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Oct. 1, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:31
Freedomain Locals AMA 27 9 2022!
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Hope you're doing well. These are some great questions from the community at freedomain.locals.com, which you can join for free and even get a preview with UPB 2022.
Get a preview for free, all caps UPB 2022.
So here's some questions. Hope you had a great birthday, Steph.
Thank you, I did. I was wondering why some people refuse to discuss anything beyond the surface level.
As soon as the conversation reaches a point where it is no longer about repeating media talking points or regurgitating someone else's opinion, the conversation just halts, as if you had stepped on a landmine.
I get that there are sensitive topics that most people would like to avoid, but this has happened in conversations that were passionately initiated by the other person.
Right. So, survival strategy 101.
It's a really important to understand. So, our evolution.
Our evolution was that the rulers told us that our team was the best.
And if we ever questioned that or tried to get to any kind of objective morality or universal values, then we were traitors and we were killed or tortured or imprisoned or ostracized.
So... To repeat the talking points handed to you by those in authority is a way to stay alive.
It's not a very noble way to stay alive, but of course the purpose of genes is not nobility but reproduction.
And so those who fearlessly countered the edicts of the rulers were generally not very successful, to put it mildly, were not very successful in the dating market, in the reproduction market, and those genes just didn't pass along.
So the way that you get people to turn against themselves is to reward them for the pretense of knowledge.
Let me sort of say that again. So the way you get people to turn against themselves is to reward them with the pretense of knowledge.
So you give them these talking points, X good, non-X, evil, and then of course you tell them there are no values and no truth and no morality or anything like that, but that's so that you can make up whatever you want.
People who want to manipulate your view of reality will tell you that you can't think for yourself, that there are no absolutes that you can determine, but there are absolutes that they can inflict upon you, and to resist those is evil.
So this is sort of post-modernism.
Post-modernism says you must be disarmed in the realm of ideas by no longer believing truth, reason, reality, your senses, or anything like that.
And that's not so the general epistemological chaos can result.
That's so that you can be easily imprinted on.
You can't brand concrete, but you can brand plasticine a whole lot easier.
So the softer you are, the easier you are to control.
So if people have the pretense of knowledge, then what they do is they gain virtue from falsehood.
And the falsehood isn't necessarily what they're told.
The falsehood is that they believe it because they've been told it.
That's the real mechanism of why they believe it.
But they tell themselves that they believe it because it's moral and they're good people and all of this and the other.
And again, I've said this a million times, but when I was mocked for my Crystal Palace football team, which was low-ranked, and I was mocked by somebody from, I think, West Ham.
And some other kid, when I was very little, and he was like, you know, your team sucks.
My team's great. It's like, just because you're born on the other side of the street, it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, it's not your team.
You're not on it. I mean, you don't kick any balls.
Like, just obvious things, right?
That since sort of from the very beginning, I've been blessed slash cursed with, like, stuff that doesn't make any sense.
I just say it doesn't make any sense.
that they're moral and have deep and wise understandings of good and evil in the world, but all they're doing is regurgitating their programming, then you set them against themselves because there's always a part of yourself that knows that we're lying, right?
There's always a part.
I mean, you could call it the conscience, the soul, whatever, the UPB aspect of the mind.
But we know that we're bullshitting, right?
And then if we meet someone, because we've based our identity on pretending to know things that we don't know, this goes all the way back to Socrates, right?
The sophists. We base our identity, our value, our marriage, the instruction of our children, our career, our social relationships, our position in the world, our moral pomposity is all based upon something which is not true.
And we know it's not true.
We know it's just nonsense and we're posturing.
We're using... The mantle of morality to cover up the nakedness of our ape-like ignorance.
And then what happens is we meet someone who asks some basic questions, who asks some simple questions.
How do you know? What is truth?
What is virtue? What is morality?
There's facts that contradict your narrative.
And what happens then?
Well, what happens then is we feel great deep and abiding rage towards the guy who's asking questions or making an alternative argument.
Why? Because he's doing something that we say we're doing, but we're not.
Right? He's doing something that we say we're doing, but we're not.
I mean, if you imagine a guy who's cheating on his wife, and lying about it, of course.
A guy's cheating on his wife, and he comes across a guy who's not cheating on his wife, who talks about how wonderful his wife is, how loyal he is to his wife, how he would never think of sleeping with another woman or cheating or whatever, right?
He's going to feel rage. Because someone's actually doing what you're pretending to do, which is have love and fidelity towards your wife.
And so this is why people are mined then against the truth.
It's not enough just to lie to people.
You have to get them to believe that those lies are the truth because then automatically, psychologically and automatically, they will rage against and oppose and attack the truth-tellers of their own accord.
It's a way that the system inoculates itself against basic questions.
So, you could say have some sympathy.
This is most people, and this is a lot of intense and heavy programming.
You know, it's all over the place.
It's everywhere you look. And so, I would say have some sympathy.
Most people are not constituted to think for themselves in the face of such programming.
So, I would say have some sympathy.
This doesn't mean abandon your integrity and so on, but have some sympathy for people who have had really the essence of their humanity taken from them, which is our capacity to reason and think for ourselves.
And it's been replaced by programming.
And yes, they can be dangerous.
And yes, they can be upsetting.
And you should definitely be on your toes around them.
But I don't think that, you know, hostility is necessarily the right response.
If you had been in their shoes with their whatever intellectual abilities they have or don't have, you may have ended up the same way.
I can't claim to have earned this independence of thought since I had it when I was a toddler.
So this is just how I'm constituted.
And I don't want... I've always opposed you can't take pride in anything you're just born with.
That'd be like me taking pride in having blue eyes.
I'm just born with blue eyes.
I can't take pride in that. And if I was born with this kind of independence of thought, and you probably had a bent yourself that way, and this is how society advances, right?
