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Dec. 10, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:34:33

Responsibility as Power! Freedomain Livestream 9 Dec 2022

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	Yeah, that's it, everybody.
	How you doing? 7 p.m.
	on... Well, it's either the 12th of September or the 9th of December.
	I'm going to go with plan B. I'm going to go with what's behind door number two.
	Welcome to your Friday night philosophical chitty-chatty bing-bang.
	And, of course, I am here for you if you have questions, comments, issues, challenges, criticisms, hairstyle suggestions, armpit braiding tips...
	I am all here for you. All you need to do is raise your hand and I will be happy to have a conversation.
	Now, what should I talk about?
	What should I talk about?
	If you're in the chat, then I can talk about Responsibility, accountability, and my thoughts and feelings about that, I'm quite troubled and outraged by what's going on these days compared to what happened when I was a kid.
	So if you want me to talk about accountability, then just hit A. If you want me to talk about Twitter, hit T. See?
	I'm into T and A. A for accountability, T for Twitter.
	Just let me know, and I... Hey, you know, voting apparently is the thing to do.
	A, T, I'm sorry, you can't choose both.
	Alright, you want accountability?
	Looks like people are...
	So tired of Twitter?
	Yeah, well... The lights are being turned on, but nothing can be done about the infestations, really.
	Alright, so it looks like accountability.
	So, let me ask you this.
	When you were a kid, wasn't accountability just a huge freaking deal?
	You've got to be accountable.
	Gotta take responsibility.
	Man, if you didn't study for that test, well, that's just your deal if you didn't get that assignment in on time.
	That was just your deal, man.
	That's just your thing.
	Gotta be accountable. You didn't finish the book.
	If there's a pop quiz, you just get marked down.
	And God help you if you try to have any excuses.
	Kid, you gotta take responsibility.
	Don't blame other people for what's going on, for your choices.
	Accountability. I mean, this is from when I was just a little kid.
	As a little kid, you gotta be accountable.
	God, it was all such foul and vile lies, wasn't it?
	I remember sitting by a swimming pool, right?
	So here's the thing too. Here's another accountability thing, man.
	You forgot to bring your swimsuit, your swimming trunks, your Speedos, your banana hammocks.
	You forgot to bring those for swim day.
	Well, you're accountable.
	You got to sit and watch everyone else have fun.
	And when I was a kid, even younger, when I was in England, we used to have school lunches.
	And there was a little bowl by the little flat that we lived in in England.
	And I think my brother had written the note and it said, don't forget the diner money.
	It was supposed to be dinner, but he was a kid, right?
	So don't forget the diner money.
	I always remember that. And We were supposed to bring in, I can't remember, 25 pennies or 25 pence for lunch or something like that.
	Now, if you forgot the money or you didn't have the money, and there were times when we forgot, there were times when we just plain didn't have the money, then you'd get a lecture and they would make you wear a big, bright, thick elastic band, like one of those wristbands that you get at an amusement park, but thicker, obviously, and bigger.
	You'd have to wear this, and this was the mark of the poor kid who couldn't afford lunch.
	You're accountable. You didn't bring your money in.
	We'll feed you, but we've got to mark you first as a deadbeat.
	And, of course, you know, it was pretty rough, and you try and hide it with your sleeve, you know, things like that.
	So you were marked out as the poor kid, right?
	Got to be accountable. So, I remember sitting by a pool on swim day in junior high school when everybody was very excited to see...
	Well, all the boys were very excited to see the girls in swimsuits.
	So, some of the guys were trying not to have erections.
	Oh, my God. Oh, there's only so much Margaret Thatcher you can process through your brain.
	So... Sitting by the pool, and I can't even remember why, but some other kid and I got into a bit of a wrestling match to throw each other into the pool, and we were both trying to strain to push each other into the pool.
	It wasn't particularly hostile.
	It was just one of these goofy things that you get into, like sniffing the photocopies, or sniff those photocopies, or every now and then in an act of rebellion, if one kid coughed, other kids would all start coughing at the same time, and We'd have a little rebellion based on that.
	So it was just, you know, some goofy thing where you try and get the other kid embarrassed by pushing him into the pool.
	So we were pushing each other in.
	And then I won and I managed to push him in.
	And he broke code, right?
	Because the code is, if you're wrestling around and the one of you loses, you don't sit there and say, well, he pushed me in, right?
	Because that's bro code, right?
	That's bro code 101, right?
	If you're messing around in class and you get caught, you don't turn and say, well, he made me do it or whatever it is.
	But this kid broke code, which was really unfortunate.
	And so I got a big lecture about pool safety.
	I didn't even know if that kid could swim.
	It's like... Come on, he's wrestling with me by the pool.
	It's the shallow end, bro.
	We stand up and our nipples are over the water, so I think he'll survive.
	But yeah, got a big lecture on responsibility and safety.
	And he said, did you push that kid in?
	And I said, well, sort of.
	And he's like, oh, is that like being sort of pregnant?
	You know, like, even though it was a complex situation.
	Frankly, we were both trying to push each other in.
	I just happened to win. It's like being a little bit pregnant.
	Can you be a little bit pregnant?
	No? Well, you didn't just kind of push him in.
	It's like, well, no. Anyway, so...
	And I remember...
	And so, yeah, held accountable.
	I was not allowed to swim for the...
	I gotta be accountable. You know, I pushed a kid who was five feet tall into a three-and-a-half-foot pool.
	He could have drowned if he didn't know how to stand.
	He would... Right? Right?
	And I remember also back in grade 6, I was talking in class, like there's a meme, which is, you know, the back of the classroom and there are these kids like dining with pretend wine glasses and they're fine dining in China, the back of the class, right?
	I was trying to avoid the front, right?
	Now, university, I went to the front because I wanted to get my money's worth, but yeah, back there in junior high school and all that.
	I would sit in the back as much as possible because you could sort of pass notes and kill time.
	You know what it is, like you're locked in the boring dream of a dead person in school.
	It's also irrelevant, so far away, so ridiculous, so nonsensical, so useless, and so false, right?
	See how much the present gets rewritten in real time by propagandists, and that's when you can check it to some degree.
	Imagine how bad history is.
	If the future is a lie, history is a fever dream.
	What's that old Norm MacDonald joke?
	It's weird. It's weird how the good guys have won every single conflict throughout history.
	What are the odds? I don't do a very good Norm MacDonald imitation.
	I have a deficiency of adenoids.
	But I remember in grade 6, in grade 6, I was chatting away in the back with my friends and we were passing notes of hilarity back and forth.
	Anyway, I got busted and I had to write out lines.
	I had to write out a hundred lines.
	Oh, I will not disrupt the class.
	You had to write that out a hundred times, right?
	And, anyway, so that afternoon, after school, I was playing baseball, and I had a problem, because I could never afford a glove in baseball.
	I don't mean to be some Oliver Twist guy, you know, I mean, I still had a better childhood in terms of resources than 99.9% of people across history and across the world, but, you know, relative to the other kids, we were the bro-cast people on the block.
	So, I could never afford a baseball glove.
	Now, the kids were pretty nice.
	The colony kids, the colonial children were pretty nice and they would lend me the baseball glove.
	But the problem was that I'm a lefty.
	And I'm not like a kind of lefty.
	Like, my wife is ridiculously ambidextrous.
	And I'm a total lefty.
	Like, my left hand is like this nimble Nureyev of gesticulation, and my right hand is just this dead meat puppet.
	It can barely do anything.
	Like, if you ever want to see something ridiculous, watch me trying to throw with my right hand.
	I literally lift up my back leg to throw with my right hand, like I'm some sort of girl.
	But anyway, so...
	Kids would...
	They were nice, and they would lend me their glove.
	But the problem was, as a lefty...
	It meant, because, you know, people are a righty, so they have gloves that go on their left hand, baseball gloves, right?
	So I would catch with my left hand, and then I would have to rip off the glove, and then, you know, I'd have to grab the ball with my right hand, rip off the glove, hand the ball back to my left hand from my right hand, and then throw the ball, because I could not throw.
	I would rather lose the game and have everyone castigate me than have my classmates, and in particular the girls who were watching, I would simply never ever let them see me throw with my right hand.
	I would actually probably rather go with amputation or some sort of hyena attack rather than let the girl see me throw with my right hand.
