window and say, look, look, right?
	Let's see here. Can an anarchist society exist...
	Without hierarchies.
	So Bakunin, a Russian anarchist said, people think that I deny authority as an anarchist nonsense.
	I recognize the authority of the shoemaker in the making of shoes, of the dentist in the cleaning of teeth and so on.
	So it depends what you mean by hierarchy.
	Is there going to be a hierarchy of coercive centralized power?
	No. Is there going to be a hierarchy where some people are paid more and worth more in the economy than others?
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	Is there going to be a hierarchy where pretty people tend to get more attention than ugly people and slender people more attention than fat people?
	And yeah, of course, these things will still exist.
	The purpose of a voluntary society, the purpose of anarchism, is to recognize that The true and essential nature of man.
	See, every utopian society, and we live in a utopian society at the moment, a utopian society is fundamentally predicated on the idea that human beings have no essence that cannot be transformed by ideology.
	So this is called the new Soviet man under communism.
	Under communism, you were going to let go of selfishness and the desire for profit.
	You were not going to have any greed.
	You were going to selflessly work for the common good, blah, blah, blah.
	And it was going to be the new Soviet man.
	We're going to completely rewrite humanity because it's radical environmentalism insofar as people say, well, it's just the environment that determines the nature of man.
	And it comes to some degree out of Existentialism, although it predates existentialism, the idea in existentialism is that existence precedes essence.
	Right? So you are before you are anything.
	So a human being is a complete blank slate and can be written on by just any ideology and any ideology can rewrite humanity in the image of the ideal man and the ideal woman and it'll be totally fine because human beings have no essence.
	And so, all utopianism, like multicultural societies, are predicated on the idea that human beings will not be tribal.
	Why? Because we'll say, don't be tribal, and lo and behold, we will just not be tribal, right?
	Now, that's a pretty big diastral, when you think about it.
	Because if it turns out we are tribal, as we can see in South Africa, well, it's not particularly positive in terms of outcomes.
	And... So when you recognize that environment and genetics, you can't look at one or the other when it comes to humanity.
	It's sort of like saying, what's the size of a football field?
	Well, it's length and breadth, right?
	And so you can't look at the size of a football field using only a line.
	You have to maybe figure out how long it is, but it doesn't tell you how wide it is.
	So it doesn't really tell you how big it is.
	So... The fundamental proposition of all ideologies is to say we can create an entirely new human being unrelated to any evolutionary factors.
	We can create an entirely new type of human being based on ideology.
	And based on ideology, the human being's essence can be completely rewritten By the language of sophists, you have no identity.
	You have no evolutionary absolutes.
	You have no essence as a biological species.
	All of your evolved over billions of years, all of your evolved characteristics Can be completely rewritten by words on a page.
	And you can see this happening all over the place in terms of male and female and ethnicity and so on, right?
	And so this idea is that if we say X... Then all who resist it are wrong and all who accept it are good, right?
	If we say race is a social construct, okay, well, does that reference biology?
	Can doctors say that and still be good doctors treating different ethnicities?
	Well, of course not, right? But if you say it and everyone accepts it, then somehow the category of ethnicity or race ceases to exist.
	And somebody was writing to me about how he pointed out that different races have different bone patterns or bone structures, as of course do men and women.
	Women have the wide pelvic bones and so on.
	And this is, of course, how crimes are solved.
	This is how anthropologists figure out who is who.
	And, of course, they were considered to be a Nazi for pointing out a basic biological fact because the ideology demands that we erase all facts and tendencies and realities because the language that is used completely dominates the reality that is.
	And that's liberalism.
	That's leftism. Which is, when we say something, we rewrite reality.
	And we can completely cut off people from their past and reshape them as entirely new human beings based upon the power of language and of ideology and rewards and punishments, right?
	So... It is insanity masking as sanity and tends to produce diagnoses of mental illness on the part of the sane, right?
	Just as in Soviet Russia, if you didn't like communism, you must be clearly insane and would have to be drugged.
	So when you sort of understand that people who are secular as a whole, the atheists, the leftists, and so on, they approach reality As if it is completely under the sway of language.
	And anybody who doesn't reform themselves on the basis of the demanded language is an evil resistor, a counter-revolutionary, an obstructionist, and so on, and must be destroyed.
	So that everybody ends up swimming in line and at least pretend...
	It's a form of humiliation, right?
	It's a form of humiliation. For you to be forced to deny basic facts of reality is a form of dominance and control over you.
	And so they threaten people who don't accept that existence precedes essence and then they get everyone to parrot it.
	And if you don't, you're attacked.
	And if you do, you're praised.
	And it's simply a form of dominance and control over you.
	Once the powers that be or those who have control over you, once they can get you to deny basic facts, they own you.
	So that process is really, really important to understand.
	So what does anarchism or voluntarism, what does it do?
	So it says, based upon the endless examples of history and what we actually know about human biology and psychology, human beings cannot handle power.
	We know this.
	We know this not just theoretically, not just from Lord Acton's famous dictum, not from all the examples of history.
	We actually know this biologically now, that rising up in a coercive hierarchy releases endorphins It becomes physically addictive and when you gain power over people and control and bully and threaten them, you cannot have empathy for them.
	So people get addicted to power and control Which destroys empathy and actually often replaces it with sadism.
	This is not a theory.
	This is not a Christian view of the horrors of falling prey to the temptations of Satan, although that's a great way of putting it.
	Christians have a great way of putting it.
	It's a very well-known and well-understood fact.
	Human beings... Cannot, cannot handle power.
	Now, the ideology which says human beings must be able to handle power, in other words, you give a small group of elites massive control over trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of people, so biology and history says that can't work.
	It will never work. It's not what we were evolved for, really.
	We were evolved for smaller tribes, local genetic proximity, cooperation.
	We were evolved for...
	Cooperation in hunting and so on.
	And of course, there was a lot of violence, particularly against children in prehistoric societies.
	But we were not evolved to have massive, abstract, multi-tens or hundreds of millions of people having power over them.
	We were not evolved to being able to snap our fingers.
	There we go. Snap our fingers.
	And have resources summoned through money printing and borrowing at the drop of a hat.
	We were not built.
	For any of this. And so the modern state, where a small group of people claim to be so immune from the corruptions of power, that they are the only solution to the problem of power.
	The only solution to the problem of the corruption of power is to give a small group of people power over everyone and everything at all times.
	That's not a solution. That's not even magical thinking.
	I don't even know what that is.
	That's so bizarre.
	When you sort of blank slate it and just look at it objectively and empirically, it's so completely insane.
	So anarchism starts with one basic principle.
	Human beings are what they are.
	Human beings are what?
	We evolved the way we evolved.
	We have the brains we have. We have the reward systems we have.
	We have addictions to dopamine.
	We have the urge towards gratification in the moment and hypersexuality.
	This is who human beings are.
	This is the clay that we have to work with.
	So let's not fall prey to this utterly bizarre fantasy That we can just make human beings into whatever we want.
	Because that's a sign of insanity.
	And I'm not kidding about that.
	That is genuinely a sign of insanity.
	Right? Like if you're making a wall with your dad, right?
	And your dad says, oh, shoot, looks like we're going to need more bricks.
	Listen, can you just run down to the hardware store and construction store and get some more bricks, right?
	And You head out there.
	The construction store is closed.
	So you pick up a couple of bags of earth, right, from the plant store.
	And you come back and you say, here you go.
	And he says, wait now, what are you doing?
	Did I stutter? What are you doing?
	I told you to get bricks. And you're coming back with bags of earth.
	And you say, Dad...
	Stop being a counter-revolutionary.
	Stop being an obstructionist.
	Just think of them as bricks.
	He says, no, that's kind of weird.
	I don't know where that's coming from, but my thought cannot turn earth into bricks.