There's a... Think of evolution, right?
So you need a huge mass of stable genes and some minor amount of mutation.
No mutation, you don't get any advancement.
Too much mutation, you just get chaos.
You need a small amount of mutation with a large amount of stable genes in the system, in the body or wherever it is.
It's the same thing with society.
You need a large amount of people who...
Don't really question much, and then you need a couple of people who do, and that's just how society attempts to evolve, despite itself, against itself.
And of course, the genes that, in evolution, the genes for blue eyes spread at the expense of the genes for brown eyes.
I can actually trace back to the blue eyes were so attractive that one guy had blue eyes and just obviously spread his genes pretty widely.
And so the genes that are being displaced fight back.
And it's necessary for evolution, right?
Evolution was, let's get rid of slavery, one of the great moral advancements of humanity.
And the slave owners and the slave traders and the slave catchers all resisted that because that was their livelihood, their income, and their sense of virtue and productivity.
All right. Uh, hey Steph, the history of philosophy shows, sorry, the history of philosophers shows have been fantastic.
Do you think ancient Greek and Roman mythology have anything to teach us the modern world about wisdom, virtue, or moral philosophy?
I've never been a huge fan.
I've read a lot. I used to, when I was dry on ideas for plays or Novels or short stories.
I would sometimes just read Greek mythology thinking, well, I can just adapt these to one of the new sort of modern paradigms.
And actually I'm starting to work on a new book now.
It's a sort of prequel to the future.
The near future. I don't know.
Maybe that will actually be his name. Who knows?
But I would look at those myths and I just wouldn't find much value in them.
So the chaos of the thinking of the ancient world The abuse that occurred within families the abuse that children and children grew up in the ancient Greek and Roman world and Seeing human beings owned, beaten, sometimes killed, raped, sometimes the female slaves or the male slaves too, I'm sure, especially in Greece.
And so children grew up seeing a huge amount of chaos and violence and incest, and children, of course, were abused, as is the case, well, unfortunately, I think, growingly now, but children were abused in sexual manners as well.
And so that stuff, that chaos and That trauma being projected into the world of the gods where almost every conceivable crime occurs is a way of talking about the destructive nature of ancient Greek and Roman families.
It's a way of projecting that onto the gods and thus not normalizing it.
Metaphysically, right? I mean, if this occurs among the gods, then how can we stop it among people?
So I think in general, those ancient myths were people serving their abusers by projecting it onto the gods and therefore resisting any possibility of change.
Did you know that Gabor Maté is a famous physician and he's not a psychologist, I don't think, but he talks a lot about self-knowledge and he's very smart and very good at this sort of stuff.
He was on the show a couple of times.
Do you know that Gabor Maté used ayahuasca to treat his patients?
What do you think about it?
I don't know. I don't know.
Can this break a loop in someone's thinking, allow them to have greater access to self-knowledge?
I don't know. For me, just personally, there's no advice.
I can't give any advice on any kind of medication, as everybody knows.
But for me personally, grit your teeth and do the self-knowledge.
That's been the approach that's worked for me.
I never took any psychotropics.
I've never taken any drugs.
I've barely drank over the course of my life.
And so for me, it's just grit your teeth and do the self-knowledge work.
And that's what's worked for me.
Can other things work for other people?
I don't know. I don't know.
But it wouldn't be my approach for myself.
Steph, how do you think your life would have played out if you had grown up with today's technology?
Well, I wouldn't have achieved the consistency that I achieved before I became a public figure.
So the reason I became a public figure was because it clicked in my head how a stateless society could work.
And this came out of a debate I was having with somebody I worked with in the software industry.
I was a director of technology and I was having a debate with someone.
And it just struck me.
Wow. Wow. Well, dispute resolution organizations or DROs, this could really work, and I began to really play with the idea of how a society without a state could operate and function from an economic self-interest standpoint, which is the one thing you can always guarantee.
People will pursue their own self-interest, and if you can harness that for the cause of good and stability, you end up with, I think, about as perfect a society as you can possibly imagine.
Which is what I finally wrote about 20 years after the fact.
No, not even 20 years after the discovery, but 16 years after the discovery, I wrote about it in my novel, The Future, freedomain.locals.com.
If I had been a public figure beforehand, I would have been a monarchist.
I would have accepted the role of the state in things like police, national defense, justice system, courts, potentially prisons, and so on.
And I would not have emerged with the consistency that I emerged with because I didn't grow up with the technology to broadcast my ideas.
I actually wrote a novel about In the 90s about a guy who broadcasted his arguments across the internet using a camera.
Isn't it funny? Long before it was even really possible.
Let's see. Why do you think people don't want to strive to live good moral lives anymore?
I've read about polls that place living a moral life very low on the priorities list of young people.
Yeah.
Ideally, even if people's opinions and worldviews are very different, but evidently people don't even care anymore.
It's like total apathy.
Yeah.
So, I mean, there's lots of reasons behind it.
The fall of religion is the first and foremost.
Objectivity is tyranny to the manipulative because it gives people defense against the control of reality that is necessary.
To control people, you have to control people's perceptions and manipulations, but to do that you have to get them to not trust themselves.
So Christianity gave people and gives people a bulwark against manipulation because they can return to the examples of Jesus, the universal morality of Christianity, and this gives them a bulwark against being manipulated and controlled.
Of course, some would argue that then they get manipulated and controlled by priests and so on, and there is a danger of that, and Jesus is one of the first to recognize that, so that's why he says, at least in the Protestant tradition, your primary relationship should be with God and not with the mortal, so to speak, which is why in Catholicism, the Pope's semi-divinity or the Pope's infallibility is put forward.
So, why do people not want to live a moral life anymore?
