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Feb. 8, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:30
LOCALS 'ASK ME ANYTHING' RESPONSES!
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All right. Thanks, everyone.
Got some questions.
Tuesday, February the 7th, 2023.
And let's see here.
Let's dive right in. Hey, Steph, possible case of family annihilator in the UK. Emma Patterson, she was the head teacher of Epson College, and her daughter was shot dead by the husband who then killed himself.
Why are some men family annihilators?
What drives them to do this?
Of course, I have no idea.
In this particular case, so nothing I say has anything to do with this particular case.
I mean, I suppose we'll never know in detail because he killed himself and the evidence is probably on the wall somewhere.
But I will say as a whole, a way of possibly processing this kind of stuff is if you do better than your parents, it's really tough.
It's really tough. So I talked about this when I gave my speeches in Australia some years ago.
So think about how flat human progress has been, right?
There's no progress really until 17th.
No, even later I would say.
In terms of like material survival and wealth accumulation and so on.
End of slavery and some beginnings of the free market.
This is sort of late 18th century, 19th century, so for 99.99% of human history, there was no progress.
Why was there no progress? Clearly, we were capable of it, but we didn't do it.
Why? Because resentful parents attack children who do better than they do.
resentful parents attack children who do better than they do.
There are things my daughter is better at, and not just the inconsequential sort of reflex stuff just based on youth.
There are things that my daughter is better than me at, and they are interpersonal.
And I'm happy about that.
My gosh, I would absolutely want my daughter to be better than me at certain things, like if your legs were attacked viciously when you were a kid and you spent half your childhood in a wheelchair, you'd want your children to be more athletic than you, right?
Because that would mean they would be doing better, which would be good.
It means they hadn't been attacked and been put in a wheelchair.
And throughout most of human history, maybe even across the world right now, there are a lot of parents who resent you if you do better than they do.
And the mechanism goes something like this.
People who do bad things, how do they live with themselves?
How do they live with themselves?
The people can't look in the mirror and see evil.
Unless, you know, they're sort of doing that Sam Smith reframing, evil is cool, evil is good, evil is whatever, right?
I mean, whatever he's doing with this Satan stuff, I have no idea what he thinks, but I assume that his singing and performing and songwriting talents are just like, hey, they're grabbed by evil people to amplify their negative messages and so on, right?
So, people can't look in the mirror and see evil.
Genuine, like deep evil.
So what do they do when they've done evil things?
Well, they say, this is the best that can be done.
Either they redefine the evil as good, or they say, well, even if mistakes were made, if you confront them, right?
Everyone's heard this, if you've confronted your parents, almost everyone.
If they did bad things to you, they say, well, we did the best we could with the knowledge we had.
So they reframe everything to be fairly virtuous, right?
Or the best you can do.
Well, I had it tough as a kid.
I was less mean to you than my parents were to me.
And therefore, there's been a progression.
I was 25% better to you than my parents were to me.
Therefore, I'm a good guy. I'm a good person.
Good mom, good dad, whatever. That's this incremental progression.
If even negative stuff is admitted, it's defended against that way.
Now, if you...
We're to take a quantum leap forward.
And if you want to know the real reason why I'm attacked in various places and in various circumstances, everything else to me is just kind of an excuse.
This is the real reason.
I took...
A really terrible childhood and turned it into really great parenting.
Oof! That's tough, man.
What one man can do, what one woman can do, another man or woman can do.
So, I mean, this is not incremental progression.
This is a complete reversal.
This is a judo move.
This is a complete reversal. It's so important to understand how troubling this is for people, how deep down troubling this is for people.
And there's a reason why the first attack that came upon me was around parenting and all of that, right?
Even before I was a parent.
So, if you do better than your parents...
Then you give a kind of free will to your parents that they deny they have.
Now, you are, in a sense then, the only witness to a crime.
Because if you don't do better than they do, or if you just do incrementally better than they do, like you're 20% less bad or whatever, then they can live with that and say, well, you know, I built this and now he's building another and so on.
He's not doing better than me in terms of improving.
Morally, therefore, you know, this is probably the best that can be done and all of this stuff, right?
So, if you do a quantum leap forward from your parents, then you become a witness to a crime.
Because the incrementalism, incremental improvements can't be justified anymore.
Incremental improvements can't be justified anymore.
And therefore, your parents could have done better...
And therefore, they are enraged at you.
Honestly, I mean, in some of the most dysfunctional families, they have the same relationship to you being a good parent that organized crime would have to you witnessing a murder.
If you're going to testify, then they are really harsh with this stuff because people will almost have no blowback greater than when they think they're good and you reveal them to be immoral.
