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April 17, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:49:44
HAPPY EASTER - HERE'S HOW TO END THE LUST FOR POWER!
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Yes, indeedy.
Good afternoon. Good morning.
Well, good afternoon to all of our good chums out there in the way of Europe.
And I guess even further east, hope you're having a wonderful Easter.
Happy Easter to all of our magnificent Christian friends.
Of course, it did, you know, relatively strike me this morning that the Twitter board...
First of all, it's really a little surprising how little stock the Twitter board owns and how the Saudi prince who said he wasn't going to take Elon Musk's offer actually sold his shares in 2019.
But it's kind of surprising to me how the board has so few Twitter shares.
I mean, because when you hear, well, no board member can own more than 15%, you think that rule's in there for a reason, right?
It's in there because you think that the people are trying to jam themselves up on Twitter shares, but no, they really don't have any.
It's really, really tiny.
it's really, really tiny.
So it's interesting to...
If the board members don't have a lot of Twitter shares, how well Are the interests of the board members aligned with the interests of the shareholders?
That's sort of a big question.
So I guess just another quick brush up too on this stuff.
So the fact that somebody put in an offer, I think it was at the time 40% higher, now I think it's 18% higher, that somebody put in an offer doesn't mean that the board has to take that offer at all.
But I think that the board needs to have a plan for a turnaround.
So if everyone in the industry is doing badly for whatever reason, supply chain issues or so on, then okay, your plan is to, you know, hunker down, work on supply chain issues until they're resolved and then start back up again.
That's, I think, a reasonable plan.
But if, you know, stock price is down enormously as it has been for the Twitter board, if the stock price is down enormously and there's no particular plan, like what is the plan to resurrect it?
What is the plan to turn it around?
If there is no plan to turn it around, And I would argue that the stock price is down, I think, to some degree because of the deplatforming.
There's a lot of hate watching, right?
Some people come to Twitter to read stuff that really upsets them, you know, and that can be for healthy reasons or, I guess, more likely unhealthy reasons.
But, yeah, a board is not obligated to take a higher offer because there could be good reasons.
You know, if the stock price just went down 50% because of some external reason and the board has a plan to turn it around, Then it probably makes sense to reject even a 50% higher offer.
But I think this is one thing that should go to the shareholders for a vote.
And you can actually bypass the board if you want to buy a company.
You can bypass the board and you can go directly to the shareholders.
And that probably is plan B, I would guess.
Elon Musk said if the board rejects his purchase, then it's going to be a plan B. And we'll see.
We'll see how that works. Plays out.
But courts in the US, and I think in most of the West, courts are pretty loathe to adjudicate business decisions because, you know, they're experts in the law.
They're not experts in business.
And so if somebody says, oh, this was a bad business decision ensues, it's really tough.
To get that through the courts.
Because the courts are like, hey man, what do we know, right?
Everyone's making a good case on either side.
Business is kind of uncertain.
So, well, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
The odds of him getting Twitter and restoring free speech are very low, in my opinion.
Acquiring Twitter, maybe.
Improving speech, maybe.
But the big barrier is the stores in Apple and Google, right?
The Apple and Google stores, which have their own free speech policies, as Parler found out and other people have found out, Gab and so on.
So I know Gab put an offer and said, hey, put $2 billion into us and we'll beat Twitter.
Yeah, that's tough.
I mean, the network effect of large social media platforms is really, really hard to duplicate.
So... Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting.
I don't think it's going to go back to the way it was in 2016.
And this is the big question, right?
So I think a lot of people don't understand this, which is a really pompous and annoying way to put it, so I apologize for that.
Even if I'm speaking, it's like, I understand.
Sorry, I went all Reginald on everyone.
That's a reference to almostnovel.com, my novel.
Anyway, so this is a fundamental question.
It's a Do you think that people are evolved to seek money or to seek power?
Do you think we have evolved to seek money or to seek power?
I mean, obviously to put it another way, if somebody's offered significant political power or a million dollars, which would they be more likely to take?
Because if we think that people are searching for money alone, right?
If people are simply searching for profits and money, Then social media platforms that are getting decimated because of their anti-free speech policies would reverse those anti-free speech policies because, you know, they're all about the profit, right?
They're all about the profit. So are we evolved to seek money or power?
Now to ask that question in a sense is to answer it.
So power Is coercive control over resources?
Violent control or threat of violent control over resources?
Money, of course, is a symbol for stored or saved resources.
Are we evolved to seek money or to seek power?
It's actually a very...
It's almost a tautology because it's very simple to answer.
It's not even a theoretical... And the reason it's not even a theoretical is, of course, because our evolution, or over the course of our evolution, money is a very late-stage development.
And if human beings have been around for 150, 200,000 years, we've only had money for a couple of thousand.
And as far as the real ability to be able to accumulate resources, that's really only been around for about 200 to 250 years.
I would sort of say...
British Pound Sterling Agricultural Revolution and boy did I read a lot about the Agricultural Revolution in order to write my other novel which I released recently called Just Poor.
You can get that for free at JustPoorNovel.com and so for the vast majority of her evolution the only thing that you could get was power to gain additional resources.
The only thing you could get was power.
There was no money to accumulate, or at least not that would have much impact on our evolution.
So as far as our evolution goes, we have evolved to seek power, not money.
Now, the fact that power and money have coincided is like double cocaine in the modern system.
The fact that money and power have now coincided and that seeking power also gets you a massive amount of money.
I mean, if you look at the Net worth of politicians relative to their salaries.
I mean, there's no connection.
There's no connection whatsoever.
Whatsoever. I mean, was it Elizabeth Warren makes a couple of hundred grand a year, and yet it's net worth of 67 million?
Look at Nancy Pelosi. Like, the fact that...
Like, that's irresistible, right?
You cannot possibly expect...
I mean, people couldn't resist power even in the past, right?
And... If you put the lust for power together with the lust for money, I mean, it's when crack came along, like it just went through neighborhoods and just completely destroyed them and so on, because the high was just completely irresistible and unbelievably addictive.
So, for sure, we are hardwired to seek power over money.
We have a choice between power and money.
We will mostly go for power.
It gives us more endorphins.
It gives us more of a high. It gives us more of a joy.
It's more addictive. Now, the reason why we have evolved to seek power is because it's easier than achieving skill.
So, is it easier to become an incredibly skilled hunter Or, when the incredibly skilled hunter brings his game back to the village, is it easier then to threaten to kill his children if he doesn't give you a leg of deer?
Violence is easy.
Skill is hard. And societies are constantly torn in this balance between skill and violence.
So societies that have very skilled people produce a lot of violent controllers because the skilled people are producing a lot of resources, a skilled farmer, a skilled hunter, so you name it, a skilled warrior even.
And so skilled people produce a lot of resources and a lot of resources swells the power class, the political class, so to speak, like the chieftains and the warlocks and the witch doctors and so on, who threaten with violence or even more conveniently, and especially when you get older and it's hard to beat up on young who threaten with violence or even more conveniently, and especially when you get older and it's hard I will curse you, your family will have bad luck, your lineage will end, I'll put a voodoo curse on you and so on.
So it's a lot easier, a lot easier to threaten people than it is to become a skilled hunter.
And for some people, of course, becoming a skilled hunter is fundamentally impossible.
They might have bad ears or eyes or slow reflexes or whatever, they just can't move quietly, whatever it could be.
They don't have a good sense of smell to figure out where the game is.
And they just can't.
They can't be a skilled hunter.
So this is always what's torn, right?
So if you have a lot of skilled hunters or skilled producers, then you produce a lot of resources, which is then scooped up by the political class and swells the political class, who then threaten the hunters for their resources.
And then the hunters get tired of hunting for the political class And the society collapses, right?
They starve to death or they, you know, they get taken over by another tribe or whatever it is, right?
And then it still starts up again.
And... If you have a lot of resources but no political class, then you have a lot of producers, but you don't have a lot of warriors.
And if you have a lot of producers without having a lot of warriors, then you're taken over by some neighboring tribe which have more warriors and fewer producers because they'll use violence and all that.
So you're always a mark if you're a productive person, if you're a skilled person, if you're a productive person.
You are a resource.
You're a livestock. You're the goose that lays the golden egg, right?
And this is what this analogy, or I guess this fairy tale, this is what it's always been about, right?
Which is... I'm sure you know the story, right?
This couple has a goose that lays golden eggs, they get greedy, and they tear open the goose to find all the golden eggs, and they just kill the goose so they don't get any more golden eggs.
That's just the way. And this is a fundamental tension in society.
If you get too greedy to use violence against your producers, the producers stop producing, or flee, or whatever, right?
Or get depressed, or...
Whatever. So, they simply, their production goes down and then the political classes, which can't give up their addiction to control of power, you know, when production goes down, then the political classes get more violent and this, you know, this death spiral kills productivity, kills production. So, without a doubt, we have evolved to seek power rather than money.
Money is a very new phenomenon.
And the idea that we would evolve, in most places where we evolved, you couldn't store anything, right?
Like, if you've ever seen, oh gosh, what's that movie where the guy wanders off into the Alaskan wilderness and dies, so at one point he kills a large animal, covers it in sticks, but when he comes back, the large animal is covered in flies, and he can't eat it, right? He can't store anything. And so violence was more productive than storage value, right?
Because storage value largely didn't exist.
So if you sort of look at the modern world and you say, if you look at the oligarchs who are spending huge amounts of money in order to shift or influence or create political power and control, it goes against this capitalist idea that everyone is motivated by profit.
Profit alone, more money, more money.
Well, no. People spend huge amounts of their money I mean, look at Bill Gates.
I mean, the World Health Organization, he funds enormously, and he just spends huge amounts of money to gain authority, influence, power, and control over others.