	Because if I threw with my right hand, it would come with some kind of a yoo-hoo!
	Something that would just be like, that would just be it.
	That would be it. My genes would end.
	That would be the end of the line for the three-billion-year march of the Molyneux genetics.
	Like I simply, yoo-hoo! Would not let people see me throw with my right arm.
	And so that's what I had to do.
	Anyway, so I tried.
	We were really trying to win the game and it was real close at the end there.
	And I remember, sorry, this is jumping around a lot.
	The first time I played, so in England, the game is called rounder.
	It's similar to baseball. But when you hit the ball, you have a choice to run or not.
	You get three pitches and if you hit but you think you can hit better next round, then you don't run, right?
	And so the first time I played with the kids in school, in grade 6, first while I lived in Whitby when I came to Canada, and I was in grade 8, and then when I came to Toronto, it put me back in grade 6, which was, you know, half good, half bad. Anyway, so...
	When I was first playing baseball with the Canadian kids, I have my strengths and weaknesses in sports, but I'm a pretty good hitter, man.
	I'm a pretty good hitter, man.
	I can crack them over the back 40 like nobody's business.
	So, I mean, when I was playing baseball, when I first introduced my daughter, and my wife would come out too, we'd play baseball, I'd be like, where do you want to crack?
	There it goes. Where do you want to crack?
	There it goes. I'm a pretty good hitter.
	So, the first ball I hit and it was like, okay, but it's kind of a grounder up to the right.
	And so I hit the ball and everyone's like, I'm just standing there like, oh, I'll take the next one.
	I'll just take the next one.
	It was like, run, you limey bastard, run!
	I was like, oh, can I not wait for the next one?
	You! So, oh man, crazy.
	So, at the game, after I was assigned the lines, I tried to catch the ball.
	I realized I needed to throw the ball with my left hand, so I tried to catch the ball with my left hand without the glove so I could throw it back right away without having to rip the glove off.
	And you can't throw it with the glove on, right?
	And it just, it wrecked.
	Like, I just caught it wrong and it just wrecked my wrist, right?
	You know, it wasn't broken or anything, just like a sprain.
	So I couldn't really do the lines.
	I couldn't do the lines.
	Boy, don't I sound like a really bad coke addict, right?
	So I just, I couldn't do, I couldn't do the lines because I couldn't write.
	Now, of course, in hindsight, I could have scribbled them out with my right hand or whatever.
	But anyway, so I went in the next day and the teacher's like, where are your lines?
	And I said, well, I didn't do them.
	And she said, right, double the lines now.
	You're 200 now. And I said, well, you know, but see, my wrist is kind of swollen.
	I caught a ball bad.
	I caught a bad ball in baseball.
	And I was like, still have to do them.
	Okay. So, even an injury, an injury, frankly, based upon poverty, which is, you know, was not exactly my fault.
	Although I did get a job shortly thereafter.
	I was only 11, but get your job in, right?
	So... So I was responsible, see, even as a kid, even though I had sprained my wrist, I still had to write my lines.
	She did, to be fair, she didn't make me write 200 lines.
	I just had to write the other 100 that night.
	So, yes, sprained wrist, man, you've still got to write your lines.
	Too bad, man. You've got to be responsible.
	So, I was responsible for being bored in class.
	I was responsible for trying to stay awake by passing notes with friends.
	I was responsible for doing the lines, even though I was not responsible for the injury I got, to some degree, because it came out of poverty.
	So, you know, just accountability and responsibility, man, that was the big thing.
	That was the big thing, man.
	I remember a friend of mine, his mom got sick.
	He missed an exam. He had to take her to the hospital.
	Man, did he ever have to fight to get to retake that exam.
	Because, you know, you just got to be responsible.
	And, boy, isn't that a total lie in society.
	See, responsibility, I thought it was an abstract virtue.
	We've got to be responsible. When I got caned in boarding school, because when I was six, we were playing football, footy soccer, and the ball went over a spiked iron fence that separated the concrete playground or the play area at boarding school from the sanatorium.
	The sanatorium is where the sick kids went.
	And, you know, you could wait for one of the masters to come over, and then he would go round and get it, but we were in the middle of a very feverish and high-pitched and high-stress game, and we were tied, and so I was just like, oh, I'll get it, right?
	So I shimmied up over the fence and got the ball and came back over.
	But when I came back over, some little weasel bag had gone and gotten one of the prefects, which is sort of one of the higher boys.
	And then he went in turn and got one of the teachers.
	And I had broken the rule.
	He said, broken the rule, you cannot climb the sanatorium fence.
	And I was a little crap disturber in my brain back then.
	And I remember this very clearly.
	Again, the age of six, right? And...
	I said, well, let's just get in the ball.
	But you could get injured.
	And my initial response was to say, but if I'm injured, I'm right by the sanatorium anyway.
	I'll be fine. If you want to get injured, that's the place, right?
	Of course I didn't say it, right? Too high stakes back then.
	So yeah, I was taken up to the headmaster's office where I got a stern lecture and I got caned on my buttocks.
	And yeah, because I didn't even really know.
	I don't remember the rule. I don't remember that I knew the rule.
	I don't think I knew the rule. But it doesn't matter.
	Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
	You're six years old. You climb a fence to get a ball, man.
	You get caned on your ass.
	In that weird way that they have in these kinds of schools or used to.
	And I actually checked the website of the school a couple of years ago.
	They don't do corporal punishment anymore, of course, right?
	So I was responsible, you see, at the age of six, I was responsible and had to get caned.
	You've just got to take ownership and responsibility for what you do.
	And so I grew up with this whole idea, this whole idea that, you know, boy, society is just really about accountability and responsibility, man.
	I mean, if they're going to inflict it on six-year-olds to the point of physically beating that child with a bamboo stick, right?
	If they're going to be so wildly keen on accountability...
	Imagine how accountable adults are.
	I mean, if they're pushing that level of accountability and responsibility and self-ownership and free will and moral responsibility and consequences on a little kid who doesn't even know the rules, if a sprained wrist doesn't get you out of writing lines, man, if this is how accountable adults Adults hold kids.
	Can you imagine how accountable adults hold other adults?
	I mean, that's going to be insane.
	Insane levels. It's like if you expect a kid to lift 20 pounds and then you exercise like crazy, this muscle called accountability.
	Kids, you've got to lift 20 pounds.
	Can you imagine how much 30 and 40-year-old adult males who've been training on this accountability hours a day, they must be able to lift 20 pounds.
	A thousand pounds! Funny story!
	Not so funny story.
	It's total bullshit.
	Adults, where's the accountability?
	Now, there's accountability if you don't have a lot of power, obviously, right?
	If you're low status, if you're marginalized, if you just don't have that much power, well then you see you're accountable.
	But the people who have power?
	The power to inflict accountability on others?
	Man alive, all dogs go to heaven, my friends.
	Accountability, inflicting accountability, has nothing to do with morality.
	In the modern world, maybe throughout history, I don't know, but certainly in the modern world, the power to inflict responsibility and accountability, nothing to do with ethics, nothing to do with virtue, nothing to do with developing a sense of responsibility.
	It's all nonsense. Responsibility.
	Accountability. That's just an exercise of power.
	It is a manifestation of power to be able to inflict responsibility and accountability on others.
	And it is a mark of power to completely escape accountability and responsibility yourself.
	The word accountability, responsibility.
	These are markers of power.
	The power to inflict responsibility is a mark of superior strength.
	The power to evade responsibility is a mark of superior strength.
	Responsibility, accountability, morality.
	It's all about power. When I was at boarding school at the age of six, one of the youngest kids in the whole school, well, they had the power to drag me into a room and beat me with bamboo.
	They had the power to do that.
	And because they had the power to do that, well, they needed an excuse.
	They needed a way to manifest that power.
	So they give me this laser-targeting thing called accountability and responsibility.
	Responsibility is an excuse or a manifestation of the exercise of power.
	People who have real power are never held accountable.
	They're never responsible for anything. People who are subjugated, people who are slaves, people who are marginalized, and of course children are the most marginalized in all of society, well, they have responsibility and accountability inflicted upon them, as it was the case for you, as it was the case for me.
	You get inflicted upon you The brand!
	The fiery flame arrow called accountability and responsibility.
	I couldn't decide between the two words, so sorry for the repetitive metronome.
