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July 4, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:58
HOW TO KILL RESENTMENT! FREEDOMAIN FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE
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Good evening.
Good evening, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Hope you're doing well. Don't forget, get your free book.
Well, it's free if you subscribe to localsfreedomain.locals.com and just get this book.
I keep listening to it and keep loving it all the more.
Like, you know, when you hear yourself, if you sing into a microphone, you hear yourself back, you're like, oh, that's not quite Pavarotti.
But when I listen back to my own books, it's like, oof.
So we'll do the first maybe hour or so gen pop questions and then I'll switch to supporters only.
And if you're listening to this later or now, you can of course go to freedomain.locals.com and you can...
Sign up. You get 12 months for the price of 10, just a couple of bucks a month, and boy, does it help me out.
And you get my latest free book.
Well, I guess free as a whole.
So I hope that you will check it out and enjoy it.
If you want to know what my writing is like, you can go to justpoornovel.com.
You can go to almostnovel.com.
You can go to fdrurl.com slash tgoa.
So I hope that you will check those books out.
I love my own writing.
Thank you. Sometimes with a modern watermelon and some flaxseed.
All right. So, I do have stuff to talk about tonight, but I am all ears as well.
For you, my friends, if you have questions, comments, issues, criticisms, mad praise for my dandelion fluff hairdo, whatever is on your mind, I am super happy to hear what you said.
Are cogitating about.
So lots of people typing. So I'll just give a second here.
Steph, I'm going to play a possibly cruel trick on you.
Guess a number between 1 and 100.
Done. Okay.
Tell you? 67.
I always like a smidge more than two-thirds.
$67 donation? Oh, that's very kind.
I should have guessed. $3 million!
There we go. Well, that's very kind.
So $67 Bitcoin donation.
Okay, we'll take that. I think that's about $67 these days.
Oh, I don't know. I just, I can't help but laugh.
You know, as long as you've got enough to eat, who cares, right?
So here's a good question.
How does a moral individual traverse the boundaries between arrogance and humility in a world that is riddled with vanity and a constant broadcast of their lives?
Okay, so I'll tell you that.
I'll tell you that. Now, you may or may not want to take as gospel my particular pronouncements on how to navigate the modern world, but hey, still here, still standing, still broadcasting, and the outline of bullets didn't get all of me.
So, here's the thing.
To be rational in the world is two things, both of which are honesty, one of which is relatively easy, one of which is very hard.
The first thing you must do is not claim a knowledge you do not have.
Refuse to claim a knowledge you are not certain of.
And that way you model humility.
Now also, when you are humble, there are two kinds of people in your life, if you're genuinely humble.
And humility is simply honesty.
Humility is, I'm not going to fake or pretend to know something that I do not know.
So humility... Will reveal the predators in your life.
It's a beautiful, terrifying, godforsaken, illuminating, powerful thing to do.
So when you no longer fake knowledge that you don't have, then some people will say, wow, you know, I really respect the fact that you're openly stating that you don't know something.
That's really remarkable.
That is the Socratic ideal, right?
You don't know what you don't know, to be honest about it.
I really respect that. And you know what?
The fact that you can say, I don't know, and be comfortable with yourself and be confident with yourself, the fact that you refuse to lie for the sake of vanity, right?
Claiming to have knowledge you don't have is just lying for the sake of vanity.
And it also humiliates other people who probably don't know that, but then pretend that, well, you pretend that you do know and so on, right?
So in terms of like, how do you truly help the poor?
That's a very big complicated question.
And if you just say, well, the welfare state, then you're just claiming a knowledge you don't have and kind of intimidating others.
So when you are honest about the limitations of your own intellect, which we all have pretty much infinitely, I mean, the number of things we don't know vastly dwarfs the number of things we do know.
So when you act with honest humility and you openly say, I don't know, maybe I can find out, maybe nobody knows, maybe you know and can tell me, but I don't know, then you encourage other people to be honest about the limitations of their own intelligence.
It's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing.
Because they see you saying, hmm, I don't know.
I don't know. In my novel, I was just listening to this the other day, my new novel, The Future, one of the worst characters makes a rational point against one of the best characters, and one of the best characters says, no, you're absolutely right, you're absolutely right, sorry.
So, when you're honest about what you don't know, which is most things, me too, right?
When you're honest about what you don't know, some people in your life...
I don't know the proportion, probably not too many, but some people in your life will say, A, I really respect that, B, it's really inspiring to me, and they will spread that humility.
They will then go and act in that humility.
I mean, most people's claim to fake knowledge just arises out of terrible government schools where you have to answer, and if you don't answer, you get humiliated, so you just make up answers, all that.
Now, that's the one kind of people.
The other kind of people, probably more numerous, although I can't guarantee that, of course.
The other kinds of people are the people who say, ooh, a tasty fissure of uncertainty.
I can get my proboscis in there and slurp up all the resources I need.
Oh, how delightful.
Oh, expressing uncertainty.
Oh, boy. That means that they're weak and I can bully them and control them and manipulate them.
