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July 28, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:40
WOMEN WERE EXPLOITED?!?
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It's Steph. Good.
End of July-ish to you.
Hope you're doing well. It's 27th of July, 2022.
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Without any more further ado, we have somebody who has questions, comments, issues, criticisms, feedback.
I think Monsieur, Adam, if you can unmute, I'm happy to hear.
Hi, can you hear me? Yes, go ahead, my brother.
I was wondering if I could ask you about a pretty common topic nowadays.
People like to say, kind of a line now that a lot of people memorize and just repeat, especially younger people.
I go to school or go to college.
It's that women for all of human history have been oppressed by the patriarchy and the men have exploited them in many different ways.
And although it does seem to me, and I'm not an expert in this at all, but just my reading of history and some of the books I've read, does seem to me that there is definitely some truth in that, that the world used to be a much more violent place.
And so More powerful and dominant men did exploit women, along with other men, too, though, of course.
And I read an interesting thing from Ludwig von Nießes, his take on it, and I think he wrote this in his book called Socialism, which is a great book.
And he ascribed the liberation of women to the liberal revolution in the late 18th century.
And his point was basically that the world transitioned, and this is a simplification, but that the world transitioned, the Western world, from the principle of violence dominating most of people's affairs to the principle of contracts,
of voluntary contracts, and that this gave women quite a bit more liberty, along with other men too, but it kind of freed them from Having to rely on more violent men and having to be dependent on this sort of behavior.
I'm just wondering what you think about that, because there's so much talk about it, and it's such an annoying line to hear, especially when you leave out things like how men were oppressed, too, by a small minority of men and had to go to war and give up most of their resources anyways.
But I'm just wondering what your thoughts on that in general was, and then also on Mises' take, if you have read about it at all, or if you want me to go on a bit more later, but yeah.
Well, no, I think I understand it and I've heard the same nonsense myself.
So, I mean, it's just basic physiology or physiognomy.
If men have exploited women throughout all of human history, why are men bigger and stronger?
I mean, just look at the size difference.
Men are bigger, stronger, stronger skeletal muscles, 40% extra upper body strength.
Why? You see, if you exploit other people, you tend to get weaker.
I mean, if you pay someone to work out for you, so to speak, or you force someone to work out for you, that person gets stronger and you don't.
So if men had exploited women, then women would be big and strong because they had to do all the labor, and men would be small and weak.
Which would mean that then they would be hard-pressed to exploit women because the women would get bigger and stronger.
So just looking at the physiology, it's a completely ridiculous argument.
I mean, the basic question you have to ask...
I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh because it's just so ridiculous.
Not what you're saying, but this whole line of thinking.
Okay, who went to war?
Now, of course, throughout history, it was the men who went to war, almost exclusively.
I mean, there's the Amazon, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
So men were forced to go to war, and it's hard to see how there's a worse thing in most of human history than having to go to war.
At a time when there was no battlefield medicine to speak of, one tiny infection could cause your death and so on, right?
And, I mean, even now you complain about the patriarchy and you just play this game, right?
If you have kids, you can play this game.
You go past the construction site and you say, spot the women.
Go past the place where they're building houses and see who's clambering up around the roofs and who's got the giant hammers and spot the women.
It's not there.
If you look at how land was cleared, I don't know if you've ever had to do this.
My God. I mean, I've had to do this a couple of times over the course of my life, which is actually clear some land.
It's unbelievably ungodly work.
Like, it's unholy, right?
So you say, okay, well, who settled virgin territory?
Who settled the land?
Who came and hacked out something arable from naughty...
Tree-infested swampy land.
Well, it was the men.
Who were the sailors who sailed and got scurvy and explored and died?
It was the men.
So the idea that men have exploited women, for what?
For what? If you've got a war to fight, do you order up the women to go to fight throughout most of human history?
Of course you don't, because they lose.
If you have to clear land and plant land and put up fences and do that rough, brutal, spine-bending physical labor, do the men say, ah, you know, what we're going to do is just going to get the women to do it?