	And you say, oof.
	Do you just hate bricks? Is that what it is?
	Do you just hate earth? Like you're just not willing to make the effort?
	Are you prejudiced in some manner?
	Uh, okay. Says your dad.
	I really don't know kind of where I went wrong in raising you or teaching you, but...
	Okay, I'll tell you what.
	Do it. Do it right in front of me.
	Here, I'll open these...
	I'll open these bags of earth for you.
	Spill it all out. Spill all the shit out.
	Here you go. Okay. Turn these into bricks.
	And you say, Dad. Dad.
	That's not how it works.
	Okay? You're the one who has to turn them into bricks.
	I already believe that they're bricks.
	And then you say, look, just...
	Okay, if you believe that they're bricks and they're bricks to you, and maybe I'm just...
	I had some heat stroke or something and I'm seeing there was a bag of earth.
	You go and you make these bricks fit into this wall, right?
	And he's like, Dad, you're the bricklayer.
	You're the expert. You're the one who has to believe that they're bricks.
	And if you do believe that they're bricks, they will become bricks.
	This would be an insane conversation to have with someone, right?
	But literally, this is what happens, is people say, I don't like human nature the way it is.
	I don't like how humanity has evolved.
	I don't like the inbuilt preferences of humanity.
	So what I'm going to do is I'm going to redefine humanity according to my ideology.
	And anyone who doesn't go along with me is evil.
	So guess what? We evolved to care for ourselves.
	We evolved to care for our family, our friends, our local community.
	And then we can, in abstract ways, care more about the world as a whole, although every culture doesn't seem to be particularly equal when it comes to that.
	And so that's how we evolved.
	Now, if you have, as your ideology, the requirement that human beings...
	Be absolutely the opposite of what we evolved and survived to become.
	Evolution works when you take care of yourself.
	Evolution works when you take care of those who are closest to you, and then it kind of ripples in lesser effects out there as a whole.
	Now, this is not selfishness.
	This is survival. Because if our ancestors had not cared about themselves and those they were closest to the most...
	We would never have evolved to have the capacity to reject all of that through the cause of ideology.
	Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
	This is the old adage of science and particularly engineering, that if you want to build a bridge that's going to stay up, you have to accept the laws of physics and tension and strength and so on, right?
	So anarchism looks at society and says, okay, human beings are what?
	Okay, human beings are biological creatures, we're mammals, we have rational consciousness, most of us at least have a conscience, and we've evolved to have certain particular tendencies.
	It doesn't mean we can't override those tendencies, but we have evolved to have particular tendencies.
	Now, if we accept that human beings are what they are, then we have to say, okay, what is the best society for human beings as they are?
	And I don't mean as they are in the current system, which is heavily propagandized and programmed and made slowly insane by endless amounts of contradictory Winston Smith, O'Brien, how many fingers am I holding up kind of inflicted madness.
	But what are human beings in their essence?
	Okay. So when we start looking at society, we say, okay, can human beings handle power over other human beings?
	And that's kind of a universal statement.
	It's a binary, right? You can't artificially divide human beings into those who can handle power and those who don't, right?
	That's like saying human beings, those who are warm-blooded and give birth to live young and the human beings who are cold-blooded and give birth to eggs.
	No. So if human beings can handle power, then all human beings should have access to power, the same levels of power, which means no hierarchy, you understand?
	If all human beings can handle power over other human beings, then it's one big dial that goes all the way to the top, right?
	Every human being should have power over every other human being.
	Now, that's of course not really possible because the whole point of having power over someone is you have power over them that they don't have over you.
	The government can raise your taxes.
	You can't raise the taxes on your neighbor or the government in return or anything.
	So if you've got a category called human beings, let's say Zero, they can't handle political power over, they shouldn't have political power over others.
	And ten, maximum political power over others.
	Okay, so let's say all human beings are five.
	But if all human beings are five, it means that everybody has power over everyone else, which means nobody has power over anyone else because there's no disparity in the power.
	The moment you say someone has a power of five, someone has a power of two, then you've just broken the whole continuity of what it means to be a human being.
	The definition of a human being has to include all human beings.
	So if you say human beings can handle power, then everybody has to have the same amount of power in society, which means no hierarchy.
	If you say human beings cannot handle political power, based upon biology, based upon every shred of evidence in history, based upon every philosophical principle known to man and God, human beings cannot handle political power, you end up with what? No hierarchy.
	No political hierarchy. So...
	The people who start their social systems by taking humanity as it is, as it has evolved, as we have evolved, end up with anarchism.
	Because if you accept human beings and don't create artificial distinctions, you accept human beings for who we are, and you don't create artificial distinctions, there's no conceivable way to justify, practically, biologically, or morally, or politically, a state.
	If human beings can't handle political power, then there should never be differences in the political power between them, because that's the only way all human beings could exercise political power, which means there's no such thing as a political hierarchy.
	If human beings can't handle political power, then you can't have a state.
	This state will corrupt everyone and destroy everything over time.
	Now, of course, if you have...
	I mean, here's the difference, right?
	The other day I was walking with my daughter.
	We went to a river and we took our ducks and we were walking down the river and my daughter was catching crayfish and feeding them to the ducks, which apparently they absolutely love, these mini lobsters from hell.
	So we're walking down and I was looking around thinking, why does this seem familiar?
	Why does this seem familiar?
	Oh, that's right.
	The landscape reminds me of Skyrim.
	And it did. You know, it just kind of had that middle European medieval flavor that Skyrim kind of has.
	I thought, oh, this kind of reminds me of Skyrim.
	And then I thought, it's kind of funny, right?
	Because if I was in Skyrim, I could send a ball of light up there to do cool things in the sky.
	You know, I could set fire to that tree by throwing fire from my fingertips or whatever, right?
	But I can't do any of that, right?
	So you've got to understand ideologies are like video games.
	You can program anything you want.
	In a video game, if you want a person to be able to fly, you can make that happen like that.
	If you want people to have magic, you can define anything.
	You can redefine anything.
	You can give anybody any power that they want.
	There was a bug in Skyrim for a while where you got a giant chicken.
	There was another bug, I suppose it was a bug, where you got hit by a giant and you went rocketing up into low orbit.
	It just was kind of ridiculous, right?
	So you can do all of that because...
	You have control over every variable.
	Now, if you look at reality, tangible, material, objective reality, and you think you have control over every variable, guess what?
	You're insane.
	You're insane and you won't last because you'll think you can fly and you'll jump off a building and you'll die.
	So, ideologies are video games and Because you can do anything you want.
	Redefine humanity, redefine male, redefine female, redefine ethnicity, redefine anything you want.
	Now, of course, if you were to live in the real world but think you were in Skyrim, right?
	And let's say some bear came charging at you.
	Well, in Skyrim, what do you do? You light it up with your fire spell or whatever, right?
	But that's not what happens in the real world.
	You'll just sit there going, fire, fire, fire, and nothing will happen and you'll get eaten by the bear.
	The infinite metaphysical madness of ideology which says I'm going to produce the society that I want and I'm going to mutate and twist and deform human beings into fitting the society that I think is right.
	I'm going to take humanity in a state of society.
	They say I'm going to take humanity and I'm going to divide humanity into the 99% who can't handle power and the 1% who can benevolently wield power.
	Not only can they handle it, it's absolutely wonderful.
	And I'm going to both call these things human beings, even though they have opposite principles.
	Can't handle power, corrupted power.
	Not only not corrupted by power for the 1%, but it's the only way that society can be moral.
	That's, philosophically speaking, that's TFN. Totally freaking nuts.
	Totally freaking nuts.
	So that's the basic belief behind it.
	Take humanity as they are, with all that we know about humanity, and say, what is the ideal political society, given that human beings cannot handle power?
