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May 4, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:27
ROE v. WADE LEAK - FIRST THOUGHTS
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Hi there, Stephen Molyneux. So, of course, I guess, like everyone, I saw the news last night that the Supreme Court appears to be, at least in a horrifyingly leaked draft decision, to be ready to overturn Roe v.
Wade, which returns the question of abortion back to the states.
If you think about the Second Amendment, it's right there in the Constitution, but there's a wide variety among the different states, so it seems in line with I'll do something more on this later, but I just wanted to share a thought that I guess won't be coming from most people, which I think is really important.
So the question is always why are People, and particularly women, why are they so enraged at this, right?
You say, well, it's my body, my choice, and so on.
Yes, but mask mandates and vaccine mandates and supporting people kicked out of society and fired and not able to travel if they don't take a vaccine, that ship seems to have sailed, right?
So the question is, why is it so enraging?
I don't think based on any particular principle about my body, my choice, right?
But I think it has a lot to do with the subsidy of sexuality, right?
So, for a woman to be able to offer sex to a man massively, and you know, due to lust and hormones and all of that desire, massively increases her Market value, right?
In terms of dating and romance.
A woman who is able to offer sexuality to a man, and in particular non-condom based sex and so on, right?
A woman who is able to offer sexuality to a man gains enormous value in the dating market.
I wouldn't argue that that value is long-term.
I wouldn't argue that that value is particularly moral.
I wouldn't argue that that value is particularly earned because it's simply, you know, the hot dog or the donut hole that's programmed by nature to make more of us to replace those of us who age out, if you're lucky.
So it's not a particularly moral thing, but it is a thing that provides enormous value.
Now, all civilized societies have recognized this basic reality that children Require unbelievable amounts of resources to raise well, right?
You can raise any child badly by simply neglecting it and letting the internet and the peer group raise your child.
But to raise a child well, to model good behavior, to model good values, to instill morality and reason and negotiation, all of these things are, I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad, 13 and a half years going strong.
It is a huge issue.
A huge amount of resources are required to raise a child well, to raise children well.
So this basic reality has conditioned All of, again, civilized societies and how they deal with sexuality, right?
Sex is making the beast with two backs that makes babies that require hundreds of thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of hours to raise wealth.
So how do you do that?
Well, the traditional thing has been to restrain sexual activity until there's a commitment to delay sexual activity until there is a lifelong commitment, a monogamous marriage commitment.
Based on marriage style commitment.
That's been the traditional way to do it.
And that way, when a man and a woman are choosing each other, not based upon the lusts of the moment or the drunken revelry of the night, but rather based upon, does this person have The moral values, the fundamental compatibility values, a nobility of character.
Will they be a good mother to my children?
Will they be a good father to my children?
That's the most sort of fundamental questions, and that's how culture is continued.
When you choose people based upon spiritual and moral values rather than the fleshy, ape-like lusts of the moment.
And again, nothing wrong with fleshy, ape-like lusts, but again, contained within A marital structure that understands that children are unbelievable resource strains if you want to continue having your civilization.
Like if you just want to rat and let daycares raise your kids, then you lose your civilization because there's no value transfer.
There's no installation of moral values and therefore you just get more people that can be easily filled up by propaganda, which I suppose is part of the point.
So if you restrain sexuality until people are adults and then only unleash sexuality within the bounds of a socially reinforced, legally protected and reinforced pair bonding mechanism like monogamous marriage, that's the best chance you can possibly have to continue the work of your forefathers and your foremothers in the development of your civilization.
So now, to get a man to commit to you, right, if you're a woman, to get a man to commit to you requires that you are a good woman, right?
Assuming that you're looking for a good man, that you have, you know, qualities of honesty and integrity and loyalty and good humor and good grace and will be a good mother to his children and so on, right?
So if you want to get a man to have sex with you, then you need to provide the qualities of character that will make him want to marry you and therefore you can have sex with each other, right?
And you get the pill, which unleashes sexuality in the 1960s, and then you get the welfare state, which unleashes sexuality even further, and then you have the almost necessity in the moment of abortion, which reduces the...
I mean, horrifyingly reduces the products of open and easy sexuality without commitment and so on, right?