Because it wouldn't work.
Any tribe that relied on female hard physical labor would lose out to every other tribe that didn't.
I mean, this is just obvious.
I mean, all you have to do is look at the professions that men and women go into and look at the number of female construction workers versus the number of male office receptionists.
So, I mean, it was a brutal—and I'm not trying to be down on women here at all.
I mean, it's just—this is such a ridiculous notion.
It is one of these things that simply takes not even two seconds abstract thought.
You just look at the world around you.
Who built the modern world?
Who built the cities?
Who built the roads?
Who cleared out the forests?
It wasn't the women.
It wasn't the women.
Who built computers?
Who built modern engineering miracles?
Who built bridges? Who builds whatever?
It's not the women.
Now, women say, ah, but we weren't allowed to!
Weren't allowed to.
Well, Resources were so scarce and history was so brutal that any edge that any tribe could get a hold of in the struggle for survival and competition, often violent with other tribes, any edge that any tribe could get would cause that tribe to swell and emerge victorious over all of the other tribes.
It's like that old Jerry Seinfeld joke about How close the times are in the 100-meter dash?
You know, one-tenth of one-hundredth of a second, and it's like you lose.
It's like the guy says, if I had a pimple on my nose, I'd have won.
The competition for calories, for land, for resources, for agriculture, for water, the competition was so fierce that if there was this amazing unlocked potential For productivity, for fighting skill, for physical strength, for endurance.
If that was there, the first tribe to say, well, let's get the women to do all of this horrible stuff, all this hard work, fight all these battles, clear all these trees, drain these swamps, fight off these bears and lions and tigers, oh my! The first tribe...
To get that edge of using women in this way would have dominated the world.
And women would not have evolved to be physically weaker.
Because if women could do what men could do or do it better then that would have spread like wildfire.
So It's a projection.
I mean, if you look at the modern world, it is, in general, the transfer of resources through the power and force of the state and central banking.
It is the transfer of resources from men to women.
I mean, there have been studies that have been done, I think one out of New Zealand, that women pay vastly more.
Sorry, women pay vastly less in taxes than they receive in benefits.
Men pay vastly more In taxes, then they receive in benefits because free healthcare, government healthcare, so to speak, goes to women in general.
Pensions disproportionately benefit women.
To get a lot of women into the workforce, you have to create huge layers of bureaucracy with comfortable office jobs and nice travel to exotic locations with scrumptious buffets and wine lunches.
So, yeah, the state is a massive transfer mechanism as a whole and a violent one at that.
From men to women.
And again, I'm not blaming individual women for this.
I think women are wonderful.
Men are wonderful. But these are just the facts.
So as far as exploitation goes, women live longer.
Women have easier jobs.
Women disproportionately benefit from the state mechanism and in that sense, collectively are exploiting men, violently and coercively enslaving and exploiting men.
And again, I'm not blaming women for this.
It's the system as a whole.
It's always tempting when you have a terrible system to focus on individuals and say they're the fault, they're the problem, they're the issue.
No, no, no. It's the institution.
It's the moral falsehood of the institution that is to blame.
Now, to get to the top of the food chain, we need these enormous brains.
Now, to get these enormous brains, we have unbelievably extended infancies and childhoods.
As you know, the first year of life is sometimes called, or the first six months of life, or three months maybe, it's called the fourth trimester.
Because of all the species in the known universe, we are born the most ridiculously helpless.
Most mammals can walk within a couple of days of being born.
We take like a year. So to get this giant brain, we are born extraordinarily helpless.
There is no more useless pile of DNA putty than a human baby.
Love babies. Babies are wonderful.
Cute as buttons and great fun.
But they're useless as tits on a ball.
And this just goes on and on and on.
If you've been around babies or you've raised a baby, you just know.
For the first couple of years, they're resource and accident magnets.
You have to constantly watch over them, constantly take care of them.
They can't do anything for themselves.
And it's not really until they start approaching a half decade that they could go and get some food for themselves and all that, right?
So you've got five years of generalized uselessness.