	And if they can handle power, they should never have power over each other, because they can all handle power equally.
	You cannot have a political hierarchy.
	You can't do it. I mean, you can if you want, but it will self-destruct.
	So... Let's see here.
	Sorry, I did a long thing there.
	All right.
	What is the source of authority in the context of parental authority?
	What is the source of authority in the context of parental authority?
	So the source of authority is knowledge and wisdom and being correct.
	And being correct. So let's say you have a guy who constantly wants to tell you to buy stocks.
	And let's say just about every time he tells you to buy a stock, the stock price goes up.
	Does he have authority over your stock purchases?
	Yes, he does. Why does he have that?
	Because he's built up credibility over a fairly long period of time in order to have, quote, control over your stock purchases, right?
	So the source of his authority is It's being right and also caring about you and wanting you to do well financially.
	So as parents, you kind of have to be right a lot and you have to be motivated by that which is best for your children.
	And if they accept and they understand that, then you will have authority.
	What do you think of humility?
	Is it a virtue? I used to think my shyness and passivity was humility and therefore good.
	It kept me from taking risks.
	I believed it was a good thing.
	I never stated any preferences.
	Not a great start. Ah, that's very interesting.
	It's a great question. So humility is just about the most powerful virtue that there is.
	Because without humility, very few other virtues are possible.
	So humility is when you are honest about your lack of knowledge and your lack of expertise.
	That's humility, right?
	So if somebody says to me, are you good at debating?
	I would say, yes, I am good at debating.
	If they would say to me, are you good at ballet?
	I would say, I am not good at ballet in any way, shape, or form.
	Stripper poles. No, actually, I'm not very good at those either.
	So humility is honesty.
	It's a form of honesty. Now, the opposite of humility is arrogance, and in particular, moral arrogance, where you say, well, I know the best way that society should be organized, and I want to throw people in rape rooms who disagree with me.
	Well, that's an appalling intellectual vanity and the foundation of all political hierarchies, as we've talked about.
	So there are people who say, I don't know, like diversity is a strength.
	It's like, okay, well, that's not what the studies say.
	The Putnam studies, you can look them up, P-U-T-T-M-A-N. They say it's not a strength.
	They say it tends to wreck neighborhoods and makes people cocoon and not go out and social trust goes down and all that, right?
	So diversity is a strength.
	Okay, do you know that? Can you prove that?
	Is that a fact? Right, so humility says, okay, I've heard that diversity is a strength.
	I wonder if that's true. Evolutionarily speaking, we would be skeptical.
	And evolutionarily speaking, we would expect various ethnicities to look after their own interests at the expense of other ethnicities because that's how we evolved.
	The only reason there are ethnicities is because people looked out for their own proximate gene pool more than distant gene pools.
	That's just the way. It's the only reason there are any species.
	It's the only reason that evolution could conceivably work.
	So, humility is saying, I don't know.
	I don't know. You know, people are constantly, society, the media is constantly firing all of these moral absolutes at you.
	And, you know, we have to help the poor.
	And the only way how to help the poor is to point guns at people and take money and give to other people.
	It's like, how do you know that's helping the poor?
	How do you know?
	Humility is refusing to be bowed down by the sociopathic moral arrogance of power seekers posing as good people.
	Humility is when you have the guts, the honor, the courage, and the honesty to say, don't know, don't know.
	Don't know. If you think you know, that's one bad thing.
	Because if you think you know something, you stop looking for answers.
	It's a barrier to knowledge.
	If you think you know something that isn't true.
	That's one level of arrogance, but the supreme level of arrogance is being so certain that you're right about something that you're willing to destroy anybody who disagrees with you.
	It's sociopathic, fundamentally.
	It's evil in its action.
	So I think humility is great, but humility is the opposite of hierarchy.
	The hierarchy is, you know, that old thing about statism.
	Ideas so good, they have to be mandatory, right?
	And so a hierarchy, politically speaking, is when people are so certain of their moral correctness that they're willing to destroy people who disagree with them.
	Humility says, and this is the value of Socrates, right?
	Humility says, I don't know, man.
	I don't know. How do you know?
	Is it true? I have my doubts.
	And that's where growth comes from.
	That's where progress comes from.
	Progress is this tiny little herd of people just trying to advance against this massive man mountain of pig arrogant ignorance that tends to characterize most of humanity and most of human history.
	So humility is a great, great strength and power.
	I mean, my theory of ethics, I think the only valid modern theory of secular ethics called universally preferable behavior came out of humility.
	People think I'm arrogant for, oh, I've solved the problem of ethics.
	It's like, you know, by saying that, I'm saying that for almost 40 years, I didn't know what ethics was.
	I thought I did, but I didn't.
	And when I finally blank slated it and said, okay, let's pretend that there's nothing that's known about ethics, that's humility.
	All the great progress comes out of humility.
	But humility is attacked by arrogance because the two are political opposites.
	You know, like all the people who were like, well, without the government, we wouldn't have any roads.
	It's like, how do you know?
	How do you know? The government doesn't build roads anyway.
	They just contract other people to do it.
	How do you know that having all these roads is such a great thing?
	Maybe if we didn't have all these roads, we'd have teleporters or jetpacks.
	How do you know? You don't know.
	And back to anarchism.
	Anarchism is fundamentally the acceptance that you don't know.
	I don't know who should get married to everyone else.
	So everyone should be free to choose their own marriage partners.
	I don't know what job everybody should have.
	Therefore, people should be free to choose their own jobs.
	I don't know what hobbies everyone should have.
	And in fact, I would say about 98% of people's hobbies are genuinely incomprehensible to me.
	I don't know. And therefore, people should, of course, be free to choose their own hobbies.
	I don't know. Always which argument is the best or which facts are the most accurate.
	And therefore, free speech should be A basis of human society.
	It really is human society and civilization is based on free speech.
	It is free speech. Free speech and civilization are the same thing.
	Because civilization is using words, not swords.
	So just humility. I don't know.
	Now, I don't know how society should best resolve disputes.
	I don't know. Now, people say, well, we've got this answer called the state and the court system and this and this.
	Millions, what is it? Millions, 40 million, 15 million, some crazy number of lawsuits are filed in America every year.
	Most of them, vast majority of them against rich people.
	It's basically just a shakedown, I think.
	It's not a productive or positive way for people to resolve their disputes.
	So, I don't know the best way that humanity should resolve its disputes.
	Therefore, people should voluntarily get together to form organizations to figure out the best way to do it, to figure out the most optimum way.
	And here's the thing. Even if you were somehow magically to be blessed or God-given with the wisdom to know exactly how humanity should resolve its disputes in the here and now, what about technology that comes five years down the road or 50 years down the road or 500 years down the road?
	It's got to be flexible. It's got to be flexible in order to be...
	Adaptable. So I don't know.
	I don't know how a particular geographical region should defend itself against invaders.
	I don't know. And neither do you.
	And neither does General Mattis.
	And neither does Justin Trudeau.
	And neither does Boris Johnson.
	And neither does anybody.
	They don't know the best way to defend against...
	What was it I was talking about on Joe Rogan probably seven or eight years ago?
	I was talking on Joe Rogan about, you know, how would a free society defend itself?
	It's like, I don't know. But I would imagine it would have something to do with bioweapons targeted at the leadership of the enemy force.
	Because if you knew that there was going to be a virus released in your environment that would only ever target you and maybe your family, then you'd probably think twice about invading.
	Talking about the dangers of gain-of-function research eight or nine years ago.
	So I don't know.
	I don't know the best way. And even if you did know the best way, you wouldn't know what the best way is next year or five years from now or 10 years from now or 50 years from now.
	I mean, people say, well, you've got to have a big army and a navy and an air force in order to protect your borders.