But if you want a man to commit to you and you can't provide sexuality to the man until he commits to you, then you both need to recognize quality in each other's character so that you live together.
Because, you know, you get married and you spend a lifetime together.
You're going to spend... You know, the majority of your time not having sex, right?
You're doing taxes, paying bills, raising kids, running households, caring for elderly relatives.
There's going to be a whole lot of stuff that's not between the sheets.
So you've got to like each other and you can't live on icing, right?
For a woman, if something interferes with her capacity to offer consequence-free sexual access to a man, that implicitly requires that she raise the quality of her character to the point where the man will commit to her in order to have sex.
If consequences potentially accrue to sexual activity, the quality of the men and the women involved in that sexual transaction have to go up because there is the chance that they will have to raise a child together.
And if you look at a woman And instead of saying, you know, how hot is she?
How much do I want to have sex with her?
But rather, what is her quality of character?
Would she be a good mother to my children?
Those are, I mean, those are not opposite things, right?
I mean, you can obviously be very well put together and very attractive and a very good mother to your children and so on.
The hot crazy matrix is not, I mean, I'm married to one, so the hot crazy matrix is not totally accurate in all situations.
So when you...
Remove consequence-free sexuality, you implicitly raise the requirement for qualities of character.
Because the need or requirement to potentially raise a child with that person means that you just can't, you can't do the hot crazy thing, right?
If she's hot and crazy, you have to restrain yourself and you have to go elsewhere.
So, I believe that the subsidy of sexuality has been present for a lot of women.
And a woman, you know, to take that sort of 1 to 10 scale of attractiveness as a whole, offering sexual access can easily raise you 2 to 3 points for a woman, right, on that.
So, if you're a 5, you can get a guy who's an 8 to sleep with you.
It's really not that hard to get a guy to sleep with you anymore than it is hard for a man to get a woman to accept a gift or resources or dinner or Venmo or whatever, right?
So if you're a five, then you can get to an eight by offering sexual access.
You can get a guy who's an eight, but he won't marry you.
He won't wife you.
He'll simply have sex with you, may date you for a week or two or a month or two or whatever, but then he's going to move on.
And then, of course, you're spoiled because then you think, well, I got an eight.
I just have to get another eight, but you're subsidized.
You understand that you're heavily subsidized.
And thinking that you're a great businessman because you get a million dollars a year in free money from the government, or have inherited the money I suppose, is not a very wise thing to do.
So the subsidy of sexual access might be shaved back somewhat and somewhat slightly in certain states if Roe v Wade is overturned.
The cost of the subsidy becomes more clear.
So what happens then is like a woman who's a five in level of attractiveness can absolutely get an eight in terms of a man, right?
And it's not just physical stuff.
It's like general sexual market value, right?
It's resources, it's and so on.
So a five can get an eight, but if she can't offer consequence-free sexual access, then what she has to do is she has to make up consequence-free sexual access with improved qualities of character.
Then the 5 becomes an 8.
In fact, the 5 becomes a 10 if she has great qualities of character.
Good humor, intelligent, great conversationalist, positive, helpful, resourceful, great mother to children, great at running the household if that's what the couple decides they want to do.
Then she can easily become a 10.
She can have her pick of the litter, so to speak.
And also for a man, he has to choose women of higher quality if the risk of a baby being born is hoving into view somewhere over the horizon, however shattered it might be behind the clouds.
The man has to say, okay, well, yeah, she's hot, but you know, if she gets pregnant and we can't easily get an abortion, So the withdrawal of the sexual subsidy to sexual market value is really challenging for people.
And I say this with great sympathy.
It's really challenging to people because it says, okay, if I don't get the free subsidy of sexual access, how am I going to get a great man?
How am I going to get a good man?
How am I going to compete? Now, that question, how do I get a great partner rather than how do I get laid?
How do I get a great partner is really foundational.
For a woman, of course, it's enormously, profoundly and almost unbearably humiliating to be used for sex because it means that she has to have liars in her life, generally, because men will generally lie to get sexual access.
And women then have to believe those lies and then they get really angry and all of that, right?
So, you know, you think of some rock star.
