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Oct. 17, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:53
Your Single Biggest Risk of Failure! Freedomain Call In
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All right, everybody. Hey, I have a little bit of time today, and some people had questions or comments.
Somebody needs perhaps potentially a wee bit, a smidge of feedback about a prior relationship.
So if you want to raise your hand, then I can unmute you and you can chat away.
Go in once, go in twice.
What's on your mind? And if you're not that guy, if that guy's not around, then be the other guy or gal.
And raise your hand. And I'll just wait for people to...
I don't have a huge topic.
I'm just in the midst of wrangling my way through the philosopher John Locke.
And this is in my series, History of Philosophers, which you can get at freedomain.locals.com.
And don't forget, I got a juicy promo code, all caps UBB2022. And you can get a free month.
Listen to my new book.
The future, my Atlas Shrugged, so to speak.
And you can get the History of Philosophers series, which is, I think, some of my best work, if I do say so myself.
And also, you can, there's dozens of premium shows and spicy call-in shows and all that kind of stuff.
And it's the place I check first for messages.
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All right, I'll give everyone a tidy moment or two.
oh no sorry i don't i'm not the one that had a question about the x i had a comment about the children and value yeah go ahead yeah so i live in uh in angola in africa and here a lot of people complain about public schools right because kids sit on the ground there is no proper classrooms the quality is very bad But I noticed that here,
if you are rich or middle class, and you put your kid in a bad school, right?
Everybody will criticize you, tell you that you're a bad person, that you don't value your kids.
But if you are poor, you are not held accountable for the same behavior, right?
The kids can sit down on the ground.
And even this week, a teacher took 300 kids on a On what they call a peaceful protest, so walking for almost 5 kilometers, 200 kids, only one teacher supervising this.
And everybody said that the teacher is a hero, and so everybody saying that the government is wrong for not caring for the kids, but nobody asking why.
Is being poor a way to get a free pass of being a bad person?
That's a very interesting question.
So, there are people who are poor through no particular fault of their own.
They have some significant health issue.
They might have brain issues.
They might just not be smart.
We have, I think, a lot of sympathy and care and concern for those people.
They're essential and elemental parts of society.
We've got to be charitable and kind and helpful for things that aren't their fault and hold them back.
That's not most of poor people, though.
Most people, and I grew up not, you know, North Africa poor, but I grew up about as poor as you can get in the West.
And the poverty that I saw was poverty of the mind.
It was poverty of the mind.
Being poor, most fundamentally, and again, I say this with decades of experience among some very poor people, and also helping people go from being poor, i.e.
students, to being middle class by hiring them and training them into being productive members of a company and so on.
So poverty arises from...
Immaturity, for the most part.
Again, tons of exceptions, but the bulk of it arises from immaturity.
People who are poor most often are the people who can never, ever, ever admit that they're wrong about anything.
It's defensiveness.
Admitting faults, admitting that you're wrong about something is so foundational to making money because you have to be able to change course.
And if you sort of imagine a hunter in the woods, right?
And he sees what he thinks is a deer quite a ways off.
And so he starts moving towards the deer.
And as he gets closer and closer and closer, he realizes it's just a clump of bushes that looks vaguely like a deer.
Now, he's not going to be a very good hunter if he can't say, whoops, I made a mistake.
I thought that was a deer.
It's not a deer. And so I really need to change what I'm doing and not pretend to hunt a bush and go and find a deer.
Now, if he can't admit that for whatever reason, I mean, he's obviously a little crazy, but if he can't admit that he was mistaken, what's he going to do?
Is he going to say, well, I'm going to sit here and wait for the deer to emerge from the bush that the deer is inside, right?
I'm just going to sit here patiently all day and wait for the deer to emerge.
Well, if he does that, he's not going to end up with any deer.
Just can't admit that he's wrong.
People who, you know, one of the great drivers of poverty is bad relationships.
Man, if you ever want to stay poor, you just have...
