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Oct. 6, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:38:44
An Introduction to Virtue!
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Time Text
Alrighty, ready. Hey everybody, it's Steph.
6th of October 2022.
My word, what a year it has been.
I hope you guys are doing well.
I hope you're having a good day.
And I hope, this is the thing that happens when you get older, I hope you had good sleep.
Do you remember this when you were a teenager?
I distinctly remember waking up after a night.
I used to go to discos quite a bit, to dance places, nightclubs, when I was in my teens.
And I remember just being out crazy late at a nightclub, having a blast.
I didn't drink much at all, but I do remember very clearly.
I had this funny little plastic grandfather clock, tiny one, that hung on the wall.
And I remember waking up after a good old snore.
I really haven't done this much in my life, but I woke up.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon.
Okay, just tell me, what is the latest?
Let me know in the chat. What is the latest you've ever slept in?
Man, that was something. That was something.
And... I'm sure that everyone's had those kinds of nights.
And that was something for me.
I'm generally a bit of a night owl.
I'm really productive at night.
And I will sleep in a little bit in the morning.
And I'm a slow riser.
I love that time in the morning.
Like you've woken up.
You think about your dreams.
You think about your life. You think about your plans.
At the moment, I'm writing a new book.
So I'm thinking about the new book.
And that time of dreaminess...
It's a really fertile and creative time, that time in the morning before the actual start of the day begins.
And the days are nice. Days are pleasant.
Days are good. Having a lovely time with my family and, you know, really enjoying my daughter's last couple of years of childhood.
Ooh, I'm going to miss that.
I'm going to miss that when she goes out into the world.
So I'm really enjoying these last couple of years of childhood because, you know what they say, sometimes the days are long but the years are short.
That certainly does happen to me.
Anyway, enough of me.
Enough of me. Karen, my friend, do you want to unmute?
And we're happy to chat.
Oh, I'm happy to chat. I'm sure you will be too.
Hi, Stefan. Can you hear me?
Yes. What's up? What's on your mind?
Okay. Well, I have no questions.
I just wanted to tell you, I heard your last stream with your daughter and you...
You and your wife did beautifully.
Your daughter is such a joy to listen to.
I just love hearing her speak.
You know, she's just, of course, well-educated, well-spoken, and I just wanted to let you know that I enjoy hearing her.
You and your wife did a great job.
Well, thank you. That's really, really kind.
What are your thoughts? I mean, I know people have a lot of mixed feelings sometimes when I do a show with my daughter.
I mean, obviously happiness at hearing a good and solid relationship.
What were your thoughts or feelings about hearing this kind of stuff go on?
Well, I just enjoy it so much.
And, you know, now I want to tell everybody about peaceful parenting.
Even though I don't know too much about it, my children are grown already.
But I just think you did an excellent job in your communication between the two of you.
You seem so close and, you know, she's knowledgeable.
And, of course, she's homeschooled.
I think that's wonderful, and that was the best for her.
And I just enjoy it.
That's all I wanted to say.
Well, thank you very much. I love her answer, and when y'all review movies and stuff like that.
Yeah, we were thinking of doing She-Hulk, but I really can't give any cash to Disney, so...
Well, I appreciate that. Now, if you don't know much about peaceful parenting, peaceful parenting is the idea that where you have the greatest power disparity, you have the greatest moral responsibilities.
And this is something that was kind of drilled into me when I was younger, and I think there's some real truth in it.
You know, if you and I are co-workers and we ask each other out or we go on a date or something, it may be a little bit awkward in terms of the corporate structure, but it's a whole different thing if...
I'm your boss and I'm responsible for your continued employment and your performance review and your salary and all of that.
And I ask you out. That's kind of a different matter because it's not so voluntary when there's a great power disparity.
So this idea that where the power disparity is greater, the moral responsibility is higher.
In other words, the best behavior has to be where you have the greatest responsibility.
degree of power over someone.
And there's this weird thing in society where we say...
Well, that's true in general, yes, that's true, but not with parent-child.
So parent-child relationship has the greatest power disparity in the world, ever.
And so we have this kind of funny thing where we say, okay, in general, where the power disparity is greater, the moral quality has to be higher, but not in the realm of parenting.
In the realm of parenting, the power disparity is the greatest And in general, in the parent-child relationship, and I don't just mean individually, in terms of individual parents and individual children, I'm sort of also talking about society as a whole.
With the parent-child relationship, the moral quality, the moral requirements are by far the lowest of any social relationships that exist.
So I'm not supposed to ask an employee out.
On a date, because that could be an abuse of power, potentially.
So you've got to be really sensitive about this kind of stuff.
But when it comes to children in society, we completely throw that principle out the window.
It's very sus when you think about it.
We completely throw that principle out the window.
And what we do is we say, oh, yeah, no, if you've got kids, man...
Well, you can scream at them, you can yell at them, you can call them names, you can hit them, and for a lot of people, not everyone of course, but for a lot of people, not only is that okay, that's good!
You don't want to be raised in those spoiled brats.
Boy, you know, when they hit kids in the 50s, you've got real quality kids, and now they don't hit kids at all, and they just pander to the kids, and everything's wonderful that the kids do, and nobody ever says anything or resists any of their impulses, and you've got these spoiled brats who can't hold down a job and are snowflakes.
So not only do we say...
That where the greatest disparity in power is, not only do we say we have the lowest moral requirements for good behavior, but in fact we completely break through that bedrock, that permafrost, and we drill down in the opposite direction and say...
Well, you know, men are bigger and stronger than women, so men have a special duty to not be violent towards women.
I mean, nobody should be violent towards anyone, we say, but men in particular, because they're bigger and stronger, should not be violent towards women, because there's a power disparity there, don't you know?
But parents are, in a sense, infinitely bigger and stronger than children, but there we say, oh no, you should hit your kids, you should discipline, you know, kids need discipline.
And even if you don't hit your kids, there is confinement.
You take them and you set them on that step for the time out, one minute per age.
If they do things that you disapprove of or are, quote, bad, you take them and you confine them and you punish them.
That's really apparently quite important as far as quality parenting goes.
So we have this very – I mean logically, morally – It's completely strange that, you know, you think of, I guess, a less than sign, right?
Sort of two widening lines.
Greater power disparity, higher moral requirements.
Ooh! Except for the situation where we have the most power disparity and then we have the opposite moral requirements.
You can't hit people, especially if you have power over them, but it's really good to hit children.
And people would never really make jokes and say, well, I'm an airline pilot, but I sure do like my wine.
And sometimes I'll drink wine on the job because that's kind of funny and cool.
And people would say, they wouldn't make those.
I'm a surgeon, but boy, do I ever like to have my red wine right before surgery.
Because, you know, surgery is just really stressful.
But you have all of these...
Women. Some men, I suppose, but it seems to be a female thing.
Where they say, well, parenting is stressful.
I need my wine. Got to have my wine moms.
Got to have my red wine.
Wine, wine, wine. This alcoholism while parenting is considered to be like a funny thing.
But there's no, boy, you know, I like to drive a truck and I got to have my wine because that would be illegal and rightly so.
So we have this do not operate heavy machinery while under the influence, but, you know, apparently you can't get through the day with your kids without some wine.
And that's...
Now, again, there are people who are alcoholics, and I have some sympathy for that, but people don't generally try to make it cool or funny.
And this is just kind of a trope that we have.
So we have these standards of interacting with each other where we don't Verbally abused.
We don't call names.
We don't hit.
We don't confine.
We don't lock in rooms.
I mean, can you imagine if you have an employee and the employee is late on providing some TPS report?
You know, TPS report is supposed to be done at noon and they don't get it to you until 1 p.m.
Can you imagine, in full view of all of the other employees, picking that employee up, sitting them down on a vent and say, you sit here!
For the next half an hour, and then you've got to apologize to me, and you've got to think about what you've done, and you've got to promise me to never do that again.
And if the employee says, I'm not sitting on this vent, what am I playing among us?
I'm going to get up, I'm going to walk around.
And you pick them up and you carry them back to the vent.
And you sit their butt down on that vent, because they were late with the TPS report, and they've got to learn.
And it's in view of everyone else.
Anyone who did that would be in unbelievable trouble.
It would be jaw-droppingly, incomprehensibly awful to do that to an employee.
But we do that with children.
This is the time-out, right?
We do that with children. People consider that a vast improvement.