Now, I mean, the payoff for that...
The tortoise and the hare, right?
The payoff for that is that we rule the planet.
I mean, in terms of top of the food chain and comfort levels and so on, right?
So to get these giant brains, what had to happen?
Well, women had to be disabled in terms of direct economic productivity for a good portion of their lives.
I mean, you would say, you know, prior to modern civilization, you'd say, okay, well, maybe 15 to 40 or 15 to 45.
Not that I'm advocating anybody has babies at 15, but I'm just talking about in primitive tribes, primitive evolutionary tribes.
So we're talking a good 30 years, 15 to 45.
You got 30 years where women are...
Having babies, recovering from having babies, breastfeeding, raising toddlers, making everything safe.
And you say, ah, yes, but then the children get older.
Absolutely. And then the children, in general, around the age of seven, pass from the women to the men so that the men can train them in productive pursuits.
And what happens then?
Well, not super long after that, she's a grandmother.
And then she's investing in Raising the next generation after her children.
Now, we could say this is bad, we can say this is good, but it's completely irrelevant.
It doesn't matter what our opinions about this are.
It's literally like saying, it's wrong that the giraffe's neck is just too long.
It's wrong that the elephant's trunk is too long.
It's wrong that the sperm male has that weird lower levered jawbone.
None of this makes it. It's just what it is.
Now, why do we have these big giant brains?
Because women choose men based upon their ability to provide and the more intelligent men can provide more.
So women were an integral part of developing the giant brains that disabled women in terms of direct economic productivity For almost all of our evolution.
Men and women were an incredible, bonded, united team for all of our evolution.
We got the gold, baby.
We got all the way to the top.
We won everything in terms of evolution.
We got the most glorious organ in the universe, the human brain, and that came at a cost.
Now, were women exploited by what?
By nature? Can't be exploited by nature.
Were they exploited by men?
Well, if they were exploited by men, why did men end up with the most difficult and dangerous jobs always?
From war, to battling predators, to clearing swamps, to working with heavy, dangerous machinery, to...
This is simple stuff.
Why would men... I mean, if you...
If you have a John Deere sit-down lawn mower and you've got two acres to mow, do you go out there with a pair of nail clippers?
No. You've got something much more efficient to use to get the job done faster.
And it requires far fewer calories, at least you personally, not counting the energy expended by the gasoline.
It takes far fewer calories for you to sit and trundle along and mow your lawn on a John Deere mower than it does to do it by hand.
So you're exploiting the John Deere lawnmower to get the job done quicker.
What does it mean to say women were exploited?
Well, it's an appeal to rampant, self-pitying, vicious and aggressive narcissism.
If women are concerned about exploitation, Then they should be concerned about a political system that tilts enormously towards gynocentrism and female power.
And again, I'm not blaming the women for this, not blaming the women at all.
It's just a fact of life.
That women outvote men.
Women vote more reliably than men.
And that's partly because they get more of what they want because there's a block voting that goes on.
Now, women, of course, are divided in their voting.
Women who are married... Children tend to vote for smaller government.
Women who are single or with single moms, they tend to vote for bigger government for reasons too obvious to state here.
So if you're concerned about exploitation, you sit there and say, well, wait a minute.
Men got the vote because they could be drafted and often were to go fight in wars.
Now, women got the vote but didn't want to be drafted, which meant they got power without responsibility in the same way.
So, if exploitation was the key, we'd say, okay, let's trace the forced resources from one group to another.
Who's doing better under the state, financially, men or women?
More men in the private sector, more women in the government sector.
Who has easier jobs?
Who's harder to fire?
Who has more union protection?
Who has more benefits? Who's getting more of the welfare state?
Well, the welfare state is basically the single mother state.
That's entirely, largely, largely from males, from responsible males to irresponsible females, the welfare state.
So if you are concerned about exploitation, you would look at the present, not the past.
See, people always want to drag you into the past To distract you from the present and get you arguing about what was in their imagination rather than what is in actual reality.
Oh, go focus on the past.
Go focus on a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, a thousand years ago.