	Tick tock. But what they said, you're responsible, you're accountable, is just the infliction of power and authority.
	I mean, the teachers who taught me, who taught you in the government schools, they couldn't be fired.
	They could hold you back a year.
	They could kick you out of school.
	But they themselves couldn't be fired.
	So you see, you were responsible.
	You were accountable. You didn't study for the test.
	You got failed. If they were bad teachers, though, they couldn't get fired.
	You feel me? What has it been?
	340 plus days since Jelaine Maxwell was convicted of sexually trafficking minors to...
	Apparently absolutely no one.
	She's like a drug dealer.
	Convicted of supplying drugs to...
	no one, no customers whatsoever.
	Complete lack of accountability.
	I am responsible for all of the, quote, terrible things I said on social media, all those facts and arguments and reason and evidence that I put forward.
	There's a team on Twitter that had to be finally contacted by the Department of Homeland Security to take down...
	Blackmailed child sexual abuse material.
	They wouldn't do it.
	They would not take down this material of children.
	A child who was blackmailed into explicit sexual activity.
	It was posted.
	He showed them evidence of his age.
	Contacted law enforcement.
	Twitter would not take it down.
	Back then... Apparently things are changing now, obviously for the better.
	I'm responsible, you see, and I must be punished.
	I must be held to account and banished for my badness.
	Where's the accountability for people like that?
	I mean, to me, that's straight-up facilitation of distribution.
	It's jail time. Easy peasy.
	Where will the accountability be?
	Well... Accountability, you see, that's a slave marking.
	That's a brand of ownership.
	The infliction of accountability while escaping it yourself, well, that's a marker of power.
	It's a status symbol, you see.
	It's also tiresome.
	Just this endless gaslighting and manipulation and all of this pretense of morality.
	But see, the pretense of morality is a great relief because the people who use morality to destroy morality are fully 100% responsible.
	Like, I never have to shed a moment's concern for anybody in power who comes to a bad end.
	Ever. I mean, this is a great relief that they use morality I mean, the teacher didn't say, well, you know, I enjoy exercising power over you, so I don't care about your sprained wrist, man.
	Just go write those lines, because it gives me pleasure.
	I like having power over you.
	He didn't say that. Oh, no, there's this abstract principle called responsibility.
	Accountability. They're cloaking all of this mild to moderate to extreme sadism in all of these moral terms.
	It's all about morality. It's all about accountability.
	Oh man, that was the wild shock that happened.
	I still remember. You know, it's where were you when moments.
	You have those, you know, where were you when this happened, right?
	My mama cried when President Kennedy died.
	I remember being in the States when Matt Drudge, before he got woke and silly, was breaking the Monica Lewinsky story.
	I talked about this years ago.
	I'll just touch on it briefly here.
	That was a mind frack of interstellar dimensions to me.
	I remember I was driving in the States.
	I was on a business trip with a salesman.
	That's funny, you know, because I'm obviously fairly good with language and fairly convincing, so I would always get I was really good at closing sales because I understand the whole purpose of sales.
	The whole purpose of sales is you're not trying to sell someone something, you're trying to benefit their life.
	And if you can't benefit their life, don't try and sell them.
	But if you can benefit their life, then really work hard to sell them so their life gets better and yours gets better too.
	So I had these salespeople and the salespeople would always, because I was the chief technical officer, they'd always say, Well, we need staff to come along because they're going to have a lot of technical questions.
	And then I'd end up running most of the sales.
	They're just, you know, hanging off my jugular, so to speak.
	But I remember I was driving with this salesman for the company I used to run, which is still running, by the way.
	But I was driving.
	You had a big-ass pickup truck.
	I was driving in the States, and we were listening to the revelations about Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton.
	And, of course, I'd been told my whole life that you can't have consensual affairs with underlings.
	Now, this was... There's no bigger gap, really, other than parent-child.
	There's no bigger gap that you could conceive of between...
	The President of the United States and an unpaid intern.
	30 years his junior or whatever she was, right?
	I mean, that's the most powerful man in the world with an unpaid young intern.
	No bigger power disparity.
	And I was young, obviously naive.
	God, I hope I'm still naive.
	I was talking today about how When I first started this back in 2005, 2006, man, did I ever underestimate society's addiction to child abuse.
	Holy crap. And I'm so glad that I was that naive and optimistic.
	I'm so glad.
	Because I might not have done it if I'd have known the truth.
	I might not have done it.
	It's like the gods of child protection kept the reality of the world from me until I was so committed I couldn't turn back.
	Oh, blessed, blessed eye-poking of the gods to keep my sight dim enough that I didn't realize the vast and ghastly shapes assembling to oppose me in the gloom of the midnight of the human condition.
	Thank God!
	Thank God!
	The gods kept the expansive demons facing me down from my view so that I could sail forward until I was surrounded, could not go back, had to fight my way forward.
	And here we are.
	O blessed, blessed ignorance and optimism and naivete!
	Thank you, O gods of eye-closure!
	And glaucoma for dimming my vision and not letting me even begin to guess the forces arrayed against the protection of children.
	Thank you for keeping me blind as a bat without even sonar to navigate by so that I could get the word out there about the protection of children and then be utterly surprised when the forces of hell all rained down upon me and upon us as a community.
	Thank you. For getting me into the fight until there was no way out.
	But forward. What is the old saying when you're in hell?
	Keep going. I didn't know it was hell.
	Because I listened to what society said about its love for its children rather than what society actually did, which was to relentlessly exploit, abuse, undermine, neglect, and bless its children.
	Not everyone, not all the time, of course.
	Oh, I may have lost one thread too many.
	Did I lose one thread too many?
	I might well have.
	I did the accountability thing.
	Oh well, it'll come back.
	Alright, listen, let me just jump in here, and you can tell me.
	I mean, if you're enjoying listening, that's totally fine by me.
	But if you have questions or comments, issues, criticisms, I am more than happy to hear from you, my friends.
	Just have to raise your hand, and I am all yours.
	I can unmute and we can get to it.
	If you have questions, you can, of course, also type them into the chat window and I can hear them from or read them from there as well.
	It's really, really up to you.
	Let me just go back and see.
	Somebody gave me the quote, I'm a total lefty.
	Ah, I remember the ball scene from Almost.
	Yes. Oh yes, sorry.
	Thank you for reminding me.
	Yes, I was talking about Clinton and Lewinsky.
	Yeah, so I was listening to this story and I was like, oh my god, the feminists are going to just eat him alive!
	The feminists are going to just come down like a ton of bricks on Bill Clinton.
	Man, it's going to be a nuclear shadow left by his former DNA when they get through with him.
	And I just remember...
	Literally mouth agape.
	You know, like, I could barely think of anything else.
	Just as the days went by.
	Like, you know, when you have something that you have an instinct about and it just can't leave your brain until you've solved it.
	Oof. And not only did the feminist not come down on him, but the feminists actually supported him.
	And as one feminist said, I'd give him a blowjob too if it meant he'd keep Roe v.
	Wade. So they didn't care about power disparities.
	They didn't care about consent.
	They didn't care about the sexual exploitation of somebody so far down the chain they're a boat anchor.
	Didn't care about any of it.
	And they turned on Monica Lewinsky.
	Ah, the sisterhood.
	Yeah, so that was one of my first big red pills.
	And it's there that I really began to...
	I mean, I did a pro-feminist play when I was in university.
	God help me. It was mostly just to get laid.
	But anyway. Ah, crazy.
	All right. Let's see here. I just figured out the biggest power disparity.
	A newborn baby and a mother that is also president.
	Yeah, I guess so. I guess so.
	How do you feel about people who listen to the show and don't follow the values?
	I feel that they're human beings.
	I mean, I... My goodness, I... I was an objectivist for many years and I did not consistently follow those values.
	I argued for those values for sure.
	Like I argued for, you know, free markets and voluntary interactions and so on.
	But I had people in my life, many people in my life, who deeply and vehemently opposed reason and evidence.
	Deeply and vehemently opposed reason and evidence.
	And I was like, this is fine.
	You know, dog with a cup and a fire, right?
	And it took me a long time to go from theory to practice.
	A long time.
	And I'm not even going to take credit for my big old transition.
	I'm not even going to take credit.
	It wasn't like I had some, oh, intellectual revelation that I should start living my values consistently.
	I wish, man. I wish it wasn't that way for me at all.