	It's like, well, America is putting more effort into protecting borders in the Middle East than it is to protecting its own border.
	So that's not working. Nobody knows.
	You don't know. I don't know. So humility leads to a voluntary and peaceful and free society.
	And massive, unbelievable levels of pig, ignorant arrogance lead to believing that you have an answer so good that you can point guns at people's heads to make it come true.
	All right. Question for Steph.
	I have noticed over the years that I really dislike being told what to do by authority figures.
	Even if it turns out later they were correct.
	And it was in my best interest.
	Is it something from my childhood? Well, no, that's something from your present.
	That's something from your present.
	And you should feel that way.
	Because by the time you're an adult, you should have internalized those standards and values that keep you safe and protected.
	You shouldn't need to be told what to do.
	As an adult, you should have internalized those standards.
	Let's see here.
	Your thoughts on Anthony Robbins, motivational speaker?
	Well, he's a big guy.
	He's like that meme of that giant, jawed, stubble-bearded guy with the grin.
	Yeah, I mean, I think he's fine as far as personal growth goes and all of that, but he's still not going to save the West or anything.
	Like, there's no talk about the really essential and important issues to do with people as a whole.
	It's always a big challenge, you know, when you say to people, oh, you know, self-actualization and personal honesty and understanding your emotions and your history.
	That's all well and good, but it doesn't really help that much if you end up in a gulag, right?
	So this is why I've sort of gone between these two poles.
	As a whole. But yeah, he seems like a nice guy and puts out a lot of energy.
	And I did watch one documentary on him called I'm Not Your Guru.
	And yeah.
	I mean, he faced a lot of child abuse as a kid.
	And he has turned that into some positive stuff for sure.
	All right. How can it be determined whether a futuristic personality can be manifested, peacefully parented man, or not?
	New Soviet man. Well, that's non-aggression principle, right?
	Human beings in their natural state.
	What is your natural state?
	The natural state is when you don't have a gun to your head.
	You say, oh, well, in history it was your natural state to have a gun to your head.
	It's like, yes, but in terms of how a human being develops in the absence of violence, that is the natural state.
	If you want to know the natural state of a tree, you don't turn it into a bonsai.
	You don't move the trunk and manipulate it into something that it's not.
	You let it grow in its natural element without forcing it to do one thing or the other, and it's the same thing with people.
	All right. Hey Steph, after my father fell into a coma, it was very hard on my family, and I do miss my father, but I asked myself why I wasn't more sad.
	Could weed addiction suppress certain emotions and feelings?
	Yes, of course. Or could it be because of how he treated me my whole life?
	Well, I'm sorry, I suppose, but my father died last March.
	Yeah, it was early on. I couldn't go to the funeral because of COVID. So yeah, my father died last March.
	To which one can only say, so?
	So he's dead. I'm a practical, empirical guy.
	I hadn't spoken to my father in probably 20 years.
	He would still occasionally phone me and leave a message, but I hadn't really spoken to him.
	Oh, you know, maybe I had a very brief interaction with him and I accidentally picked up the phone without checking it.
	But I hadn't spoken to him in any real depth.
	Oh gosh, probably more than 20 years, maybe 30 years.
	He had no practical impact in my life.
	I had no conversations with him.
	I didn't make any decisions based upon his feedback.
	Neither did he make any decisions based upon my feedback.
	We had no relationship. So what does it matter to my life?
	I don't mean to him, of course, but what does it fundamentally matter if we don't have a relationship and he's above ground or we don't have a relationship and he's below ground?
	I try not to. I have a bit of a sentimental streak and it's something that I'm working on because the time for sentimentality is in the rear view.
	Sentimentality will be an absolutely monstrous wound to manipulate you going forward.
	So sentimentality is – which is an over-exaggeration of empathy to the point where you get paralyzed and exploit it.
	So I try to be rigidly practical about these things.
	Okay, what practical difference does it make that my father died?
	Now, to him, to his family, absolutely.
	I mean, you know, fantastic.
	Not fantastic, that's the wrong way to put it.
	I fully accept that it has huge impact on the people who were close to him.
	I just wasn't one of them. It's like when I was a kid and I was in boarding school, they made us, you'd get a buzz card and they'd make you write a letter to your father.
	And I would write dear, insert name, his first name.
	And they'd say, no, no, no, you have to, he's your father.
	I was like, is he?
	I don't really see him. To me, father was somebody who would teach you and guide you and play with you and enjoy your company and not be weird.
	You know, like that would be a father.
	And so I did end up writing Dear Father, but, I mean, it never met me.
	Now, of course, I have been a father now for almost 13 years, and I was like this before.
	I'm a million times more like this now.
	Now I know what actually being a father is.
	Looking at my father, who had his tragedies and he had his issues and so on, so this is not some sort of blanket condemnation or anything like that, but You have to look at the practical things.
	Do you enjoy the person's company?
	Do you have intimate, happy, enjoyable, funny conversations with them?
	Do you look forward to them calling?
	When the phone rings, does your heart light up that they're calling?
	I mean, that's how it is with my wife and with my daughter and all of that, right?
	So my friends, hey, great, how you doing?
	Blah, blah, blah, right? So as far as the practical stuff goes...
	We get very sentimental, and I understand that, and I'm not saying that's a terrible thing.
	I think it's actually not a bad thing, although I think going forward it will be a bad thing, as I mentioned.
	So the weed addiction, yes.
	A weed addiction is saying to yourself, I cannot self-soothe.
	I cannot calm down my own upset.
	Therefore, I need to drug myself.
	And if you don't know how to calm down your own upset, a lot of that would have to do with your parenting, how you were parented, right?
	Did your parents help you to soothe yourself when you got upset as a kid?
	Probably not. All right.
	Young children who can speak three languages.
	Is this a sign of high IQ? Or is it just learned through repetition and retention?
	So children go through a phase of intense and unreproducible language acquisition from about the age of 18 months until about the age of 7 or 8.
	And people who, for whatever reason, raised by wolves, who don't go through that process of language acquisition, never learn language very well.
	So it's simply just a phase of the brain development where you are a sponge to languages.
	And... So it's neither IQ nor repetition and retention.
	It's like saying, gosh, toddlers grow really fast.
	It's like, yes, and then they stop.
	And the brain is fantastic at language when you're very young, and then it stops.
	Turned on VPN, and now the screen is working for me.
	Interesting. All right.
	Thoughts on language use and its relation to truth.
	I noticed you write with brevity and flow, which I find lacking in much modern literature.
	You also ripped on ugly pomo prose in The God of Atheists, which I enjoy reading.
	The God of Atheists is a modern comedy that I wrote many years ago, long before, really, internet communications arose, wherein one of the characters talks to a camera and publishes it on the internet with fantastic speeches.
	So it's a great modern comedy about corruption in the music business, the software business, and academia.
	So you can get it at fdrurl.com forward slash...
	T-G-O-A. F-D-R-U-R-L dot com forward slash T-G-O-A for God, the God of Atheists.
	So, mediocre minds complicate, great minds simplify, right?
	I mean, listen, and I appreciate people's comments.
	It's like, oh, somebody wrote, I never really understood existentialism.
	I'm glad you explained it so clearly and all of that, right?
	And the way I explained, I think, ideology as saying that existence precedes essence and you can summon into being anything, any human being you want, any type of human being you want through language and pressure and power.
	So I will clarify things.
	I will simplify and clarify.
	And the fact that I have come up with a theory of ethics that absolutely proves, even to my opponents, the rational...
	Gosh, I can't remember his name.
	Rationality rules. That's the guy.
	He was a huge critic of UPB. We did a debate on it, and he totally accepted that UPB proves that rape, theft, assault, and murder are all wrong, immoral.
	And it's like... Then I don't care what else he says.
	He's like accepted the only important conclusions that matter.