Well, I used to hit my employees, but now I just force them to sit on a vent for half an hour, and I'd say one minute per year or whatever, right?
Because, you know, when you're three, three minutes seems like half an hour to an adult.
So peaceful parenting is simply the consistent application of the morality we take for granted everywhere else in the known human universe.
I mean, philosophy is about universality and consistency.
Just as science is about universality and consistency.
We don't say, well, the theory of evolution works really well on amphibians, but it doesn't work at all on lizards.
It works on mammals, but it does the opposite for birds.
It's universality.
We don't say that the theory of gravity works really well on matter that's painted blue, but when you paint that matter red, it completely reverses gravity.
That would be crazy. I mean, that would be insane.
And we have this bizarre, when you sort of look at it logically and morally, we have this completely bizarre approach towards children.
Where the most vulnerable people in society are the children.
They have no economic independence, no legal independence, no political independence.
They can't vote.
They can't leave.
They can't choose their parents.
All adult relationships are voluntary.
But children don't choose their parents.
And children have almost no recourse to legal protections.
I mean, I remember I was working in a restaurant.
I was about maybe 16 years old.
And the restaurant had a little bar, and there was a bartender.
And there was a, just sort of around closing time, bartenders have a volatile deplanting situation when it comes to closing time, right?
You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
And the guy was kind of drunk, the customer was kind of drunk, and at one point he threatened to punch the bartender.
And the bartender shrugged and said, yeah, go ahead, I'll call the cops, you'll go to jail.
I mean, that's a pretty wild thing.
It was wild for me to think about that, that you could just call the cops and somebody who hit you could go to jail.
Now, if you grew up with a single mom who's violent or a single father who's violent, in particular, I mean, it happens with two-parent households, but in particular, a single mom who's violent or single dad, And you get hit by your mom.
You can't call the cops.
I mean, I suppose you could, but if you were to be like, I don't know, 10 years old and say, my mom hit me, you call the cops, you say, my mom hit me.
I mean, I know in Sweden they banned it in, I think, 1966, but, you know, for the most places, people would be like, well, that's...
And even if it's illegal, let's say you call the cops, you say, my mom hit me, and then the cops come.
And sternly tell your mother to not hit.
Well, there's lots of ways to punish children that don't involve hitting.
You can confine them, you can take away their treasured possessions, you can lock them in a room, all of which are perfectly legal.
You can't do that with your wife, but you can sure do that with your daughter.
I mean, it's so completely bizarre.
When you think about it, I think it was Dostoevsky, the humanity of a society is ultimately determined or prima facie determined by how well it treats its prisoners.
No. No, that's nonsense.
The humanity of a society is displayed most evidently by how it treats its children.
Primitive societies are child-sacrifice societies.
So if you just take the basic moral rules that we apply, not just to and between adults, but to and between children, right?
If a child were to attempt to give a time out to another child, let's say that Bob and Sue are playing with a toy, and Sue has it, and Bob says, will you give me the toy in five minutes?
Yes, they put a timer on, five minutes comes, and Sue doesn't want to give him the toy, refuses to give him the toy.
Now, if Bob picks up Sue and puts her in a timeout, child to child, that would be considered aggression.
And wrong.
And of course, we do have the brain-bending contradiction of a parent literally hitting a child saying, don't hit people.
Or we have this ferocious brain-bending contradiction of talk back, talk back, talk Don't talk back!
So, if the parent is yelling at the child, this is parenting.
if the child then yells back at the parent well that's just shocking and appalling I mean I remember when I was in my early teens when I got big I was not too big a kid I'm almost 6 feet tall 190 odd pounds fairly fit And I started working out in my mid-teens.
But before that even, my mother was advancing to hit me, and out of anger and fear, I grabbed the door and swung it towards her so that she would be blocked from coming to hit me.
And it hit her on the hand and she was just, you know, she was just appalled and screamed and how dare you and blah, blah, blah.
And this is, we don't generally even think about these kinds of things as out of the ordinary or out of the norm, which just shows how nutty we are as a society.
And of course, if we look at children...
If we were to fundamentally make decisions as a society on what was best for our children, I write about this in my novel, The Future, which you can get at freedomand.locals.com.
And if you use the promo code UPB2022, all uppercase, you can get it for free.
But if we were to structure our society around what's best for children, what would it look like?
Well, we wouldn't be putting our kids in daycare.
Daycare is not great for children at all.
In fact, I mean, there's studies in Quebec, that's the province in Canada, where you can see the negative outcomes that occur to children in daycare.
And the earlier they're put in, generally the worse the outcomes are.
We wouldn't be putting them in daycare.
We would be, I mean, my moms would be breastfeeding and staying home.
Breastfeeding adds IQ points, skin-on-skin contact grows empathy.
So we would be doing all of that.
We wouldn't be putting our kids in traditional or government schools.
There would be other ways of educating them that children would be enthusiastic about.
We wouldn't impose various curricula upon them without their feedback and say so.
In the same way that kids don't...
A kid's movie is not released without a whole bunch of test audiences saying which...
Parts they like the best, which characters they like the best.
That's how the movie is developed and released, so it's not accidental.
You say, ah, well, children don't know what's best for them.
In other words, we can completely ignore the preferences of children and just inflict our will upon them.
Which is very strange.
Why would we not respect the needs and preferences of children?
How are they supposed to grow up with empathy if they're not empathized with?
How are they supposed to grow up thinking that other people have important needs that they should take into account when making their decisions if the children's needs are never taken into account when society makes its decisions?
And how on earth, how on God's green earth could we have A national debt and unfunded liabilities if we cared about our children.
If we cared about our children.
How could we have them born into, in some places, about a million dollars worth of debt before they even draw their first breath?
No wonder they're crying. How on earth could we use them as collateral to bribe voters and buy political power in the here and now?
This is why when people say, well, you know, it's really, really important that we leave a clean earth and a sustainable planet for our children.
Oh, I don't know. How about if we leave a sustainable economy for our children?
Is that possible? I mean, people make about a million dollars over the course of their life.
Being born a million dollars in debt makes you worse than a serf.
A serf in the medieval world.
Economy, a surf was somebody tied to the land.
Couldn't leave the land, was bought and sold with the land.
Not quite a slave, but not far off from it.
But you see, the surf would usually work about 20 hours a week, and not really at all in the winter.
In the medieval period in Spain, you got five months off every year.
So in many ways, children are born into...
An economic subjugation that's worse than being a serf.
They can't ever work their way out of it for the most part.
So, peaceful parenting is simply the radical notion that children are worthy of consideration.
Now, people say, of course, well, but, you know, you have to yell at, hit, and confine children because their brains are undeveloped.
Don't you know? And because their brains are undeveloped, you have to control their behavior.
You can't reason with them.
And so you have to yell, hit, confine, beat, whatever.
You can't reason with them.
Really? All right.
Can you reason with a dog?
No. Are you allowed to beat a dog?
No. Are you allowed to confine a dog for misbehavior?
Most people would view that as pretty negative.
What about old people whose brains are not doing so well, right?
They're called senior moments where you can't forget where you put your keys or you forget to mail something or whatever.
You have a senior moment, right? Okay, so their brains aren't functioning that well.
Are we allowed to hit seniors for leaving the stove on when they shouldn't?
It's dangerous, could burn the whole house down and be allowed to confine and beat seniors because their brains aren't working at top-notch?
No. That would be elder abuse, you see.
And it is. It would be.
What about people who have significant cognitive challenges?
They have some damage to their brain or something failed to develop their significant cognitive challenges.
Let's say somebody with Down syndrome or something like that.
Are we allowed to use violence and confine them?
no so the idea that we can be violent towards those we cannot reason with is in no way shape or place enacted with moral justification except in the realm of parenting what we say to our children is that might makes right That's what we say. That's how we act.
I'm bigger, I'm stronger, I have political and economic power, so I can inflict this upon you.
And then we're just shocked.
Shocked, don't you know? When children turn out to be bullies, when the bigger children end up bullying the little children.
Well, of course they do. It's like raising somebody in an English-speaking household and then being shocked that they end up speaking English.
When you raise children with the lived experience that bigger people can impose their violent will on smaller and weaker people, That their needs and preferences mean nothing, that the fact that they hate school means nothing, they've got to go anyway.
The fact that they find nothing of use in school doesn't matter, they've got to go anyway.
We have all of that in society that we can yell at, insult.