Who was it? One of the guys from Kiss said he slept with like, I don't know, 4,800 women, right?
Okay, so those 4,800 women probably thought they could be the next Mrs.
Whoever, right, from Kiss. And then they see some, oh, he bought some $10 million mansion that could have been mine.
And they're just never satisfied with anything going forward.
It's really terrible.
It's really terrible. So, for a woman to say, I'm not going to sleep with you, but instead we have to get to know each other, we have to figure out how shared our values are, we have to figure out what we want out of this relationship.
You know, if the woman wants to be wifed, if she wants to have kids and so on, then that needs to be something that's very much agreed upon and she has to trust the man.
And so, for a woman to withhold sexual access...
is a quality test for the man, because if the man really likes her, he'll want to spend time with her, even if sexual access is postponed for whatever period of time, at least a couple of months, at least, at least, at very least a couple of months.
So, people say, well, what about sexual compatibility and so on?
It's like, well, but if you love the person, then you'll find a way to make them happy, right?
I mean, that's, that's not a big issue.
So, withholding sex Which something like the repeal of Roe v.
Wade brings a little bit closer, a little bit closer over the horizon.
The withholding of sex or the withholding of easy consequence, free sex, is really tough.
It's really tough for people who've been used to that kind of subsidy.
It's going to be tough for men too.
Because they'll have to work on qualities of character rather than hair gel and sit-ups or whatever it is that they're doing or making money.
They'll actually have to work on qualities of character to get a quality woman.
So for all of the people who've been relying on this subsidy to gain positive feedback, attention, lust, and desire and envy, for all the people who have been relying on this subsidy of consequence-free sexuality, if that's diminished even in the slightest, there is a kind of Existential panic that sets in.
And again, I say this with great and deep sympathy.
There's kind of existential panic that sets in.
Because if you think you're a great businessman and then some subsidy is withdrawn or some protective tariff is withdrawn and you actually have to compete based upon the mere quality of your business decisions and the quality of your product and your marketing and your sales and your production and all this kind of stuff, if you've had a subsidy and you've incorporated that subsidy into the vanity of your self-regard, when that subsidy is withdrawn or even diminished or even threatened, You get a real panic.
And the real panic is, okay, what if I have to compete without offering something I didn't earn?
Lust is not earned. Men's sexual desire is not earned.
Female sexual desire is not earned.
It's just programmed into us.
You don't earn it. So what if I actually have to compete without a subsidy?
And you think of If some government agency or some government protected industry like professorships at universities and so on, some heavily subsidized and protected industry or some outright industry like public school or whatever, if you imagine, right, imagine if that's privatized or if that's even threatened to be privatized.
Well, of course, there'll be some teachers and some people in these environments who would be thrilled because they're like, oh great, we'll get rid of the bad teachers, we'll get more good teachers, it'll get better quality curriculum, parents will be more involved, it'll be fantastic.
But I got to think those people would be in a significant minority.
If protections and subsidizations are removed, Then you will have to survive on quality.
Quality of character, quality of work, quality of integrity, quality of product.
You have to survive. And if you have become kind of soft and lazy and entitled because you are getting a massive subsidy, Like, you know, the people on Instagram who come from very wealthy families who are constantly posting pictures of themselves on yachts and private planes and so on.
They're getting a lot of vanity for things they didn't earn, just happen to be born into a particular family.
And if all of that's taken away, what happens to your personality?
Let's say that one of those families were to lose all of its money and you end up living in a little apartment.
Okay, well, that's a tough transition.
You could argue it's a bit more of a realistic view of life and you're not getting this massive subsidy of your parents' wealth.
It's the same thing with physical beauty or having a great figure or having a You know, sexy visage or whatever.
I mean, it's a subsidy given to you by nature that you didn't earn.
Now, again, you could say, ah, yes, but people work out to maintain their attractiveness.
It's like, yes, but the most attractive people tend to work out the most because they get the most reward from it.
It's like the companies that are most protected by the state tend to lobby the most because they get the most rewards out of it.
That doesn't really prove anything. If you think of privatizing a government-run business or a government-run agency, people would experience significant panic about that.
