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Dec. 28, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:59
Freedomain Subscriber Questions!
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Alrighty, righty. Sorry I didn't get to these questions last night in the show, but these are questions from subscribers at freedomain.locals.com.
It's a great community. I hope that you will check out the subscription.
You can subscribe for free and see if you like it using the promo code, all caps, UPB2022. So...
Let's see here. Steph, do you think standard, not excessive, not a beating, corporal punishment can be responsible for teen and adult children subconsciously seeking physically abusive relationships?
What about self-harm, such as cutting oneself?
In my American Deep South culture, most parents whip and spank their kids, but not all of us turn out this way.
Thank you. Well, of course, in the American Deep South culture, you have a...
A focus on military service, which certainly in a free society would be entirely honorable, but serving the military-industrial complex doesn't seem like the ideal way to retain the republic.
So it comes down to this simple equation, this simple question.
If you say that corporate punishment, that violence in beating or hitting children has a place in parenting and can make people better, then you're saying that violence can serve virtue, that violence can serve virtue, that physical violence, violation of the non-aggression principle can make better people.
Then how are you going to counter government programs such as the welfare state, such as public education and so on, which I argue trap people in poverty and ignorance, Because the moment you break principle and you say, well, violence can achieve good in this particular circumstance or this particular situation, then you've just said that violence has great value.
The initiation of the use of force, violence has great value in society and violence can produce morality.
And what that means is that human beings can be physically coerced and brutally trained into being good.
But they can't be.
If you brutally train someone into being good, in other words, you beat them whenever they are, quote, bad, and then you reward them either by some positive reinforcement by not beating them if they're, quote, good, they're not making the choice to be good.
It's like electroshock therapy.
It's like aversion training.
It's like training a puppy to not poop in the house with a rolled-up newspaper.
Not that I agree with that either, but...
You're simply saying that the best way for people to be good is for other people to terrify and brutalize and hurt them into being good.
But virtue, if it's not a choice, is neither virtuous nor will bring any happiness.
Now as far as self-cutting and things like that go, Self-cutting, to me, I've talked to a number of people about this, so this is not exhaustive or scientific, it's just my opinion, but self-cutting seems to be very strongly associated with particular forms of mental and physical torture, such as extreme forms of verbal abuse, which implants a self-attacking disorder.
Alter ego into the brain or sexual abuse, which is the use of the person's flesh to torture them in a violent, horribly invasive manner, which is similar to cutting.
Cutting is using one's flesh in a horribly invasive manner in order to cause trauma.
And the closest analogy or the closest, I think, precedent for that is sexual abuse, but it could also be extreme verbal abuse.
Because those both go straight into the body, right?
Into the mind and into the body.
Physical abuse, unless it's extraordinarily violent, like stabbing and so on, but physical abuse will raise bruises and welts, but doesn't directly invade the body in the way that sexual abuse and verbal abuse does.
So, again, not scientific, but that's my thought about that.
All right. I have not.
Have you read On Christian Doctrine?
Would you do narration for donation audiobook work if the book is short?
That's very kind. I appreciate that.
I don't take fee-for-service.
I don't do that. Never have.
All right. Let's see here.
What are your thoughts on government-funded therapists?
People have told me that government-funded therapists are hierarchy gangs that prey on people's weakness to be happy.
Well, I mean, therapy is a wonderful thing.
Talk therapy is a wonderful thing.
If you're a white therapist, government-funded therapist, well, no, it's in violation of the law of non-aggression.
So it's funded through coercion, right?
Are there personality-slash-psychological profiles for certain careers?
For instance, women who go into the sex or porn industry were likely to be sexually abused as children.
But are there less obvious career choices that possibly have red flags?
And how could I go about researching this?
Oh, it's a big topic. So you can do research into, you know, surgeons tend to have psychopathic tendencies, although I think they've turned that, in a sense, coldness to virtue in helping people be healthy.
Reporters have significantly sociopathic tendencies, which is why they can be kind of bullies and dangerous at times.