	So yeah, I have a way of talking about ethics that's very solid.
	And I think that you want to – if you can't explain clearly what it is that you're talking about, you're almost certainly wrong.
	Because if you can't boil it down to an essence that is communicable – Then not only are you not right, but even if you're right, you're not a value.
	You're not a value. There's no point having...
	I mean, it's like if you come up with the most beautiful song in the world, you never tell anybody, you never write it down, you never play it to anyone, and you die.
	What was the practical difference?
	Between you having that song and not having that song.
	There's no practical difference.
	Anything which you can't summon out of yourself and spray across the world in comprehensible language is a net negative or absence to mankind as a whole.
	We're all part of the chorus of bringing truth to the world.
	And if you obfuscate and if you baffle gab and if you are aggressive and punchy and violent in your assertions, then you're simply obscuring the truth.
	All right. Hi, Steph.
	Recently, I became a supporter. And despite it being...
	Sorry. And this is my first time being on the stream.
	I've followed you since 2012.
	Well, very nice to meet you. I really appreciate that.
	That's very kind. And thank you so much.
	You know, I got to tell you, it's tough.
	You know, it's tough. Skeptical, critical audiences...
	Of all these kinds of shows, right, people who have skeptical and critical audience members have challenges with vaccine mandates and are facing challenges in income and therefore everyone else who talks to those people is facing challenges in income.
	So, yeah, if you can support, fantastic.
	I would really appreciate it. I never hear leftists mention childhood trauma, despite it being the most significant environmental influence in human behavior.
	And lefties discussing numerous determinism...
	Wait, did that go on somewhere else?
	Oh, deterministic factors in the environment.
	Right.
	Right.
	I also wanted to mention the difference between the left and the right is that the left are existential and believe that existence precedes essence, whereas the conservatives say stuff has evolved for a reason, and let's not just throw it away. whereas the conservatives say stuff has evolved for a reason, We've got to figure out why it's there first before we can just get rid of it, right?
	And that is, of course, saying that there's empiricism to the formation of human societies.
	But Leftism.
	So the question is, why would someone think that language defines a human being?
	That you can create the new Soviet man or the thousand-year Reich perfect square-jawed Aryan German under Nazism or whatever.
	Why would somebody believe that language, ideology, And aggression or force defines a human being.
	Why would somebody be so susceptible to that idea?
	It's crazy, right? Objectively, right?
	Well, the reason why somebody would be so enamored or susceptible to the idea that language defines humanity...
	It's because they've been subject to such withering and absolutist verbal abuse that they have been reshaped in the twisted image of the golem serving the endless ring of the vicious, acid-tongued abuser's mouth.
	So if you have had, I don't know, hit me with a Y if you've ever had a verbal abuser in your life.
	I certainly have. If you've had a verbal abuser in your life, hit me with a Y. I just want to see how experienced people are with this stuff.
	So that we can talk.
	Yes, multiple. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
	We've got an N. We've got a Y. Another Y. That's good.
	People say, why do you say Y? I guess it's a fundamental question of philosophy, right?
	Okay, so you guys have had some verbal abusers in your life.
	Okay, so verbal abusers...
	Attempt to substitute your natural personality with conformity to avoiding the pain that they can inflict.
	Right? So a verbal abuser will attempt to replace your organic natural personality with a frightened need to please work to avoid the sting of their tongue.
	And they will try to implant in you A controllable essence that they have defined.
	So I'm trying to think what it was when I was a kid.
	When I was a kid, one verbal abuser in my environment, it's more of a teenager, was your...
	I'm trying to think of the best way to put it, because it wasn't too obvious.
	Your head's in the clouds, you're way too much into abstractions, you don't get close to people, and you're tough to connect with, like all of this kind of stuff, right?
	That my intellectualism and my focus on rational absolutes and universals was off-putting and alienating to people around me, and it was kind of an emotional defense mechanism that I had so that people wouldn't get to know me, I wouldn't be open and intimate and vulnerable, all that kind of stuff, right?
	And that criticism was so well implanted and so adroitly Wrapped around the soft layer around myself or God.
	And what the verbal abuser wants to do is they want to pull you out of yourself and have you look at yourself in a skeptical and critical manner, in a negative manner.
	And it's really, you know, it's fine to have an observing ego, like to evaluate yourself relative to ideals.
	Perfectly fine. What you don't ever want to do is let people rip you out of yourself and drape you in negative language.
	So that you look at yourself with hostility, right?
	So, I mean, all the stuff that's talked about with me, you know, this crazy racist stuff and cult leader and all that stuff is designed to rip me out of myself and have me look at myself in a contemptuous way.
	Now, once you do that, you have no power.
	You have no power in your life anymore.
	You have no power in your life anymore and you are really owned and controlled.
	So if your organic natural self has been smashed by verbal abuse, and you have been reconstituted in the image and under the control of the language of verbal abusers, then when you hear the idea that existence precedes essence,
	when you hear the idea that language defines humanity, when you have been destroyed and rebuilt anew, Under verbal abuse, then that idea is perfectly reasonable to you because it's happened to you.
	You have been destroyed and reshaped according to the narcissistic needs of the verbal abuser.
	You've become a slave to language, and all you do is pursue the approval and avoid the displeasure of the verbal abuser.
	You have been replaced by a series of remote control commandments with the carrot and the stick of approval and punishment.
	You don't exist as an organic person anymore.
	And so when someone comes along and says ideology or language can reshape a human being, you're like, well, yeah, it happened to me.
	But at the same time, of course, you can't look at it as an effect of trauma.
	You can't look at it as something that happened to you from trauma, that it was abuse.
	You have to abstract it as some sort of existential reality of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Otherwise, you get too close to the verbal abuser, and then you get too anxious because you don't want to provoke the aggression of the verbal abuser.
	Do you think there will be a return of Donald Trump?
	I mean, yeah, he may run again.
	He may run again, but that's why I'm off politics, is that, you know, probably by, certainly by 2024, there'll probably be another 14 million reliable Democrat voters.
	So, yeah. Enjoy the reading aloud, but is there an e-book of to-goa like there is almost?
	I'd like to read it myself, too.
	I think we're working on it, but I know I'm working on it, but not yet.
	Sorry. Explains lefty wall of text memes.
	Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I'm sorry, of course, to all the people who had verbal abuse.
	My father, unfortunately, so much enforced authority and so conformity, he stamped out any hint of myself and told me it was humility.
	Well, you see, if you can identify that you were abused, you survived.
	You survived. You understand?
	If you can actually identify that you were abused, you survived.
	So no, he didn't win.
	If you can point at your accuser, sorry, if you can accuse your abuser, he lost.
	And you won because you retained your moral integrity and your capacity to identify evil.
	Teachers can be very abusive, often using peer pressure to control children.
	Well, When we grew up and went to school, there were certain teachers who would hurt the children any way they could.
	Gosh, how does that sound go?
	I should know this. God knows I listened to it enough as a teenager.
	By pouring their derision upon anything they did, exposing every weakness, however carefully hidden by the kid.
	But in the town it was well known when they got home at night their fat and sociopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives.
	Great song. All right.
	Yeah, teachers humiliate you in front of the class.
	Yeah, for sure. I put in one of my novels, I put something that happened to me that I was reading a book called Emil and the Detectives, which I actually read with my daughter many years ago.
	Emil and the Detectives, I read that as a kid, and I was really curious to see what was going to happen because it was about kids teaming together to right or wrong, which I was very fascinated by.
	And I was looking down, you know, you had these desks that closed.
	I was looking down, I was reading Emil and the Detectives in the back of the class, and the teacher got really angry at me.
	And said, Mr.
	Molyneux, if you are so good and you understand all of this, you can get up and teach the class.