They think they did a good job, the best they could with the knowledge they had, and it turns out they didn't.
They didn't do the best they could with the knowledge they had.
In fact, they might have been pretty evil.
So improving mankind, why is it so hard?
Why is it so slow?
Why you make these rational arguments, as I've made for 40 years, you make these rational arguments, and there's just such blowback.
Why? Why? Why?
Why? Why? Annie Lennox style, right?
Well, the reason that there's such blowback is because people can't handle The fact that they're bad people.
And they, you know, compared to what?
Well, compared to you. Right?
So if they were terrible to you or bad to you and you're really great to your kids, then you've just revealed them to be bad.
They think they were good.
They think they did the best they could.
You do way better.
There's a real humiliation to that.
And, again, nothing to do with this case.
I don't know anything about it, but a general theory, a potential way of looking at it, would be something like this.
That a good family, or a decent family, or a much better family, is something that the original, like the parents of the parents, or one of both...
Views with great rage.
And in the same way that organized crime might wipe out, or would want to wipe out, potential witnesses, I think highly dysfunctional parents might in fact I am much more successful than you.
I am much more successful than you.
And just sort of on a minor level, I think, like we all experience this if we're successful, right?
And whatever that sort of means, but something sort of above the norm, above the average.
So when I was an actor in university, I didn't even need to audition.
I was just automatically cast as the lead in a variety of plays.
I did a Harold Pinter play called A Slight Ach.
I did a Chekhov play, The Bear.
And I was just cast as the lead or sort of major roles without even having to audition.
In fact, The Bear with a Slight Ach, I did both plays in the same night, a really existentially horrifying Harold Pinter play called A Slight Ach, and then Chekhov's Rather...
A robust and ribald dramedy called The Bear.
I did both of these at the same notch.
And then when I was in McGill, I was cast as the lead in Macbeth and I didn't even really have to audition.
So I was like, you know, number one, big tip-top actor.
But that's a big fish in a little pond, right?
And then I went to theatre school and there were some really, really great actors in theatre school.
And they were certainly better than me at some things.
I think I held my own in some areas and until they discovered my politics, they strongly urged me to drop the whole writing thing and just be an actor because they really thought I was that good.
But... If you've gone from that being the big fish in the little pond to being the prettiest girl in a small town to going to, I don't know, LA or New York or whatever, trying to make it a modeling, it's a whole different planet, right?
You go from karaoke to fronting a band, right?
Maybe that's a whole different thing.
And a friend of mine was fantastic at math and then was very confident and decided to do a math and physics double major, right?
Well, first of all, he found it really frustrating because everything was so insanely difficult, and then they were just bell curved up, which he found somewhat...
He had a bit of a spark-like side to his personality.
He found that somewhat really frustrating and annoying and incomprehensible, and he got ill, and I don't know if it was to do with stress, but it was really tough for him because he was considered to be, you know, the star mathlete in my high school, and then he was doing this math and physics double major with other people who were all, you know, top tier, and it's a tough ego adjustment.
It's a tough ego adjustment.
I would imagine that some, a way of approaching, it doesn't answer right.
It could be a number of other things.
It could be a genuine disease in the brain.
It could be psychotropic meds gone nutty.
It could be, you know, but I would say what I would look at is say, okay, well, what was your, if there's family annihilation, and again, you usually can't find out many truths about it because family annihilation is the whole family is destroyed.
But I would look as a framework, has there been Too much improvement.
Is there a backlash to the improvement?
This is why moral progress is so slow, because it really threatens the moral identity and sense of virtue that comes from the parents.
So I'd look into that. All right. Hey, Steph, how can I identify my own manipulations with my child or say it in another way?
Or to say it in another way, how do I know if I'm inadvertently manipulating my toddler?
Also, what are your thoughts on couples counseling?
I mean... It's sort of like saying, what are my thoughts on sports?
You know, it depends, right?
If you're playing sports and staying fit, that's a good thing.
If you're spending all your Sunday watching the sports ball on TV and ignoring your family, that's bad.
So that's... What are your thoughts on couples counseling?
I think it's very good if you have a good counselor.
I think it could be really bad if you have a bad counselor.
So I don't really have...
It depends too much on the individual.
But counselling as a whole, I think, is great if you have the right person.
My own manipulations with my child.
Inadvertently manipulating my toddler.
Well, that, first of all, is a fine question and good for you for raising that within your own mind.
I really appreciate that.
So manipulation in general is the following phenomenon.
You are trying to get someone...
To do what you want to say him, right?