	At some point, like I was in a pretty exploitive business relationship, and I was living with a woman that...
	It was one of the...
	It was a bad relationship, really the worst kind.
	See, a really bad relationship, you just get out, right?
	This was a relationship...
	It was good at times.
	It was not good at times.
	It wasn't bad enough to leave.
	It wasn't good enough to commit.
	It was one of those limbo relationships.
	You just... Half and half, right?
	One foot on the pier, one foot on the boat.
	They're kind of getting slowly wider, but you can't really make any decision which way to go.
	So I was really lost at this point.
	And the gap, this was sort of really 10 years or so after I'd gotten into philosophy seriously.
	And the gap between my values and my life was just widening.
	And, yeah, it was wild, man.
	One day... One day, well, one night, really, I couldn't sleep.
	Now, I mean, I think everyone has that, you know, once every couple of months, everyone has a night where, for whatever reason, like you had coffee too late or whatever it is, you had a nap in the afternoon or something, you just, you don't sleep that well or, you know, you're up for a good chunk of the night or something like that.
	That happens to me, I don't know, maybe two or three times a year.
	And usually it's because I haven't eaten.
	Right? And I have a tough time getting to sleep or staying to sleep when I'm hungry.
	Because I exercise a lot and muscles burn up a lot more.
	They burn up a lot more calories than fat does.
	So if I'm hungry when I go to bed, I'll be starving in the middle of the night.
	So sometimes, right? Anyway, I was like, I just couldn't sleep.
	I couldn't sleep. Now, for me, I always have to sort of tell myself, go to bed, right?
	I remember when I had COVID, I was like, oh man, this is great.
	I mean, it sounds odd. This is great.
	You know why this is great? Because, this is great because...
	I'm so tired I've got to go to bed.
	It never happens to me.
	Now, I go to bed and I will fall asleep and I will sleep.
	I guess, you know, once a night or whatever I get up to pee because I'm, you know, 56 or whatever.
	And it's not like I wake up and have to pee.
	I just, like, wake up and it's like, oh, I might as well pee.
	Help me get back to sleep. So, yeah, I sleep well and all that, but I have to make myself go to bed.
	But when I had COVID, it was nice.
	And I was like, oh man, I gotta go to bed.
	Waves of tiredness and all that.
	It's like, wow, this is actually kind of nice.
	So I was, you know, in this relationship in my 20s and it was not bad, not good, not great.
	It was okay and so on.
	But, you know, you're living in this state of timelessness and this is your 20s as a whole, right?
	Just live in this state of timelessness.
	You know, the future is forever, and you don't really have a shape to your life yet, and there's no story arc, and you're just kind of living day by day, and all of that.
	And the relationship was, you know, again, mostly good, sometimes bad, and, you know, but just not enough to really commit to.
	So, anyway, I just have that night where I'm like, can't sleep, right?
	And it was like, I wasn't even close.
	Like, you know how sometimes you'll sort of be drifting off and then you have some, I remember this when I was a kid, right?
	You have a dream when I got my first skateboard when I was, I don't know, seven or eight.
	And after I got my first skateboard, I was trying to fall asleep.
	And I, of course, had this not quite asleep, half vision, half dream.
	And I dreamt I fell off a skateboard and, of course, kicked my covers off and half fell out of bed.
	And you have those things and then you're up for a little bit.
	But This is like night, not even close.
	This is like, you know, trying to hold a helium balloon underwater.
	Like I just couldn't fall asleep.
	So, you know, you toss and turn.
	And of course, this is the annoying thing.
	You don't know you're not going to sleep.
	You think you're going to fall asleep any minute.
	So you end up, you know, hours and hours, right?
	So I got up after a while. And it happened the next night.
	I was like, oh man, that's weird.
	So then I thought, I don't know.
	I mean, sometimes I can't sleep when I'm fighting a bug.
	Like, you know, if you have a cold or something or something floating around in your system, you can't sleep because your immune system is kind of activated.
	So I was like, okay, I'll just...
	I used to like the Neocitrine, you know, like that powdered night thing for colds.
	You stir it into a nice warm, a hot cup of water and it's really tasty and, you know, always makes me feel kind of cozy and comforted because...
	It's one thing my mom was really good at was when I was ill.
	She was really helpful and kind about all that stuff.
	So I take an Eocitron and I'm like, okay, man, okay, I'm going to bed.
	And I remember very clearly, my unconscious was like, okay, you can drug us.
	Yeah, you'll get your sleep that way, but we'll be here.
	I remember. I remember that very clearly.
	Falling asleep thinking, well, this ain't over.
	This ain't over by a long shot.
	I just couldn't sleep. Couldn't sleep.
	Off and on, 16 months.
	So, I don't know, after a month or two of this, I'm like, I gotta go see a therapist.
	I gotta find out what's going on.
	And really, that was the journey.
	So it wasn't even like I had some big revelation.
	I have a lot of sympathy. Oh, they listen to the show.
	You listen to the show, you don't follow the values.
	I'm Yeah, that's the human condition.
	It's fun to play with the theory.
	It's held to practice the fact.
	It really is, literally, is hell.
	And I've always said this from the beginning of the show.
	Like, you listen to our philosophy, learn to think critically, reason and evidence, man.
	It's a beautiful thing.
	And it's a terrifying thing.
	And it's 40 days in the desert.
	It's belly of the whale.
	It's Job watching his livestock and his family explode.
	I mean, philosophy comes through your life like Genghis Khan with a healing carpet of flowers afterwards.
	It's brutal. Philosophy connects you to reality.
	Society loves nothing more than to sever you from reality so that society can remake you in the image of its own madness.
	Philosophy cuts through that, pulls you out of the matrix and connects you to absolute factual reality which is anathema to society, civilization.
	Civilization wants to detach you from gravity so it can push you anywhere it wants.
	It wants to detach your senses and your reason from empiricism because reality can't be faked but ideology can be reshaped at will.
	There are all the people who are like The suppression of political dissidence on social media is just a conspiracy theory.
	And now that it's been definitively proven, in my view, on Twitter, people are like, well, we always knew what was happening.
	It's no big deal. What the fuck is it?
	Is it a conspiracy theory that's false?
	And when it's proven, we always knew it and it's no big deal?
	You can make up these kinds of things.
	This is people who live in language, live in words, live in manipulation, live on the befuddled and propagandized sweat and labor of others.
	Historical assholes of the nth dimension who prey upon the livestock they fence in with language.
	Branded with ideology.
	There's a nervous woman in my new novel.
	The character says to her, the good guy says to her, with sympathy.
	You've been lied to so much and you don't know that you've been lied to.
	So your conscience is very dangerous and will get you when you least expect it, which is why you're so nervous.
	He's a good guy, a little harsh, but I think we can all understand that.
	So we live in theory.
	We lived in theory. And theory is pleasant.
	Theory is the pretense of virtue.
	Trying to live philosophy through theory is like trying to eat through recipes.
	Or it's like when I used to, quote, study for my math tests.
	I'd just flip through the math textbook and say, oh yeah, I recognize that question.
	Yeah, I think I've seen that before.
	And then, of course, the math test would come and it'd be like, uh, what should I do again?
	But yeah, I mean, living in theory is the great temptation.
	You live in theory and you think you are achieving things in reality.
	I've read another book. I read another blog article.
	I perused another substack.
	I gained some more information. And listen, the getting of the information and the understanding of theory is a beautiful thing and it's a necessary thing and it's essential.
	Knowledge is a prerequisite for virtue.
	But it is not virtue.
	Studying is a prerequisite to becoming a surgeon, but studying is not surgery.
	And it is enormously tempting, and I say this as somebody who succumbed to this temptation for more years than I would ever be able to justify.
	Is it easier to read another book Or is it easier to go out into the world and live your values?
	A friend of mine said to me the other day, he's doing me the kindness of reading the first draft of my new book, and he reminded me that Jesus said to his followers, I send you out as lambs among wolves.
	I send you out as lambs among wolves.
	A lot of predators out there.
	Is it easier to read another book or is it easier to go out there, speak the truth and live your values?
	In the moment, abstractions can be a very potent addiction because abstractions are necessary for virtue but can very often become, and I say this with all humility having lived this myself for many years, abstractions can be a great Barrier to virtue.
	One more book, one more article, one more podcast, one more documentary.