And if you understand evolution, again, sorry to be annoying and pompous, but, you know, every day, it's a Sunday, I guess, that's my day, Sunday the 17th of April, day of annoyance and pomposity.
But if you look at Zuckerberg spending all of his money to influence his elections, you look at Soros, you look at Bill Gates, you look at all of these oligarchs, they are willing to burn money in pursuit of power.
And that's because that's what we're hardwired to do.
Someone like Vladimir Putin, reputedly worth a huge amount of money, still continues to follow and control and be in charge of politics.
Because we get more of a high...
Out of power than we do out of profit.
And so, just sort of to understand this in social media companies, they are absolutely completely and totally willing to burn their profits in pursuit of power.
Now, the shareholders, they want profits, but I assume that the boards of these companies are more interested in power than they are in profits.
So, if you look at the huge, it was hundreds of millions of dollars that Mark Zuckerberg was pouring into various election things.
Well, if he hadn't taken that money out of Facebook, then there would be more money to improve Facebook, which would improve profitability.
So, again, this is all, you know, I'm not saying I know the path of these hundreds of millions of dollars, but, you know, they came from somewhere.
And his primary thing is Facebook, so at some point they came out of Facebook and it could be that he sold a bunch of shares and so on, which again drives down share price.
But he's doing all of that in pursuit of power.
So the Marxist analysis that capitalists are driven primarily by power is anti-evolutionary.
Because evolutionarily speaking, we absolutely, and in almost all circumstances, prefer power to profit.
Now, sometimes we will accumulate profit in order to pursue power.
You can't sway elections if you don't already have the hundreds of millions of dollars.
So sometimes profit is very important, but profit as a path to power is very common.
Profit as a path to power is very common.
I mean, so the Marxist analysis is we're not tribal.
Of course we are. The Marxist analysis, because class is the important thing, not the tribe, and the tribe is the important thing, evolutionarily speaking, so it's anti-evolutionary that way.
The idea that human beings can work for some abstract common good at the expense of their own survival and profit is anti-evolution.
You understand that hard leftism is way more anti-evolutionary than Christianity is.
Christianity at least gives you your own soul to tend and says that the profit of your soul is what matters, and getting to heaven is what matters.
And getting the happiness you achieve from following the teachings of Jesus as close as you can is what matters.
And that's the bargain in Christianity, right?
Which is, what is the profit of man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?
So self-interest in Christianity is very evolutionary speaking, evolutionary speaking.
It's very much aligned with evolution, that we seek our own benefits.
Now, Christianity, of course, would redefine the benefits to say it's not just material gain and not just sex and all of that.
It's not just things of the flesh.
It's things of the soul and of the spirit and of virtue and of heaven.
But it's very pro-evolution because it simply attempts to harness our self-interest and turn it to moral absolutes, abstract, universal moral absolutes, which is pretty noble.
Pretty noble goal, and the great revolution of Jesus, as I talked about about a year and a half ago in a very lengthy show.
Jesus said, it is achieved, it is done.
And that is universalism in ethics, not tribalism, but universalism in ethics.
And so Christianity looks at man, and of course has had thousands of years to look at man, and says, look, we are motivated by self-interest, it's just that we need the right self-interest.
Satan will say to you, your self-interest is things of the flesh, power, control, sex, fame, glory, money, things of the mammal, right?
Satan casts you back in time.
But Jesus says that the joy of virtue and the attainment of heaven is your selfish goal that you should be pursuing.
So, in a sense, self-interest is foundational to Christianity.
In a very real sense, self-interest is foundational to Christianity.
And Christianity acknowledges the lust for power, because when Jesus was 40 days in the desert, And Satan came to him and said, I'll give you the whole world.
You can be in charge of the power of the whole world.
You can do all the good you want by having power over others.
Of course, that is a lie.
It's a falsehood. You can't do good for others by having power over them.
All you can do is break them.
It's like saying you can hash chickens by throwing raw eggs against a wall.
It just breaks them. So Christianity acknowledges The lust for power.
That this was the greatest temptation of Jesus.
Was to have power over the whole world.
And he rejected it because he wished to pursue virtue and achieve heaven.
So the Christian analysis of human nature is infinitely superior to the Marxist analysis of human nature because the Marxist analysis of human nature says we can love servitude.
We can completely scrub self-interest.
And we can go against our evolutionary lust for power simply by aligning with a tribe that doesn't exist called the class.
It's all madness, all mad nonsense, all completely mad nonsense, but obviously very compelling.
People who don't have an identity absolutely love ideologies that tell them to abandon the self.
To abandon self-interest.
If you don't exist in a sort of fundamental psychological sense, then any philosophy or ideology which makes a virtue out of self-erasure makes your abandonment of yourself, your failure to identify as an actualized human being, your failure to think for yourself, turns that into a virtue.
Wonderful. That's the NPC thing, right?
I will give you an excuse to For non-existence.
I will make a virtue out of non-existence, and I will make an enemy out of those who exist.
I will destroy those who exist for the sake of those who don't exist, and therefore you become virtuous by failing to think virtue is enslavement.
Well, I mean, this is an old argument from Nietzsche, right?
It is a slave class, right?
The slave class that had no power made a virtue out of powerlessness.
The slave class that could not make any decisions for itself because they were enslaved made a virtue out of unthinkingness and made a virtue out of resentment.
Resentment is when you can't do anything to punish someone who's harming your interests, right?
So if you're a slave, you can't do anything really to punish.
I mean, you could kill your master, I suppose, but then you'll be hunted down and killed.
Your family will be killed, so that doesn't really work.
So if you If you can't actually harm the people who are harming your interests, if you can't actually fight back or escape them, then you seethe with resentment, which is a frustrated vengeance lust, an unactionable vengeance lust.
So if you look at the modern economy and you say, okay, so people will burn profits in pursuit of power, and often they will only accumulate profits in order to pursue power, right?
If you want to have a big bonfire, you've got to gather a lot of wood.
And if you want to have a lot of power, sometimes the best thing you can do, if you don't have a lot of charisma, you know, if you don't have charisma, you're not particularly well-spoken, you're not particularly good-looking, you don't have good hair, you know, the Bill Gates kind of thing, right?
Then, okay, what can you do to get power?
Well, you can't convince people, you can't be charismatic, you can't be a political leader, so you just get a bunch of money.
You get a bunch of money and spend it, and then you have power without, you know, the showbiz of politics, which you really can't compete in, so...
Yeah, if you look at the economy and just look at what's happening with various social media companies in particular, oh yeah, they're totally burning profits in pursuit of power.
Absolutely. Totally burning profits in pursuit of power.
And evolutionarily speaking, that's what you should expect.
And that's why the stateless society conception, right?
Dispute resolution organizations, stateless society conception, is absolutely...
Absolutely pro-evolution.
And it is the only ideology that is pro-evolution.
It is the only ideology that is pro-evolution.
So if you've ever been around like a really rampant alcoholic, you know that if they want to stop drinking, they have to never touch alcohol.
Right? There's no...
Stopping a little bit. There's no I'll manage it.
Because they have a highly addictive personality and their addiction of either biological or social or personal choice is alcohol, they can't just drink a little.
I think it was many, many years after what Steve Tyler and Joe Perry were called the toxic twins and snorted half of Peru, according to their own estimations in the 70s, and drank like fish.
And I think it was many decades later...
Steven Tyler, truly repulsive human being by the way, but Steven Tyler said, you know, every now and then I can have a beer at this point.
Many, many decades after quitting.
So addictive personality is like you can't have the drug of choice in the vicinity.
You can't do it. I remember a friend of mine when he was quitting smoking many years ago.
He said, you know, it's tough.
You know, quitting smoking is tough.
You have a higher relapse rate for heroin users than you do for tobacco users, right?
Quitting smoking is tough. And he said to me once, he said, you know, we went to go and see a movie and in the movie, this is back when this was the case, right?
You'd have all of these characters luxuriously smoking, you know, sitting back, a cup of coffee and, you know, there's that slight hissing burn when people smoke on camera.
Not in that Bob Geldof-the-wall way where he's just looking like the whole movie, like he's about to vomit and he's got a cigarette burned all the way down to his knuckles at the beginning.
But, you know, it looks...
You get that crackle, that heat.
You see the glow at the end of the cigarette.
And, you know, the characters breathe deeply.
And he's just like... He said, that gave me nicotine fits like you wouldn't believe.
Like, there should be a warning on movies.
By the way... If you're quitting smoking, do not come and see this movie because the positive depictions of smoking will give you sweats and all of that.
It's pretty tough.
Smoking is a real hook.
When I was working as a temp back in the day when I was in university, I did Excel work and word processing work and all of that for companies and I did a temp job.
I was talking to one guy in his 50s, which back then, of course, seemed about as old as Procrusty's.
Yeah, he said to me, yeah, I didn't smoke for like, I don't know, 15 years, and I just woke up in the middle of the night, and I was like, I have to have a cigarette.
I drove to an all-night convenience store quite far away, picked up a pack, boom, and now I'm back on smoking.
I was like, wow, 15 years.
15 years, that's really something.
So, the stateless society is the fundamental recognition that we are evolved to seek power, and the avoidance, and even Christianity accepts this and says, but the power you want is over your own Soul over the devil, over your flesh, for the sake of the future, for the sake of heaven.
So Christianity is totally down with evolution and our pursuit of power.
It simply redefines that power.
Marxism says that you should not.
The new Soviet man, they call it, the new communist man, the man who simply, like Boxer, the horse in Animal Farm, just slaves away.
For other people, regardless of self-interest, regardless of breeding, regardless of profit, regardless of anything.
Just a machine that serves the needs of others.
Well, I mean, that's a narcissistic view of human nature, but it does appeal to others who want to avoid thinking for themselves by using that word service.