Right? All that kind of stuff.
So, humility, which is honesty about the limitations of your knowledge, is a beautiful thing, man.
It's a beautiful thing because it reveals who has empathy and it reveals who is a predator.
Being humble, expressing honestly the limitations of your thinking is a beautiful thing.
It spreads virtue and illuminates evil.
Boy, you can't do better than that in this life than having this one simple trick baffles doctors and it spreads virtue and illuminates evil or manipulation or whatever you want to call it.
Somebody says, I must say that I've really enjoyed the future as a story, as well as deep thought processes.
And once Roman made his arguments, it became rather conflicting overall.
Very great piece.
So I've always had this ability to give real strength and weight to the worst arguments known to man.
So there's a character in the book who makes an unbelievable...
You may not believe this. You may not believe this.
You will listen to this book or read it, and you will hear the strongest conceivable case against peaceful parenting that you could possibly imagine.
I really dug in and got behind the character who makes the very strongest conceivable case in the most wild circumstances against peaceful parenting.
So, yes.
Because it's called steel manning.
Straw manning is when you create some weak argument and pretend to push it over.
Straw manning is intellectually lazy and, again, weak.
Steel man is when you create the very best possible opposition to your own argument.
Somebody asks, William, Steph, do I have the duty to regularly initiate conversation with, call my parents, if they were not abusive but were neglectful in my childhood?
So, neglect is one of the worst forms of abuse.
There's sexual abuse, neglect, verbal abuse, physical abuse.
This is my hierarchy. I'm not saying that's science, right?
Sexual abuse, neglect, in order of like worst to the least worst, most worst to least worst.
Sexual abuse, neglect, verbal abuse, physical abuse.
I could go into the reasons for that hierarchy.
Sexual abuse, of course, is obviously terrible, but neglect is awful because we know that neglect is perceived as more damaging by children than abuse because most children will act out to gain the parent's attention even if it means being abused.
They will act out, they will do something, they will say something in order to gain the parent's attention.
If you're neglected, it means that your parents don't need you for anything, even as a target, for venting their own frustrations in the form of abuse.
So, if you say they were not abusive but were neglectful, I would strongly disagree with that, that neglect is one of the worst forms of abuse.
When you are physically abused, at least the parent cares enough about you to try and correct you or give you a story about why they're trying to correct you.
If you're verbally abused, at least you serve as a poison container for the bile of your parents.
If you're neglected, they have no use for you at all.
And then you're really hanging by a thread.
It's almost impossible to develop...
An organic personality when you are neglected because you're hanging by a thread.
You can't disagree with anyone about anything.
You think of sort of typical scenarios where you've got a teenage girl fighting tooth and nail with her mom.
Okay, well, they're both in there.
They're both engaged. It's not particularly healthy or productive, but at least two people are in there.
But if your parents just give you a shrug, they don't care.
If you're home or not, they don't care.
If you talk or not, they just want you to, they want you just in your room, not doing anything.
You're really hanging by a thread.
And if you're not providing any value to them, even in terms of being a poison container, man, they can dump you at any time and then you're dead, right?
Evolutionarily speaking. So it's really, really tough.
It's really tough. All right.
Let me catch those. Great, great, great questions.
Great, great, great questions. Thank you.
you thank you very much perhaps every industry is similar but the software industry is definitely a place where a lot of people falsely claim knowledge they don't have yeah i didn't finish this thought on wednesday but the woman who was saying when grilled in congress i think the woman who was saying well we just had a hope We just had a hope that the vaccines were going to prevent infection and transmission.
We hoped. It's like, okay, well, if hope is a strategy, then what the hell is Elizabeth Holmes doing in prison?
She just had a hope that Theranos was going to work, right?
Should you leave your kids alone if they're asking for it?
Yeah, you know, kids do need some privacy.
They do need some time to let their thoughts unfold.
They do need some quiet and some solitude.
I don't think that parenting as a whole, when they're young, they need more stimulation.
But as they get into their teenage years, they're going to want some time to themselves, some time alone in the house and all of that.
I think that's useful too because, you know, they move out.
They're going to be living on their own perhaps if they don't get married right away.
So I think they'll be used to that, right?
My mother once gave me cereal with spoiled milk, and when I told her, she replied, I don't care, shut up and eat it.
My mother once fed me dog food.
I don't mean to one-up.
I don't know which is worse.
At least dog food won't harm you.
But yeah, it wasn't like a conscious world thing.
She just was careless in what she bought and she got me some kind of stew.
And I was like, God, this tastes horrible.
And I went and found the can in the garbage and it was actually dog food.
So this wasn't like, you know, forcing me to eat dog food or something.
But it's pretty rough.
Happy Canada Day.
Well, it's midnight in Canada in terms of liberties.
All right, so let me just wait for a second for another question or two because I love the fact that you guys are dropping by here tonight.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for all of your support and your encouragement.
I really appreciate it.
It means the absolute, complete and total world to me.
But let me just make sure that you guys don't have any questions.