I think you would do research on psychological profiles within careers and then look for those patterns.
And I've read some, but not all of that.
Free Domain, I have found practical anarchy and everyday anarchy on your site.
How do I find achieving anarchy?
That was the how-to goal book, and I've never finished that.
I wrote about half of it.
I never finished it for reasons that I can get into perhaps another time.
But the closest to that is my novel, The Future, Which is what a free society looks like and what it's based on and the principles behind it.
Let's see. Since bombing the brain, what are some of the things you have discovered about childhood amnesia and have you found ways to reverse it?
Well, childhood amnesia, I think, is usually to do with trauma.
The brain does not want to remember particular things.
To take an extreme example from just everyday injuries, a lot of people who get particularly head trauma, say in car crashes or other forms of injuries, they remember the events leading up to the injury.
They do not remember the injury itself because of brain trauma.
I think if you are beaten around the head, I think that can interfere with your body's capacity to retain memories.
I think also extreme stress, heavy doses of cortisol and adrenaline can impair the body's ability to retain memories.
So I think that childhood amnesia has a lot to do with trauma.
I don't know if therapy can help recover memories.
So recovered memories can be really dicey because people are very suggestible, particularly when they're very vulnerable.
And so, which is why, you know, in shows, I'm always telling people, like, your experience matches my, like, outmatches my theories infinitely if I have something that I think might be true.
If it's not according to your experience or emotions, we absolutely discard it, right?
Never want to do anything like that.
So, I would say that recovered memories can be tricky.
Memories are dynamic.
Memories are not... Like videos.
Like videos, you make them and you store them and then you play them back.
And you may have different emotions about things, but the videos themselves are objective.
Memories aren't like that. And I often think it would be a pretty wild thing when you have sort of vivid memories of your childhood to go back in time and to see.
What was actually happening would be a pretty wild thing.
And I think that there would be quite a bit of divergence between what you remember and what actually happened.
I don't think enough that the memories aren't valid because, you know, what does our body remember?
Our body and our minds remember that which is really important to us in terms of aiding our survival or avoiding dangers, which I guess is two sides of the same coin.
So I think that if you lie to yourself, then you create an alternate reality.
Or if you're forced to light yourself in order to survive, then you create an alternative reality.
And then if you say, go to therapy, like I'm reading this book, I'm glad my mother died by this woman who was a child actress who had a brutal and sometimes like throwing things kind of violent mom.
And a therapist who, in my opinion, goes way too fast in exposing this.
This woman has been a bulimic for like, I don't know, three years or something at this point.
And the therapist says, well, no, your mom, you know, she says, well, when did you first start counting your calories?
And the woman says, well, my mom said, well, when I was 12, she told me like I had to not develop boobs, I had to not...
Grow up because I was a child star and all of that.
And the therapist, and again, this is the woman's report.
I don't know what actually happened, of course, but according to this woman, the therapist said, well, no, telling you to restrict your calories for these reasons is abusive.
And just boom, straight there, right?
And no sort of delicacy in that sense.
And then quite predictably, the woman who had a Stockholm Syndrome situation with her mother, which I guess has been cured, hence the title of the book, But she bailed out on therapy.
She deleted a therapist number.
She blocked her and all of that.
And that is somebody who reacted very strongly to something that may be true, but you don't operate without anesthesia.
And you don't, in my view, drop straight into your mother was abusive when somebody has so internalized that abuse that they've been...
I mean, shortly after this, she was throwing up in an airplane, making herself throw up in an airplane, and she lost a tooth.
Like, this is how much damage had been done after years of...
I don't think you just drop straight into that when it's been somaticized to that degree, but I'm not a therapist, so it may have been quite the right thing.
The woman, I guess, made the journey eventually.
So, whether memories can be recovered through Sympathy, therapy, self-knowledge, self-empathy, and so on.
It could happen, but memories can also be kind of dicey.