And I say in my book, when I talk about this, or rather when the characters debate about this, I put verbal abuse in the category of a violation of the non-aggression principle in parenting.
Now, verbal abuse is a terrible thing in general.
But between adults, it's voluntary.
In other words, if you have a friend who puts you down or insults you repeatedly or whatever, then you can just choose not to see that friend.
If you have an abusive boss, you can choose to quit or transfer or work to get him fired, as I've actually had to do in points in my career.
You manage upwards with a spike, with a kind of economic shift, so to speak.
So you have lots of options and the relationship fundamentally remains voluntary.
And your brain has already developed, right?
So you already have your adult personality.
Your brain is not nearly as plastic or malleable.
But verbal abuse in an enslaved or trapped situation with regards to parent-child with a forming and developing brain has a huge effect on the personality.
It is a form of toxicity that is introduced into the child.
And gives them, you know, difficult things to wrestle with for the rest of their life.
And verbal abuse has, in a way, in many ways, more lasting impressions upon the personality than physical violence does.
Physical violence is, you know, clearly wrong for children, and it's a wound that heals usually, and they can remember it.
And it's not justified by society as a whole, but some of the subtle personality reforming poison drip of negative language has many more effects.
And I think if you talk to people who've been physically abused and verbally abused, the physical abuse is often in the past, the verbal abuse is something they usually still have to wrestle with, even as an adult.
So, yeah, peaceful parenting is simply the idea that you can reason with children, you should reason with children, and if you can't reason with children, you don't get to hit them.
Can you imagine? If we have this rule that says, well, you know, if you're not being rational, I can just belt you.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine like a husband, you know, hits his wife, the cops come by and the husband says, hey, she wasn't being reasonable.
I was giving her facts, data, evidence.
She wasn't listening.
She wasn't being reasonable. She thought I was having an affair, right?
I heard from...
I had a message of affection from somebody called Tiffany, and she thought I was having an affair.
So we called Tiffany.
Turns out Tiffany's my second cousin.
We grew up together.
No affair. She lives in Thailand.
Tiffany from Thailand. But she still thought I was having an affair.
So she's being irrational. She's yelling at me.
So I hit her. She wasn't being rational, you see.
So I got to hit her. You try that in a court of law.
Won't happen. They'll say, okay, even if we accept that your wife was being completely irrational and not listening to reason, you don't get to hit her.
See, that's the standard we have, adult to adult.
My boss fired me even though I had a perfect performance review.
He wasn't being rational. So I hit him.
Right? I mean, this would be crazy.
Couldn't have a functioning society like that.
But that's how parent-children works, parent-child works, authority-child works, and that's how our economy...
Our economy is based almost entirely...
It's funny because, you know, they say, oh, you're a child laborer.
Boy, a child laborer is like the worst thing ever.
Can you believe they used to put children to work at the age of six?
Now, the fact is that society was so poor back then that if children didn't work, they generally would die.
But we say, child labor, child exploitation, can you believe that there are people in Singapore or China who get paid a pittance per hour, children who actually have to work?
And I saw this when I, in 1999, actually spent Y2K in Morocco with a friend of mine.
It was a really fun trip.
And I remember a couple of things from that trip.
First of all, the four main colours of Morocco.
And also going to the dye, the place where they made all the dyes and you had to hold mint in your nose, up against your nose because the stench was just so appalling.
And there were children making carpets.
Their little fingers, nimble fingers and so on, there were children making carpets.
And of course I emptied my pocket of all my money and gave it to the children because children are making carpets.
Child labour is the worst thing ever.
Can't let children work!
Really? So, exploiting children for economic gain is just this great and fundamental evil.
Yet still we have a national debt.
And still we have in America, what is it?
Close to $180 billion of unfunded liabilities.
Is it billion?
No, I think it's trillion.
Unfunded liabilities.
U.S. national debt, past what, $31 trillion?
Now who's going to pay for that?
The children. If it can indeed even be paid for, it's the children.
So you see, exploiting children for economic gain is just the worst thing ever.
But national debt, well, that just happens, man.
You see, putting children to work at the age of six is terrible.
But having them borne a million dollars in debt, Well, that's just politics, man.
And people don't even talk about it.
I mean, you see debates.
People don't even talk about paying off the national debt.
I mean, nobody talks about that.
Trump didn't talk about it. Biden obviously didn't talk about it.
Nobody talks about that. Because that shines a light on a very dark place in society.
People don't want to look there.
So instead of a society...
Which is like an inverted pyramid where the people at the bottom have the least power and are the most exploited and the most mistreated.
How about... And here's the funny thing, too, is that, you know, even on the left, well, they'll say, well, you know, we've got to protect the exploited, the proletariat, the workers, the powerless.
We've got to have unions and legislation and laws to protect these people.
But even they don't talk about the injustice of having children born a million dollars into debt.
Children born into economic serfdom to foreign banksters.
Don't talk about that. And the last thing I'll say about peaceful parenting is what's very strange, foundationally bizarre about parenting is that When you look back at the mistreatment of, say, blacks in American history, yeah, it's pretty explicit, right?
There was slavery, there was Jim Crow, segregation, right?
It was embedded in the laws.
Blacks were second, third, or non-class citizens, exploited and rejected.
And that at the time, there were some people who were uneasy about it, of course, but that at the time was accepted.
People didn't say about blacks in the past, oh, you know, they're wonderful, noble, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then behind the scenes or under the table would oppress them.
No, the oppression was right up front, right front and center, right?
And you can think about this about a wide variety of groups and races and sexes throughout history.
In the ancient world...
And I've talked about this, of course, in my History of Philosophers series, which you can also get at freedomain.locals.com.
But in the ancient world, there were a lot of slaves.
And people didn't say, well, you know, slaves are just wonderful and equal citizens, and we would do anything for our slaves, and slaves are the very best among us, and we would sacrifice anything to make the slaves' lives better while still holding them in slavery.
No, they said, well, we won the war, we get to keep the slaves.
And other people would argue that, well, slavery was, you know, some people are better off, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, this was the argument that was put forward by just about every ancient thinker.
The idea that we would have a society without slavery is 18th century England and onwards.
Before, the fact that there were slaves and people's view of slaves was congruent.
Wrong, but congruent.
There was no contradiction. But here's the funny thing about parenting.
Across the world, parents say, I would do anything for my children.
My children are the world.
I believe the children are the future, is that old Whitney Houston song.
And we worship and venerate our children and promise them the very best and say that we would do anything for them.
No sacrifice is too great.
My kids are my life.
I would do anything for my kiddos.
This is what we say.
We elevate them to the highest moral standing.
And that's not all.
Peaceful parenting I was taught that in many ways.
Now, the abstract, the philosophy, that I worked on myself.
But when I was growing up, and this is still the case, right?
When I was growing up, what did I watch?
I don't know, The Flintstones, Lever to Beaver, My Three Sons, Scooby-Doo, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home.
And in all of these shows, children were never hit.
Children were never insulted.
Children were parented peacefully.
And my three sons, was it Fred Ward or Leave it to Beaver?
And the older stuff was sort of beyond when I was watching many shows, but there was family ties with Michael J. Fox.
Where the children were all treated reasonably by some hippy-dippy parents, negotiated with.
You had family ties with the Olsen twins and, oh gosh, John Stamos and that other comedian who died recently, Bob, someone or other.
And what happened?
Well, they had a talking stick. Everybody was reasonable.
Everybody negotiated.
Nobody was ever hit. Nobody was ever yelled at.
Nobody was ever put in a timeout.
Nothing like this ever happened.
So this is the truly insane thing about the world.
It's not just the modern world, it's the world throughout history, but it's particularly acute in the modern world, is that there's all this virtue signaling about how children are wonderful and we love our children, we do anything for our children, and everybody, everybody who has a TV got thousands of hours of instruction on peaceful parenting through sitcoms.
Eight is enough! No spanking scenes.
Now, you would see spanking scenes occasionally in some of the shows set in older periods.
Oh, Little House on the Prairie.
I think occasionally kids would be taken out back to the woodshed, but you'd never see it.
You'd never see the hitting. And this was, I think, a nod to an older time.
It was set in the 19th century, I think, right?
Swiss Family Robinson. Children treated well.
When I grew up...
The books that had a significant influence on me were the Enid Blyton books.
Mallory Towers and The Famous Five were the two that I read the most.
I actually had a great time reading them again with my daughter.