You know, thank you for your service.
You're serving your country to serve and protect.
No, serve just means not thinking.
That's all. That's all service means.
That's all service means is I'm going to Abandon my sovereign consciousness.
I'm going to obey, but I'm going to call it a virtue because I'm going to be socially punished if I think among my cult of loserdom tribe around me.
So stateless society is the only evolutionarily accepting worldview.
We have evolved to thirst after, to hunger after, to be addicted to power over others.
And the only limit to that power is personal repercussions.
If the leader of the bonobo pack is too aggressive towards the young males, the young males will gang up and kill him.
So personal blowback is the only thing that limits our pursuit of power.
But when you have the state, the army, the police, the court system, the jails, fiat currency creation, you name it, There's no blowback for the exercise of power.
Or you could say there is blowback, but it's abstract.
It's usually a generation or two down the road and all that, right?
And we can see that the boomers were the first generation to grow up with no blowback for power, which is why they said, oh yeah, we want to have a warfare welfare state.
Why? Because there's no blowback.
It's all debt. It's all debt.
So I understand the boomers.
I don't blame the boomers. And of course, it's easy to criticize the boomers when we have the internet now, but they didn't.
The gatekeepers were savage, I can tell you that from personal experience.
So, yeah, stateless society, that's the only thing.
It's the only conception of human society that accepts the basic biological reality that human beings have evolved to be addicted to power.
And that ain't going away.
That ain't going away.
In fact, I think it's getting worse.
Because now...
So the only way that that would go away is if those addicted to power or the profits of power...
I mean, you're really addicted to the pursuit of power.
You're not addicted to the cocaine, you're addicted to the high, right?
So you're addicted to the profits of power.
And when we have half of people in the Western world and other places physically surviving on government handouts, then you have people fundamentally adapted to and addicted to the profits of power.
When you have a welfare state that pays people to have kids and then keeps those kids in Xbox and Skittles, the pursuit of power, the addiction to power is worse now because so many people are profiting from power and bought out through power.
That is worse now than it was in the past.
There's no negative blowback for those holding power and between a quarter, a third and a half the population is, as they see, dependent upon the profits of power, which means that they will fight half to death to maintain the power that gives them the resources they feel they need to survive.
Now, whether they do or not need those resources to survive is kind of immaterial because it's a theoretical and the reality is we know that they'll take to the streets and riot if there's a threat to the resources because they believe that liberty is now a predator that will end their lineage, right? So if we accept evolution, which we should, if we accept evolution, then we say, okay, human beings are physically addicted to power.
And again, I've talked about these studies before.
We know the bonobo studies you gain in the social hierarchy.
You get endorphins released into your system.
We actually are physically addicted to power, to coercive control over resources.
So if you take that, okay, we're tribal and we're coercively addicted to resources, to the violent control of resources.
So how do we deal with that?
How do we deal with that as a society?
Well, we can't have a state, can't have political power because human beings will always be addicted to that political power.
And say, oh, well, there's a few people who won't be.
Sure, absolutely. There are a few people who won't be.
There are a few people who won't be.
They tend to have done a huge amount of self-work.
They tend to have had very positive childhoods so they're not backfilling in their misery by pursuing control and power over others.
But there are so few.
You know, the presence of gay people throughout the evolution of humanity does not mean that humanity didn't evolve because they were a very small minority.
The presence of people who swung a little bit too far along the curve of ideology and sacrifice who then would sacrifice themselves for the good of the tribe.
If that was everyone, there'd be no people.
So it's a very small number, and you can't design evolution around a very small number.
10% of married couples have issues with fertility.
You know, fertility is kind of an alignment of the planets thing.
I mean, there are those couples who like, yeah, we share a cup of coffee, my wife gets pregnant, right?
But fertility is a tricky thing, particularly, of course, as we age, which was not the issue through most of our evolution.
But there's a lot of people who have issues with fertility.
And of course, throughout most of human history, there weren't FSH measures, there weren't IVFs for fertility treatments and so on.
And so does evolution say, well, you know, a minority of people Have trouble reproducing, therefore evolution doesn't work.
And there's a small number of people who, while being tempted, will be able to say no to political power.
But there's such an exception that it's a central story of Christianity that Jesus was offered political power and said no.
No! Whereas 99.999% of people would say yes.
I mean, have you ever heard of anybody who wins the lottery and then doesn't cash in because they think that that money will be bad for them and that it's actually a tax on other people and they're just going to print the money, it's going to raise inflation for the poor?
Like people who say, no, no, no, don't give me that $5 million tax-free because it could be bad for me.
And I've read all these stories of all these other people who win this money and their lives turn to hell in a handbasket and it raises...
Inflationary pressures for the poor, and its debt, and its bad, and its state power, and oh, people cash in the money, right?
Now, you could say, yes, but one in a thousand people, or one in ten thousand people will say no, but that's completely irrelevant.
I made this argument way back at the beginning of the show.
Occasionally, a horse is born with two heads.
I saw a picture the other day of a cow that had a hoof growing out of its forehead.
Okay, it's incredibly rare, and it's completely irrelevant to evolution.
Evolution works with the significant majority.
So, basically Marxism is saying that state control of the economy will work when all cows are born with a hoof out of their head, but that will never happen.
It will never happen.
Accepting that we have evolved and To pursue power over profits helps us understand why state control of the economy will always end the same way.
All right, that's my big intro speech.
I hope that it's helpful. I was just mulling this stuff over this morning.
So I am all ears if you have a comment, a question.
I mean, I can do these on my own.
Pleasant though it is to know that there are people listening.
But if you have any comments or issues or problems, questions...
Criticisms, suggestions, rapid praise of my novels.
I am more than happy to hear, so unmute if you'd like and go right ahead.
Can I ask you a question?
It's kind of funny when people say that, because if I say no, there's no point asking that question, and if I say yes, there's no point asking that question.
Okay, but yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I'm sorry.
I did it out of habit.
I'm very sorry. No, that's fine.
It's not a big thing. It's just a kind of funny thing.
But sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I was listening.
I got this thought when talking about the new Soviet man.
And, well, maybe communism in general.
I guess the question is, like, is communism a perversion of the idea of family?
Because it's kind of, well, you do what you can, you provide for those you can't, just like parents provide for the children.
And it's just like a perversion of the idea that what happens in a family can happen over the entire society.
Well, I think it is, or at least that's a core element to it, but the conception of family...
Okay, let me ask you this, because I don't want to do a monologue with such a great question.
What do you think the difference is between the male conception of family or the father's conception of family and the female or mother's conception of family?
Well, the father's prospect of family is mostly you got to provide and protect.
And the mother's perspective is you got to nurture and make things fair.
Well, the father perspective is kind of like the family in relations to nature, and the mother perspective is the family in relation to other families and inside the family.
So between kids and the father and the kids, and if that makes any sense.
Right, yeah. So the purpose of the mother is to keep the children alive...
And deliver them to the fathers who then teach the children how to be productive.
And this is common throughout the animal kingdom.
So the purpose of the mothers is to keep the children alive usually to the age of sort of five or six or seven or eight.
And then they get turned over to the fathers particularly the sons so that the fathers can teach them how to hunt, how to farm, how to gather, how to manage the livestock, how to be productive.
Now I watched a documentary some time back ago about these eagles in the Philippines.
I can't remember what they were called, these sort of spotty, scattered eagles.
And they were following the parents and one of the offspring.
Now, the parents would bring food to the offspring when it was very young.
And then the father in particular, after a certain amount of time, and even the narrator says, you know, it's time for the father to apply the tough love.
And the tough love is, I'm not bringing you anything to eat, so you're just going to live on scraps and bat wings and, you know, whatever.
And the purpose of that is what, of course?
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, the purpose is the kids learn to deal with nature because nature doesn't care.
Right? So the mom would want to keep giving the resources in some ways because, you know, and it's beautiful, right?
This is not a complaint against women, right?
Because, you know, I mean, in the humans, she bore the child in her womb and she breastfed and they were one, right?
They were united. And it is the blessing and the curse of women to forever infantilize their children.
And society. Forever to infantilize.
And that's because women were designed to have their own children, and a lot of them, and they had a constant conveyor belt of tiny, helpless, squalling things to keep alive.
And then they would switch to grandchildren, and then great-grandchildren.
So their entire focus is on keeping helpless things alive.
Which is why when You want to appeal to this mothering or nurturing nature of women.
What you say is, oh, this is an excluded and vulnerable population.
Right? And then boom, right?
The women are like, oh my God, excluded and vulnerable?
Those are babies.
I must mother! And it's just hardwired in, right?
And so the Marxist idea basically goes along the lines of All society is a family and all the citizens are kind of infants.
Because from each according to their ability to each according to their need, that absolutely perfectly describes how the family works.
Who can hunt?
The men or the babies?
Well, the men can hunt.
So from each according to their ability That's men going to hunt, or I say hunt, it could be farm or whatever it is, right?
But men going to hunt.
Now, to each according to their need, well, the babies can't hunt, but they need resources, right?
So, the Marxist conception is that society is full of infants, and it is a feminine or maternal view, right?
It is a feminine or maternal view of society as the family.
And we know this because it's obsessed with equality, which, as I've mentioned before on the show, women must be obsessed.
Like, you and I are only alive because women were obsessed with equality throughout human history.
That's the only reason we're alive.
Because If we have an older sibling who takes our food, the mom chases him down and makes her older sibling give it back.
Older siblings, you know, not always throughout history noted for their kind benevolence.
It happens sometimes, but in general, and it's more modern.
But the Cain and Abel thing is very real.
Like half of sibling relationships are classified as emotionally abusive, and that's just even under the current standards, right?