Crappy relationships, crappy friends who drink too much, who encourage you to waste your life, who are low-class, low-rent, and they'll hold you down.
So you have bad relationships, bad friendships, they'll hold you down.
But the thing that holds people down the most, other than never admitting that they're wrong, and it's kind of part of that, is bad romance.
Like, just bad romance.
And I remember it.
Growing up in England, we were in a fairly...
It wasn't a terrible neighborhood, but it was very, very poor.
The neighborhood in Canada was a little worse.
But it wasn't super bad, like dangerous, but it was very poor.
And, you know, paper-thin walls.
And I just remember hearing couples having fights, screaming, you know, that bloody-voiced, hysterical...
Jim Morrison, you can petition the Lord with prayer, kind of screaming.
And I just found it completely bizarre.
Like, why on earth would people voluntarily choose to live with each other and scream at each other?
It makes no sense. Nobody's forcing you to...
And of course, I didn't know about sex when I was very little, so I didn't really understand that that's often the light that gets the angle of fish to clamp on your balls, so to speak.
And it's like, I never understood...
Just be nice. Just be nice.
Be friendly. Be reasonable.
It's not that hard. In fact, it's a lot harder to scream at people than it is to just be nice.
And so I heard all of these.
And then in Canada, when we moved to Canada, we moved a couple of times just within one apartment building because we went from one bedroom to two bedroom to three bedroom.
And it took a couple of years to sort of upgrade that way.
And we moved to one floor, the fifth floor, and neighbors invited us over.
It was just my mom and I at this point.
And he was invited us over.
And then we didn't end up going over because the guy had shot his gun into the wall of the apartment building.
I mean, it was like, hello?
What the hell? And so I just found this all quite bizarre.
It's just so much easier to be nice to people and to get along when you share values and they're reasonable and so on.
And if they're not, then probably not a good idea to have your heart enmeshed with theirs.
But just bad relationships.
Bad relationships are as simple as they keep you up at night.
It's really hard to be successful if you're exhausted.
And if you're tense and upset and angry and fighting or distant or cold or there's always just one problem after another.
I remember seeing a cartoon in a magazine when I was a kid.
It was a guy or it was reprinted somewhere.
It was one demon chasing another demon down the street and this passerby just saying, ah, it's just one goddamn thing after another.
Well, it's kind of true, right? So even just something as simple as exhaustion from lack of sleep from a bad relationship will cause you to fail.
You cannot succeed in life if you can't sleep.
And so you fight and there's door slamming or words are hurled or somebody's just giving you the silent treatment and, you know, you toss and turn and It's a line from an old Bare Naked Lady song.
I couldn't tell you I was wrong.
And he talks about just tossing and turning all night.
And that exhaustion is pretty foundational.
People will judge you.
Yes, go ahead. Sorry.
So it's kind of like a cost of living.
Like when they say that if you are in a low-trust society, you have to worry so much about...
Crime that you spend most of your time trying to protect yourself?
Is it in this way that you're saying that the bad relationship is costing you?
Do you mean like physical abuse in a relationship?
Like hitting? Is that what you mean by crime?
What do you mean? No, no.
I say, you know, they say that if you're in a law...
Sorry, my sound was wrong.
Sorry. I said, you know, don't trust society, right?
You have to spend a lot of resources to protect yourself.
Like, I have bars in my window now, right?
Oh, yeah. Because somebody might enter and steal something.
So you are making a parallel with relationships, right?
If the relationships are very difficult and you have to worry so much about it, then you're exhausted and you don't have energy to grow yourself.
Is that what you mean? Well, yeah.
I mean, so if you are poor, then you're much more likely to be in a bad neighborhood.
And in a bad neighborhood, you're more subject to criminal predation or attacks.
And so if you have a bad relationship...
A bad, like you're living with a woman or a man and it's just bad.