Well, Morality has become increasingly dangerous to live.
It's increasingly dangerous to live a life of integrity and people want to survive.
And I'm not going to get mad about that.
I'm not going to complain about that because if people hadn't wanted to survive, let's say everybody had been...
Pure moral paragons in the past.
Well, I mean, everyone except the rulers, well, we just wouldn't have made it as a species, right?
I mean, we had to subjugate ourselves to the tribal collectivist reality of our environment just in order to survive.
So, this is why in the history of philosophers I'm talking about, that we know these philosophers because in general they are of utility.
To the powers that be.
We don't have a sort of neutral view of the history of philosophers or the history of philosophy.
Why are certain philosophers taught in government schools and government controlled universities?
Well, it's not because they're negative towards the powers that be, right?
So... I'm not mad that people submerged their integrity in order to survive, because you and I wouldn't be here if they hadn't, so it's just sort of a fact of life.
So, in general, let me put forward, it's a very general thesis, tons of exceptions, but it goes something like this.
Masculine morality tends to revolve around honor.
Feminine morality tends to revolve around shame.
which is why if you look at the past, if you slandered a man, he would try to fight you, either in a formal or informal manner, formal being pistols at dawn, like a duel where you go at dawn and take 10 paces apart, formal being pistols at dawn, like a duel where you go at dawn So there would be, you know, that this would be to regain your honor and so on.
This could be as far as war.
This could be incredibly destructive and negative, of course, of Hatfield McCoys or what's talked about in the South in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Just this low-rent trashy cousin shooting cousins until there's virtually nobody left.
So, So masculine morality tends to be around honor and courage.
And I remember as a little boy creating games of war with my friends, and there was honor in...
Shoot, quote, quote, right?
Shooting an enemy with your pretend wooden or your pretend stick pistol who had, quote, killed your friend.
And there was honor also in making sure that the wounded got back to safety.
There was honor in going back to patch up somebody who'd been wounded.
And so there was a lot of courage under fire and there was a lot of honor involved in that.
Now, in the feminine world, though, the morality tends to be around shame, in that if you see, if someone disagrees, person A disagrees with person B, and Either there's an honorable debate or some sort of conflict that's out in the open,
or if person A kind of starts a whisper campaign to destroy the reputation of person B in a fairly untraceable manner or a manner that's not really possible to respond to, Then that's more on the female side.
And I say this, you know, shame and honor are both, they're not unimportant in the pursuit of morality, but they can be exaggerated beyond any kind of balance or any kind of personal integrity.
So what's happened, of course, is that Honor is necessary when there are physical consequences for failing to fulfill your honor, right?
So the honor is don't lie about someone.
And the negative consequence of lying about someone is they're going to challenge you to a duel.
And you either go and get half your kidney shot off.
Or what you do is you refuse the duel in which case you're shunned from society and no sort of quote honorable or upright or decent men will have anything to do with you.
And that of course means that they will oppose any marriage you might have and your wife will be cut off from her social circle and your kids will grow up alone.
So there's a huge negative consequences for all of these things.
And so yeah, negative consequences from a physical standpoint, pretty important.
And that's so onerous is designed to help you avoid that.
Negative consequences from a shame standpoint, that you'll be shamed by people spreading lies about you, which you can never really identify and fight, sort of the mean girls phenomenon.
That's a different matter. Now, of course, as men have been withdrawn from the sphere of raising children, I mean, slowly and patiently, and some I think it's a plan and some of it's just happenstance.
As men have been withdrawn from the raising of children, we've turned from an honor culture into a shame culture.
And again, this is no negative thing towards women.
This is just how things operate.
And so, and there's lots of reasons why men develop more honor-based morality and women develop more shame-based morality.
And again, no hate to either gender and both are important components of morality.
But the replacement of men in the raising of children with women in the raising of children, or rather the displacement of fathers and male authority figures, has turned us into a shame-based culture.
Now the problem with a shame-based culture is you lose free speech.
That's the problem. Let's see here.
My wife has begun...
To alter her financial contribution to our agreed-upon marriage arrangements.
We verbally agreed to split expenses 50-50.
I pay for my children's expenses.
I put an average of X amount of dollars in our joint checking account every year to cover Christmas vacations and medical bills, etc.
She refuses to acknowledge the reality of the situation and hurls verbal abuse my way when explaining the situation.
She often claims I'm stealing from her.
I make X amount of dollars per year and she makes about half that.
I save X amount of dollars per year for our future and she gets her nails done.
Recently she has not been contributing to our joint checking as usual and causing disturbances to our finances and stability.
She moved over two counties and we were married three and a half years ago.
I have two children with a previous wife, three beautiful and wonderful young girls.
She claims I have sacrificed nothing and she everything and she changed teaching positions and I stood behind her during a...
DUI conviction. Wow.
She put down X amount of dollars on her home from her home sale, and I'm grateful to her, but she claims it's only her home while pressuring me to invest into it by building an X amount of dollars deck, the repairs, etc., This also shielded her monies from long-term capital gains taxes.
I paid X amount of dollars cash for moving, furniture, etc.
in a new home. Please help with advice as I am shaken and have no idea how to move forward, Steph.
I asked earlier about this refusal to acknowledge reality.
She always claims all disagreements are solely my fault.
I am stealing from her somehow, although I make more.
No. I am a successful job occupation and my other friendships and work relationships are rock solid.
She also does not meet my physical needs, either intimately or emotionally, and everything is conditional.
She will lay down her responsibilities and pile them on me.
Whenever she fabricates, she does not get what she wants.
She's also recently stole X amount of dollars from my investment account by...
Hacking into my basic accounts and claims I owed it to her.
It's all insane. I'm getting gaslit and cornered via verbal abuse and manipulation by withholding affection, etc.