You're trying to get someone to do what you want him to do without telling him that that's your goal.
That's manipulation, right?
If you say, please bring me a glass of water, that's not manipulation.
If you say, I'm thirsty...
And if you're just announcing it, but if you say, I'm thirsty and you want someone to bring you a glass of water, that's a little bit more manipulation.
If you say, I'm going to tell you that I'm thirsty so that you will bring me a glass of water, then that's not manipulation, right?
So it's when you want someone to do something indirectly without telling them that.
That's manipulation, right?
So... If you want your toddler to do something and you are trying to manipulate your toddler, it's because, and again, this may be limited by language because toddler is kind of a wide range, could be sort of 80 months, could be up to four, could be even older, depends on sort of how you look at it.
I don't know what the technical definition is and I'm not sure how you would mean it.
So, if you want your child to stop crying, then you can say, I would really like you to stop crying That's one thing.
If you try to distract him, again, if he's able to understand and so on, right, then if you distract him, that's more manipulative.
So when my daughter was little and I was helping her learn how to use the bathroom, I would give her a Skittle when she did it.
That was not manipulation because they said, use the bathroom, get a Skittle, right?
And that was not manipulation.
So, are you being honest with what you want the person to do?
Are you being honest with what you want the person to do?
Or are you trying to get what you want by being indirect?
So... So think of the friend zone, right?
So if you're some guy and you're hanging out with a girl in the hopes that you can date her, but you don't say, I would like to date you, I'm going to ask you out or whatever, but you're just kind of being pleasant and positive in the hopes that she will warm to you, that's kind of manipulative.
Because you're kind of falsifying what you're there for.
Now, of course, I'm not saying don't be nice to the women you want to ask out or the men you want to ask out, but if you're just around there, let's say you're around there and maybe she's got a boyfriend and she's telling you she's got problems with her boyfriend, then if you're not honest about wanting to date her, then she's going to look to you for objective advice when you have an ulterior motive, which is to break up.
Her and her boyfriend so that you can date her, right?
So that's manipulative.
Because you want to date her, but you're not saying, I want to date you, or I want to ask you out, or whatever it is, right?
So you can waste a lot of time being manipulative.
It's not, of course, 100%.
It's not 100%, right?
There's, you know, seductions and so on and all of this.
But I do think that, in general, that's the approach.
So if you find yourself wanting your kids to do something...
And you're trying to get them to change their behavior without being direct about what you want, then that's manipulation.
And it really is, it's an interesting aspect of life, really interesting aspect of life, to try and figure out how far you can take not being manipulative, right?
How far can you take not being manipulative?
Like asking directly for what you want and not trying to get what you want through some indirect manner.
Relationships can be kind of exhausting with people who are constantly manipulative.
I'm not putting you in this category.
I'm just, of course, saying this as a general principle.
Relationships are pretty exhausting with people who are constantly manipulative because you're putting a lot of the burden onto other people.
You're putting a lot of the burden onto someone else.
And that's not fun at all for other people.
Manipulation, it's funny because it's both a kind of submission and a kind of dominance.
So it's submissive in that...
People who have power tend to be more direct, right?
People who have power, you know, if the policeman can give you a ticket, you know, he says, you know, a parking ticket or whatever, he says, move that car, right?
And move the car, right?
And so, people who have power are more direct.
But people can have a lot of power.
There's also an exercise of power in being indirect.
Because when you're indirect, you're saying to someone...
Well, you have to figure out what I want, and you have to try and provide it.
And there's a certain amount of power in that, so people definitely can take that way, way too far.
So, yeah, my suggestion is just try and avoid the power dynamics of manipulation and just say what it is that you want.
And you can train your kids on manipulation, right?
You can tell them what the general idea behind manipulation is, because kids are generally, if they want things that they don't think their parents are going to give them, then they will try to be manipulative.
God bless them, just right, is exactly what you would want them to be doing, right?
So you can teach your kids about manipulation and say, you know, if I do this, am I being manipulative?
If I do that, am I being manipulative, right?
You can ask him for something and say, manipulation or not.
And when they want something, say, can you ask directly or are you going to be manipulative?
And you wouldn't say like, oh, well, it's so bad.
I mean, manipulation is part of human nature and it's not innately a terrible thing.
It's just, well, it's manipulative.
So it's just generally from, it involves weakness on one party or the other.
So, yeah, just be direct about what you want.
So, for example, if your toddler wants sugar rather than a piece of fruit or sugar rather than something healthier, then if you just say, oh, no, no, no, this is going to be much nicer for you, you're going to like this a lot more, well, that's manipulative, right?