People can be very suggestible about things that they don't know about but are desperate to know about.
And, of course, I've talked to lots of people who say, I can't really remember much before the age of 12.
That could also be a massive amount of understimulation.
Neglect is very hard.
It's very hard to form memories when you're neglected as a child because everything's kind of monotonous and inward-facing.
Memories tend to come in from the outside in when you're kids.
All right, Steph, how do you know someone loves you?
And specifically, how does a child know their parent loves them?
Right. How do you know someone loves you?
Well, I think that you know someone loves you when they're When your opinion of yourself has been justly earned to be positive.
I mean, self-love, it's, you know, sounds kind of narcissistic and solipsistic and so on, but self-love, it's important to respect yourself.
It's important to have ideal values and to strive to achieve them.
We can never achieve them perfectly. That's why they're called ideal.
But to have a reasonable amount of self-respect, a reasonable amount of courage, not an excess of courage, which can be suicidal, nor a deficiency of courage, which...
It's suicidal to your self-respect.
So if you're a good person and you fight the good fight in a reasonable manner and you oppose evil and you support virtue and you are good to people in your life who are good to your back, if somebody accepts and agrees with you on that, then they would love you in the same way that you would respect yourself.
I prefer to talk about self-respect rather than self-love because it's important to differentiate the two.
So, I mean, love is our involuntary response to virtue.
If we're virtuous, that's true within ourself, but I think self-respect is more appropriate than self-love because self-love just sounds a little bit, again, sounds like navel-gazing and almost narcissistic, but it's just a particular terminology that I prefer.
It's nothing totally objective.
So if you're good and you respect yourself and then someone responds to your virtue and responds to your good nature, your good humor, all of the good things that you bring, then they're basically agreeing with you in your assessment of your virtue and you will love them in return if they do things that are good and strong and virtuous and noble and kind and benevolent and all of that.
If they're good without being exploited, if they're virtuous without being taken for a ride, if they are...
Moral without being someone's predatory mark, then that's about as good as you can get in this world.
So, if you act virtuous and you have self-respect and somebody recognizes and responds to that in a positive, warm, and empathetic manner, Then that's about as close as you're going to get to know.
There are sort of really practical things, like do they think of your needs, sometimes even in opposition to their own?
Do they do things for you?
And again, this is all mutual, the things you do for each other.
Do they take delight in your presence?
Are they jumping up and down when they see you?
And are they staunch when you're under attack?
Like if you're Under attack, and all virtuous people this happens to, of course, do they stand by your side?
Do they run for the hills? Do they die for cover?
Do they abandon you in your moment of need?
And so on, then that would be a sign that they love you, and of course that they respect themselves.
It's hard to respect yourself if you abandon a friend in time of need when he's being attacked.
Anyway, I'm sort of writing about this in my book, so it's kind of in my mind, so...
Alright, Steph, what's the difference between anger and hate?
Can we say any of them is inherently good or bad?
What's the best argument, if any, against the thesis that we should limit the spread of something like hate?
What's the difference between anger and hate?
So, in very general terms, anger is a pushback against an intrusion on your interests.
It's morally neutral, right?
So anger is an intrusion when you believe negotiation is possible.
Right? So if somebody, you know, let's say a friend of yours borrows money from you and then doesn't pay you back, but you believe that the person will listen to reason and so on, then you will feel anger towards that person and that anger will propel you to go and talk to that person.
You know, hey, man, why don't you pay me that money back?
Why do you keep dodging my calls? That's not right.
And so when somebody has violated something to do with your self-interest, but you believe that negotiation is possible, then you will feel anger, and the anger propels you into a state of assertive communication.
It's healthy and it's good.
Hatred, on the other hand, is when somebody is intruding so aggressively into your self-interest that No, you don't feel that any negotiation is possible.
So anger will lead you to negotiate, will lead you to sit down the table, maybe pound the table a little bit, but anger will lead you to negotiate.