So, equality is why we're alive.
So in order to be able to deliver the children to the men so that the men can make those children productive, women have to apply coercive redistribution.
If you have twins, you have to make sure that they get breast milk equally.
And if one is really grabbing for the breast, you have to, I'd say violently, but coercively take that kid's hand away and Stop breastfeeding him and breastfeed another even though he's crying and screaming and wants more milk.
So coercive redistribution is the very essence of motherhood and why we're all alive.
And again, I know this like from an evolutionary standpoint, it's a beautiful thing.
I mean, you combine it with the power of the state, it becomes predatory and destructive.
But of course, that's true for everything, right?
Everything combined with the power of the state turns pretty negative, right?
Yeah, so you think from each according to their ability to each according to their need?
Yeah, it hooks into a very deep part of us, which is if we don't have equality, we're dead.
Which is absolutely true when you're a mother managing resources for her children.
In fact, for a mother, the less competent, the more resources.
For adult males, or for males as a whole, the more competent, the more resources.
So if you're the best football player, you should be on the field the most.
Because you're the best football player.
If you're the best hunter, you should get the most arrows.
If you're the best warrior, you should get the biggest spear.
So for adult males, more competent means more resources.
But for females, for mothers, less competent means more resources.
So when you're a baby, she'll get up to feed you in the middle of the night.
She won't do it when you're seven, right?
She'll just say, wait till morning.
So for women...
The less competent you are, the more resources you should get, which is why when people, through the power of the state, want to gain resources, when women vote, they present themselves as helpless and broken and weak.
And for men, this gets a certain amount of contempt.
For men, this gets a certain amount of contempt.
But for women, it produces massive amounts of sympathy, right?
Like, as I said, a friend of mine's daughter was in a running race.
At her school. And there was a kid who wasn't even there, was on vacation, and therefore didn't come to the running race, right?
And because it was an all-female school, the kid who didn't even show up got a participation ribbon.
And, of course, the kids who won, the kids who were working hard and had trained hard, said, well, how come, wait, how come so-and-so gets a participation rate when she wasn't even in the country?
What are you talking about?
And like, well, but she helped you train.
It's like, no, she didn't.
No, she didn't.
But for the women, the idea of everyone gets a trophy except one person is exactly, like, emotionally, that's exactly the same as everyone gets food except the baby.
Everyone gets food except the baby.
Now that is repulsive to women, as it should be, evolutionarily speaking.
It should be repulsive to women.
That's why we're all alive.
But again, you take that, you put that into the power of the state, and it becomes the pathological altruism of the welfare state and other things that we talked about on the show endlessly.
So the Marxists are hooking into something very powerful.
Now, as I said before, the fascists...
Go to hyper-competition, right?
Brutal, often biologically based or genetics-based competition.
And so fascism is hyper-masculinity plus the state.
And whenever you add the state to something, it turns from healthy growth to tumor.
So fascism is hyper-masculinity.
Communism is hyper-femininity and it's always going to play out this way as long as you have the state.
Because again, you can't get rid of women's desire for coercive redistribution.
Nor should you. Because then babies will die.
So you can't get rid of that.
And you can't get rid of men's desire for competition and keeping scarce resources away from the incompetent.
I mean, if you go in hunting and you give all of your Bows and arrows to the least competent hunters, you're going to starve to death.
So bringing resources to the least competent is the feminine imperative.
Keeping resources away from the least competent is the masculine imperative.
So, yeah, I hope that helps.
Does that sort of make sense of the formulation?
Yeah, like you make me reformulate my question.
Well, maybe make a sub-question.
So would you say communism is the perversion of the idea of motherhood that gave rise to fascism as the perverse idea of fatherhood?
Yeah, I think that...
So what the state does is it takes femininity and it moves it from personal coercion, grab the food back from the older kids so that you can feed the younger kids, And it moves it to institutional coercion.
It hijacks the beautiful coercive redistributionism of motherhood and turns it into political power.
And because it moves the pendulum of femininity so far to the left, I guess, in this particular pendulum example, then society panics because society cannot survive coercive redistribution at the institutional level.
It absolutely requires it at the personal level but it can't survive it from the institutional level.
So what happens is society gets a very strong sense that it is unsustainable to have this motherhood egalitarianism pushed into coercive institutional pathological altruism and society panics.
But by then of course all the people who depend upon this redistribution Are already entrenched and will fight like hell.
And then what happens is, as these pendulums tend to go with the state, it goes from the sort of egalitarian decadence of 1920s Germany to the brutal fascism of Hitler,
and I know he was a national socialist and so on, but it was hyper-masculinity to the point where they're, you know, Murdering people by the millions and they're euthanizing people who have mental health issues and they're killing...
It just...
It goes from...
You always get this extremism with the state and it doesn't even...
At least the pendulum swings through the middle.
This just warps from far left to far right.
So society kind of freaks out and panics and says, Oh my God!
You know, we can't survive this hyper-femininity with the state, this metastasizing girliness.
And so they run to the most brutal men and society turns around.
And then the brutal men destroy the country because it's masculinity plus the state.
And then you swing back to the feminine, right?
And yeah, it's pretty bad.
And it's oftentimes the women who panic because the women get this relief from being able to view everyone as a toddler.
And so they feel very virtuous all the time.
And that's very addictive, right?
So they love everyone being a toddler.
But then what happens is when they begin to sense that their pathologies through the state are overwhelming the society.
Then they panic and they run to the men.
They run to the more really, really hardcore masculinity.
And that's when things tend to swing pretty hard.
The other way. And, I mean, certainly women voted for Hitler and women were very big and enthusiastic fans to a large degree of national socialism and so on.
So, yeah, they go from this hyper-egalitarianism to, oh my God, this is way out of control.
We desperately need the men to step up and save us.
And then the men do, but they end up destroying the society because, well, it's the state.
You know, the initiation of force can't really achieve anything good.
Now, you could say, of course, ah, but what about the initiation of force?
You just said that the women take resources from the older children and give it to the younger children.
It's like, yes, but the older children have stolen those resources because the resources belong to the parents.
If someone steals your bike, you can steal it back.
And if you have food set aside for the baby and it's stolen by an older kid, you're just stealing it back and reasserting your property rights, not theft.
So does that help?
Yeah, thank you.
That helped me out a lot, actually.
You're very welcome. Very welcome.
I'm happy to do it. And if anybody else has any comments or issues or questions, I'm happy to hear.
Are you ready for the awkward pause, which I, as a British-raised person, will survive somehow?
Hey, Steph, I got a comment.
Hit me. Okay, yeah, so I think...
Because you said that people were evolved for either money or power, and then I think maybe a broader...
Wait, what? What did I say?
It's only been half an hour.
You can't misquote me that badly already.
You've got to give it at least a couple of days.
Profit or power. Profit or power.
No, that's not what I said.
I didn't say people have evolved for either profit or power.
or would anyone else like to jump in and correct?
All right, if nobody's jumping in.
So what I said was people have evolved for power because money and profit are such a tiny fraction of our history as a species.
The people have evolved to pursue power.
Now, they like profit.
It's not like it's a bad thing, but oftentimes they will use that profit to help them pursue power.
But primarily, this is why people are willing to give up share price in return for censorship, say, for instance, right?
Or why people are willing to give up, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in order to sway elections or get DAs elected or whatever it is, right?
So yeah, my case was that we have evolved for power and for the vast majority of people, given the choice between money and power, they will choose power because that's how we've evolved.
So it wasn't like we've evolved to seek money and power or it's an either-or thing, if that makes sense.
Yeah, and now I'm reminded because you said money didn't exist in its current form.
It's pretty wild how you got, I mean, even right in the conversation, that's pretty wild, right?
Yeah. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, so, well, I wonder if maybe that could be improved on because Because I see money as a form of power.
So they're kind of in the same category for me.
It's a recent new form of power.
And I know you were defining power as...
Do you remember my definition of power?
Which doesn't mean that it's right, but I'm just curious, do you remember it?
I think you said it was the ability to get resources through violence.
Yeah, coercive control. And then money is not that.
So then money...
You can disagree with that definition, but just don't ignore it, right?
So if I define coercive control over resources...
Now, you could say fiat currency created by the state is coercive control over resources and so on, but I'm trying to differentiate profit, which is a private sector phenomenon, from coercion, institutionalized coercion, which is a state phenomenon.
So money is not power.
Because money is not coercive control over resources.
I mean, we're talking about, you know, fairly earned in the free market kind of thing.
Yeah, I was thinking that...
But even with the coercive control, the use of coercion, or the ability to exercise coercion, that is a means to end.
The thing that they want is the resources, and then they want...
The ability to use coercion as kind of a secondary, like as a mean to get resources.
So it's not an end goal.
It's a mean to get them.
So even people who want to exercise coercion are still really seeking just resources.
And then perhaps if they didn't need to exercise coercion, then that wouldn't be something that they valued because it's just a means to an end, maybe.
Well, I'm not super impressed with the blinding insight that the purpose of coercive control of resources is control over the resources.
I mean, that's in the definition, right?
Yeah. I'm sorry.
Well, my original question, or my original comment was going to be, and I don't mean to just skip that, but my original kind of comment, I think maybe we're kind of evolved to embrace error.
Like, that there's a lot of incentive.
I'm sorry, you said we're evolved to, and I couldn't quite catch it, your audio is fairly bad.
You said we're evolved to what?
Oh, I'm sorry. Like, to embrace error.
So, like, because you see it all the time where people ignore obvious facts, and then it even seems like they really don't notice it.
And then, so I think it's got to be that our minds have probably evolved to have some ability to ignore things that we know are true.
And then...
I think that's something that kind of makes us different than animals, because they probably never have that dilemma.