And if you say, I really wouldn't like you not to eat the sugar, right, because it's not that great for you and you've had a lot today or whatever, I'd really prefer if you didn't.
That's direct, that's honest, right?
Why don't people blame the parents of early adult suicide victims for being terrible parents?
I can think of some surface reasons, like don't want to get busted for being a bad parent, but is there something deeper?
Let's see here. Why don't people blame the parents of early adult suicide victims for being terrible parents?
Well, you know, it's tough.
It's tough. I mean, certainly that would be my go-to position.
That would be my go-to position.
But it's really tough to toss those accusations out, right?
So it could be that somebody got enmeshed in some mental health, you know, with the best of intentions.
Maybe they, I don't know, lacked vitamin D and went for mental health, or maybe they got a fistful of medicines that didn't work out that well or whatever.
So it could be any number of things.
It's not just... The parents.
Early adult suicide victims, yeah, it would be, again, it would be my go-to position, but it's an unjust accusation to lob without proof, and since the primary witness is gone, if there was going to be proof of that, if the primary witness is already gone because they killed themselves or he killed himself, then it's a tough accusation.
Like, you wouldn't want to get that accusation wrong.
Right? Because if parents are dealing with the suicide of a child, an adult child, and they're then unjustly accused of being terrible parents, that's really salt in the wound, right?
So in a sort of theoretical way, I can understand it.
But unless the parents confess that they were bad parents, which if they had that capacity, they really wouldn't be that.
It wouldn't be as bad.
So you're not really going to get the truth and an unjust accusation.
Now, if there's some note that's left by the suicide victim and so on, but my guess is that if the suicide victim had enough knowledge, self-knowledge, to make that connection, then they'd be much less likely to commit suicide.
So... Yeah, it's a tough call.
I wouldn't lot that accusation without proof.
Proof is very hard to find when the primary witness is gone, so it's tough.
Would you be interested in polling your listeners according to sex, age, continent of origin, relationship, status, etc.?
Someone mentioned in a thread here on Locals that the majority of listeners are young single men.
Is that really so? No, I don't think that that's really so.
I think certainly philosophy tends to skew more male than female, but there are massive parenting threads, ladies are free domain threads, lots of people talking, and of course a lot of my call-ins are with women, married couples and parents and so on, so no.
All right. Let's see here.
How can I better negotiate with my four-year-old son who is reflexively disagreeable?
I'm so sorry. Look, you say disagreeable, you've just framed the whole thing in your head.
You've just framed the whole thing in your head.
My wife and I are committed to peaceful parenting, but his lack of cooperation is disruptive to daily activities, family outings, etc.
He gets plenty of one-on-one parent and group family times to explore relationships and dynamics.
Thanks. Right.
Reflexively disagreeable.
Right. So you have an expectation.
I'm just going to go out on a limb here.
I could be totally wrong. I'll just tell you what I think.
All the caveats. This is in general, as you know.
If anything I say doesn't match your experience, just toss it away.
Toss it away. I'm just reaching out here.
I'm out on a limb. So if you think that your four-year-old son is reflexively disagreeable, it means that you have an expectation that he's going to agree with you.
Eh, that is incorrect.
Can it be universalized?
No. Because if you say in your mind to your old son, I want you to do something, and if he disagrees with you or has a different opinion and perspective, he is reflexively disagreeable.
Disagreeable is a negative statement, right?
This person is really disagreeable.
It means that they're argumentative and combative and stubborn and oppositional and so on, right?
His lack of cooperation...
Well, if you approach someone with the idea that you're right and if they disagree with you, that they're wrong and disagreeable and they are disruptive, lack cooperation, then you're approaching him with my way or the highway.
It's very aggressive, and I'm not saying you're obviously yelling at him or obviously not hitting him.
You're peaceful parenting. Good for you.
Fantastic. This is a little tweak.
But you have to be – to be a peaceful parent, you have to be entirely committed – To the very real possibility that you could be entirely wrong.
You have to approach your child with the entire acceptance, the deep and humble acceptance, that you could be entirely wrong.
So you say, and also if you say, his lack of cooperation, he's disagreeable, it disrupts, that's not a negotiation.
A negotiation is, hey, I could be wrong.
I could be wrong.
Like I just, I say this all the time in my show, right?
In these conversations and call-in shows and just every time, could be wrong.
Don't know anything about this case.
Here's a possible framework.
I don't know. This is the way I would approach it.
I don't know what you should do. Here's what I would do in your situation, which is not a commandment, just sharing what I think.
So you have to be humble.
Your son, like if you weren't peacefully parented, your goal is for your children to be more right than you are.