	And of course everyone tittered like, hey, you're not going to do that, right?
	And I was like, you know what?
	What the hell with you, man? And I got up and I strode up to the front of the class.
	And the teacher was a little startled that gave me the chalk, right?
	And I turned around and I wrote, Saturday the 12th of April.
	Here's your lesson. And the kids all laughed.
	And the teacher said, that's the wrong date.
	And I said, oh, sorry. I rubbed out the 12th.
	I wrote down the 13th or 14th or whatever it was.
	And I said, but it's still Saturday, kids.
	So you don't even have to be in school.
	That never happened again with the teacher.
	Let's see here. Hey Steph, if bad parents have instilled negative personality traits in someone, would you consider that a reduction of someone's free will?
	I ask this as someone in their 30s that feels like they're still trying to break out of many of the bad habits given to me by my parents.
	This may be a calling question as I'm having a hard time conveying what I'm wanting to say.
	It is a reduction of your free will until...
	You notice and change.
	So let me give you an example, right?
	So right before I went to Africa in my mid-teens, I was sprinting through a forest, jumped into a pile of leaves, turned out to be a pile of leaves covering a lot of rocks, and I twisted the hell out of my ankle.
	And I was like, oh man, I'm going to Africa, and I got a twisted ankle, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Now, if you...
	You reject that your ankle has been twisted.
	You just say, oh, well, I guess I've just gotten, you know, that's just the pain of being in your mid-teens or whatever.
	You get ankle pain when you walk, right?
	Then you're going to keep walking on your ankle, you're going to keep running on your ankle, and you have the free will to ignore your ankle being hurt.
	And what does that do? Well, eventually it's just going to completely destroy your ankle.
	And so then you don't have the choice even to heal.
	So when you recognize that you're hurt and you rest, ice, compression, elevation, all that kind of stuff, right?
	I mean, I iced the hell out of it.
	I compressed it. And then by the time, and of course, you know, try being on a plane with a hurt ankle.
	Like, you know, you can feel the blood pulsing through your ankle because it's so swollen.
	But by the time I got to Africa and in a day or two, I was mostly fine.
	And so because I accepted that I was hurt, okay, it limited my free will.
	I couldn't run because my ankle was hurt.
	I couldn't climb stairs easily because my ankle was hurt.
	I couldn't just roam around.
	I had to sit there with my leg elevated with ice on it and all of that, compressed.
	So my free will was limited by my injury.
	But because I accepted my injury and worked to heal it, my free will expanded from there.
	So the fact that you're injured, yeah, you can say it limits your free will because you've got to deal with the injury, but that's just a fact.
	The fact is, you are injured.
	Now, if you work to deal with that injury, you end up with your free will restored, and in fact, you end up often with a greater free will than you otherwise would have had.
	You end up with a greater wisdom and free will than you otherwise would have had.
	Let me ask you this. Bit of a rhetorical question, but I'll ask it anyway.
	After that happened, did I ever jump off low cliffs in the woods onto what looked like big piles of leaves again?
	Answer? I did not.
	Like, everyone's done this in northern Ontario, right?
	I did this in the town of New Lisker when I was working up there.
	You go running off at the end of a dock and you jump into the water.
	It turns out the water is about six inches deep and you hurt yourself.
	And everyone's like, okay, well, I'm never jumping into a lake unless I know what's in there.
	So, yeah, you get injured, and yes, your free will is limited for a while, but because you recognize that you're injured and you work to heal it, you end up with your free will restored, and often you will end up with greater free will because you won't make the same mistake again in the future.
	So, the injuries are not the problem.
	It's the denial of the injuries that end up with the free will getting really broken.
	This has been fantastic, says Marg, listening while driving, but I'm fixated.
	Oh. Just be careful.
	Careful with your driving.
	My wife is overweight.
	Keeps saying she will lose it.
	Ten years later, just the same weight.
	I'm concerned for her health.
	We have children.
	She is so subservient, but when she eventually speaks up, it's with emotion and upset.
	So unstable.
	Question, is this from childhood?
	I have asked her.
	She says her upbringing was fine.
	Her father has OCD, a control freak.
	Very moody.
	So, I'll tell you why.
	I'll tell you why I would imagine that she has the eating issue.
	Hit me with a why if you have a points system for yourself.
	A point system. You give yourself gold stars or X's.
	You give yourself ticks or crosses based upon good or bad behavior.
	You know, like, oh, I went to the gym today.
	I can have a couple of bites of chocolate.
	Or, oh, I didn't work out yesterday.
	I better not have dessert. You know, like you're rewarding or punishing yourself for various things that you do that are good or bad, right or wrong during the day.
	You ever do this? You have a point system with yourself.
	Like you're training yourself like somebody trains a puppy.
	Here's a kibble. I'm going to give you a stern talking to.
	Here's negative. Here's a newspaper, rolled up newspaper to the butt.
	Do you train yourself?
	Do you give yourself little rewards and little punishments based upon what you've done right or wrong during the day?
	Do you? So if you are like that, then it's almost impossible to lose weight.
	Because what happens is you lose weight and you reward yourself for losing weight.
	And how do you reward yourself for losing weight?
	You give yourself some sugar or some fat, some whatever it is that's going to make you overweight again, right?
	You can't do it. This is why so many people just oscillate, right?
	They lose 10 pounds.
	They gain 10 pounds. Because what they do is they say, well, food is my reward.
	Food is the kibble that I give to myself for doing something right or good, or just to stave off the negatives.
	Like, if you've got a really self-critical side, you're going to look for the higher food, or it could be anything.
	In this case, we're talking food.
	You're going to look for the higher food.
	To drown out and suppress the negative emotions that are coming out of the harsh or critical voice.
	And if her father had OCD, man, OCD is one of the most fundamental carrot and stick situations in the human mind.
	Because you say, I'm really anxious.
	Okay, if I wash my hands 50 times, I won't be anxious.
	Okay, I washed my hands 50 times, and now I should be rewarded by a lack of anxiety, right?
	But all you're doing is reinforcing it.
	All you're doing is reinforcing that you have to wash your hands in order to feel less anxious.
	And so it doesn't work.
	It doesn't help at all, right?
	Very self-critical people often become hoarders.
	You know why, right? So very self-critical people often become hoarders because if they need something that they threw out, they can't handle the self-criticism.
	Oh, you've got to go buy a new one.
	You're so stupid. Why didn't you hang on to it?
	It was free. You could have just hung on to it, but now you've got to go out and buy a whole new one.
	So they hoard everything because they can't handle the potential self-criticism of needing something that they threw out.
	Do you reward yourself For good behavior and punish yourself for bad behavior like you're training a puppy.
	You can't lose weight.
	In my humble, amateur, non-nutritionist opinion, you cannot lose weight on the kibbles and slaps routine.
	You can't. You will always end up rewarding yourself for losing weight.
	By gaining weight. So it's never going to work.
	So you have to get off the kibbles and slaps routine.
	The carrot and the stick. You have to find a way to be happy with yourself without rewarding yourself.
	Virtue should be its own reward.
	You know, the use of things you can say like that, right?
	You have to find a way to be happy with yourself.
	And happy in your life without the reward.
	Because when you give yourself the reward, you are always, always, always also giving yourself the punishment.
	Because the withholding of a reward becomes a punishment.
	So, oh, if I work out, I can have a cookie.
	You know, whatever it is, right?
	Or, oh, I can sit around on the couch today because I worked out yesterday or whatever, right?
	Okay, well, then you're just buying your leisure by working out and you're manipulating yourself, you're managing yourself, and nothing is for the thing itself.
	Nothing you do is for the thing itself.
	It's always for the reward you're going to give yourself or to avoid the punishment you're going to give yourself.
	And this we inherit. We inherit from parents.
	We inherit from religion a lot of times.