Somebody says, I have a friend going through a divorce.
I'm grieving because I miss the friendship I had with her, but I don't think it'll be the same going forward.
So are you in a marriage yourself?
Are you in a long-term or committed relationship yourself?
This is to the person asking that question.
Just hit me with a Y or an N. You are.
Okay. Should I read a little bit?
Yeah. So this is my thoughts on divorce.
All right. Why are you hassling me?
Why are you hassling me?
I'm just doing a search for something here.
I don't like software where you bring up a search and it doesn't put you in the right box.
Alright. So this is the main character, or one of the main characters, listening to his parents.
And he says, I remember when I was about nine, becoming quite fascinated by my parents' relationship, trying to eavesdrop on them whenever I could.
They were cautiously reserved, and I could usually only hear murmurs through the ventilation.
I suppose they were always concerned that someone could hijack their phones and listen in.
But I did hear them talking once, at the foot of the garden, when I pretended to nap on a lounge chair, but was surreptitiously cupping my ear to hear the words that strangely echoed off a stone statue.
"'Twenty years I feel I barely know you!' said my mother.
Her tone was aggrieved, as it so often was.
That morning she had turned on a blender, but it had sparked and died in her hands, and she had lifted it off the counter as if to hurl it before dropping it and crying out to no one that nothing worked!
My father had just grunted.
You've got to stop talking to Joan.
This isn't about Joan.
Of course it is. Divorce is spread like the flu, you know that.
You've got to cut her off like a tourniquet or we'll both bleed out.
I could see her biting her thumbnail in the shaded green distance.
"'But they were together so long, longer than us!' My father shrugged.
"'People die younger than us who are still breathing.
Stop measuring yourself by others!' She looked at him savagely.
"'Oh, hell! You're one to talk!
All you do is measure your dick against everyone else!'"'Maybe, but you don't seem to mind the beautiful house and dress as it buys.
It almost comes down to money!' My father extended his hand.
Hello! You might remember me from our first date when I told you how ambitious I was.
Isn't it enough now, though?
Not according to your visa bill.
They were circling each other like wounded sharks, snapping for a kill shot.
Joan got the virus, my father said.
He imitated a woman, I don't know who.
You're just a broodmare, cooking and cleaning and wiping asses.
Why do you let your husband take all the glory and run the world?
Get out of there, girl.
You go and be brave and stunning.
Show the world what you're made of.
Take the bull by the horns.
Go be a girl boss, you empowered woman, about to find her voice.
My mother laughed, despite herself.
I married an ape.
Agreed. And you're going to stay married?
And you're going to drop Joan, because drowning people just pull you down.
Divorced people hate seeing happy marriages.
Are we happy, though?
My father's face crumpled as he scowled, and I realized how rarely I saw him in full sunlight.
That's the kind of open-ended crap question that turns concrete into quicksand.
Before you talked to Joan this morning, were you unhappy?
Be honest, he warned.
She paused.
I wasn't... Unhappy?
Good enough. Not being unhappy is like not being in pain.
We don't get euphoria all day long.
But she puts this worm into your ear.
His voice dropped low and conspiratorial.
That maybe you're unhappy and maybe your husband is selfish.
Oh, perish the thought. And maybe there is some undefined something more out there.
And maybe you think being five foot ten is tall.
But there are people out there who are fifty feet tall.
So you're really short after all.
Oh, come on. You had me until...
My mother waved her hand.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
That's just...
acid. Conjecture.
Like the... We're in a simulation, lunatics.
Here are the facts. Joan is a plain woman in her 50s who's going to find out that the wonderful world she's setting out to join is just a refugee ship of broken people with broken lives and she doesn't have the sexual power she had in her 20s.
And she's going to end up burying her regrets in cat litter.
And all the money she thinks she's going to get from Bill, well that's just going to go to the lawyers and two houses and 18 vacations.
It's pathetic, and I hate her with all my heart for sowing this stupidity in the minds of her friends.
She screwed up, she got greedy, she overreached, and now she's fallen out of the cruise ship and we cannot circle back to find her.
My mother gnawed at her thumb.
She's so sad.
She needs someone. She had someone.
She had Bill and a decent marriage.
But someone put the worm in her ear, and now she's trying to put the worm in your ear.
Don't let her. Don't do it.
It's a hole with no bottom.
You know it! So I'm supposed to just abandon her in her hour of need?
My father shrugged angrily.
She abandoned Bill.
She's got nothing to complain about.
They moved on, and their voices no longer slid round the semicircle of the stone statues' outstretched hands into my cupped ears.
Anyway, so that's my thoughts on, well, a-character's thoughts, not necessarily mine, but a-character's thoughts.
I think they're pretty accurate.
You've got to watch divorces.
They really spread like wildfire.
And this is not just me. This is actual facts.
Like, you can measure divorces spreading in a social circle.
So... You've got to be careful.
You've got to be careful to make sure it doesn't spread.
Make sure it does not spread.
And, yeah, so that's a little bit of the book that I wrote.