Oh, yeah. Listen, our ability to ignore the evidence of our senses is, again, one of these double-edged swords.
It's both beautiful and terrifying.
I mean, we only have science...
Because we ignore the evidence of our senses.
The evidence of our senses is that the sun and the moon are the same size, the earth is flat, that the sun goes around the earth rather than vice versa, and so on.
So our ability to reject the immediate evidence of our senses is incredible.
It's called concepts, right?
Concepts are ideas that generally reject the immediate evidence of the senses, or at least are not totally dependent on So a concept called a forest, there's no sense evidence of a forest.
Like you can't touch a forest.
If you take away all the trees, there's no forest.
So the concept forest is an abstract description of a relationship between trees that does not exist in reality.
So because you can't see the actual concept forest, you can only see a bunch of trees.
And the concept, like mammal as a concept, doesn't exist in the world.
It exists as a categorization of forest.
Animals with hair who give birth to life young and warm-blooded or whatever, right?
So our ability to reject the evidence of our senses is the foundation of our genius as a species, which is great.
It's wonderful and terrible and terrifying because the ability to reject the evidence of our senses, you know, like the fine people hoax with everyone saying, oh yeah, Trump said at Charlottesville that Nazis were very fine people, and he didn't, of course.
He condemned them totally.
And so the ability to reject the evidence of our senses gives us both science and And cults, right?
And delusions and manipulations and mental illness and, you know, all of that.
So, yeah, without a doubt, I mean, the fact that we can reject the evidence of our own senses is an incredible thing.
And yet, you know, I mean, the state exists because people think that there's a moral category called the state that could be the opposite of whatever individual is allowed to do.
The state as a concept is allowed to do the opposite of what is defined as moral by everyone else.
And living with that double think, you know, if you look at the sun and you think, Wow, that is 93 million miles away.
That's eight light minutes away and it's thousands of times bigger than the earth and so on.
You look at that and we are spinning around it.
I mean, if you ever really sort of, I'm sure everyone does from time to time, you sort of sit down and think of that stuff.
That just blows your mind, right?
Just blows your mind.
And that kind of stuff is true, but we have to spend most of our life ignoring it, right?
I mean, ignoring reality is pretty essential.
You know, over the course of this conversation, thousands of people have died around the world.
Thousands of people have been born.
I haven't thought about it at all until I've just pointed it out and even then I don't know the individuals, right?
So, being able to ignore reality If you sort of sit there and say, in the general span of the universe, I'm a tiny blink, I'm going to die within a couple of decades and odds are I'll be forgotten within a couple of decades after that or maybe a century or two after that, you kind of just have to ignore this stuff.
If you think about all of the incredibly complex phenomena that keep your body alive, like all the organs that try running a car For 80 years without ever lifting the hood.
Well, you can run a human body without ever lifting the hood for 80 years.
It's incredible just how it's evolved.
But you think of all of the crazy things that need to happen for you to stay alive from minute to minute.
It's mental. So yeah, you have to really ignore a whole bunch of stuff.
I mean... In terms of moral courage, you have to, to some degree, blind yourself to consequences in order to have moral courage.
And if everybody focused on how bad things could go, if they have moral courage, we probably wouldn't have any moral courage.
So, yeah, there's a lot of things that we need to ignore just to get everything done.
Every time you eat a meal, there are a thousand people dying of starvation somewhere in the world.
And if you had...
Those people around your table, you'd not be able to finish your meal.
In fact, you'd give your meal to the people who were starving, right?
Because you wouldn't be able to eat while people are starving to death right in front of you.
Now, again, I know that there's no particularly practical way to get your meal to the hungry people or whatever, but...
Yeah, we do have to ignore quite a lot just to get things done.
And men tend to be a little bit better at that than women, which is why men are sometimes referred to as kind of cold-hearted.
But yeah, we've got to be...
You know, we have to...
The coach who wants to win has to keep the less competent players on the bench, right?
The bench warmers. Now, the less competent players really want to play.
But the coach has to say, I don't care that you really want to play.
I have to ignore your feelings and preferences.
Whereas for women, especially sort of go back to the toddler thing, for women, well, you can't ignore the preferences of those around you because those around you tend to be babies.
And if your babies are hungry and you ignore, they'll die.
You can't ignore the feelings of those around you, which is why, you know, women can't flip past a television station with a woman crying without stopping, right?
Whereas men are just like, oh, fine, it's not the sports channel.
So, yeah, as far as the sort of selective erasure of reality in order to get things done, for a man, if he gets the woman of his dreams...
Then I'm sure she's the woman of some other men's dreams as well.
But he has to basically say, well, too bad for you.
I got her. You didn't.
And not only does he have to ignore other men's feelings, but he may even have to take slight pleasure in the fact that he's won.
And, you know, if a man's in a duel, like a sword fight, then he has to ignore that the other man wants to win and he has to focus on his own needs and preferences and so on.
So just, yeah, men are way better at saying no.
And you know...
That you're in a hyperfeminized society when, you know, well, people are sad and doing badly, right?
And, you know, if the response is, well, we've got to step in and help them, okay, you're in a hyperfeminized society.
If the response is, well, they should just try harder then, shouldn't they?
Then you're in a masculine society.
And, again, both of these are very important and turned pathological by the state.
So, does that help at all?
Yeah. So, just one other example is, About the prevalence of slavery, like, basically in all human cultures since as early as we've been around.
And then, so, we must have had evolution that helped us to be comfortable with slavery, or even to think, like, think that it's helpful and important.
And so, and then when, like, for you, you come and you say, here's universally prevalent with the cave here, that we're I think that does kind of rub against the grain of where we've evolved, how we've evolved over time.
It's sort of a little anti-the evolutionary build-up of the slavery systems of the past.
Yeah, I mean, so for men...
Given that it was like, when you're in a win-lose situation, and win-win situations throughout human history are incredibly recent.
We have not at all evolved for win-win situations, right?
So this is why people find it so hard to understand why the free market is a win-win situation.
You know, if you want the pen...
More than you want the dollar, and I want the dollar more than I want my pen, then I'll give you the pen for a dollar, and that's a win-win situation.
We are not at all evolved for that.
Just about everything in society was win-lose in the past.
That's what we've evolved for is win-lose.
Now, you can't win if you empathize with the losers.
You can't win if you empathize with the losers.
And whining about losing is a strategy that does not work in the masculine world.
You know, it's just a famous line from a pretty old movie that wasn't actually very good but had a couple of great lines in it where Tom Hanks, Major League I think it was called, and Tom Hanks, like there's this girl, he yells at this girl for making a bad basketball play and she starts crying.
And he's like, he's completely confused because he's used to dealing with men.
And the woman starts crying.
And he just, he's like completely, Tom Hanks is completely, like, yeah, don't, but there's no crying in baseball!
There's no crying in baseball!
Don't cry! Or, you know, like when women get together, there's a lot of fake compliments, and when men get together, there's a lot of fake insults.
That's one of the big differences between men and women, right?
Trash talk and all that, right?
And so for men, the win-lose is You can't have too much empathy.
Too much empathy means that you will not want to hurt the guy who's coming at you with a sword because it'll hurt him and you don't want him to feel bad.
But you have to not only accept people feeling bad, but enjoy.
You know, people say, Schadenfreude is such a terrible thing.
It's the pleasure in other people's unhappiness.
Like, I'm sorry that this is just how we're evolved.
I'm not sort of giving it a moral thing here because it is, of course, a form of mild sadism.
But that's evolution.
Obviously, the lion can't sit there and say, well, this baby zebra really doesn't want to get eaten.
So I will feel for the baby zebra and not eat it, right?
Because then the lion starves to death.
And that's actually not even good for the zebra population, right?
Predators who become too competent die out, right?
I mean, I bet you cheetahs could run even faster.
But if they become too competent, they wipe out the prey species and therefore wipe out themselves.
So predators have to only evolve to a certain level of competence.
They get too competent. Like the state is a predator that's become too competent, right?
So it tends to do bad things to society as a whole.
So yeah, for sure, if you're a slave, then, you know, if it's him or me, right?
It's him or me. That's the way that men work.
It's him or me. Some guy comes at you with a knife, and you've got a knife?
Okay, it's him or me. Self-defense.
Boom, right? Or what was there?
Some famous Florida sheriff.
Some guy shot a cop and then they chased him down.
And they shot him 87 times.
And then some reporter said, why does he have 87 bullets in him?
And the sheriff said, because we ran out of bullets.
He was not feeling bad about this self-defense.
Now, of course, if you look at the Kyle Rittenhouse thing, there's Self-defense versus, you know, but this guy had mental health issues and he was sad and unhappy and all this kind of stuff that goes on, right?
So for a man, it's like, look, if it's going to be one of us, it ain't going to be me.
And both men come into that.
So they're used to win-lose.
And with win-lose, empathy is very bad.
Empathy is very bad when you're in a win-lose situation.
And so this is why a lot of people, when they would win and they would...
They would end up ruling over the other tribe and they'd make them slaves and so on.
They would say, because it's a tough thing, you know, emotionally a little bit, because, you know, we're all human and all that, right?
So you have to invent some reason as to why you've won and how it's a good thing.
And the way that you do that is, you know, religion helps you, or I wouldn't say religion, tribalism, conceptual, superstitious tribalism, because, again, I don't want to put Christianity into this category as a whole.
Never in general and certainly not on Easter Sunday.
So this tribal superstition says, well, we won because God was on our side.
So it's God's victory, not ours, right?
And that's a way of dealing with the sort of lack of empathy thing that occurs when you win against someone else and you end up ruling over them.
And we all have this, right?
If someone else is going to be a slave or you...
For the most part, it's like, okay, I will take that other person being a slave rather than me.