They're instincts, right?
To be more right than you are.
My daughter has, in many ways, better instincts than I do for people because she's been right and I've been wrong about people.
I mean, sometimes I'm right, but I want her to be better than me at assessing people because that means...
So if you weren't peacefully parented, and very few of us were, if you weren't peacefully parented, then the idea that your children are just being disagreeable or disruptive is like, no, no, no.
If you weren't peacefully parented, it's likely that your children are more right than you are.
Because they are being peacefully parented, which means they have the capacity to disagree with you, to expect reason, to not be frightened, to not be hit, to not be yelled at, to not have the bond threatened, to not be punished.
So this is foundational to peaceful parenting.
Your kids are more likely to be right than you are.
And you have to approach things, I think, with that kind of humility.
And reflexively disagreeable.
That's painting yourself as correct.
And look, peaceful parenting isn't just bottling things up, not yelling and not hitting.
Obviously, that's better than yelling and hitting.
But if you grew up with your parents are right and you're wrong, then just because you don't yell and don't hit, but you still have that attitude of, I'm right and my kid is wrong, you're going to get these kinds of issues.
Also, if he's four, and smart listeners and all of that, if he's four, the best thing to do is say, well, how do you feel when we disagree?
What are your thoughts? It's going to take a while, but you can certainly ask.
All right. Could you explain the causes of the Industrial Revolution?
Woo-hoo! Woo! We're going on a ride.
I've heard you make the case that morality drove innovation, specifically the ending of slavery in 1833, which allowed for new cotton-based agricultural labor-saving devices in the late 19th and early 20th century.
How would you explain the creation of other labor-saving devices prior to 1833?
What were the moral conditions that allowed textile-based machinery, the steam engine, and machine tools to be created while slavery was still widely practiced in the Industrial Revolution?
If you could timeline, starting from the Roman Empire until 1833, the increasing moral standards and subsequent technological advancements.
Oh yeah, I'll just whip that off.
Is it really cause and effect?
Or can an argument be made that morality and innovation are independent from each other?
And can you reiterate why the process isn't reversed?
Labor-laving devices lead to increased moral standards.
Thank you, Steph. Okay, I'll chew this as best I can.
So the Industrial Revolution was preceded by what?
And if you don't know what preceded the Industrial Revolution, then I would suggest you read my novel called Just Poor.
My novel Just Poor is a Dickensian novel.
Dickens set his novels in the Industrial Revolution because that's when he lived and that's what he experienced as a child.
And I set my novel Just Poor.
It's a Dickensian novel set not in the Industrial Revolution but in the Agricultural Revolution.
So the ending of slavery in 1833 was important, but remember that since the end of the Roman Empire, slavery, to a large degree, was not occurring in Europe.
What you had was serfdom.
Now, serfdom had certain elements of slavery, and it certainly wasn't free market, but you could buy and sell land, and there was some real – there were some market conditions in the realm of labor on the land.
And so because there were market conditions and workers were paid and you could sell the products, like if you owned the land, you could sell the products of your crops in the market and thus make money, you're automatically putting in place – whenever you have a meritocracy, you put in place the Pareto principle, which says that in any meritocracy, the square root of the participants you put in place the Pareto principle, which says that in any meritocracy, the
You know, there are people – I've got a green thumb or people were saying to me recently, like if you've tried to do a podcast and you realize, wow, Steph could really rip off some speeches without a lot of prep.
I mean, I do have a bit of that Blani Stone, Gift of the Gab, Philosopher's Stone kind of thing going on in my brain.
And, of course, there's been a lot of practice, but one of the reasons I've practiced, you know, why does a guy who sings well practice scales?
He doesn't sing well because he practices scales.
He practices scales because he sings well already, and he wants to get even better, right?
So... So the Pareto Principle starts to kick in, even in the realm of serfdom.
So what happened was when you started to get better crop production, like turnips as a winter crop, crop rotations and other things, people started to have more of a market for selling.
And therefore, the people who were better at producing crops ended up owning or controlling more land.
And of course, what happened was as crop production went up, then infant mortality went down, which meant that there was more people than you needed, especially when you had people who were really good at crops.
You had more people than you needed on the land.
And so what happened was there was the enclosure movement in sort of the 18th century century.
The enclosure movement was the lords started to consolidate or allow the workers on their fields to consolidate.
The land. So it was getting sliced and diced into smaller and smaller subdivisions, which was very, very inefficient.
So then there was an efficiency program where the people who were the most productive were given control over the most land.
People were kicked off their land.