Please advise. Is this beyond repair?
Has she never loved me, as I assume?
And should I leave the relationship and never look back?
Well, as you know, I never tell people what to do.
It would be pointless, right?
I mean, if you're trying to teach someone something and you simply elbow them aside and do it for them, they really don't learn much, right?
So, you say that your friendships are rock solid.
Why don't your friends warn you about this aspect of your wife?
That's number one. So we have to get out of this hyper-individualistic mindset because it crushes us with an excessive burden of responsibility.
We all need...
We're a tribal species.
And why are we a tribal species?
So let's say you go hunting with six other hunters.
And the goal is to circle the prey and then drive it to a central location with noise and then kill it with arrows.
I'm back at Roman's tribe.
So let's say that's your plan.
Now, you're only one part, right?
You're, what did I say, seven others?
So you're one-eighth of the hunting party.
You may be the leader and so on, in which case maybe your responsibility doubles, but it's still only a quarter.
You can't either claim total victory or total loss if the hunt succeeds or the hunt fails.
Why? Because the responsibilities are spread out among a tribe, among a group, in this case, of hunters.
If you're on a soccer team and you win, there's no one person who can say, I won it all by myself.
If you lose, there's no one person who can say, I lost it all by myself.
Let's say that you are doing a penalty kick and you miss, right?
Okay, well, sometimes that's just going to happen no matter how good you are.
But if you have a weakness with penalty kicks, you shouldn't be doing the penalty kicks.
If you have a weakness with penalty kicks, but you're going to end up doing penalty kicks, your teammates should help you improve your penalty kicks because you're all part of a team.
So if you are not...
You know, if you're living alone on an island somewhere in the middle of nowhere, then yes, you're pretty much responsible for everything that happens to you.
But you have, in this situation, you have friends, you have colleagues, you have immediate family, you have extended family, you probably have, let's go conservative here, you probably have 25 people in your life who claim they love you and want the best for you.
They claim they love you and they want the best for you.
Okay. If you have 25 people in your life who claim they love you and want the best for you, how do you end up in this situation?
That's a central question about your life, and this is something everybody needs to look to, and not just in terms of other people looking out for you, but you looking out for other people.
I had some questions about a friend of mine who's dating.
Two-hour convo laid out my thoughts.
That's what you've got to do. Don't tell them what to do, obviously.
If they choose to do whatever they do, they're going to, right?
But at least you gave them your feedback, right?
They can choose what they want to do.
But at least they have information that you, I think, are honor-bound.
Because if you don't give your thoughts on a potentially challenging situation to someone, and then that challenge takes them down, you are part of that, right?
Mess. You are part of that mess because you withheld information that was essential for them to make better decisions.
You are part of that mess.
I can't emphasize this strongly enough.
We are all bound in together in the good and bad of life.
We spend so much time, I don't know, stupid watching sports together or going to bars or, I don't know, going out for dinner or talking politics and, you know, whatever.
I've never got the sports watching.
It's never made any sense to me at all.
But we spend so much time with each other doing nonsense things.
Ooh, let's play Dota 2 together online.
Hey, did you hear about that leak of Grand Theft Auto 57?
You know, like we spend so much time on nonsense, which is fine.
Nonsense is fine. Nonsense is fine.
It's not like, you know, but you can't eat icing for a living, right?
You won't live very long. So...
We're all bound up together.
I mean, why do I do these call-in shows?
Well, because they're valuable, because they teach me things as well, because I think it's a great way to really help people in a public square, because these kinds of conversations generally occur in a very private sphere, and making them public, I help normalize these people having deeper conversations.
But because if I have the ability to help people gain some kind of wisdom or perspective on their life, if I refuse to do that, I'm bound up in their failures.
It's just the way that it is.
Because we're a tribal species.
Because we're a tribal species, like, why don't we have eyes in the back of our head?
Because we're a tribal species. So we have other people to watch our backs.
Right? You always see this in two guys with swords and there's guys all around them.
What do they do? They stand back to back.
And that way they have eyes in the back of their head.
You got my six. You got my blind spot.
Why have we developed the capacity to have blind spots?
In other words, to really focus to the exclusion of other stimuli because other people are supposed to watch our backs.
Why have we developed such a great capacity for love and self-delusion when we really fall for someone?
Because other people are supposed to be watching our backs.
You've seen this trust exercise where people say, catch me, and they stand on a chair and they fall back and people catch them.
Why are they able to fall? Because people catch them.
They wouldn't do it otherwise. You occasionally see a meme where they fall the wrong way or whatever it is.
I remember we did this trust exercises in theater school where we would climb from one end of a big room to the other using people.
You'd climb on top of people.
They'd go from the back to the front and you'd flow over on a sea of people from one side of the room to the other.
And that was to help us understand how we should support each other in a play or in a scene.
Right? So we have these, quote, blind spots, which again, is just the ability to focus.
Right? We have these blind spots because other people are supposed to be watching our back.
We don't have eyes in the back of our head because other people are supposed to be watching our back.
In other words, we developed forward focus vision because other people are watching our back.
Now what's happened is we have turned our monomania, our focus, our OCD obsessions relative to other species, we've turned that from a strength to a weakness.
Why? Because now we're focused on one thing and nobody's watching our back.
And are you watching the backs of those around you?
How did you end up in this situation with this, what you describe as a sort of very selfish and entitled wife?
Who was watching your back?
Who watched your back in the marriage where you ended up, I guess, leaving or divorcing with the two girls?
When you got involved in a romantic relationship after the last marriage busted up, did your friends, or did your friends after the marriage busted up, sit down and say, hey man, we got a Sunday free, let's just talk through all of this stuff, let's figure out what happened, so it doesn't happen again.
The issue, this is a shadow cast by people not watching your backs.