And then, yeah, you're stressed, you're tired, you can't digest properly, you're exhausted, you don't have time to cook properly, and you don't usually have facilities to exercise.
Now, exercise is one of these things that, I mean, you can do isometric exercises on the edge of a couch and, you know, if you've got one step, you can go up and down on that step and so on.
But it's tough to get the right exercise.
Your digestion is all screwed up from stress.
Your energy is low, and you're distracted, and you're haunted.
You know, a bad relationship is like having a chain-dragon, blood-soaked ghost sitting in your brain, lecturing you about what a bad person you are.
Because we internalize. You've got a hypercritical girlfriend or boyfriend, and we just internalize this, right?
I watched a brief and tragic clip from this Twitch streamer called Amaranth, or something like that.
Amaranth? And there was this guy, apparently her husband, who was, you know, in my view, just completely gaslighting her and spinning her in circles.
And she claimed that he had threatened to, what, take out their dogs or harm her dogs or something like that.
And she says he's got all the money and he's threatening to bankrupt her or leave her with only a million dollars.
And as far as I read, I don't know what's true or not, but I sort of read that she'd made sort of tens of millions of dollars as, you know, a very pretty and I assume somewhat charming woman.
A streamer. And this is exhausting.
It's debilitating.
And the other thing, too, is that if you have a low-quality partner, then you can't move up.
Because the way you move up is by socializing.
The way you move up in the business world, in general, is through socializing, through networking.
And if you have a sort of loud, trashy, tattooed, you know, prone to drinking boyfriend or girlfriend, you can't socialize with your bosses.
And you can't sort of hang out with them and that's kind of how you have to get knowledge of these openings and where you can go.
And so the relationship between not admitting that you're wrong and being poor is very strong.
And the biggest subset of not admitting that you're wrong Is you have a bad partner, and you can't admit that you're wrong about being with this person.
You can't admit that, look, this is a bad relationship, it's exhausting, there's no future, we can't get stable, we can't get any kind of happiness, and it's just wretched, and I'm putting flesh above any spiritual or moral elements.
And so you end up just grinding your life away into nothing.
I remember when I was working up north, occasionally we would get out of the woods and get into a cabin, and we stayed once at a hunting lodge, and I won't repeat all the unholy words that this elderly couple were screaming at each other, but it was pretty appalling.
It's one of these things that kind of branded itself in my brain that you could be in your mid to late 60s, as it seemed to be that couple was.
Of course, they're long dead now, but You could be stuck in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and you could be hurling abuse at each other when you're pushing 70 if you don't play your cards right or admit that you're wrong.
So if you can admit that you're wrong, you can make money.
Now, admitting that you're wrong, is it an intelligence thing?
Is it an IQ thing? I don't think exactly at all.
I don't think exactly at all.
In fact, there's many, many people of very high IQ and intellectual and educational achievements who can't admit that they're wrong at all.
Can't admit that they're wrong. I mean, you can look at this at American politics to dip into the...
Nameless country for a moment.
I mean, there's a significant increase and escalation in the conflicts.
It's a world war in a way, Ukraine and Russia, because so many of the countries in the world, particularly in the West, are supplying arms to Ukraine like they never heard of World War I and what happens when you start to let these soft entanglements grow up around you.
At some point, there is a risk of escalation to localized nuclear conflicts.
And there wasn't any of this stuff under Trump.
Love him or hate him. And, you know, there's stuff to love about the guy, stuff to hate about the guy, I think.
But this stuff wasn't happening under Trump.
And people just can't admit. And look at inflation.
Now, inflation, I mean, it's not all Joe Biden's fault, of course, because Trump printed a lot of money as well.
But people, they just can't admit that they're wrong.
I can't admit that they're wrong.
And people who can't admit that they're wrong, they can't change course.
They can't adapt.
I mean, just think of a wolf hunting a rabbit.
The rabbit is continually changing course.
And as the rabbit changes course, the wolf has to change course.
And if the wolf can't admit that the course needs to be changed, the wolf will starve to death.