	We inherit from school.
	Kibbles and slaps. Treats and punishments.
	Carrots and sticks.
	Now, to be free fundamentally is to be free of self-management.
	Self-control of yourself and reward of yourself and punishment of yourself.
	To guide yourself.
	Because to reward and punish yourself is to be alienated from yourself.
	Is to stand outside critically and say, well, this person is so immune to reason and good sense that the only way I can get them to do anything positive is to reward them or threaten them with punishment.
	And the only way I can get them to avoid doing something negative is to threaten them with even more punishment.
	You're outside of yourself, whipping yourself.
	Rewarding yourself. Like you're a dog.
	Like you're a circus animal being trained to perform.
	Like you're a dolphin being trained to jump through a hoop.
	That's not how reason works with your higher self at all.
	At all. It's a very low level plane of existence because it is how we train animals.
	It is how we toilet train a dog or a cat.
	Rewards and punishments, rewards and punishments, rewards and punishments.
	Just little circles around.
	And this can even happen with self-praise, self-criticism.
	It doesn't have to be food. It could be anything.
	When you say to yourself, oh, I've been working really hard.
	I deserve a... No, no.
	Stop that. Please, I'm begging you.
	Stop that. Oh, I've got to go work out.
	I really ate yesterday. No!
	No! Find a way to enjoy working out without it being a punishment or a reward.
	Find a way to enjoy your food without it being a form of behavior modification, like your Pavlov teaching the dog to drool when he listens to the bell.
	You know that Pavlovian response, right?
	Pavlov would feed dogs and ring a bell and then he would ring the bell without feeding them and they would still salivate.
	Don't train yourself like a pet, like a dog.
	It's incredibly disrespectful to the glory that you are.
	The beauty and power and depth and magnificence that you are.
	Should be just a little bit bigger than, ooh, who's been a good boy?
	Get half a cookie. Ooh, who's been a bad boy?
	Go on the treadmill. And that's a brutal way to live.
	It's a brutal way to live. Don't do it, man.
	Find a way to love or dislike the things in and of themselves.
	But don't be on a hedonistic treadmill seeking to avoid your own punishments and get your own rewards.
	Don't be your own whipmaster.
	Don't be your own Siegfried and Roy.
	Don't do it, man. Don't do it.
	What about cheap meals when you're on a steady diet?
	I'm not overweight and I used to be.
	Just reward myself a lot less.
	The diet will not be sustainable if you're rewarding and punishing yourselves.
	Because when we reward and punish ourselves, you know what we get?
	Rebellious and resentful. When you just reward and punish yourself, manipulate yourself, control yourself, bully yourself, praise yourself, you get resentful as anybody does who's bullied and rewarded and is not treated according to the high glorious nature of their sovereign reason.
	My reward was looking good in my favorite jeans.
	Okay. What can I say?
	All right. I despise praise for this reason.
	It is a reward and a manipulation.
	Well, so praise, you can appreciate something that somebody did.
	Praise usually is something that is a form of behavior modification, that you want someone to change his or her behavior, and you're going to hold out praise as a means of controlling them.
	Now, appreciation is different.
	Appreciation is, like, if you want your daughter, let's say your daughter draws pictures, and you want her, you think it's really good for her, good hand-eye coordination, she's off the tablet, so, oh, that's a wonderful picture, but you're not saying it because of the picture itself, you're saying it because you want her to draw more.
	And there's no more certain way than to get a kid to stop doing something than to praise them for effect, to praise them for manipulation's sake.
	So if you want your kid to not like something, then you praise them for doing it, not for the thing itself, but to control their behavior.
	And their joy will switch off like that.
	Praising my daughter can be like defusing a bomb sometimes.
	She really hates praise. I say, no, no.
	Hey, I think it's a beautiful picture.
	I don't care if you ever make another one.
	That's a beautiful picture right there for me.
	But the moment it's like, good job!
	There's this horrible meme.
	I guess it's a little video of some poor kid in a daycare.
	The boy's just trying to pull off his...
	His mask! And he's like, I don't know, 18 months or two years old or something like that.
	And the mom is like, good job!
	Yay! Keep the mask on! Yay!
	Yay! I hate that!
	Oh, I hate that! Yay! I hate that!
	Yay! Good job!
	It's just manipulation.
	It's just control.
	It's just... I'm going to give you positive feedback in order to control your behavior.
	Ugh! Ugh! Skin crawling.
	It's skin crawling. How do you handle our praise, Steph, if it's a reward?
	So the way that I handle your praise is that you are praising not me, but philosophy, right?
	I mean, you're not saying, Steph, there's something about the incommunable essence of you that I love beyond all reason, despite that.
	You're saying, I appreciate the philosophy that you're putting forward.
	It is helping me in my life.
	It's practical utility in my life.
	The praise is for the philosophy, right?
	Not some existential abstract version of me, right?
	Because what do you know me of? You know of me through these shows.
	You know of me through these conversations.
	What do you consider it when you occasionally do have a rich meal or cheesecake or something like that?
	So what I would do, and I do, of course, last time I had cheesecake.
	Oh, you know who used to have good cheesecake many years ago?
	A married couple that I used to know.
	They would take me to Red Lobster, and Red Lobster used to have this vanilla bean cheesecake.
	Oh, it's like an angel crying on your tongue.
	And... So you just enjoy it for the thing itself, but you don't view it as a reward for anything.
	You just enjoy it for the thing of itself.
	You enjoy the taste of the cheesecake, and you must steadfastly refuse to say, I will punish myself for this later.
	This cheesecake is a reward for working out.
	out you just enjoy the cheesecake for the thing itself what is the best way to help spread free So the name has been so coated with toxicity that I would not attempt to spread free domain or me because, you know, Google search and everybody's like, oh my god, right?
	But what I would say is just take the ideas and the arguments and present them.
	People say, where did you get this from?
	Say, oh, I can't remember.
	Somewhere on the internet. Whatever, right? Or, you know, I've thought of it myself.
	I don't care. It's fine with me.
	Somebody says, I've lost north of 100 pounds and kept it off.
	My relationship with food and lifestyle are wildly different than they used to be.
	Both had to change. Yeah?
	Good for you. Good for you.
	Perfect. That makes perfect sense.
	Thank you. I assume that's something to me.
	So I'm glad it helped.
	What do we got here? I'm sorry.
	It's really low. I should find a way to raise the screen so I don't have to crane down like I'm looking at my own balls.
	Here we go. Enjoying things for their own sake is a hard adjustment to make, but it is a load off your back.
	You can't ever enjoy anything if it's for an effect.
	You can't enjoy cheesecake if it's a reward.
	Because you can't enjoy it for the thing in itself because you can't have cheesecake next time because you'll have to punish yourself.
	You can't just relax, sink into the moment and enjoy what is.
	It's always some abstract manipulation out of your own body, out of body experience or whatever, right?
	You mentioned hoarders are afraid of self-criticism and I think that it's true for me as even though my parents were hoarders, I no longer contact or visit them but I still struggle with hoarding.
	How can I fix this? So...
	Hoarding arises out of a scarcity mindset.
	A scarcity mindset is really, really an important thing to understand.
	So hoarding, if you think of how it used to be for our ancestors, where it was really, really hard to get food in the winter, right?
	This is where you got pickling things from.
	This is where you got breads made.
	This is where you'd get frozen food.
	It was really hard. This is why you domesticated livestock and kept chickens and geese and all of that and sheep and cows.
	So it was really hard to get food over the winter.
	And so you would have to hoard.
	You would have to really ration yourself because if you didn't make it to spring, you didn't make it to spring, right?
	So that's a scarcity mindset.
	I can't throw anything out because it won't be there in the future and I won't be able to get another one and I'll be without it and it'll be really important.