Hatred is when you believe that no negotiation is any longer possible and you just basically wish to either To destroy this person's influence over your affairs.
Now that could be by harming the other person.
In extreme cases, this would be murder or spreading vicious rumors or slander or something like that.
So hatred is when you just need to remove this person from your environment.
It could be violent. It could be slanderous.
It could be very aggressive.
Or you could simply detach yourself from that person.
No longer have any contact with them whatsoever.
So anger drives you to connect and to communicate and resolve these issues.
Hatred is when you simply need to erase that person's influence over you, either by harming them or removing yourself from the situation because you no longer believe that any negotiation is possible.
People will communicate hatred as well, or they will get hateful It may start with anger, but if the anger is not listened to, if the anger is not addressed, if the anger is not understood, if the anger is not negotiated with...
I mean, people start with anger and then they escalate to hatred if...
I mean, you can see this to some degree in the manosphere, that there's anger against gynocentricism and monkey branching and hypergamy and so on.
There's anger against it. And then men try and speak out.
Within society about the inequalities and the disposability and the, you know, whatever it is that men are experiencing, which is often negative.
So what they do is they get their anger at society when they first take the red pill and they say, gee, you know, I mean, I am really, you know, men are being treated badly in many ways in society and so on.
And then what happens is a lot of times the male vulnerability, the male anger, which Pushes them to express their upsets and their preferences and their hurt.
If then the men are attacked and vilified and brutalized, then what happens is the anger, which is initially a negotiating position, turns to hatred, which is more destroy the person's influence over you no matter what, which is retreat into things like Monk mode, right?
When sort of the men going their own way or MGTOW phenomenon where it's like, I can't negotiate with women, so I'm going to remove any influence that women have over me by no longer pursuing women, not trying to be in relationships and so on.
And I think that's where when people have hope, they have anger.
When they give up, they have hate. So I hope that helps.
Again, just my perspective. Do you think it is hypocritical for people to judge people who were coerced to get the COVID injections on the basis they were risking their lives when people judging and paying tax so forfeiting part of their life to the state anyway?
Do you think it is hypocritical for people to judge people who were coerced to get the COVID injections on the basis they were risking their lives when the people judging or paying tax so forfeiting part of their life to the state anyway?
I'm sorry, I don't really understand that.
I will sort of talk about this You know, there's this meme out there, you know, with the angry golem from Lord of the Rings.
Angry golem is like, you take the vax and you can't travel and you can't work and strip all of your rights.
And then, you know, the nice golem is like, well, let's just all put it behind us and move on and blah, blah, blah, right?
I don't judge people for taking the vaccine, the COVID vaccine.
I don't judge people for taking the vaccine.
I do think that it was incumbent to do research, particularly if you're a parent.
I think it's really incumbent to do research.
People who just believe whatever the government and the media says, I don't even really know what to say.
I mean, that's so far from my experience and so far from the people that I know.
I almost don't really know what to say to people like that because that would be such an enormous conversation that they would be so resistant to.
I mean, I'm certainly willing to have it, and I have it on occasion, but the people who just, well, the media said it was safe and effective, and so I took it, right?
Almost, again, I don't really know what to say.
Certainly for older people, when you heard about the lies about the Iraq War, and like, there's all of these instances, you know, and all the stuff that was false about Trump that they were saying, and, you know, there's...
People who still believe that stuff, I really don't know what to say.
It's like a whole different culture that I can't...
It's a different language I can't really communicate with.
So I don't hugely blame people for taking the vax themselves.
I think if you push the vax hard on your kids, that seems to me a bit of a different matter.
And it's not so much whether somebody took the vax or not.
It's whether they chest-thumped from the rooftops about how the unvaccinated should not be allowed to leave their houses, about how the unvaccinated should not be allowed to keep their jobs, about how the unvaccinated should not be allowed to travel, about how the unvaccinated should be fined.
It's not that they took the vax.
That's, again, their own medical choice, their own medical decision.