She was a wonderful writer.
And in those stories, they were all written, I think, in the 40s and 50s or something like that.
In those stories, there were parents and there were children.
And the children were never hit, never insulted, never yelled at.
In the 40s and 50s, these were massively popular books in England.
Enid Blyton was like the children's author for at least a generation.
So peaceful parenting is what people say is their ideal and how they actually live.
It's all over the media.
I mean, tell me, the last movie, I mean, there's been a few, obviously there have been a few, but they're specifically around dysfunction, right?
So, the movie Precious was set in the black community, there was child abuse, there are a couple of other movies that you can think of where children are abused and mistreated.
Of course, you can...
And here's the interesting thing, too.
Even in the Jeffrey Dahmer series on Netflix, the child is not directly mistreated, but he witnesses mistreatment.
So he's got a mother who's a drug addict, he's got a father who has a temper, and the father yells at the mother, and the mother yells at the father...
And the mother passes out from drug use.
But the child himself is not directly abused.
Now, to produce someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, you have to be directly abused, but they can't show that.
It's far too painful for people to see children being abused.
And so, peaceful parenting is the absolute sacred value of society And people receive thousands of hours on how to negotiate with peacefully children through media, through movies, through television, and so on.
And yet, with this unquestionably elevated ideal, with thousands of hours of instruction, when you talk about people actually living the values that they proclaim and love,
When you talk about people living the values they proclaim and love, when you say to people, oh, okay, so you want the very best for your children, here's the data on how bad spanking is, on how bad verbal abuse is, on how bad some forms of pedagogy and instruction are,
on how bad it is if you go to work when your baby is little, if you divorce, The statistics that come out of the single mother universe.
If you say to people, oh, you want what's best for your child.
You'd do anything for your child. You'd sacrifice anything for your child.
Well, then try not to get divorced.
Try and work things out. I do what's best for my child.
Anything for my children. Oh, okay.
Here's the facts about what's best for your children.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I say that I want what's best for my children, but now you've given me the facts about what's best for my children, you're just a cult leader.
I mean, this is the view that a rational person has of this generalized madhouse called society.
Oh, you want to get to...
Dallas? Oh, you have to take this highway to get to Dallas.
You're desperate to get to Dallas?
Because Dallas is the closest hospital and you're bleeding out and you're desperate to get to Dallas?
Oh, just take this highway, man.
This will take you straight to Dallas.
You evil bastard!
It's crazy. It's wild.
I mean, even Whitney Houston, right?
I believe the children are our future.
Teach them well and let them show the way.
How does she treat her daughter?
She's got the ideal.
She's got the training.
Just the opposite. And so the ideal is camouflage.
Like the guy who pretends to be really pious but is kind of a degenerate.
The piousness is a camouflage so that he can be less likely to be suspected of degeneracy.
And, of course, proclaiming your endless devotion and love for your children is camouflage in general so that you can...
Mistreat them. So again, for more on this, you can get my book, The Future, at freedomand.locals.com.
And yeah, sorry, I hope that wasn't too long a rant, but obviously this is a topic very close to my heart.
And so the reason why I think it's interesting, I mean, Izzy likes doing the shows, and I, of course, enjoy doing the shows with her enormously.
But you see, she's almost 14, right?
She's taller than my wife, which is not...
The greatest achievement in height known to the universe.
But, you see, she is, I mean, approaching her mid-teens, right?
Now, from before she was born, I said that parenting as a whole is generally targeted to the teen years.
So... When your baby's a little, you can't spoil them.
You do everything that they want and need because they can't supply anything to their own comfort, even comforting themselves when they're upset.
And then there's supposed to be this terrible twos.
The terrible twos is when the child is reacting to the hypocrisy of the adults.
So, you know, oh, you're my daughter.
I love you. I would do anything for you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, can you stay home today?
No, no, no. I've got to go to work.
I don't like this school.
Can we do something else? No, no, no.
You've got to go to school. So anytime that the child asks the parent to do something, the parent says, oh, I'd do anything for you.
Oh, can we build a fort out of the couches in the living room?
No, it's a big mess. It takes a lot to clean up, and I think I'm getting a headache.
I certainly mean to laugh, but...
Children are constantly scanning for hypocrisy.
And so, my daughter's never had a temper tantrum.
Ever. Doesn't mean she never gets upset, doesn't mean she doesn't get angry, but it's rare.
And why would she? Anger is a form of self-defense when your preferences are being violated unjustly.
That doesn't happen. And so what I think is interesting is that the teen storms, as I called them from the very beginning of this show, the teen storms are what you parent for.
So right now, she's got a peer group.
She's got independence. She'd love to get a job, right?
It's tough to do that at that age.
Now, back in the day, I had already a job for two years by the time I was her age, but it's tougher to do now.
But you see, she's supposed to be going through all of this really difficult, eye-rolling, to heck with you, mom and dad, all of this teen storm stuff, right?
And the theory was, peaceful parenting will not result in hostile, dysfunctional teenage years.
That's the theory. And I hope that you can tell that in practice, Well, it's worked out even better than I thought.
Why would you be angry at people who love you and treat you well?
I mean, that would be incomprehensible.
It would be like saying, well, I'm working out hard, but I'm losing muscle mass.
That would be incomprehensible, right?
I'm eating fewer calories than I burn, but I'm gaining weight.
This would be like a violation of the laws of physics.
This object at rest tends to stay in motion.
Things just don't happen. Why would you be hostile towards people who love you and treat you very well?
I mean, the only reason that people would ever be like that is because they're suspicious because in the past they were treated really badly.
I mean, of course, some people are just waiting for the theory to fail because they don't want to believe that it's true.
I understand that. I understand that.
I mean, if you've already been an aggressive parent, then you're not particularly happy at the peaceful parenting thing working out.
I understand that. I understand that.
I mean, too bad, so sad.
Sorry. It doesn't matter.
I mean, if you've already been a smoker, For 20 years and then you find out that smoking is bad for you, you're going to feel bad.
Does that mean we should never tell people that smoking is bad for them?
I mean, of course not. Society has to progress.
If you made your living as a slave catcher and then slavery gets outlawed, as it bloody well should have been even before, does that mean you're going to feel bad, man?
You're out of a job! Well, too bad, so sad.
We have to progress. We have to progress.
And I have some sympathy, but not really since the 1940s, right?
Since peaceful parenting was continually displayed in mainstream media.
And what I mean by that is that people would not have tuned into a show that reflected to them accurately back how they themselves parented their children, right?
So most people still, even now, Most people hit their children.
But there's no show wherein children get hit.
So, how would people react if, in a popular show with parents and children, if a child was hit?
How would people react?
Well, they would be appalled.
They would write letters.
They would try and get the entire show cancelled.
They would report to the regulatory Boards for broadcasts.
It would be shocking and appalling.
In other words, if people saw in TV or in the movies, if people saw an accurate reflection of how they themselves parented, they would be outraged, shocked and appalled and horrified.
But that's what you're doing.
I mean, I'm sorry, if you look into a mirror and see a monster, it's probably not the fault of the mirror.
So, it's a strange world that we live in, man.
It's a strange, strange world.
All right, let's move on to another topic.
Thank you for your intelligence. Mark, you have a comment, question, issue?
Just unmute yourself, brother, and I'm all ears.
Can you hear me? Go for it.
Hi, I just want to say that I'm really thankful for all your other content that you've produced.
You helped me personally and I just wanted to show you my appreciation and tell you to keep up and never let go.
For example, for me, you helped me to understand more economics.
Even now, I'm in a master's degree at the university here in Quebec and you've taught a lot of things that they never teach us in school and I just wanted to say that I'm really thankful for all of it.
For example, when you said that the government's money is other people's money, they never tell you explicitly that.
The way you introduced me to libertarianism and everything, it really helped me understand more the world and be a more mature person.
I just wanted to tell you that I'm really thankful for all you've done for the people.
Well, I appreciate that. That's very, very kind.
This obviously means a huge amount to me because You know, philosophy can be a little bit of a slog at times.
And as far as philosophers go, I mean, I'm doing this whole History of Philosophers series.
I have it fairly easy relative to most philosophers in history.
So I have great sympathy for them.
And it's a very kind and wonderful thing that you've said because that helps me.
It does help me in my life stay with integrity in what I'm doing.
So thank you very much.
I appreciate that. And best of luck with your degree.