And in a sense, the lazier they are, the more entitled they are, the less they've taken care of their professional responsibilities and the value that they add based on their human capital, the more panicked they will be.
In other words, the more they've let their qualities decay based on the subsidy, the more panicked they'll be if the subsidies are threatened to be withdrawn.
In the same way, if people have let their qualities of character languish because they can gain positive attention and resources through their physical appearance alone, through lust, if they've let their morality decline for the sake of lust, then anything which threatens their attention and resource gathering through the mechanism of lust creates a genuine existential crisis.
And again, I say this with all sympathy.
All sympathy.
A genuine existential crisis, a panic, in the same way that privatizing a government agency would create a panic in the lazy and entitled workers.
And the more lazy and entitled, the more panic.
So the more people, and it's not just women, right?
But the more people have let their qualities of character decay because they can gain massive amounts of positive attention through lust.
The more that something like the potential repeal of Roe v.
Wade will threaten their vanity, because then if sex becomes less consequence-free, then people will start looking more.
It'll happen over time.
It's an unconscious process, but it will happen.
People will start looking more for qualities of character rather than markers of fertility, which is the general ape-like lust that drives a lot of modern culture.
Okay. In other words, if somebody takes over your government department, they're going to start looking for real productivity and do customers like you?
Do you do a good job? Are you efficient?
And if you are none of those things, then you've either got to up your game, which is really tough, right?
And particularly in terms of morality.
If you've become ensconced and embedded in a social circle based upon trashy sexuality, then actually having to start to up your game in terms of providing real value in moral qualities to a potential partner is going to threaten everything about your social circle.
Like, you know, if you're around a bunch of drunks and you stop drinking, your entire social circle will probably reject you.
Or at least you won't have much in common with anymore and you'll probably drift apart.
So it's people's social circle.
It's their entire family upbringing.
If their parents didn't say, well, you've got to actually provide moral qualities to a partner, getting someone to sleep with you is pretty easy.
It's pretty boring and it's pretty lazy.
Then, you know, their family circle, their social circle, their vanity circle.
There are vanity tickles that they get from thirsty likes and lusts on social media and so on.
All of that gets threatened and then you're kind of this bare forked animal.
You look at yourself in the mirror and you say, okay, well, if I'm not giving sexual access, if my sexiness becomes less of value than the qualities of my character, what am I going to do?
Because everything you subsidize, you get more of, and everything you, in a sense, tax, you diminish.
And so, if your appearance and your sexiness has been subsidized by consequence-free sexual access, then you have let your moral qualities atrophy, and therefore, bringing those moral qualities up to scratch is going to be very tough.
It's like I'm in my 50s, right?
So when I take up a new sport, I have to be pretty careful.
I didn't have to in the past, but if I take up a new sport, I have to be pretty careful because my tendons, my joints, like all of this, just a little bit creakier than it used to be.
So if you've let your moral qualities atrophy, and in fact they've worsened atrophy, you've actually become resistant to moral qualities because when vanity embeds itself in your personality, Vanity is when you are envied for things that you did not earn.
So when vanity embeds itself in your personality, what happens is vanity sets in the throne.
And like all false gods, it is a jealous and hateful god and will banish all competitors from the kingdom.
And therefore, your moral qualities get banished by your vanity.
They become the enemy. And therefore, when anything threatens the vanity of gaining envy for what you did not earn, what happens is Your vanity which survives on this will rage against moral qualities, will rage against anything which could threaten to dethrone it from the seat of your heart, or rather the seat where your heart used to be.
So, you know, I would really counsel or recommend, like, have some real sympathy for people who've been kind of lured into Gaining value through consequence-free sexual access, anything that might threaten that with bringing potential consequences is really tough for them.
It's really tough for them. And, you know, we can look at culture, we can look at parents, we can look at educators, we can look at people in the media who've led people astray in this horribly predictable way, in something which has been predicted by religious texts for...
Literally thousands and thousands of years, this devilish seduction into gaining value for that which you have not earned, which hollows out your moral qualities and degrades and decays them.
It's really tough.
It's really tough for people to say, okay, if I cannot offer what I did not earn, what can I offer?
And the only answer is morality.
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