My brother insists in taking care of our old mother in her old age.
She was neglectful in many ways during our childhood.
For example, she was never able to stop me from beating him.
I brought this and other issues up with my brother several times.
I also pointed out she'll be a bad influence on his daughters.
None of it changed his mind. At what point should I drop the issue?
So I'm a three and done guy.
I'm a three and done guy.
It can be anything for anyone.
So three and done is I will bring an issue up three times.
If I make no headway, I'm done.
But I'm not done without consequences.
Right? Why should people listen to you?
Well, they should listen to you because you have utility and wisdom and virtue and you care about them and you love.
So that's why they should listen to you.
But, of course, not everyone is going to recognize or act upon the fact that you're a virtuous person who has good and wise things to say.
So what are the consequences of people not listening to you?
When you have, I mean, look, it doesn't mean that they've got to agree with you, but they've got to engage, right?
They have to understand that you have an important thing to say.
They have to engage in the conversation.
It doesn't mean they have to do what you say.
Of course, that would be tyrannical, but what are the consequences of people who won't even listen?
Like, you make a very strong and detailed case, and they neither accept it, Nor rebut it.
Because that's what you've got to do.
Somebody makes a strong case to you.
You either accept it or you rebut it.
But you can't just ignore it.
Or at least people in my life wouldn't accept that.
And I wouldn't expect people to accept if I just ignored what they say.
So I'm a three and done guy.
I'll bring it up three times.
If they neither accept nor rebut the case, what happens?
What happens? Well, they've just lowered, they've narrowed the Overton window, so to speak, right?
So if you bring up something really important, like, mom didn't prevent me from beating you, she's a bad influence on your kids, she's a dysfunctional, dangerous, whatever, whatever is going on.
If they neither accept nor rebut what it is that you're saying, they've crippled the relationship.
Doesn't mean ended or anything, but they've crippled it.
Because now you know for a certain fact that reason and evidence and conversation about important things don't exist in the relationship.
So what effect does that have on the relationship?
Some people will respond to virtue of their own accord, growing towards it like a plant grows towards sunlight.
Other people, you've got to prune.
All right. She chats with me about her escapades and happiness about being newly single, so I feel I need to start limiting contact.
This is the divorced woman?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. What are your thoughts on life coaches?
My thoughts on life coaches is they tend to be peppy, it tends to be a little bit like a drug that's hard to replicate, and they tend not to focus on moral issues.
You know, the, you can do it, you go, and of course a lot of life coaches are just middle-aged women who didn't get married who think that they can be motivational speakers because it beats working for a living.
Can you talk about sex addiction and managing it?
Open topic. Well, just talk to Ashley Biden about that.
So, sex addiction occurs, I think, when you are exposed to pornographic material or sexually charged material, sexuality, at way too early an age.
I mean... So in terms of, I don't think pornography is good at any age, but in terms of like being exposed to sexual material, I mean, it's in movies and stuff like that.
I remember being about 14 and taking a girl on a date to go and see the first airplane movie and there was boobs flashing across the screen at one point.
It's like, cringe!
So if you...
are exposed to sexually charged material early on in life.
Then you get imprinting without perspective, without wisdom and it tends to make kids a little bit obsessive about sex and then what happens is sexuality becomes the defining aspect of adulthood and the great value that you can give and receive in a relationship And that means, of course, that you have sex with people you haven't vetted.
You have sex with people who aren't safe or may not be safe.
You have sex with people who may be carrying diseases but you can't tell, you can't check.
You have sex with unstable people who may latch onto you and be true bunny boilers and so on.
So... When you have that level of stimulation as a child, this is the purpose, of course, of all of the sexually charged material that's being hurled at children these days, is to make them more art-selected, to have them focus on sex as the major value that adults transmit to each other or exchange with each other.
And then what happens is, because you feel that the only...
value or the main value you can bring to someone else and the main value someone else can bring to you is sex then you get a flash of endorphins you get a pump of endorphins through the pursuit of sex and the achievement of sex but afterwards because you've devalued yourself to mere flesh and animal rutting and the angelic beautiful universal part of you has been deluged under a sea of flesh Or drowned under a sea of flesh, then you get the crash, right?
You get the crash, and then you have to, because the way that you get the endorphins is through sexual activity, you have the sexual activity, you get the crash, you realize that you weren't loved for yourself, you realize you betrayed the highest and best part of your personality, and then what happens is the cycle starts again.
You go hunting for sex, and it never satisfies, right, in the long run, so...
My other question for you is, would you approach your local library about all the diversity-slash-feminist children's books?
I'm so fatigued with seeing all this on display.
Thoughts? How would you do it?
I wouldn't. I wouldn't in particular...
Librarians are mostly government workers, right?
I mean, libraries only exist because nobody enforces IP or PACE. Libraries are theft central, right?
They're theft central. I've written 14 books maybe over the course of my life, maybe 15.
It's a huge amount of work, a massive amount of effort and concentration holding all the stories and the characters, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, even the arguments, the threads and so on.