That's the issue. It's like, well, if we have a moral problem with exploitation, and I think we should, then let's look at the present.
Are women concerned about exploitation?
It's like when I had this debate with the woman about abortion.
And she said, well, it's wrong to force people to become parents.
It's like, okay, well then you must be against mandatory child support and all of that because that's forcing a man to become a parent.
That's different, right?
So there's no principle there.
It's just if I complain about being The victim of exploitation, then I can exploit others.
You know that most people complain about what they're doing as camouflage.
I'm a victim is almost always a cover or a camouflage for I'm victimizing others.
I always translate I'm a victim into I'm a bully.
And you need the state to accomplish this or achieve this.
I mean, if you just say, okay, what is your definition of exploitation?
Why is it wrong? And how do you apply it objectively?
Well, if you say, well, exploitation is taking people's resources Without their choice and against their will.
Ah, okay, so you see it's bad to take people's resources against their will.
Okay, so then what you would do is you would go to a feminist group or a female advocacy group and you'd say, well, exploitation is when you take people's resources against their will, right?
Yes. Okay.
Well, I mean, we've really got to talk about this national debt then because that's taking the future away from people who aren't even born yet.
It's taking away children's freedom and future.
Enslaving children, the next generation, for many generations, it is enslaving those who aren't even born yet.
Is that not exploitation and the worst possible kind?
Now, if they say yes, then you'd say, okay, well, if you're really concerned about exploitation, the worst exploitation, in my view, and I think there's a reasonable case for this to be made, the worst exploitation is the national debt.
No question, no doubt.
Because that's stealing from people who have literally no chance to fight back because they ain't even here yet.
They ain't even here yet.
So you say, well, if you're against exploitation, we've really got to work to crush the national debt.
But if you went to feminists and say, well...
If you're against exploitation, let's tackle the national debt, they would immediately say, we're not going to do that.
Why? Because the national debt is part of the exploitation that again disproportionately slides towards women.
In other words, if governments can't borrow, they can't bribe women for their votes.
In other words, if the government is unable to exploit the unborn, then women don't get free stuff.
So, I mean, and again, men do this too, the whole military-industrial complex, and I get all of that, right?
But it's just about free stuff.
But you see, free stuff, against the will of the victim, against the will of the provider, free stuff is exploitation.
So if you're crying out about exploitation because you want free stuff, well, it's a completely self-detonating argument.
Because you're saying, I'm crying out about exploitation so that I can exploit others.
So I think it's really tragic.
But it's what happens.
The corruption of ideas, the corruption of morality, the corruption of arguments that occurs when the government has the power to create, borrow, and print, and tax.
Everybody gets addicted to the free stuff.
And once you're dealing with an addict, you're never dealing with the truth.
You're never dealing with honor, honesty, integrity.
It's called conflict of interest, right?
If you've ever dealt with somebody who's addicted, and we all have, we all have, whether it's a physical substance like marijuana or alcohol or weed, or it's Quote, free resources from the predatory state.
If you've ever dealt with an addict, you know they literally cannot afford to tell the truth.
They cannot afford to, because their addiction is so desperate.
When you live by lying, the truth can never live within you.
The truth can never pass your lips.
So, as far as exploitation goes, no.
No. That's just not the way it is.
Men are as women chose them to be and women are as men chose them to be and we faced unbelievable odds and horrors over the course of our evolution.
We were an incredible team that got to the top and we should honor and respect and love each other as men and as women for the amazing job we did to get to the top of the food chain, the top of the cognitive elite, really the only cognition that matters is human cognition.
What an incredible team.
What an unbelievable team men and women proved to be.
And if we honor and respect that incredible team that men and women are in the development of the great glory of the human mind, oh man, could we love each other.
Could we love each other.
If you are a male-female doubles team and you win At Wimbledon or the Olympics or whatever the top of US Open, whatever the top is.
If you are a male-female sports team and you get to the top, do you then turn on each other and say, you've exploited me this whole time?
No, you're an incredible team.