But when people said that the unvaccinated should lose their human rights for being unvaccinated, that's when I crossed the line as far as having no sympathy for people.
I'm just straight up, I have no sympathy for people like that.
I have sympathy for people who were lied to, who were coerced into it in a sense by having to get it to keep their job and so on.
I have great sympathy for that. It's a very, very tough situation.
But people who encouraged that and applauded that and approved that, and the people who, despite all the lessons of the 20th century, just thought it was a great, great freaking idea to just carve off an entire section of the population, turn them into an other, turn them into an opposite, turn them into an enemy, and hate them. Like, this never happened to the Jews, like this never happened to the Tutsis and the Hutsis, and like, that this never happened to the bourgeoisie or the kulaks, that this never happened.
That people are just carved off from society, turned into an opposite, and made evil, and then it's just fully florid to take away the rights and attack them.
That's just a great idea.
There's no way that people can reasonably or rationably think...
They don't have to know the whole history of the Nuremberg trials and why forced medical procedures or bribed medical procedures or procedures without full and informed consent, why that was banned.
They don't have to know all the history of that.
They just have to understand that to carve off entire sections of the population and to be easily trained to hate them and want to take away their rights and call them evil...
That's just about as immoral a thing as has ever happened in history.
And people aren't going to wake up to that.
Nobody wants to look into the mirror and see a Nazi looking back, obviously, right?
Or some totalitarian or some fascist or some communist.
Commissar. People don't want to look in the mirror and see that.
So once you've gotten people to demonize an entire section of the population and wish for them to be stripped of their rights and harmed, then those people are really lost to morality until the end of time.
I mean, maybe very few of them.
Tim Robbins, the actor, seems to have reversed himself a little on this.
But people who Who can't have that truth and reconciliation, who can't have that public, wow, I really got drawn into a pretty dark circle of hell there, and who can't honestly assess their own capacity to be shamed into doing evil or advocating for evil.
That's tough, man. So yeah, people who took it under coercion, they have my sympathy.
People who advocated for others to be stripped of their rights, I have no sympathy.
In fact, I don't believe that there's, without a massive amount of apologies and reconciliation, I don't see any way to solve that.
Alright, let's see here.
That one's pretty long. I might do that one another time.
Is the current tech field worth getting into, or has wokeism overtaken anything virtuous about the field?
Well, you don't have to go be hired, right?
I mean, I had one tech job which was programming, and then six months into that tech job I started a company, so just do that.
Have you seen the Karate Kid spinoff series Cobra Kai?
And if so, what do you think of it?
I think I watched about 10 minutes of it, but it didn't grab me really at all.
So I didn't really have any thoughts about it.
Let's see here. Isn't trying to choose a woman for marriage who will not be corrupted by the state power of divorce and family court like trying to choose a dictator who will not be corrupted by general state power?
Well, no, because the dictator...
In order to rule, has to exercise that power.
The definition of the dictator is he's exercising that power.
A woman in the current system, yes, she can use the state, but the definition of a wife is not to use the state.
In fact, it's really only the definition of a non-wife ends up using the state through divorce and all of that.
So I would not put that in the same category at all.
It's the difference between an arsonist and somebody who could be careless with fire.
One is intent and the other is not.
So with regards to getting married, I mean, you have to have the conversation.
What happens if we are going through a rough patch?
What happens if we are disagreeing with each other significantly?
What happens if the marriage doesn't seem to be working out?
Got to have those conversations.
And the only acceptable answer is, we're not getting divorced.
We're going to find a way to work it out.
See, having an out dissolves your will to stay in.
Having an out dissolves your will to stay in.
So, if a woman says, well, you know, gosh, you know, if the marriage is really, really bad, I guess we just have to separate or be divorced.
It's like, no, not going to marry you.
I'm not going to marry you. Because if you say, whatever it is, we work it out.
We are not getting divorced. Whatever it is, we work it out.
Then that's somebody who will behave better over the course of the marriage because they don't have an out.