And so the sort of revolution of the free market and of capitalism is to say, ah, but now we can have win-win.
But, you know, it's not like the entire planet is caught up to that win-win stuff.
Now, when you can have a win-win situation, empathy is no longer a liability.
In fact, empathy becomes a bonus, a help, a positive thing.
Because if you can't empathize with your customers, then you can't sell them anything.
If you can't figure out what people want or need, or even if it's a hidden need or whatever, like supply creates its own demand sometimes.
People didn't know they wanted tablets until they were tablets, post-Moses anyway.
So empathy is a liability in a statist or tribalistic or violent society, but empathy becomes a bonus.
A positive when we are talking about a free market society.
And again, the empathy has to be managed.
It's empathy for the customers, not for your competitors.
So, yeah, that's my sort of view on that, if that helps.
Good, good.
All right.
Any other good stuff, guys?
Great, great thoughts. Great questions.
I'll say great thoughts, including myself a little.
I think it's pretty good.
But yeah, if you have any other comments, I'm happy to chat a little further.
And again, happy Easter out there.
Hello, is my audio okay?
Yeah, it's a little loud, but we'll survive.
Okay, let me tone it down a little bit in that case.
Give me a second. How about now?
Yeah, I think that's good. Go ahead.
Alright, that much better.
Okay, so I think I understand your argument about communism having a feminine characteristic, but I would personally argue that it is more of a childish characteristic, if that makes any sense.
Because, and I think you made a really good point in one of your speeches about communism and this whole leftist redistribution thing quite some time ago.
I unfortunately can't recall.
But the gist of it, as far as I can remember, was that the people...
Who cling to communism basically seek to fulfill their needs that have not been met throughout childhood.
And I think that is a much stronger part of the whole thing, if that makes any sense.
Well, so I think that's a very good point.
I think the two are complementary.
So, first of all, saying that communism is childlike, I suppose you would say, well, that's no contradiction to what I said, because, of course, women, to care for toddlers, have to regress.
They have to empathize and get in the minds of toddlers and children and figure out what they need, especially when the children are pre-verbal, right?
You have to figure out what they want, and then you have to figure out whether it's just what they want or fair.
So, I think that saying that communism is childlike or childish, when I'm talking about it being childish, The result of a woman's need to get into the mind and soul, so to speak, of babies and toddlers, women have to regress to be good mothers, right?
So I think that's fairly close.
Now, as far as unmet needs, yeah, that's a great point, and I appreciate you bringing that up because the question is not where does it come from?
The question is why is it compelling to adults, right?
So where does it come from?
Well, it comes from femininity and the care for babies and toddlers and the forced redistribution that is motherhood.
So saying that that's the origin story doesn't explain why people believe it as adults.
And I think that that point that you brought up, that I guess I brought up some years ago, about if your needs are met as a child, if you're protected and loved and people fight for you and are loyal to you and so on, then you grow up without all of these unmet needs.
And so if a politician comes along and says, I'm going to infantilize you, you would take that as an insult.
Whereas if you do have unmet needs from your early childhood, and like if you weren't taken care of and a politician comes and says, oh, don't worry, I'll take care of you.
Well, if you were taken care of, it's like trying to fill a cup that's already full.
No new water gets in, really, it spills over.
And so, yeah, the question is, and it's a great thing I think that you're bringing up, not...
Why does it exist as a concept, but why is it so compelling to adults?
And I think that the unmet needs of childhood is pretty important.
That's one aspect. Of course, the other aspect of it, and there's a reason why leftists tend to be so antinatalist, right?
Why do they want to scare kids, you know, well, don't have babies because climate change or overpopulation or...
You know, you might have a different sexual orientation, and we'll talk about this with you when you're very little and all.
Like, why did they want to pursue these antinatalist strategies?
Well, because, of course, I mean, there's lots of reasons, but one of the main reasons is that if you can convince women to not have children, the motherhood impulse doesn't just go away.
Like, you can convince someone to not eat, that doesn't mean that their hunger or their capacity to digest goes away.
And so if you can convince a lot of women to not have children, then their maternal needs or their needs to be mothers, which is the most foundational definition of what it is to be a woman, just as the need to be a father is the most foundational definition of what it is to be a man, because that's why men and women exist, right?
So if you can convince women to not have children, then it's way easier to sell them on political power, on the leftist side, right?
It's the reason why women... Vote Democrat and why, in America, I think it's only college-educated women who are more pro-Democrat now than they were a couple of years ago.
Everything else has gone more pro-Republican.
So if you convince...
Women need to take care of people.
Women need to take care of people.
Because they're born and bred and raised and evolved to take care of babies and toddlers.
So women need to take care of people.
So what you can then do is you can say to women, there's this helpless, vulnerable, excluded, and marginalized section of the population, and if they haven't had kids in particular, then they will get this fierce mama bear mothering protective instinct over those then they will get this fierce mama bear mothering protective instinct over those people, and this can be hugely exploited to gain
So yeah, I think the unmet needs thing, not just from people who didn't get their needs met as babies and toddlers, but also women who didn't have kids, and men to some degree.
I think it hits women harder.
That's another reason why I think it remains compelling in the here and now, if that makes sense.
Yes.
Yeah, that is a very good point, but I would like to add an additional thought in that maybe the people who are antinatalist are doing so because their minds are sort of regressed to a childlike state, just as communism is a childlike state.
So in a way, their minds are saying that I have needs that have not been met in my childhood.
So I'm sort of stuck on that level.
And so if new children are born, then I will have no chance to have my needs met, if that makes any sense.
Well, I hear what you're saying.
Are you yourself an only child?
No, I actually have an older brother.
And what's your relationship like with your older brother?
It's extremely distant.
Right. So you did not have a positive relationship, obviously, or at least certainly don't now, with your older brother, right?
No. We did play together, but I think that there was a strong dominance aspect to the relationship, if I'm honest.
You mean from his side?
Yeah, from his side, yes.
It's really hard...
It's really hard for older siblings, particularly older males, to not feel superior.
That's a big curse of being the older brother.
Because you're taller, you're stronger, you're more able, you're this, that, and the other.
So it's really, really hard for older brothers to not feel superior to younger brothers.
I mean, this is something I write about in my novel, Almost.
So if you have siblings, I would recommend...
You should read or listen to that book either way.
But yeah, older brothers in particular, it's really hard.
I'd say almost impossible to avoid that sense of superiority, especially when it's a one-to-one thing.
Because you are just smarter and faster, and you get to stay up later, and your allowance is higher, and you just have every single possible mechanism of feeling superior.
And it's really, really hard to...
Avoid that. And so that, of course, is pretty unpleasant for the younger sibling.
I mean, I guess you could say it's a fairly good challenge to overcome, right?
So the younger sibling is like, well, I'm smaller and I'm weaker and I'm slower and I'm dumber, you know, and in the same time frame.
And so the younger sibling will often want to, you know, catch up and fight and they may end up further ahead.
Whereas the unearned privilege of the older sibling, right?
Oh, like, congratulations on being born two years before me.
Wow, what a great achievement.
You must be so proud. It's like winning the gold, right?
They haven't earned it, right?
And every time we place our vanity on the unearned, we just create massive problems for ourselves, which is why younger siblings will often end up outstripping older siblings, because they have to fight To get to any kind of equality.
And the older sibling just has it automatically by being older, which is why they tend to underachieve.
And it can happen that way.
And also why the older siblings tend to have less satisfying relationships because they need people to feed their vanity.
And this is why sibling relationships can be really claustrophobic for younger siblings.
Because it's like, okay, if you're always going to be the little boy, the younger sibling, the little kid to your older brother or your older sister...
Then, like, why would you want to spend time around them?
Because that just diminishes you.
You know, one of the great challenges of siblings is you have to grow up and be adults and treat each other as equals, right?
And parents should be encouraging that from day one, right?
They should say to the older brother or the older sister, they should say, look, you're just born older.
Like, doesn't make you better, right?
Doesn't make you better at all. It's just an accident, right?
So... Think how you would want things to be if you happened to be born later rather than earlier.
Just think about that. How would you like it if you just happened to be born later and your brother happened to be born earlier?
Would you enjoy it? Would you then feel like, oh, well, he should have all of this pride?
So taking vanity.
Vanity is when we mistake the accidental for a personal achievement.
So taking away vanity is one of the most essential jobs of parents.
You have this with sisters too, right?
So one sister is born super pretty and the other one is born plain.
And you have to constantly remind the super pretty one, it's just an accident, didn't earn it.
It's not a virtue. There's nothing wrong with it.
It may be fine, but you didn't earn it.
And you can only take pride in what you've earned.
You can't take pride in the accidental.
And if you try to take pride in the accidental, you know, it's like eating junk food.
You're then full of crap and you don't want to eat real food because you're full.
And if you take pride in the unearned, it displaces your desire to actually achieve something for real.
Something that you've actually earned.
It takes that away. And so you end up really hollowed out.
And then you can't really be loved, right?
Because people can only love you for your moral virtues and the things that you've earned.
You can't love someone for that which is accidental.
It's like loving someone for being tall.
It's like, you didn't earn that. Or someone who's got really great hair.
It's like, well, you didn't earn that.
So I can't love you for what you haven't earned.
And so if the parents really care, of course, and I hope they do really care about the kids, they have to constantly pry away from the children Any pride in what they have not earned.
And unfortunately, it's just a very under-pursued aspect of parenthood.
You know, people say, oh, peaceful parenting is just about not hitting, not yelling, not...
Okay, that's... I mean, that's necessary but not sufficient, right?
So... The sibling stuff is really powerful.
And of course, sibling relationships...
have in many ways a stronger influence on people than their parental relationships because sibling relationships kind of follow you around through life, right?