So you got, because the Pareto principle put the people with the magic green thumb in charge of the most land, you had a massive explosion in the production of crops.
Honestly, it was insane.
Five times, ten times, fifteen times, sometimes even twenty times the amount of crops And so you had labor-saving devices as part of this process because slavery was not how most of the land in Europe was farmed.
It was serfdom and there was a meritocracy principle in that.
So then what happened was you had savings, right?
Savings being like what is increasing the economy.
Increasing the economy is you get more productivity with the same amount of labor.
If you think of a guy digging a hole with his hands, if you've ever had to do that, it's pretty unpleasant.
You break your fingernails on the rocks and hands get bloody after a while.
You give that guy a shovel and he can dig – maybe he can dig half a hole in a day and hurt his hands.
But you give him a shovel, he can dig 20 holes in a day or 10 holes in a day and he doesn't really hurt his hands.
It might hurt his back a little or whatever.
So same person, and obviously the cost of the shovel and all of that, but same person, you get 10 or 20 holes as opposed to half a hole.
So that's your productivity increase.
And the productivity increase more than pays for the shovel.
So that's how you get this kind of increase.
So you've got a massive increase in the amount of crops being produced, fewer people on the land.
The people who were kicked off the land, where did they go?
Well, they couldn't compete with the green thumb magic Pareto principal producer, so they went to the city to look for work.
Once you start to get a bunch of people in the city looking for work, then you have a big labor pool that makes it efficient to produce things in the city.
But the moment you start producing things in the city with the wage workers, the first thing you want to do is make the wage workers more efficient by replacing some of what they do with machinery, which is where you get some factories and so on, right? And that's really how it all got going.
Now, as far as the moral standards, it's not like there was this massive explosion in morality, and then what happened was there was a big explosion in productivity.
These things, as you rightly point out, they are really wound in together.
Now, I do think that The increase in the free market in labor, which occurred first on the land and then in the urban proletariat among the capitalists, that did give rise – or that was given rise to by a certain amount of individuality and a certain amount of freedom.
See, people in general, they don't just implement a moral principle.
They experiment with it, right?
So – And they see what's going to happen.
It's like, oh, okay, so if I allow the people who are the most productive farmers to control more land, let's see what happens, right?
Maybe they'll just get lazy, right?
Maybe they'll just get lazy, right? I mean, I remember my father was in charge of a mine production in South America.
He told me this story many years ago.
And he was charged with increasing the productivity of the mine.
And what he did was he moved to piecework, right?
And so if you worked longer hours, you would get paid more.
But for whatever reason, in the local culture or local customs, what happened was people, the workers, they just quit at five.
They didn't want more money.
They didn't want more resources.
They just did the same thing.
So he had a really tough time increasing the productivity.
So there's a bunch of things that are sort of needed.
You need the Protestant work ethic, although the Protestant work ethic has been somewhat debunked by a lot of the non-Protestant countries also having massive increases in productivity.
But what happens is you'll let, you know, oh, these really productive people, okay, let's let them have a little bit more land, right?
Okay, well, that can help a lot.
Of course, the other thing, too, is that there was a real destruction of the literal people and the...
So in some European countries, like half a percent or one percent of the population was executed every year, and they tend to be the most violent, and so the most violent, the ones with the least impulse control, the most aggression.
So you end up, and this was even more so true in England, and I write about this in my novel Just Poor, but you had people who took...
They took biblical texts totally literal, and they fought each other, and they killed each other.
And so the people who had more subtle and probably more intelligent analyses that – there's a sort of line about this in – well, not this exactly, but something like this in Monty Python's Life of Brian – Blessed are the cheese makers.
What does that mean? And then the intellectual guy says, well, obviously, he's not just referring to cheese makers.
He's referring to all manufacturers of dairy products, right?
So what's so special about the cheese makers?
That's the literal thing. All manufacturers of dairy products, that's sort of the abstraction and so on, right?
So, the people who were more literal, the people who were more sociopathic and more violent and had less impulse control kind of wiped each other out.
And that led to smarter people being in control of things and people who had more subtlety in their thinking.
And there was, of course, the rediscovery of the individualistic focused texts of the ancient Romans and, in particular, the ancient Greeks and all of that.
And there was, of course, a growth in the general humanism coming out of Italy, out of the Quattrocento, and the increased humanism, which led to the Renaissance, which led to the Enlightenment and individualism, and the belief that individual reason was essential.
There was, of course, post-Milton's Ario Pagetica, there was a growth in free speech.
So there was a lot of things that were going on, and that would be my sort of basic case.
All right, let's see here.