Because they don't have an out.
And that commitment to just work it out no matter what, it doesn't prevent bad things in a marriage.
It just makes for a really good marriage.
Because once you accept that you are not going to get out, you behave much better and Then if you have an out, here's to take an example, right?
Do you take better care of a car you own or a car you rent?
Well, the car you rent, you know you're going to hand back.
You're not going to take it for an oil change.
Are you going to put premium gas into a rental car?
No, you're not, right?
Unless it's sort of in the agreement.
So whatever you have temporarily or whatever you have an out for, You are not going to treat as well.
Something you borrow...
I mean, it's a problem with the commons, right?
Something that is not yours, something that is not permanent, you will not take as good care of.
So if the marriage...
If there's a conversation to have before you get married, we're not getting divorced.
Whatever happens, we're going to work it out.
Now, because you know you can't get divorced, you'll just treat each other better, right?
Because why would you want to create a mess if you can't get out?
All right. Should we do the long one?
Let's do the long one. Hello, Steph.
And Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to you two.
I was wondering if you could help me understand something on a recent call in with the Finnish girl who moved to Australia.
You talked about how once you confront your abuser and start to assert your own needs and preferences, that they begin to see you not just as an inanimate object into which they can pour their abuse, but as a real person who they have terribly hurt.
You use the kitten in the pillow analogy.
This is one reason why being confronted in such a way is so painful for the abuser.
Please correct me if I've misunderstood.
No, that's fair. I thought that this was a really insightful and useful thing to explain, but it made me wonder how that fits together with what you have said about how abusive people usually aren't ignorant or misguided of the evil they do.
As is often claimed, because they consciously hide their behavior from public scrutiny, they purposefully keep it behind closed doors.
I was wondering how these two explanations, which I realize are not explaining the exact same thing, can be applicable to the same person.
The first one seems to recognize that the abuser is somewhat unaware of the hurt they have done, but the second one shows how they are fully aware of what they're doing is morally inexcusable and abusive.
No, no. So, uh, gosh.
I imagine that people who run convenience stores don't steal from convenience stores like other convenience stores.
Why? Because they know how much hard work and dedication and risk goes into starting and maintaining a convenience store, so they're not going to steal from another convenience store owner.
So, that's because having lived that life, they have empathy for that life, and they see the other convenience store owner as similar to themselves, so they won't steal from that owner.
On the other hand, somebody who's, I don't know, been on welfare and doesn't work and so on, they can go and steal stuff because they don't have any empathy, they don't put themselves in the shoes of the other person.
Now, we know for a fact, a simple fact, and you can look at this on crime statistics after the 2020 pullback in criminality, Post-George Floyd.
On policing.
Sorry, the pullback on policing post-George Floyd.
So when people face fewer consequences for their bad behavior, their bad behavior tends to increase, right?
This was Giuliani taking over from de Blasio or something.
Giuliani taking over from the previous Democrat mayor in New York.
Just started arresting people and crime, of course, went down.
The streets got cleaned up. All the Gotham stuff, right?
So people...
It's not that they're saying, what I'm doing is morally wrong.
What they're saying to themselves is, I don't care that negative consequences accrue to other people.
I care only if negative consequences accrue to me.
So if you steal from a store owner, you're punishing the store owner.
You're stealing. It's wrong.
You're hurting him. And of course, if enough of you steal, then there's no store anymore, and then you can't get stuff from the store, either to buy or to steal, and then you end up having your life stolen back, in a sense, by your own theft, because now you've got to take three buses to go and get some groceries.
So, it's not that the abuser...
He doesn't hide his abuse in public because he knows it's morally wrong.
He hides his abuse in public because he knows other people will disapprove of it and he might experience negative consequences.
Either scornful looks or somebody calling security or maybe getting arrested or people frowning at him or maybe being filmed and shamed on social media.
He doesn't care that the negative effects are accruing to the child he's abusing.
In fact, that's kind of the plan, right?