And that's sort of the first thing that I look at When somebody sort of comes into my life who seems appealing, seems interesting, somebody I might want to get to know better, the first thing I scan for is, okay, can this person admit when he or she is wrong?
I remember when I went to watch the movie Joker, and I mean, there's been a lot of examples of this, but the one that sort of popped into my head just now was I made a claim about the movie because, you know, I'm making notes during the movie and I missed something.
I made a note about the movie and people told me I was wrong.
And I fought hard for my position and people told me I was wrong.
I went to go and see the movie again, which I didn't want to do, but I went to go and see the movie again.
It was only available in theaters back then.
This is, I guess, pre-pandemic.
I went to go and see the movie again and I came to the Bit of the movie in question, and I was 100% completely and totally wrong.
And I did an apology video as I've got a whole series of videos called I Was Wrong About X, Y, and Z. And it's a funny thing where people think, well, if you admit that you're wrong, people will lose respect for you.
And it's like, well, people who want to bully you will use you admitting that you're wrong to invalidate everything you say that goes against their wishes in the future.
Oh, you're right about this.
Well, remember that time you were so certain that you were wrong about that other thing?
Well, this could be the case now.
And they'll just try and dismantle any certainty that you have because you once admitted that you were wrong.
Well, you don't want those people in your life.
Come on. Come on.
I mean, there's the sales tax, there's the income tax, there's the property tax, and then there's the asshole tax.
The asshole tax is the price you pay economically because you're exhausted and weighed down by the assholes in your life.
It's the biggest tax of all because it's a tax that eliminates unrealized income.
You'll never succeed.
I mean, a guy I knew when I first got into the programming world, I got my first professional job as a coder.
I got my first white collar job.
Brilliant guy. Brilliant guy.
Amazing coder. But he was going through a divorce and the divorce was highly contentious and His productivity was destroyed because, you know, he's afraid of every phone call.
There's always something that's going to be an extra bill.
He feels lashed to his job.
And I remember he'd be on the phone and you could even hear the raised voice at the other end.
And the raised voice was actually the lawyer.
I guess the lawyer was channeling the ex-wife.
And he would put the phone down, his hands shaking, his cheeks would be red.
And I just remember him saying, guys, because we all work together in the same room, like a half dozen of us.
And he'd be like, we didn't even have cubicles, just all the table.
And he said, guys, never get divorced.
Never, ever, ever get divorced.
And it was horrible. And again, I don't want to get into too many details.
But his productivity was really, really bad.
And everyone was kind of aware that he was given the easier tasks and, you know, he would disappear at some points during the day.
He'd have, I guess, meetings or, you know, he'd have to go for walks to clear his head.
And, you know, you'd see him trying to debug something, just scrolling through.
I remember watching him just scrolling through lines of code and he would be pretending to be working, but he'd just be hitting the page down every five or ten seconds because I remember he'd get to the bottom and he'd just stare at it.
And that is the reality of what happens to you economically if you have destructive people in your life.
You just can't be productive.
And I saw a lot of this.
In this particular industry, there was a lot of disrupted relationships.
A lot of guys who were type A, hard-driven, very intelligent workaholics, you know, the alphas of the economic world.
And You know, their girlfriends or their wives found there's all kinds of sexy.
He's hard driving. He's got a nice car.
He's taking me to a nice restaurant.
And that's fine if you get married and have kids because then you've got kids, right?
For the woman. But if you're just kind of dating and hanging around, you're going to spend a lot of your time waiting for that guy to get off work so you can get off together.
And there's just a lot of...
I remember being in a relationship once where I'd worked...
I don't know, 30 hours straight or something like that.
I came home completely exhausted and my girlfriend was like, no, no, I haven't seen you in a couple of days.
Let's go for dinner. I wanted to be a good boyfriend and I had the spine of a centipede.
So does being poor give you permission to be a bad person?