	That's a scarcity mindset. And it comes from a very sensible place, which is in colder climates.
	You really, really need to hoard.
	Now, super cold climate's not so much because you can always go hunting polar bears and whales and narwhals and seals or whatever it is, right?
	But for the sort of moderate temperate, like north of Greece, south of Greenland, that's just a summer-winter thing, right?
	So you've got to really hoard...
	For the winter. So that's good.
	Now, scarcity mindset is, I don't have enough.
	I can't afford to lose anything.
	I can't afford to throw anything out.
	I can't afford to not be without stuff.
	Scarcity mindset. Scarcity mindset is crippling in life.
	And it could go just about anywhere.
	So scarcity mindset is...
	It's a friend of mine.
	mind.
	It's actually the guy who invited me to come on his volleyball team where I met my wife.
	He was going through a terrible divorce, a brutal divorce.
	I was working as a programmer with him and a bunch of other guys.
	We were all in the same room.
	And he'd spend half the day on the phone with his lawyer and it would just be brutal and horrible, just an absolutely nasty, nasty divorce.
	And he actually, he did help me quite a bit.
	I was a very Protestant, it was my first professional job, so it was my first job where I wore a suit and I wasn't a waiter or something, or a temp.
	And I remember him taking me to a room and he was just sitting there chatting away, asking me about my life, and he was chatting about his life and all of that, and I was like, Shouldn't we get to work on stuff?
	Shouldn't we talk about the coding that we need to do?
	He's like, dude, you take your job so seriously.
	Relax. Enjoy.
	It's fine. You're a professional now.
	It's not widgets per second.
	Because when you're a waiter, if you're just sitting around chatting, you'll get barked at.
	Go clean something. But with a professional, it's kind of a rhythm thing.
	Focus and then lack of focus can help you be creative and all that.
	Anyway, so he was going through this absolutely brutal divorce.
	And I remember I asked him, I said, dude, why did you marry the woman?
	Why? And he said, and it's funny because he was actually a tall, fairly good-looking guy.
	But he was raised with really absent parents.
	He was raised really wealthy, really absent parents.
	And he said, oh, I had a miserable childhood.
	He said, my parents, you know, if I'd lose my bike, they'd just buy me another bike.
	I had everything that you could possibly want.
	And nothing. So I said, well, why did you marry the woman?
	And he said, she was the first woman who would sleep with me.
	Now that's scarcity mindset.
	Because he felt deep down that there was not going to be another woman who would sleep with him.
	So you have no choice.
	Scarcity mindset is when you have no choice because you will not do better in the future.
	You will not do as well or better in the future.
	So for hoarder scarcity mindset is, I'm going to need this in the future and there won't be a way to get another one.
	And look, I have a little bit, you know, with all these electronics and bips and burps and barps that I have, I have, you know, everything you order comes with 60 million cables and I get a whole rack in the basement of like hooks on the cables and things that, and every now and then I just like, I'm going to throw this stuff out.
	Oh, what if I need it? I'll just order another one.
	I believe I'll have $8 in the future to get another HDMI cable should I need my 31st one or something, right?
	Scarcity mindset is hoarders.
	Scarcity mindset also, also is overweight people.
	I've got to eat now because, right, who knows?
	Promiscuity is scarcity mindset.
	I'm not going to wait and keep myself for a great relationship in the future because there won't be one that scares...
	Drug abuse. Scarcity mindset.
	I'm not going to have happiness in the future.
	I might as well have happiness now.
	It's our selected. Scarcity mindset.
	So, or produces our selected behavior.
	Scarcity mindset is absolutely crippling in your life.
	You have to look forward to the future to say things will be better.
	I'll have more resources.
	I'll have more money. I'll be better off.
	I'll get more love. That's abundance mindset.
	And it's kind of hard for us, particularly Northern Europeans, to think in this sort of tropical way, right?
	But that's the world that we live in right now, is that there is massive amounts of abundance for just about everyone.
	And you can get what you want, and you will get what you want, as long as you don't fall prey to the scarcity mindset.
	Abundance. Plenty.
	More than you could want.
	You think in those ways, and it really comes true.
	I know that sounds a bit odd, right?
	What do you think of the no-fat movement?
	I think it's a great idea, I suppose.
	If I was in Canada, I'd be happy to take any HDMI cables you're checking out, Steph.
	Yes, I'll be right on to mail that, right?
	All right. What do we got here?
	This resonates with me because my mom would always praise me for my paintings, but I really lost motivation because I felt like she wanted me to paint for her own benefit.
	She would ask me to paint something so she could give it as a present for weddings and birthdays.
	Oh yeah, no, parents pushing you stuff.
	I mean, when I was in grade 8, I took a grade 13 writing class.
	I also took a university-level computer science class.
	And my mother was just so mad proud about me doing stuff five, six, seven years beyond where I was in school that she just always bragged about it to her friends.
	And I just got really resentful and was not pleased with it in many ways.
	And it took a lot of overcoming to say, okay, well, I've got to still maintain my love for this stuff even if my mother's using it in a bad way, right?
	Because that's then to have her control me through that negative stuff too, right?
	That's not good. Alright, let me just see here.
	Did I miss any questions over here?
	Did I? I think people have given up doing it over here because I just don't answer.
	Alright, what do we got? Same with me and my mom pushing me to play the piano.
	I haven't played in 20 years. Well, don't let them take away piano from you.
	Just because they're using it for vainglorious means doesn't mean that you shouldn't enjoy it for your own sake.
	All right, looks like we are winding down.
	Look at that. Boy, oh boy, does it seem to fly for you?
	Is it just me because my brain is revving like the roadrunner's legs?
	Is it just me? Does it seem to fly for you guys as well?
	Because I swear we just started like 20 minutes ago.
	I've lost time. Should I do a show drunk?
	Should I? Should I do a show drunk?
	Let's see here. In Melbourne, the authorities respond to any form of protest with violence.
	Is that a sure sign they were abused as children?
	Yeah, I would say so, for sure.
	That was extremely enlightening.
	I grew up poor, which might explain my scarcity mindset.
	I am no longer poor, so I shouldn't have issue anymore.
	Thank you as much. So here's a little trick, right?
	Here's a little trick. So, you have to translate.
	That's the last thing I'll say. We got a minute 40, right?
	So, you have to translate things in your mind, right?
	So, if when you were a teenager, you made $4,000 a year, part-time or whatever, right?
	And then you get a job for $40,000 a year, you have to take your mindset and divide it by 10.
	So when you were a kid, right, you'd spend, I don't know, 20 bucks on something.
	Okay, but now you're making 10 times as much, so you can spend 200 bucks and get the same feeling.
	If you end up making $400,000 a year, you can spend $2,000, right?
	And that's...
	Well, $200, and it's the same as $2 back in the day, right?
	So you've got to do a divide in order to maintain whatever you grew up with in terms of money.
	You have to do a mental recalculation in your head.
	If you grew up super poor and you're middle class now, it's 100 to 1.
	So what used to be $10 for you as a kid is now $1,000 for you as an adult.
	And you've got to really just recalibrate and readjust these things.
	All right. That will help you, I think, manage your money better.
	But that mental recalculation is absolutely essential if you grow up poor because otherwise you'll just be hoarding and panicking and not enjoying any kind of resources and not enjoying any additional stuff that you have.
	All right. Okay, I will talk to you guys soon.
	I don't think I'm going to do a show tomorrow because it's my birthday.
	Tomorrow I'll be 55. Freedom 55, baby!
	So, yeah, have a wonderful evening, everyone.
	I will try and do a show on the weekend.
	Thank you so much for dropping by, freedomain.locals.com.
	Great pleasure chatting with you guys.
	Lots of love. Best audience in the known universe.
	And I will talk to you soon.

▲