Everyone in your life who claims to love you or care about you is intimately involved in every success and every disaster that you have.
Listen, I don't just say this for sentimentality's sake.
I don't just say this to sound cool or be nice.
When I say the quality of this conversation, the quality of what I do is intimately bound up with you, the listeners, you, the callers, you, the people who give me feedback.
I'm not kidding. It's a very real phenomenon.
I can't be any better.
Then you inspire me to be.
This is why I move heaven and earth to try and provide value to you in this conversation.
There's something Freddie Mercury, he said, Freddie Mercury years ago said, I can only sing as well as the audience wants me to.
It's kind of true. If they're cheering, exciting, he reaches new heights.
Which is why he did his best performance with his greatest, most enthusiastic audience at Live Aid.
I'm not a sole philosopher.
I'm not a sole performer.
I'm not a singular star in the night sky.
You and I and everyone in this conversation, we're all intimately bound up in the success and or failure of philosophy.
So... Look to your friends.
Did you see this?
Okay, if your friends can't see that this woman was dangerous, they can't care about you.
Because if they can't see deception, they can't see honor.
If they can't see lies, they can't see the truth.
And if they can't see the truth, they can't be moral.
So either A... They can't see the characteristics of the woman who became your wife, in which case they can't help you, but they can't love you either.
Because if you can't see immorality, you can't love morality.
Or they saw her, but decided to...
Hold their tongue, keep their peace, not interfere, right?
They avoided the challenge, right?
Everybody knows. When you talk to a friend, particularly about girlfriends, when you talk to a friend about a girlfriend, if you have criticisms, you might lose the friendship.
Everybody knows that. And I understand.
The genes don't want quality.
The genes just want more of themselves, right?
The genes don't care about morality, right?
The mammal side of us doesn't care about morality, just cares about making more mammals.
No hostility to it.
It's why we're all here, but that's a basic fact.
So everybody knows that if you bring criticisms to a friend about a date, a girlfriend, a fiancé, a potential wife, or a wife, if you bring criticisms, the friend is...
Not unlikely to choose the woman and reject you.
Or he might go to his girlfriend and say, oh, this friend had real criticism of you.
He had real criticisms or real questions about our relationship, in which case, you know, if she's an honorable woman, she'll sit down with your friend saying, look, let me explain things or let me understand or here's how I'm changing or it didn't happen or here's I'm going to therapy or whatever it is, right?
It's going to want to make sure that the friendship is maintained and the criticisms are addressed, right?
That's an honorable statement. Woman, not super common either for men or for women.
More likely what she's going to do is she's going to work to separate her boyfriend from the friend who criticizes her.
And again, a lot of times she's going to be very successful at that by running the usual shame-based slander campaign.
Or it could be as ridiculous as, you know, withholding sex if you're going to go and speak well of this friend or, you know, I mean, well, I'm just, you know, when you praise this guy who attacked me viciously, it just...
My heart goes cold and you won't have any sex or affection.
So I should just train you into this, right?
Again, this is not...
I don't ever imply you have sex when you don't want to have sex.
But what I'm saying is that it can be manipulative in this kind of way.
So your friends, did they watch your back?
You know, if you come back with your seven other co-hunters without any food...
Oh, it's all my fault.
It's all me. It's like, no...
If some guy didn't close the circle correctly, then the temptation of the group, the hunters, is to blame that one guy.
Ah, you let the buck get away!
Well, no, if he didn't understand or wasn't able or wasn't competent, all right, then that should have been addressed prior to putting him in a situation where the success depended upon his competence.
Everything in a tribe is a tribal responsibility.
Everything in a group, in a family, in a friendship is a friend.
There's no one person who just ends up in a disaster.
Now, that having been said, I genuinely have no clue what the hell couples are doing when they separate finances and pay.
I'll pay $12 for this, you pay $11 for that.
I don't understand. If you can't merge your finances, why on earth are you merging your lives?
If you can't merge your finances, why on earth are you merging your bodies?
If you don't have enough trust to merge your finances, how do you have enough trust to make new people and subject yourself to the laws of the state with regarding marriage and divorce and alimony and palimony and childhood?
I don't understand that.
I just don't understand that at all.
I never have. To me, it's one of the tests of trust.
Do you trust your partner with your finances?
And if you don't, that's an important factor.
All right. What to do from here?
I don't know, but I would definitely talk to my friends and say, did you see this?
All right. Some guy has noted that anti-theists have absent fathers because God is an exalted father and so they cannot connect with God easily.
Is this hypothetical new to you?
It was to me. What are your thoughts?
Yeah, I mean, but you could, this is the problem with some of these explanations that require psychology without philosophy.
Psychology without philosophy can explain just about anything.
So you could make a case that people who are atheists, which is not agnostic, but against God, the people who are atheists are atheists because their fathers were absent and they are angry at father figures.
God is a father figure and therefore they are against God.
You could as easily make a credible argument that people who grew up without fathers have such an absence of fatherly presence in their life that they would be immediately drawn to religion and would attempt to fill the father absence of their life with a spiritual father and so on, right? You could say that people who grew up with mean fathers are...
Anti-theists because they associate God, Old Testament God with a mean father and they rebel against their father, they rebel against God.
You could say that guys who grew up with nice fathers are theists because they look at New Testament dewy-eyed lamb holding Jesus as God.
So the problem is without philosophy, psychology can be used to explain just about anything by...
Vaguely convincing, selective sampling, right?
And so, I don't know, maybe there is a relationship between father absence, but if there is hostility towards God based on father absence, Then I would assume that what would be more common would not be father absence, because father absence occurs in war, right?
I mean, if you saw an upsurge in atheism after a war, that might be an indication that father absence was promoting this.