All right, Monsieur Travord.
If you want to unmute, I'm all ears.
Mark, if you just wanted to mute yourself, thanks.
Yeah, Trevor, just unmute, and I'm all ears.
I'm actually, technically, I'm all forehead, but I'll do the ears thing for now.
Yeah. Are we on?
Yeah, go ahead. Can you hear me?
All right. Thanks, Steph. I was just glad to get the chance to talk to you, and thanks for your show.
It's been a great help for me over the years that I've been listening, but...
What triggered me to ask a question here is you were talking about slavery earlier and I remember it triggered a memory of something I read a long time ago in like Norse mythology or Norse writings and sagas that they always believed that there was like a thrall class of people like people who need to be subservient to something and it kind of seems that way with all these people who I guess would be more on the left and need to be Well,
I think that the power of our reason and the power of our imagination is so great that anybody who is not confined by some higher standard goes crazy.
I mean, this is the danger of mysticism is that mysticism is metaphysical narcissism in that if you feel something is true, it is true.
In other words, your feelings dictate reality.
And that is a monstrous elevation of a subjective state to a pretend universal truth.
So the creativity and fertility of our minds is so great that anytime we are not bound by any external standard, we go mad.
It's sort of like, think of how strong we are when jumping, right?
I mean, you could do this any time.
You just jump up onto a couch and so on, and you can jump up pretty high.
Now, what is it that brings you back down to Earth?
It's gravity. So, of course, if you can imagine jumping that strenuously with no roof or ceiling over you, you're outside, you jump that strenuously, but for some reason there's zero gravity, well, you would simply float off Out of the atmosphere, into space, and you would die.
So we need to be bound by something that brings us back to Earth.
We can range so enormously widely and deeply in our imaginations that if we don't have any discipline to bring us back to Earth, we get lost in We get lost in fantasy, and that's a delusional state that is incredibly dangerous.
And, of course, people who are lost in fantasy or who believe things are there when they're not or believe things are true when they're not, I mean, they're called psychotics.
And it's really a very terrible diagnosis for mental health where you actually have visual and auditory hallucinations.
Of course, we've heard endless tales of parents who believe that the devil is telling them to kill their children and then they go ahead and kill.
And then they – see, I don't know if people actually hear these voices or they just say that they do.
I don't know. I don't know that there's any way.
Maybe you could tell that in some sort of auditory processing system.
But people say, oh, you know, I hear these voices, and these voices are telling me to do terrible things, so off I go and do terrible things.
So these are all...
Appallingly, desperately terrible mental states to be in.
And I don't know that there's any particular cure or resolution to these things, which is why people tend to often end up with heavy medication in these sort of situations and environments.
So, yeah, I think that I don't believe in anything really like a thrall class unless we're all enthralled to reason, evidence, philosophy, science, and objectivity.
But we really do need...
To be bound by something.
Otherwise, we simply spread without limit.
We spread without restraint.
We spread without discipline.
And we spread without feedback or blowback.
And so I make this case in my novel very sort of briefly.
As society progresses, we get further and further from base survival.
So in a more primitive or less technological society, he who does not toil does not eat in general.
If you want shelter, you have to build it yourself.
If you want food, you have to hunt it or pick it yourself.
If you want to survive the winter, you have to plan for it, or there is no survival.
So we are really up against nose-to-nose, bald, bare, empirical, factual, implacable, unrelenting, unforgiving reality.
And again, I've sort of mentioned this before, but when I was working as a goldpanner and prospector, Well, you had to be really, really respectful of reality, of nature, of physics.
I mean, you know, that's a coarse phrase, fuck around and find out.
Well, if you didn't pay attention, if you're working with a flamethrower in the middle of nowhere and you burn yourself, well, it's two days to get to a hospital and you might not make it.
If you break a leg, if you cut yourself badly, any of the kinds of things that happen when you're working with heavy equipment in remote areas...
You can't fuck around. You can't dream or imagine or suppose or you can't will things in.
You can't talk your way out of anything.
If you're in university and you forget an assignment, you can, I don't know, get a doctor's note from a friend or you can go and try and talk your way out of it.
And if you get a bad mark, you can try and talk your way into getting a better mark and If you get pulled over by a cop in your car, you can try and talk yourself out of a ticket.
So there's all of this stuff when you're dealing with people that you can talk in and out of just about anything.
It's called propaganda or maybe you've got good reasons or whatever.
But when you're dealing with actual reality rather than people, you can't rob the earth.
I mean, I was there gold panning and prospecting and if I found some gold...
Good for me. But I couldn't steal the gold.
I couldn't talk the earth into giving me the gold.
I actually had to go and look for it myself and gather it up myself.
There was no magic.
There was no sophistry.
It had to be done.
And if I tried to ignore reality, reality would literally end me.
Now, in civilization...
As it's currently constituted.
In civilization, well, you can talk people into giving you stuff.
You can bully people into giving you stuff.
You know, if you're a woman, this is why there are so few homeless women, is that women can generally trade sex for shelter.
Now, a woman alone in the woods, if she needs shelter, what does she do?
Well, she can't shake her ass at a tree and get it to constitute itself into a log cabin.
She has to Go and build a log cabin or a lean-to at least or something to give for shelter.
But in civilization, words rather than deeds become the primary way of grabbing resources.
And the more decayed and decadent the society becomes, the more words are elevated above deeds in the acquisition of resources.
So... We are so abstracted from reality.
I mean, you can't go and have a riot and get meat to appear on your table, like in the middle of nowhere, out in some woods or something.
You can't just go and have a riot and say, I'm really angry and upset.
And then the deer are like, oh, hey, if you're angry and upset, I'll just impale myself on this tree stump and you can eat my meat.
Sentences I wasn't sure I was going to be saying today, but here we are.
So getting angry, getting upset, and getting resources thereby, well, that only works in civilization.
It doesn't work in nature.
Yet we came from nature.
And I've pointed this out, my biggest video was called The Story of Your Enslavement, about how you can't bully a tree into giving you fruit.
Now, if someone's picked fruit, you can threaten or bribe or, no, not bribe, sorry, you can threaten or bully or manipulate or steal their fruit.
But you can't do that with the tree.
If there's no tree, you can't yell at the ground to give you peaches.
If there is a peach tree with no peaches on it, you can't yell or manipulate or bully or shake your abs or your ass at the tree to get it to give you fruit.
You actually have to act in a pragmatic and objective way in the real world with absolute rules in order to get your resources.
But the more civilization and in particular the more debt we get as a society, Well, I mean, debt, of course, is the imaginary creation of money by stealing from the future.
And so it's not even a zero-sum game, right?
If you are a bank and you have $100 million and you lend someone a million dollars, you only have $99 million to lend.
Somebody else doesn't get that million dollars.
But if you can just, you know, create money by typing whatever you want into your own bank account, there's not even a zero-sum game.
And this is why I say debt produces psychosis.
Debt produces insanity.
So the more we exist in a debt-based monetary system, in a political system with forced redistribution of wealth, the further and further people get from actual reality, the further and further people get from producing the values that they need to survive, to consume in order to live, and the more people are returned to a state of infancy.
The more people are returned to a state of infancy.
And you see this all over the place in the world as it stands.
So how do infants get resources?
Well, they have tantrums.
They cry, they scream.
And they bribe with giggles.
And the cessation of crying, right?
Crying is one of the most... Like a baby crying is very unpleasant, which is why everyone...
There was an old Dilbert many years ago about...
Hey, I've got a flight.
I'm going to the colicky babies convention with everyone else.
It's like colicky babies convention.
All the babies, of course, on the plane are crying and it's very unpleasant.
So how does a baby get resources?
Well, a baby can't produce its own resources, so the baby gets resources by crying and laughing.
Right? If the baby wants fun, then the baby will...
Laugh. I mean, I remember when my daughter was a baby, I had a plant sprayer and I pretended to accidentally spray myself in the face and jump back and shake my head.
And she just found this hysterically funny.
So, of course, I did it for the next hour.
Right? So she was, you know, controlling me.
She was giving me the kind of feedback that had me do this goofy, funny, silly thing for an hour straight.
And when she watched the movie Cars...
She likes the character Mater.
And so what she would say to me, Dad, be Mater, be Mater.
I'll do my southern accent.
And so she was just, you know, and she got my resources, which was fun, and I was happy to give them to her, of course.
She got my resources, called fun.
So babies don't interact with reality.