So... You can pour years into a book.
I mean, basically, I poured 40 years of thought into my newest book.
And then, basically, some jerkwad can just wander into a library and get the book for free.
Don't pay anything. Where else can you do that?
Where else can you just go and get someone's labor for free?
Well, I mean, here, of course, you get my labor for free, although it costs me to produce this.
I mean, I need an income, and it's expensive to run all of this technology, and All these servers and bandwidth and so on.
So, yeah, I mean, libraries are lefty because they exist basically on the violation of any kind of intellectual property rights.
Now, I don't know if there would be intellectual property rights in a free society.
That question is in...
I answer it to some degree in, again, the new book, The Future, but I wouldn't go to a library and say, don't be lefty because the whole thing is founded upon that, so...
Are you bringing back the free domain message board?
I'd be for it. I think we should try.
I think we should try. All right.
How do you get rid of resentment towards your mother?
I thought I had got rid of it, but it returns.
Is it because she has never admitted to any wrong?
Has never apologized for anything?
How do people suppress guilt?
Are you talking about how does your mother suppress guilt?
Okay, I will give you one simple easy trick, one easy way to get rid of Look at me mashing my eyeball like a real pro.
So here's how you get rid of resentment.
So if you're a Christian or you're part of the Christian tradition, you believe in Christianity, then you have a commandment to love your enemies, but you also know that evildoers who do not repent will go to hell.
In other words, the devil takes care of the punishment for you.
So you don't need to get angry.
Being angry is like being really...
I don't mean being angry in the moment, but holding on to festering resentment towards someone over years is a lack of faith.
It's a lack of faith. God's going to take care of it.
The devil's going to take care of it.
Their soul's going to go where their soul's going to go based upon the morality or evil of their actions in the material world.
So... Let God and the devil wrestle over her soul after death, and they will know infinitely better than you where she should go and how it should play out.
So, that's a very powerful thing.
That's one of the reasons why Christians tend to be fairly joyous, right?
Norm MacDonald, when Jack Posobiec was talking about this with Norm MacDonald, just in terms of the joy that he had, there's a fair amount of joy because...
The punishment for immorality is not something that you have to enforce.
When I was playing racket sports the other day, I was chatting with a fellow, and he was like, I was talking about how, you know, Galene Maxwell has got 20 years for sex trafficking underage girls to no one.
Ghosts! Abstract ideas!
Pictures in the dictionary! She was, right, trafficking underage girls with Jeffrey Epstein to apparently no one, even though there was recording devices, hundreds of CD-ROMs, of videos, and it's all gone, right?
And he was like, I would just, I mean, I don't find this funny, but I mean, at this point, expecting it to be different is why I'm not in politics anymore.
And he was just like, oh, I can't stand that.
I've deleted the apps.
I've turned off the news. I don't care.
I just, I can't look at this stuff because nothing's going to change.
Nothing's going to Well, of course, things change always over time.
So he was really frustrated.
And I said, are you a Christian? He said, no, I'm an agnostic.
I said, oh, so, I mean, God isn't going to punish these people for the immoralities they do.
And he's like, no, that's the worst part.
People aren't going to punish them, and God isn't going to punish them, and they just get away.
So please understand that they don't get away.
55 years doesn't mean I'm right, but it means I've got some evidence.
Gathered together some empirical evidence and thousands of conversations with wonderful listeners on this show.
From what I've seen, from what I've seen, nobody gets away.
Nobody gets away.
Again, this is one of the themes of my book.
Nobody gets away. The...
Hell that people experience in their lives has, as far as I've seen, remained directly proportional to the wrongs they've done.
The hell that people experience in their minds, in their lives, as they age, as far as I've seen, remained directly proportional to the evils that they've done.
The people who've done the most wrong suffer the most.
You don't need to be resentful towards your mother because the great God called conscience crushes even amoral atheists of ethics.
The great God of conscience with his stone fist will grind people's hearts capacity for love and joy into nothing.
You see Peter Strzok doing that thing.
I have a line in my new book where a character says about the modern world, people have stopped believing in the soul and so no longer remember the price we pay for greed.
The people who do wrong have no capacity to love or be loved.
All they can do is manipulate and try to win in the merely material sense.
They have no capacity to love or be loved.
Now, if you've been truly loved, if you've been truly loved and if you've had the deep spiritual honor to truly love people, You know that there is no substitute.
There's no amount of money, there's no amount of prestige, there's no amount of fame, there's no amount of glory, there's no amount of medals, there's no amount of anything that would take the place of that glorious connection called loving and being loved.
It's a rare prize these days, but there's nothing better.
Now those who...
Through cruelty and neglect and laziness have not worked to pump the bellows of the fires that light up the heart into love.
Through actions of deep and courageous virtue.
Those people who have chosen greed, greed for control, greed for power, greed for subjugating others, greed for prestige, for money.
Those people Who have chosen greed over love.
Boy, I tell you, they don't have to wait until after they die to go to hell.
Hell is impatient, you see.
Hell is really impatient.