But I would assume that if we're going to take the case that God is a substitute or an amalgam of earthly fathers...
Then anti-theism or being anti-God would be more likely derived from the mother bad-mouthing the father and bad-mouthing masculinity as a whole, right?
So if you've got a mother who chose a guy who left or who cheated or whatever, right?
It was an addict. Then is she going to sit there and say, well, my fault.
Tons of guys out there.
I'm a young, attractive woman.
I chose this guy.
My bad. My fault.
Or is she going to say, you know, all men are terrible, all men lie, all men betray, all men deceive, right?
And then she has a son, right?
And so if she's going to pour all of that hatred of masculinity into the son, father absence is necessary but not sufficient for the antitheism.
So again, you can... I try not to go round and round this sort of psychohistory stuff.
I try not to go round and round trying to explain things from this kind of standpoint because you can find so many counterexamples.
And without philosophy, psychology can be used to explain just about anything in a pretty convincing way.
becomes a kind of sophistry.
I remember a suggestion you gave to get quality time with your spouse after your young children's bedtime, but in my family, sorry, we're totally exhausted at the time.
TV is the only reliable distraction during the day.
The kids would rather play with us than do anything else, but I feel guilty giving them a kid's TV in order to have uninterrupted time with my wife.
Any suggestions?
You're avoiding conflict, right?
So, So, TV is a distraction.
I mean, that's as old as when I was a kid.
Oh, your eyes are going to turn square if you watch TV all the time.
So, I think it's fine to have some time with your wife and give TV to your kids.
TV is not some sort of alien, I mean, as long as you're seriously vetting the shows, not some alien possession device.
But... What you need to do, of course, is sit down with your kids and try and look, say, we have a challenge.
I don't know how to solve it because, you know, your needs are so super important to me.
We have a challenge. I want to spend some time just with mom.
All right, mommy and I love each other.
We spent lots of time together. Before you came along, we're so happy you came along.
We absolutely love spending time with you, but, you know, you get sick of candy after Halloween, after a while, and I wouldn't, maybe don't say get sick of Halloween, but you know what I mean, right?
Find some analogy that the kids will understand of a too muchness and say, okay, listen, I want to spend some time just with mom, just chatting.
But I don't want you guys to just watch TV when I'm doing that, because TV is okay in smaller doses, but not great in larger doses.
So how do we solve this, right?
And get your kids enrolled and involved in the solution to the problem.
Now you could say, oh, they're super young.
It's like, You know, you'd be really surprised.
Sit down and have a serious conversation about challenges you have as a parent.
You'd be absolutely shocked at what kids can do in terms of the feedback.
So I would work on that. So, here's a punchy fellow.
It's a good question. Steph, you complained that people did not follow you from YouTube, but you spent five years manipulating people on YouTube.
You spent five years talking politics, promoting Trump.
You did not believe in what you were saying for those five years, assuming that you were telling the truth now.
Now you say that all politics is a farce, that the political system is blah, blah, blah.
You never believed in the viability of politics.
You started off your podcast 16 years ago talking about the futility of nagging the state.
But why did you spend five years manipulating your audience of close to a million on YouTube, telling them to vote Trump?
I never did.
This election is the most important ever, etc.
If you're so good at identifying abusers, why did you promote Trump?
Right now, it is obvious that Trump is or was a total buffoon, joker, fraudster, manipulator, incompetent political parasite who manipulated his most loyal followers, blah, blah, blah.
Also, if you spend five years manipulating your YouTube audience, how do we know you're not manipulating us now?
So, punchy, that's fine.
Criticism, totally fine.
But here's the thing.
So, the media was not telling the truth about Trump.
I mean, the series of videos that I did, the untruths about Donald Trump, I think there were three of them.
It's just pointing out that the media wasn't telling the truth.
Now, I think you can understand why it would be important for me to people to understand that the media doesn't tell the truth.
At a very personal level, you can understand why.
And again, I've talked about this a million times before, what that point was.
It's a way of breaking the hypnosis of the media, getting people to question the simulated or manipulated reality around them.
It's very, very important for an empiricist to Cut off the hypnosis of the sophists, right?
So I sort of talked about that.
Now, when it comes to me being manipulative, I told the truth about someone who was being lied about.
I'm not exactly sure how that makes me a manipulator.
Like, if somebody is saying that your best friend is a criminal when he's not, and I say, that's not true, he's not a criminal, here's the evidence, I'm not sure how that's manipulative.
Again, I'm happy to sort of hear it, but here's the thing.
If you give me a pejorative, if you give me a harsh criticism, like, Steph, you're manipulative, you were manipulative for half a decade, and then your examples are wrong, You understand who's really being manipulative here, right?
So if you want to criticize someone, get all of your facts, right?
Make sure that they're accurate.
Ask the person for feedback before...
I'm not expecting you to know all my 5,000 shows.
I mean, you can go to fdrpodcast.com and do the search for them and find them pretty easily.
But if you're going to take a run at me, which is fine...
You really have to make sure you get your facts.
Here are the quotes, right?
In context, right?
Here are the facts. Because if you just kind of blow up and rage at me and insult me, and it's an insult without evidence, right?
A negative judgment, particularly in a public square, without any evidence is...
It's an insult and it's manipulative, right?
So you don't want to display manipulation while accusing someone else of manipulation without evidence.
In other words, you don't want to show clear evidence of your own manipulation...
While accusing somebody else of manipulation while providing no evidence, that means that all the valid criticisms that you may or may not have won't get listened to you.
Like, if you scream at someone that screaming at people is always unacceptable, they're like, what's the matter?
Like, you're misfiring here.
Like, you're not even noticing what you're doing yourself.
So... With regards to Trump, yeah, Trump was very much an outsider.