Your sibling is the only person who remembers your childhood who's around when you're middle-aged or older because your parents have usually died off by then.
So, yeah, no, it's tough.
It's really tough. It's really tough for older siblings who aren't coached because, man, do they ever glide.
And I understand why. Like, if you can get a free sense of superiority without having to earn it, That's pretty cool, right?
That's a nice thing.
It's like cocaine rather than virtue.
You know, it's an immediate high and you don't have to work very hard at it.
So it's really tempting for older siblings to feel superior because they just happened to be born earlier and it's like, that's really pathetic.
That's really pitiful.
It's really pitiful.
If you can overcome your vanity, you can actually be of service to the world.
I mean, I'm a pretty smart guy.
I'm pretty good at philosophy and...
I don't take any vanity.
Honestly, I take no vanity of that.
I didn't earn some of these gifts that I have, which means that because I didn't earn them, I should share them as benevolently and as positively as possible.
So, yeah, the sibling stuff is pretty powerful and pretty deep.
But yeah, if you're a parent out there and you've got siblings and the older sibling is superior because they were born earlier, I mean, you've got to shut that down.
And hard. And hard.
And so here's the thing too, right?
So I would say to the older sibling too, like not only is it cold and it's going to mess up your relationship with your brother, but you're setting yourself up because you're going to be a slave to older people throughout your life.
If you say, well, look, being older means being superior, how are you going to deal with your older boss?
Right? Because you've already strip-mined this whole thing.
You can't say, well, my older boss is not superior, even though he was born older, because you've got this whole principle going for yourself.
Every cage we try to put other people in, we end up putting ourselves in.
It's back to the Twitter thing. The Twitter stockholders kind of got deplatformed by not being allowed to vote.
Well, they didn't sell their stocks after Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden story, which could measurably have changed the election.
So they didn't sell their stocks.
They're not allowed to exercise their democratic rights when they stayed with a company that didn't allow other people to exercise their democratic rights, in my view.
So yeah, it's really tough.
I would say you can't possibly take pride in being taller or having better hair.
You can take pride in your moral virtues And the best way to take pride in your moral virtues is to stimulate moral virtues in others.
This whole show for like 60 years has not been about, oh, look, I'm a good person.
Oh, look, I had a terrible childhood and I'm a great dad.
No, it's about getting everyone else and me through the conversation to improve.
But it's about, I mean, my measure as a moral philosopher is not how good I am but how good I make the world.
That's the test, right?
If you're a great doctor, your measure is not how healthy you are.
I mean, it's important that you're healthy, but your measure is how healthy you make your patients, right?
I know that this is a very silly analogy because you guys aren't patients, but, you know, please forgive me for the rather inaccurate medical analogy, but it's the closest one.
You know, if you're a coach, right?
If you're a coach, your success as a coach is not how good you are at the sport, but how good your team is at the sport, right?
It's about the sharing thing.
And I mean, I say this to my daughter too, right?
I mean, so she happened to be born, like through sheer coincidence, right?
Obviously she happened to be born in, you know, one of the first families dedicated to the total peaceful parents in concept around.
And this means that she was very lucky.
And she should appreciate that luck.
She should be happy about that luck.
But she shouldn't take pride in it.
So if there's some kid out there who is dysfunctional, Then you shouldn't view yourself as superior because you're more functional.
You should view yourself as lucky.
Now, the superiority is great, and obviously that's important, and so on.
And there does come a time where people become more responsible for whether they're functional or not.
Like, you can't spend your whole life blaming your childhood, otherwise I wouldn't have ever escaped it.
But you can't just say, well, I'm superior because I have parents who reason with me, And who've never hit me and never yelled at me and never raised their voice and reasoned with me always and really enjoy my company and have ample time to parent and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Some other kid who's getting beaten up every day.
Pretty easy to feel superior to that person, right?
But, you know, how would you be in that person's shoes is kind of a foundational question, right?
It's kind of a foundation. I was lucky to be born in a first world country speaking English with the skills and abilities that I have.
If I'd been born, and again, I know it's a silly thing, because if I had been born in India, you know, in the 14th century, it's not like I wouldn't be me, right?
I'd be someone else. So I get that.
But, you know, just recognizing the fortuitous nature, I happened to be born and have the biggest show in philosophy at a time for the 10 years from 06 to 2016, when there was actual free speech on the internet about as much as could be conceived of.
And so that's, you know, that's just fortunate.
It's just really, really fortunate.
And being aware of the fragility of your good fortune and therefore attempting to use your good fortune to help others, I think is really, really important.
And I think it's one of the things that you can be genuinely loved for.
So I know that was a bit of a ramble tangent, but I hope that makes some sense.
I understand what you are saying, but I'm not sure how it connects to my comment about these people perceiving the children as, quote-unquote, competitors for the needs that they have.
Oh, sorry, yeah, no, thank you for reminding me.
Sorry to interrupt. Thank you for reminding me.
I knew that that was okay. So let's look at it from a genetic standpoint, an evolutionary standpoint.
Is it better for your genes if you have siblings?
Well, if you're looking from the younger sibling perspective, it sort of is.
Because if you're looking at the more competition, if you become more competitive, then you have a better chance of passing on your genes.
But you could also say that if you have a sibling, then you have a rival in that sibling.
So it could go both ways. You don't have a rival if your mother is fair, right?
If your mother makes sure that you get enough resources and if your parents remind your older sibling that it's just an accidental circumstance that they're older and they shouldn't take any pride, then you don't really have a rival.
I mean, you could say if there's only food enough for one kid, then you have a rival.
But of course, remember, kids were put to work from the age of five or six onwards, sometimes even younger, but they would be sorting berries or picking crap out of food or, I don't know, herding sheep.
You can do a lot.
One of the things that I talk about in Just Poor, and it's actually also in my new book as well, is just how incredibly competent children are and how ridiculous it is they're excluded from so much.
I mean, you had 12-year-old court astronomers in the past because they were just so good at math, and you had child geniuses of just about every kind.
Throughout human history and the fact that children are so excluded from just these arenas of competence, it's really sad.
It's really sad and such a waste of resources.
So it's not like if, and you could also be, as a kid, you could be trained which berries to go and eat or go and gather or whatever, right?
So things that you could do. So having another kid...
Is a good thing in terms of resources because generally, especially if it's male, right?
And it'd be stronger sooner.
It can produce more than consumes, right?
But for your genes, it's good that you have a sibling, right?
Because the sibling also carries your genetics.
Because if it was good for our genetics...
To have only one child, which of course it wouldn't be, right?
Just population as a whole. But if it was good for our genetics to have only one child, then our hormones would have evolved to kill our sexual desire after we have one child, right?
So, I mean, if hormones can turn breast milk on and off, they sure as hell can turn sexual desire on and off.
So the fact that we continue to have sexual desire, particularly for men, until, you know, about 12 minutes after we're dead...
It's because the more the merrier, right?
For our genes, the more the merrier, the better.
So I would say that we are evolved.
And this is the tragic thing.
I honestly genuinely don't know why so many sibling relationships go so badly.
You know, I remember having a speech with two sisters years ago.
Two sisters who just were focusing all their times on their little high school buddies and Then they were on spending time with each other.
And I was like, you know, I get that your friends are really important to you right now.
I get you. I mean, really, I understand that.
I mean, you've got to find people to settle down with at some point, and it's going to be outside the family.
So the fact that you're focused on peers makes total sense to me.
But I guarantee you that none of these high school friends will be present at the birth of your children.
None of these high school friends are going to be lifelong companions.
Now, siblings can be and should be.
That's where your loyalty should lie.
And I'm not saying don't have friends and only focus on each other, but you should really focus on your relationship with each other and not just focus on all these friendships that are just going to fade away.
Everyone moves away. They go to different countries, different places, different schools, different careers.
They get addicted to drugs.
They end up with a bad boyfriend or girlfriend.
So many things happen.
You're just going to lose track of people.
So all these people who are so important to you will be gone in five years, three years, two years, maybe next year.
But if you work things right with your sibling, you can go through the whole of life's journey together and then you have an ally, you have a companion.
You fall on hard times, you've got a place to stay.
You run out of money, you've got someone to lend you money.
You need someone to drive you to the hospital, you've always got someone.
You will have a companion, And someone greater than a friend for your whole life if you take care of that sibling relationship.
Don't lord it over. Don't feel superior.
Don't feel your younger sibling.
It's annoying. Because that's annoying as shit.
I didn't swear, obviously, in front of the kids or the teenagers.
But don't pull the superiority stuff.
Don't feel better because you happen to be older.
That's a pathetic thing to base your self-esteem on.
It really is. It's saying I can't get my self-esteem from anything outside of an accident.
A total accident.
That's the only thing I can base my value on.
Which is saying you have no value.
Saying you have, oh, I'm so good looking.
I've got such great hair.
I've inherited a lot of money.
Well, these aren't things that you earned.
You can't base your self-esteem on that or you're locking yourself into a prison of self-hatred forever.
People who take cocaine say I can't be happy in any other practical way.
And people who base their happiness or sense of self-worth on the accidental.
It's terrible.
So, your genes want you to have siblings.
And if you were close to your brother, then you would have the greatest relationship outside of marriage that exists in this world.
Siblings are the greatest relationship outside of marriage that exists in this world.
You can take care of each other's kids.
You can watch out each other's backs.
You can make sure you don't date the wrong people.
You can make sure that your marriages stay on track.
You can help each other with your careers.
You can lend money. You can be a support.
You can have an arm-in-arm on either side if you've got three.
Companionship all the way through your entire life.
Adding to your wisdom, your security, your strength, your feedback, your protection, everything.
You can watch out for each other From birth to death, or as close as you can be to those things.
And that's the only relationship that will do that.