Hell drums its fingers and says, hmm...
No, you know what? I'm not going to wait till you're dead.
I'm coming now. And it comes and snaps and swallows them whole.
And they live in its red pulsing belly of isolation, manipulation, control.
Fake tears, fake smiles, fake connections.
And they get stuff instead of love.
They get power instead of love.
Thank you.
Thank you.
They get praise instead of love.
And they just run like somebody sprinting up a collapsing staircase.
It's going down faster than they're going up.
They run to the next high.
They run to the next burst of power.
They run to the next strangling, hand-clasping applause of approval from other evildoers, other wrongdoers.
They climb the staircase, but it doesn't matter.
The staircase falls down, delivers them straight to hell.
Straight to hell. When I was younger I confronted people who did me wrong.
And I saw the hell. I saw this cold-eyed calculation in my mother's eyes.
Cold-eyed calculation.
I said, here's what you did wrong.
Here's the issues that I have.
Help me out. Help me to understand how this came about.
And I saw, she was like, okay, what can I say?
What can I not say? What can I get away with?
How deep is this resolution?
Can I gaslight him?
Can I fake him out? Can I pretend that I didn't know?
Can I pretend I don't remember?
Can I burst into tears?
Can I claim illness? Can I claim cruelty on his part?
Can I claim I did the best? What can I do?
What strategies can I take to not be real?
Please, God, below, let me find some sinuous, snaky way through the maze of these questions so I don't have to admit guilt or take ownership for anything.
It's a horrible, horrible sight to see someone calculating what they can get away with rather than having a simple and direct conversation about the truth.
That's hell. And she's in hell.
And she has been in hell for decades.
Alone, obsessed, isolated, crazy, paranoid.
Oh my God, it's awful.
Awful. Another person I confronted just, like their whole head seemed just cracked like an egg, split apart and inside was a blue-purple-faced screaming baby, just cried and cried and could not even take a breath.
And that's what's deep down at the bottom of all of this.
That's what's deep down at the bottom of all of this.
Conscience is nature's universally preferable behavior buried in the brain.
I didn't create.
I discovered. I didn't make.
I unearthed. UPB. UPB is the conscience, which is why people who hate UPB or fear UPB or are hostile to UPB are merely confessing that they hate or fear or are hostile to their own conscience.
Their own conscience is the part of us that knows we're bullshitting when we say, but it's okay when we do it, but won't admit.
This is double standards that you always see.
It's completely wrong for people on the right to question UPB. The integrity of an election.
People on the left do it all the time.
So when you claim that there's a moral principle, which you're violating repeatedly, it violates UPB in your brain.
You lie about it. Somebody says, but I love you.
I love you. And you say, well, I want to talk about something that's going to be difficult for you.
And they're like, no, don't want to do that.
Not doing that. Okay, then you don't love me.
Because if you only love me when I'm convenient, you don't love me.
Simple as. If you only love me when I'm doing what you want, if you only love me when I'm giving you endorphins, if you only love me when I'm telling you what you want to hear, you don't love me.
You love your own illusions, you love your own narcissistic, hedonistic capacity to pursue and achieve pleasure, but you don't love me.
She... And listen, the punishment that wrongdoers receive...
It's worse than anything I could imagine and in fact it's worse than anything I would ever inflict myself.
I wish my mother, I deeply, deeply wish my mother did not suffer as much as she suffers.
I deeply wish that to be the case.
But I can't change it because I can't make her confess the truth and I can't change what she did.
I mean, decades ago I would have said, oh, come on, guys, she suffered enough.
Let her go. I would have said to Satan himself, come on.
She suffered enough.
Please, my life is fine.
Let her go. Let her go.
Let her release her. I can't.
I can't release her.
It's like the line from John Milton.
Satan says, anywhere I fly is hell.
I am myself.
Hell. Hell. I am myself hell.
The punishment that the great God of conscience inflicts upon the wrongdoers who deny their wrongdoing is beyond what the greatest sadists could conceive of, and it happens to billions of people every day.
And you'd think that that amount of punishment might have them change course, but it rarely does.
Somebody writes, I'm growing concerned that I might one day become an overprotective parent.
I become nervous whenever I see children in the proximity of physical danger and feel the urge to intervene.
So far I've not witnessed anything bad happen, so theoretically my fears have been unfounded.
But I can't shake the feeling that something bad will happen.
I'm a man and I understand that this is typically a feminine characteristic.
First of all, I understand that.
I saw a map the other day.
Great-grandfather was allowed to roam 12 miles from his house.
Grandfather was allowed to roam 9 miles from the house.
Father was allowed to roam...
Three miles from the house, son is allowed to roam one mile from the house, grandson can only go down to the end of the street.
We shrink. We're shrinking. Now, part of that is just, you know, diversity and lack of social trust and so on.
Part of that, or multiculturalism, which, you know, don't blame me.
You can look up the Putnam studies.
He talks about this repeatedly.
But the other thing, of course, is that we have fewer children.
And because we have fewer children, we are more concerned about the health and security of the child.