They get their resources through people.
And civilization returns so many people to a state of infancy by having their upset feelings.
Get them resources. Having their tantrums, get them resources.
Having their praise, get them resources.
So they never really have to grow up and deal with actual reality.
They can stay in a state of quasi-infancy where tantrums produce resources.
Now, nature doesn't care about your tantrums, but other people, in order to appease you, will give you resources in order to have you not riot or not have tantrums or whatever it is, right?
So... So we all need to subjugate ourselves to actual principles, actual facts, actual reality.
I mean, the group who lives in the wilderness and the group who live in civilization are in conflict in my novel.
And the group who live in the wilderness say to the group who live in civilization in the cities, they say, you think we're primitive?
You're going to end up back here anyway.
You're going to end up back here anyway, but we're prepared for it and you won't be.
So you'll die and we'll survive, and yet you think we're primitive.
Give me a break. Civilization always goes the same way.
So yes, we all need to be enthralled to an objective standard if we want to grow up.
I mean, there are lots of people who can whine and manipulate and Complain and bribe and offer sex or approval or companionship or whatever in return for resources.
In return for resources, they can do all that stuff.
They can do all that stuff.
Which simply remains.
It simply means that they remain as children.
They remain in the status of children or toddlers.
And so, of course, in the past...
So men do this in various ways, of course, with the state and with the military-industrial complex and the welfare state and so on.
And women, of course, were not supposed to offer sex in return for resources without working.
So in the modern world, such as it is, women can offer the opportunity for sex or can offer sex itself in return for resources, but they don't have to work.
I mean, I guess you could say they've got to exercise a little and they've got to...
Wear makeup or whatever and have nice clothes, but they don't have to work in the way that they used to in the past.
So in the past, sex came with commitment and sex came with having children.
And having children is a huge amount of work.
And running a household, especially in a more primitive society with fewer labor-saving devices, is a huge amount of work.
So now women can offer sex for resources, so to speak.
And the resources, I'm not talking about sugar daddies, although that's a more obvious form of it.
it.
I'm talking about being taken out and being taken on vacation and people buying dinner and buying drinks and so on so they can offer sex or the potential for sex in return for resources.
That's never how we evolved.
And I think this is one of the reasons why women have a tougher time maturing into robust and powerful and effective femininity in the modern world.
Because in the past, the mutual exchange of sexuality would result in a gaggle of kids and a household to run and chores to do and food to obtain and children to raise and that's a huge amount of work.
And And so sex came with labor.
But now you can get sex without labor and that I think makes maturation that much more tricky to put it mildly.
All right. Thank you for a great question.
I hope that that's helpful to people.
And let me ask if anybody else has any comments.
Let me just mute that.
Oh yeah, okay. I think we've got...
No, do we? Sorry, my screen is rather unbright, to put it mildly.
But yeah, if you have any questions or issues or problems, I'm happy to hear and happy to help and happy to answer as best as I possibly can.
Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead.
Yeah, great. My question to you really is, what makes you think a TV show offers moral instructions to people who watch it?
I mean, people have been watching TV shows since the 1940s, family shows, and they've shown that you're not supposed to hate your children, you're supposed to negotiate with them, but really nothing has changed since then.
It's the same thing.
So what makes you think that it's an actual instructional tool of how to raise a family?
Well, I mean, that's not even my opinion.
That's fairly well established.
Yeah, I mean, so if you have an agenda, let's say that you wish to improve support for gay marriage.
Well, what you do is you have a lot of gay characters very positively portrayed in the media and you have, you know, the Will and Grace stuff and you have people laugh and view things very positively and you can see this very clearly and this is not any evaluation of the content.
I'm just sort of talking about the process.
Propaganda works and the mainstream media is a primary agent of propaganda because it's not inhabited by people who are looking for the truth or a deep exploration of human nature or an expression of facts.
It's called programming, right?
They have an agenda that they wish to pursue and so what they do is – and you can see that with the introduction of shows, gosh, all the way back to Billy Crystal was on a show called Soap and I think he played the first gay character.
In mainstream television.
And you can see that as these characters come in and as these shows become more popular, then people's beliefs shift in accordance to this.
And so, yeah, it's very...
I think it's fairly well... I mean, I know.
I've read a bunch of studies on it. It's very well documented that this kind of...
This approach in media has significant effects on...
I mean, Barack Obama was opposed to gay marriage back in the day.
And now, of course, the support for it...
Well, the support for it's beginning to fall a little bit, unfortunately, because of some of the more extreme things that are coming out these days.
But as a whole, this kind of programming does a very good deal to change...
It does a lot to change people's minds about things.
I mean, if it didn't, then the propagandists wouldn't try to get a hold of these levers of power, right?
Yeah, I see your point.
But do you think that overall TV has helped the family and raising children and not being abusive to them?
Or do you think it's the same and nothing's changed?
Or even gotten worse, actually, over the years?
Well, I think that...
Well, I know this for a fact that spanking has been declining, not as fast, of course, as people would like.
But unfortunately, spanking has been replaced by neglect and abandonment.
Right? So the problem with TV, let's just sort of take TV for a moment.
So the problem with TV is you have two opposing forces when it comes to the better treatment of children.
So the first is to train people on how to negotiate with children, which TV has done admirably for the last, gosh, well, 1940s to now?
I mean, three generations, 80 years, whatever it is, right?
So TV has done an admirable job of portraying peaceful parenting, but TV has also been relentlessly promoting female careerism at the expense of child raising.
And so what's happened is the primary issue with children has shifted from direct abuse to neglect and abandonment, to kids being put into day cares for babies and so on, right? And pre-K and K and all of that.
And of course the relentless promotion of teachers as the most noble human beings who exist on the face of this or any other planet.
Despite the fact that proportionally there's far more sexual predation on children from government schools than there ever was or is in the Catholic Church or other churches.
So teachers have been so relentlessly promoted that people have very little question about the value of what's being taught or the destructive nature of what may be being taught in sort of general institutional schools.
So unfortunately, abandonment and self-hating propaganda, hatred against your culture, hatred against your history and your country and so on – So children are being, I think, more verbally abused and more abandoned, but physical abuse has gone down to some degree.
Not a huge, huge degree, but physical abuse has gone down to some degree, but it's been replaced by something arguably, in the long run, even more toxic, which is abandonment and propaganda.
So these two sort of forces have been...
To some degree in opposition, and I think that the second force of abandonment and propaganda has won out to some degree.
But that's my thoughts. I'm certainly happy to hear what you think.
Actually, I agree with what you're saying.
I mean, you kind of shed light into the issue for me.
But I still think that at the end of the day, I mean, that result is still negative.
It's not positive. It's just shifting from one place to another and still a negative thing.
And I think that, in my opinion, they should show the reality of what life is and really show how kids are actually raised and how the world that we live in actually is.
But as you said before, it's a very painful thing.
And I remember when I was growing up, I used to watch Little House on the Prairie, right?
I was very upset at one point because I'm like, this is not how my life is.
My life is the complete opposite.
And you know, I'm 10 years old, 11 years old watching this and like, you know, it created depression for me at that point because, you know, I wanted that life where I could be negotiated with and I didn't have that.
So I just think that at the end of the day, Things are not getting better because, one, two parents are working.
The kids don't have a family, per se, where they can be raised with correct moral values, like you and your child.
So I think that's the main issue.
I think the economy is really in decay in the West, and we see that at this point.
So, you know, I guess my opinion, I think I'm a little negative in the whole thing.
I think that things are getting worse, and they're not getting better.
Well, yeah, I mean, there's a big pendulum.
And I think that there's indications that the pendulum is beginning to slow in extremism.
And human beings have a kind of ballast to them historically, where when things get too crazy, there is a general drive towards a return to sanity.
And yeah, I mean, things are kind of nutty out there in the world at the moment.
But I think that there are some indications that this relentless extremism It has gone too far and is starting to trigger people's desire for a return to normalcy.
So human beings don't swing forever.
There is a weight because we have to exist within reality.
Even if our reality is generally social, there's still a lot of, you know, even if you've got to go to a meeting to get your government contract, you still have to deal with reality to get in the car, drive there and get to the right floor.
So we're constantly being reinforced with empirical reality.
And when society's ideas get so opposed to tangible reality, tangible reality generally tends to reassert itself.
It's not necessarily the prettiest of processes, but it can be relatively peaceful.