	I'm accumulating knowledge, I'm accumulating knowledge.
	I'm studying, I'm studying.
	Are you going to act on it?
	Peacefully, reasonably, virtuously?
	Are you going to live virtue or are you going to study virtue?
	Are you going to Use words, or will philosophy manifest itself in your deeds, in who you associate with, in who you support, in who you oppose, in what you say?
	Well, the people who listen to this show, this conversation, who do not live the values, they will get no condemnation from me.
	It would be utterly hypocritical for me to condemn those people.
	I mean, I can say to myself, well, you know, but my whole social environment back then, I had to give it all up.
	I had to give up everything. My God, I became an iconoclastic monk of sky tower solitude with philosophy when I really began to live it.
	It's like everybody was attached by fishhooks and velcro to my tender skin and they all just got pulled away!
	God, it was like losing six of my seven layers of epidermis of my largest organ, my skin.
	Like you go to get a tattoo removed and they go to the bone.
	Philosophy took everything from me and left me Curled up, naked, the bowels of a thunderstorm exposed to the elements, isolated beyond measure.
	And there was despair, without a doubt.
	A fundamental belief that I had truly messed up.
	Too wretched. I was too much of an absolutist.
	Too intolerant.
	Too judgmental. My standards were too high.
	It was all a psychological problem.
	Trying to have any kind of integrity in the world.
	And then...
	As the cliche goes, it's always darkest before the dawn.
	And then... Little cracks of light, little coins, little snatches of song, hints of beauty, shades of subtle colors began coming in.
	Cracks in the wall, warmth on the floor, light under the door.
	And I began to experience...
	And sometimes, quite consistently, such an overwhelming flood of joy.
	And I still get it to this day.
	Just a deep oneness and rightness and beauty in the mind and the heart and the soul and the body and the bones and the marrow and the hair and the eyelashes and everything is tingled and overthrown from heaviness.
	And I'm feeling it even now, like I'm floating, like I have silver threads attached to every pore being held aloft by tiny flying creatures.
	It's a wild thing.
	It's a beautiful thing. And from slight cracks in the darkness, little gold coins rolling down the hallway, slight sounds of laughter, In the distance.
	From there, the gifts began to roll in.
	Sleep returned. Vitality returned.
	Certainty returned. Freedom returned.
	And for the first time in my life, and for most of the days ever since, love didn't even return.
	Love arrived.
	Love arrived. It had never been there before.
	It couldn't find me. I was addicted to survival and approval and pleasure.
	I hid myself in hedonism and in the hide-and-go-seek of love seeking to find us.
	Couldn't find me, buried under all that mad greedy flesh.
	Love came.
	Thank you.
	Love of reality.
	Love of virtue.
	Love of action.
	Love of myself. And then, the coup de grace to the shadows of the past.
	The beheading of the headless monster of my history.
	Genuine love from good people flowed into my life.
	And has remained with me for over 20 years.
	And that's the prize.
	And there is nothing else that means anything fundamentally.
	My daughter curling into my side as we chat.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	My wife gives me a big smile and a hug in the morning.
	The friends that we had over at Thanksgiving.
	My daughter's first dance.
	These gems that get fired by brute reason into the depths of a dark heart and light it from within.
	For this there are no substitutes.
	For this the empty conformity of my youth was a shadow without even a substance to block the light, to cast it.
	All I had before was prison food.
	Now I have the just-right buffet.
	The perfectly filling feast.
	That's why I've always said it's a hell of a passage, man.
	It really is a hell of a passage.
	Is it worth it on the other side?
	Oh my God. It's a tipping point, you know.
	Even the scant pleasures...
	Sorry, let me not be unjust to my youthful self.
	The... Powerful pleasures I had in my youth.
	The pleasures of exercising intellect, the pleasures of creation, of writing, of acting, the pleasures of vanity, which I had, and vanity has a pleasure, otherwise it couldn't possibly be a vice.
	All vices do have pleasures.
	That's the bait on the hook, right?
	The pleasures of romance, the pleasures of staying up all night at nightclubs, Dancing, having the odd drink, and chasing girls.
	All real pleasures.
	We're not going to say, oh, they're all shallow, nothings.
	No, those are real pleasures. But here's the thing, man, those pleasures are going to fade.
	You don't want to be that guy with the suspiciously high forehead and slightly sagging skin at the nightclub.
	You don't want to be that guy that the girls look at with pity like, what's grandpa doing here?
	Those pleasures are going to fade.
	And you need to find a better place to land when you fall out of the hysterical rollercoaster of hedonism.
	And look, hedonism is fine.
	Enjoy your body.
	Enjoy the pleasures. Enjoy the senses.
	Enjoy sensuality.
	Enjoy all of these things.
	It's wonderful. But it's not sustainable.
	The pleasures of the flesh are there to pair bond you.
	with the virtues of the soul and through that the love of another a mother to your children father to your children those pleasures were falling apart those pleasures were fading And for my unconscious to have buried through the sleepless caves of those 16 years in order to get to the paradise that I've inhabited for over 21 years with you beautiful people giving me great thoughts,
	great conversations, great support.
	This fertile soil of actual planting.
	This beautiful landscape of actual connection.
	The idea that I might have missed this turnoff.
	This exit.
	From the road to nothing.
	Of earthly, youthful pleasures.
	The idea that I might have missed this exit.
	Missed this joy.
	You know, having had that, that's why I would go back and nag people relentlessly.
	What was I known as the Eggman on Twitter?
	Nag women in particular relentlessly, saying, please use your youth, your beauty, your fertility to settle down, to get a good man, to have children, to live the life of That we only get because our forefathers and foremothers did the same.
	It was out of a desperate desire to share the joys that, through the accidental purpose of my Somewhat despised unconscious, I was dragged off the road because your unconscious can see time in a way that your conscious mind can't.
	Your conscious mind is lost in abstractions, which are timeless, or in the sensual pleasures of the moment, which are timeless, but your unconscious knows the passage of time and can see down the road in a way that you just can't any other way.
	In this sense, the unconscious is a fortune-teller that knows what The next 10, 20, 30, 40 years.
	See, your unconscious has died thousands and thousands and thousands of times before.
	Because everyone who passed along the genetics for the maps of our unconscious has died already.
	Well, for me, everybody, because my father is dead now.
	Your unconscious knows the entire life plan, entire life pattern.
	I mean, your unconscious, your body knew, oh, it's time for puberty.
	Now, if you grew up on a desert island, you'd think you were being covered with strange, dangerous moss, and that something was wrong with your voice, that it wasn't squeaking anymore.
	Your unconscious knows, oh, it's time for puberty.
	Time to turn on the hormones.
	Time to get sexual desire going.
	Time to get that pair bonding going.
	And you see this, of course, going from a baby to a young woman, a young man.
	If you're a parent, you see this whole process is wild.
	how much the body and the brain knows how to grow and how to accumulate and what comes next.
	The unconscious can see through time And my unconscious could see that my path was going to lead to unending misery.
	That the compromises that my conformity and those around me demanded, that I only be with them if I ceased to exist.
	I could only be with people if what I valued most I ignored.
	It's like a woman saying, I will only date you, you who speaks English, I will only date you if when I speak English to you, you do not understand it. I will only date you if when I speak English I will only date you if you sit on a mountain top all night long and never think of an elephant once.
	My unconscious could see down the tunnel of time.
	I see this now, many years later, decades later.
	My unconscious could see down the tunnel of time and could taste the dessert in the recipe for the appetizers.
	Could see where this path was going.
	I mean, for me, I'm just trundling along every day.
	Oh, get up, go to work. Oh, go out with my girlfriend.
	Oh, let's think about getting married.
	Oh, got another project at work.
	Oh, wow, I'm really enjoying this book.
	Oh, look, a new video game came out.
	Wonderful. There's nothing wrong with that.
	You've got to live in the moment. You can't live in the future and the past is dead.
	You've got to live in the moment, but you've got to live in the moment with an eye to the future and the eye to the future.
	The big telescope and microscope to the future comes from the unconscious, which has lived and died many times before.
	I'm not talking about past lives or anything.
	I'm talking about genetics. Listen to the wisdom of that which has lived and died 10,000 times before and knows something about the path of life.
	The unconscious is forged in the fires of history.
	It knows something about the future because your current, your present is the future to your unconscious and it knows the path of life.