Well, I think that bad people can't admit that they're wrong.
And when you can't admit that you're wrong, you will be broke.
You will be a failure in life.
And I don't know why it piles up.
Like, how much pain has to pile up for people to start finally thinking that they might be wrong?
Well, a lot.
And I say this, that it's been that way for myself as well.
But yeah, one of the most foundational life skills for success in anything is to admit that you're wrong about something.
If there's one lesson in success in life that I could give you, that I could hand over from my battle-scarred, weathered and lined and blood-spattered experience, it would be there's almost no greater superpower in life than entertaining the possibility that you're wrong, And admitting that you're wrong.
Now, you don't want to be there sort of apologizing for your existence and apologizing for drawing breath and so on.
So it's important to fight for what you believe in, but you always have to be open to the possibility that you're just completely wrong.
I mean, my whole show, this whole conversation is founded on me admitting that I was wrong.
It's the whole beginning. I was a minarchist and my very first published essay on lourockwell.com, The Stateless Society and Examination of Alternatives.
I was just writing... An email to a bunch of people and I was pointing out it's like 17 years, 17 years since I started this philosophy show.
So I was a minarchist, you know, small government, government should handle police, military, law courts, maybe the prisons, and that's it.
Minarchist, right? And I was wrong.
I held that opinion for 20 years and I was wrong.
This is why my first statement was, my first published article was the State of the Society.
It's kind of what got me going here.
It's what made me feel or think and believe that I had something to add.
And shortly thereafter, I realized that the objectivist or Aristotelian view of ethics that I had accepted for 20 years...
I was wrong. I was wrong.
And that's when I started working on UPB. One of my early essays was Proving Libertarian Morality, which was the foundation to UPB. And I just tend to admit that I'd studied something for 20 years.
I'd studied something for 20 years in the core of what I believed, the most important aspect of what I believed, which is the morality.
Philosophy is about morality, fundamentally.
The most important aspect of what I had believed I was wrong on.
I mean, fortunately, I hadn't done much damage because I hadn't been a public figure, but I was wrong.
I was wrong. I was wrong about atheists and their desire for objective morality.
I was wrong about Christians and their virtue of compassion.
I mean, there's a lot of stuff that I've been wrong about, and I hope that I have at least maintained your respect by fessing up when I'm wrong.
And, of course, I have people in my life who, if I say that I'm wrong, they say, okay, okay, Okay, thanks for telling me, and that's fine.
But they don't sort of hold it over me like, oh, you're certain of this.
Well, you were certain of that, and you were wrong about that.
Well, that's just a strangulation of your potential.
Yeah, so you have a choice in life.
You can be right about everything and broke and abused, or you can admit that you're wrong and spread your wings and flourish.
So when it comes to poor people, people who can't admit that they're wrong, Are a millstone around your ankles.
They will drag you down.
They will keep you down. Because nobody's right all the time.
And if somebody says that they're right all the time, you have to sacrifice any consciousness or integrity that you have, any virtue or belief in your own intelligence that you have, in order to appease them.
In order to appease them.
You know, it's the old thing.
I remember a friend of mine once complaining about his girlfriend because...
When he was flirting, they had a long-distance relationship, but when he was flirting with a girl, it was like the worst thing ever.
She just ground him to the dust.
This is decades ago. She just ground him to the dust about flirting with another girl.
But then she actually kissed a guy, and of course, she couldn't admit that she was wrong to do that.
It was like, well, you just haven't been paying enough attention to me lately.
So he was wrong when he flirted with a girl, and he was wrong when she kissed a guy.
I'm like, dude. It's a simple question.
Simple question in any relationship.
This could be in business, could be friendship, could be dating, could be online.
Okay. When was the last time your girlfriend admitted she was wrong?
I mean, there's these sort of little meme jokes online.
Where the woman says, this is me preparing to apologize to my husband for being wrong.
And then, you know, she builds up for like 30 seconds, like she's about to take a giant dump off Mount Rushmore.