Your sibling is the only relationship that can follow you through life, and you can go through the whole journey together.
Your wife, you're going to meet as an adult, and you'll go from adult to old age.
A lot of your friends, when you were kids, you went through childhood together, and then you scattered when you became adults.
But your sibling, man, your sibling can go A to Z. The whole journey.
How much can you learn from each other on the whole journey with each other's feedback?
How much can you be safe, protected, secure, confident?
So when you have security, you have confidence.
I remember when I was in theater school, there was a guy who was talking about his parents and he said, listen, his parents said to me, look, no matter what you do, you're going to go out and try and become in the theater world.
Just know, no matter what happens to you, you always have a place to come to.
You always have a soft place to land, which is us.
Was that guy going to be able to take more risks with more security than people who couldn't go back home or weren't allowed back home?
Of course. Security is strength.
Security is confidence. Companionship.
Bonded companionship like siblings is one of the most beautiful relationships in the whole world.
And I do know some families where the siblings look out for each other, take care of each other, share well.
The oldest don't lord it over the youngest.
The youngest don't whine and play the victim.
They really take care of each other.
It's a beautiful thing to see.
So, evolutionarily speaking, it's good that we have siblings, and siblings should be the greatest strength to us.
But unfortunately, again, through culture, through a variety of things, sibling relationships are kind of shattered.
And parents just don't take care of sibling relationships as much as they should.
I don't know that many siblings who get along that well.
It could be, obviously, selection bias and so on.
I know families where the kids do.
But as adults, it's tragically common.
So, yeah, I hope that sort of connects things a little bit, that you should be happy.
That you would have a sibling, and you should view that sibling relationship.
If it's a good one, if it's a positive one, you can't control the relationship, you can only influence it, but it should be a very positive force throughout your life.
I mean, if you have a sibling who really cares about you, you'll never end up getting into a long-term relationship with the wrong woman.
Especially if he's older, has more experience with women.
If you start getting interested in the wrong woman, he's just going to sit you right down, right?
And say, no, no, no, no, come on, this is not right.
I'm not being an uncle to the offsprings from this witch, right?
Something like that. Does that help at all?
I understand what you are saying about the sibling relationships, but I don't know how that connects, I don't get how that connects to my question or suggestion.
Can you, Ron, leave your question, just to make sure I connect the dots as well?
So the angle I'm approaching this whole deal from is that the anti-Natalists themselves are regressed into a childlike state.
And because of that childlike state of their minds, they don't want more children to be born because they view them as rivals For the resources that they would have been able to gain when they were little.
So wait, now that I've phrased it...
But here's my point.
So if you are...
This would be an older sibling perspective, right?
I don't want any other children to be born, because you're already born, right?
Yeah, okay. I'm sorry, but I understand.
But why... This is my point.
Why would you view a sibling as a negative?
You say, ah, well, there aren't enough resources, but no...
People put their kids to work, evolutionarily speaking, people put their kids to work very early.
So it's not like you'd have fewer resources, you'd have more resources.
And you'd have a companion, someone who you could hunt with, someone who would be loyal to you, like blood is thicker than water, right?
Someone who'd be loyal to you more so than anyone else, except maybe your wife, over the course of your entire life, or more than one person that way, right?
And so your genes absolutely want there to be siblings.
So saying that the antinatalists are people who don't want siblings, then it's not that everyone doesn't want a sibling.
Evolutionarily speaking, siblings would be the closest companions that you would get, like seven brides for seven brothers kind of stuff.
So siblings would be the people who would always be in your corner, who would always come to your aid, who would always stick up for you in a fight, who would always protect you and look out for you.
Siblings would be essential to your survival and, of course, would be a huge plus for your genes.
In other words, any tribe where they didn't have siblings in the tribe would die out.
And therefore, since siblings are essential for survival of the tribe, of your genetics, saying that people don't want siblings goes against evolution.
Right, right. I get it.
That's why you asked me of my relationship with my brother, because it is...
Yeah, for you, what was the point of that, right?
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Okay, so... But that's your personal experience rather than what would be...
Look, my relationship, obviously.
I was not even bothered about it, right?
So that's what I'm saying, is that you have a perspective that is particular to your situation, and you wouldn't want to extrapolate that to evolutionary pressures as a whole, if that makes sense?
Yeah, exactly. And it's not like that if you take the whole set of antinatalists, that there can't be a subset who is just doing it because they hate the idea of siblings, so to speak.
But it is not a universal phenomenon, if I understand it correctly.
A lot of times, particularly older siblings, if you have really aggressive or abusive parents, older siblings are a problem.
Because they'll rat you out like you wouldn't believe, even when it's not your fault.
So then there's this hostility between the siblings that happens because, you know, the parent comes in and says, you know, who broke this?
And then the older sibling points at you and is able to out-talk you because you're a younger sibling, and you end up getting punished because of the older sibling, which makes you resentful and angry.
And so, you know, this kind of abusive authority always sets this sort of citizens or siblings against each other.
Yeah. I mean, this is just one of many things, but it can definitely be the case that having aggressive or abusive parents can turn the siblings against each other.
And again, also, if your older brother has vanity for being the older brother, if he thinks he's superior because he's older, then what happens is, as you get older, you threaten his stability.
As you get older, you threaten his entire personality.
Because as you grow closer to him in terms of equality, and God help you if you surpass him, because if he's based his personality on being superior to you, then he's emotionally invested in your failure.
You have to be smaller and weaker and dumber and less successful forever.
Because his entire personality, this is why you don't let this happen as a parent at all.
Because if you have an older sibling who feels like, well, I'm superior because I'm just better than my younger sibling.
I'm taller, wiser, stronger, faster, better at athletics and so on, right?
People want to hang with me and I don't want to hang with his friends.
He wants to hang with my friends, all that kind of stuff.
I'm superior. Then what happens is if you base your identity and value on being superior to someone, you will sabotage the shit out of that person.
Always. Because you have to retain your superiority.
You have to retain your superiority to the people when your vanity requires that they be inferior to you.
You have to, have to, have to.
Which is probably, if this is where your brother, that's probably one of the reasons why you don't want to hang with him.
He said he'll sabotage you. He'll mess you up.
He won't prevent you from dating the wrong people.
He won't encourage your success.
He will betray you because he needs to feel superior to you.
And this is why you can't let this happen as a parent with your siblings.
It will destroy the relationship because then the younger sibling has to be this tag-along shadow for the rest of his goddamn life.
Because if he succeeds to an equal or greater level than the elder sibling, the elder sibling will sabotage just to retain that sense of superiority that was unjust and now must be enforced, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it makes completely sense.
It's like as soon as I phrased the question again, it just clicked into place.
Oh, right, now I understand.
And the thought I have connected to this, it's like a really strange parallel because sometimes the measure of success slash the measure of achievement in a society or even a small group is distorted.
And I swear that it kind of matches what you told me, because as soon as I got myself a relatively good, stable job, my brother got married, so he could stay quote-unquote ahead of me.
It's like within one year or two years.
It could be a coincidence, but it matches.
Here's the question, though.
Had he been in the workforce longer than you?
Yeah, he had been much longer, yes.
Okay, so how much did he help you succeed in your career?
Like, did you go to him with work problems?
Did you go to him with problems with bosses or customers or co-workers and he'll sit down with you for like an afternoon and go over his experience and really help you get ahead?
Of course not! Right?
He needs you to fail.
I mean, I know I'm jumping to conclusions here, but someone who cares about you...
If I had a younger sibling, who was, I don't know, for some strange reason, much younger, who was just now getting into podcasting, you don't think I'd sit down for as long as it took to give him the ropes and tell him my experience and help him avoid mistakes and pursue success?
Right? Of course I would.
Of course I would. My daughter has written a script for a short movie.
You don't think I'm going to help her by...
Having a look at the script, maybe giving a couple of tips and acting in the voice.
Of course I will. I've done it before.
Of course I will. Right?
So, yeah, if your brother is not helping you with his wisdom, then, yeah, he's invested in your failure.
It's really, really sad.
And this is, you know, a central heartbreak in the world that is just so little discussed.
Yeah, exactly. It's quite abysmal.
And just as a last wrap-up observation is that personal experience can really influence your wider perspective, as I have just learned.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I assume for myself, this is my assumption, right or wrong, but it generally is very helpful.
When I have a strong reaction to a topic, I immediately say, what in my childhood is informing this?
Now, that doesn't mean that I'm wrong.
It just means that I need to know where the strong reaction is coming from, right?
And so if your strong reaction is, well, it has to do with finding no value in your siblings, it's like, okay, what's your relationship with your brother like?
And again, your relationship with your brother might be great and you might have just had a great insight and so on.
But for me, 99 times out of 100, it's because of something from my childhood or my past or whatever, right?
That's important to sort of unpack.
And then you can approach it with more of an objective lens, if that makes sense.
Assume it's you until proven otherwise.
That's what I do, and I think that's a fairly good approach.
Yeah. Thank you very much.
That was actually quite insightful.
Well, you know, once in a while I'll pull it off.
All right. Thanks, everyone, so much.
I'll stop here. Happy Easter again.
Thank you guys so much for your support.
My gosh, what an honor and a privilege it is to be able to have these conversations after the smoking crater of my prior...
Illustrious career is still blowing away in the wind and having people still here to chat with.
My gosh, it is a deep and abiding pleasure.
Thank you so much. For helping me explore philosophy.
And thank you so much for your support.
If you're listening to this after, it is freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Please check out my free novels.
My gosh, I keep listening to Just Poor.
I keep listening to it.
And I'm like, this is so good.
This is so good. And yeah, justpoornovel.com and almostnovel.com.
Check those out. And have yourselves a wonderful Sunday.
Lots of love from up here. I'll talk to you soon.
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