And humanity, our minds, our bodies are such a glory.
It's like 1% for me to step over to godhood.
It's such a glory.
The human mind is such a glory.
All who had a hand in the fashioning of this incredible organ should take an endless and self-congratulately and ticker tape filled and tinsel filled bow.
But the idea that we turn on each other, oh, you exploited me, I'm a victim of...
It just shows you how petty and vindictive and devilish we become when we are paid enormous amounts of money for whining and complaining.
Now, with regards to the evolution of this, it's a great question.
So, in order for women to gain material equality to men, strength and economic productivity had to be unlinked.
Strength and economic productivity had to be unlinked and Pregnancy had to be controllable.
Now, strength and economic productivity being unlinked required the end of slavery, the development of labor-saving devices, and so on, right?
And air conditioning.
And soft chairs.
Right? So, for women to become as economically productive as men, or at least to have a chance there too, a woman can mow a lawn...
If she's sitting on a John Deere tractor as well as a man can.
But you need the tractor because if it's cutting it by hand, a man is going to be at least 40% more productive.
And remember, there was not a whole bunch of excess productivity.
It was a razor's edge of survival throughout most of human history.
So you couldn't afford these social experiments like, hey, let's have the women do all of the land clearing and the sowing and the harvesting, right?
Let's give that a try for a couple of years because if it didn't work out, and it didn't and it wouldn't, then the entire tribe just fucking dies.
Just dies. So, you know, better the devil you know, so to speak.
So you needed to uncouple physical strength from economic productivity, which required the end of slavery, the invention of labor-saving devices.
Secondly, you needed the diminishment of violence in society because women are better at emotional violence, but men are better at physical violence.
So a man might beat you up, but a woman will try to destroy your reputation and end your line through social contempt, right?
I mean, there's exceptions, but this is generally the case, right?
So for women...
To have economic flourishing required a more peaceful society.
Now, a more peaceful society in England, it was estimated for a couple of hundred years, the 1% of the population that was the most violent and psychotic was generally kills, hung, drawn and quartered, maybe guillotined or whatever, right?
And so you've got these crazy psycho genes slowly weeded out of society, which is one of the reasons why England end up, at least for quite some time, quite polite.
And you need a diminishment of violence.
Now, that's a combination of better parenting.
That's a combination of Christianity.
That's a combination of a wide variety of sort of political and economic and social forces.
So when you have...
Labor-saving devices and you have a diminishment of violence and then through modern science and technology you get the pill, you get condoms, you get IUDs, you get the 18 different forms of birth control that are available to women.
So women can control their childbirth.
They can be economically productive without being as physically strong as men.
And they don't have to contend with violence, right?
Because when there's a lot of violence, then a woman, in a sense, kind of has to get married because otherwise she might be abducted and raped.
You say, ah, but that's exploitive.
It's like, well, yeah, that is exploitive for sure.
No question. And it does go on around the world these days.
And that's unpleasant.
But men could also be exploited.
They would be forced to fight wars, dragged to be enslaved.
And of course, if there was a war and your side lost, then in general the men would be killed or enslaved, but the women would be taken as concubines and they would have a chance for their genes to continue, which really wasn't the case for the men, right?
As they say, in a coarse manner, but there's some truth in it.
The woman can always land on her back, right?
So... Yeah, it was pretty rough.
I have unbelievable admiration for the men and women throughout history who managed to struggle to get forward to where we are right now.
And the fact that we just try and get this one-sided exploitation narrative, you know, it's like, gee, why were so many patients classified as COVID positive?
Well, because... The hospitals are paid for this.
They got extra money for this. So it's not an objective metric.
It's just what you're paid for. And I don't view this women are exploited throughout history as any belief system.
It's just, okay, well, if I say these magic words, I get a huge amount of resources, right?
And so when you pay people to say stuff, you know, if you pay an actor for a million dollars to do a commercial to say, I love this gin.
And the actor then holds up the gin bottle and says, I love this gin.
Why is he doing that? He's getting paid a million dollars for it.
Does he really believe it?