	Your body knows how to age.
	Your unconscious knows the end path Of almost every decision you make.
	You cannot be wise without making friends with your reptile brain, with your mammal brain, with the immortal part of you that has seen it all before and knows that that which is new for you is excruciatingly old for it.
	And if this is God for you, bless you.
	There's greater power in that Than in the shallow nowness and conformity of modern atheism.
	If you don't listen to your body, you don't listen to your unconscious, you don't listen to God.
	You're living the life of a mammal cursed with a conscience and cursed with regret.
	Thank you.
	And because we are cursed with a conscience and cursed with regret, we gain the blessings of happiness and joy through virtue.
	No other way.
	No other way.
	Why couldn't I fall asleep?
	Why did I have insomnia?
	Because I was trying to wake myself up.
	From the sleepwalking spiral shark circle of the everyday.
	We're solving problems in the moment.
	Of imagining That my days are repetitive beads that stretch on to infinity.
	That later my life will get shaped.
	That later my life will get purpose.
	That later my life will have meaning.
	That later my life will be manifested virtue rather than theoretical morality.
	I, the big empiricist, did not want to put my moral values to the test.
	And it took some financial success and it took some independence to be able to achieve that.
	Please, dear God, try and make some money.
	How do you become the second richest man in the world?
	world?
	Well, you start as the richest man in the world and you buy Twitter.
	Zoom out.
	Let your unconscious tell you the end results of the path that you're on.
	Thank you.
	I'm addicted to drugs and video games, says someone.
	How do I find something better to do?
	Well, stop doing those things with medical supervision if necessary.
	I would certainly recommend.
	But... You're not addicted to drugs and video games, fundamentally, in my view.
	It's just my opinion. I'm no expert.
	It's just my opinion. You're not addicted to these things at all.
	You are necessarily distracted to avoid the crimes of those around you.
	You're not running towards video games.
	You are running away from the crimes of those around you.
	I'm not talking about legal crimes.
	It could be moral crimes, betrayals, abuses, neglect, hypocrisy.
	I would bet dollars to donuts, as the old saying goes, that you were deeply wronged as a child and there are people around you who would rather you be distracted than know their crimes.
	I mean, the old Soviet Union, they used to declare people mentally ill who questioned the system and then they would drug them.
	They would rather people be drugged than question the system, than oppose the system.
	And there's a system around you of some kind, probably familial, could be some other thing, that if you're alert and awake, people will suffer because of your moral and critical evaluation.
	And so they need you drugged.
	They need you distracted. And you are used to complying with them, which I understand, and you are obeying their need for you to dissociate.
	All right, Clayton, you have a question or a comment or an issue.
	Just need to unmute and I'm all yours, my friend.
	Yeah, I'm here. Can you hear me now?
	It's my first time on Telegram.
	Well, hello, welcome. Yes, I can hear you just fine.
	I had a couple of questions.
	I guess the first thing I'll piggyback on what you were mentioning about the temptation.
	One more book, one more podcast, one more live stream, this, that, and the other, and you kind of spend a lot of time thinking and not doing the work to align your body with your mind.
	And I was wondering, is it also a temptation, or am I getting this backwards, for one more conversation?
	Like with somebody you've tried to reach out to, like maybe your dad.
	I know I've had these conversations with my dad.
	And I'm just wondering, is that a temptation as well, or is that something that...
	Or do you look at that as a...
	A black hole type thing, you know, a temptation to just continue to beat your head against the wall to try to...
	Does that fall into the same category, would you think, of the temptation to not align your mind with your body?
	Is that not doing the philosophy to shake the dust from our sandals and walk on?
	I think that's a very good point.
	A very, very good and deep point.
	One more conversation.
	Yeah, very right. So...
	It is a way of taking excessive ownership for problems in a relationship to imagine that if you just found the right approach, if you just found the right words, if you just found the right data, if you just spoke about it in a certain manner or had a different attitude, that somehow you could pick the locks of other people's hostility or indifference or distraction.
	And it comes from chasing people and it comes from not having a 50-50 relationship.
	Let people be who they are.
	Don't imagine that there's something that you can do or say that's going to magically rewire someone else's brain into becoming what you want them to be or even what's right for them or what's good for them.
	Like, oh, if I just tell this person, you know, how bad social medicine is, if I just tell them this way or that way, or maybe it happens to their grandmother or whatever it is, and it's like, no, no, no, you give people the facts and let them have their objections and have a couple of conversations, but let them be who they are and accept them for who they are.
	When we just want to change our approach to control or manipulate ourselves, Or maybe even bully the other person.
	We're trying to evict them from themselves and replace them with what we want.
	And I think it's sane or healthy to just accept people for who they are.
	Have a couple of conversations if they're hostile, if they're indifferent and so on.
	Let them be who they are.
	Do not try and run both sides of the relationship.
	That's kind of narcissistic in a way.
	I'm not saying everyone who does this is a narcissist, but it's kind of narcissistic to try and play both sides together.
	And it's kind of narcissistic in an odd way to take 100% ownership for the relationship as a whole or saying, well, the other person is not making good decisions because I haven't convinced them well enough.
	Well, so then you want to replace their judgment with your judgment, but that's not seeing them as separate sovereign individuals who end up having to be accountable to themselves for their judgment.
	You can be there as a resource and as somebody who can give advice, but the idea that you can displace other people's free will with your own rational persuasiveness is going to get you trapped into a lot of dysfunctional relationships.
	Trapped is definitely a good word for it.
	I feel that. Also, we say that the best way to understand others is to understand yourself.
	I remember how hard-headed I was and how I just locked people out.
	And I don't know when it clicked.
	I can't point to an exact moment.
	And maybe, you know, has it clicked is a good question.
	Just somebody, you know, somebody got to me.
	I remember being very much closed off and stuck in my own ways and not listening to other people.
	And now it just seems like I'm always blowing up my own ways trying to figure a different way out.
	But yeah, when you said temptation, one more book, one more podcast, because when you're having these conversations with people, they usually tell you that you're lost and that psycho mumbo jumbo is a word that they throw at me.
	And that's just a way of ending the conversation.
	But then when I hear that, part of me says, well, maybe I am.
	I'm just kind of wasting my time talking to you, but then I have trouble stopping talking to them.
	I had another quick question for you.
	Well, hang on. Sorry, I just want to mention, too, but I talked about this in my first book, On Truth, The Tority of Illusion, about this desert that you have to cross to get to the new world, right?
	And so it's easier to stay in conversations with people who aren't listening than to abandon those conversations and cross your fingers for people who will.
	The familiar is the enemy of the new, right?
	Yeah, sorry, you had another question.
	It's like showing them that you're scared to cross the desert if you won't leave the desert.
	I gotcha. I tried asking a couple of questions.
	I know you probably don't want to open this conversation right now, but I had asked a few questions and presented a couple of arguments about the Twitter, whether you should rejoin Twitter, and I never heard back, and I didn't hear it in a live stream, and I was wondering...
	Did you respond to that?
	I'm not saying you should or shouldn't have.
	No, it's a fair question, and there have been people who put out polls.
	Somebody sent me a link to a poll on Twitter where it's like 95% of people.
	I think it was Sticks, Hex, and Hammer.
	Mad, mad props. Thanks, brother.
	And yeah, should I go back on Twitter?
	Listen, I'm perfectly happy to go back on Twitter, but Twitter did me a lot of harm, and they unjustly banned me for reasons that were obviously, in my view, completely invalid.
	And no warnings, no suspensions, just a straight up, right?
	So, I'm fine to go back on Twitter, as in, you know, people who've wronged me in the past, I have no problem potentially revisiting the relationship.
	I have some standards, right?
	So, I mean, if I've spent five years building a house, right?
	And they say, hey, man, you build a house here, this is your land.
	I mean, obviously, don't do anything illegal, because then you go to jail, or, you know, we take your house, and you've got to pay your property taxes, but this is your land, man.
	So then I spend five years building this house.
	It's back-breaking work. It's really hard.
	There's bugs in the summer. There's ice in the winter.
	But finally, I get this house built.
	And then some asshole comes along and says, yeah, it's not your land.
	Yeah, you get out.
	And they just lock me out.
	I can't even go in and get my stuff.
	You know, my wallet, my keys, my passport, everything's in that house.
	They won't let me back in.