But of course, you're there to help your child be healthy and successful as best they can in an increasingly crazy world.
So the way that you do that is you remember that if you try to protect them from every harm, you're harming them.
And I don't just mean psychologically, of course, but just physical stuff.
And just remember what you did as a kid, all the risks you took as a kid.
So you want your child to be safe and healthy and protected and bubble wrapping them through their childhood is doing quite the opposite, right?
It's one of the reasons why kids are becoming obese is the parents are afraid to just let them go out and risk things.
Steph, I'm genuinely curious.
What was your impression of South Africa from back in the day before the previous government collapse?
Was it anything as bad as it's made out to be?
Well, I mean, there were certainly aspects of it that were bad.
I remember the whites in South Africa being very nervous because they knew that they were kind of standing on a volcano.
Of resentment and so on.
So I do remember them, you know, really wrestling with this issue and things being extraordinarily nervous.
And of course, a lot of the whites tried to do right by the blacks and lots of extra food and healthcare and hospitals and so on, charity and so on.
So it was a volcano kind of situation for sure.
And everyone knew it couldn't last.
Everyone was scared of what would come next.
And of course, a lot of people were in the process of leaving.
So it was like a tennis court over a smoking volcano, if that makes any sense.
Let's see. We live in a rural town.
I'm sad to see these books in our local library.
They do not represent our community in any form.
So the world is mad, or going mad, because whenever you put an animal in a situation of limitless resources, you can look at the mouse utopia experiments with this, whenever you put animals in a situation of limitless resources, they go mad.
Sanity is based upon scarcity.
Where you have no scarcity, you have little to no sanity.
So, whether the books are in the library or not is probably not going to make much of a difference.
As long as the scarcity issue is waved away with money printing.
They sent $100 billion now in aid to Ukraine saying it was about to win.
Of course it's not. So...
We just have to wait for the resources to return to the state of rational scarcity that nature dictates.
And this is, again, another reason why I'm not doing PowerPoints.
I'm not really doing politics anymore.
Because reason...
You know, if you say to someone who's in possession of $10 billion, you ought to budget, you ought to watch what you spend, they'll look at you like, okay, not really, you've got $10 billion.
And so when people have this really psychotic delusion of infinite resources, trying to talk sanity into them or restriction or self-constraint or control or anything, it's kind of useless.
It doesn't really, it doesn't work.
Do you think adoption is evil?
I do not think that adoption is evil at all.
I'm sorry to be, you know, a broken record guy, but evil is violations of the non-aggression principle.
Is adoption a violation of the non-aggression principle?
It's not. Adopted children...
Do about as well as biological children if they're adopted into a two-parent functional household.
So, this is an old Ann Coulter argument.
If single mothers wanted what was best for their children, they would give their children up for adoption, right?
Because the children of single mothers don't do as well as adopted children into a two-parent stable household.
How do I philosophically return to Christianity?
It seems like a good value set, but I just don't believe the mythology.
I walked away from the Catholic Church 25 years ago.
So the best cure for atheism is conversations with atheists.
The best cure for atheism is conversations with atheists.
Atheism is...
I say this, of course, somewhat allegorically, but atheism is somewhat satanic.
Insofar as atheism destroys morality without providing a rational substitute for morality.
Right, so atheism destroys the absolutes of morality in Christianity, but without providing a substitute for that, right?
So, this is a story I've told before.
I'll keep it really brief here. So to me, if you're going to knock a building down during a storm, you better have another building ready.
If you just knock a building down during a storm, And you don't have another building ready.
You're just kind of killing people because they're being driven out into the storm where trees are flying around and cows are flying around and getting sucked up into the sky.
They've got no shelter. You say, ah, well, but the church is not a great shelter.
It's like, is it better than the open ground?
It certainly is. So if you're going to take down Christianity...
Then you better give people a good reason to be moral and have an explanation and understanding of what morality is.
Otherwise, it's kind of satanic that you're driving people out of the only shelter they have and not providing them any alternative shelter, which means you're just getting people killed, so to speak.
So go talk to atheists and say, oh, you don't believe in God.
Explain to me morality.
Well, it's reciprocal altruism and empathy, and it's like, okay...
How is that different from a pack of hyenas?
And they say, oh, it's reciprocal altruism.
Oh, is it based on genetics? Yes.
And how does multiculturalism work?
You know, just ask these questions. They don't have a clue.
They don't have a clue. They can't answer these questions.
Science! I think that the relationship between modern status science and morality has taken a few blows over the last few years.
So, scaring yourself into the arms of the church by staring deep into the heart of the devil is a pretty powerful spring-back position.
So, just talk to atheists and say, help me understand how morality works, where does it come from, how do you define morality, how do you justify property rights?
And you'll realize that the reason that they hate God is because God is morality.
They don't hate Christianity, they hate moral rules.
They don't hate Christianity, they hate moral responsibility.
They don't hate Christianity, they hate free will!
And a requirement to be virtuous.