Would he do it without? Who knows?
But he's getting paid a million. That's why he's saying it.
Maybe he believes it. But that's why he's saying it.
So if you're getting rewarded for saying, women are exploited.
Oh, men feel guilty.
Oh, we'll give you stuff, right?
But it's just hiding up women's exploitation of the present.
So I wanted to read actually a little bit.
There was something in my book. So, the civilized man, whose name is David, meets a noble savage in my book for reasons that are very, I think, interesting and powerful to do with peaceful parenting, but the noble savage who is held in great contempt by the man of the city has some very powerful arguments.
He says this. This is a man named Roman, who's the noble savage, talking to David, the city man, the civilized man.
He's got a bit of an accent.
He says, Do you know why you have the intelligence to make your slave machinery?
Do you even know how we evolved?
He opened his right hand and pounded the base of his left fist into it.
We evolved.
Through unspeakable and unending brutality.
Particularly the northern people.
We grew our brains because people who did not plan for winter, the stupid, the greedy, the short-sighted, died over the course of that winter.
Like those pink, soft Roman city dwellers.
People who had no food in late winter went knocking and begging.
At the doors of their neighbours, holding up hungry children, tears in their eyes.
Do you know what their neighbours did?
Do you know why we have any brains at all?
His voice lowered to almost a whisper, causing David and Alice to lean forward together.
Their neighbours slammed their doors in their faces.
They locked their doors, fastened their windows.
And picked up an axe, if need be, to chop down their stupid greedy neighbours, to make sure they had enough food for their own children.
And those children saw the neighbours being driven into the snow and cut in pieces if necessary.
And maybe they buried those bodies around the houses.
And when does spring going?
Do you think that those children ever forgot that lesson?
Do you think those children ever failed to prepare for the length of winter?
Do you think we would ever have evolved the intelligence and forethought to make the machines that make us lazy if our ancestors had not lived like us rather than you?
A few pieces of genuine spittle flew from Roman's mouth.
Alice blinked in surprise, trying to remember if she had ever seen such intensity in anything or anyone outside of crazed historical documentaries.
Roman said, And you have taken all these brains, the product of hundreds of thousands of years of blinding suffering and harshness.
And you have turned them into unsustainable laziness.
And when your daughter saw my son, she realized that she was seeing a true male for the first time in her entire life.
A male who hit a child, cried David, and immediately regretted it because it seemed or felt like a very weak move.
Roman nodded. Yeah, I heard about that.
Do you know why we hit our children?
Because out here, the non-aggression principle doesn't work.
With coals, or bears, or wolves, or a slipped axe, or a broken leg, or a twisted ankle, or fire, or hunger, or boiling water, or an infection, or another tribe.
Yes, your eyes will widen, but we are not alone out here.
There are lots of eyes watching your civilization circle to drain.
He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly and pointed a forefinger at David.
I want you to think of something.
Again, father to father.
Imagine that these two girls had surprised a pack of hungry wolves up on a mountain.
Or a cougar.
Or a coyote. Or a family of bears.
And imagine that this guardian robot thing had failed or had been bitten in two by a predator.
Imagine everything that your civilization shields them from had broken through and was staring them down.
With blinding speed, Roman picked up a rock, turned, and threw it directly at his son.
Like an ancient parted sea, the tribe leaned away from the rock.
His boy caught it deftly.
Roman smiled and shrugged.
Now worry's here for us.
My son alone might not win.
I'd as sure as hell would be a fair fight.
Your girls will be eaten alive because you have disarmed them with safety and they would go screaming into the mouths of the beasts.
We imitate predators here because the world is a predator and you sit in your robot zoos and judge us for being deficient when you came from us.
We gave birth to you Our harshness gave you the brains that you rely on to escape consequences to avoid nature and reality.
His lips curled.
Your civilization is a tumor, like all civilization.
It is a success we cannot survive as a species.
It grows, surrounds healthy cells, and kills the host.
It is a devilish temptation for comfort at the expense of survival.
You would be nothing without us.
You are our children!
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