But there is a reassertion of empiricism when ideas get too far away from the truth.
When ideas end up in this sort of postmodern scenario, when ideas end up Opposed to the truth, then those who follow those ideas become such relentless examples of misery and dysfunction.
I mean, you can see this, I think, among leftist or liberal women.
Diagnosed mental health rates are, I think, a little over 50%.
And it's not like everybody else.
They're all taking drugs.
They're all taking antidepressants.
They're unwed. They have no children.
It's a big number, I think.
Yeah. And this is just like literal diagnosed mental illness.
And women, like all of us, have a desire to be happy.
And when ideology – see, ideology is kind of satanic in a way in that it offers you an immediate benefit at long-term cost.
It's like any addiction, right?
I mean, smoking gives you the benefit of nicotine at the expense of your long-term health.
And alcoholism gives you the fun of being drunk at the expense of your long-term health and relationships.
And so addictive stuff is sort of an analogy for Satan in that it offers you happiness that you picture will be forever, but it's only in the moment and it costs you in the long run.
And it costs you more than it gives you.
I mean, it costs you more.
I mean, if you save money, you're sacrificing in the short run, but you end up with more money in the long run, or at least you used to before inflation kicked in.
So the illusion that you can have as much or more later, and so enjoy it now, and then you end up with less later than even the happiness you had in the moment.
So you had plus 100 units of happiness, but you end up with minus 1,000 units of unhappiness down the road.
So women, when they're offered liberation from...
pregnancy, from childbirth, from child raising, from running households and so on.
And they're offered, oh, you can have money and you can have men still be attracted to you and you can have a career and you can travel and you can drink and you can sleep around.
And all of that is quite pleasurable in the moment, of course, right?
And then what happens is, as I've talked about repeatedly, and I'm certainly not the only person to talk about this, what happens, of course, is when they hit the wall, right, in their late 20s, early 30s and so on, then the pleasures that they had, which is there's pleasures that are just relief from responsibility, right?
There are pleasures that they had all turned to ash in their mouths, and then they look forward to another half century of barren sterility and all of that, and it's pretty rough.
Now, this is not the case for all women, but this is the sort of general trend.
And so in the first full flush of like the 1960s sex, drugs, and rock and roll hedonism or the 70s licentiousness and key parties where people would – like married couples would all gather at some guy's place and they'd all throw their keys into a bowl and then you'd just pick up a key and have sex with whoever the key was.
And again, I'm not saying this was super common, but it certainly was there.
And the 60s were more florid in terms of creativity, and the 70s were just a dark, ice-storm degenerate decade that led into the material hedonism.
Spiritual hedonism, creative hedonism in the 60s, led to the sexual deviance and horrors of the 70s, which led to the material hedonism of the 80s, which led to the nihilism of the 90s, and then we sort of go on with this kind of stuff.
But... What's happened now is that because we were a couple of generations into leftist feminism, the evidence is piling up.
Now, of course, people are desperately trying to hide the evidence.
But the evidence is piling up.
I mean, to the point where we have this cougar phenomenon.
The cougar phenomenon is, oh boy, you know, women in their 40s, they just love sex and they just have this super high sex drive and this, that, and the other.
And it's like, eh, that's not technically true.
It's not even particularly true.
But it's a way to try and get young men to find older women attractive.
And it's a desperate ploy to try and get young men into the beds of older women.
It's all pretty sad and tragic, but now the antidepressant stuff and the Karen phenomenon where you see these usually middle-aged or older women ranting and miserable and angry and upset and all of that stuff.
They're generally portrayed as single and lonely and all of that.
You hear these tragic stories of women who go to the doctor not because they're ill, but just because they want someone to I think we're good to go.
Well, no.
We're designed to do any number of things.
I mean, we're not sort of – we're designed to respond to environments and circumstances.
And I could certainly see how population would drop in a time of increased wealth because population increase in the past had to do with child labor and taking care of you in your old age when you're old as a parent.
If you can save enough that you can take care of yourself in your old age.
And of course, we have this huge tidal wave of robotics coming at us that people aren't really talking about because it's just too bloody unsettling as a society.
Massive, massive percentages of jobs will be obsolete over the next 10 to 20 years.
I mean, you can see this fascination with this AI art.
And I've played around with it myself.
My daughter and I were playing around with it, typing various things into the AI art generators and seeing what we could come up with.
And it's going to be pretty rough for a large number of people as automation comes along.
But I could certainly see if automation comes along, you probably would end up having fewer children.
You don't need them for their labor.
You don't need them to take care of you in your old age.
You would do it simply for the pleasure of having children, and some people would have more, some people would have less, but I could certainly see a lowering of the birth rate in this kind of situation.
Now, what we're having now is very artificial and based on debt and so on, but yeah, the automation thing is...
I'll probably do a whole separate show on that, but the automation thing is one of the most staggering changes that has ever occurred.
The only parallel I could really think of is the depopulation of the countryside that occurs in 18th century England and parts of Western Europe, the Enclosure Act, where the continual subdivision of land was reversed by landowners because land became more privatized and where the continual subdivision of land was reversed by landowners because land became more privatized and trade became more privatized and foreign markets opened up, which meant that better farmers could bid out worse farmers and they enclosed the land and
And you ended up – you had these crazy tiny stained glass slivers of land that were continually subdivided among family members.
And so this was all bought up and the inefficiencies were removed, but you ended up with a bunch of people who didn't have a place to farm and they took their slim profits and went to the cities and formed the basis of the urban proletariat that drove the Industrial Revolution.
That change with the rationalization of land ownership called the enclosure movement, again, 18th century, late 17th, 18th century, that's the last time that I can think of this bigger change as automation coming down the pipe.
Automation in fruit picking, automation in agriculture, automation in trucks, in cars, automation in food service, automation in cooking.
This is... A staggering development that was entirely predictable and society is in no way prepared for.
And unfortunately, and the elites have talked about this, you know, that I think the elites are beginning to question why they need so many people.
I mean, in the past, you needed more people because it was taxes and you could draft them for your armies and so on.
Now, I think the elites are like, I'm not sure we need so many people, which I think is behind a lot of the stuff that's going on in the world as a whole.
But yeah, that's going to be a...
A big old, big-ass change that's going to be happening.
A free market would do this fairly well and would be a fairly soft gradation, but I don't think it's going to be quite as soft as we'd like it to be.
All right, anything else you want to mention? Yeah, that's it.
I mean, it was a pleasure speaking to you, and I really thank you for everything, always.
My pleasure. Thank you for calling in because it certainly is better to have topics with the audience.
And it's funny, you know, I don't know if it's just me being lazy, but you guys have such great questions and comments and you provoke such, I think, good speeches in me that I have done some solo shows, but boy, you know, once I started getting into this live streaming stuff a couple of years ago, I mean, I always did the call-in shows and all that, but...
Not knowing where the questions are coming and all of that and having that jazz, do it on the fly kind of stuff is really great.
All right. I have time for one more. If anybody else has any comments or questions or issues, I'm certainly happy to hear.
And yes, we have one.
You just need to unmute and I'm all yours, my friend.
Hey, Stefan. Hello.
Yes, can you hear me? Yes, go ahead.
Yeah, so I have a question.
I do believe the day of reckoning is coming, but thanks to you, I'm heavily invested in Bitcoin.
So my question is, wouldn't Bitcoin provide a soft landing, so to speak?
The transition with the use of Bitcoin would make it not as violent as future, or should I say past, What's your opinion on that?
I'm curious. Well, the transition from a coercive society to a voluntary society has never been attempted before.
I mean, there have been collapses, because the most famous one in Western history is the fall of Rome.
And the fall of Rome liberated a lot of people from two decades worth of enslavement of the Roman armies, massive amounts of taxation and corruption and so on.
So the fall of Rome, I've got a whole video on it, which I recently re-upped to my video channel.
So you can find those fairly easily.
Just go to freedomain.com slash videos.
So the transition is pretty tough.
The people who have adapted to a particular form of resource acquisition strongly resist any changes in that resource acquisition model, right?
So it's sort of an awkward and convoluted way of saying people who've adapted to coerced redistribution of resources, they're not happy if anything threatens that.
In other words, people who survive as they perceive they need to off-government handouts Are not happy to the transition towards charity.
So if Bitcoin were to replace fiat currency, fiat of course meaning by government command, if Bitcoin were to replace fiat currency, then you couldn't have a welfare state because you can't have forced redistribution of Bitcoins.