Why might a father and or mother continue to feign amnesia of their abusive behavior rather than apologize to their children, knowing that children no longer accept these lies?
My oldest brother has drifted away, second has left his family while leaving an open door should they choose to apologize, and I'm currently apartment hunting in preparation of separating from my family of origin.
What do they have to gain that it's worth losing all of their sons and grandchildren?
Well, that's embedded in the fact that they were abusive.
right? So, to feign amnesia of their abusive behavior, you think that just starts when the children confront them as adults?
When the children become adults?
No, that's the whole process.
That's gone on the whole time.
That's gone on the whole time.
If you're mean to your children, if you abuse your children, you scream at them, you call them names, you hit them, you must immediately erase that from your consciousness.
So, this is an old habit.
It's an old practice. It's the only reason that abuse can continue.
If the first time you hit your child, you're like, oh my god, I'm so horrified.
I've got to never ever do this again.
You burst into tears. You fall to your knees.
You read books.
You go to therapy. You're like, I could never ever do this again.
Oh my gosh, this is the worst thing ever.
Well then, that will happen once.
You'll apologize to your child and you'll fix it and move on and be a better parent.
So the first thing you have to do is...
You have to erase, like you hit your child, you have to say, no, that wasn't abuse, that was good parenting.
No, I'm doing right by that person, and the real abuse would be to not hit my child.
Come on, you look at these kids who haven't been hit, and they're just monsters running wild and blah, right?
So you have to say, no, no, I'm a good person.
I'm not abusing my child.
I'm disciplining my child.
I'm teaching them responsibility. I'm teaching them accountability, blah, blah, blah, right?
So you have to make yourself, you have to take your evil and forge it into a virtue in your own mind.
And then you break universality because you'd never want it done unto you.
You break connection with your own child.
You become your own parent who abused you.
And so this amnesia, this splitting, this unreality.
And so when the adult children come and say, wait, you did me wrong.
I mean, these are people with decades of practice of...
Dissociating from the evils they've done.
So this is not a new thing.
What you're doing is you're showing the lack of empathy that is why the abuse started and continued in the first place.
Modern Western women have an almost superhuman ability to sense which men are and are not having regular sex.
And then they typically are only receptive to the advances of the more promiscuous and thus confident men.
Many men report dry spells due to this feedback loop and it even affects well-meaning men seeking a partner for long-term relationships.
How can an otherwise attractive man break out of this vicious cycle?
Why is it a vicious cycle?
Like if a woman doesn't have the judgment to evaluate a man's character, but only cares whether he's having sex, then she has no judgment and she has outsourced her judgment To the loose morals of other women.
Does this guy have value?
Well, he's having sex with other women, therefore he has value.
I don't see how that's a vicious loop.
You would want to eliminate that kind of potential partner from your dating roster, unless I'm very much mistaking your question.
That would seem to me like, oh, good.
Well, if she's not going to accept my romantic advancements because I'm not having regular sex with other women, then she's just confessed that she has no ability to determine Responsibility from irresponsibility, good from evil, and she's outsourced her evaluation of the value of a man to the loosest, most slatteringly women in the environment.
It's like, run, run, run!
That's good, right? Let's see here.
Hey, Steph, I remastered the audio video to your Intro to Philosophy series in 2006.
I wanted to share it with you. Thank you.
I have just put it all together, and I'm uploading it as we speak.
Would you agree that if young people share their privacy so eagerly in social media, they will also not mind giving up their privacy to the state and therefore increase its power?
No, because you give up your privacy in return for connection, communication, influence, and all you get in return is some ads and stuff like that.
In general, right? In general, there's lots of exceptions.
But no, that's a whole different thing with the state, right?
You have suggested that in a stateless society, ostracism would play a role in preventing or punishing crimes.
The collectivist left has been using this tactic for years, and it's a method that is tearing down society.
Obviously, the collectivist left is completely irrational, and the people ostracizing like they do suffer from public schooling and other mind-destroying institutions.
But does this make you concerned about the role of ostracism in a stateless society?
While writing this message, it occurred to me that maybe this is also a proof of its effectiveness when applied in a rational society.
Well, again, for more on this, it's a great question.
I really, really appreciate it.
All of these questions are great, by the way.
I very rarely come across a dud.
So, if you read my novel, The Future, or listen to the audiobook, it's available on Locals, of course.
You can just subscribe.
So, yeah, ostracism is great, but ostracism plus the state is bad, right?
So if people are profiting from state power, then those who criticize state power are interfering with those profits and therefore ostracizing those people and silencing them would be massively rewarded by continued or maybe even increased access to state power and resources, right? So if a single mother with two kids on welfare gets the equivalent of well over $90,000 of salary benefits, right?