He was outside the sort of Bush, Clinton, Obama dynasty that had been sort of in charge of American politics for a long, long time.
And he very much was an outsider.
And, you know, I think, to be fair, wasn't it kind of nice to have a couple of years without war?
I mean, was it four years, really, without war?
Now we're back to... War, right?
And all of that. So I thought that was alright.
I thought having a decent economy and the admittedly slim possibility that it was...
It's possible to outgrow deficits, to outgrow debt, to have the economy grow to the point where you could have more of a soft landing, that more jobs could be created, fewer people on welfare, that there's a way to grow yourself out of the welfare state, which means that there isn't a crash which is going to be incredibly destructive to hundreds of millions of people.
I think it was an interesting possibility, which again, I talked about.
And when Trump did bomb the airfields in Syria, came down on him like a ton of bricks.
I was also very critical of Trump, of course, for his massive spending.
And I was out of politics by the time all the later stuff came along.
Yeah, I mean, if something unusual happens, and a sort of white swan event or an incredibly rare event comes along, like you may be some MGTOW guy who's like, well, modern women are bad, I'm not going to date modern women, and then some woman comes along who's wonderful and thoughtful and kind and considerate and virtuous and rational and hardworking and all that, and you're like, okay, well, you said modern women were, it's like, well, Here's an example to the counter.
So, yeah, let's talk about this in more detail.
And again, I appreciate the feedback.
I really do. So, complain that people did not follow you from YouTube.
I identified it. And yeah, of course, I was kind of cheesed at the time.
But as the sort of shockative platforming wore off and I looked at the more objective metrics, I'm actually very thankful that people didn't follow me.
And I've expressed this many times.
I'm very thankful that people didn't follow me from YouTube because it Allowed me to move off politics, right?
Because if people aren't going to commit to following me, then I'm not going to commit to doing risky stuff like following politics.
And also politics just became...
Politics became boring because it just went back to the same old thing.
It just went back to the same old thing.
So let's see here.
Nagging the state.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was critical of the people who thought that Ron Paul could be elected, but Trump was electable, so it was a different matter.
Let's see here. Yeah, so you have to sort of give me specific examples of how I am manipulative.
And that doesn't mean changing your mind, right?
That doesn't mean... I've got an entire series of videos called I Was Wrong About, where I've changed my mind about a variety of things.
I've apologized to people I've wronged in the past or entire movements and theologies I've wronged in the past.
So if you change your mind about something based upon new information, saying that you're manipulative or whatever...
I mean, then nobody can change their mind.
Nobody can process new information.
Nobody can grow in your world because if you say anything that contradicts anything you could conceivably have said over the last whatever, right?
Then what? That's absolutely unacceptable.
Well, that seems kind of tyrannical in a way.
Like, if new information comes along, politics...
And also, I was covering politics long before Trump.
I started the True News, what, 2010, 2011?
So long before Trump, I was doing politics.
I did politics... Through Obama's tenure, I did politics long before that.
So this idea that there was some new thing, it's just not true.
So again, I've sort of explained why I wanted to push back against media falsehoods about somebody, because the way to point out that the media lies, so then obviously when people read about me, they have some more skepticism.
So I've sort of explained what I was up to.
Do I think I was hypocritical?
No. Do I? No, because some new event came along with new information.
And again, you know, four years without war saved how many human lives?
I mean, maybe that's bad in your book, but whatever, right?
So was I manipulative?
No, I was telling the truth about somebody who was being lied about.
I don't know that that was manipulative.
Again, if you have a definition that includes that, telling the truth about somebody who's been lied about, totally fine.
If you're going to accuse me of being manipulative or deceptive and so on, but you don't have any quotes, and you don't ask me as well, like, can you help?
This seems like a contradiction.
Can you help me resolve it?
I mean, I think if you think someone's a decent person, and look, only a decent person would be troubled by accusations of manipulation or hypocrisy or whatever's going on here, right?
So if you think someone's a decent person, then accusing them publicly without evidence and without giving them a chance to explain themselves or without researching how they might have explained themselves in the past, that's kind of manipulative, right?
And a little abusive, a little bit, right?
So I want you to be listened to by the people in your life.
I want you to have your criticisms taken seriously by people in your life.
And so I'm telling you how to get your criticisms taken seriously.
Don't publicly launch attacks on someone with no evidence and getting basic facts wrong.
That's not going to help your credibility.
People then have an excuse to simply not listen to you, because if you're so concerned about manipulation, then why are you manipulating my audience with these public accusations with no evidence and without asking, has he addressed this in the past?
I mean, do you really think you're the first person to point this out or to bring this up as an issue?
I've talked about this many, at least half a dozen times in the past, in great detail, with evidence.
So, you know, charging in With very little knowledge, with wild accusations that are mostly false, without asking any questions, without defining your terms, it's displaying the kind of vices that you're accusing me of.
So you're falsely accusing me of these vices while You're expressly and empirically displaying these vices yourself, and that's just not going to help people listen to, look, you're a passionate person.
You care about truth.
You care about morality. You care about integrity.
Wonderful. I think that's great.
And again, taking a run at me, totally fair, totally fine.
I take runs at people. It's absolutely fine, and I welcome it.
Every show, I'm like, questions, criticisms, issues, whatever you have that's negative to say about me, that's wonderful.
It's very helpful. I certainly don't want to be in error, and aggressive people can really help me figure out if I'm in error about something.
So you care about virtue.
You care about public figures.
You care about integrity. And I'm just trying to give you some helpful advice, hopefully, to have you not live in this frustrated environment or this frustrated life where you have criticisms of people but you keep getting rejected.
Your criticisms keep getting rejected and downplayed and ignored.
I don't want that life for you because that's very frustrating.
And I sympathize with your desire to make the world a better place and for people to improve their behavior.