And then she just starts yelling at him that he's wrong.
Like, this is sort of a joke, and although not particularly funny, so...
Yeah, I don't think that being poor necessarily gives people permission to be bad or to be wrong, but I do think that poverty is a shadow cast by not admitting that you're wrong, and particularly in parenting, right?
Parents have to be able to admit that they're wrong and apologize to their kids, or they're not.
I mean, this is really where it comes from.
Dysfunction comes from parents never admitting that they're wrong, and when you can't admit that you're wrong, you just always have to be a bully, no matter what.
So sorry for the long speech.
Does that make any sense to you?
No, this was very insightful.
Thank you very much for the answer.
I just want to make one last comment, and first, thank you for all these years.
It's been very nice to listen to you, even though it was a little bit of a Listening for the meme in the beginning, but I learned a lot, so I changed my view of you, and it was very good for my life.
Oh, sorry, you were like a hate listener at the beginning, like, aha, he's a bad guy, I'm going to find out what a bad guy he is.
Yeah, yeah, okay. I appreciate that.
Hey, look at that, admitting you were wrong.
That's very nice. Go ahead.
Yeah, you were the loony libertarian that I was listening to to have fun, right?
To make fun of, but thanks.
And, you know, the philosopher, the Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho died, so if you can make in your history a philosopher, if you can have a day for him or a few minutes for him, I think it would be very nice for us to speak Portuguese.
Could you just remind me of the name?
I just missed that. Go ahead. Olavo de Carvalho?
Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, he was on my show, wasn't he?
I think he was, yeah. Yes.
Yeah, I would love to. Unfortunately, he passed away, but yeah, I would love to when I get to contemporary philosophers.
I definitely would like to do more Portuguese and Spanish-speaking philosophers and so on, so I'll do my best, but I'll make a note of that.
Thank you for the suggestion. Thanks.
Last comment. I think one of the problems that we have, at least for me, I think in Africa, is that The state gives you a good reason for you to not admit that you are wrong, right?
Because people are telling you that if you have a problem, if you are poor, if you are not educated, it's because they have these magical social problems, right?
Social justice, injustice, inequality.
So there is a ready-made reason for you not to look at yourself, not to look at your family, and I think that's I'm not saying that it makes the people not responsible, but it's a ready-made reason for them to not introspect about their own feelings.
And so if we cannot even change that, then we cannot admit false, right?
I'll keep you talking.
No, listen, brother, that is a staggeringly brilliant comment.
I did this whole 20-minute speech and missed out something absolutely essential that is really at the core of things.
So I really appreciate you giving me that slow pitch because that is a staggeringly brilliant comment.
And yeah, we can certainly see this with the question of racism and racism and so on.
The other thing that pops into my head as well is...
In the past, before the welfare state, if a woman got pregnant out of wedlock and kept the baby for whatever reason, the charity would support her if her parents were unable to support her or completely unwilling.
A charity would support her, but the Victorian charities were very clear.
I don't know how it works in Africa.
I assume with the welfare state, it's the same nonsense.
But when there wasn't a welfare state, the charity was very clear.
You made a big mistake.
You're going to have to fix that mistake, and the best way to fix it is to not repeat it.
And if you do it again, you don't get any more charity.
And so you really did have to figure out whatever bad decision you'd made in whoever you chose to sleep with.
That was a bad decision and you have to fix that bad decision and you can't repeat it.
Whereas, of course, now you get more and more and more money the more and more and more children you have.
So you never have to increase your standards.
You never have to up your game.
You never have to choose better people.
And so, yeah, I thank you for that.
That was like a truly fantastic thought and insight.
Thank you so much for sharing it.
That elevated what I was talking about about a thousand percent.
So thank you very much.
And yeah, I'm glad that you started listening even as a want-to-make-fun-of-the-bad-guy listener, and I appreciate that somehow it was able to be turned around for you.
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