And a requirement to do something other than work to pay your internet bill so you can fap and play video games.
They don't hate Christianity, they hate responsibility and morality, choice and requirements.
Christians have to do stuff.
Atheists can just sit in their own squalor and chase endorphins until they lose the ability to get a hard-on.
All right, let's see here. How do you know you're not conflating honesty in general with some very specific way of being honest that works versus other ways of being honest that are useless and pointless?
Sorry, that's a... I don't know.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Sorry. Explain it to me like I'm three years old.
When a mother uses false allegations of abuse against her husband to get what she wants in divorce proceedings, she gets a house, money, control of their child, and freedom to remarry.
She also has the emotional power then to poison the child against the father, professing virtue for saving the child.
What price does a mother pay for her abuse of power?
Well, first of all, It's very hard to know when false allegations are being made.
This is the whole problem with he said, she said.
Now, it could be that the mother confesses later that the allegations are false and so on.
But any woman, and this happens for men as well, right?
But any marital partner who makes criminal false allegations against a partner during a time of divorce will never love again.
Will never fall in love again, ever.
Not even close. In a free society, the punishment would be pretty clear, right?
But no, I mean, the price that you pay is the children will not be able to love her.
Whether she likes her or not, whether they profess her or not, children will not be able to love her because she has made an egregious criminal lie.
Falsely accusing someone of a crime is a crime, especially if you take it to court systems, right?
So... The children will fear her and if the children want a good life, the children will have to flee her as a whole if she doesn't confess and beg for forgiveness and try to have absolution.
And I think that process of these, what, SAID, sexual allegations in divorce, that is such an egregious wrong and attack against the husband or the wife, if the husband's making it, that it seems to me, I can't picture a situation in which restitution could be made for such a lie.
And so where restitution is impossible, forgiveness is impossible, love is impossible, she just wrecks her own life.
And what kind of man, right?
So let's say you're a quality man of integrity and virtue and you...
Find out that these allegations were made in the divorce.
Maybe you find out they're true. Maybe you find out they're not true or whatever.
Either way, you either married a guy who sexually abused the children or you made it up as part of a way to gain leverage in the divorce.
Would a quality guy have anything to do with her?
No. Of course not.
She's just going to end up stuck with these low-rent trashy guys who are going to put her children statistically even further at risk and that's it.
That's it. I mean, have you not spent time around miserable older people?
Have you not? Have you not spent...
I mean, they just were around my mother quite a bit.
Not too many of them because she wasn't that popular even among terrible people.
But there are... I mean, there's a lot of them.
Just go to the mall. Just go to the mall.
How many happy old people do you see?
I mean, there's some for sure.
But how many old people are just wandering around with that thousand-yard stare?
That's the line from the movie.
I was wandering around the mall in the eternal search for the perfect soft yogurts.
How many genuinely happy old people do you see?
They kind of trash society as a whole and fail to even work 1% of what was necessary to To keep the freedoms they inherited around.
Somebody says, I have embarrassingly been divorced from twice, but I didn't lose.
I came out even in one and ahead in the other.
What I did is carefully examined what didn't work over protective in-laws and found someone without significant in-laws.
Now I'm about to have my 10th anniversary and we're still happy as a couple of teenagers in love.
Well, that's lovely to hear. Congratulations on beating the odds.
Good for you. Alright, why is it not letting me jump to recent messages?
I'm afraid to refresh. I'm just terrified to refresh.
Alright, okay, so...
Oh, oh, wait, oh, wait, no, nothing.
I'm just typing. All right. So we've got a little of a half an hour left.
I'm going to switch this to supporters only because I have some stuff that I want to discuss about.
It's a bit more sensitive than the main topic.
If you want to join up, love to have you in the conversation.
Happy to keep taking questions.
But I'm going to switch this over to supporters.
Thank you so much for listening.
You guys have the most incredible questions, and I really, really appreciate the stimulation that these questions give my creative and philosophical brain.
I really do appreciate that.
So thank you so much, freedomand.locals.com, to join these supporter-only conversations and to get my new book in e-book and audio book format.
So I will...
Continue with the supporters, and thanks everyone so much.
I will try and do a show on Sunday, 11 a.m.
Eastern Standard, for our wonderful thing.
How do you react when kids point at fat people in the store and say, he's fat?
Supporters will find out in just a moment.
Okay, let me switch this over. Oh, okay.
So, it's one minute till it becomes supporters.
Okay, well, I can let this one...
Squeeze out. How do you react when kids point at fat people in the store and say, he's fat?
You're right. You're right.
Now, you can, of course, have a conversation about being diplomatic, right?
I mean, so you would say to a kid, let's say, you just, you make a bad picture.
Do you want me to say it's a bad picture?
Okay. Sometimes it happens, right?
It just makes a bad picture. So, you can tell people, you can tell kids, of course, and you should, encourage them to tell the truth, but then say there's lots of different ways of telling the truth.
Is there a way to tell the truth that is a little less harsh?
And sometimes it's fine to tell the truth that's harsh.
But is it possible?
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