If you feel bad, the only way you can feel better is by abusing a child and then you then abuse that child...
Clearly, you are infinitely preferring your own feeling better at the expense of the child feeling a whole lot worse than perhaps being damaged for life.
Well, certainly being damaged for life, whether that damage can be changed or recovered is a different matter.
But, you know, if you break your arm and you get it set and you heal it, it's still not like you never broke your arm.
They infinitely prefer the child to feel bad so that they can feel better.
The flex of power or the discharge of negative emotion.
The woman I was talking about with the book, I'm Glad My Mother Died, she says that the only way she could handle her anxiety and the chaos of her feelings was to force herself to throw up, and sometimes she would do this multiple times a day.
So she would rather her body get punished than judge her mother, which is judging her mother as immoral was the way out of that.
And of course, her mother would rather, since her mother would rather that she suffer than her mother suffer, then she, as a child growing up, having to appease and please that mother, would rather that her body suffer rather than her mother in her mind suffer.
This was all occurring even after her mother died.
So, it's not that they know that it's immoral, they just know that it's disapproved of.
In the same way that a bank robber will rob a bank and, you know, will gum up the cameras, not because he knows what he's doing is immoral, He's not at the level of morality.
He's at the level of hedonism.
He's at the level of preference.
What's good for me in the moment?
What's good for me in the moment?
I mean, there's a sort of famous story of rabbits introduced to Australia and the rabbits ate up all the grass.
Now the rabbits starved to death, right?
Because they overgrazed and then there was no grass and all the rabbits died.
The rabbits are just in, well, I'm hungry.
I'm going to eat right now. They don't care because they can't really conceive of it, of course, right?
That they've got to manage your resources and not overstrip, right?
This is our selected behavior.
Our selected behavior generally is in the realm of hedonism in the moment.
And so the hedonism in the moment is, well, there were storms in Buffalo, winter storms in Buffalo just over this last weekend, and people stole a bunch of stuff, right?
I guess the storm meant that police couldn't respond or whatever.
I don't know what it was, right? But when there's riots and so on, people steal stuff, right?
That's just hedonism in the moment.
I want something in the here and now.
They don't think about empathy. They don't think about morality.
They don't think about the long-term effects or blowback or if the store's closing down or whatever it is, the neighborhood becoming a wasteland.
So it's just hedonism in the moment.
Drug addiction, of course, is the same thing.
Sexual addiction, gambling, it's hedonism or pleasure in the moment rather than something which is good for you in the long run.
I mean, addiction, in a sense, is always burning the future for the sake of a flicker in the present.
So, no, they don't think of it as immoral.
They think of it as, I could suffer negative consequences if I do this in public.
In other words, I know that other people think that it's bad.
I don't think that it's bad because I prefer doing it to feeling bad myself.
I prefer my child feels bad than I feel bad.
Well, but enough about boomers and the national debt.
So yeah, it's not a moral question at all.
It's a question of, will I suffer negative consequences for screaming at my child or calling him terrible names or hitting him?
Will I suffer negative consequences in private?
Nope. Then I'll do it.
Will I suffer negative consequences in public?
It's just a calculation of immediate benefit versus loss.
I feel better, says the abuser, for hurting my child in private, but I will feel worse because I'll have negative consequences if I hurt my child or abuse my child in public.
So it's me plus or me minus.
That's the only calculation that's going on.
There's really nothing deeper or more...
We hope that we can coax these people to the level of morality, but remaining at the level of mammalian hedonism is where most people in these kinds of situations generally sit.
So, I mean, there's a whole other group of people who, rather than being abusive in a sort of physical sense, they are verbal abusers in a cultural sense.
And they turn people's morality against them, not because they're moral, but because they can gain resources thereby.
So they view, they know that other people take morality seriously enough to change their behavior, so they will manipulate people using other people's sense of morality while having almost no sense of morality themselves.
It's only me plus or me minus.
That's the whole equation.
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Love you guys. The questions are great.
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