Now, you can have charity, and Bitcoin charities are legendary, and I myself very much enjoy giving to worthwhile charities and helping out people.
So there'll be charity, for sure.
But you couldn't have a temper tantrum, and you couldn't vote to get someone else's Bitcoins.
You couldn't threaten to riot. I mean, you could threaten to riot, I suppose, but you still wouldn't be getting other people's Bitcoins.
You couldn't provoke a war and use that war to print money to launder it through the process of war.
If there was a conflict in a Bitcoin society or potential conflict, you'd need to make the case to get people to pay you to protect them from that, and you'd need to be efficient, and you'd need to have a proven track record.
I call them defense DROs, and there's more about this in my free books, Everyday Anarchy and Practical Anarchy, and in my novel, The Future.
So, charity, of course, is...
One of the most fascinating interactions of humanity.
It really is incredibly deep, incredibly rich, incredibly complex topic.
So I'll just touch on it briefly here.
Charity is helping people who have not directly created their own misfortune.
Right? So if you're just...
Pray to some misfortune that couldn't really be predicted or avoided.
And, you know, you think of like, oh, if you're a healthy guy but you just get sick, it's like, well, no, you should have health insurance for that kind of stuff, right?
Or, you know, but you could see charity where somebody is being responsible and then they just get hit by a bus, you know, and they have insurance for sure.
I mean, they have catastrophic insurance, job loss insurance, injury insurance, and so on.
So they can survive, but, you know, they're going to need some help.
You know, so the typical thing is somebody's ill, so the neighbors bring over food.
Somebody dies, and so people bring over a casserole.
And, you know, if a widow, her husband died recently, then her neighbor, some dude, usually will mow her lawn and, you know, help out with the stuff that her husband used to do.
And all of that's charity, and...
All of that's wonderful. Now, of course, if a woman's husband dies and then you're going to be charitable towards her and do the things her husband used to do to help her out while she transitions, well, that's one thing if you find out that She murdered her husband.
You're probably going to not do those things for her because that is not a mess or a disaster or a negative that she was innocent of the creation of.
So charity is such a delicate operation.
You want to help people out, but not to the point where having problems becomes profitable for them.
You want to help them out with the goal of getting the back of their own feet, but the more you help them out in the moment, the less likely they are to get back on their own feet.
So it's really challenging.
It's really complicated.
It's a very complex, delicate, and surgical thing.
You want to help people out, but you don't want to encourage people getting into messes in order to get free stuff.
Now, in the future, when people are peacefully parented and raised well and all that, then they won't have this deep yearning to return to a state of infancy, which is to manipulate others for the sake of getting resources.
They will have outgrown intimacy and they would view that as kind of ridiculous.
You know, I'm going to go on the rank assumption that you and I don't enjoy wearing diapers and crap in our pants as adults, right?
Because we had that as babies, we're past that phase, and we would consider it ridiculous and undictified to do such a thing in the present.
Well, the same thing should be true with manipulating other people for resources.
It would be like wearing diapers.
And it comes from the same period of life and mindset.
It would be undignified and ridiculous and embarrassing to do such a thing.
So, people who've adapted to The threats and bribes as a way of getting resources, right?
The threat of, I don't know, protests or riots or whatever and the bribe of, I'll vote for you.
The people who've adapted to that, it's going to be a challenge for them to adapt to a situation where they have to be productive and provide resources in order to gain values from others.
That's going to be a challenge.
And like all people whose immaturity gets confronted, it escalates and then it subsides.
And we've seen this before, like in California some decades ago, they cut welfare benefits, and yeah, people were like, okay, well, I'll just get a job then, I guess.
I mean, there were some protests and some frustration and all of that, but it's like, yeah, just get a job and all that.
Like all the single moms, if the welfare state, it's going to end sooner or later.
It's no kindness to pretend it won't at all.
It's really brutal to people to pretend that that which can't continue can.
It's just ridiculous and horrifying.
It's really one of the most grossly abusive things that you can say to someone is to say that that which cannot continue is going to continue because it fails to prepare them.
Can you imagine? Some new people move to your neighborhood and you're like in the north of Europe in Siberia or something and it's summer and they're like, oh man, this is great.
There's food everywhere. There's fish everywhere.
There's lots of places to hunt.
I mean, this is great. Now, if you were to say to them, oh yeah, no, summer lasts forever.
There's no winter here. Would they prepare for winter?
No. Would they build a shelter that could withstand winter storms?
No. Would they lay up any food for the winter?
Would they? No. If you were to say to them, no, no, summer lasts forever.
There's no winter. There's no such thing as winter here.
Enjoy! Be the grasshopper, not the ant.
And you understand that that would be murderously cruel.
You would be working as hard as you could to get them killed, to pretend that that which will not continue will continue.
That which cannot continue will continue.
In this case, it's summer. Oh yeah, summer lasts forever, you don't need to prepare for winter, you don't need to...
So they've got some crappy lean-to and they don't have any food.
Winter comes and they're going to die.
There's almost nothing more cruel than pretending a state of plenty which cannot continue will continue.
I mean, if another group of people move to your early modern North American environment, right...
And they say, oh, I'm going to set up my permanent residence here because, man, there's buffalo everywhere.
And so they built a big stone house and they settle in and they plant all their crops and they're just ready, man.
And you haven't told them that the buffalo migrate.
I mean, they're toast.
Because they haven't planted enough calories to survive.
Without the buffalo. Because they assume the buffalo will always be around and you know for sure that the buffalo migrate and won't be around and you've got to follow the buffalo or die or the caribou or whatever, right?
How cruel is that?
That you have told them something that they assume will continue.
You've told them, oh yeah, the buffalo, they're always around.
They never move. They never change.
They don't migrate or anything. Right?
And then these people wake up And everyone's gone.
And the buffalo are all gone.
And they don't have enough food.
I guess they could try and track you down and follow and all of that, but it's unbelievably cruel.
So all the people who aren't talking about debt, deficits, unfunded liabilities, and so on, I don't know what to say.
It's just, I could never imagine in this or any other universe being that cruel to say to people, oh yes, I'm a lost forever, you don't need to plan for winter.
The people who plan for winter are conspiracy theorists.
They're insane. Look at them half-starving in the summer because they need to pretend that it's going to get cold.
And they look at them reinforcing their homes to withstand crazy winds and cold.
I mean, it's this conspiracy theory.
They've got this bizarre fantasy that winter comes.
I mean, I don't know.
I can't imagine. I don't have much of a cruel streak in my personality as a whole, but I can't even conceive of being that horrible and cruel and half-murderous towards people as to not tell them that winter is coming and that the buffalo move.
I don't know, man. If you know a potential disaster and you don't warn people, you are complicit morally in the disasters that befall them.
Seriously. Seriously.
If there's a blind guy about to wander into traffic and you don't yell at him to stop, you're complicit in him getting killed by a bus.
It doesn't mean you murdered him.
I don't mean you're...
It's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
It's not directly evil. But you're complicit.
You're complicit. And of course, the media, who doesn't warn people about the miseries of an unsustainable system and how it's going to change and when it's going to change or when it might change.
The people who are just saying, oh, there's no winter.
I mean, I don't even know.
I can't fathom the mindset of people who aren't warning.
You know, I really, really care about the happiness of women.
The happiness of women is inextricably bound up at the happiness of men.
I really, really care about the happiness of women.
And for women, winter comes at 40.
And imagining trying to fool women or pretend that their attractiveness in their 20s lasts into their 40s and 50s with no change.
Winter isn't coming. I love women.
I want women to be happy.
And not telling them about the simple facts of biology and attraction is so unbelievably vicious.
That, to me, is the true bottomless depths of misogyny.
It's to withhold basic facts about women that are essential for their happiness.
To say to women, you'll be 22 forever, winter is not coming.
Oof. And, I mean, if you look at antidepressant use among particularly white women, have been skyrocketing and miserable.
I don't know. There's just a lot of cruel people in this world.
A lot of people who get their kicks by watching people starve in a winter they said would never come.
It's kind of incomprehensible to me, but that is kind of the world that we live in, at least for now.
But, as I say, reality always reasserts itself sooner or later, and we're probably in the sooner phase than the later phase.
Alright, thank you everybody so much for a very, very wonderful conversation this afternoon.
Lots of love from up here, freedomand.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out the show.
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