	And then I find a new place to live, build a new house, and then a couple of years later, someone comes along and says, oh, yeah, you can go back on that land again.
	Now, my house has fallen to shit, right?
	Pipes have burst and, you know, the roof's got holes in it and I got a new place, pretty comfortable.
	And somebody says, oh, you can go back, you know, you can have your land back now, that's okay.
	What would you do? You definitely would have a different...
	When you're weighing the pros and cons, it would definitely have shifted, there's no doubt.
	The trust would be broken.
	No, but trust can be regained.
	Trust can be regained.
	So if somebody came to me and said, you can have your old land back, you can have your old house back, Make restitution.
	Well, they gotta apologize for kicking me off my land.
	They gotta make restitution and they gotta damn well show me how it ain't gonna happen again.
	Because, man, would I ever be mad at myself.
	If you get back in that house, you spend a year or two fixing it up, finally getting up and running again, and then they say, oh no, you're kicked off again.
	Then they would only have invited me back in order to kick me off again.
	That would just be sadistic on their part and masochistic on my part.
	So I would need some pretty solid guarantees that it wasn't going to happen again.
	And I would need some restitution because I got to pay to get my house fixed up again.
	So yeah, apologies, restitution, promises it ain't going to happen again.
	I would need that from any business relationship.
	I would need that from any friendship.
	I would need that, right? From anything like that.
	But if some woman cheats on you and gives you an STD, a girlfriend of five years cheats on you, gives you an STD, and then you break up with her or whatever, and then a couple of years later she shows up at your doorstep and says, you can have sex with me again, what would you say?
	I think we need to have a bit more of a conversation, you know, because, you know, maybe an apology, maybe I guess the medical bills would be nice for you to pay and tell me how you're not going to give me another STD and cheat on me with a football team.
	I don't know, right? So you can't just jump back in.
	I mean, some people aren't. I mean, that's fine, you know, whatever, right?
	But... I'm a universalist kind of guy, so my standard is the same in personal relationships as in business relationships.
	And yeah, Twitter did me pretty damn dirty.
	They did me pretty damn dirty.
	They did us dirty too, and that's kind of a big part.
	Like if we appreciate your values and we want to try to obtain those same values, if we want to align our body with our mind, if our mind believes in your values and we want to try to align our mind and our body.
	And we see what they've done to you and we see the value that they took from you.
	And that value, while on a smaller scale, was very valuable to us because you reached several of us on Twitter.
	So they took it from us as well.
	I try to, like I want to try to chase those same values.
	So if I use Twitter, if I look at it as a tool, and I try to separate the owners and the inventors and their morality from the morality of actually using the tool that they invented and or owned, I just...
	I don't...
	Like, if it's against your values, and I'm trying to obtain similar values, I kind of felt like some of the arguments that you had presented in those previous videos, I was having trouble separating that from whether or not I was pissing on those values by continuing.
	Well, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say necessarily pissing on the values or whatever, but I would say that You know, one of the terrible things about the modern world, which I think we kind of all understand is that it's really difficult to get ahead if you have any pride.
	And I don't mean like too proud to.
	Just, you know, some basic self-respect, right?
	So you can get a long way in this life these days by playing the victim.
	By pretending to be hard done by, pretending that there's these giant systems that just keep you down and you're just a marginalized, you know, sad, crying victim.
	Like if you just throw away any sort of shred of pride and self-respect, you can get a lot of resources.
	You can game and play that system pretty hard.
	And so if you have some pride, it's a real liability.
	Now, when I was a kid, when I was a kid playing the victim, I mean, particularly among the males of my youth, like playing the victim, it got you nowhere.
	Get you laughed out of the room.
	Yeah, you get you laughed out of the room.
	It hurts. Like, I'm upset.
	I didn't get picked for the team.
	I'm crying. Right?
	But, you know, I grew up in a much more masculine environment than what's going on these days.
	And women are very susceptible to...
	Cri de coeur, right?
	Cries from the heart and cries of victimization.
	And I understand that.
	It's a beautiful aspect of women.
	They need to be sensitive to the least among us and make sure that the least among us get resources because otherwise the younger siblings don't tend to survive very long.
	So I love that in the family.
	It's obviously pretty destructive in the status sort of legal society-wide cultural environment.
	But then everything else in that gets corrupted by that.
	So, if I were to just head back on Twitter, then I would be saying that I am no longer a moralist.
	I am now a pragmatist.
	Because everyone's arguments for going back on Twitter is, well, just think of all the good you could do.
	In other words, it's an argument from effect.
	Well, if you go on Twitter, you can do all of this good.
	And it's like, but that's an argument from effect.
	It's not an argument from morality.
	Right? Absolutely, the 500-year plan that you mentioned, 100%.
	And I would lose respect for myself because – and I would need to address this and I would need to say, okay, well, it's important to have standards in relationships.
	And if somebody does you really dirty, then you could just rejoin that relationship even if they never apologize.
	Even if they never apologize, even if they never try to make amends, even if they never tell you how it's never going to happen again or how they're really going to work hard to have it never.
	So you can be abused in a relationship and you just rejoin that relationship and you can cover that giant wound with the tiny band-aid call.
	But think of all the good you can do and it's like, but that's an argument from effect and I've always argued against the argument from effect.
	Now, if people could address that and say, no, no, no, the argument of fact is superior to the argument from morality.
	But that's like saying, well, we can break morality for a good effect.
	But that's the whole point of the welfare state and the socialized medicine was to break morality.
	Thou shalt not steal for the sake of a good effect.
	We're giving money to the poor. We're giving health care to the sick.
	It's like my whole case from the very beginning was the argument for morality, not the argument for effect.
	And then people are saying, yeah, yes, but the effect of you being on Twitter would be so good.
	It's like, I guess that you haven't listened to a damn thing I've said for 16 years, but you think I haven't either?
	Yeah. Absolutely.
	No, I understand.
	All of those temptations will try to lure you with those things.
	I was curious about the slippery slope from my perspective.
	I'm sure that there's a building block to this that you could jerk out from under me and help me out here.
	But, like, if the inventor of the wheel was a douchebag, and he's the one that stole your house, do we stop using the wheel?
	So, if the immorality of the owners...
	Do we stop using the tool?
	See, I'm having trouble with...
	Well, no, no. The analogy there is...
	No, no. The analogy there is, oh, well, because Twitter was bad, I'll stop using the internet.
	Well, that... No. I mean, that's not the case, right?
	And the owner of the...
	joke, do we stop using the wheel?
	Well, I mean, I have no idea of the morality of the people who made this damn microphone.
	They could have been good.
	They could have been, I don't know.
	But the point is, in relationships where there's a specific moral element and a specific moral violation, do you continue as if nothing happened?
	So, for instance, there are people in my life in the past who did me great wrong.
	I've told them about that wrong, and of course I informed Twitter about the injustice of what they did to me.
	So, there are people in my life who did me great wrong and great injustice.
	Would I go and rejoin those relationships with no apology, no restitution, as if nothing happened?
	No guarantee or at least even an acknowledgement that wrong was done and no commitment to better behavior in the future.
	No restitution. No apologies.
	Would I just go and rejoin those relationships?
	Well, imagine if people I've talked about in this show, right?
	People who did me great wrong. It's my mother, right?
	Would I just say, oh yes, I went and had lunch with my mother and I'm back in that relationship.
	People would say, oh my gosh, what happened?
	Did she apologize? Nope.
	Oh gosh, did she offer to find some way to pay for the therapy you had to go through?
	Nope. Oh, does she even acknowledge that anything wrong happened?
	Nope. Well, is she going to be abusive towards you again?
	Well, she's not made any commitment to not do that, and there's no guarantee.
	What would people say?
	They would say, what on earth was the point of the last 16 years, right?
	Why would you put yourself through all that suffering?
	Right. Of drawing lines in a bad relationship.
	Why would you put yourself through all that suffering if you're just going to go and rejoin without apology, without acknowledgement, without any restitution?
	Why? People would be upset with that, right?
	And they would also feel kind of cheated because, you know, if they had made decisions based upon my resolution to have quality relationships, if they had made decisions and then I just sailed back into an abusive relationship without any apology or restitution, they'd be mad at me.
	Right.
	Right. Right. No, it's not. It's not even like I wish I almost wish it was tempting so I could understand more of the people who want me to go back on.