So I'm just saying, if you want to take a run at someone, gather the information, ask around if they've got a lot of material, do your searches.
Again, you can go to free domain, fdrpodcast.com, do a search for every time I've talked about this stuff.
And just make sure you get your facts right.
Make sure that there isn't an explanation that has some credibility that you have overlooked.
Don't just gather your frustration into a ball and throw it blindfolded because it's not going to hit its target.
And in this case, most likely it's Probably going to go off in your own face.
So I'm really trying to help you get more credibility to your criticism.
So again, happy to hear more, but you have to have a definition of manipulation that includes me that doesn't also include exactly what you're doing.
That's not going to work. I love your work, Steph.
I peacefully raised my now 30-year-old daughter with attachment parenting and unschooling.
Do you know anything about pre-Christian European mystery school Gnosticism?
Some say Socrates was an initiate.
They claim psychedelics are a tool of observation.
At the local mystery cult eight men and eight women would take, say, psilocybin mushrooms and report their observations.
They predicted the problem of the rise of the Abrahamic cults and their child abuse practices like circumcision.
I credit psilocybin healing my depression by accelerating empathy with my childhood.
I felt like I got five years of therapy in a dozen sessions.
Are you open to psychedelic therapies?
I dislike that way.
It's just a personal preference, but I dislike that way of phrasing the, are you open?
Right? Because it's kind of manipulative because then it's like, well, no, I'm closed.
It's like... I'm open to reason and evidence, but the problem is that psychedelic therapies mess with sense perception.
I mean, that's my understanding.
I'm no expert on these things, but they're going to mess with sense perception, right?
So you have a relationship to your inner and outer world, and things that mess with that, I'm not a huge fan of.
Just personally. I can't tell anyone else what to do, but just personally.
So if people go on an LSD trip, I know that's stronger, right?
But if people go on an LSD trip, then the LSD is messing with their sense data.
It is shattering the relationship between the body and the mind, right?
Because the sense data comes through the body and imprints itself upon the mind.
As an empiricist, I rely on sense data from the body to create and maintain universal principles within my mind.
Anything which messes that up is threatening to rational empiricism.
So I'm not a big fan of these kinds of things.
And it's hard to say.
If it helps you, is it good?
Not necessarily, right?
Let's say that you have increased empathy with your childhood, right?
It's a good thing to do. But let's say because you accelerated that increased empathy, you overstepped a true understanding of the evil that was done to you and the evildoers who did it to you as a child.
So then my question is not about the past, but about the present and the future.
So I think one of the reasons why using philosophy as a robust tool in self-knowledge exploration, in the exploration of personal history, personal trauma, is that the wound...
That foundationally is moral, I believe, that the wound of the past, because what hurt, like, we all fell down and skimmed her knees as kids, and we all, you know, got bloody noses as kids, and we all had whatever, like, head injuries, little head injuries as kids.
Those don't produce lasting trauma.
I mean, they produce caution, which is a good thing, it's kind of what they're designed to do, but they don't produce lasting trauma.
Why? Because it's not moral injuries.
They're just physical injuries. They're just physical injuries.
I'd never broken a bone, but I did once.
I cracked a forearm on a bike.
I don't have any trauma about that.
I can't quite bend my arm straight compared to the other one, but I have no trauma on it.
I banged my knee in St.
Louis, chasing my daughter down a corridor, playing, and it took a while to heal.
It doesn't produce no trauma in me.
It's just a challenging physical situation to fix, right?
So, what is it that produces the trauma?
What produces the trauma is the cruelty, is the sadism, is the violence, is the viciousness.
Even the violence doesn't produce trauma.
So, It's the evil that produces the trauma.
Why is it that things that are merely physical don't produce like skinning your knee or breaking an arm, falling off a bike accidentally?
Why is it that they don't produce lasting trauma?
Because they keep you safe through the pain of not being...
Careless or whatever it is, right?
So the physical pain is there to train you out of doing these things again in the future or putting yourself at that risk, right?
So the skinned knee is to say be more careful on your bike and we are more careful on our bike and so the pain is about the future.
Now if we end up being more careful then the pain has achieved its object and we are no longer in danger in the future or we're certainly in less danger in the future, right?
So pain is about the future.
So if you continue to have Trauma from childhood abuse, my guess is that most likely it's because you are still in a situation of risk in the present or future with regards to evildoers around you.
That you haven't accurately and deeply identified evil, its characteristics, its markings, its habits, its predatory zones, its control mechanisms and so on.
And if you haven't identified that through a deep moral analysis of your original pain, Then you continue to be in danger and when you continue to be in danger you will continue to be in trauma.
Trauma is a negative stimuli designed to provoke you into dealing with the source of the trauma so that you are safer in the future.
So, I mean, I remember reading this as a little kid, right?
Well, pain is unpleasant. Why do we have pain?
And the example was like you're some guy climbing a tree and you're getting stung on the back because you kicked a wasp nest you didn't even see or a bee's nest or whatever.
And you're getting stung on the back, but you don't feel any pain.
You don't feel any discomfort. And so you keep climbing the tree until the poison overwhelms you and you fall down and die.
So the pain is there to save you.
The pain is... You're in danger.
And so you've got to stop climbing.
And so my guess would be that if these kinds of therapeutics Diminish the trauma without you going through the necessary process of learning about evil, then it may lower your defenses against evildoers in the future.
It's a hypothetical.
It's a possibility. So I sort of put that out as a hypothetical.
So great questions, but I don't want to tax everyone's time too much, so I'll stop here.
But yeah, thanks everyone so much.
I will continue on with these questions.
They're absolutely fantastic, and I hugely appreciate everyone who has written in these questions.
You can submit more at freedomand.locals.com.
Lots of love, everyone. Take care.
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