And so then if people argue against the welfare state, and they win, the welfare state has ended, she's out $90,000 a year.
She doesn't know how to feed her kids, she doesn't know how to provide health care for her kids, dental care for her kids, clothes for her kids, you get it, right?
So she has a massive incentive to attack and ostracize and support them, attack and ostracism of those people because there's so much money at stake, right?
In a stateless society, you don't have that issue because there's no particular profit in ostracism.
And so it's used as a form of self-defense.
So, again, the state completely distorts incentives.
All right.
Myself and many others in the manosphere have noticed that when it comes to dating preferences, American women tend to be far more ruthlessly obsessed with a man's status and dominance than are European women.
For example, the loudest and most obnoxious guy in a U.S. bar, typically a super alpha frat bro type, mesmerizes women, but in Europe he's more likely dismissed as a buffoon.
Why do you think this is?
That's interesting. Of course, I never got involved in the dating scene in England or Ireland or Europe because I was 11.
I was predating when...
When I left England, so I don't know.
Let's see here. A buffoon.
I mean, in general, there is a more macho culture in America than in Europe.
And my guess would be that in Europe, there is an association with alpha male and world wars.
Alpha male and Nazism, totalitarianism, maybe even communism, although communism tends to be more...
Fascism is hyper-masculinity and communism is hyper-femininity because fascism is hyper-status and dominance and communism is hyper-egalitarianism, so it's the masculine versus the feminine pathologies in my view.
So I would imagine that since the U.S. has not been invaded since the War of 1812, and even that was pretty localized, the U.S. has never been bombed from the air.
The U.S. has not experienced a world war on its...
It's not had trench warfare like France did for...
People say, wow, France really folded in May 1940.
It's like, well, yeah, you try fighting a war on your soil for four-plus years, the First World War.
So I would imagine that...
In Europe, there's been a recoil for militarism.
Obviously, First and Second World War were absolute catastrophes for Europe.
First World War was just about the worst thing in all of human history because it led to the Second World War and all of the horrors of that.
So I think that because Europe, after the Discrediting of masculinity that was the two world wars went fairly left and fairly nanny state and welfare state and restrictions on free speech and all the stuff that happens when female voters tend to dominate the situation, redistributionism and hyper-empathy and pathological altruism and so on, right?
So America, I mean, I guess the last war was the Civil War and so it did not have any sort of 20th century wars on its soil,
so I imagine that the super alpha stuff is more acceptable and even praised in the US, whereas in Europe it's viewed as negative, I assume, as a legacy of the wars.
Why is it that communists are usually and probably most effectively opposed by authoritarian right-wingists instead of libertarians or ANCAPs?
Is this due to tribalistic human nature, the inability of individualists to act in a court manner, or other factors?
Let's see here. There's a reply from a very wise listener.
It says, it's the Overton window. Both sides unconsciously agree to ignore individualists.
The enemy of my enemies, my friend, applies here.
Yeah, I don't know that communists are very effectively opposed by authoritarian right-wingers, because the authoritarian right-wingers tend to impose fascism, which is pretty horrible, too.
Could a DRO enforce imprisonment, the death penalty, or even cruel and unusual punishments if members agree to contracts, including these measures?
Well, again, it could do anything, but you have the efficiency principle.
So when you have a free market in the provision of services, then what you have to do...
You have to have an efficiency principle.
So, imprisonment, the death penalty.
So, why is the death penalty a question?
Death penalty is a question, obviously for reasons of an eye for an eye and vengeance and the moral horror of what people do in the world.
But the DRO could absolutely enforce imprisonment.
And maybe if there was a property crime, let's say that you burned down somebody's forest and it cost them a million dollars, then maybe your labor would be involuntarily either in some restricted area like a prison or 80% of your income would be taken for restitution.
Or maybe there would be what used to be called a wear guilt, even violent crimes.
There would be a financial penalty in dealing with it.
So the death penalty, of course, eliminates any possibility of financial restitution.
So I would say that in a DRO, people would probably prefer financial restitution to outright murder.
But again, remember, we're talking like 0.1% of the current crimes in the world if people are peacefully parented.
So it's really not a big issue in a free society.
How does the NAP, a non-aggression principle, apply to vengeance and preemptive strikes, both today and in a voluntary society?
For more on that, I will refer you to my most excellent novel called The Future.
So there's very, very good details about exactly the worst-case scenarios that people come up with for free societies.
Thanks very much for listening.
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Thanks so much, everyone. I'll see you tomorrow night.
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