	It is so absolutely untempting.
	It would be like, you know, if someone if someone were to say to me, oh, yeah, you should go and start up a relationship with your mother again, right?
	I'd be like, hey man, she can call me anytime.
	She can make apologies. She can make restitution.
	I'm going to pick up the phone. I'm still her son.
	You know, my father died, never contacted me, never called me, never tried to make any restitution, never apologized for the wrongs that he did.
	That he left me with a crazy violent woman while he went off to look for gold in South Africa like some Indiana Jones wannabe.
	And he chose to shuffle off this mortal coil without trying to make amends.
	But if I were to say, look, I have these standards of quality in relationships that inform and drive all of my current relationships, every single one.
	I don't have a single exception.
	And then if I were to say, well, no, I'm going to go hang out with my mother again.
	You understand, that would be completely bewildering.
	That would be a contradiction, like subjecting your child to that person without any reformation, absolutely.
	Right. No doubt. I think a second ago you said Twitter is not the devil, and it kind of clicked for me where I think maybe the divergence is, is what is Twitter.
	See, like, when you say she, your mother, it's an objective entity that we can all look at and see your mom.
	But when you say Twitter, it's like, you know, it's like you've got this clean-cut This line of what is Twitter and the relationship is Twitter, and I'm having trouble making it such a clean-cut line because I'm looking at it more of a wheel and an inventor, a tool and an inventor.
	And I'm not saying you should go back to Twitter whatsoever.
	I'm just trying to test my own pursuit of these values, which I also respect, and I don't want to be a contradiction.
	No, no, no. Twitter is not a tool.
	No, no, no. Twitter is not a tool.
	Twitter is weaponized access, or at least it was in the past, in my view.
	So Twitter is, we will allow some people to speak, we will deny other people the right to speak.
	It is arbitrary pursuit of power.
	Unless the owners are inventors, the people, right?
	Well, so you can use a wheel having nothing to do with the person who made the wheel.
	You can just have seen him, right?
	But Twitter is not a neutral tool.
	It is people. It is a corporate culture.
	The wheel operates independent of the people, whereas Twitter does not operate independent of the owners and operators.
	Right. Like if my mother leaves me a pen in her will, I can use that pen.
	It's not my mother. But if my mother demands that I go and apologize to her in order to get the pen, that's a human person.
	That's a human element. That's a relationship.
	And the tool's function is in no way tied to the owner's actions whatsoever.
	So the function of the tool is independent of any intervention or permission, so to speak, from the owner or operator.
	It's supposed to be that the social media entity is not an editorial board, right?
	Which is why you can't sue social media companies for the content on their platforms because they are not censoring, they're not editing, they're not using their tools to favor one perspective or belief or ideology over the other or anything like that, right?
	And, I mean, that has been abandoned by almost all the mainstream social media companies.
	And, I mean, I can tell you the exact date, right?
	2016. The moment that Trump got elected, censorship came in.
	Because the lack of censorship had produced an outcome that the elites didn't want.
	Of course, I remember the glory days, 2006 to 2016, 10 years of virtually unfettered free speech.
	And what progress we made as a society.
	Yeah, what unbelievable progress we made as a society.
	And so Twitter is people making, at least in the past, in my view, people making biased decisions to reward certain perspectives and punish others, largely in pursuit of political power.
	Twitter is not a tool.
	It's not a thing. It's supposed to be a tool and a thing.
	But there are people in there who are making destructive decisions.
	Twitter prioritized the banning of perfectly legal free speech.
	Prioritized that over the removal of child sexual abuse material from the platform.
	Now that is about as evil a priority as I could conceivably imagine.
	To remove speech that makes you upset though it's perfectly legal.
	To remove that and to focus on that and to not focus on removing child sexual abuse material on your fucking platform.
	That's not a wheel my friend.
	It's like a wheel possessed by a demon.
	Yeah, that's hell. It's like you can't separate the tool from the possession.
	And that's not just my opinion.
	By the way, that's not just my opinion.
	That's not just my opinion.
	No, that's something that Elon Musk himself...
	Has said, right? So this woman, Eliza, who is I think a victim of trafficking and so on, she wrote, Twitter prioritized the censorship of non-illegal speech over the removal of child sexual abuse material at scale.
	Let that sink in. Elon Musk wrote back, exactly correct.
	Yeah. Exactly correct.
	Twitter prioritized the censorship of non-illegal speech over the removal of child sexual abuse material at scale.
	Now, That ain't a wheel.
	That is a moral hellscape.
	Fixing that would go a long way towards restitution, though.
	We have to say if our values, you know, because you and I have that prioritized in the right order, whereas the previous owners didn't.
	So getting that straight and effectively, that's a good first step towards some restitution.
	I'm not saying that he has, I mean, I don't, you know, getting it out of order, the apologies and stuff like that.
	No, no, no, that's sorry.
	Sorry, brother. That is in no way a step towards restitution.
	Not even close. Right?
	So if someone decides to stop stealing your stuff, is that restitution for the stuff they've stolen?
	I was thinking actively purging that from their platform was an action in the positive.
	Okay, so they may have stopped doing some great evil.
	Does that mean that that's restitution for the people they've harmed?
	Yeah, you're right. That's more repentance than restitution.
	No, because repentance and restitution are the same thing, because repentance is something you say.
	Restitution is the empirical evidence that you mean it.
	I thought confession was what you said, repentance is turning away, using the action to stop stabbing you, and then restitution is offering to pay for the doctor bills of stabbing you.
	But I don't care what people say.
	I only care what they do.
	So restitution and repentance to me are the same thing because if somebody says, well, I repent, I'm sorry, but they don't make any concrete steps for restitution, then they're not really sorry.
	They're not sorry because words are cheap.
	They're not sorry. If somebody steals $500 from you and they still have it and they say, I'm sorry I stole the $500 from you, but they won't give the $500 back, are they sorry?
	Right, and they also have to not take your next $500.
	Well, and, you know, maybe a little bit of, maybe an extra $500 so that it doesn't just come out net zero for them.
	Yeah. Right, exactly.
	That's the restitution, yeah.
	Yeah, okay.
	That's interesting.
	Interesting points. I really appreciate you taking the time on that.
	I have an idea for another topic you might let marinate and maybe spring up in the future.
	I was wondering what you might think about...
	I saw a rumor that Trump was saying suspend the Constitution to save the Constitution.
	I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
	Yeah, I mean, I did read some of that.
	And there are actually...
	There are measures in American law to suspend the Constitution, but I mean, Trump's...
	I mean, I won't say it's kind of deranged because I understand that he suffered what he perceives to be a pretty staggering and unjust loss, but he's not exactly helping the cause to make claims like that.
	So, yeah, it's...
	I mean, he's always had a problem with personnel and who he hires and all of that.
	So, yeah, but that's fairly on the line of politics.
	So I don't really in particular go there.
	But, hey, man, I really, really appreciate the questions and very, very good comments and questions.
	You guys, I would say this to my daughter today, like you guys absolutely bring out the best in me with these great, great questions and comments.
	So, yeah, thanks a million.
	Appreciate it.
	And you're welcome back anytime.
	Thank you, sir.
	And thank you for all the good you've done in my life.
	And like I say, I know you keep doing the good work and I genuinely appreciate it.
	Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
	And don't forget to give yourself a great deal of praise as well for, you know, I may have cooked up a few good recipes, but you're the one who has to actually cook and eat the dish, so you've done it yourself.
	All right. Well, listen, thanks, everyone, so much for a wonderful evening of philosophy and conversation.
	And you can go, of course, to freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
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	I will hand out, like candy, the History of Philosophers series.
	I created a feed for it, so look for that on social media.
	I'll hand that out. So yeah, lots of love from up here.
	If you could help out the show, man, I would really, really appreciate it.
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	And it's been a cold and chilly couple of years for philosophy, and I know it's been that case for everyone, so don't give anything you can't afford, but if you'd like to throw a little bit of gratitude across the internet to Free Domain, I would really, really appreciate that.
	It's a bit of a Game of Thrones winter as far as that goes, but we'll see where things go in the future.
	I've got some exciting plans for next year, and again, I'm working on a really, really great book at the moment.
	I just passed 51,000 words, so it's coming along beautifully.
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	Thanks again so much. You guys are very much the best.
	Have yourself a wonderful weekend.

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